“Why didn’t you tell me?” His face is murderous.
“Why’d you lie?”
He sighs. “I didn’t want you to feel worse than you already did.”
“That! Right there!” I place my hand on his chest and immediately think better of it. “You don’t have to spare my feelings. Ever.”
His eyes blaze into mine, and I’m filled with a frantic desperation to understand what’s going on in his head.
“Fair enough,” he finally sighs. I wait for him to admit he read the letter. He doesn’t. Maybe I’m being paranoid.
A train whistle blares in the distance. “We’ve got to go,” he says, and we both climb back on the ATV. He turns the key, bringing the vehicle to life, and drives parallel to the tracks as a long steam train whooshes by. Fitz drives us away from the lights and the sound and the people, into the cold, black desert mountains.
“Where are we going?” I yell over the growl of the engine. His answer is a quick squeeze above my knee, asking me to be patient. To trust.
The ride is brutal and breathtaking. All my extremities go numb, and the dark hides our surroundings. I close my eyes and instead concentrate on the feeling of being here, trying to pick out what I’d say about Williams, Arizona, if I had the travel career I claim to want.
Cold.
Wow. Brilliant, Paige. Cold weather is cold. Hand me my Pulitzer Prize now, please.
I regretfully loosen my grip on Fitz and sit up, allowing the wind to batter my face.
This is it. This is what I’ve been waiting for. It’s not New York, but it doesn’t have to be. New York was never about the city itself. Not really. It’s about something new, about leaving the bubble of the only town I’ve ever known.
I try to summon words for what it feels like to be here, in this place, with this boy.
Alive.
A bone-deep ache has settled into my fingers and toes, but I feel alive in a way I can’t remember feeling, maybe ever in my life.
Fitz brings the quad to a stop in a small Christmas village with two-dimensional houses and shops outlined in colorful lights. I stumble off the quad and walk farther into this make-believe winter wonderland until I’m at the center, where Santa Claus is sitting in a giant sleigh, playing poker with a handful of elves.
“Hey, Mike.” Fitz nods. Santa returns the nod and folds, tossing his cards facedown with a string of expletives.
“Welcome to the North Pole.” Fitz’s eyes sparkle as he stuffs his hands into his pockets, watching me.
I’m silent for several more seconds as I take in the outline of the mountains behind the village.
“Well? What do you think?” Fitz tugs on his hat impatiently.
“I think …” I take a breath, searching and failing for the words that could describe the warm buzz in my chest. The desert mountains and the dark sky are beautiful, they are. But I can’t keep my eyes off the boy who brought me here. “I think it’s better than all the pictures on my wall combined.”
“High praise.”
The train whistle blares in the distance and Fitz grabs my hand. “We have to hide.” He pulls me behind the Sweet Shoppe. I peek around the facade and see the train rolling slowly by, the heads of several small children pressed against the windows.
I turn to ask him how long they’ll stay and am surprised to see small dots of white on his shoulders. “Is that—?” I look up in amazement.
“Snow flurries,” he breathes.
“You kept your promise!” I throw my head back, sticking my tongue out like a six-year-old. When I look back at Fitz, flurries cling to his eyelashes. Painful longing snakes through my body, robbing me of all sense.
I throw my arms around him and squeeze. “Thank you.”
He squeezes back, longer and harder and better than he ever has. When he releases me, his broad grin slips sideways off his face. He startles a little, as if I’ve surprised him. “We have to go.” He brushes past me, heading for the quad. I scramble to keep up with his long strides, my feet sliding over slick rocks.
“Wait. Did I do something wrong?” My foot slips out from under me, twisting my ankle. I fall, and my knee slams hard into a large rock.
“Ow!” I roll to my side, clutching both my ankle and my bloody knee.
Fitz is at my side in a second, frowning deeply at the sight of blood. “Can you stand?” He offers me his hand and pulls me gently up. I test my weight on my foot, but my ankle throbs in protest.
“I don’t know. It hurts,” I hiss.
“Can I—I’m gonna … don’t make this weird, okay?” he says as he scoops me up into his arms.
The weight of his hands on me makes my brain fuzzy. “What are you doing?”
“I told you not to make it weird, Collins.”
Ha. Okay. His face is inches from mine, and I’m supposed to pretend it’s not weird? I suppose it’s also not weird that we hugged for an unprecedented amount of time and then he bolted away from me. Nope. Not weird at all. My gaze snags on my torn leggings and my brain gets even fuzzier. “That’s a lot of blood.”
“You’ll be okay.” He places me gingerly on the quad and drives back to the train station. I can tell he wants to go faster, but every bump and jostle causes me to whimper in pain. With his slower pace, we arrive after the train. He stops next to train car J and we watch as people swarm out of it. I press my hand against my knee, but my stomach protests at the sheer amount of slick, warm blood. When the train’s empty, Fitz offers me his hand and I gingerly step off the quad. My ankle still aches, but with his hand tight on mine, I’m able to lean my weight against him and limp up the train steps.
“Do you feel okay? Are you light-headed?” he asks.
The blood has soaked through my leggings, pooling at the top of my sock. “I’m a little dizzy,” I confess.
Fitz swears under his breath.
To be honest, my mental state is probably half from the blood, half from the fact that Fitz has touched me more tonight than in the last year combined.
“Jane works on this car. She’ll have a first aid kit so we can get you cleaned up before we go home,” he explains as we board the train. “Hey, sis. We need a first aid kit.”
Fitz’s twenty-three-year-old sister looks up. Adopted like her older sisters, Jane is half Puerto Rican and half white. Her long, curly black hair is squished under a chef’s hat, and she wears an apron over her clothes. She drops her broom and retrieves a first aid kit from the back of the car. “Oh, wow. That’s a ton of blood. Is she okay? What do I do?”
“Find crutches. She twisted her ankle.”
“I don’t need crutches,” I say as Jane leaves.
“I know. But I needed to get her out of here. She’s bad in a crisis. Tends to panic.”
I sit on a bench seat and Fitz sits across the aisle. He picks up my foot and gently places it in his lap. My thick black leggings are already torn at the knee but he rips them further and presses several gauze pads against the cut, applying pressure to stop the bleeding. His brows are drawn, his face serious.
After a minute, he lifts the gauze and checks the cut. “You know, every time you almost kill yourself, my heart nearly explodes.” He tilts his activity tracker so I can see the spike in his pulse. I don’t know what to make of it.