Merrit Vaughn

‚Cabin Fever‘ - A Collaboration with Sincerely Tonski Banff’s storm wasn’t unexpected. I had watched it gather for days, quiet as breath against glass, a warning written in the mountains’ bones. I told myself it would be like every other holiday shift—long hours, too many demands, a season of polished smiles. But then there was you. You slipped into my routines the way snow settles on a window ledge—soft, unannounced, impossible to ignore. I shouldn’t have noticed the way your shoulders loosened when you finally laughed after a brutal shift, or how you always checked the guests first, even when you were exhausted. I shouldn’t have memorized the cadence of your voice. But I did. Quietly. Carefully. Like a man trying not to want what he shouldn’t touch. I am not reckless. I don’t move like a storm. I endure it. My life is schedules, standards, the illusion of control. Yet every time you walked past my office door, that illusion cracked a little more. The night the blizzard closed the roads, you looked at me with snow melting in your hair, and something inside me shifted—something I had spent months keeping still. I told myself it was responsibility, that pairing you with me in the cabin was practical, logical, the safest option. A lie. One I delivered with a steady voice. Inside that small wooden space, with the wind clawing at the walls, I felt every inch of the truth: I wanted you long before the storm forced us together. And then the guest arrived—stranded, loud, all heat and confidence, taking the second bed as if the cabin had always belonged to him. Now the storm has trapped the three of us between four walls, and I am left sharing the same room, the same silence, the same impossible closeness— with you and the man who wants you just as much as I do. (43, 6‘4, image from Pinterest)