E & E

"Maybe you can go out the window?" He suggests. I instantly do a 180 and walk toward the window, when my face shrinks again. The snow seems just as tall on that side, and like it goes out for a mile. I'd just fall, and get stuck.

"I'm gonna call the desk," I say softly.

Ethan doesn't seem in a rush, and I figure he probably doesn't have anything to do until later. I've accepted that I'm not going to make an afternoon flight, but I'll see about the evening. The desk phone rings, and rings, and rings, before I hear the fragile voice of the old woman. "Hello, Montgomery Inn."

"Hello! I um... I'm actually roomed here already. I'm in room six and, um, there's a ton of snow piled up? All in front of the door, the window. I-I guess I don't know what I'm supposed to do, like... do you have a snow crew? Or-or someone to shovel us out of here?" I ask with a subtle laugh. The lady laughs back, but hers seems sad.

"I'm so sorry dear. We are working on it as fast as possible. We just haven't had a snowstorm like this since 2003 and... well we haven't really had to do anything about it before." Then she pauses.

"Well... what-what are you going to do about it?" I ask.

The lady explains. "Well, dear. We can't always afford the services we need... I'll have to take a look around to see who can do us a favor."

"I'm sorry, a favor? It's shoveling snow, it's state responsibility..."

"Well, dear--" she starts. If I'm called 'dear' again, I might lose it, "I have contacted the county and they'll send some boys to have a look, but no guarantees today, dear. We're in a busy season, and we usually have a few boys to move the snow. But it seems like we had a doozy last night... I think some heavy machinery is needed. There's four doors with a pile now. It's gonna take a while to melt."

DUH. I do my best to stay calm, because Ethan is looking at me curiously, and I'd hate for him to see me getting upset with another old woman. "I understand, Miss... Manager... but I-I have a flight to catch and it's impossible for me to even leave the room, let alone get on the roads, so--"

"Right, dear. It's dangerous. I would stay inside unless you've got a shovel," the lady says. I can feel my jaw clench.

"So we can't leave the room today. At all," I say quietly to confirm. Ethan looks concerned.

"If you can't, I wouldn't try," the lady says.

"That's not what I'm say--nevermind. Thank you," I say quickly before I get too upset, and I hang up. I'm sure Ethan understands context. "They're a country ass town and 'the boys' aren't here to help, so."

"We're stuck until further notice. Or until we dig ourselves out," Ethan says.

"I have no desire to dig through that. I wanna go to Vancouver but not that bad. You don't seem in a rush," I comment.

"I'm not," Ethan says. He wraps himself in the blanket and sits back on the bed. "And... unfortunately I don't think you've got too many options right now. Might as well get comfortable. Maybe they'll have someone here this afternoon."

By Miss Manager's halfway-halfwit tone, I doubt that we'll even have someone help us by today. I start texting my group chat with the update on my situation. I guess two out of four days isn't bad. Maybe two and a half days if a miracle happens. I wonder what the other patrons are doing. I wonder how we're gonna eat.

I feel wholly embarrassed to step onto the dipped tile squares and maneuver the heavy curtain around just to take a piss, but when Ethan seems just as flustered, it somehow makes me feel better. At least we're going through this freak situation together. I'm genuinely happy that I'm not alone, even though I wish I were with Trent instead. We chat some, but mostly end up just laying back down. I think I pass out for a little bit, and so does Ethan.

I kind of feel bad for not talking, but I get frustrated with every passing minute, which quickly turns into hours as we sit and wait. It's one o'clock before we know it. I play on my phone, Ethan seems to be invested in a book.

"I'm surprised you have service," Ethan says. I shrug. So am I. "I can barely keep a single bar."

"Doesn't matter anyway. Not like I can call the local snow patrol." I could call Trent. I don't know where he is in relevance to me, or if he'd actually help, but--nah. Not worth the hassle. Plus, what could he do?

Reality sets in by two pm, and I decide to call Lucie and Beau and tell them my situation over the phone, because texting just sounds like a lot of spaced out replies, and I'd rather get it over with and mope. My friends genuinely sound upset that I'm stuck, and I was hoping their sincerity in missing me would make me feel better, but I just feel more sad. Beau even mentions the fact that I was basically the one who planned this trip and got us great deals, and it definitely makes me feel worse. Then I think they are heading out for day drinks, and Lucie tries to be as nice as possible, so I let them go. I look out the window at the white bed of snow, and then I catch Ethan staring.

