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Mac gazes out the window at the field of snow blanketing the street, his breath fogging up the frosty glass.
“It's really coming down, huh?” he says.
Dennis trains his eyes back on the road—whatever he can see of it through the flurry of snowflakes battering the windshield. In the darkness of a long-gone sunset, the street looks more murky grey than white, an illusion only broken up by the Range Rover's headlights and a spattering of streetlamps.
Snow in Philadelphia isn't uncommon, especially during this December through February period they have just been ushered into, but rarely do they get more than a couple of inches at a time. Enough to frost windows and give children the ammo for a few snowballs before their tiny, frostbitten hands started scraping the pavement, but never quite amounting to anything aside from a gradual change into sickly grey slush that leads to four-car pileups on every other intersection.
It’s a routine that Dennis has been acquainted with for long enough to form a routine. Day one: pull the hats and gloves out of his bottom drawers in preparation. Days two and three: call in from work claiming to be snowed in. Day four: give himself an extra twenty minutes in the morning to account for the slushy remains of snow still strewn across the streets. The extra twenty minutes also account for the time it takes for himself and Mac to get over themselves, settle whatever aimless argument they had gotten into during their days home, and get in the goddamn car together. More than once—whether due to his own stubbornness or Dennis' unflagging animosity—it ended with Mac taking the twenty minute walk to work as Dennis drove just slow enough to watch him in his side mirror.
This year made sure to differ itself from that routine. A snowstorm had torn through the city as soon as the calendars flipped to December, leaving icy streets and two toppled powerlines in its wake. Another one, only marginally less destructive, rolled through five days later. The entire gang had holed up in the bar overnight for it, all five of them crowding into a booth and passing around an old bottle of bourbon to keep themselves warm.
“It’s getting pretty rough out there,” Mac reiterates, a silent assertion of “we should've stayed at Paddy's” sewn between his words.
Charlie, Frank, and Dee were doing just that—sealing themselves in like they had the week prior, this time accompanied by a sole drunken barfly in place of Mac and Dennis. He refused to stay there overnight again, not with the twenty year old bourbon that burned like bile down his throat and those goddamn lines Frank kept dropping about feeling the snow coming “in his bones,” because he was getting to that age where talking like a goddamn wizard became the standard. When Dennis made a beeline for the door, Mac had followed; always toeing at Dennis' heels until they inevitably tripped over one another.
The hum that Dennis gives in response is shorter this time, clipped. He doesn’t need to look at Mac to know that he is pulling one of those faces—eyebrows drawn, bottom lip jutted out in a near-pout like he is holding back what he wants to say right behind his teeth. Dennis still finds himself looking, catching a glimpse of that familiar expression in the rear-view mirror before Mac turns away.
It's hard to tell when this particular strain of tension wormed its way into their dynamic. Sometime around those godforsaken rehearsal dinners, maybe. Or in the weeks following, when Mac had engaged in a string of hookups and came home cold, shitfaced, and— not distant, necessarily, just different. A grey area that Dennis can’t quite parse.
It's getting hard to see down the unpaved, vacant streets, no other cars daring to push through the three inches of snow that have already landed. The Range Rover is reliable, of course. An all-terrain beast who plows through any challenge posed to her without fail. But it has been a good few years since she got her tires changed, and Dennis can feel it as they fight through the snow. The windshield wipers dart back and forth, doing a pathetic job of clearing anything. Flicking them up to their maximum speed only succeeds in spreading a thin layer of ice over the glass.
“Goddamnit,” Dennis hisses. He flicks a hand in Mac's direction. “How close am I to the curb?”
Mac rolls down the window, leaning over to stick his head out. Dennis grits his teeth at the rush of cold air that quickly makes itself at home in the Range Rover, driving away any warmth they had amassed. Before he can open his mouth to complain, Mac is already ducking inside, wiping away the dampness from his face. “I can't tell, dude, it all looks the same out there.”
The whole car jostles as he settles back into his seat, a sudden, jerky movement that has Dennis gripping the wheel tighter. When he presses down on the gas pedal, he is rewarded with the grinding sound of the wheels attempting—failing—to power through the snow beneath them.
