by Carrie Quest
“Nat showed me that article about your stuff, and with what you know about snowboarding? Brody said you could pretty much write your own ticket. Magazines would be falling all over themselves to sign you up.”
“Maybe.” We’ve hit the Boulder city limits and I stare out at the foothills bordering the western edge of the city. The snowy peaks gleam in the dusk and the city lights twinkle down below. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I can tell that what I’m looking at is beautiful. I can remember coming home for Christmas and driving this same stretch with a deep sense of satisfaction and love. I can understand the beauty on an intellectual level, but I can’t feel it.
The only time I respond to my physical environment with anything but numbness is when I’m surrounded by warmth and color. Hiking through the lush jungles of Vietnam, or seeing the sun sparkle off the brightly painted palace in Bangkok. The ocean works, too: the deep, perfect blue of the water off the coast of Italy and the waves curling onto the beach of Australia’s Gold Coast were enough to spark something in me, even if it was only for a moment.
I can’t really explain that to Ben, though, because I hardly understand it myself. I also don’t know how to make him understand that I’m not driven when it comes to photography in the same way I was when I wanted to conquer the world of snowboarding and damn the consequences. Ben wants me to get better, so he’s latched on to something I might be good at and figured out what I’d need to do to be the best. Grow my social media following, get hired by magazines, get some experience under my belt by working with Brody.
He’s mapping out a path to success because that’s what Ben does: he figures out how to be the best and makes it happen. The guy is a training machine and always has been. I’d be eating ice cream for dinner while he weighed out protein portions. His focus is legendary.
The only thing I’ve been focused on since I got back to Breck is his sister, but again, not the time to bring that up.
“I’ll think about it,” I say. “Keep talking to Brody and see what happens.”
“He’s planning a killer trip. Plus, he’s bringing Zeke along, so you know it will be hilarious.”
I grin. Zeke is a fucking force of nature. He competes in slopestyle and the guy flies so high off those jumps I swear he’s part bird. Seeing what he busts out at the Olympics is one of the only things I’m actually looking forward to. Plus, he’s the king of stupid practical jokes, so hanging out with him is always good for shits and giggles.
“There’s always the announcer route as well,” Ben adds. “Especially if the Olympics go well, right? Gabe Power must have a pretty big hard-on for you, considering the size of the check he’s about to write.”
Yeah, no way in hell that’s happening either, but I know Ben’s trying to help. I’d be doing the same for him if the boot was on the other foot.
When we get to Ben’s house, Brody is outside squaring off with a tall blonde girl who’s wearing a pink tool belt. He’s waving his arms around like a maniac and she’s glaring at him, arms crossed, tapping her foot against the ground.
“Ah, shit,” Ben mutters as he pulls up and kills the engine. “I was hoping they’d be getting along a little better by now.”
“What the hell happened here?” I gesture beyond the two of them to the driveway. Brody lives in a tiny house on wheels, which he tows along behind his truck, and last I heard it was parked up in North Boulder somewhere where a hippie guy was going to start a tiny house compound. The house is in Ben’s driveway now, and somebody apparently plowed into it, because one of the back corners is crumpled in.
“The girl giving Brody hell is Nat’s sister, Allie, and she came into town last week in a blizzard and lost control of her car.” He points to an SUV parked haphazardly on the front lawn that’s got a good-sized dent in the hood.
“He looks pretty pissed.” Brody’s usually a mellow guy.
“Yeah, they didn’t exactly hit it off,” Ben says with a smirk. “Although, to be honest, I was pretty sure they’d be fucking by now. All that energy has to go somewhere, right?”
Allie is yelling at Brody now, and he’s got his hands planted on his hips like he’s afraid he’ll reach out and strangle her if he lets go. She pulls a hammer out of her tool belt and waves it at the house, then points it at his nose. Neither one of them have noticed that they have an audience.
“Is that a pink sparkly hammer?”
