Snowed In With Gramps

⚠️ Content Warning

This novel contains explicit MM sexual content, graphic praise-kink and D/s-light dynamics, light bondage with safeword use, a significant age gap (33 years, both consenting adults), a widower processing grief, depictions of closeted religious family trauma (off-page, discussed), and emotional intensity. Intended for readers 18+. The heat runs graphic across twelve on-page scenes. HEA guaranteed.

The phone rang at three-fourteen in the afternoon and I knew before I picked it up that somebody was in trouble.

I’d been at the workbench for about two hours, peg-jointing the last rung on a kitchen stool that had been ordered by a couple from Albany in September and then forgotten about by everyone, myself included, until the woman sent a Christmas card asking after it. The storm had come in slow all morning, the way the bad ones always do up here — clean sky at dawn, milky by ten, and by two o’clock the pines on the ridge behind the workshop had started to roar the way they roared the night Marianne died, which was the only other night I could remember that sound being that particular register of wrong.

The radio on the shelf above the drill press had been on NOAA since breakfast. Winter storm warning, Essex County, accumulation eighteen to twenty-four inches by midnight, wind gusts potentially exceeding sixty miles an hour, road closures imminent, travel not advised. I’d heard it five times. I’d chopped enough wood to last three weeks. I’d filled the generator. I’d brought Bear inside. What I hadn’t done was expect to hear the landline ring, because the only person who called me on the landline in December was my son Dave, and Dave had already called on Saturday to confirm that he and Carla weren’t driving up for Christmas because of Carla’s mother’s hip, and that was fine by me. I didn’t need the noise.

So when the bell on the wall jangled through the workshop I wiped my hands on my thighs and walked across the sawdust to answer it, and the voice on the other end was my grandson’s, and Noah was saying Grandpa the way he used to say it when he was six and had done something wrong, and the bottom of my stomach went out from under me before I’d even gotten the receiver all the way to my ear.

“Grandpa. Grandpa, thank god. Jesus. Okay. Okay, I need you to listen.”

“I’m listening, son.”

“I got stuck. I was driving up, I was almost to the valley, I got stuck at Teddy’s — Teddy Macklin, you met him at graduation — his mom’s place, I came off 73 about an hour ago because the visibility went to shit and I thought I’d wait it out and now the road’s closed behind me, they just closed Route 73 both directions, I can’t get to you.”

“Okay.”

“That’s not the problem, Grandpa. Jazz is coming up alone.”

I put my hand flat against the wall beside the phone. The wood was cold. “Say again.”

“My roommate. Jasper. The one I brought to Placid in July. I told you about him, the one with no family, he was coming up with me for Christmas, we took two cars because he had his own stuff to bring, he was going to follow me up. I was ahead of him, I didn’t know he’d fallen back, I thought he was right behind me, and then I got off at Teddy’s to wait for him and my phone didn’t have signal for forty minutes and when I got through to him he was already past Keene, he was on the forest road — Grandpa, he’s on your forest road right now, he’s in a 2007 Corolla with two-wheel drive and bald tires and he doesn’t know the mountain, he’s never even been up it, he’s never driven in snow like this in his life, and I can’t get to him.”

“Where was he when you talked to him.”

“He said he was at the trailhead. The lot with the sign. Where the pavement ends.”

“How long ago.”

“Twenty minutes.”

“You still got him on the line.”

“No. He lost signal right after. Grandpa — “

“Noah. I’m getting in the truck.”

“Please. Please. Grandpa, I’m going to lose my mind, he has nobody, if something happens to him — “

“I’m getting in the truck right now. Stay at Teddy’s. Don’t try to drive. I’ll call you from the cabin when I’ve got him.”

“Grandpa — “

“I’ve got him, son. You hear me?”

A breath. Wet. He was crying and trying not to. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah.”

“Sit down. Drink some water. I’ll call.”

