"Dammit, that feels good..."
Hot water sheeted down around me, so painfully, blissfully hot that I wondered for a moment of I was hallucinating, freezing to death, still wandering in the storm. Then Sienna raked her nails down my back just a little too hard and I decided I probably wouldn't hallucinate being sliced with knives.
Sienna realized I'd flinched and pulled her hands back. "Sorry."
I took a long draw from the tumbler of bourbon on the shelf, then turned and gathered the naked blonde in my arms. She put her head on my shoulder and sniffed. "Are you sure you're ok?"
I buried my head in the wet tangles of hair. "Yeah. My skin feels like its on fire and my ears are fat, but I'm fine. Thank you. So very much."
She pulled back and looked at me for a long time, then kissed me gently.
The moment was broken by Tori opening the bathroom door and knocking on the shower glass. I regretfully turned off the water and we exited the shower, dried off. "Windows and doors are secure, gas, electric, and water lines haven't been fucked with either outside the house or inside. Hot water heater, breaker box, and furnace look good too. Looks like we're safe," she said.
"Thank you."
"Tell me again," Tori requested once I was dressed in warm pajama pants and a sweater. "What happened?"
I padded to the kitchen in my slippers and pulled a pizza from the freezer, preheated the oven, poured myself another drink, and sat down at the table. I still felt frozen. The girls sat down around opposite me, waiting.
I shrugged. "Told you before. I thought my snowmobile had just been burning a bit more gas the past few weeks. About four I realized it was using gas really fast and turned around about twenty five miles out. It went dead shortly thereafter. When I checked the tank, it looked like someone had cut at least part of the way through the line going to the engine and then tried to patch it so it wouldn't be noticeable right away. Every time I went over a bump, the line probably tore a little bit more until it gave way completely. Not the best way to sabotage a snowmobile, but it wouldn't likely be noticed by a casual rider."
"Unlike cutting all your brake lines," Sienna said.
I tipped my glass to her and nodded. "So why did you guys decide to come looking for me?"
Tori shrugged. "See started getting worried when you weren't back around six. It had started coming down pretty good by then. I said you knew what you were doing, she said something had happened, you rarely stayed out that late even when the weather was great."
"I said I was going out to look for you, and she couldn't stop me." The blonde seemed proud of this.
Tori snorted, grabbed my tumbler and took a sip. "And because she doesn't know jack shit about this area and has only ridden a snow mobile twice, I went with her so she didn't wreck or get lost and freeze to death. You know, like you were trying to do."
I extended a middle finger and smirked at my neighbor. The girls had found me stumbling determinedly through the edge of the tree line, having made surprising progress in several mind-and-body numbed hours. I'd kept the presence of mind to move in a straight line at least, and avoid hypothermic undressing, an unconscious urge that kept getting stronger as the exertion raised my body temperature and the temperature around me dropped. I'd fixed one objective in my mind and held onto it with incredible will, and the arrival of Tori and Sienna had confused the hell out of me. My face still hurt from where Tori had slugged me in an attempt to shake me out of my stupor before putting me on the back of Sienna's snowmobile.
Back at home they'd stuck me in the shower and poured warm drinks down my throat in a seemingly unending repetition, and I kept trying to tell them that I was ok, that they were the ones in danger. I finally made myself understood to Tori, who immediately went into the same defensive mode is seen during the break-in, and she'd taken a long time checking every possible point of sabotage in the house and laying out firearms in every room.
Now, I just wanted hot food, alcohol, and sleep.
I wolfed down the pizza, brushed my teeth with unsteady hands, shed the mountain of blankets Sienna had insisted on piling on my shoulders as we sat at the table, undressed, and crawled into bed. A few minutes later Tori turned the lights out and I felt smooth warm skin around me, her head on my right shoulder, See's back pressed to my left side, my arm pillowing her head.
I closed my eyes and tried to relax. Tried to unwind. Tried to sink into a calm of sensation created by the warmth and affection around me. Tried to put out of my mind the thoughts that felt like unforgivable betrayal.
Somewhere in my endless trek of lifting feet and slowly freezing to death, my motivation had...changed. I still wanted to survive, get home with a warning about the danger...but the foremost thought in my mind wasn't either or both of the women to my left and right. Right now, more than anything, I wanted - achingly, desperately, regretfully - to feel Jessie laying on my chest. To run my hand through glossy black hair and see her lift her head and look at me with those bewilderingly intelligent eyes, flash me that feral grin.
The one thought that had inspired every step through the blizzard was that I didn't want to die having spent only one weekend with Jessie.
I wanted more than that.
And I fought with every fiber of my being to lock that feeling away in the dark corner of my brain where I kept all my regrets and my enjoyment of pain. It made me feel unworthy, dirty, guilty...messy.
