Kiss Her Once for Me (76)

“I should call my mom,” Jack says, all thoughts of Andrew set aside for a moment.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” Katherine’s voice screeches loud enough for me to hear when the call connects. Jack listens to what she says next, nods along, a crease appearing between her eyebrows.

“Okay, yeah… of course. We’ll get back as fast as we can. No, we saw Andrew and Dylan… you talked to them? Good. If they make it back to the parking lot before we do, feel free to leave without us. No, Mom, it’s fine. Don’t wait for us. We have the truck…. Don’t worry about us. I can drive in the snow…. Yeah… I will…. Love you, too.”

By the time Jack hangs up the phone, my face is as pinched as hers. “Is Katherine freaking out?”

“Mildly, yes.” Jack eyes me, and I know she’s thinking about my fiancé kissing someone else, but she asks, “Are you freaking out?”

“Mildly, yes.”

“Then let’s go.”

It turns out, there is no fast way back to the parking lot, but we get on the lodge getback trail and push forward with our poles as ferociously as we can. I still have the same feeling of flying, but it’s tainted by the fact that I can barely see two feet in front of me in the dense snow. I stare at the back of Jack’s green jacket and follow her movements as precisely as I can.

I’m not sure how long it takes us to get back to the lodge—I lose track of time as I shut down my brain and go into panicked autopilot—but when we arrive, it’s obvious most people have cleared out already. The Lincoln is gone, which hopefully means the rest of the Kim-Prescotts made it out before the weather got too bad. Jack shoots off a quick text while we’re still in range of Timberline’s cell service to let the family know we’re safe and heading home.

Everything feels frantic and dire as I race to return my equipment, then meet Jack back at the truck. There’s a small buildup of snow behind Gillian’s rear tires, but thankfully, Jack once learned this lesson the hard way, and she now carries emergency winter supplies in the back of the truck. She pulls out a shovel and clears enough of a path for us to get out of the parking lot.

Just in the time it takes her to dig us out, the snow has started coming harder and faster. The road back to the highway is slick, but Timberline was busy, and enough cars have driven the road that we’re able to make it back to the highway safely.

The highway itself is a different story entirely; cars plod along at fifteen miles per hour, and Gillian’s windshield wipers aren’t quite up to the task of clearing snow fast enough for Jack to actually see. She cranks down the driver’s-side window and sticks her head out every few seconds just to make sure we’re not about to plunge off the side of the road. It’s doing wonders for my anxiety.

“We’ll be okay,” she takes pains to reassure me every few seconds. “We are totally okay.”

And she’s right. We are okay, until we make it to the turn-off for the cabin, and Gillian immediately gets stuck in a bank of snow. The tires spin out until the back of the truck pitches, and Jack hits the brakes. “We’ll be okay,” she says quickly. “Just hang on. I can dig us out. Stay here.”

She leaps out of the car, and while I wait for her to return, I attempt to warm my hands on the one heater vent that works. When she climbs back in ten minutes later, her face is flushed and distinctly unhappy. “Did it work?”

“Uh,” she says, half nodding, half scowling, leaving me wholly unconvinced we’re ever going to move again. She pulls off her gloves and grips the wheel. She coaxes the car from first to second, and Gillian seesaws in the snow, gaining ground and slipping back. The road up to the cabin is steep, and despite the grueling effort Jack makes to gain ground, we end up back where we started. Jack’s right hand massages the gearshift back down into first, the tendons straining against her skin. I have to give it to the Kim-Prescott siblings. They both have the unnatural talent of turning driving into something mildly obscene.

She clears her throat, flexing the muscles in her jaw. (Also obscene.) “I don’t want to alarm you, but—”

“We’re going to die.”

“Probably not.”

“Probably?”

“It’s unlikely this is how we go. But I don’t think we can drive the rest of the way home.”

“I mean, we’re stuck in snow and visibility is negative ten thousand, so I sort of guessed that. How far are we from the cabin?”

“Um. Maybe three miles or so?”

“Three miles! This is absolutely how we go!” It’s already getting dark, and with the blizzard-like conditions, we’ll end up lost in the woods.

But (my anxiety screams at me) we can’t just stay in the truck, either—not with her feeble heat, for as long as it lasts until we run out of gas. “God, I knew this was going to happen!”

Jack shoots me a look that somehow manages to be condescending despite our impending deaths. “You knew we were going to get stuck in the snow on the way home from skiing?”

“I know you and I do not have a good track record when it comes to snow.”

In profile, I see the half-moon tug at the corner of her mouth. “Fine. Here’s what we’re going to do. Our friends the Singhs have a cabin about a half mile up the road,” she says, taking control of the situation just like she did the last time we got stuck in the snow. She leads, just assuming I’ll follow. “I think we can make it there. Hopefully they’ll be home, since they usually come for the holidays. I don’t think my dad can drive down the hill in these conditions, so we’ll have to stay with the Singhs until things clear, and we can come back for Gillian in the morning. Does that sound like a plan?”