Carry Your Heart (14 page)

“It’s 720…”

He fumbles for his phone quickly. I give him a smile. “Shut up,” he growls.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“What’s your phone number?”

I recite the digits and he types in the numbers. He slides the phone away. “Can’t believe you got me sick.”

“Feel better.”

“That’s such a passive aggressive thing to say, Speedy. You obviously planned this.”

“What?”

“This whole thing is a trap.”

“What kind of trap is it?”

He gives me a quizzical look—he looks a little delirious. He cocks his head to one side. “I think I need to lie down. I have to brainstorm before I answer that question.”

He trudges off with his tray of uneaten food and heads for the door. I smile broadly.

I have a huge crush on Hunter Dawson.

And we’re going on a date.

Chapter Fourteen

“Get up,” Mike shouts at me. My skis are twisted underneath me awkwardly and my poles have slid halfway down the slope. “You have
got
to watch your angles, Pippa! You’re going to wipe out every time you try that.”

I curse under my breath and stand up gingerly, testing my poor, abused knees before I slide down to pick up my warped ski poles.

“Honestly,” he says, huffily. “Do you want to tear your ACL before Jackson?”

“Yeah, I came here because I wanted to tear my ACL.”

“Well, ski like that, and you will.”

“Jesus,” I say. “I used to be able to make that turn.”

“You never could make that turn—it’s a bad turn, nobody makes that turn! Stop hallucinating about what you used to be able to do, and control your speed!” He turns away and looks up towards Lottie. “Come on, Lott, let’s see it.”

Lottie gets down the grand slalom course quickly, almost effortlessly. Sometimes, it looks like she hardly has to turn on her spindly legs. It’s as though her body is immune to the gravitational forces that knock me halfway down the slope.

“See,” Mike says, annoyingly.

I roll my eyes.

“You should pay attention to her technique.”

Lottie rolls across the finish line.

“Tuck through your ending,” Mike reminds her.

She nods and glances at me. “You okay?”

“Fine,” I say tersely. Hearing the bitchiness in my own voice, I sigh heavily. “Sorry. I really
am
fine—just pissed about my turns. I feel like I should get this by now.”

“It’s only been two weeks.”

“I know. It’s just…frustrating,” I sigh.

She nods sympathetically. “I can help you if you want.”

“I don’t…”
I don’t want to need your help.
Totally different from not needing help. I glance at her. I’m pissed that she’s still better than me. “Yeah,” I change my answer. “That would be great, actually.”

She smiles. “Cool.”

“Can I try again?”

“It’s getting dark,” Mike says.

I exhale.

I hate ending on a crappy run. And I hate that my mind’s racing because I’m having dinner with Hunter tonight. I hate, even more, that I thought more about Hunter Dawson than I did about my turns today.

I have to focus on skiing. That’s what I’m here to do.

I pull on my parka and check my phone. And even though I’m annoyed, I see his name and melt a little.

speedy, do you like pizza?

dumb question everyone likes pizza. come to my room when you’re done snowshoeing

***

I take a shower and actually blow-dry my hair before I pull on jeans and a long-sleeved, tight t-shirt. Cute clothes might be worth a try in November, but by early December on a mountain, I wouldn’t last five seconds in a dress.

I head up to Hunter’s room. I’m surprised that I still get butterflies before I see him. Surprised that he makes me so nervous.

He opens the door before I knock and steps out into the hallway.

“You better to be ready to go. I’m fucking starved.” He looks me over. “Can’t believe you got me sick.”

“I didn’t get you sick.”

He grins. “Whatever.”

“Oh, now it’s whatever.”

“I haven’t had real food in three days,” he says. “We’re going to have a feast.”

“I’d have brought you food.”

“Yeah, well, I’d have just thrown up on you. Not that you don’t deserve it. This is definitely your fault.”

“Maybe Laurel gave it to you.”

“No jokes about Laurel. Too soon.” He hits the elevator door and looks at me. “How was the mountain?”

“Cold today.”

“Oh, you’re not familiar with winter in Utah?”

I shrug. “Can’t be much worse than winter in Colorado.”

“Freezing. Jackson is even worse.”

“Yeah, I remember,” I say.

“So, are you going to try to win this weekend, or are you aiming for third?”