"You look sad. I'm sorry about your trip, that really sucks," he says when I look over at him.

"Thanks. It really does." I cover my face with my hands. "Sorry you have a sad, mopey, bummed out roommate that you didn't ask for," I force a laugh.

"I mean, I kinda did ask for this," Ethan shrugs. "Didn't know we would be stuck in the wildest snowstorm I've ever seen but, hey. Somebody has got to come around sometime soon to get this snow out of here. We've gotta be near a major highway." He smiles softly, and I feel myself relax a little. Maybe he's right. We can't just be stranded in a building forever. Maybe it'll just be a little slow compared to the city. "You know? I happen to have cards. I also have a puzzle, and a word search. Why don't you set up Speed, and I'll call the old lady to see if there's anything to eat?" Everything about Ethan is warm, comforting. He seems like he's trying to calm me down, when he's just doing what anyone else would do. I nod in response, and he smiles gently, hopping off the bed to hand me some cards and hop on the phone.

"Hello? Hi, this is Ethan Jacobson, staying in room 6. Yes. Yes--we are both here. Stuck, yeah. I-I was actually calling about possibly getting some food? How does that work because, well... we need to eat in the meantime before the shovels get here. We've been up since six... Yes ma'am." Ethan works some magic on the phone, or at least it sounds like it, and I decide to set up Speed like he says, and flick the radio on again. I can't help but admit some tiny part of me is wondering how this is going to go, and is maybe a little excited at the prospect of being snowed in. It's completely unpredictable. I would much rather be other places, and this is possibly the worst place--scratch that, the airport would be the worst--but Ethan seems like he has more interesting things to say, and he's unbelievably nice.

I wonder how boring life has been thus far that I'm actually a little fascinated that nature's trapped me in a 250 square foot box with a stranger. I figure if I make it out by this evening, or even tomorrow morning, I'll get two days of my trip, and have an interesting story for my friends. Maybe I'll just stay an extra day by myself after they head out, and enjoy the cabin. Goodness knows I've needed a vacation, any vacation, for a while now.

"So," Ethan says to me, "we should be 'on the lookout' for some food, I guess. The owners feel bad but they're working on it, I guess."

"And I'm assuming they'll get it to us by... plowing through the snow? I don't get it." I sigh, running my hand through my hair. Ethan sits on the bed with the cards between us. "I still have some granola."

"I'm not picky," Ethan sighs.

We play some rounds of Speed, and he wins most of them, but I get my few victories. I feel like a kid again, getting invested in the competition. At some points we take a mutual pause, playing on our phones and listening to the music, but then someone will pick up the deck again and start to shuffle, and we're back to it. I feel like we do that for hours. Ethan recants some stories about being stranded in the woods.

"I was a Boy Scout leader. Eagle Scout, eventually. Very devoted. But yeah I got lost a few times. One of the last times, I was about seventeen, trying to impress some girl... we ended up with dead phones, muddy, side-of-the-highway... it was not good at all," he laughs, and sorts his cards as I lay mine down. I'm probably going to win this round. "She didn't wanna see me again. Called me 'worm-boy,' told the school I tried to get us lost on purpose to kill her." He rolls his eyes.

"Fuck that girl, really," I scoff. I don't even think I have an equivalent story of trying to impress a girl. Maybe something from college, but nothing to those lengths. I'm stuck on my hand full of threes and a jack and two, while Ethan seems to get past his slump and go through his deck. "But... I mean if you are a killer in disguise just know... you're not gonna be able to hide the blood that easy in the snow, so don't try anything." Ethan lays down some cards quickly and I try to put mine down, but he slaps his last cards down onto the deck, pinning his hands on top of mine.

Ethan chuckles. "I assure you, I don't even have an escape plan here. And you're not my usual victim," he jokes, then he winks. "I win."

That wink does something to me that I decide to chock up to hunger, and I realize his warm hands are still enveloping my own on top of the mess of cards, some scattered. They're bigger than my hands, a little scarred, but soft. Clean fingernails.

That's when I hear a thump at the wall, almost like someone knocks. Our hands depart. Then I hear two more, and Ethan and I stare at each other. We just wait, until we hear another thump, and then I hop off the bed to stand at the wall. I thump back twice. Then the person thumps again, so I do the same.

"Creepy?" Ethan asks.

"They might be stuck too," I comment. Then we hear someone yelling outside, and I run to the window, opening it. The snow seems to pile up right at the ledge of the window. The screen is halfway broken.