“Fuck,” Ben says. “We’d better get over there.”
“There’s no way in hell I’m getting involved with a girl waving a hammer,” I tell him, tapping my head. “Brain injury, remember?”
“Asshole,” Ben says. Then he launches himself out of the car and runs over to where the two of them are standing.
I’m about to go join them when my phone rings. Piper’s name flashes up on the screen and I grin. The girl has always had the best timing.
“Hey,” I answer, watching Ben try to disarm Allie while pretending to hug her hello. He’s a smooth fucker, I’ll give him that.
“What are you doing?”
“Watching Nat’s sister try to bash Brody’s head in. You?”
“Reading my pre-op instructions again and trying not to freak out that there will be a power surge during the operation which will cause them to fry my eyeballs.”
“That’s a weirdly specific thing to freak out about.”
“I’ve been considering this surgery for years,” she reminds me. “I’ve had time to think through all the variables.”
“They’re professionals, Piper, and they get paid a fuck ton of money. I’m sure they sprung for the surge protectors when they were kitting out the office.”
She sighs. “I guess.”
“It’s gonna be fine. Nat will drop you off on her way down to meet Ben, and I’ll be there to pick you up tomorrow at noon in your parents’ boat of a car. You and your perfectly intact eyeballs. Your dad spent the entire trip going over the post-op instructions with me, and we stopped on the way out of town to pick up your prescriptions. Everything’s set.”
The surgery does sound a little gnarly, so I don’t blame her for being anxious. I’ve been through enough medical shit to know that the night before an operation is never fun. Plus, she’ll be awake the whole time, and then have to keep her eyes covered until the next morning, which she’ll hate.
“Did you get me extra pain pills?”
I laugh. “Um, no. But your dad already wrote out a medication schedule for me.”
“Did he email you an extra copy, just in case?”
“He did, in fact. Plus, he shared it as a Google Doc. The man is thorough.”
Ben appears to have convinced the two combatants to head inside, and I should probably join them, but I don’t want to stop talking to her. I fucking missed this. In the years that we’ve been apart I thought about Piper all the time, and I won’t lie, a good portion of those thoughts were about her gorgeous body and exactly what I wanted to do to it. But this is different. I’ve had sex with other people since Japan, but I’ve never had a friendship like this with any of them. We didn’t chat on the phone or trade banter back and forth.
We didn’t laugh. Not like this.
“I wish you were here,” she says suddenly.
“Me too.”
“This morning was…”
“Frustrating?” I suggest.
“Fucking hot,” she corrects me. Her voice is low and raspy, and my cock instantly feels heavy.
“I’m in your parents’ car,” I remind her. “In full view of your brother. Now is not the time to remind me about how hot your body was when you were rubbing all over me this morning.”
Yeah, too late. I’m feeling pretty fucking reminded. Also rock hard and aching to pull out my dick, close my eyes, and reenact what happened this morning with a different, happier ending.
“You could come back tonight,” she says. “I’ll wait up.”
“Nope. Not gonna happen. You need to rest up for tomorrow and we need to figure ou
t what the hell we’re doing here, Piper.”
It’s not like I don’t want to be with her. I’m about one stroke away from coming in my pants at the thought of it, but she seemed pretty determined to keep things in the friend zone before last night, and the last thing I want to do is hurt her.
She’s silent for a minute. “So that’s a no to phone sex?”
“A hard no.”
“But how hard is it?” she purrs out, which makes us both laugh.
“I’ll see you tomorrow at Dr. Denham’s office,” I tell her. “And if he incinerates your eyeballs by mistake, I’ll punch him in the nuts.”
“Promise?”
“Of course. Whatever you need.”
“Will you bring me soup and narrate the Twilight movies for me all night?”
“You’ll still be able to hear,” I remind her.
“Yeah, but I’ll need you to describe the action.”
