Cabin Fever Read online

  “Hey,” I say to the girl, “do you think Billy Joel was the most popular artist of the eighties?”

  She blinks her blue eyes as she places the brown paper bag on the counter. “Who’s Billy Joel?” When she sees the surprise on my face, she adds, “I was born in 2000. So I don’t really know…”

  “Forget it,” I mumble. I stuff the biscuits into my Hermes Birkin purse. I’m not entirely sure when I’ll have a chance to eat them, because Chase will never let me consume food in his car. There’s a strict no food policy within the Porsche. He loves that car almost as much as he loves Billy Joel. If he and I were to get married, I might have a chance at the number three spot.

  “Drive safely in the snow,” the girl says as I turn to leave.

  I frown at her. “Snow?”

  I peer out the glass windows of the restaurant. Sure enough, there are little snowflakes slowly falling from the sky.

  “I heard it’s going to be a blizzard,” she says.

  It is? Chase says he checked the weather out here for the weekend and it’s supposed to be clear. What the hell?

  I thank the girl and hurry outside, because I’ve been in here far too long. The sun has dropped in the sky and the temperature has plummeted. The cold air hits me like a punch in the face, and the dark fabric of my coat immediately becomes flecked with white powder.

  I hurry to the car as quickly as I can and slide inside, my teeth chattering as I settle into the leather seat. Chase has got the heat blasting inside the vehicle, and the circulation returns to my fingers.

  “It’s snowing,” I manage.

  He shrugs. “The weather report said there would be flurries.”

  I look at the big flakes of white falling from the sky. “Are you sure it’s safe to keep driving in this?”

  Chase looks at me like I’m crazy. “It’s not even sticking. If I can’t drive in this, I may as well give up and go back home to Virginia.”

  Chase moved up here from his home state a year before we started dating, but he has fully assimilated himself into New England culture. He even got a Red Sox blazer. Still, I worry he can’t drive in the snow as well as a native. “It could get worse,” I point out.

  “It won’t.”

  “It might.”

  “It won’t.”

  If there’s one thing about Chase that I both love and hate, it’s his confidence. When Chase is confident about something, there’s no arguing with him. Drew and I laugh about it—we call him Confident Chase. If you ask Chase what he wants for dinner and he answers, “Chinese food,” there’s no question in his response. He is not asking if I feel like Chinese food or if Indian might be preferable. It means I will be calling up Ming’s Palace to place our order before the night is through.

  Confidence is sexy in a man. I can’t say it isn’t. But then again, shouldn’t I get to decide what we’re eating for dinner some nights?

  “Hey,” I say. “There’s a gas station over there. Do you want to get some gas?”

  Chase glances down at the gauge, which shows a half-empty tank. “No, we’re fine. The tank is still half-full.”

  “Right. And we’ve still got a lot of driving ahead of us.”

  “Half a tank is plenty.”

  Maybe his response means he’s an optimist while I’m a pessimist. Or more likely, it’s something dumb like he can’t put gas into the tank of his precious Porsche when it isn’t completely empty. In any case, I’m sick of arguing. Billy Joel is the greatest artist of the eighties, KFC is made from mutant chickens, and we don’t need gas.

  Chase glances at me and his face softens. In spite of some flaws, he isn’t a bad boyfriend. Anyone would get stressed out during a road trip. It’s hard to blame him for getting a little snippy with me, considering I’m getting snippy myself.

  “Listen,” he says, “we’ll be at the cabin soon. And we’re going to have a really romantic dinner together. Just the two of us. And then…” He winks at me. “We’re going to have a really romantic night.”

  He reaches out for my hand and gives me a squeeze. He has soft hands for a man—smooth and warm. Just like his lips.

  “I can’t wait,” I say. And I mean it.

  Chapter 2

  It’s over an hour later, and the snow is showing no sign of stopping.

