“All right,” I ask. “Do you want meat lasagna with green beans and potatoes, or… chicken curry with steamed broccoli?”

I turn the second package over, holding it closer to the light of the stove. When the hell did MREs start coming in chicken curry flavor?

Imogen pulls the sleeping bag tighter around her, sitting on the floor, legs crossed. She’s dressed again, and I’m wearing an enormous camouflage jacket and overall pants that I found in the plastic bins stacked against the wall.

Hope Bubba doesn’t mind that I’ve borrowed some of his stuff. Maybe if he ever finds out what happened I’ll give him a gift card to a hunting store or a free heliskiing trip or something.

Not that whoever owns this cardboard-and-plywood place has any business heliskiiing. The ramshackle cabin has more of a drinking beers and racing souped-up snowmobiles vibe to it.

“I’ll take the chicken curry one,” she says.

“Great,” I say, and shove them both into the MRE heater.

I wonder again if this is the last two, because Imogen says she couldn’t find my pack after she dragged me in here. She also said she didn’t look that hard, and Christ knows I’m not venturing out to look for it tonight in bare feet and a sleeping bag.

It might be sitting there, somewhere she didn’t see it.

It might be at the bottom of the lake. I’ve got no clue what happened to it, and I can only cross my fingers and hope that it’s the first, and not the second, particularly since Bubba didn’t seem too hot on stocking his little getaway with, you know, food.

The MREs finish heating. I give Imogen hers, open mine, and for a couple of bites we eat in silence together.

“You know, something occurred to me,” Imogen finally says.

“Mmm?” I ask, spoon in my mouth.

“There’s a woodstove here,” she says slowly. “There’s a bed frame, there’s a twin mattress, there’s all these sheets of plywood and everything. This stuff didn’t get here on someone’s back.”

“No,” I agree.

I don’t think we’re going to talk about what just happened, how it feels a little right now like my world’s flipped again and somehow I’m right back where I was ten years ago.

The last time it took me forever to get over her. Even though I never saw her again after prom night — not until Amy called me over to the counter at the Solaris airport — I was nearly twenty years old before I stopped seeing Imogen’s face on every girl I looked at.

And there were plenty. I rebounded like hell, plowing through the cheerleading squad at Solaris High, even though most of them were Melissa’s friends who’d sworn to her that they’d never touch me.

I taught ski lessons sometimes the next winter, after Imogen was already in California, and I met rich men’s daughters, took them to the secret hot tub in the resort, the one where I first saw Imogen naked. I sat them in the same spot and whispered the same things and got what I wanted but it was never what I needed.

Sometimes it was the rich men’s wives, purring cougars who knew what they wanted and weren’t afraid to have a barely-legal kid give it to them.

It took forever to get over her, is my point. The only thing that finally worked was joining the Navy and going to flight school, the thrill of the air the thing that made her face disappear, only for her to come back.

“So there must be a road,” she says, opening her MRE and peering inside. “And that road must go somewhere that has plywood and wood stoves and big plastic tubs.”

I open my own MRE, stab into it. It isn’t really good — it tastes like an MRE — but I’m so hungry right now that it could taste like vomit-flavored dirt and I wouldn’t care.

“Did you see a vehicle?” I ask.

Imogen shakes her head slowly, stirring her MRE together. The only light is the low fire in the wood stove, so she’s lit from the side, her face orange and shadowed, her glasses darkening crazy lines across both eyes.

“I didn’t look,” she says. “I figured we weren’t leaving until tomorrow, anyway.”

I look at her ankle, pointedly.

“Maybe if we find a snowmobile,” I tell her. “But I don’t think we will, and you’re not walking anywhere on that.”

She pulls the edge of the sleeping bag over her ankle, even though she’s got her thick wool socks back on, like not being able to see it will make me forget that it’s black and blue and swollen.

“We can tape it again,” she says, not looking at me.

“We taped it before you did whatever the fuck you did to it.”

“Whatever the fuck I did to it was pull you out of the lake,” she fires back. “I can do that, I can walk out of this stupid valley on a road.”

