“There are sides?” she asked, hitting me again.
“Yeah—aren’t there?”
“I thought we had a whole grand mêlée deal going on!” she called back, taking cover behind Pietr’s fort.
“Grand mêlée? Are you goin’ medieval on our asses?” I laughed.
Amy roared, bending over to hold her sides at the absolute indignation in my tone.
I barreled over the wall of snow and took her to the ground with a whuff!
Giggling, we tried to untangle ourselves from each other and each other’s scarves. We got to our knees and peered over the wall, watching Max and Cat still heaving snowballs at each other around the tree.
Every time Cat got hit, she screamed. And every time she hit Max, he mimicked her scream so well she shouted at him. In Russian.
Pietr started stockpiling snowballs and I thought back to social studies class and the arms race. My face ached from grinning in the cold.
His back to me, Max made a lovely target. I tore into the top of the densely packed snow wall and freed a nice chunk of snow.
Max stumbled when my snowball thumped right between his shoulder blades.
He turned and snarled out my name. “Jessssie…”
“Wuh-oh,” Amy squeaked.
Ignoring Cat, he raced straight for us, and I pitched snowballs so fast and hard my shoulder tightened.
Some went wide, but a few nailed Max.
Right in the chest and gut.
One accidentally went a bit lower.
He growled—but didn’t slow down.
One of his snowballs hit me in the shoulder so hard I spun partway round.
Stooped and repeating, “Ow, ow, ow…,” I felt him rush past and heard the ooof as someone lost their breath. I whipped back just in time to see Max barrel over Amy, wrapping an arm around her as he took her to the ground and stopped her fall as fast as he’d started it, dropping into something like a push-up position, boots and one gloved hand holding them both up, one arm keeping her just suspended above the blanket of snow.
“Give her back, you beast!” Cat shrieked, raining snowballs on Max’s broad back.
He seemed not to notice; his nose a hairsbreadth from Amy’s, he said, “Good morning.”
She just stared up into his face, her heart surely pounding after it’d dropped so quickly into her stomach. “Good morning yourself.”
He turned his head and looked at all of us. He grinned, a stretch of his lips making him boyish and brazen at the same time. “Battle’s over,” he announced. “I win.”
“What?!” Cat demanded, furiously pressing snow between her gloved hands.
“Da, I won.” He looked back at Amy and kissed the tip of her nose as he smoothly brought them both back up to a standing position, his arm staying tight around her. “I rescued the princess.”
“What?!” Cat socked him with a snowball and he pushed Amy behind him, shielding her with his broad body, and nearly doubling over laughing at his sister.
“Rescued the princess from trolls!” he roared, scooping up a discarded snowball. He hurled it at Cat and roared even louder when it pulled her hat right off her head.
“You brute!” she shouted. Her face was frozen and pink in a strange balance of outrage and laughter.
Max looked over his shoulder at his willing captive. “Come with me?” he asked, his voice dropping. Going suddenly serious.
She nodded and he scooped her up easily, sprinting around the far side of the house, away from our curious eyes and ears.
Alexi
I heard them on the porch before I saw them. Setting down my coffee mug and the newspaper that announced “Stray Dogs Become Problem for Junction,” I moved my chair closer to the window.
His voice was low—dark.
Hers was soft. And more vulnerable than ever.
“If you aren’t sleeping well, maybe you need to do something differently,” he suggested. “Change a habit. Get some help.”
“What habit? Or help?”
“How you sleep. When. Maybe where?” He paused. I imagined Max was as deep in thought as he could get. Probably rubbing his forehead because that most important part of him—well, not the part he did most of his thinking with, but the part he should engage more regularly—was pounding against his skull at such sudden and intense usage.
“I don’t sleep. Not much,” she retorted. “That’s a habit I’d definitely like to change. I fall asleep as soon as I can. As soon as I…”
There was a stretch of silence.
“As soon as you…?”
“As soon as I can stop thinking about him. And you.”
I shifted to peer between the curtains, catching a sliver of their two forms, huddled together, him in a denim jacket—stubborn against the cold—her bundled in a thick coat, scarf around her neck and covering her chin, knit hat pulled down to cover all the way to her eyebrows. Their breath pooled out in soft clouds of steam, mingling and fading into nothing as winter tore all warmth apart.
He reached an arm out to rest around her shoulders. She leaned back. Away. Far enough that he hesitated and dropped his arm down, sitting back to watch her, to wait for some clue to what he should do next.
Max being awkward yet attempting to be something—someone—better was fascinating.
“What do you dream about?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
She straightened, going stiff at the question, and shook her head. “No,” she said. “You can ask me almost anything else—but not that.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Okay,” he said. The next words blurted out. “Do you trust me?”
Amy watched him a moment, knowing the question was loaded and that no matter how she answered it’d potentially change everything between them.
“Yes,” she finally said. “Yes. I trust you. Completely. I want no walls between us. Ever. That’s how much I trust you.”
“Da. No walls. So sleep with me.”
She shot back from him, her body language all angles that read like a line of exclamation points. “Sleep with you?”
He raised his hands. “I don’t want sex—”
“You don’t want—”
“Just sleep beside me. Maybe knowing someone you trust is right next to you…”
“Ha.”
“What?”
“You must think I’m stupid. Or easy.” She stood, straight and sharp and, placing her hands on her hips, glared down at him.