Chapter Seventeen

We decided to risk the first quilt in the dryer on low heat, since it was a lot less likely to dry if the power went out and we had three of them at once that needed to hang around the wood-burning stove.

The quilt and Orion's sheets were fine. The others were drying. We had a midday meal of porridge with dried cranberries (unearthed from a cabinet in the utilitry that I hadn't snooped into, which sadly only had an ancient supply of expired almonds and apparently every rejected house product from shampoo to furniture oil that "didn't smell good enough").

Scraps, evidently having rested enough to overcome her earlier traumas, took to following us around. If we were bickering over the correct way to put a flat sheet on a bed (finished side down, obviously), she wanted to be curled up on her blanket in the same room. If we were having a spirited debate over the merits of nuts in oatmeal (absolutely not, no matter what Orion said about how protein made the meal hold one over longer), Scraps wanted to be sitting on the kitchen table with us. It was endearing.

I, on the other hand, wasn't handling any of this particularly well. "So how likely is it we're going to lose power and then die?"

"It's relatively likely we'll lose power. We will not die from losing power."

"We could still, like, you know, die indirectly from losing power. Don't you have a sat phone or something?"

"A sat phone?"

"Yeah, a satellite phone? Like they have on those shows where they're in the wilderness?"

"We're not ‘in the wilderness.' There's a pizza place like ten miles away."

"That's how you measure civilization? Where the nearest pizza place is?"

"Look, city boy, we're not in Siberia; we're in California. It's snowing. We don't need a sat phone."

Which might've been true. But I was still concerned. "How will we cook?"

"I have a camp stove and propane, and if we run out of that, we still have the wood-burning stove as backup. And no, we're not going to die indirectly from losing power—that's not a thing unless one of us needed some kind of electrical device to keep our bodies running, which we don't." Orion sighed. "Seriously, I've been here with no power before. We'd light some candles, get the stove burning, and we'd be fine. Sometimes this stove heats up so much that it's too hot."

"Doubtful," I grumbled.

In truth, I wasn't so much worried about the power or starving or freezing. It was more the uncertainty. If the radio came on and told us exactly what time the electricity would go out and for how long, I'd be fine. Even if it was "in five minutes" and "for five days." But the uncertainty, the vague waiting and wondering was stressing me the hell out.

I thought that I could be helpful if I went out and chopped wood. Split wood? Did whatever you had to do to turn pieces of tree into a thing you could shove into a stove or fireplace. When I told Orion that, he seemed dubious. To put it kindly.

"What? I can do it. Why can't I do it?"

"It's not that you can't. But it does take ... practice."

"How hard can it be? You swing an axe at some wood and kaboom, right?"

It turns out, it's not quite that simple to chop firewood. Also, I assumed you didn't have to be a literal lumberjack, but I couldn't get a single one of my "rounds" (as Orion called them) to break until he basically did it for me except for the last little bit, like when one of the dads at a birthday party interrupts the pi?ata so he can bust it up almost to breaking point, and then hands the baseball bat back to the birthday kid for the very last hit.

"What the fuck ," I panted. "You did this for an hour this morning."

He shrugged. Then he laughed. "Okay, I did, but also I was a little bit dying. I just didn't want to let on that it almost leveled me." He rubbed his shoulder. "And just doing it now woke up all those sore muscles, so can we go in? We don't need more firewood."

"But I really wanted to help."

He reached out to pat my back, and his hand lingered, ending up in the neighborhood of my neck. "You help plenty, Queer Eye . Come on."

I helped plenty? Did he just mean rearranging his bedroom and shaming him into using his quilts? That didn't actually seem all that helpful. Though if he said it was, I didn't plan to argue about it.

Alas, failing at firewood did not help my general level of anxiety, and I finally sat myself down on the floor surrounded by issues of Sports Now , determined to find my dad's letter to "Where's Sporty?"

Orion didn't ask or comment on my new activity, but Scraps came over to lie in my lap, which was slightly awkward from a paging-through-lots-of-magazines angle, but entirely welcome from a so-anxious-I-can't-think-straight angle.

"You're sure we're not going to freeze?" I called around the time my stacks of checked issues began to overtake my stacks of unchecked issues.

"I'm one hundred percent sure!" Orion called back.

Which had to be good enough.

When I finally found what I was looking for, it turned out not to be what I was looking for at all. I stared at it, rereading it over and over again. My dad had quoted the lines to me often enough, so I knew it couldn't be a mistake, but I was having a hard time accepting what I saw was true.

"Dinner tonight is basically tuna sandwiches, but the bread is more like matzah because apparently I don't know how to ..." His voice trailed off. "What's wrong?"

