by Lili Valente
But right now, the status fucking quo feels like a rope binding my hands, keeping me from reaching for something better than good enough, and chafing like hell in the process.
“Can you carry your skis?” Laura asks Chloe, hooking one bulging snack bag over each shoulder. “If so, I think we can make it in one trip.”
“I can carry my skis and my boots.” Chloe prances back and forth in the fresh snow. “I’m so excited! I can’t wait to go fast!”
“Not too fast,” I say, because that’s what stick in the mud, status-quo-loving, boring dads like me say. Even though I lived to go fast when I was Chloe’s age, and no amount of grownup nagging ever slowed me down.
I am well aware that I’m flopping my lips in vain, but I flop them anyway because once fear has penetrated as deep into a person’s marrow as it has into mine, logic has no power. My only victory against the cold, clutching, constricting emotion has been the fact that I continue to let Chloe out of the house every day. I allow her to play and explore and do potentially dangerous things like ski, swim in the ocean, and go rock climbing with her grandparents every summer, even though the fear monster insists I’m risking losing her the way I lost her mom.
“You okay?” Laura lays a hand on my shoulder.
“Great,” I grunt, lifting the heavy cooler and hauling it up the hill to the rental chalet, grateful for the chance to use my brawn instead of my brain. Hopefully, a few black diamond runs will get the fucking angst out of my system, and I can enjoy the day without being a moody son of a bitch.
I drop the cooler and Chloe with Angie on the second floor, where she’s claimed a table next to a couple of lockers, and follow Steve and Laura down to the ski rental. We secure performance skis for ourselves and lift passes for the group and are out on the bunny slope twenty minutes later, gliding through the fresh powder to the bottom of the hill and the tiny lift Chloe used to ride all day long when she was first learning a few years ago.
Now, the kid can barely stand to warm up on the bunny slope. After two runs, she’s already whining, “Come on, Dad. Let’s go! I want to go up to Stormin’ Norman.”
“We’ll get there.” I settle onto the lift chair beside her as it whisks us into the air, high enough to catch a sweet view of Mount Hood behind the main lodge. “But let’s give Laura a little more time on the bunny slope, okay? She said it’s been a couple years since she skied.”
Chloe glances down at the slope, where Laura is making her way competently, but cautiously, down the bunny hill. “She’s not as good as I thought she would be.” She turns back to me, a serious expression on her face. “But that’s okay. You don’t have to be great at skiing to have fun, and I can stay on the blue runs with her if she needs company.”
I nudge her shoulder with mine, pride filling my chest. “You’re a good kid, kid. I love you.”
She wrinkles her nose. “I love you, too. Even though you have a big butt.”
She laughs and I roll my eyes—because I understand that it’s no fun teasing me unless I pretend to be irritated by it. We hop off at the end of the lift and Chloe zips immediately down the hill, swishing back and forth with an ease and control that’s incredible in a seven-year-old.
On impulse, I tug my phone out of my pocket to snap a picture to send to my parents, who are always complaining that I don’t send enough Chloe updates to satisfy their grandparent needs, to see a missed call from my sister and an epic string of texts I somehow didn’t hear come through on the way up the mountain.
Diana: Okay, I promised I wouldn’t say anything to you about this, but I can’t help myself. Because I feel like you’re making a mistake, big brother. And I think you’re lying to yourself. And as someone who messed up her life by lying to herself for way too long, I really don’t want the same thing to happen to you.
I saw you with Laura yesterday, and that wasn’t pretend, dude. I’ve seen your commercials for the steak house. We both know you’re not that good an actor.
You’ve got a thing for her, Brendan.
There are real feelings there.
How can I tell, you ask?
BECAUSE I’M YOUR SISTER AND I KNOW YOU AND I KNOW THE DOPEY SAD LOOK YOU GET WHEN YOU’RE CRUSHING ON SOMEONE. IT’S BEEN THE SAME SINCE SEVENTH GRADE!