I hung up before he could say anything else because Noah had been an apologizer since he was a toddler and this wasn’t a time for it. I shut the radio off. Clipped the new stool to the ceiling rack so it wouldn’t come down if the power flickered. Crossed through the breezeway into the cabin proper, where Bear was asleep in his bed by the woodstove with his paws twitching, and he lifted his head at me and I said, “Stay,” and he put his head back down.

Boots, first. The old Sorels, the good ones, laced past my shins. Then the wool pants over the work pants, the Carhartt jacket, the insulated gloves. I took the axe out of the wood crib by the back door and set it in the mudroom in case I needed it and then I thought better and put it in the back of the truck instead. Tow strap. Jumper cables. The blue wool blanket off the back of the couch, the heavy one Marianne had bought in Lake Placid the summer before she got sick. Thermos. I filled it with what was left of the morning’s coffee and topped it off with a splash of bourbon because the boy was going to need it and I wasn’t going to ask.

The plow truck was in the lean-to off the back of the workshop. An ’89 Ford F-250 with a plow I’d put on it myself in 2004 and replaced the hydraulics on in 2019. It started on the second try. I let it warm a full minute because I was going to be taking it onto ice and I wanted the heater working when I put a half-frozen twenty-two-year-old into the passenger seat.

Then I backed out, dropped the plow, and started down the road.

The drive from my cabin to the trailhead parking lot at the foot of the forest road is three and a half miles when the road is clear, and it took me eleven minutes on a good day, and it took me twenty-two minutes that afternoon. The snow was coming down sideways by the time I was halfway. I plowed what I could. The wind off the ridge kept filling the track back in. Twice I slowed to a stop because I couldn’t see the hood of the truck for the ground-blow, and twice I waited it out, and twice I went on. I’ve been driving this mountain since I was fifteen. I wasn’t worried about me. I was doing the math in my head about what the temperature was outside the cab versus what the temperature was inside a Corolla with a dead battery, and I was thinking about what twenty minutes turns into when a phone call ends and a boy gets scared and sits still instead of doing anything, and I was pressing the accelerator a little harder than I should have been.

I came around the last bend before the trailhead with the plow throwing a six-foot wave of snow off my right quarter and I saw the Corolla.

It was parked at an angle just inside the gravel turnout, driver’s-side front wheel sunk into the plow berm the county had thrown up against the edge of the lot sometime that morning. The car was blue. Or it had been blue. There was so much snow on it you could only see the blue through the rear windshield, which was the only part of the glass that had been cleared. Somebody had been kicking at the driver’s door from the inside to try to get it open against the drift and had given up. The wipers weren’t running. The lights weren’t on. I pulled up twenty feet away, put the truck in park, killed the plow, and got out with the blanket.

I walked around the front of the Corolla. There was a head in the driver’s seat. Hood up on a down jacket that had taken on enough meltwater to be no use at all. The hood moved. Eyes opened. He’d been asleep, or close to it.

I tapped on the glass.

He jerked. Jerked again. Got his hand on the door handle and shoved. The drift didn’t give. I could see him say something through the window I didn’t catch, some word that started with an f, and then he looked up at me through the glass and his face did this thing I’ve been thinking about off and on ever since — he saw a stranger in a brown Carhartt with snow frozen in his beard coming at his car door with a blanket in the middle of a whiteout, and instead of going to whatever a city kid’s reasonable fear would have been he made a small, broken noise I could hear through the glass and the weather, a little human oh of relief, like he’d been waiting for someone to come and couldn’t believe someone actually had.

I put my shoulder to the door and drove it open through the drift in two shoves.

“Out,” I said. “Now, son. Come on.”

He didn’t move. He couldn’t. His legs had gone. He’d been sitting too long, and he was cold in a way he hadn’t clocked yet because the body lies to you about that, and when I reached in with the blanket he just looked up at me with the hugest pair of wet blue eyes I’ve ever seen on a grown man and said, “Are you — are you Noah’s grandpa?”

