Icebound Hearts

Chapter 7

It started snowing hard around nine, the kind of fast, thick snow that turned Pine Ridge's one traffic light into a soft orange smear and made the whole town go quiet in that specific muffled way only a real snowfall could manage. Maya was still at Frost & Bean an hour later than she'd meant to be, having gotten pulled into helping Ellie run inventory after close, and by the time she stepped outside, her car parked two blocks down, because the lot out front had been full for the dinner rush was already wearing four inches of snow like a bad toupee.

Her car also, it turned out, did not want to start.

"Come on," she muttered, turning the key again. The engine made a sound like a tired old man clearing his throat and then gave up entirely. "Come on."

She was still sitting there, forehead against the steering wheel, weighing the actual logistics of walking two miles home in this versus calling her dad and enduring the inevitable lecture about the battery she kept meaning to replace, when a truck pulled up alongside her, headlights cutting twin cones through the falling snow.

The window rolled down. Jake leaned across the passenger seat, hazards already blinking behind him.

"Car trouble?"

"I'm just sitting in a freezing car for fun, Thompson."

"Sounds like a normal Friday night for you, honestly." He nodded toward the passenger side. "Get in, I'll give you a jump. Or a ride, if the jump doesn't take. My dad's got cables in the truck bed, he's basically allergic to not being prepared for car trouble."

She thought, briefly, about saying no about the two-mile walk, about the version of tonight where she didn't get into Jake Thompson's truck alone in a snowstorm and have to sit with whatever had almost gotten said in that coffee shop three days ago. But the wind picked that exact moment to gust hard enough to rock her car slightly on its wheels, and pride, Maya decided, was a luxury for warmer nights.

"Fine," she said, grabbing her camera bag. "But if you make this weird, I'm walking."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

The jump didn't take. Twenty minutes of Jake crouched in the snow with cables and increasingly colorful commentary about the state of her battery confirmed what Maya had suspected the car was not starting tonight, not for anybody, not for any amount of jumper cables in the world.

"It's dead," Jake announced, straightening up, snow melting in his hair, breath fogging in the truck's headlights. "Like, actually dead. You need a new battery, not a jump."

"Great."

"I can give you a ride home. We'll deal with the car tomorrow I'll get Cooper's uncle to tow it, he does that for people all the time." He was already coiling the cables back up, matter-of-fact about it in a way that made it easy to just say yes instead of arguing.

She climbed into the truck's passenger seat, grateful immediately for the heat blasting from the vents, snow melting off her coat onto the floor mat. Jake got in on the other side, cables tossed in the back, and pulled out onto Main Street slow and careful, wipers working hard against the snow.

"Thanks," she said, after a minute. "For stopping."

"You looked like you were about to attempt the world's coldest two-mile walk."

"I would've been fine."

"You would've been an icicle by the water tower." He glanced over, half a grin visible in the dashboard light. "Also, my dad would've killed me if he found out I drove past you sitting in a dead car in a snowstorm. Small towns, Carter. Everyone finds out everything eventually."

"Don't I know it."

They drove in comfortable quiet for a minute, snow coming down heavier now, the truck's headlights carving a narrow tunnel of visible road out of the dark. Pine Ridge slid by outside the window — the darkened storefronts on Main, the church with its lit-up nativity scene three months too early, the turn toward the residential streets where both their houses sat, half a mile apart, in the same neighborhood they'd grown up in.

"Can I ask you something," Jake said, eyes on the road.

"Depends what it is."

"The application. The thing you mentioned the other night. What is it, actually?"

Maya looked out the window, watching snow catch in the headlights, and found somewhat to her own surprise that she wanted to actually answer the question instead of deflecting it.

"There's a summer program," she said. "In Minneapolis. You work under this photographer for six weeks, and at the end there's an actual gallery show. Real gallery, real people, my work on an actual wall."

"That's incredible."

"It's really competitive. I probably won't even get in."

"You will."

"You don't know that."

"I know you took a picture of me at a hockey game and it apparently made my life flash before my eyes for a full week, so yeah, I have some confidence in your abilities." He said it lightly, but there was something underneath the joke, something that made Maya's stomach do the same complicated lift-and-drop it had done in Reyes's basement office.

"You saw that photo?"

"You showed it to Ellie. Ellie shows everyone everything. Small towns, Carter." He glanced at her again, quicker this time, like he was checking whether he'd overstepped. "For what it's worth, it's a really good photo. Like, actually good, not just... not just because it's me. You made something out of nothing. That's a whole different skill than just pointing a camera at a hockey game."

"That's basically what Reyes said."

"Then Reyes is right."

They came to the turn toward Maya's street, and Jake slowed the truck, and neither of them said anything for a second, the wipers thumping steadily, snow piling soft and silent against the windshield in the pause between strokes.

"Can I tell you something," Maya said finally, echoing his own words back at him, "and you not make it weird?"

"I make no promises, but go ahead."

"I haven't told my dad about the application. Not because I think he'd say no. Because I think some part of me is scared he'd say yes too easily, and then I'd actually have to go through with it, and then I'd have to find out if I'm actually good enough for it to matter, instead of just getting to wonder about it forever from a safe distance."

Jake pulled the truck up in front of her house, engine idling, snow collecting on the hood in the glow of the porch light he'd stopped short of.

"That's the exact same reason I haven't called that program back yet," he said quietly. "It's easier to want something in theory than to actually go find out if you're good enough to have it."

They looked at each other in the dim cab of the truck, snow falling silent outside, both of them holding some version of the same fear they'd apparently been carrying separately for weeks without either one knowing the other one had it too.

"Thanks for the ride," Maya said, finally, because somebody had to say something, and the alternative felt like it might tip into territory neither of them was ready for yet.

"Anytime." He didn't move to unlock the doors immediately. "Hey...Maya."

"Yeah?"

"Apply. To the program. Whatever else happens with the rest of it you should apply." He said it plainly, no joke behind it this time. "You deserve to find out."

She held his gaze a second longer than she probably should have, snow ticking softly against the windshield, the whole truck cab gone warm and quiet and strange with everything neither of them was saying.

"Goodnight, Thompson," she said, and got out before either of them could say anything that would be hard to take back tomorrow.

She didn't look back at the truck as she walked up the driveway. She didn't have to. She could feel him still sitting there, headlights on, watching to make sure she got inside safe, all the way until she closed the front door behind her.