  It’s not flurries anymore. It’s legit snow now—big white snowflakes that land on the ground and don’t immediately disappear. I checked my own phone to see what the forecast was showing, but I couldn’t get a signal. So I have no counterargument for Chase when he insists it’s going to stop “any minute now.”

  Chase has slowed down from ninety to a more reasonable but still nail-bitingly terrifying seventy miles per hour. We’ve crossed the border into Vermont, and during the last twenty minutes, the traffic has thinned considerably. We’re off the highway and haven’t seen another vehicle in at least ten minutes.

  “I’m worried about the snow,” I say.

  “It’s just flurries,” Chase says. “It’ll stop within the hour.”

  Bullshit. I pull my phone from my purse and bring up the weather app again. Still no signal. Not LTE, not 4G… nothing.

  I look up at the GPS mounted on the dashboard of the Porsche. The words at the bottom of the screen read: “Lost signal. Searching...”

  “I’ve got no signal for internet,” I say.

  Chase shrugs. “I told you it’s going to be patchy up here. You brought books, right?”

  I did. In my suitcase in the trunk, I’ve got my Kindle with five books loaded up, plus two paperbacks and my Itty Bitty Booklight, just in case things get really bad. But when he said that, I didn’t honestly believe I’d lose internet access for the weekend. I’ve never been off the grid before for longer than the duration of a plane ride. Not since the grid existed.

  Drew and I have been texting intermittently during the drive, so I send him a text: Can you see what the weather is in Vermont tonight?

  Drew will tease me for not having checked myself, but I’ll deal with that. At this point, I want to know if I need to insist we turn around.

  Except my phone stalls while trying to send the text. Finally, a message pops up, which reads, “Message Failure.”

  Damn.

  I look out the window at the scenery zipping by—the tree branches coated with a layer of white powder, a lone farmhouse with its roof caked in snow. “Could you slow down a little?”

  “Slow down?” Chase acts like he’s never heard the words before in his entire life. Like he needs to pick up a dictionary to find out what they mean. “I’m only going seventy miles per hour.”

  That’s slow to him. When I’m going seventy, I feel like a roadster.

  “I’m just saying,” I mumble. “There’s a lot of snow on the ground.” And it’s not like he’s got snow tires.

  “This car handles really well in snow.” He sees my pursed lips and lets out a sigh. “Look, we’re almost at the cabin. Just relax, Natalie.”

  “How are we going to find it anyway?” I poke the useless GPS. “We don’t have any signal.”

  “I brought a map. It’s in the glove compartment.”

  Oh God. I have to use a paper map to navigate? Is this the Stone Age? We may as well get out a compass and sundial while we’re at it. But I don’t want to be lost, so I dutifully pull out the map from the glove compartment.

  The map is huge. I try to lay it flat over my lap, but it’s too big and some of it is blocking the passenger’s side window and it’s on the dashboard and it’s everywhere. I hate maps. I have the worst sense of direction. Without GPS, I’m toast.

  “I marked the cabin on the map,” Chase tells me.

  I find the big red X, which I suppose is our destination. That’s half the battle, considering I have no idea where we are right now. I look out the window for a sign to give me any sort of clue, but there’s just dead trees and snow. Lots and lots of snow.

  “Where are we?” I finally say.

  Chase rolls his eyes.
“Rocking Stone Lane,” he says.

  I run my finger over the map, trying to locate the road. I notice my fingernails have been bitten to a quick—I must have started biting them again. I don’t get manicures anymore—not since culinary school. You don’t want to get chunks of nail polish in your food—it’s not something that gives you a lot of repeat business. I would never risk making one of my clients unhappy or serving any food that isn’t up to my usual standards.

  “Found it!” I say triumphantly, although I am aware nobody is going to give me a medal for finding a road on a map, since I’m not five. “Okay, you have to turn left on Cook Hollow Road.”

  We keep our eyes peeled for Cook Hollow Road, which is difficult because the landmarks are getting obscured by snow. Chase slows down to a shocking forty miles per hour, mostly because the road is growing more uneven.

  “There it is!” I holler.

