Chapter 24: The Heater Dies
"What?" Joanna sat up straight, her eyes wide as saucers.
"The whole room just... stopped being warm." Mia's voice dropped, drawing them in. "We'd been lying there in this thick, charged silence for hours, both of us pretending to sleep, and then suddenly the air changed. I felt it first on my face. This cold draft creeping in from the window, then spreading across the room like a slow tide."
"So it actually broke?" Alyssa asked.
"I don't know if it broke or if it just gave up. The building's old, the heating system's held together with hope and spare parts. All I knew was that slowly the room was freezing, and I heard him start to shiver down there on the floor."
Mia shifted on the bench, pulling her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. The locker room was warm, but she could feel a phantom chill just from the memory.
"It started small," she continued. "A little shudder now and then, like he was trying to hide it. Then it got worse. I could hear his teeth chattering, and he was trying to muffle it, pressing his face into the blankets. And I remember thinking 'this is my fault. He's freezing down there because he insisted on being a gentleman.'"
"You called him up?" Cassie asked.
"I called him up. Told him he was being an idiot, that he was going to get hypothermia on my account, and that he should get in the bed because it was big enough for two people and we were both adults." Mia smiled, the memory softening her face. "He protested. Of course he protested. He said it was fine, he was fine, he'd slept in worse conditions. So I threw a pillow at him."
"You threw a pillow at him?" Joanna laughed.
"Right in the face. Then I said 'I'm not asking you to marry me, I'm asking you to not freeze to death like an idiot. Get in the bed.'"
The girls exchanged glances, grins spreading.
"So he climbs in," Mia continued, and her voice took on a different quality, softer, more intimate. "And I can feel the cold coming off him before he even gets under the covers. His body temperature was way down. But he settles in on his side, facing away from me, leaving about a foot of space between us. Being respectful. Being a gentleman."
"That sounds agonizing," Rachel said, the scientist in her intrigued.
"It was. We lay there for another twenty minutes, both of us shivering in our separate zones, and I could feel the cold seeping in from the other side of the bed, from the window, from everywhere. And I just thought, 'this is stupid. This is so stupid.'"
Mia paused, savoring the memory. The way the mattress had creaked, the way she'd felt his whole body tense as she moved closer.
"So