“In we go,” Gabe says, pulling off his shirt and sliding into the hot water with his boxers. “Don’t tell me you’re too queenly to get in something as banal as a hot tub?”
Dove shoots him a glare. “Do I look like a queen?” She eases herself in, thankful for her layered tank tops and boy-cut shorts.
“No.” Gabe gives her a thoughtful once-over. Dove notes that, more interested in her face, he hardly looks at her body. “Actually, you look like a bird—not in a bad way, but a fluffy chick. The kind someone should take extra care with.” He looks at the bubbling water. “Sorry—that sounded weirder out of my head than in it.”
Dove smiles and leans back onto the edge of the tub, enjoying the intense heat. “Well, thanks, I guess—it’s not exactly what I pictured from a round of hot tubbing with the likes of you.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Well, your reputation does precede you….”
Gabe bites into his cupcake, chewing and swallowing before replying. “I’m sure it does—and there was a time when I’d have been glad to have those misconceptions as part of my cosmic makeup.”
“Cosmic makeup?” Dove shakes her head and nibbles the cupcake, trying to keep it from getting wet. “You sound like such a snowboarder.”
“Well, I am,” Gabe says. He looks at her from across the tub, stretching his legs out under the water. “But I’m not like that—the way I was, I mean.”
“So you’re a reformed lothario?”
“I don’t know that I’d use that particular word….”
“Okay—how about hookup artist?” Dove raises her eyebrows and licks the frosting.
Gabe shrugs. “I suppose….” He finishes his cupcake, then submerges under water for a minute, then pops back up. “Those are some amazing cakes.”
“I know,” Dove says. “Melissa’s definitely got a way with sweets.”
Gabe’s eyes flicker with the memory of something, the sweets he and Melissa shared on the mountaintop, perhaps. “What’s her story, anyway?”
Dove looks at Gabe, wondering how this hot guy—with rivulets of water running down his tanned face, the silvery curls unmatted by water—left his lascivious ways. “Why do you want to know? Are you trading your multitasking past for a singular future?”
“Who knows about the future, right?” Gabe looks at Dove, who nods, certainly understanding how shaky the future can seem. “But for the present? I’m all about one girl.”
Dove cranes her neck forward and opens her eyes wide, waiting for the name. “Oh, yeah? And who is this lucky lady?”
“Oh, she knows—I think,” Gabe says.
“Are you sure? Women sometimes need to be told fifteen times to have one thing register,” Dove says. “Not that I’m trying to speak ill of my kind, only that if a guy assumes a girl knows how he feels, I bet most of the time she doesn’t.”
Gabe nods. “I can see that … but this time, I’d name a star after her—and I’m almost certain she’d understand what that meant.”
“I wish I were always that certain,” Dove says, finishing the last of her cupcake and dropping the wrapper onto the deck where she knows she’ll have to sweep it up later. She looks out to the pathway, wondering where Harley is, if she’s alone or okay or up to something she shouldn’t be.
“Why aren’t you?” Gabe asks. “A tale of two hotties?”
Dove makes a face. “No, English Lit 101, that’s not it.” She sinks her shoulders into the steaming water. “I just have a hard time figuring out what to leave behind and what to focus on in the future.”
Gabe looks at her over the dark water. “Do you mean what—or whom?”
“So this is what the bedrooms look like.” Melissa carefully holds her cupcake in her palm so as not to scatter crumbs on the plush beige carpet.
“Yeah,” Max says, showing her in. “This is where all the action happens.” Melissa raises her eyebrows to him. “Actually, I don’t know why I said that.”
“Oh, so this hasn’t become a den of delights?”
“Well, I’ve written a lot,” Max says, gesturing to three thick black books. “If that’s the kind of delights you mean.”
“What’re you writing?”
Max sits at the small table and flips open a page, looks at the words, then quickly shuts it. “Just blather, really. Mainly descriptions of life here or life back home. It’s for a tutorial I have….”
“At Oxford?” Melissa asks and then explains. “Dove said you go there now?”
“Yes, that’s my current place of educational squalor.” Max stacks the book with his other journals. “Just chalk it all up to the struggling path toward becoming a writer.”
“Is that what you want to be?” Melissa asks. “Can I eat in here? It’s so clean.” She looks around. “Dove must come in here every two seconds to dust and wipe everything.”
“I wish,” Max says. “Of course you can eat—but no, Dove doesn’t come in here at all….”
“Did she do something wrong?” Melissa’s face is full of concern, her mouth full of sweet cupcake. “Matron would be really pissed off if she found out that not all of the rooms were being cleaned. It’s part of the vacation package—your holiday is prepaid and includes …”
Max waves his hand to quiet her. “I know what the holiday entails and includes. Or, I thought I did.” He stands up and goes over to his bureau while eating the cupcake. The chocolate frosting is the same color as his hair, and Melissa thinks about how funny it is, to be in some guy’s bedroom—some beautiful guy’s bedroom—and feel nothing for him. How half of her is still on that mountaintop with Gabe, eating jelly beans and naming stars, and the other half of her is still wishing for JMB, for the affection and crush to be requited. She wonders where he is—if the fact that both he and Harley are missing means anything—or if she should just let the coincidence go.
“Look,” Max says, holding out a five-by-seven photograph. “This was a while ago—sorry about the scratches.” Melissa wipes her hands on her pants and goes to look. “That’s me—and Lily. Or, as you know her—Dove.”