  Wow. I found something on a paper map and then applied it to a real life road trip. That’s definitely a first for me. Maybe I can do some new things before I turn thirty.

  Does that mean I can tell Chase to turn around and let me go home?

  Chase swerves onto Cook Hollow Road. This road is even narrower than the last. The white powder is untouched on the pavement, because we are the only idiots dumb enough to be driving around the middle of nowhere in this mess. I can’t see the road because of the snow, but it feels like it’s barely paved. The Porsche lurches as the tires attempt to keep their footing.

  “Listen, Chase,” I say. “Maybe we should get back on the main road and stay at a hotel till this snow blows over.”

  A muscle in his jaw twitches like it always does when he gets upset. “Are you serious? We’re almost there.”

  “Yeah, but…” I look at the thickening wilderness ahead of us, blanketed in white. “It just feels like this might not be safe. A hotel would be better.”

  “I don’t even know how to find a hotel. We have no GPS, remember?”

  Right. The thought of it gives me an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “I’ll slow down, okay?” he says as the speedometer drops to thirty. “Where do I go next?”

  I squint down at the map. “I don’t see a name, but there should be a little road on the right. It should be coming up soon.”

  After a couple of minutes, we see it. And oh my God, this road is tiny. It’s only one lane which means if something were coming in the other direction, it would hit us head-on before we even managed to see it in this stupid snowstorm. I desperately want to turn back, but I’m not certain if it’s safer to turn around or push on. Chase is right—we have no idea where to find a hotel. According to the map, the cabin is nearby. We should be there soon.

  I peer out the window, but it’s getting hard to see much. It’s dark aside from the headlights and the snow is really coming down. This is not a flurry anymore by any stretch of the imagination. It is outright snowing. Hell, I might even call this a blizzard. The infected eyebrow ring girl was right.

  The speedometer on the car drops down to twenty. Then to ten, and I can feel the Porsche’s tires slipping in their attempts to stay on the road. This is bad.

  “Chase,” I say.

  His jaw twitches again, his hazel eyes pinned on the road. He took his Ray Bans off when the flurries first started and the sun went down. “We’re almost there.”

  Except… are we? I look down at the map spread across my lap, but it’s useless at this point. I’m not even entirely certain we’re on a road anymore. There are no signs to indicate where we are. The cabin could be absolutely anywhere. It could be twenty feet away from us and we’d never know it—the visibility is awful.

  “It’s straight ahead,” he says confidently.

  Ah, Confident Chase. I wish I could believe him.

  I take my phone out of my purse. Not only is there no internet, I have no phone service either. Zero bars. There’s only a little message in the corner of the screen that says “No service.”

  “I think we should turn around, Chase,” I say.

  “I told you—we’re almost there.”

  “I think it’s safer to turn around.”

  The speedometer is hovering at five miles per hour. We are crawling along. I feel the car struggling with each foot we travel. And then…

  We just…

  Stop.

  “Shit,” Chase says.

  I can hear the wheels of the Porsche turning, even over the wind roaring outside the car, but nothing is happening. We are not moving. We are officially stuck.

  “We may be stuck on something,” he says.

  “I think we’re stuck in a foot of snow.”

  He shakes his head. “This car can handle snow.”

  “Oh, please.”

  He gets this wounded look like he always does when someone insults his car. He would defend this car’s honor before he’d defend mine. Nobody but nobody talks smack about his Porsche.

  “I’m sure there’s something blocking one of the wheels,” he says. “Could you get out and check?”

  I stare at him. “Why don’t you get out and check?”

  “Your coat is warmer than mine,” he points out.

  He isn’t wrong. Chase brought along a leather jacket he had imported from London from a store called Belstaff because he saw a photo of David Beckham wearing it. The leather is butter soft, but it’s completely impractical for any trip involving the snow. But God forbid I should tell him that. And instead of boots or anything resembling boots, he’s got on his Everlane leather loafers.