“Yeah, son. I am.”

“Oh thank god.”

“Can you stand.”

“I don’t — I don’t know. I was — “

“Arms up.”

He put his arms up. I got the blanket around him, hooked one arm under his knees and the other behind his back, and lifted him out of the driver’s seat in one motion. He was not heavy. He was not anywhere near as heavy as he ought to have been for the height he was — I’d already clocked he was close to six foot — and he sort of folded against my chest on the way to the truck with a little shudder that could’ve been the cold or could’ve been something else. I got the passenger door open with my elbow. Set him on the seat. Got his legs in. Unwrapped the blanket enough to free his hands, kept it wrapped everywhere else. Reached across him for the belt. His jacket was so soaked the nylon was giving under my fingers.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what.”

“I don’t know. Everything. I drove up. Noah said — “

“Noah called me. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

“Okay.”

“Thermos by your knee. Pour some of that in the cap. Two hands.”

He got the thermos. Got the cap off. Got coffee into it with fingers that weren’t working right and would be working less before they worked more. I closed his door, walked around, got in, cranked the heat to full, and put us in gear.

He took a sip. Coughed. “There’s — “

“Bourbon. Drink it.”

He drank it.

I plowed my way back up. He didn’t talk for the first mile. I could hear him breathing. It was too fast at first and then too slow and then evened out about the same time the feeling started coming back into his hands, which I knew was happening because he made a soft sound I couldn’t identify and then said, “Ow.”

“That’s just the blood. Let it happen. Keep the cap warm in your hands if you can.”

“Okay.”

“What’s your name, son. Noah said Jasper but that’s not what he calls you.”

“Jazz. Jasper. Either. Most people call me Jazz.”

“All right, Jazz.”

A pause. Then, quieter, and I swear to God a little shy: “Thank you, sir.”

I’d had a lot of people call me sir over the years. Customers. Kids at the hardware store. The woman at the DMV. Nobody had said thank you, sir in that tone, in that register, with that particular little hesitation before it, in my entire adult life. It did something in my chest I wasn’t going to examine while I was driving up a mountain in a nor’easter. I filed it.

“You’re welcome, boy. Hold on. The last bend is a bitch.”

He held on.

I got us up the last grade in second gear with the plow raised and the rear wheels spinning twice, and then we were on the flat at the top, and then we were coming around the final turn into the clearing and he saw the cabin for the first time and he said, softly, “Oh.”

I looked over at him.

He was looking at it the way people look at churches.

It’s not much of a house. It’s not. It’s a rectangle of peeled pine logs with a porch across the front and a river-stone chimney on the south gable and a tin roof that my father put on in ’67 and that I replaced a third of in 2011, and in December in a storm with the yellow light from the great room coming through the two front windows and a plume of woodsmoke trying and failing to go straight up through the swirl it looked like what it was, which was the only place in the world I’d ever wanted to be, and I was used to that being a thing I felt alone. It was a different thing to have a stranger in my truck see it and get that look.

I put us under the lean-to next to the woodshed. Killed the engine. The cab got quiet. He had the thermos cap empty in both hands and the blanket up to his throat and the melt was dripping off his hair into his collar and he was shivering in a sustained low-amplitude way that meant he was actually warming up, not getting colder, and that was about as much as I could manage to notice as a medical professional because every other part of me was doing a simple animal inventory I had no business doing in a plow truck in my own driveway. The eyes. I’ve told you about the eyes. Curls soaked black but you could see the red-brown underneath, stuck to his forehead, stuck behind one ear. Little silver hoop in the ear. Mouth open a little from the cold. Freckles I hadn’t seen in the car I was seeing now under the cab light, a whole constellation across his nose, and two more on his bottom lip that I looked at for half a second too long.

I put it away. I got out.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you inside.”