“Oh shit.” Mac glances out the window; the Chinese food restaurant to their left doesn't budge. “Are we stuck?”
Dennis steps on the gas once more. Twice.
“Goddamnit,” he snaps. “We pay this city a shitload in taxes and they can't even be bothered to plow the streets?”
Mac hums. Snowflakes are still clinging to him—his hair, eyelashes, the bridge of his nose—slowly melting in the waning heat of the car. It's falling even harder outside, now, quickly building on the window as soon as Dennis flicks the wipers off. Light from the streetlamp poised above them bleeds through it, bathing them in a fuzzy, yellow hue.
“I guess we could just sleep in here,” Mac suggests. Under the haze, he looks a bit like an old photo left in the sun to develop, soft-edged and washed out.
“And sit around freezing once the heat quits on us?”
Mac shrugs, as if he enjoys that scenario. The two of them trapped in a freezing cold car together, having to huddle for warmth like the cliché opening to a goddamn porno. That thought more than anything is what spurs Dennis to reach for the car key.
The engine goes silent as he turns the ignition, taking the staticky hum of the radio along with it. With a low whir, the heat stops as well, pulling in an almost immediate chill. The car door is stiff, crackling like a sheet of ice as Dennis shoulders his way into opening it. His fingers are equally stiff as he fumbles with the buttons of his jacket, already feeling the invading cold creeping underneath.
“Where are you going?”
A scoff forces its way out of Dennis’ mouth. “Where do you think I'm going, Mac? We're a ten minute walk from our apartment and my legs still work.”
“It's probably more like twenty with the snow,” Mac argues. It sounds like an argument, at least—gets on Dennis’ nerves like the start of one.
He slams the door shut in response.
Even outside of the car, it's hard to see where the road ends and the sidewalk begins. The landscape is practically unrecognizable beneath the thick, uneven blanket of snow that Dennis has to hike his legs to wade through. If not for the street sign hanging overhead, lit by the faint glow of the traffic light, it would feel completely foreign. Ten steps in, the snow has already soaked through his shoes, moistening his socks in that distinctly uncomfortable manner.
Mac's eyes are on him as he stalks away, burning desperate little holes into his back. It only pushes Dennis to keep walking. He can freeze in there if he so chooses. Dennis will come back once the snow has melted, find his frostbitten body in the passenger seat, and use the money from Mac's monthly energy drink allowance to pay for a car detailing. The rest of it would go to whoever he could get to move the Asspounder out of the apartment with the least amount of questions.
A car door slamming shut behind him and the preceding, hurried footsteps unceremoniously pull him from that fantasy.
When Mac’s breaths reach Dennis’ ears, they come out in short pants; all the more evidence that his daily gym trips consist more of flaunting himself around the equipment than any meaningful training. “I thought global warming meant the weather was supposed to get hotter,” he huffs.
Dennis lets out a breath like he has just taken a drag of a cigarette. The air comes out that way, too—a cloud of smog that catches the waning light. He hugs his arms tighter across his chest.
“It's about the extremes,” he says, echoing some news broadcast they'd had on the TV in the past week. “Hotter summers, colder winters.”
“They definitely feel colder,” Mac agrees. “We used to run around in shit like this all the time when we were younger, it didn't matter if we had hats or gloves. Charlie and I used to build snowmen with our bare hands.”
Dennis remembers that, another tradition he had joined long after Mac and Charlie had conceived it. Hours spent building armies of snowmen only to go back and kick them down before the other neighbourhood jackasses could do so. He doesn't dare to say it, but Dennis thinks that younger might be the key part of Mac's equation. “That's—”
It happens too quickly to process, feet sliding out beneath him on a patch of ice and hurling him forward. Dennis’ heart lurches into his throat as he falls, knees landing squarely in the snow. His hands brace him before he can plant his face into it, but the snow doesn't award him a moment to catch his breath before it begins soaking through his jeans. A shiver wracks his frame.
“Goddamnit,” he hisses.
