The adrenalin that had been keeping both Josh and Tiffany going had pretty well died out by the time they finished dinner, and neither could hardly keep their heads up. They were just getting set to go check on the dogs and go to the hotel when the siren sounded at the edge of town, announcing the arrival of another Iditarod finisher, so they decided to at least stop at the finish line to see who it was that was finishing. A couple of hours before, they had been the center of attention of the crowd as they raced down Front Street; now, they were nearly anonymous as they stood along the snow fence, watching a single musher and eleven dogs finish at an easy lope.

"Finishing in twenty-fifth place is race number nineteen, Elmer Torgensen of Big Delta," the announcer said. Torgensen raised his hand to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd.

"Hey, he was expected to do pretty good," Tiffany observed.

"I heard he had some dogs go sick at Rainy Pass," Josh said. "He's come all the way from Nikolai with just those eleven."

"Must be good dogs," Tiffany commented. "You know, we beat some darn good teams."

"Under the circumstances, we did pretty damn good," Josh agreed.

Torgensen brought his team to a halt; he'd done this before. While dog handlers took his dogs, the announcer called him over to the stand for a brief interview. Torgensen wasn't a talkative sort; all the announcer and the reporters got out of him was a few "Yups" and "Nopes". Josh and Tiffany and the rest of the Spearfish Lake people were just heading for the dog lot when the announcer went on, "With the twenty-fifth finisher in, that means we have a winner of the thousand dollars for the fastest time from Safety to Nome in the top twenty-five," he said. "The winner, in two hours and fifty-three minutes, appears to be Josh Archer, Race Number 36, finishing twenty-second."

It took a few seconds to penetrate Josh's tired mind. "Hell, I never knew I was in the running," he said to the others.

"There was a blizzard going when the top teams came in," Mark said. "That probably slowed them down."

"Well, son of a bitch," Josh said. "I guess I finished in the money after all." It was with a sense of relief; with that thousand dollars, he could sleep in motels on the way home, rather than in his sleeping bag on the seat of his pickup. It would be a long drive, a week or more from Anchorage to Spearfish Lake, with stops along the way to exercise the dogs, all thirty-two of his and Tiffany's. That would help take the edge off of it.

They walked over to the dog lot; all twenty-three dogs the two of them had brought to Nome were sound asleep, curled up on pallets of straw. "They deserve it," Tiffany said. "They're good dogs, all of them."

"The best," Josh agreed. "We were just along for the ride."

"They're making me sleepy," she nodded. "Let's do it."

The six turned to walk back up the street to the hotel. It was still early, but Josh and Tiffany were all in. "We've got a little problem," Jackie said. "We'd reserved two doubles, but all they had was a double and a single. One of you can take the single, the other the double, and we'll try not to wake you up when we come in. Then we'll have to get up at first light to get going."

"I don't care," Josh said. "You two take the double, and party all you want. Tiffany, you take the single, and I'll curl up in the sleeping bag on the sled, so I'll be with the dogs."

"Like hell you will," Tiffany said. "We're not going to do anything but sleep, so let's share the single."

"I'll get my sleeping bag and sleep on the floor of the double," Josh said, turning toward his sled. It would be more comfortable to sleep in a heated room, it would avoid the awkwardness of having Mike and Kirsten watch him share a room with their daughter.

"You take the single, and I'll take the sleeping bag in the double," Tiffany said.

"You didn't drive a dog team to Nome to sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag," her father said. "You take a bed, and your mother can share it with you later. I'll sleep on the floor, or get a cot, or something."

"But . . ." Tiffany was too tired to argue. Right at the moment, she could have curled up in a sled basket in a sleeping bag, too.

The hotel was old; Josh wearily climbed the stairs, went to his room, and took off his parka and coat, his overboots and shoepacs, and was unzipping his snowpants when exhaustion overcame him. The pillow looked too good. In seconds, he was out like a light.

It was dark when Josh awoke from bladder pressure. A night light had been left on, and he stumbled to the bathroom to void his bladder. He was only vaguely aware that he was still half-dressed, but shed his pants and his clothes down to his long underwear before he got back into bed and slid beneath the covers.