"Hello? Hello? I'm in room five!" a woman shouts.

"We're in room six!" I yell back.

"Oh God, someone can finally fuckin' hear me!" she yells. "My room phone is broken, I-I've been stuck for hours, panicking; do you have a sweater? I'm so cold over here! Can you lean out the window?" She does sound frantic. I decide this little motel can charge me for the screen if they really want, and push out all the edges of it.

"Yeah I'm gonna do that right now," I call back. Ethan brings over the only chair in the room, and I stand on it to push half my body out of the 36" window. I can basically rest my elbows on the snow without sinking deep, and I immediately spot our guest, probably about fifteen feet away, leaning out the window and onto a blanket. She has on a single layer shirt, thin. A woman in her thirties, maybe, or early forties.

"Hi! Oh god hi! I'm Jennie! Do you have a sweater? My luggage got lost, my phone is dead--room and cell."

"I'm Evan," I say, my elbows stinging in the cold. "Ethan can you grab a sweater from my bag? Not the blue one, or the TSU one, or the hoodie," I ask, looking back. Ethan nods, and gets to searching. "You must be frozen."

"I didn't sleep," Jennie chuckles. "Do you guys need some cans? I don't have my bags... my son said he'd bring 'em; of course the snow hit. But I've got some cans for a drive that's... probably not gonna happen. I have some soup if you want?" Jennie seems to disappear back inside, as if she's answered her own question.

"Did she say soup?" Ethan asks, and it's like I feel my stomach growl. Maybe it WAS hunger. She comes back quickly with two cans of something that she tosses my way, and I'm surprised they land so close. I'm afraid that the sweater won't reach the same luck. Ethan luckily picks out the sweater I debated bringing the most, because I don't necessarily like it. He also throws in a sweater that I'm assuming is his, and I ball them up to toss them Jennie's way. She has to reach a bit, but she grabs them, and lets out relieved and gleeful sighs.

"Thank you so, so, so, so much," she says. "I don't have any bowls, sorry. Is it just you in there? I'm alone."

"No, I'm with... a friend. Ethan come here," I wave him over. "We were in the airport... how do you have cans?" I look at both the chicken tortilla and tomato garlic alphabet soup, two unordinary choices.

"Oh, I wasn't in the airport. I live an hour from here. I was going to a food drive set for today. Had the nerve to think I'd beat the worst of the snow if I went the night before."

"A series of unfortunate events lead me here," I chuckle.

Jennie explains her situation, and I don't go into detail about mine, and Ethan briefly pokes his head out to say hi.

"You two are so cute. Well. I'm gonna finally get some sleep and let you get back to whatever you were doing. My room is an ice box. I think the room above it is busted." Jennie talks so quickly, I almost miss what she says.

"T-thank you?" I say, and she says goodbye, and she'll knock if she needs us after another series of 'thank you's'. Vice versa.

I hop back inside, and close the window, realizing I've probably made it cold in the room. What an interesting way to get some food today. Ethan and I look through bags for the next step in consuming our first meal of the day. He's found some takeout cutlery packs in his bag. I find cups in mine.

"Did she say we were a cute couple?" Ethan asks with a laugh. That sure makes my cheeks flush.

"Just that we were cute. I don't know what she meant," I sigh, then change the subject. "I happen to have a few cups because I thought I'd grab coffee or something, and I think we can put them in the microwave for this soup."

"And you said 'thank you,'" Ethan says, giving me a funny look, with a funny smile. I roll my eyes and shake my head, looking through my pockets for my keys, so we can open these cans. Then I realize I don't have my pocketknife, because I thought I'd be on a plane.

"That amuses you?" I ask with a sarcastic laugh. Ethan shrugs. "I mean, I'm the cute one, so. She was probably just being nice," I tease.

"Mm, so now I'm chopped liver, huh?" He's playing this in a weird way. Like if I keep joking, I might sound like an asshole, but if I try to say anything about what I actually think of his looks, it could open a can of worms. I could call him 'worm-boy' and end it right now. That's what I'm gonna do.

"Worm-boy, just let me be the cute one. You be the hot awkward one." I think my eye twitches at my own words, but I just keep looking in my bag. I forget what I'm even looking for at this point. "Who is also unnecessarily nice."