“So you can turn it again on a rock or something, halfway out, and then I can carry you the rest of the way?” I ask, a knot in my stomach slowly unfurling. “If you go I’m not going with you, and if you go I might also haul you back here so you can sit the fuck down and heal for a minute, Imogen.”

“I’ll be fine,” she says, not looking at me, her voice quiet and sharp.

I swallow hard, look through the tiny window and into the fire inside the wood stove. She’s always been like this, fucking stubborn, and something about her being this way always makes me even more pigheaded than I already am. Something inside me hates giving way to Imogen even though I know she’ll never bend or break.

Like when she said she wanted me to tell Melissa.

Barricade the door, carry her back here if she leaves, tie her down and make her stay until her ankle’s better—

“You’re not fine,” I say, trying to keep my voice even, reasonable.

I try not to react like we’re both seventeen, because we’re not.

“You’re injured, and by going out there, you run the risk of injuring yourself further and putting us both in danger,” I continue.

I sound calm. I sound reasonable.

“We’ve got shelter, we’ve got warmth, we’ve got some food, let’s stay here another day or two,” I say.

“We’re low on food,” she says quietly. “These were the last two, we lost your pack into the lake—”

“You said you weren’t sure.”

“It’s not looking good,” she says, her eyes boring into mine. “There are a few more bins but I don’t think those have anything in them either.”

“A day,” I tell her.

“I don’t want to starve in the warmth,” she says quietly.

I finish my MRE, and my stomach growls. Imogen’s already finished hers, drawn her knees to her chest. I want to pull her to me, stroke her hair, tell her that we’ll be fine, but the girl’s like an iron gate that slammed shut.

“I bet we could catch a bunny,” I say.

She leans her chin on her arms around her knees, looking at me skeptically.

“At least call them rabbits.”

I grin at her.

“Why, you don’t want to eat a bunny?” I ask. “You know they’re the same thing either way.”

She shoves her glasses up her face, the ghost of a smile around her mouth.

“Semantics matter,” she says. “Though I’ll believe you can catch a bunny when I see it.”

“I went on a hunting trip once with my dad,” I point out.

Imogen snorts, but now at least she’s smiling.

“I’m so sure the two of you hung out in a camouflage shelter all day where you ate jerky, peed into bottles, and stayed cold and miserable in the hopes of seeing a deer,” she says.

“Not exactly,” I admit.

I can’t even begin to imagine my dad actually hunting. I can barely imagine the man wearing anything but a suit and tie. Camouflage? Pissing in a bottle? Hell no.

“It was on a preserve,” I tell her. “And we were shooting… what’s the bird that flies up out of the bushes and then you shoot a shotgun and some of them fall down?”

“Quail? Partridge? One of those,” she says. “So you did that and now you think you can catch, kill, skin, and eat a bunny?”

“I thought we were calling them rabbits.”

“Apparently, we are, now that I’ve made you think about killing one.”

“I think the hard part would be catching it,” I admit. “I’m not a bad shot, but there’s no gun and I’ve got no clue how to build a rabbit trap.”

I let it go unsaid that I’ve got no problem with the thought of killing a rabbit, even if it’s fluffy and cute.

“And here you had me thinking you were Mister Survivalist,” she teases.

“Did I?” I ask. “I guess I was doing all right until I fell into a lake and you had to drag me here.”

“That wasn’t super impressive, no,” she agrees, sitting back on her hands. Imogen straightens her leg, making a face as her right ankle moves. Even through her thick socks I can tell that her ankles are different sizes, and it worries me all over again.

“And you did scare the hell out of me,” she says, suddenly, her voice brittle but soft.

She’s staring into the wood stove, suddenly rigid, like she’s holding an invisible shield against whatever I’m about to say. There’s that haughty look I know, that holier-than-thou manner that she has that fucking infuriates me, makes me want to drag her down to earth.

Her guard is up. She just told me something real, something true, something that makes her vulnerable and that’s all. I don’t know why I never saw it for what it was before, but right here, right now I feel like plate glass just shattered over my head, shards raining down around me.

“I’m fine now,” I say, just so my mouth is making noise because it needs to do something. “I think it was worse for you than it was for me. I was barely conscious for most of that.”