I was about seven seconds behind in processing. "I'm not sure," I said, still staring down at the magazine.

"Cleary? Hey. Desmond?"

"Des. No one calls me Desmond except my dad. I mean, he used to."

Orion came over to stand behind me, since I was mostly surrounded by magazines. "Oh, I love that column. All those wild pictures."

"Yeah. Me too. I ..." It was a strange thing to explain. "My dad always said he'd gotten a letter in this one time."

"Really? Wow. That's so cool."

"Yeah. I thought so. Except I think it was a lie." I held up the page and pointed. "This is the letter. Rugby at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. He used to quote it and everything."

"Uhh. Hmm." He bent down so he could see it better, his hand brushing my fingers as he pulled it up. "And his name isn't Naomi Pearce?"

"It surely was not. Is not. Whatever you say when someone's dead."

"Oh." Cue the automatic awkwardness of someone who hears about a person they never met having been dead already. "Sorry for your loss."

"It's fine. I mean it sucked but, whatever, heart attack, dead at fifty-three. But like. He lied . For years. And he brought it up over and over again, this one time he got into Sports Now . I can't tell you how many times I heard him tell that story." I shook my head, still struggling to really understand what I was seeing. "It was this thing he held on to, like it was the only thing he had ever done that made him matter, and it was a total bald-faced lie ."

Orion crouched down and pulled the magazine from my unprotesting fingers. "They could have misattributed it. Gotten the name wrong."

"No, if they'd done that, that would have been the story. This one time I got into ‘Where's Sporty?' and they didn't even put my name on it! Made them print a correction, I did! That's what he'd have done too. But this Naomi person was the one who recognized that picture. Not my dad."

"I ... think he might have. Recognized it, I mean. It's definitely possible he knew what it was and just didn't get around to sending in a letter, so he kind of felt justified claiming this one."

It was a nice try, but the generosity of it—of giving my dad, who was such a prick about 86 percent of the time, the benefit of the doubt—just made me feel worse.

I bit the inside of my lip and closed my eyes, breathing slowly, trying very hard not to cry about such a stupid thing. "It's fine," I said.

"Des . . ."

My name sounded so odd in his voice. "Sorry." Do not cry. "Sorry, I just ..."

"Yeah." Orion's hand came down on my neck again, as it had outside. "It's really lousy when people are not what you need them to be."

"He was such an asshole, I can't stress that enough, and this one thing just seemed like such a fun story. I've literally told people about how my dad got a letter in Sports Now . Fuck, what an idiot I am."

Which was when I lost my battle with tears and couldn't stop myself, pressing my hands to my face and trying not to be more of a dumbass than necessary.

And that was when Orion hugged me. Sort of. Knelt down and pulled me against him and put his arms around me. Me, who'd done so much to hurt him, to whom he owed nothing.

"Sorry," I kept repeating. "Sorry, sorry."

"Shut up," he replied, one of his hands moving up and down my spine.

I didn't know how to recover from this moment of weakness. Thankfully, he'd made food, so we both had an excuse to do other things than sit in our mutual discomfort, though I didn't think he was actually all that uncomfortable. I felt like an absolute heel, though.

"My compliments to the chef," I said sometime later, raising what was left of my tuna-on-very-flat-bread and saluting him.

"You know, it could have been worse. Though I don't think I'll be publishing this recipe in my Snowed-In Cookbook ."

"Genuinely, that would sell. Especially if you wrote it. Kick-start your second career as a backcountry cook."

"I thought my second career was as a campaigner for children's sports," he said mildly.

My heart started to beat faster, but I didn't want to get too excited. "Okay, the cooking thing can be your third career. And it should go with a YouTube channel where you demonstrate all the things one can do with two crates of canned tuna."

"I did not have two crates of tuna."

"So just one?" I asked, batting my eyelashes.

"You should be more grateful. Right, Gizmo? Shouldn't Des be more grateful for my tuna supply?"

Scraps did not look up from her own plate of tuna and oil.

"Ouch, no allies for you, Broderick." I took smaller bites, hoping he'd say more about my campaign and his potential role in it, but he didn't.

He finished making his bed while I cleaned up in the kitchen, and I insisted on inspecting once he was done to ensure he'd put the flat sheet on correctly, which he had, even though he claimed it wasn't the right way.

Scraps, the traitor, hopped right onto his bed and curled up.

"Oh no, you don't," I said, and scooped her into my arms.

"Hey, free choice! She can sleep on my bed if she wants."

"It's already dark, and she hasn't been out to pee in hours."

He backed off. "That's a good point—very solid, excellent dog parenting."