You remember Alicia Anderson? And what a jerk she was after you brought that stuffed panda to school for her on Valentine’s Day?
With a scowl, I tug off one glove and text back, Yeah, I do. Thanks for the trip down memory lane and for the all-caps insult, but it doesn’t matter what I do or don’t feel.
Laura isn’t interested in more than pretend.
She wants to be friends. That’s it.
Diana: You’re crazy. She’s totally into you. I know this for a fact.
I glance up, waving at Chloe, who is already at the bottom of the hill with Laura, jabbing a thumb toward the blue run that starts to the right of the bunny slope. “Go ahead, I’ll catch up,” I shout.
Before I can text Diana again, and educate her on how solidly Laura turned me down just yesterday, another text pops through.
Diana: I know because she told me. But don’t you dare tell her that I told you.
I don’t want her to think I can’t be trusted, because I usually can. But this time the greater good is best served by breaking my promise and telling you to pull your head out of your butt and ask her out for real before it’s too late.
Call me if you want to discuss further, but only if you’re not going to yell at me.
Amanda and I stayed up until two a.m. last night drinking margaritas, playing cards, and convincing each other we’re glad that we’re single and go to bed alone on major holidays.
So I’m hung over and have a low tolerance for loud noises.
But I love you.
I just want you to be happy, okay?
I text back a quick—Love you, too. And thank you. I’ll call later—and zip my phone into my coat pocket. A second later, I’ve got my glove on, my poles in hand, and I’m shushing away down the bunny slope onto the blue run, heading after Chloe and Laura.
I have no idea what I’m going to say to Laura when I catch up to them—probably nothing, because Chloe will be listening and this isn’t a conversation to have in front of a nosy seven-year-old who already thinks Laura and I are dating—but knowing there’s even a slim chance that I misunderstood her yesterday banishes the gray cloud that’s been hovering over my head all morning.
Maybe it’s not too late.
And maybe I’m more ready to start dating than I thought.
Yes, I will always miss Maryanne. For the rest of my life, there’s no denying that. But if I never get to be with Laura again, I’ll miss that, too. I’ll miss it—and her—way more than a person should miss a good friend. It’s already more than friendship between us, and I, for one, would like to stop pretending that our relationship is working the way it is now.
Fuck the status quo.
I want more than that from the sexy redhead swishing down the trail in front of me, and I’m ready to fight for another chance, to do whatever it takes to prove to her that I won’t screw things up the second time around.
I’m calculating the odds of catching up to Steve and Angie before they reach the lift at the bottom of the run—decent, even though they headed out ten minutes ago, since Angie likes to stop and take in the scenery—and composing an argument to get Chloe to ride the lift with her grandparents, giving me five minutes alone with Laura, which will hopefully be enough for me to convince her we should sneak away this afternoon to talk some more, when a sudden movement draws my attention.
I glance up the mountain to see a snowboarder in neon-green pants racing down a black diamond run. He veers into the woods, mowing over a slim evergreen that snaps upright with a puff of snow once he’s clear, making the flakes glitter in the morning sun. Leaning hard to one side, he slips around a tree big enough to have given him the concussion he’s clearly looking for and drops several feet through the air onto the pac
ked snow.
I tense, expecting to see the kid wipe out, but he manages to find a path through the trees, his board skimming faster and faster, heading for the intersection between the blue and black runs at roughly the speed of light. It only takes a moment for me to calculate the distance between Chloe and the out of control douchebag, but by the time I open my mouth to shout a warning, it’s too late.
Chloe’s name passes my lips at the same time the snowboarder smashes into the snow right in front of her.
With a squeal of surprise, she cuts hard to the left to avoid a head-on collision, and a second later, my daughter is gone, shooting down a black diamond run without so much as the chance to tighten her grip on her poles.
Chapter Twelve
Laura
It all happens so fast.
An asshole on a snowboard bursts out of the woods in front of Chloe, sending her skidding off the trail. Before I can recover from the shock, or shout at the jerk to slow the hell down, she’s gone, careening away down an insanely steep run.
