She crouches down before me, kneeling so her face is level with my torso. Her quarter-moon smile and her white scar and her sweet freckles so close. My pulse throbs against every inch of my skin as she bends forward, her hair falling over her eyes. She begins to untie the laces on my boots. “Do you want to know why I live in an Airstream?” she asks quietly. Well, quietly for her, which is still sort of yelling.

And I want to know every fucking thing about her, and she has to realize that by now. We’ve spent the day bartering for facts about each other, collecting them like seashells on the Oregon coast. My pockets are full of pieces of Jack, and I want to spend the rest of this snowstorm begging for the rest of her story, putting it all together until I can draw her accurately on a sketchbook page, figure out all the lines of her.

“My parents had a rule for me and my brother. As long as we were in school, they would continue to financially support us,” she explains, her fingers still working my laces. I don’t speak. I can barely breathe. She slips off my boots to reveal the soaking wet wool socks underneath. “But I dropped out of college at nineteen, so my parents cut me off. I spent a few months couch surfing with friends until I got the job at Patty’s Cakes. Patty took care of me in a way my parents couldn’t at that time in my life. She taught me how to stand on my own two feet, without my family’s money, and she made me feel like I could be happy, even if I didn’t follow the prescribed plan for my life. Patty’s brother was going to sell this Airstream, but she convinced him to let me pay for it in monthly installments so I could have my own place. It’s the first thing I ever bought on my own, with money I earned. The first thing that’s ever truly been mine.”

Carefully, tenderly, she peels off my socks one at a time, her warm fingers grazing the cold skin on my ankles. I shiver.

“So, yeah,” she says with another shrug. “I live in an Airstream, because it reminds me every day of what I value most. Now, would you look at that?” Jack asks in her too-loud gravelly voice as she bends low over my bare feet. “All your toes are still attached.”

She takes my sweaty, damp right foot between her hands and rubs, trying to warm my skin. Then she presses my foot against the soft flannel of her clearly beloved shirt, pressing my foot to her heart. It is the grossest thing anyone has ever done for me.

It is the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.