Of course, all we’ve got at this cabin is instant coffee. I probably shouldn’t complain that I got rescued from a blizzard and all I get to drink is instant, but I slept like shit last night and complain I shall.
“Ugh,” I say quietly, to myself, and stir in another spoonful. It’s already kind of gross, so why not make it espresso-strength? At least it’ll do something then.
“Can you be ready in ten minutes?” Gideon calls from the other room, where he’s doing something or other that sounds like it involves a lot of stomping around.
I’m not sure I can be a functional person in that much time, but I’m annoyed with Gideon because he’s annoyed with me for unclear reasons and being tired isn’t helping anything, so I shout back, “Sure!” and then take a giant gulp of mediocre coffee.
“Good!” he shouts back.
“Good,” I mutter to myself, very quietly, in a terrible impression of Gideon because it makes me feel slightly better. “Andi, get dressed faster. Andi, stop being so—"
I turn away from the counter, make an undignified noise, and drop my coffee mug on the floor because there’s an animal watching me from the kitchen table.
“You okay?” Gideon calls, and I can hear his concerned frown. It’s guilt-inducing.
“Fine!” I shout back, still staring at the animal, still very tired and now with bonus coffee all over my lower legs. “There’s, um, a marsupial in the kitchen?”
There’s a brief silence.
“Or is that possums?”
I’m, like, ninety-five percent sure it’s not supposed to be here but Gideon’s got an eagle and a fox in his backyard, so who the fuck knows. There’s a rush of footsteps, and then the critter leaps off the table.
I squeak again, still very dignified, and it escapes into a hole in the baseboards just as Gideon appears in the doorway.
Helpfully, I point.
“Was it the chipmunk?”
“I think so?” I say, because it’s too early and I’m too tired to be identifying critters properly. “The chipmunk?”
He walks over to the hole and frowns at it, like that’ll help.
“It’s supposed to be hibernating but it’s living in the walls,” he says, arms crossed, sighing.
“Oh. Well, that’s fine,” I say, and start picking up the broken mug.
“Doesn’t New York City famously have rats?” he grumbles, still glaring at the hole. “One chipmunk isn’t that bad.”
“The rats aren’t in the walls of my apartment.” That’s not exactly true—there was one incident, years ago, that I’d rather not recall—but it’s close enough.
“It won’t hurt you. I just haven’t chased it out yet,” he says, and runs a hand through his hair. “And yes, opossums are the only marsupial native to North America.”
I dump the broken mug in the trash, wipe up the rest of the coffee, and set about making more.
“Just use birdseed!” I say, and it’s loud enough to startle a nearby bird into taking off. Gideon’s tromping up a slight incline toward me, coming back from yet another empty net check.
He simply sighs in response, because this is not the first or even the fifth time we’ve had this conversation.
“They’re not going to become birdseed addicts,” I say, my hands jammed in my pockets and entire head scrunched as low into my scarf as I can get it. “It’s one time, it’s a super simple lure, they get a snack today and then they come back tomorrow and there’s no snack and they fly somewhere else.”
He scrubs one gloved hand over his face and adjusts his hat over his forehead. Gideon’s got shadows under his eyes and an oddly short temper today, an extra edge to his usual gruffness. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I slept like shit last night because I was too cold to sleep well but also refused to disturb Gideon’s precious Andi-free slumber by asking if I could sleep in the living room, so I’m not sure I care about his bad mood.
We also haven’t kissed again, nor have we even almost kissed again, and I get that this is a pretty strange situation, but come on. Give a girl a horny look sometimes.
“Setting aside that we don’t even have birdseed—”
I crouch, grab a bag of trail mix off the ground, and hold it out. Gideon eyes it.
“Absolutely none of that is in their natural diet.”
“Then maybe it’s time they learned to party.”
“You’re welcome to wait back at the cabin, you know,” he says, and that edge to his voice is a little sharper and it sounds like I don’t want you here.
“And do what,” I say, and I sound like a bratty teen and don’t care. “I already read everything I’m interested in and you’ll get annoyed if I try to stream anything on the iPad over the satellite.”
“Aren’t there puzzles?”
“Ugh.”
Gideon waits.
“I don’t like puzzles,” I say. “Why would you print a whole picture and then cut it up into tiny, weird pieces and mix them up only to put it back together? Nothing happens when you finish, you’re just back where you started only you’ve got about ten fewer hours of life left.”
“If you stay, you can’t keep talking about birdseed.”
“Do you want me to go back so you can be alone?” I ask, and it comes out have annoyed and half pathetic, and neither of those are my good half.
Gideon huffs, breath puffing into the air, and he walks closer to me and sits on the ground, leaning back against a rock.
“Not really,” he says, looking up at me, and it feels better than it should. I sit with a sigh, my shoulder brushing his, my head back against the big rock behind us.
“Sorry,” I say, and he nods, then pats my knee. Pats my knee.
“It’s okay,” Gideon says, but we don’t talk much for the rest of the day, either.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ANDI
Before we go to sleep that night—Gideon in the living room, on the couch that’s too short for him, and me in the bedroom—I ransack the place for more blankets, not that I think they’ll do much besides crush me under their weight.
It’s been a weird, awkward day that turns into a weird, awkward evening, and I try to tell myself that we’re both tired and exhausted and un-showered and trapped in a tiny cabin that doesn’t have electricity, and that’s all obviously true, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling like there’s something else. Like I came on too strong, maybe, or I’m a bad kisser, or talking to his brother reminded him that he’s not supposed to be kissing girls unchaperoned or something. Instead of asking I decide to go to bed and possibly deal with it in the morning.
Besides my sleeping bag, I’ve got a fleece blanket, a comforter circa 1965, a quilt that’s seen better days, a quilt that had seen better days twenty years ago, and a wool blanket that I’m pretty sure was meant for horses but that I’m not complaining about. It takes me forever to warm them all up barely enough to drift off, but eventually, I do.