“Chloe!” My heart leaps into my throat and lodges there, making me feel like I’m being strangled by my panic.
And then I’m gone, pushing off the trail, heading after her. Because apparently, that’s what happens when you see a small person you care about in trouble. You race after them first and realize you’re in over your head after it’s too late to call the ski patrol and get a professional on the case.
The first five seconds of my plummet through time and space are enough to assure me that this run is indeed a black diamond. Or maybe a double black diamond or a blood and crossbones diamond or whatever symbol means a scary as fuck, nearly vertical, loaded with bumps and rocks death trap. Only Olympic athletes should set skis on this sucker, and I am dangerously out of my element.
Gritting my jaw, I wedge my skis hard as I bounce back and forth through the lumpy snow, trying to maintain a downhill speed of moderately-insane instead of certain-doom-dangerous. As I skid hard to the right, barely managing to avoid slamming into another skier swishing confidently down the trail in front of me, I desperately wish I’d spent more time on skis as a child and less on figure skates.
But it’s too late now. I’ll just have to pray that my advanced beginner skills will be enough to help me tail Chloe down this monster in one piece.
My only comfort is that she seems to be faring better than I am. Her body language—shoulders hunched and poles wobbling in the air behind her like tiny helicopter blades—makes it clear she isn’t enjoying our plunge any more than I am, but she’s holding her own against the big bad mountain.
Thank God. As long as she gets down okay, that’s all that matters.
The thought zips through my head, followed quickly by the realization that I truly love that little girl. This isn’t friendly affection. This is love, so powerful and real that I don’t care if I end up breaking bones between here and the base of the mountain, as long as my shattered body will somehow ensure Chloe doesn’t have to suffer.
My throat tightens, my eyes sting, and my ribs contract so swiftly that my chest feels bruised.
This isn’t the time for an emotional breakdown or breakthrough or whatever is happening to me, but I can’t help myself. All at once, I understand with a visceral certainty how terrifying it must be to be a mother. Or to be Brendan, with his heart walking around outside his body in French braids and unicorn ski pants, spouting sass and taking risks, all while having no clue how precious she is.
Precious and horrifyingly vulnerable.
All it takes is one bad call, one wrong move, one stupid mistake, one snowboarder who isn’t paying attention to the “trails merging, go slow” sign to put her in the kind of danger she might not be able to bounce back from.
“Please, please, please,” I chant as Chloe skids wildly around a turn in the trail, making my pulse spike as she narrowly avoids a collision with a boulder poking out of the snow.
Please let her be okay.
Please let her pull this off.
Please let her be waiting for me at the bottom of the run with a mouth full of the curse words she learned from spending too much time around professional hockey players. Please let her be whole and safe and in the mood to let me hug her tight, because, man, am I going to need a hug by the time this is over.
I make the same harrowing turn, getting even closer to the super scary boulder than Chloe did. Close enough that a vivid image of bloody brains splattered over obsidian rock flits through my mind, making every muscle in my body clench in fear.
And that’s what does me in.
I can feel it, the moment my tension contributes to my velocity and my velocity grows too great to allow my whip-tight, weary muscles to shift my skis in the opposite direction. As I shoot into the woods, I catch a glimpse of the end of the run, the lift churning in slow, steady circles, whisking conquering heroes back up the mountain, and Chloe skidding to a stop beside the other people shuffling into the lift line.
Thank God. She made it. She’s okay.
Relief courses through me, followed swiftly by a mental “oh shit!” as I narrowly avoid crashing into a tree with a trunk the size of a small car. I cut right, then left again, fighting to slow down, but the next big scary tree is already rushing toward me, and there’s no escape route that doesn’t send me on a fresh path to destruction.
There are trees fucking everywhere.
You would think it was a forest or something, a smartass voice in my head pipes up, only to be drowned out a moment later by a screamier internal voice howling, Stupid way to die! Stupid way to die! This is such a stupid way to die!