Mac stands with his arms unfolded, but they remain stiffly at his side, like he's waiting for Dennis to ask for help. Dennis keeps his mouth drawn in a tight line as he pushes himself to his feet, wiping his snow-covered hands against his jacket. The wet spots on his knees are already beginning to freeze and cling to his legs like cellophane.
“This is fucking miserable,” the words escape between clenched teeth.
“Yeah, dude,” Mac says. “We probably should've just stayed at Paddy's.”
Dennis feels the words hit him, blunt and bruising. “You could have, Mac. I didn’t invite you along, you just followed after me like you always do because you can’t think for yourself! If it weren’t for the squabbling and– and your insistence on sleeping in the car, I would have been back to the apartment by now.”
Mac visibly deflates. “C’mon, don't be like that, dude.”
“Like what?”
His gaze flickers between the snow, his boots, the Wawa across the street—anything but Dennis. He's got that look on his face again; brows creased, lip jutted out. It makes Dennis want to stick a hand down his throat and pull the words out himself.
“Like what, Mac?
Mac's jaw unclenches, finally. “Just— difficult, Dennis,” he says. “You're so hard to talk to sometimes.”
Dennis’ face feels raw from the wind. Difficult is— it's a good thing, makes him harder to unravel, to get under the skin of. The way that Mac says it feels like the insult Dennis knows he means it to be.
It’s already too late when Dennis realizes that his silence must read as passivity, him rolling over and taking it. To play it off, he storms a few paces ahead. It feels like climbing a mountain, like that hike in Ireland minus the dead body and brief moments of respite he had bought himself by clinging to it. He’s so focused on getting one foot in front of the other that it takes him a minute to realize that he doesn't hear Mac's footsteps.
Looking back feels like an admission of guilt, somehow. Dennis does so anyway.
Mac is still staring at the crater in the snow, the evidence of Dennis' misstep. He sniffles, wipes his nose on his sleeve. It's not Dennis' jacket at least, he knows that without looking at it. Stealing his clothes was something that had stopped a long time before this particular stretch of tension settled over them.
“Mac?”
He waits for the response, for Mac to quit agonizing over whatever metaphorical wounds he believes Dennis has inflicted on him and hurry over. Mac's shoulders tense and, as if on cue, he starts walking.
Away. He's walking away.
“Mac,” Dennis can't disguise the bafflement in his voice, “where the hell are you going?”
Instead of turning to face him, Mac simply shouts into the empty street, “Back to Paddy's!”
“What?” Dennis huffs out a laugh. “It'll take you half an hour to walk all the way back, you'll die of hypothermia before you get there.” It's an exaggeration—probably—but he'll lose a couple of fingers at least.
Mac doesn't reply. His back faces Dennis stubbornly, solid and unwavering even as he trips over his own feet. Dennis almost thinks he is going to wind up with matching wet patches on his knees, but he catches himself faster than Dennis had. He doesn’t look back.
“Mac!” Dennis grits his teeth. His pants are soaked, they're standing in the middle of a snowstorm, and Mac would rather die of hypothermia than act like a rational fucking person. “What you're doing is stupid! You realize that, right?”
It gains him no reaction.
Dennis swallows around the growing lump in his throat. Mac’s decision—his voluntary goddamn suicide via snowstorm—shouldn’t bother him. He considers it again; the car detailing, a fridge free of ZOA energy drinks, no more dildo bike in the spare room. But something pulls at his chest. The desire to have someone back at the apartment to turn on the heaters and get the kettle going while Dennis changes out of his sopping wet clothes; to sit down and watch Die Hard alongside every night leading up to Christmas; someone who will make the trek with him tomorrow, in more fitting clothing, to get the Range Rover back.
The wind feels all the more cold as he stands in place, really allowing it to seep under his clothes, beneath his skin. Dennis thinks about sitting at Guigino’s, aimlessly arguing over a karaoke machine; about the dinner years later when Dee nearly killed herself drinking that stupid histamine shake. He wishes he were back there, if only for a moment, desperate for a hint of the warmth those memories had. Measuring your words is much harder when your body is trying desperately to maintain whatever body heat it has left.
