“She felt the ice go, felt the beginning of the short fall. But the stabbing cold wet didn't come. Instead her feet scrambled on the crumbling floor and she felt herself yanked hard by the belt toward the nearer of the hull walls. She grabbed for handholds and found herself clinging not to a bumper or a length of cordage or any other bit of boat hardware, but to a boy with wide, terrified eyes. He wrapped his arms around her, and held her as tightly as she had ever been held, as the floor behind them splintered and reached out with its webwork of cracks in all directions, as if the ice itself knew Mare was still there, and it still wanted to see her fall. With his back to the wall, the boy whistled three discordant notes, and instantly the splintering stopped just shy of the surface directly under her feet. "How did you do that?" Mare whispered, turning her head to stare over her shoulder and down at the fractured floor of the tunnel. Instead of answering, the boy asked, "Are you alright?" He looked at the rope that still tethered her to the loop of cordage overhead. "Oh, I see. You were fine all along."
"Well, you did save me from wet feet and a lot of maneuvering," Mare said. They were still holding fast to each other, but neither moved to release the other. It makes for a very romantic image, but for her part, Mare was occupied with working out the safest way to let go, and the safest direction in which to move when she did. Also, she'd dropped her staff, which she would need in order to disengage the tether hook from the loop it hung from, directly over the center of the radiating cracks. Along with her drawing pad, which there was no way she was leaving without. That is, she was mostly occupied with all that, because she had never held anyone so closely or for so long, there was a small collection of synapses in her brain that could not fail to notice that out of the corner of her right eye, she could see the boy's cheekbone, and a scattering of frost clinging to his curling dark sideburns. And as for the boy, well, for reasons that will shortly become evident, he was in a state where nearly everything he encountered made his heart ache with wonder and joy. And although he had acted on pure instinct when he'd pulled Mare out of the way of the splintering ice, now he was holding on simply because he didn't want to let go. "I need my staff there," Mare said, nodding back toward the center of the tunnel. The boy had to lift his head to see over hers, in order to follow the gesture. And for a moment, Mare felt the skin just below his jaw press against her forehead. Under different circumstances, she might have noticed that she ought to have felt his pulse there. Or then again, perhaps not.”
―
Kate Milford,
The Raconteur's Commonplace Book: A Greenglass House Story