  It’s not like my apparel is a whole lot better. But at least I’ve got on boots—my Christian Louboutin Metrograf red sole booties aren’t waterproof because I didn’t expect to be tromping through the snow, but the salesgirl promised they would provide some amount of protection. It looks like these boots are about to get their first road test.

  “Fine,” I grumble. “I’ll go.”

  It’s a struggle to even open the door to the Porsche because of how much snow has accumulated on the ground, and also because of the wind. The wind is really bad. The second I get the door open, the wind slaps me in the face, and the flakes of snow rush at me all at once. Wow, it’s cold out—much colder than earlier, when the sun was up. My phone can’t tell me the temperature like it usually does, but it’s well below freezing. I mean, it has to be if it’s snowing, right? I don’t know much about weather, but I know if it’s snowing, it must be cold.

  I step into the fresh white powder and my right boot immediately sinks down. And oh my God, these boots are not at all waterproof. That salesgirl at Christian Louboutin was a lying bitch.

  “Do you see anything?” Chase asks me, despite the fact that I haven’t even lifted my butt out of the car yet.

  “No,” I hiss at him.

  Goddamn Chase. I hate him and his non-soaking-wet feet. I didn’t want to go to this cabin in the first place—why did he have to bulldoze me into this stupid trip? I could have been happy and warm on my leather sofa right now at home, watching the snowflakes falling outside my window instead of flooding my socks. I should never have agreed to come.

  I finally manage to get out of the car and make my way to the hood. There’s a scratch on the right hood of the car that definitely wasn’t there before—it must be from a branch. Chase is going to lose his shit when he sees that scratch. And I’m sorry to say the idea of it makes me happy. He didn’t even pay for this car—his parents got it for him. If I get sick from being out in the frigid cold, I’m still going to have to struggle through catering Mandy Duvall’s baby shower on Monday, while Chase comes and goes from the office whenever he pleases, because his job is to sit in a corner office and look pretty. He could not show up for a week and nobody would notice or care.

  Okay, that’s mean. Yes, it’s true. But it’s also mean.

  The cold is making me cranky. And hungry too—why didn’t he let me eat at KFC like I wanted?

  I brush snow from the hood of the car with my
bare hands because, naturally, I failed to bring gloves. What is wrong with me—who forgets to bring gloves on a trip to Vermont in February? I may not be the outdoorsy type, but I should have known better than that. Still, there isn’t much I can do about it now.

  I squint at the front of the car best I can. The visibility is terrible because of the snow and the darkness, but I don’t see anything blocking the car from moving forward. There are no barriers. Only snow. Lots and lots and lots of snow.

  A gust of wind comes at me and nearly knocks me down. Wow, it’s really bad out here. I slowly make my way back to the door, struggling not to fall. I have to hold onto the car the whole way. When I fall back into my seat and slam the door behind me, it’s a huge relief.

  “There’s nothing there,” I say breathlessly. “Only snow.”

  “Well, did you clear the snow away?” he asks impatiently.

  I look at him in disbelief. “No.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I don’t have a shovel.” I rub my hands together, trying to get them warm. I hold my pink fingers in front of the heat blasting out of the vents. My toes are numb. “That’s the only way I could possibly clear it.”

  “Shit,” Chase says again.

  I look out of the windshield, a sinking feeling in my chest. The car is stuck. We are not going anywhere—even when the snow stops, it won’t instantly vanish. The path we came here on is now buried.

  And then I look at the gas tank gauge. It’s less than a quarter full.

  That means in a few hours, we will be out of gas. Which means no heat.

  “What are we going to do?” I whisper, realizing for the first time how truly horrible our situation is.

  Chase’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. His knuckles are white. “I don’t know. Maybe someone will come along.”

  “Someone will come along? Who else would be dumb enough to be driving around here in a blizzard?”

  A few days ago, I probably would have just thought those words and not said them. But to hell with that. Chase got me stuck out in a car with hardly any gas in the middle of nowhere. I’m going to say what I’m thinking.