It’s not true. I still remember crashing through the ice in sharp relief, the sudden plunge into the cold that burned like I’d been launched into the sun. Imogen grabbing at me, slipping away, the certainty at that moment that I was going to die there.

Wrapping something around myself. Imogen screaming, leaving, being pulled toward the edge and kicking and pulling like hell to get myself out, getting half-dragged to the cabin because I could barely think, let alone walk.

Imogen, piling up blankets and coats, wrapping herself around me. She must have been freezing.

“It was pretty bad,” she says, her voice still flat, that tone that makes my hackles go up instantly.

Defense mechanism, I remind myself.

“We should get some sleep,” she finally says. “I can grab a couple of blankets and sleep on the floor, you’re still recovering—”

“Bullshit,” I say.

She raises an eyebrow.

“Bullshit that you’re still recovering?”

“Bullshit that you’re taking the floor.”

Imogen rolls her eyes, shoves her glasses up her face.

“Look, the floor is colder, and it takes a couple of days to recover fully from a bout of hypothermia, especially if you’re—”

“I don’t mind sharing.”

Something flickers across her face, this moment of uncertainty that I don’t see, so much as I feel punch me in the gut. I want to shout I was inside you an hour ago, where the fuck was this then, but I swallow it and don’t. Imogen’s a deep lake, bottomless depths.

I stand up, brushing myself off. I open the grate on the wood stove and fill it up with the wood that Imogen brought in while I was still sleeping earlier, make a mental note that if I can, it might be nice to chop some more wood for whoever owns this cabin.

Then I remember the food situation. My stomach growls. I’ll have to fulfill my karmic duties some other way if we’re gonna walk out of here.

Imogen stands, unsteady. She grabs the sleeping bag she was using, tosses it on the floor, straightens it out.

I grab it and throw it on the single bed, followed by my own, and she crosses her arms, glares.

I take her by the shoulders in the dim orange light, and for long seconds, I just look down at her.

Imogen looks like hell. There’s no getting around that. We crash-landed a plane in the wilderness and then walked out for a couple of days. She’s listing slightly to one side, favoring her good ankle. She’s got deep purple circles under her brown eyes, the shadows of her glasses making them look worse. There’s dirt and leaves and twigs stuck in her hair, which is back in some kind of messy bun.

She’s got dirt on her face, scratches on her neck. Her jaw clenches as she looks back up at me, waiting for whatever I’m about to do but I don’t know what I’m about to do.

Yes, I do.

I kiss her.

I kiss Imogen with no excuse, no ulterior motive, no impulsive adrenaline rush. I kiss her because I want my lips on hers and that’s all I want, to kiss her and have her kiss me back.

She does. Soft and gentle this time, like we’re being careful. Like we’re doing this for the first time even though it’s anything but, like we suddenly have everything to lose.

I turn my head, put my hand against her face like she’s a bird that could fly away. Her skin’s warm under my fingertips and I swear she leans into me slightly as I stroke my thumb along her cheekbone.

Our lips separate but we don’t move apart, our faces still touching. Hesitantly, she puts her hand to my face, her eyes closed like she’s blind and trying to find out who I am.

“Imogen,” I whisper. “What are you afraid of?”

“That I haven’t learned a thing from my mistakes,” she murmurs. “That I’m doomed to repeat the same pattern forever and never break out of this stupid cycle that led me back to you.”

“This is different,” I whisper. “I swear this is different.”

Imogen doesn’t say anything, just presses her lips to mine again. I don’t know if it means that she believes me, or she just wants me to shut up, but it works and I go quiet.

“C’mon,” I murmur when we separate again. “It makes more sense to share body heat.”

She doesn’t answer right away, just leans her head against my shoulder, turning her face in toward my neck as I slide my arms around her and she lets herself relax into me.

“All right,” she finally says. “Try not to kick me too much.”

The bed’s not very big — maybe smaller than a twin bed, I’ve got nothing for comparison — but for the first time ever Imogen falls asleep in my arms, and I let myself be rocked gently on the waves of her breathing.