Dennis sucks in a painfully cool breath. “I don't want you to go back to Paddy's, okay?” he says, just loud enough to carry over the distance between them. The rest of his request goes unspoken.
Mac slows to a stop, hands tucked into his pits. Dennis' eyes trace the slope of Mac’s shoulders, the slight rise and fall of them as he stands stock-still. The street is silent, as though the snow is muffling everything outside of them, keeping them suspended in the moment.
Finally, he turns. Pride, or something like it, swells in Dennis’ chest. I've still got him, it whispers.
Dennis blinks away snowflakes as Mac retraces his footsteps, head bowed.
“It's a shorter walk back to the apartment,” Mac mutters, as though wanting to defend his alleged independence. It doesn't change the fact that he wouldn’t have left if Dennis hadn’t chosen to. They would still be at Paddy’s with the rest of the gang sharing another bottle of bourbon, or vodka, or whatever other hard liquor Charlie managed to dig out of the basement. He wouldn't have left, because he didn't give a shit about leaving Paddy's if it weren't for Dennis.
Dennis allows himself to consider, for a fraction of a second, that if Mac had insisted on staying at Paddy's, maybe he wouldn't have been in such a rush to leave either. “Yeah.”
Walking side-by-side only makes the remains of discomfort between them more apparent. The surrounding snow is pale, still lightly drifting onto the ground, but Dennis feels the squelch of that disgusting, grey slush beneath his shoes. The cold gnaws at his chest, an ache deep beneath the ribs. His hands flex at his sides, numb and stiff. He can't tear his eyes from Mac.
Dennis’ fingers reach out, curling into the end of his jacket sleeve. He tugs.
Mac flinches away, hurrying out of reach so quickly that he nearly stumbles over himself. "What the hell, dude!" he spits. “Are you trying to steal my jacket? Is that why you lured me back?”
“Lured you—” Dennis sputters. “I'm not trying to thieve your jacket from you, Mac! I just saved you from an astoundingly moronic fate, and you—” He shakes his head, shakes away that flush of heat rising to his face that lands smack dab in the middle of anger and embarrassment. “Whatever. Go back to Paddy's, I don't give a shit.”
Dennis can feel the fringe of Mac's breath on the back of his neck, the sound of his footsteps trailing just behind him. He keeps his sight trained down, following the trail of rat prints dotted across the surface of the snow, weaving around fire hydrants and signposts; the cigarettes and garbage wrappers being slowly buried beneath.
“What’d you want, then?”
Dennis’ jaw aches from how hard he is clenching it, the spark of warmth blooming from it is almost welcome. “Nothing.”
Mac sighs. Dennis hears the frustration on the frayed edges of it. It brushes against his skin, painfully raw.
“Just—” His fingers loop around Mac's elbow, this time, pulling him carefully into arm's reach. He holds his breath so that Mac doesn't hear it hitch as their shoulders press together.
“Oh,” Mac says, barely louder than a breath. His arm finds its way around Dennis’ back to land on his waist. “Good thinking, dude. Sharing body heat is always at the top of those survival guides.”
He had fallen into that side of the internet a couple months back, still on the fringes of his “raw-dog lifestyle” phase. Watching survival shows to take in all of the shirtless men and useless tips instead of learning how to start a fire or which mushrooms are poisonous or not. All of them are, is what Mac had gathered, and Dennis had not paid enough attention himself to be able to dispute it. The body heat thing might be just as big of a sham, but he can't bring himself to care.
The store ahead has Christmas lights strung across its canopy, flickering with a festive red-green strobe even as the lights in the cafe itself are dim. Cheap, candy cane decals are stuck to the windows, the same ones on display in nearly every store on the block.
Aside from pulling a few extra blankets out of storage, moving the string lights from their kitchen window to drape over the TV is the only seasonal change made to their apartment; by virtue of Mac, clearly, because Dennis certainly hadn't done so. It can barely be considered decorating, and it is certainly not good decorating, considering the awful red glare that the LEDs cast across the screen, making everything look blown-out and sunburnt. Dennis hasn't bothered complaining about it yet. He'll save it for when Mac insists that they put the giant, bloodied Jesus statue—sitting in the basement of Paddy's and blanketed with a decade's worth of dust—on display for the holidays.