“Whatever you need,” I repeat. There’s no way in hell I’m doing that, but hopefully she’ll be too blissed out on pain pills to remember.
“Dr. Denham has the highest safety rating of any eye surgeon in the high country,” she says, like she’s trying to convince herself. “He’s the best. I researched it myself.”
I smile. Because that’s peak Piper, and I love it.
“It’s going to be fine. Sleep well, Piper.”
“The very best,” she says again, sounding more positive now, like she’s won the argument. “A god among eye men.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Adam.” She hangs up and I stare at the phone for a few minutes, grinning like a lovesick fool, before heading inside.
11
Piper
Dr. Denham is a sadistic and evil bastard.
I wake up in the worst pain I have ever experienced. I do not feel like there’s “maybe a bit of grit in my eye.” I do not feel that at all. I feel like a toddler-slash-torture artist tied me down in a sand box, pried my eyes open, packed my eyelids to the bulging point with sand, and then taped them closed. The urge to rub my eyes is overwhelming.
No, scratch that. It isn’t a mere urge. I sometimes get an urge to eat ice cream or hike the Flatirons. Urge is not a strong enough word for what I feel. This is a need. A need so powerful that I moan and reach blindly for the edge of my pillowcase, trying to shove my hands inside before I rip the goddamn goggles off and gouge my own eyes out.
I want to call out for Adam, but when he picked me up and took me home, I told him to leave me alone. The experience of being strapped down and having my eyes pried open with hooked metal tongs, not to mention the joy of actually smelling my own eyeballs burning as they lasered them, left me feeling way too vulnerable and freaked out for company. Especially the kind of company I want to lure to bed in the not so distant future. Black-out goggles are not a sexy look. I was hoping I’d just go to sleep and wake up tomorrow with perfect vision.
I didn’t want to have to ask for any help beyond the ride and the medication management, but I guess that plan’s shot to hell now. Fuck.
“What’s wrong?”
The bed dips and Adam is instantly by my side. He must have ignored my order to get the hell out and leave me alone because there’s no way he could have made it here so fast otherwise. Normally I would be pissed about this of course, but I’m in so much pain that there’s no room for anger.
“The fucking doctor implanted pebbles into my eyelids.”
His hand is on my back, rubbing circles that are probably supposed to be soothing, but I am beyond being soothed right now. This fucking hurts. I writhe around on the bed, ripping my hands out of the pillowcase so I can pretend the mattress is Dr. Denham’s face and punch the shit out of it.
I’m petrified, because I feel my entire existence closing in on me, like I’m trapped in a tiny dark coffin and I can’t move enough to even touch my face. I suck in a breath and I know, without a doubt, that if I don’t get a handle on this soon, I’m going to descend into a panic attack. I had a couple of those when Mom was sick, and they were awful. I don’t want to go there again.
“Hang on, let me check your medication schedule. Maybe I messed up the dose or something.”
Damn. I am a horrible and traitorous person but for the first time I am actually hoping that Adam’s brain has let him down, because a shiny pain pill to knock me out again would go down like a frickin’ treat right now. I should feel bad about this, I know, and I’m sure I will. Later.
“Do not exceed one pill every four hours,” Adam reads aloud. “You had one at ten o’clock and it’s only midnight now.” His voice is tight with concern and I don’t blame him. I’ve got goggles taped to my face, there are probably trails of drool all over my chin, my hair is so tangled that the roots are actually stinging my scalp, and I’m about three seconds from launching myself blindly in the direction of his voice to tackle him and frisk him for pain pills.
He should be scared, damn it.
“The doc said they’re pretty powerful,” Adam says. “I could try giving you another one, though, if it’s really bad.”
“No,” I grunt. “I’ll tough it out.”
I can do this. Ben once completed a medal-winning run with three fractured ribs. Adam’s broken his collarbone twice and it barely slowed him down. There’s no way those two are tougher than me. I can do this. I have to.