"Unless you want to take her out?" I offered sweetly.

"No, no, wouldn't want to interrupt your bonding time."

Yeah, right. "Surrrrrre. Come on, Scraps."

"Good pooping, Gizmo!" Orion called after us just before I shut the door.

It had been windy earlier, but in waves, with rests. Maybe I hadn't noticed as much inside with the dryer running, and the central heat, and my obsession with magazines, but outside with no other white noise, the wind sounded ferocious, almost angry, as it tore through the trees.

Scraps did not like it. Which was very fair, but I still needed her to do her business. When huddling over her didn't get anything except a lot of sniffs at her previous pees and a doleful look up, I unzipped my coat and sort of used it and my body as a shield, trying to get low enough so the wind wasn't blowing at her as intensely.

Which worked, though if you've ever been the living wall around an actively pooping dog, you'll know it's not exactly pleasant. Then she skipped out of the protection of my coat (like she couldn't wait to get away from her own poo) and just sort of casually kept going.

Away.

From me.

Into the darkness and the snow.

"Scraps!" I cried and, true to form, immediately toppled onto my back. "Hey!"

She hadn't gone far before deciding that it was a bad idea, but I still felt almost faint with terror as I scrambled up, dove into the shadows, and descended on her, grabbing her and a good armful of fresh snow all at once. "Why did you do that , oh my god. This is how you ended up in a stranger's garage! I'm sure your family is worried sick about you, wherever they are, because you freaking ran off into the snow , you horrible beast!" After which I buried my face in her fur and inhaled in relief.

I got her (and all that snow) safely into the cabin and thrust her at Orion. "Take your foster child, she's a monster—she tried to run away!"

"Run away?" He cuddled her in close. "Giz, why'd you do that?"

"What would we have done? If she'd gone into the dark right now, there's no way I could have found her! She would have one hundred percent died out there ! Oh my god! I can't even believe—"

And then he kissed me.

Orion Broderick kissed me while I shouted and dripped in his entryway.

And then I kissed him, as I'd wanted to do for hours, days, something.

And then both of us sort of sprang apart almost before I could register the sensation of his lips on my lips, and Scraps licked his neck while I laughed nervously.

"Sorry," I said, just as he was saying, "I didn't mean to—" and I said, "Wait, you didn't?" and he said, "Not that I didn't mean to, but I wouldn't have—" and I said, "Why not?"

And then we stopped and looked at each other.

"I said some pretty rough things to you," he said. "I assumed you wouldn't really welcome ..."

"Kissing? Because you kissed me. To be clear. Right? I didn't misinterpret something else? That wasn't, like, some kind of pro soccer high five where you kiss your bros on the lips?"

Those same lips, which had just been on mine, smiled lopsidedly. "It was a kiss."

"I did not reject your kiss. For the record."

"I noticed that."

"Okay, then." I nodded decisively. Please kiss me again, I thought but could not say aloud. Maybe he would, like, intuit my silent begging.

"Right." Or not.

"So."

"Yeah."

Was I supposed to kiss him now? Or did he expect me to change the subject? This was the perfect moment for me to deliver some sexy one-liner that would have him swooning, except I can never think up sexy one-liners in the moment (my sexy one-liners always seem to fall into the I can't sleep at 4:00 a.m., oh wait, that's what I should have said category).

"I'm pretty sure Gizmo wants to sleep on my bed," Orion Broderick said.

"I don't think you have any grounds to say that."

"Why don't I put her down and see what she thinks?"

"You're biasing her." But I followed them into his bedroom, newly redesigned, and watched as he tenderly settled the dog in the spot she'd been in before I forced her to go outside and she nearly ran away.

She immediately curled up and went to sleep. Traitor. I saved you. Twice! Though it was hard to hold anything against her, really, because the bed, now covered in two quilts with a third folded at the foot, looked amazing. And so much more like a real person lived there.

When I looked up from Scraps, Orion was looking at me. I gulped. "Hi."

"Hey."

"So we sorta kissed, did you catch that?"

"I kissed you and then you kissed me."

"Is there a difference?"

He shrugged. "I think so. Past a certain point, you no longer feel like there's a directionality to it."

Which seemed to beg the question about whether we should, you know, empirically explore that theory.

He stepped closer. "I meant a lot of what I said to you. Not all of it. But a lot of it."

"I know. I really want to explain, I know you don't have to listen, I know I'm not entitled to that, but—"

"Des."

I shut up. "Yeah?"

"Can I kiss you again?"

"Fuck yes. Please. Yes."

And that is how it happened. Or at least how it began. With a statement and a question.

And then an awful lot of kissing. Among other things.