Using every bit of strength left in my trembling quad muscles, I wedge like my life depends on it, since it might—I left my helmet in my locker, as we were allegedly sticking to the easy runs—and hurl myself to the left, dropping my poles and reaching for the ground with arms outstretched, praying I’ll find something to hold onto beneath the snow.
The good news is that I slow down, skidding to a stop as one ski pops off my boot and the other thuds solidly into the trunk of the giant tree. The bad news is that pain flashes through my right knee, sending a sharp, stretching, burning, “not right” sensation shooting through the joint and up the inside of my thigh.
“Oh, ow.” My eyes squeeze shut. “Ow, ow, ow…”
It hurts like a son of a bitch. I’m pretty sure I did something to my knee that will make further frolicking in the snow impossible, but I’m alive. I’m alive, and Chloe is safe, and no brains have been splattered.
My heart beat is slowing, sending out “we’re all right, time to quit freaking out” signals to the rest of my traumatized organs, when something whumps onto the snow beside me. A puff of powder explodes into the air, and my pulse leaps into overdrive all over again.
I flinch as I glance over my shoulder, only to sag with relief when I see Brendan popping his skis off beside me.
I press a hand to my chest, where I swear I can feel my heart thudding through my ski jacket, sweater, and ribs. “Shit, you scared me.”
“That makes two of us,” he says, tossing his poles onto the snow before kneeling beside me. “Are you all right? No, don’t move, let me get you out of that ski first.”
“I’m okay, but I did something to my right knee.” He reaches for the latch connecting the boot on my injured leg to the ski, and I tense, but he’s so careful I barely feel a thing until I shift to sit up in the snow, putting pressure on the joint. “Ouch. Yeah. Something’s not right. I think I pulled a muscle or maybe a ligament or something.”
Brendan’s fingers prod the outside of my knee without causing any fresh pain, but when they move to the inside my shoulders shoot toward my ears and a whimper escapes through my clenched jaw.
He backs off fast. “I don’t think it’s your ACL. Could be the MCL, which is still bad, but it’ll be easier to recover without reinjuring it. And nothing feels broken.” His big hands circle my thigh, squeezing gently as his gaze meets mine, rel
ief clear in his eyes. “You’re lucky it’s not worse. When I saw you shoot into the woods like that…”
He shakes his head as he brushes the snow from my jacket. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack. You shouldn’t have gone after her, Laura. You could have gotten yourself killed.”
“I couldn’t help it,” I whisper. “I saw her go off the trail and I just…went after her. I didn’t even think. I was just so scared.”
“I know.” He tugs his glove off, skimming his hand over my hair, sending more snow falling to the ground and making me wonder at what point I lost my pom-pom hat. “Thank you.”
“For what?” I sniff. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You risked your life trying to help my daughter. That’s a pretty big deal in my book.”
I blink, my vision swimming. “Yeah, well, I love her, stupid.”
His eyes soften. “I am stupid. I’m sorry.”
I lift a shoulder and let it fall with a laugh even as my throat gets tighter. “It’s okay. We’re all stupid sometimes.”
“Some more than others.” He leans closer, until I’m pretty sure he’s about to kiss me again. But I decide I’m okay with that, since kisses, hugs, and all other forms of comfort are sounding good in the wake of my near-death experience—fuck it, I’ll worry about redrawing my line in the sand once I’m not on the verge of going into shock—when a siren whoops behind him.
Brendan glances over his shoulder, lifting a hand to someone I can’t see from my position flat on my butt in the snow. “Hey! We’re over here! She’s okay, but there’s no way she’s walking or skiing out. She tweaked something in her knee.”
“Got it,” a male voice says behind him. “We’ll be there with a stretcher in a minute. You two hold tight.”
Brendan turns back to me, relief and regret warring in his expression. “I should get down to the bottom and help Chloe. She made it to the lift line okay, but she’ll be scared if one of us doesn’t show up soon.”