“Are you sure, Pipes? It looks like you’re really hurting over there.”
“I’m sure. Just…” I trail off because I want to tell him what to do to fix this, but all delusions of control are gone, and I have no idea what to do. The pain and irritation is so intense that I can’t get on top of anything, and in less than a minute I’m writhing around on the bed again, fisting the sheets and trying not to puke.
“Sometimes it helps to walk around,” Adam suggests. His voice is close again and I hate that I can’t see him. I’m thrashing around so much that I didn’t hear him move. He’s seeing me at my most weak and vulnerable, and I can’t even keep track of where he is in the room.
“That might be good.” I peel my fingers open and reach out blindly for his hand.
He grabs hold of me, his hand rough and warm, and pulls me gently to the edge of the bed.
“Do you want to go upstairs?”
I shake my head. “Can’t.”
There’s no way I could deal with stairs right now. My brain is shutting down and I’m going to a place I’ve never been before. I can’t coordinate enough thought and movement for stairs; I’m in a dark tunnel and all I can do is stumble through the next step.
Adam tugs me up and takes my arm. “Right. We’ll pace then. Five steps this way, turn around, five steps back.” We start walking and I trip on my own feet, but he’s right there to hold me up.
“When I was in the hospital and the pain got really bad, it helped me to count,” he says.
One, two, three, four, five. Turn.
“Count?”
“Yeah, I’d pick a big number, like ten thousand, and count my way there. It gave me something pretty mindless to concentrate on and by the time I got there I’d sometimes feel better.”
Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Turn.
“What if you didn’t?”
“I’d start over.” He laughs. “Lots of times I’d lose count anyway, especially at the beginning. I’d try to get to ten thousand and get stuck at a hundred.”
Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, forty-four, forty-five. Turn.
He keeps me steady while we pace my room, back and forth, me counting under my breath and stumbling. After a while the turning makes me dizzy, so we spin the other way. I have no idea how long we keep it up, but when I hit eight thousand, something shifts. The urgency lifts. The pain is still there, but it isn’t the only thing I can think about. I begin to notice other things.
Mundane things, like the worn spot in the carpet that I hit on every fifth step away from the bed and the sound of the furnace tu
rning on and off and the warm air blowing from the vents.
Dangerous things, like the wave of scent that hits me when Adam spins me gently around on the turn: clean cotton and male skin and a hint of something spicy that makes me want to bury my face in his chest. The way his thumb is rubbing little circles on the inside of my elbow: clockwise in one direction and counterclockwise on the return trip.
“I think I’m good,” I say, slowing to a stop.
He drops my arm and exhales a low groan. Air rushes past my hands and I realize he must be swinging his arms, stretching them out in relief. He was enduring his own pain to help me through mine, and for some reason this makes me want to cry.
Also jump his bones.
Must be the painkillers.
Wait. Those fuckers aren’t working. This is all me.
“Sure you’re feeling better?”
I nod. My eyes are still sore and irritated, but the overwhelming need to rub them and the claustrophobic fear have faded.
“Yeah, I’m thirsty, though.”
In more ways than one, sister.
“Want me to go get you something?”
I shake my head. “I’ll go upstairs. I want to keep moving.” I swallow. Hard. Then I force my mouth open and spit out my least favorite words. “Will you help me?”
It’s probably a good thing I’m blind, because I’m sure he is channeling Smuggy McSmugerstein the Third right now and looking at his face would only make me want to hit him.
But he doesn’t rub it in, which is more than I would probably do.
“Of course,” he says.
Then his hand is back, warm and firm on my elbow, and he’s guiding me slowly out of the room.
“First stair’s right here.”
I stumble a little, but we make it up in one piece. He brings me to the kitchen and leaves me standing in the middle of the room, full of restless energy and bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet while I hear him open the fridge.
“No beer for you, Little Miss Painkiller, so you’ve got a choice of water, ginger ale, or orange juice.”
