Shooting for the Stars

by Sarina Bowen

  “Okayyy…” he said. “I’m out of ideas. I guess we’re going to have to call 9-1-1.”

  She tipped her head back and let out a musical laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “Not for years,” Dane admitted. He’d grown up two towns away, but that felt like a lifetime ago.

  Reluctantly he turned off her headlights, saving her battery, yet plunging the cab into darkness. He’d been enjoying the sight of a pretty girl laughing, cheeks flushed, perfect pink lips smiling up at the ceiling. Just because Dane planned never to get involved with a woman didn’t mean he didn’t like looking at them. (Especially the occasional naked woman between his legs.) And this one was really quite extraordinary. Late twenties, slender, and with a long graceful neck. Even with the bulk of her down jacket he’d noticed a full bust that heaved as she laughed.

  “There’s no reception anywhere on this road,” she said, “until you’re almost into Hamilton.”

  “Right,” he said. “I’d forgotten. The mobile phone companies have no love for the forty-ninth most populous state.”

  Dane had spent the past ten years traveling on the World Cup skiing circuit. This was his first time back in Vermont in years. Elite skiers didn’t train in Vermont—the mountains weren’t tall enough, and the snowfall was unreliable. Instead, they trained at the big western mountains, in Colorado or Utah.

  But this year, Dane and his coach were making an exception. They’d camped here for the season—between races—to be close to Dane’s latest family tragedy. In Vermont, he was able see his sick brother every week, yet keep his troubles far away from the prying eyes of the ski association.

  “So…” the girl took a deep breath. “That leaves us waiting for the plow to come by. The driver can radio in for help.”

  Dane shifted on her uncomfortable bench seat. With the cab listing to the right, he had to hang on with the heels of his boots to avoid sliding into her. “Okay,” he said. “Look, my name’s Dane, and I just wanted to say that I’m sorry I barked at you before.”

  Her head turned in the dark. “It’s okay. Skidding is scary, and it made me a little cuckoo too—I actually felt drunk for a minute there.”

  “Are you going to tell me your name?”

  “Sorry, it’s Willow Reade.”

  Willow. He cleared his throat. “Willow, your truck is ferociously uncomfortable. Do you mind if we wait for the plow in my Jeep? I left it running.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Um, sure. If that’s okay. I’m kind of up against the door here.”

  He forced open the driver’s side door. “I don’t know how long we’ll be waiting. Do you happen to have any emergency supplies in your glove box…whiskey? Chocolate?”

  She laughed. “Sorry. I am a completely useless human.”

  The way she said it was bitter. As if she believed it.

  Anyhow, Willow followed him toward his Jeep, which was lit by his running lights. But in every other direction it was utterly dark. “Ladies first,” he said. “Do you mind climbing across? You could go around to the passenger door, but I don’t know what you’d be walking into over there.”

  He held the door while she slid inside, climbing carefully over the automatic gearshift.

  Dane closed the door behind her and walked around to the back, opening the tailgate. He saw her spin around to watch him. Quickly, so as not to let too much heat out of the car, he dragged a half dozen pairs of skis out of the back and then slammed the door. He set the skis against the back of the Jeep, in a lean-to formation.

  When he opened the driver’s side door again, her worried face looked up at him. He closed the door, plunging them into darkness. “I cleaned all the snow away from the tailpipe, and tented skis over it,” he explained. “We should be able to run the engine for a while before the exhaust gets clogged.”

  “Oh!” He could hear her shiver beside him. “Thank-you, Boy Scout. It crossed my mind that you were making room for my mutilated body. But I forgot to worry about accidental asphyxiation.”

  “Christ,” he laughed in what he hoped was a non-threatening way. “The only thing I’d like to mutilate is a cheeseburger, medium rare. And a side of onion rings.”

  “Good,” she said. “Because it’s been a pretty crappy day already.”

  “Has it?” He leaned back against the headrest. “Let’s name all the shitty things about this day. You start.”

  “Well, okay,” her voice was tentative. He wished he could see her face. Her tone suggested a frown across that pink, kissable mouth he’d spied earlier. “My truck may have breathed its last. And I can’t afford a new one.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Your turn,” Willow pressed.

  “Sure. I was supposed to drive to Keene tonight. And I have a flight out of Boston tomorrow. But the roads are trashed, and the Jeep is stuck. Your turn.”

  “That is inconvenient. I shouldn’t have been on the road at all. I drove out because I needed chicken feed, which seemed important. But now I realize that I didn’t check their water, and the chickens are far more likely to die of thirst than hunger. Go.”

  “We might die of thirst first. Go.”

  He felt her turn toward him in the dark. “I have to throw a flag on that one, mister,” she said. “We’re not trapped in a barn like them, we’re surrounded by water. How about this: I left a pot of chili cooking in my kitchen, and it might burn. Go.”

  “New rule,” he announced. “Let’s not talk about food. I’ve been working out since five-thirty this morning, and lunch was five hours ago. Your turn.”

  “All right…” Willow sounded as if she was running out of complaints, at least the ones she was willing to tell a stranger. “There is going to be some world-class shoveling to do tomorrow.”

  “Well, I have to flag that one,” Dane said. “Because shoveling means snow, and I live for snow. So here’s the real bummer. We’re getting two feet of freshy, and I can’t ski on it tomorrow. I have to travel.”