Ethan pauses, then he chuckles a bit. "I'll take it." He seems to find something interesting, and he tosses it on the couch. "Awkward." I pick up the corkscrew, and decide it's a good place to start while Ethan continues to look for something else to open the cans. Half an hour later, we've worked magic with the corkscrew, a real screw, and our various sets of keys. We heat two cups of soup at a time, and I'm impressed by the time we've figured things out to eat. We both take one helping of each kind, and I've never been more happy to eat alphabet soup.

I'm entertained enough, and full and satisfied, until I notice the sun directly in the window, and check the time. It's 5:27pm. I look up the weather, and the sunset will be at 5:38pm. I shake my head sadly. We're not getting out tonight. "I'm gonna call the desk again," I sigh.

"I doubt anything else will happen," Ethan says. I know he's right.

"Then I'll call the cops?"

"I'm sure that's happened, too. And they'd just have to call the county... I'm from a small town. I know how things go," Ethan explains.

"I shouldn't even fuckin' be here. No offense. But goddamnit, I should be on ski resort snow, not hillbilly Nebraska, mile long, ain't-got-nobody-to-call snow," I complain. "I've planned this trip for a year now. This sucks."

"Your southern drawl came out," Ethan says.

"I'm mad. Fuckin' Trent... should've just said I wouldn't see him. Asshole."

"It's kinda his fault," Ethan chimes in, and I can't tell if he's being sarcastic. "He dragged you out here just to make you waste a day."

I shrug. "I mean... kinda? I shouldn't have come all this way to spend one day with someone I knew was a flake, but he really should've made sure he could see me. W-we confirmed it and everything. I wish it didn't piss me off so much."

"You deserve to be pissed," Ethan says. "He's probably in his warm, cozy house with his dumb dog or whatever, drinking a room-temperature beer, scratching his ass, thinking about how the snow is just a minor inconvenience to him and his plans to bet on some fantasy football game. And you're here with Worm-Boy, almost slicing your fingers open on cans of soup and peeing in the shower with no way out."

I can't help but crack up at Ethan's simplification of our situations, and his kinda accurate assumption of Trent. He continues, "You came from Texas, where 50 degrees is considered cold, just to get eaten by the Abominable Snowman in Nebraska for a motherfucker who ditched you last minute. That's fucked. I think you can be a little angry, ya know?" He raises his brows. I shrug in agreement.

"Are you the Abominable Snowman?" I ask.

Ethan scoffs, "Maybe I am. Should I eat you?"

Not hunger this time. I gulp something down, maybe my vulnerability, and try to ignore the fact that anything Ethan says actually sounds good to me. He seems to talk with his whole face, his soft light brown eyes always prompting me for a response, or reading me. I try to think of something quick, but I'm pausing for too long. This has only happened a few times. Mostly with Trent. I watch That's the little 5% of me that knows I would... I would...

Ethan must sense my awkwardness, and he continues. "I can wait. Maybe on day 13, when we're starving, and the snow is 12 feet high, and you're inevitably dying first. Then I'll chow down."

"Thanks for the courtesy," I say, waving him off. "But I'm definitely crawling through Jennie's window before I ever let that happen. But really... fuck Trent."

"Have you ever?" Ethan asks plainly, dealing cards again.

"What?" I ask.

"I'm kidding. Just askin'. You know how to play anything else? Blackjack, or spades?"

"Yeah," I reply softly. "Why are you pressing me about him?" I ask.

Ethan shrugs, "Sorry, I didn't mean to make it seem that way. I just... " he sets the cards down. "I'm going to New Mexico to break up with my girlfriend. She's... being very not-great about it."

I'm confused. "Your girlfriend knows you're going to break up with her?"

Ethan nods. "We've lived states away for just over a year out of a three-year relationship. I've tried setting up FaceTime calls, just times to talk. I think she knows what's coming; she just... she said if I have something 'this important to tell her,' I need to do it in person and she'll refuse to accept anything that I don't say face-to-face." Ethan sighs, running his hands through his dark, only slightly wavy, sandy-blonde hair, and shakes his head. "I know what it's like to go so far out of your way for someone who means a lot to you, but maybe doesn't deserve it. Maybe I haven't let it on as much, but... I'm not excited to be here either. But in a way... I kind of like having to put this off. I don't know why Madison is acting like she won't give me the same reaction in person as she would over the phone."

"I'm sorry," I say quietly. "Doing all this just to end up alone is... almost worse than missing a ski trip."

Ethan laughs, and his smile is infectious. "No, I'm not alone. But thank you. This breakup will be almost as bad as missing the trip. Maybe a little less bad."