He got the door open. Tried to get down. His legs still weren’t his. I caught him on the way down — hand under his elbow, hand at the small of his back — and for one full second he was pressed the length of my side with his head under my chin, and I smelled wet wool and some kind of cheap sandalwood thing off his hair, and then I had him upright and walking and I did not think anything at all about any of it.

Mudroom. I pushed the door open with my hip. Got us inside. The woodstove heat hit us in the face and his whole body sagged.

“Okay,” I said. “Sit. Right there. On the bench.”

He sat on the bench. I shut the door, twisted the deadbolt out of habit. Turned back.

“Jacket off.”

He fumbled at the zipper. His fingers wouldn’t do it. I bent down in front of him and unzipped the jacket myself, and then I peeled it off his shoulders one sleeve at a time, and it came off and landed on the floor like it weighed ten pounds because it did. The flannel shirt underneath it was soaked through the shoulders and the chest. I could see his collarbones through the fabric. The thermal under the flannel was soaked too.

“Both shirts.”

“What?”

“Both shirts. Off. You’re wet through. You can’t sit in that.”

He went a little pink. Not from the cold. I noted the color and filed that too. “I don’t — I don’t have — my bag’s in the car — “

“I’ll get the bag later. Right now you’re putting on my clothes. Shirts off, boy.”

His hands went to his buttons. They wouldn’t work. He looked up at me with this particular embarrassed-apology face and I said, low, “It’s all right,” and I did the buttons myself. Chest by chest. Not touching skin. Not making it a thing. He had a navel piercing and I’d been told about it already — Noah had mentioned it once in July, laughing about Jazz getting it on a dare — and when the shirt came open I saw the little silver barbell against pale belly and I thought huh in a very specific, very old-fashioned way, and I kept going.

Flannel off. Thermal off — I had to tug it over his head, he put his arms up like a kid, his hair stood on end with static when it came free. Under the thermal there was a ratty white undershirt, also damp. Off. He was down to bare chest. Smooth. Goosebumps. Two small dark nipples, both pulled tight from the cold. A constellation of freckles coming down off his shoulders and disappearing at his sternum.

I got the wool blanket off the bench behind him and wrapped him in it before my brain could say anything interesting.

“Jeans too.”

“Uh — “

“They’re soaked. You’ll get hypothermia sitting in them. You can keep your shorts on. I’ll bring you sweats.”

“Okay.”

He stood. Got the belt. Got the button. Got the zipper. The jeans came down and I turned around to face the kitchen while he stepped out of them, and I heard him bunch them in a ball and set them on top of the other wet stuff and I heard the blanket rustle as he pulled it closed around himself again.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

I turned back around. He had the blanket tucked under his arms like a towel. He looked about sixteen years old.

“Socks?”

“Please.”

I knelt down. Pulled off his boots — soaked. Pulled off his socks — soaked. Took one of his feet in my hand and it was genuinely cold, not frostbite cold but a-couple-more-hours-would’ve-been cold, and I rubbed the arch with my thumb a couple of slow passes to bring the blood and he made a small noise above me and I did not look up.

I got up. Walked through into the great room. Bear had come over at some point and was sitting in the kitchen doorway watching. I went past him to the linen closet, got a pair of clean wool socks, a pair of my old sweatpants with a drawstring I hoped would tighten enough, and a Pendleton flannel I didn’t wear anymore because it was too long in the sleeve. Brought them back.

“Dress,” I said. “I’ll start the cocoa.”

He nodded. I went into the kitchen and I did not look at what he was doing in the mudroom and I also kept the oblique in my peripheral vision on purpose, and when he came through into the great room five minutes later in my socks and my sweats rolled twice at the ankle and my flannel with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and his wet hair pushed back with his hand, I stopped with the milk halfway to the pot, and I said, to no one, to myself, not out loud, oh, hell.

“Hey,” he said.

“Couch,” I said.

