Page 26 of Thin Ice

"Come up here," he said. Soft.

I climbed up and he pulled me onto the bench beside him and wrapped the blanket around both of us and put his arms around me, and I put my head on his chest, and his heartbeat was still going fast under my ear.

His hand moved slow down my back. Up. Down. Tracing patterns on my skin that I don't think he knew he was drawing.

"You good?" he said.

"I'm good."

"Was that — "

"Liam." I tipped my head up. His face was open, and a little stunned, like he couldn't believe any of this was his. "That was everything."

He kissed the top of my head. Pulled the blanket tighter.

Outside the plastic the lake cracked and boomed, rolling shore to shore, and inside it the two of us lay tangled on a bench seat in someone else's boat with the heater running and the lantern dying down and four miles of frozen water between us and every person who wanted to tell us how to live.

"Alex."

"Yeah."

"I'm really glad you stuck the throttle."

I laughed into his chest, and his chest shook with it, and the boat rocked gently on its stands, and for a while there was nothing else. Just the gold light and the warm dark and his heartbeat under my ear, and nowhere in the world we had to be.

Chapter 7: Liam

His breathing slowed against my chest. His hand, which had been rubbing my chest and stomach, went still. I looked down and his eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open, his whole face relaxed.

He'd fallen asleep.

On a boat we weren't supposed to be on.

I should've woken him up. It was almost eleven. A missing BMW at midnight was the kind of detail his dad would catalogue. But I didn't wake him up. I lay there with his weight against me and his breath warm against my chest, and I let us have it. The ten or fifteen minutes where nothing was wrong and nobody wanted anything from either of us and the world was exactly the size of a wrapped boat.

I pressed my face into the top of his head, kissed him, and thought about nothing at all for as long as I could make nothing last.

It didn't last long enough. It never does.

He stirred. Shifted. His eyes opened slowly and unfocused, and for a second he didn't know where he was. I watched him not know, watched the confusion move across his face and then clear.

"How long was I out?" he asked.

"Fifteen minutes. You snore, by the way."

"I do not snore."

"Light snoring. Tasteful snoring. Very Ivy League."

"Shut up." But he was smiling. "I can't believe I fell asleep."

I gestured at the general scene of the crime. "You're basically a stray cat. Show up, get fed, pass out."

"That's the most romantic thing you've ever said to me."

"I'm a romantic guy."

He laughed, and the laugh was the sleepy, unguarded kind, and then he said, still half into my chest: "I've slept better in your places than I've ever slept in mine. The dorm. Here. Anywhere with you." A pause. "That probably means something."