Chapter Five

True to form, neither of us speak about the almost-something and the one bed that's staring at the sides of our faces. Oskar makes porridge that I pretend is delicious, and I hobble around on one foot, testing my bad ankle until he sternly tells me to stop hurting myself.

I slump into one of the wooden chairs. "How are we going to get off this mountain?" I demand.

"Why, somewhere better to be?" There's a bite of sarcasm in his voice I'm not accustomed to.

"My brother will be worried about me, and my flight is . . ." I calculate in my head. "Tomorrow."

The grave look Oskar gives me doesn't bode well. "I'm not sure you're going to make it."

"You're supposed to reassure me. Tell me that everything's going to be fine and I'll make my flight and my family won't declare me missing because I haven't checked in with them."

He cocks his head, but a muscle in his jaw flexes. Something I've said has struck a nerve. "They'd do that?"

"I was supposed to get in touch yesterday. Thomas will probably look at the weather and panic." Auntie Thelma will talk him down, but after losing Ana, he borders on paranoid. Accidents can happen to anyone, as he so often reminds me.

"If your brother calls the cops, I can't change that."

I harrumph. This is officially my grouchy era, and I have embraced it. My lack of sleep is catching up with me, alongside my frustration that our situation seems to be stagnant, and the residual embarrassment from the almost-we're-never-going-to-talk-about lingering in my veins. "How am I going to get down if I can't walk?" I whine. "Fly?"

"I have a plan."

"Please tell me it doesn't involve sitting here and starving."

Firelight flickers in Oskar's eyes, making them look like blue flame. "It can if you like."

"Obviously I don't like. I've escaped death once and I don't want to have to escape it again."

"Well then you'll be delighted to know that my plan doesn't involve starving to death."

"Thrilled. So what is it?"

The tight muscle in his jaw works. "I'm going to walk down the mountain and call search and rescue."

My jaw drops. "You're going to call your brother?"

"No." His voice is too harsh, and I realise I've made a mistake. Touched a sore spot, pressed on a bruise. My anger vanishes as suddenly as it arrived. I'm not the only one trapped here, after all, and clearly I'm not the only one struggling.

He folds his arms from where he's standing in the kitchenette, too big in the space. I suspect that's a problem he has most places he goes.

"Right," I say to fill the awkward silence. "Of course not. Sorry. You just said he works for the military search and rescue, and I assumed—"

"Don't."

"Yep. I'm getting that."

His gaze lingers on me for a moment longer, then he shakes his head, frustrated. "I'm going to chop some more firewood." He snatches his coat from the hook and jams his feet into his boots.

"Wait," I say, but the door slams shut behind him.

Crap.

I massage my temples, fighting the throbbing headache that's been brought on, one can only assume, by stress. "Shit," I say to no one in particular, and heave myself up. My ankle is still too swollen for me to do my boots up, but I can just about get them on, laces flapping uselessly behind me as I slip into my coat and join Oskar outside.

There's another little shed I hadn't noticed on my previous observation of our surrounding area. Probably because it's so covered in snow, it could pass for one of the many rocks that are littered around us.

And in said shed, as it happens, are a whole bunch of logs. Big, thick cross-sections of trees that Oskar heaves out. He's not bothered to do up his coat, and I find myself hoping he'll take it off. A second later he obliges, shrugging out of it and hanging it on a hook on the back of the shed door.

For one glorious moment, axe in hand and his attention very firmly fixed on the slice of log, he fulfils every hitherto unknown fantasy I have about lumberjacks. The fleece is tight enough across his chest I can see his pecs. Practically count his abs (this man should not have so many, it's unfair to the rest of humankind and probably breaks some fundamental law of nature). His biceps bulge and I get my fill of those, too.

He glances up, jaw still set and eyes still angry, and the breath leaves my body. God but he's beautiful. Fabulously so.

My crush kicks up a gear until I realise how truly, disastrously, awfully attracted to him I am.

To cover for the fact my stomach is in knots and he's glaring at me, I call, "Very Viking of you."

He grunts, which isn't an invitation for me to stay, but it also isn't not. I gasp, maybe a little too loudly, as he brings the axe down on the wood, splitting it with a loud crack that echoes off the snow.

"Do you want to talk about it?" I ask. "Your brother, I mean."

Another swing. "No."

"Only, and I might be projecting here, but it seems like you're in a bit of a mood right now. And I realise that you have an axe, which means that poking the bear is a bad idea, but I just wanted you to know that unlike parents, I do in fact have a brother."

He pauses, axe in both hands and chest heaving. Even with the ice and snow separating us, his gaze burns. "What are you trying to say?"

"Right. My metaphors were a little mixed." I laugh, even though nothing—nothing at all—about this situation is funny. "I'm just trying to say that I'm here for you if you wanted to talk stuff out. Or if you're frustrated at me for putting you in this situation."

He closes his eyes like, once again, he's in pain. "I'm not frustrated at you."

"It's okay if you are. Honestly, I would be too—"

"I'm not."

"Okay."

When he opens his eyes again, the blue in them is shocking. "My brother and I were close. Before."

I nod. That's something I can relate to, even if I can't imagine then not talking to him for three years.