He went and sat on the couch. Bear walked over to him and put his whole head in Jasper’s lap without asking. I watched Jasper freeze for a half second and then put both hands in the fur at the scruff of Bear’s neck and drop his forehead onto the top of Bear’s head and make a sound.

I’d been about to pour the milk. I put the carton down. Leaned on the counter. Let him have a minute.

It wasn’t a sob. It was a shorter thing than that. A compressed little shudder of whatever he’d been holding since the Corolla died under him in a whiteout and he’d realized nobody was coming. He got it under control in about thirty seconds. He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand, and he apologized to Bear in a whisper I wasn’t supposed to hear, and he sat up, and he said, across the room, “Sorry. I — sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for, son.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know.”

I made the cocoa. I’m not going to pretend I made anything special. Whole milk, the good Dutch-process cocoa I get from a shop in Saranac, sugar, pinch of salt, a chip of cinnamon bark in the pot. I warmed it slow. He didn’t talk. I didn’t push him. Bear stayed on the couch with his chin on Jasper’s thigh. The wind threw itself against the north side of the cabin and backed off and threw itself again.

I poured two mugs. Brought them over. Sat down in the chair across the coffee table from him, not on the couch next to him, because I wasn’t going to do that.

“Drink it slow,” I said. “Don’t scald.”

He wrapped both hands around the mug and breathed over it a long time before he took a sip, and when he did he closed his eyes. Didn’t say anything. Took another sip. Opened his eyes and looked at me and the kid looked about ten years old.

“This is really good,” he said.

“Glad to hear it.”

“I’m — thank you. For — for coming and getting me. I’m sorry I drove up, I didn’t — Noah said he’d be right in front of me, I didn’t realize how bad the road was, I’m so sorry — “

“Son. Listen.”

He listened.

“You’re safe. You’re dry. You’re drinking cocoa. Noah’s sitting at Teddy Macklin’s place in the valley worried sick, I need to call him back before he goes under the ice. But right now, in this room, the job you have is to sit on that couch and finish that mug. That’s it. We’ll do the rest.”

He swallowed. His eyes went wet for a second and he blinked it down. “Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

I picked up the landline off the side table and called Teddy Macklin’s mother’s house and got Noah in about four seconds. I told him, I’ve got him, he’s fine, he’s dry, he’s on the couch, he’s drinking cocoa, the road’s closed both ways and it’s going to be closed for days, he’s safe, hear me? And Noah said, I hear you, and then the line broke up because the storm was killing the wires and I said, I’ll call when I can, son, stay put, I love you, and he got the first half of an I love you too out before it cut.

I put the phone down. Jasper was watching me over his mug.

“He’s all right,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Now. We need to talk about the sleeping situation, and then I’m going to feed you, and then I’m putting you to bed. In that order.”

“Okay.”

“Guest bedroom’s down. Pipe burst two weeks ago, I’ve got the water shut off to it till the parts come in from Plattsburgh, which is going to be a while, because the parts were supposed to come in last week and instead we’re in a nor’easter. Heater’s off in there, the room’s thirty degrees, you can’t sleep in it. Couch down here is fine if you’re five foot five, which you aren’t. Upstairs I’ve got the loft. Queen bed. Skylight. It’s warm up there because the heat comes up through the vent from the stove. It’s the only spot in the house I can put you.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll take the couch.”

He sat up a little. “No, I can — I’ll take the couch, it’s your house, I can’t — “

“Son.”

“I’m serious.”

“I’m six-foot-three and the couch is six foot. I’m on the couch one night it’s going to break my back and then I’ll be no use to either of us. You’re in the loft. I’m down here. That’s the arrangement. Don’t argue with me about it.”

He didn’t argue with me about it. He just looked at me for a second longer than he needed to, and then he looked into his cocoa, and then he said, “Okay.”

“Good.”

