Updated Apr 11, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 16: The Days Blur
Sloane
The days blur together after that night.
Not in a bad way—not like the monotonous blur of billable hours and court cases that defined my old life—but in the way that happens when you’re so present in each moment that time loses meaning. Day fourteen. Day fifteen. Week two of being trapped in this cabin with Jackson, and I’ve stopped counting the hours until rescue and started wishing time would slow down instead.
We don’t talk about what happens when I leave. We don’t talk about the future or make plans or acknowledge that the weather is clearing and the rescue is coming soon. We just… exist together in this perfect bubble, taking each moment as it comes.
He teaches me.
More survival skills, yes—tracking animal prints in the snow, building emergency shelter from branches and pine boughs, starting fire in wet conditions—but also teaching me him. How to read the tension in his shoulders when he’s having a bad PTSD day. How to ground him with touch when the nightmares threaten. How to exist in companionable silence without feeling the need to fill it with empty words.
“You’re a good student now,” he says one afternoon while we’re out checking his trap line, my ankle finally strong enough to navigate the terrain. “Remember when you couldn’t even chop kindling without nearly taking off a finger?”
“I was never that bad.”
“You were worse.” But he’s smiling, that rare, genuine smile that makes my heart flip in my chest. “Now look at you. Tracking a rabbit trail like you’ve been doing it your whole life.”
“I have a good teacher.” I glance back at him, and the look in his eyes makes heat pool low in my belly despite the cold. “Patient. Thorough. Very hands-on with his instruction.”
“Hands-on is the best way to learn,” he says, and there’s a roughness to his voice that has nothing to do with the wilderness and everything to do with the memory of exactly how hands-on he was last night.
The sexual tension is still there—will probably always be there between us—but it’s mixed now with something deeper: respect, admiration, the kind of partnership that comes from truly knowing someone. I’m not just attracted to his body anymore (though I very much am); I’m attracted to his competence, his quiet strength, the way he moves through this world with such certainty.
And watching him teach me, watching his patience and his pride when I get something right, makes me want him even more.
That night, we make love by firelight.
It’s different from that first desperate coupling during the storm—slower, more thorough, taking our time to learn each other’s bodies with patient hands and whispered discoveries. He maps every inch of my skin like he’s memorizing it, finds spots that make me gasp and moan and beg for more. And I learn him the same way—the scar on his ribs that makes him shudder when I kiss it, the sensitive spot on his neck that makes his breath catch, the way his hands clench in my hair when I take him in my mouth.
We don’t speak. Don’t need to. Our bodies say everything our mouths won’t—I love you, I need you, please don’t leave, how am I going to survive without you.
After, wrapped in his arms with the fire crackling and Bear snoring at the foot of the bed, I feel more at peace than I’ve ever felt in my entire life.
“What are you thinking about?” he murmurs against my hair.
“How perfect this is.” I trace lazy patterns on his chest. “How I don’t want it to end.”
His arms tighten around me. “Sloane—”
“I know. I know we can’t talk about it.” I press a kiss to his shoulder. “But I can think it, right? I can wish for impossible things?”
“Yeah.” His voice is rough. “You can wish.”
We don’t talk about it more than that. Don’t dare to say out loud what we’re both thinking—that maybe this doesn’t have to end, that maybe there’s a way to make this work, that maybe we could find a compromise between my world and his.
Because saying it out loud would make it real, and making it real would make it hurt more when it inevitably falls apart.
So we just hold each other and pretend that morning won’t come, that rescue won’t arrive, that we can stay in this bubble forever.
***
The days fall into a perfect rhythm.
We wake tangled together, make love while the cabin warms, eat breakfast side by side. He goes out to hunt or check traps, and I practice the skills he’s taught me—fire-starting, shelter-building, tracking. When he returns, we work together processing game or gathering firewood or tending the cabin. And in the evenings, we read or talk or simply exist in comfortable silence before falling into bed together again.
We’re partners in every sense of the word. Survival partners. Life partners. The way we move around each other in the small cabin feels choreographed, natural, like we’ve been doing this dance for years instead of weeks.
I catch myself thinking about it constantly—what it would be like if this was my life. If I woke up to Jackson every morning, spent my days learning the wilderness, my nights in his arms. No partnership review, no billable hours, no empty apartment in a city that never sleeps. Just this: simplicity, peace, purpose.
Him.
“You’re doing it again,” he says one evening, and I realize I’ve been staring into the fire, lost in thought.
“Doing what?”
“Thinking too loud.” He pulls me back against his chest, his arms wrapping around me. “I can see the wheels turning in that lawyer brain of yours.”
“Sorry. Occupational hazard.”
“What are you thinking about?”
Everything. You. Us. How I don’t want to leave. How I’m terrified of going back to my old life. How being here with you has shown me what living actually feels like instead of just surviving.
But I don’t say any of that. Instead I say, “Just wondering what happens when rescue comes.”
His arms tighten. “What do you want to happen?”
It’s the first time either of us has asked the question directly, and the weight of it hangs in the air between us.
“I don’t know,” I whisper, and it’s both a lie and the truth. I know what I want—I want to stay, want to build a life here with him, want to wake up in his arms every morning for the rest of my life. But wanting something and knowing if it’s possible are two very different things.
“Me neither,” he says quietly, and I can hear the same conflict in his voice—wanting something he doesn’t think he can have, afraid to reach for it in case it disappears.
We sit there by the fire, wrapped in each other, and don’t talk about the future that’s rushing toward us whether we’re ready for it or not.
But that night, when we make love, there’s a desperation to it that wasn’t there before. Like we’re both trying to imprint this on our memories, to hold onto each other as tightly as we can before the inevitable separation.
“I don’t want you to go,” he whispers against my skin, and it’s the closest he’s come to saying what we’re both feeling.
“I don’t want to go,” I whisper back, and it’s the truest thing I’ve ever said.
But wanting something and being able to have it are two very different things.
And as I fall asleep in his arms, I can’t help but think that we’re running out of time.
That soon—too soon—reality is going to intrude on this perfect bubble we’ve created, and we’re going to have to make choices that will either bring us together or tear us apart.
And I have absolutely no idea which it’s going to be.
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