But he can be annoying as hell sometimes, and I can understand the desire to push him away. Sometimes, when I'm feeling overwhelmed with everything, when I'm staring at the blank page and the words still aren't coming, I dream about finding a little witch's cottage in the middle of nowhere (with electricity, running water and a decent internet connection—I'm not a savage) where I can work on my books in peace.

Then I think about the girls and how much Thomas needs me, and I feel a wave of guilt.

"I shouldn't have assumed you meant calling your brother," I say. "I don't know what came over me. Obviously you weren't going to. And it's not like he's going to find out about any of this, right?" His face shifts, tightening like maybe his brother will find out, and a shiver goes down my spine. "Or hey," I say too brightly, "maybe we don't need to call anyone at all. If I've already essentially missed my flight, what are a few more days?" I have no idea how long sprains take to heal, and without the internet, I can't look it up. "Weeks?"

"We don't have enough food for weeks," he says flatly.

A fair point.

"I can take one for the team," I say.

Condensation huffs from his mouth as he gives an exasperated sigh. "And do what? Starve?"

"Um no. But I could call him. You could skedaddle and I could stay here by myself and say I just happened to stumble across it during the storm, and . . ." I trail off at the way he's shaking his head. "What's wrong with that plan?"

"Skedaddle?" he repeats, with just enough blankness that tells me he's not familiar with the word. "Do you mean run away?"

"Yeah, like . . . flee." Honestly, his English is good enough sometimes I forget it's not his first language.

"I'm not going to do that," he says.

"Oh." I thought that wasn't a bad idea, actually. "Okay. I just thought—"

"It's fine." He sends the axe cracking into the triangle of wood left before him. "I've got this."

As he chops the next big hunk of tree, I observe him. Not to ogle his muscles—though they don't escape my notice—but to really look at him. See him. Turn over the things he's told me and try to understand his frustration.

After all this time, he's risking coming into some kind of contact with his brother. And he's frustrated at himself, frustrated that his emotional response to the idea of risking contact with his family is so heightened. Even though it makes sense.

The man needs a hug.

Screw it.

"Can you stop chopping for a sec?" I ask, trying to follow his footsteps through the snow. "I need to do a thing."

He pauses once again, watching me suspiciously. "What thing?"

"You'll see. Just put the axe down. It's not that I don't trust you, but I have appalling luck, and I really don't want to test it."

To my relief, he does as requested. My ankle is throbbing again, and it's more proof than ever that I cannot clamber my way down a mountain. But that's not the important thing here.

"Arms up," I say.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm giving you a hug. Now put your arms up." I grab hold of one as I stumble closer, and then my face is planted into his chest. Not precisely the move I was going for, but I embrace it, ignoring my stinging nose and wrapping my arms around his waist. "There," I say, voice muffled. "That's better."

"Is it?"

"Hug me back and stop complaining."

His chest vibrates as he gives a low chuckle, and then his body is curling over mine, hands splayed across my back in a way that feels way too intimate for a simple hug. Or maybe that's just how tall people embrace much shorter people. Even so, there's something familiar about the contact, like we've done this before and it's something we'll do a thousand times over.

Safe. Even though I'm meant to be comforting him.

"You're warm," I mumble, pressing my nose further into his chest and trying not to inhale too obviously. This is doing nothing good for my crush. "How are you so warm?"

"How are you never warm enough?" His tone is teasing, but his arms tighten around me like he can ward off the cold, and how is this man so perfect? I wish I had access to the internet so I can Google him and check out if he has any criminal convictions.

"It's okay to be upset about your brother, you know," I say. "And to not want to call him."

"I know."

"And to be scared at the idea he'll learn you were here."

His chest shakes again with another small laugh. "I'm not scared."

"You're not? Because you came out here to angrily chop wood at the mention of calling him."

Oskar sighs, the sound going straight through me, and his hand moves absently up and down my back. "I'm just embarrassed. That's all."

"You are a kickass giant of a man who saved an idiot hiker from dying on top of a mountain." I lean back and tip my head back so I can stare him directly in the face. "And you can also play instruments well enough to be accepted into music college, or whatever it is you're doing. Have you any idea how cool you are?"

His eyes smile even though his lips don't move. "I'm not sure my brother would agree."

"I don't know anything about your family, but I do know that if my brother made a bunch of choices I didn't agree with, and then we didn't speak for three years, I would miss him like hell. You can love someone and want better things for them. You can miss them and still think they're making bad choices. Love isn't this conditional thing based on a series of requirements. I love my brother even when he takes me for granted, and he loves me even when I'm living in a fictional world instead of the one with him. That's part of being in a family."

Oskar looks down at me, freckles blurred into obscurity at this distance, only his eyes as sharp as ever. He's ice over lava, and I want to feel what it's like when he melts entirely. His hands are still on my back, one low enough it's positioned on the curve right above my butt, and like he realises the same time I do, it abruptly shifts. He releases me, stepping back, and I'm cold again, despite my fleece.

"You should be a writer," he says, a little wryly, a flush starting on his proud cheekbones. "Go inside before you freeze to death. I'll be there in a second."

Left with no other choice, I nod and hop back to the front door. When I glance over again, he's frowning over the wood, the axe still on the ground where he left it, and one hand is curled into a fist.

I open the door, step inside, and leave him to it.