Casey pulls on her balaclava and I'm regretting I haven't brought mine. The breeze nips my ears and sometime after they go numb my mind shifts from our rambling conversation to frostbite.

What is she saying?

Chocolate brown stones crunch under our boots. Wind presses my clothes against my body, trying to find a way in.

"What do you think?" she says, finishing a thought I've lost.

And I think I say, "That sounds good," but really, I don't know.

Because I can't stop Casey's eyes from looking like God made light only for them, and the rest of us see as an afterthought.

"Stop looking at me that way, or..." she says. The wind takes her voice and wraps it around Ob Hill.

We are here. We are nowhere because we chose to be here in nothing. And neither of us can explain why. It was simple, as natural and necessary as breakfast.

"Or you'll what?" I say, forgetting myself around the curve her neck makes under the fleece.

"Come here."

She leads me into the wind shadow of the Discovery Hut, says, "What do you think?"

I think I'll forget to breathe if she smiles again.

"This is sort of my whole life," I say, looking from Vince's cross to the hut, Arrival Heights, Mactown across Winter Quarters Bay. "All I ever wanted was to be here, where they stood. In the story."

She has to stand on tiptoe when she kisses me and her lips first cold, warm to my breath.

It takes seconds to put my thoughts back into my head so when she says, "That didn't happen," I don't know what she means.

"Still a frog?" she adds.

I think, "Part of history," but it gets stuck in my throat.

I'm history, now.

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