“You should go,” I tell Wilder.

I don’t mean it. Not in the least, because as much as I hate him being the only person around for thousands of miles, the thought of being here, of freezing or starving slowly to death in this plane, is infinitely worse.

But it seems like the kind of thing I’m supposed to say right now, even if I don’t mean it. Like I’m noble and brave or something instead of a terrified girl with a busted ankle who can put on a brave face for about thirty seconds before admitting how afraid she is of dying alone in the wilderness.

“Alone?” he echoes, looking up at me.

He’s slouched forward, his elbows on his knees, and he looks up at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. I push my glasses up, feeling like I need to do something and grateful for the extra layer between me and the world.

“Why?” he finally says, sounding genuinely puzzled.

I just point at my ankle, stuck straight out in front of me.

“We can splint it,” he says, his head still cocked as he frowns as my foot. “Between that and your boots it’ll probably hurt and we’ll be slow, but we can get you down.”

“There’s a boulder scramble between here and anything else.”

“I didn’t say it would be fun, I said it would be doable.”

“Wilder,” I tell him, my voice close to a whisper. “It’s broken, I can’t go down a boulder scramble.”

He looks at me for a long time, rubbing his hands together in his gloves, the knot in my stomach pulsing and tightening and loosening. I’d forgotten his stupid ability to bring out every single emotion in me, all at once: anger and disdain and nostalgia and this weird, almost tangible longing that sometimes comes out of nowhere and blindsides me like a Mack truck on the interstate.

And then he smiles. Wilder fucking smiles, takes off his gloves, stands up and steps over to me.

“It’s not broken,” he says, crouching.

“I can’t walk on it.”

“No, you can walk on it a little,” he says, reaching his bare hands out toward it.

Instinctively, I jerk my leg away, gasping in pain as it scoots awkwardly across the floor.

“If it were broken it would hurt a whole lot more,” he says, his voice suddenly gentle and patient.

God, it’s like Wilder is two different people sometimes: this guy, the nice one, who’s strangely competent and in charge, who seems to know what he’s doing, and the raging asshole with pure venom in his eyes every time he looks at me.

“Can I see your ankle?” he asks, his voice quiet.

Instinctively I want to shout no, get away from me I don’t ever want you touching me again but instead of letting my animal brain control what I do, I take a deep breath. I swallow.

And I nod, moving my leg back toward him.

Wilder settles onto his knees without saying anything. He pushes the bottom of my fleece-lined leggings up to my mid-calf, his warm hand rougher than I remember against my skin.

Don’t remember, I order myself, leaning my head back against the plane, my hands clenching in mittens.

He holds the toe of my boot steady in one hand and unlaces it with the other. I’ve got thick wool socks on underneath heavy-duty over-the-ankle hiking boots, and he undoes the double knots in my laces, tugs them through the eyelets, loosens the tongue of my boot so gently I can barely feel it even though my ankle is swollen and prickling.

I didn’t know he could be this gentle, I think.

Yes, you did, I remind myself as he takes the boot off, cold air slowly filtering through the thick sock.

“Sorry about the smell,” I say, because I haven’t taken my shoes off since we crash-landed.

“I’ve smelled way, way worse,” he assures me, a slight grin on his face. “Trust me on that.”

He pulls my sock down over most of my foot until it’s just over my toes, his fingers lightly traversing the pebbled indentations that it left on my foot.

My ankle is swollen and light purple, ugly shades of green and blue around the periphery of the main bruise. Even though it’s midday, the sun is filtered through the layer of clouds and the layer of snow covering half the plane’s windows, and I wonder if the colors on my ankle are right.

There must be some sort of light tricks at play here, I think, willing myself to stop concentrating on Wilder’s hands touching my ankle this gently. Like a prism effect or something where it’s going through the frozen particulate matter up in the clouds.

He takes my foot in one hand and the bottom of my calf in the other, his hands strong and firm and amazingly warm, and he rotates my foot slightly.

I make a face, and he looks over at me.

“That hurt?” he asks.

