Let It Snow
Lylene shivered in the dark of the barn, brushing ice off the shoulders of her traveling cloak. The snow falling outside was too thick to safely continue traveling in, and had forced her and Weiland to take shelter in the run-down building, and even then it was only her protestations that had convinced him to stop.
"You need to get used to traveling in less than ideal conditions. We need to keep covering ground if we're going to make it to the town by the end of the week," he had argued, "and the snow will cover our tracks."
"I don't care. I've been walking for nearly three days straight. And I won't be going anywhere if I get frostbite," she retorted. He stared at her for a long while in the snowy silence, judging her condition with cold eyes, but finally consented to stop for the night.
"Nothing occupied," he said. "We can't afford to be seen."
He rejected a cottage along the road for being too risky, and she outright refused to sleep under the particularly dense pine tree he preferred. By the time they found the barn, cold and smelling faintly of animals but with a roof and enough clean hay to fall asleep on, Lylene couldn't remember what having ten toes felt like. She snapped at Weiland for not letting her light a fire for risk of being seen. He had not spoken to her since.
Lying on a pile of musty straw, Lylene told herself that she did not care, but she did. She was exhausted from walking and frozen stiff and did not want to be angry with Weiland on top of it. He might have been able to deal with weather like this, but she hadn't been on the road as long as he had.
Her teeth chattered behind numb lips, and she pulled her knees in close, but couldn't get warm.
A hand touched her lightly on the shoulder.
"Hey," Weiland whispered in the dark. "You're really that cold, huh?"
"Yes." She was too tired to say anything else.
There was a pause, then he said softly, "I shouldn't have pushed you like that."
Lylene was silent.
There was a rustling behind her, then the heavy cloth of his cloak draped over her at the same time that something warm and solid sank next to her on the straw and nestled against her back.
"Weiland?" she asked tentatively.
"You'll warm up faster this way." His voice was quiet and husky, and startlingly close to her ear. She felt a tingle of warmth in her toes that was unrelated to the one in her stomach.
Lylene lay quietly in the dark for a few moments, listening to the silence that she felt hanging around them, until she couldn't take it any more and rolled over to face him.
"Thank you," she murmured, and Weiland wrapped his arms around her in response, drawing her flush against his chest. She nuzzled close to him, enjoying the crisp scent of snow and forest that clung to his shirt, and she felt the tenseness in her body drain away as their conjoined body heat warmed her. They lay like that for a long time, their breathing settling into a calm, steady rhythm, and the snow fell outside, perfectly silent.