I laugh.

“What?”

“I’m trying to win,” I say. “I probably won’t.”

“Shitty attitude right there.”

“Well, I’m just being realistic.”

“You’re being a defeatist.”

The doors to the elevator open and we ride down quietly. I steal a glance at him and he catches me and laughs. “I’m still here, Pippa.”

I roll my eyes and follow him out to the parking lot. “Did you call a cab?”

“Nah,” he says. He walks out to a BMW sedan. “Went home and picked it my car.”

“Where’s home?”

“Nowhere really.” He shrugs. “Whistler, I guess. I have a house in Washington. This was at my, um, stepmom’s house.”

“She’s that close by?”

He nods. “Yeah.” He smiles. “I actually went to see my brother this morning. I felt like I’d faint if I tried to board so…”

I laugh. He opens the door for me.

“Wow,” I say. “For someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing…”

“I read about this on Google. It’s supposedly an aphrodisiac.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

“Listen, it’s on Google. Those people are very smart.”

“Not everyone on the Internet is smart.”

“It’s the 21st Century. Everyone is a genius now.”

He closes the door and walks around the car. I like the way he walks—slouching and relaxed and athletic. I like the way he does almost everything.

“I hope you like cars better than planes,” I say.

“I do. They have four wheels and all of them touch the ground almost all of the time.”

“Almost?”

“Almost. Unlike a plane, which has four wheels, two wings, and a total disregard for the laws of motherfucking physics.”

He glances at me backing out of the space quickly.

“I think it’s cute that you’re afraid of flying.”

“It’s not cute and I’m
not
afraid of flying,” he mutters. “I just don’t trust planes.”

I bite back a laugh.

“There’s got to be some kind of
Harry Potter, Twilight
bullshit going on there, right? I mean—a five gazillion pound machine in the
air
?”

“It has wings.”

“Oh, really—the wings? Let me tell you something about wings. Penguins have wings. They can’t fly.”

I giggle.

“Hunter.”

“I’m serious. Wings do not equal flight. Penguins weigh less than planes. Gravity is—you know what? Let’s not talk about things I’m afraid of.”

“I thought you weren’t afraid of planes.”

“I show you one weakness for five seconds…”

I grin. “Sorry.”

He smiles and stops joking around for a second. “Nah, I don’t know where it came from.” He rubs his chin thoughtfully. “I was fine with them and then one day, when I was eight or nine—I was flying back to my dad’s from my mom’s. She used to be on the East Coast, and—I just, I don’t know what happened. I think there might have been bad turbulence—or maybe even normal turbulence. But I realized that the whole thing could fall out of the sky. That some people were sitting in a plane, thinking everything was fine, the odds were so tiny, but everyone thought the odds were so tiny…and then they crashed…” He rubs his chin again and puts his hands back on the steering wheel. “Just feels like Russian roulette for some reason. I dunno. I know it’s irrational, but, hey…tell that to my
idiot
brain.”

He drives fast—maybe too fast. And I turn out the window looking down to the city, which at night looks like a glowing grid.

He rolls down a window, slightly, and the air chills the car.

“So, can I ask you a personal question?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say.

He turns and looks at me. “You can tell me to fuck off.”

“I haven’t done that yet?”

He grins. “Seriously, you can. I won’t care if you do. It’s personal.”

“Okay. Ask. I’m not that sensitive.” I say. He looks at me carefully. “Watch the road, Hunt.” More so he’ll stop looking and I’ll be able to catch my breath.

He turns his eyes back to the road. “Do you remember the avalanche?”

I wasn’t expecting that. I bite my lip. Yes. I remember everything about it. “Yeah.”

He’s quiet.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, just wondering about it,” he rubs the back of his head. “I feel like—I don’t know. Just seems wild. Not in a good way—just like, one of the crazier things that can happen to a person.”

I nod. “Yeah—no, I-I remember it. Most of it. I started to black out when they came for us.”
Because Hunter and Danny were so obviously dead and I was so alone and…
I swallow. “It’s really heavy.”

He looks at me. “Yeah, no, I get that.”

“No. I mean. The snow. It’s really heavy. Literally. It’s like being crushed,” I say. “I never thought of snow that way before—like it had so much weight. You never think that the earth can do that to you. That the ground’s not permanent. That snow can crush you…” I swallow and stop talking.