Light was streaming into the window the next thing he knew. Even as he came to wakefulness, he knew something was strange. He'd slept too long; he needed to get the dogs fed and get back on the trail, and it took him a moment to realize that the race was over, but something still felt strange. His bones ached from so much time in bed. A dull pain in the back of his head told him that he'd slept too long, but how wonderful that sleep felt. He felt like a new man.

"Go take a shower," he heard Tiffany's voice say. "You smell like a goat."

He swung his head around to see Tiffany's head on the pillow next to him. "What the hell are you doing here?" he asked.

"What I wanted to do yesterday," she said, "But I was too tired to make an issue out of it."

"But your folks . . ."

"Are on their way to Anchorage," she finished the sentence for him. "They left about an hour ago. I've been out to the dog lot, and fed the dogs. They're doing fine, except for Rusty, who seemed like he didn't want to eat."

"He was getting iffy about eating clear back at Shaktoolik," Josh said.

"I got some chicken soup from the hotel kitchen, and started to lay it on his tongue with a turkey baster," she said. "Four or five tubefuls, and he decided he's rather do it the regular way. He finished up the soup, and started in on his regular food. Now, get up and take a shower."

"But . . ."

"Make it a real good one. I know you haven't had one since McGrath. I can wait."

"But . . ."

"But all you want, but I'm not getting out of this bed a virgin."

"But . . . oh, hell." Josh threw the covers back and sat up. The covers went back far enough to see that Tiffany was nude under them. He began to unbutton his long underwear. "Are you sure about this?" he asked.

"Of course I'm sure," she said. "Josh, I know this is hard for you to believe, but I'm not a little girl any more. If the last two weeks haven't proven that to you, then there's only one way that I can."

"But what would your folks think?"

She sighed. "My folks have been suspecting that we've been having sex for a year or two, now. They were dead sure of it when we spent the two weeks together in the camper at Talkeetna, and Mom told me last fall that they weren't in a good position to make a big deal of it. That has something to do with my being her bridesmaid when she and dad got married after living together for sixteen years. Now, go take a shower, and then make a woman out of me."

Josh was naked, now, and his smell was about as much as he could take. He hadn't been out of his long underwear in more than a week, and he stank to high heaven. If he wanted to, he could take one more shot at reasoning with Tiffany when he got back from the shower, but under any circumstances, a shower would feel good.

It wasn't as if he didn't realize that Tiffany wasn't the little girl that had nosed him out at the first Pound Puppies race years before. As he turned the water on and waited for it to get hot, he reflected that he'd realized that this day would come, sooner or later. He'd dated very little since that day years before when he'd told Amy that not only was he not going to go to Athens University, he wasn't going to college at all, and she'd evaporated like the dew under a summer sun. He hadn't had a woman since Amy -- a long time to wait between eighteen and twenty-four; he'd been too busy with work and diesel maintenance schooling and training dogs. Maybe, he realized subconsciously, he'd been waiting for Tiffany to get old enough.

Tiffany had dated even less, but for the last six years, they'd seen each other virtually every day, been to races together, trained their dogs together. Ever since Josh had bought a lot next to Mark and Jackies farm and put an old mobile home on it, just across the road from Tiffany's house in order to be closer to his dog team and their training area, they'd lived in each other's pockets, and in the last couple of years, he had indeed become aware of the fact that Tiffany wasn't a little girl any longer.

However, aware of their difference in ages, he had consciously made the decision to wait until she was out of high school before letting things go farther. Apparently, she hadn't made that decision. Josh remembered how urgent everything had seemed in high school, when he went with Amy in the summers, even though he'd suspected at times that their lives were going to take them separate ways.

After two weeks of strange experiences he had never dreamed would happen to him back when he'd first kissed Amy, first felt the warmth of her bare breast, this may have been the strangest of all -- taking a shower in a hotel room in Nome, Alaska, knowing that a good-looking teenage girl waited in his bed in the next room for him. How different things had turned out than what he'd imagined!

Everything had its time and its purpose, and the time had come, he realized. He shut off the shower, dried himself thoroughly, and felt human for the first time in days. Even the headache had gone away, replaced with an ache rather lower in his body. As he got back into bed, Tiffany greeted him with a kiss that made the one at the finish line the day before seem like a peck on the cheek. After that, were were no more questions, and things went on automatic.