Quite maturely, I squeal and run away, deeper into the thicket of trees, holding back the bubble of laughter gathering in my throat. I feel the first blow against my back, followed quickly by another clod of snow hitting my thigh. I halt in my tracks to gather up another snowball for my own arsenal, tripping slightly from the momentum of my run, and I don’t realize Jack is right at my back. She bumps into me, and since I’m already off-balance, I go tumbling down into the snow, my ankle twisting as my legs give out beneath me.

Jack reaches out to try to hold me up, but I only succeed in bringing her down with me, until we’re a heap of limbs strewn across the snow.

Jack is strewn across me, her weight pinning me down. Even through the pain in my ankle and the wetness seeping through my clothes, I’m laughing. It’s a deep laugh, the kind that catches you by surprise and doesn’t let go. Above me, Jack looks stricken for a second, and then she’s laughing, too, perhaps at the sound of my laugh. But Jack’s laugh is ridiculous—a mix between the honk of a goose and the screech of tires on wet asphalt—and the sound of it only makes me laugh harder, until there are tears streaming down my face. Until I can’t remember the last time I let myself laugh like this.

Then, all at once, the reality of the moment settles over me. Jack is lying on top of me. We’re touching in so many places: knees, thighs, arms, stomachs, chests.

I gasp, and Jack’s eyes go wide. “Shit, I’m sorry—” She scrambles off me. “Sorry.”

“No,” I manage through the pain and embarrassment. “It’s my foot. I—I think I sprained it.”

I sit up, and she sits down, so we’re side by side in the snow. “The hazards of all-out war,” Jack muses. “Do you think you can make it back to the cabin?”

I look up. We’re far from the path now, where the rest of the family is engaged in their snowball fight, and I can’t see the cabin through the trees. “Maybe,” I say. Now that Jack is no longer on top of me, the pain in my ankle is consuming all my attention. “Maybe not?”

“May I?” she asks, indicting my foot. I nod, and then she’s slowly untying the laces on my boot. I see her that night in the Airstream, bent in front of me, doing the same thing.

I wince as she tugs the shoe off my sore ankle. She immediately takes my foot in her hands, cradling it carefully. For someone who’s never heard of an inside voice, Jack has a surprising capacity for tenderness.