Page 26 of The Edge of Never

A hand slid over my forehead.

“Fuck, your skin is freezing. Hold on, don’t pass out on me.”

“I cannae… cannae stop shaking.”

The hand left me and there was some shuffling next to me.

“Shh, it’s okay, Thane. I’m going to get you warm.”

The sound of a zipper followed by a rush of cold had me trembling harder. Then a solid form wrapped itself around me before something else covered us. The zipper noise came again. Whatever was on top of me rubbed my arms and settled down after a minute. A hand gently touched my chest, and a head leaned against my shoulder.

I cracked my eyes open the best I could, staring down at the dark brown head of hair directly in my line of sight.

“I’ve got you, Thane. You’re going to be okay,” came Kit’s voice.

I had to be out of it because there was no way in hell Kit would have climbed into the sleeping bag with me. They didn’t like me. I didn’t like them.

That was the very last thought I had before my consciousness gave out and darkness took me under.

Nine

Thane

Coming back to awareness was like climbing out of a thick layer of mud, slow going and sticky. I felt my body being weighed down and my ankle throbbed with pain. But I no longer felt cold. I wasn’t shivering.

I wiggled my fingers and found they weren’t numb. A good sign. I was alive after falling into that fucking freezing cold water. That was something.

“Thane?” came a tired voice that was far closer than I expected.

My eyes flicked open to find it was pitch black. Something moved on top of me.

“Are you awake?”

The gears in my brain started to engage and register there was a body on top of me. A warm, very much alive body that felt good against me, which was an incredibly fucked up thing to be thinking under the circumstances. My focus should be on why the hell they were on top of me, not on the way their curves pressed against me, and how I wanted to trace them with my fingers.

What the actual fuck? Stop it!

“Kit?”

“Oh, thank fuck.” Their head shifted on my shoulder. “You had me scared out of my mind. I thought you were going to die for a moment there.”

Their words stopped me from asking why they’d crawled into the sleeping bag with me. There wasn’t exactly much room for two people in it, even with Kit being a lot smaller than me.

“Ye thought I was gonnae die?”

They shifted their hand across my chest and worked the zipper down to free us from the confinements of the bag.

The next thing I knew, Kit straddled my lap and reached up for something. Light flared in the tent as they turned a head torch on that hung off a hook on the roof.

I squinted and groaned.

“Sorry, that’s kind of bright, but figured we need some light in here.”

After blinking a few times, I stared up at Kit, who had stripped down to their thermal layers that showed off all their… assets. Why the hell did I have to notice that? My brain was playing tricks on me, and it wasn’t funny.

Kit’s hands rested on my chest in a rather intimate fashion that had me swallowing hard.

“When I got you in here and wrapped you up, you continued to complain about being cold and your skin was freezing. I figured the best way to warm you up was to give you my body heat.”

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