Mac’s breath stutters, Dennis feels the spasm of it under his hand. “Your fingers are like icicles, Dennis. I can feel them through my jacket.”
Dennis flexes them, feeling that bone-deep stiffness that makes them almost robotic to move. “So are yours,” he mutters.
There are three breaths between that and the moment Mac's fingers brush against his wrist to guide Dennis’ hand into his pocket. It stings a bit, the rub of the fabric against his raw skin, but he allows it, clenching and unclenching his fingers until they begin to feel a bit more like they’re properly attached to his body. A couple of stray objects in Mac's pocket skim them—a crumpled receipt, pocket lint, some peanut shells. It must have been a while since he last wore it. Dennis will have to make sure to throw it in the laundry before he ends up in anaphylactic shock over a single shard of peanut.
“Better?” Mac asks.
The thin fabric isn't doing much to shield his hand from anything, Dennis can still feel each breeze that rushes through. It is a wonder that Mac isn't shivering more than he is beneath the light fabric.
He rubs the corner of the receipt between the pads of his fingers, smoothing it out. “Yeah, ‘s good.”
Dennis stares down at their shoes, the untied laces of Mac's boots dragging along the snow. They’re stepping nearly in unison, leaving a long trail of parallel footprints. If someone were to come by, they could track the path they've taken; every misstep and stumble, the backpedaling and turn-arounds.
“We should make hot chocolate when we get home,” Mac says suddenly. “If you don't get something warm in your system then you could get internalized frostbite. I saw it on TV, the guy had to cut his own kidney out with a whittled tree branch and pinecones.”
Dennis cringes, sniffles, and carefully pushes aside the urge to press his face against Mac's shoulder to stave off the chill. “As long as we don't use that terrible chocolate protein powder you bought last time.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“It tasted like chalk and sawdust,” Dennis retorts, a reminder of that awful, gritty texture rising up in his throat. Mac has been living off of discount protein bars and energy drinks for long enough to burn his tastebuds off. “You've really gotta stop spending our money on shit like that, dude.”
The dig must not come out as harshly as Dennis intended it, because he sees the slight curl of Mac’s lips out of the corner of his eye. His eyes catch on a few different things, then. The snowflakes gathering on Mac’s lashes; the flush of his cheeks, surely numb from the bite of the cool wind; the moment that the breath passing his parted lips fogs up. Dennis can't remember the last time it felt easy to look without putting on a front, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder without working up the will to pull away.
One of Mac’s hands covers his, separated only by the thin layer of fabric making up his jacket pocket. His thumb traces over Dennis' knuckles—subconsciously, he has to assume. The idea of Mac doing it intentionally, weaving between the joints of his fingers with such slow diligence, is too much to think about right now. His other hand rests against Dennis’ ribs, opposite his heart. He can’t quite bring himself to grab it, but he pulls his arm in a bit tighter to sandwich Mac’s fingers between it, feeling each subtle shift of them as he does so. It's like they’re digging beneath his skin, reaching into Dennis' chest and squeezing.
Mac's lips are moving, “D'you think Die Hard will be on when we get back?”
Dennis is partially listening—half imagining Bruce Willis swathed in that awful red LED glare and half watching the way that it paints the side of Mac's face now, as they pass under another string of lights. “Maybe.”
The snow is really starting to come down, making anything beyond Mac into a blur and leaving him vignetted. It's hard to imagine it fading away now; melting into the grey, slushy mess that seems inevitable of it. Dennis presses closer, fisting the fabric of Mac's jacket pocket between his fingers desperately. There's a world, maybe, where it doesn't stop, and they have to become accustomed to living like this—unable to separate from whatever spot of warmth they can find in the cold.
Mac's gaze is on him. Dennis drags his eyes up to meet it.
Around them, the snow keeps falling.