I got up. Took our empty mugs to the kitchen. Started the next thing — I’d left a pot of stew going on the back of the stove since noon because I’d been planning to feed myself and Bear and now I was planning to feed three, and the stew was more than enough. I gave it a stir. Pulled the biscuits I’d made Tuesday out of the bread box to warm on the hearth. He watched me move around the kitchen in his wet-hair and my clothes with his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms around his shins. He was almost lost in the flannel. The sleeves I’d rolled to his elbows had come unrolled once on the left and he hadn’t fixed it and the cuff was hanging past his wrist, and I shouldn’t have noticed it, and I did.

I fed him stew and two biscuits with butter. He ate like he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, which he probably hadn’t. He apologized once for eating so fast and I said eat, and he ate. Bear got a knuckle bone and took it to his bed. Outside, the wind went up another notch and something hit the north wall and slid off — a branch, ice, hard to say.

He finished the second biscuit. Set the plate on the coffee table. Looked at me.

“I really don’t know how to thank you.”

“You don’t need to thank me.”

“I do.”

“You can thank me by going up to the loft and sleeping. That’d be plenty.”

He nodded. Stood up. Held the blanket around his shoulders like a cape even though he didn’t need it anymore. Walked with me to the foot of the ladder — I say ladder, it’s closer to a set of very steep stairs with a handrail, the kind my father built into every structure he ever put up because he liked the cleanness of a loft more than he liked the inconvenience of it — and he put his hand on the rail and his foot on the bottom tread and he stopped.

He looked down at me.

He was one step up. It put his eyes about level with mine. The flannel hung past his thighs. I could see the little silver hoop in his ear catching the light off the sconce in the hall. His curls had started drying at the ends. He was biting the inside of his lower lip, and I could tell by looking that he was about to ask me something he’d been thinking about since the kitchen, and I could not for the life of me have told you what I thought it was going to be.

What he said was:

“Can I ask you a weird question?”

“Ask.”

“What do I call you.”

“Silas is fine.”

“No, I mean — Noah calls you Gramps. Like — to me. When he talks about you. And I don’t know if — I don’t know if that’s a family thing, or if I should say Mr. Whitaker, or — “

“What do you want to call me.”

He went pink again. The same spot, both cheeks, high. “I — I don’t know.”

“Gramps’ll do just fine, boy.”

He stood there with his hand on the rail and his mouth open about a quarter inch and he looked at me, and he looked at me for longer than a person ought to look at somebody else’s grandfather in a stairwell, and then he said, very quietly, “Okay. Gramps. Thank you.”

“Goodnight, Jazz.”

“Goodnight.”

He went up. He didn’t look back. I watched him till his feet cleared the top tread, and then I stood at the bottom of the ladder a while longer because my hand was still on the rail and I wasn’t in any hurry to take it off.

Upstairs, a floorboard creaked. Then another. Then the rustle of him getting into the bed, the quiet thunk of a pillow being rearranged, and then silence.

I walked back into the great room. The fire in the woodstove was getting low. I opened the door and fed it two splits of seasoned birch and watched it catch. Bear looked up from his bed and looked at the ladder and looked back at me and sighed.

“Yeah,” I said to the dog. “I know.”

I touched the empty place on my ring finger where the band used to be and wasn’t, and hadn’t been for three years now, and I sat down on the couch in the dark with the fire going and the wind screaming and the house full for the first Christmas since Marianne, and I did not sleep.

Upstairs, somewhere over my head, a twenty-two-year-old boy in my shirt was sleeping in the bed she and I had shared for thirty-one years, and I was listening for the sound of his breath through the floorboards like it was the only thing in the world, and I knew.

I already knew.

🔥 The Morning After. The Whole House. His Husband.

One year to the day after the storm, Silas Whitaker wakes up with the cabin all to himself and the boy who saved his life. A 9,400-word bonus chapter too hot for retailers. Matching wooden rings on leather cords. Explicit uses of husband in bed. Loft. Workshop. Tub. Every surface earned. Only available here.