I sneak a glance at him. I feel like I’ve already said too much, and I stop talking.

“How long were you stuck for?”

“Not long. Half an hour. I got out. I wasn’t buried that deep. And I tried to find them,” I say. “We hadn’t told anyone where we were going. Which was stupid.”
And then I found them.
I close my eyes against the memory.
I will never say that aloud.

He nods. “Are you ever afraid that will happen again?”

I shake my head. “No. I mean—sometimes.” I bite my lip. “I try not to think about it. I only ski in-bounds now.”

The mountain developers maintain the in-bounds trails. They detonate dynamite to trigger avalanches after heavy snowfall, so that no unsuspecting skier will be caught in one.

“Does that work? Not thinking about it?”

“Usually. Not totally. It was pretty surreal,” I say. “Even now, it feels like it didn’t happen to me—like it happened to somebody else. And then…” my voice catches unexpectedly. “With Danny and Ryan...”

I stop talking, afraid I’ll cry if I keep going. I can see the both of them so clearly the morning that everything changed. We were talking about what to do for dinner. What movie we wanted to see that night. I swallow tightly and stare at my hands.

“Sorry,” he mumbles. He grasps one of my hands warmly. “I sorry I brought it up. I just wondered.”

“It’s fine,” I manage to say, controlling myself, forcing their faces to recede from mind, focusing on this car, this day, this boy’s hand in mine.

The car slows off the empty highway, down and around an exit ramp, to a stoplight. The city’s unbelievably flat. Salt Lake City, one of the two cities in the Great Basin, sister of Reno, Nevada. Basin is an understatement. It feels like a deep hole. The mountains surge towards the sky on all sides.

We walk from the parking lot to the restaurant. It’s small, casual, more of an Italian artisanal kitchen than a pizza place. Cloth napkins and all that.

“Google knows its stuff,” I say.

He laughs. “I’ve actually been here before.”

“Ah.”

“I’m not that clueless.”

I wonder, nastily, if he’s been here with Laurel.

“For the Olympics in 2008,” he says, as if reading my mind. “My dad was being honored or some shit.”

It’s the first time he’s mentioned his dad since the dinner.

“Nice.”

“Yeah, it was—that’s when I got really into snowboarding,” he says. “Started trying to fly.” I smile watching him talk.

He’s adorable—recounting how long it took him to hit his first one-eighty—how miserable falling down the half-pipe feels, how much he hates losing. Only one part of me doesn’t listen to every word he says, and that’s the part of me telling to look out. That this is falling for someone again. That this is too much, too fast.

He’s a good guy,
I reassure myself.
Whatever his reputation…

We don’t drink much that night—a glass of wine each—and he wraps his arm around me as we leave the restaurant.

We hit the highway, comfortably quiet with one another. I lean my head against his shoulder and know that I’ve found someone. I’m not sure how else to describe it.

When we roll up to the parking lot, he clears his throat and I turn to look at him.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he grins at me.

“What are you laughing at?”

“I’m not laughing,” he laughs.

I roll my eyes.

He clears his throat. “Google said I was supposed to kiss you if I thought it was a good date.”

“I don’t think you actually Googled it.”

“You might be right, but I bet that’s what Google would say,” he says. He leans forward, unbuckling his seatbelt to reach me, and kisses me—hard and good and gentle all at once. He pulls back.

“Thanks for dinner,” I say. I hesitate, wanting to say something, do something more.

He opens his mouth. “Look, Pippa…”

“Yeah.”

“I know you probably need time,” he says.

“I…yeah.”

“I’m okay with that.”

I smile at him. “Thank you for that too,” I say softly.

We walk side by side, out of the cold and into the hotel. He reaches for my hand in the elevator, entwining our fingers for a brief moment when it’s time for me to go.

Chapter Fifteen

The flight to Jackson leaves at the crack of dawn on Friday. But Hunter texts me before take-off.
Safe flight, speedy. Let me know how the races go.

In Uggs and sweatpants, her hair framing her delicate face, Lottie leans against the window. I haven’t told her about Hunter. I could tell Courtney, but she’s so far away—and I feel the resentment in her voice that I left without telling her I was leaving every time we speak.