I just nod, wishing he’d stop, but he keeps doing it, his eyes searching my face.

“But not too bad?”

“Not too bad,” I agree. “It’s way worse when I put weight on it.”

His hands move, sliding around, fingers digging into the swollen flesh around the joint. I’m holding my breath, thinking about how my foot must smell awful and how I haven’t shaved my legs in the past week, since I was going to the Arctic after all to look at musk oxen and not expecting someone to touch me. Even just to see if I have a broken ankle or not.

“How much does that hurt?” he asks, still prodding.

“Some,” I say. “I’m not kicking you in the face or anything.”

“And thanks for that,” he murmurs, teasing me. “Wiggle your toes?”

I wiggle.

“Can you rotate your ankle?” he asks, finally letting me go.

I rotate the ankle, dutifully, while he kneels next to it and watches.

“It’s not broken,” he finally says, rolling my sock back over my foot, pulling it up over my ankle. “Just sprained.”

“I still can’t get down that boulder scramble,” I say, remembering how much it hurt just to get outside to pee. There’s no way I can just hop from rock to rock with my ankle like this, and Wilder sure can’t carry me, not that he would, which means that there’s no way I can get out of this plane.

I take a deep breath, forcing myself to stave off the panic. It’s always worse at times like this, when I’m under stress and haven’t been eating or sleeping well, and good God are all of those things true right now.

“We’ll wrap it up,” he says. “There’s no ankle splint in the emergency kit but with some good bandaging and if we lace your boot up real tight, I think we can manage getting you down the scramble.”

We.

I don’t trust Wilder Flint. I don’t even like him, except for in moments like this when I catch myself thinking he’s okay, though in my defense right now he’s actually being okay.

But it’s not like I’ve got a choice. Well, I mean, I do obviously, but my choices are pretty much that either a) I trust Wilder Flint just enough to go with him, or b) I stay here, in this plane, and die of either hypothermia or starvation or dehydration or a lovely combination of all three.

“I’m not light,” I warn him, heart clenching.

He lifts my leg gingerly, sliding my boot over my toes and foot. I could put my own shoes back on but for some reason I let him do it, because sitting here with him, letting him be nice to me feels…

Well, it feels nice.

Of course he’s being nice, there’s no one else around, I think.

“Last year I had to wrestle a former NFL linebacker down a double-black-diamond ski slope,” he says, adjusting my boot around my ankle. “I think I can handle you.”

“Were you on skis?”

“Not at that point,” he says, a smile in his voice. “We don’t — well, we didn’t — screen for skiing ability before we would take someone heli-skiing, and let’s just say this guy didn’t have very much. You know how much force it takes to break a ski?”

“Oh, my God,” I murmur, because the answer to that is a lot of force.

“He did that, and as you can probably imagine, it fucked his knee up pretty good.”

Wilder tightens the laces around my foot, glances up at me.

“Too tight?”

I shake my head, and he starts looping the laces through the hooks over the ankle of my boots.

“Anyway, I figure if I can get three hundred pounds of screaming man-meat down a ski slope far enough for the rescue toboggan, I can probably get you down a couple hundred feet of boulder scramble,” Wilder says, double-knotting my laces.

“Now you screen for skiing ability?” I ask, trying not to smile and failing.

“Exactly,” he says. “Anyone who wants to heli-ski has to take a day of private instruction first. We got a couple of complaints, but most people appreciate that we’re not just letting incompetent maniacs down a difficult mountain with them.”

His hand is still on my leg, one finger on the stubble-laden strip between the bottom of my leggings and the top of my socks, and we just look at each other for a long, long moment.

There are a thousand things that I want to say, a thousand things I want to ask Wilder, starting with why are you being nice to me now? and ending with why did you ever pretend to be nice to me in the first place?

But I don’t ask either. I’m not sure I want to know the answers, if I’m really being honest with myself. And right now, I’m having an odd glimmer of a world where we’ve never met before, where we’re two strangers who have to get down a mountain together.

“Besides that guy, who’s the worst skier you ever had to take up?” I ask, and Wilder laughs.