  “The snow will still be here when you get back,” Willow pointed out.

  “You aren’t a skier, are you? There’s nothing like first tracks. Flying down a slope in un-tracked powder is the best thing there is. It’s better than sex.”

  Willow burst out laughing. “You did not just say that.”

  “What?”

  “I feel sorry for your girlfriend,” she giggled.

  “I don’t have one.”

  But that only made her laugh harder. “Sorry, I’m no expert on skiing, so it’s possible that you know something I don’t. On the other hand, it’s also possible that you’re meeting the wrong girls.”

  He grinned in the dark. “Fair enough. I think it’s your turn.”

  “Ah.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, my ex called today and asked me to sell his motorcycle and wire him the money. As if that would take no effort on my part. Even though he left me in debt.” Her voice quavered a bit at the end. Their little game had turned into a peculiar little confessional. “Your turn.”

  “My brother is dying,” Dane bit out. “And I’m supposed to be driving to see him right now.”

  Christ. He had no idea what made him tell her that. To say that he wasn’t a sharer was putting it mildly. But the dark and the warm sound of her voice had loosened up his tongue.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  He shook his head in the darkness. “It’s been a long illness. I’ve known it was coming.”

  “What’s his name?” she asked.

  Her choice of questions made him like her even more. It wasn’t a nosy what’s wrong with him? Instead, she’d asked something much more relevant, something which honored his brother the way Dane thought of him—a happy, laughing man. The father that Dane never had.

  “He’s Finn,” he answered. “We’re Finn and Dane. My mother had a thing for Scandinavia.”

  Poor Finn.

  For almost fifteen years,
Dane had known Finn would die. When Dane was a teenager, his brother sat him down and explained it. “It killed mom, and it will eventually kill me, too. But maybe not you, Danger man, you just keep skiing fast, and maybe you’ll outrun it.”

  He and Finn were ten years apart. His brother had been twenty-five at the time he received his diagnosis. Poor Finn had started showing symptoms a good decade earlier than most people with the disease. Now Finn was not quite forty, and Dane was about to turn thirty.

  And eventually, the symptoms would come for him, too.

  No matter what his brother said, Dane was sure of it. He had spent the last fifteen years trying to accept it. And this was Dane’s true secret. The fact that his brother was sick could slip out, sitting next to a silky-haired girl in a dark car…that didn’t matter—not really. But nothing could shake that other truth from his lips. If anyone ever found out about the genetic time bomb that awaited him, Dane would lose his place on the ski team, his endorsements. Everything.

  “It can’t be easy,” Willow said, her voice low. “Watching somebody die.”

  He lifted his arms behind his head, grabbing the headrest with both hands. “We all go someday, right?” How many times had Dane said that aloud—a million? And always with the unfortunate knowledge that while there are many ways to die, he’d seen one of the ugliest. First his mother, and now Finn.

  “I guess so,” she said softly.

  “Including your chickens?”

  She laughed. “Don’t say that. They’ll probably be fine. I’m just mad at myself for driving out through the storm. I’ve tried to become a country girl, but it just never quite stuck.”

  “So you’re not from around here either, like you accused me of a little while ago….”

  She laughed again, and it was a musical sound. He decided he wanted to hear that laugh a few more times before the plow truck showed up. “No, before we moved here, I lived in Manhattan for seven years. I went to NYU, and then did most of a doctorate.”

  “So…then you decided to move to the sticks and raise chickens?”

  “Ugh. Do I have to tell this part?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Not if it’s painful.”

  “It’s just painfully stupid,” she sighed. “I followed a guy here two years ago. He was very interested in the back-to-the-land movement. Unfortunately he was also very interested in a twenty-one-year-old folk singer. So now I own a hundred-year-old farmhouse on fifteen acres, which I cannot sell. I can’t get a decent job, and I can’t finish my graduate degree. I’m kind of stuck, and there’s nobody to blame.”

  “Except for the asshole.”

  “Except for him. But if I’d been smarter, it wouldn’t have happened. Now he’s in California. He’s gotten smarter, too, I think. She has a trust fund.”

  “Christ,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  A silence fell between them. “Excuse me for a minute, I’m going to check the tailpipe,” he said. He opened the door, which brought the dome light on again, and he got another look at Willow’s face. This time she smiled at him, and her big hazel eyes shone. God, she was pretty. In a perfect world he could run his fingers through that hair, taste those perfect lips. Hell, if he was going to dream big, in a perfect world he could go home to something like that every night.

  But not this world. Never in this one. He shut the door.

  The wind whipped his face as Dane walked to the back of the car. For a moment, he couldn’t see at all. The gust pushed on his chest so fiercely that he put a hand out, his fingers finding the Jeep’s frame. He followed it around to the back, where his taillights revealed that snow was drifting everywhere, accumulating in spite of the wind block he’d tried to make with the skis. He kicked as much snow away from the rear of the Jeep as he could. But it was falling incredibly fast. So much for the comfort of the heater…

  Coming In From the Cold is Book #1 of the Gravity Series

  About Sarina

  SARINA BOWEN LIVES IN Windsor County, Vermont, where her hardier ancestors first began farming and logging 250 years ago. She appreciates soft cheese, hard cider and the DSL internet service that finally arrived on her rural road last year. Sarina lives with her ski-crazy husband, two sons and eight chickens. Visit her at www.sarinabowen.com.