In the picture, Dove is radiant—in a fitted lilac dress, her long light hair coiled up in classic movie star position, revealing her collarbone, her graceful arms both linked around Max, who is clad in a dinner jacket—a smile wide as a crescent moon. “You look so happy,” Melissa comments. “When was this?”
Max takes the photo back, slipping it into his chest pocket face in. “My eighteenth—thus the fancy dress. She was unbelievable that night—everything I’d ever wanted.”
“So what happened?”
Max shakes his head and pulls at his hair. “A misunderstanding. Some girl—”
“Named?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me,” Melissa says. “And it should to you—you’re the writer, right?”
Max concedes. “Fine. There was this girl—someone at school with us last year—called Claire. She was Dove’s good friend, and I vaguely knew her. Enough to know she might not be reliable—but …”
“But let me guess—she was gorgeous.”
Max shrugs, regretting the memories. “It wasn’t that Claire was bad—she wasn’t part of the cruel set. And I knew—know—why Lily, I mean Dove, liked being with her. Claire was funny where Dove was shy; together they were a good pair. It was Claire who first told me Dove liked me—and I couldn’t get my head around it.”
“Let me guess—Claire was also the one who told you that Dove didn’t feel the same anymore.” Melissa wipes the crumbs from her lips.
“That night, at my eighteenth, Lily and I had this talk—and danced—and for me it was …” He stops and looks at Melissa. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Maybe because I’m here—and I’m not just a piece of paper….” She points to his books. “And maybe you need to see where the plot’s going?”
“It just got screwed up,” Max says, his voice full of frustration. “I wanted to be with
Lily—Dove—whatever she is now. And then Claire told me it would never happen—and for some stupid reason, I believed her. When Dove found me next …”
“You were with Claire, attached at the mouth, and more than a little drunk.” With a towel wrapped around her shivering body, Dove stands in Max’s doorway, looking at both of them while water pools at her feet. “While I’d been off looking for Claire to tell her this was it—that I was finally ready to tell Max how I felt, to be with him—on every level …” She glances at his bed and then back to the two pairs of eyes looking at her. “By the time I got there, to Max’s room at his parents’ estate, it was pretty clear I wasn’t first choice—or that I wasn’t a choice at all.”
“Lily …” Max reaches out for her.
Melissa pinches her own mouth shut and takes this moment as her cue to leave. Nodding good-bye, she walks past them and down the back stairs, out onto the deck for some air.
“Just who I’ve been looking for,” Gabe shouts to her from the hot tub.
Melissa turns to him. “You can’t have been looking that hard—what’d you think, I’d magically appear in there with you?”
Gabe raises his eyebrows, his cheeks ruddy from the cold air and hot water. “A guy can dream, can’t he?”
Melissa shivers with the thought that Gabe Schroeder could use the word dream in reference to her.
“You coming in or what?” he asks. “I promise I won’t bite.”
Melissa looks at her clothing, wondering why she chose today to wear a thong. I don’t even like them. They’re uncomfortable no matter what anyone says, they don’t flatter my rather cushioned behind, and the thought of dropping my pants right now … “I don’t think so,” Melissa says. “I should get back to work.”
“Work, work, work,” Gabe says. “What does a guy have to do to get you alone? Strand you on top of a mountain?”
Melissa leans onto the tub with her forearms, trailing her fingers in the water and finally breaking into a smile. “I get your point.” She thinks about it and then just talks, figuring Gabe’s seen her humiliated before; she may as well be honest. “I’m just self-conscious, I guess.”
“About what?” Gabe is genuinely confused.
Melissa shrugs and looks down at herself. “I don’t know—me?”
“Oh my god,” Gabe says. “If you only knew …”
Melissa leans closer to him, watching him cup water in his hands and spill it out. He rubs his hands onto his face, giving his skin a sheen Melissa finds enticing. “You have everything worth looking at, Melissa. And nothing that should make you think twice about getting in here right now.”
She looks at him, realizing her feelings—is it a crush? A real like?—just got a little bit deeper. “And you’re not just playing me?”
Gabe sighs. “Can’t I ever lose that image?”
“Well, you were on the cover of Ski Life magazine as their number one international player….”
“But I’m not—really. Not anymore. James and I both did a lot of that stuff for publicity, anyway.” Gabe thinks for a second. “Have you seen him, anyway?”
Melissa swallows, her mood bubble threatening to burst. “No. No, I haven’t.” She looks at Gabe and thinks about absent James, how he could be off anywhere with anyone, and even if he were here how he hasn’t made the slightest overture toward liking her. And just like that, Melissa strips down, into the thong and her T-shirt, and jumps in.
“Now what?” she asks Gabe, who stares at her from across the tub.
“It’s up to you,” Gabe says. The night air settles in, bringing a chill, and later hours that will lead into the next day—to Changeover Day. “You have to decide.”
In his room, Max hides the photo in his pocket, hoping Dove won’t see it. But she’s close to him, close enough that her wet hair drips onto his feet.
“Do you have something you want to tell me?” Max says. He sits on the edge of his bed.
Dove looks around, impressed with the state of his room. “Looks like you didn’t need me in here, after all.”
“I did—I do, but not to clean.” Max pulls her in her towel between his legs, not caring that she’s wet and that the dampness is moving from her body to his.
“You do just fine without a maid, it seems.”
“I don’t want you to be my maid.”
Dove drops her towel, angry. “What do you want, Max?”
“Don’t yell at me—you’re the one who kissed me, Dove. You. Outside on the snow, on my mouth.”
Dove blushes at the truth, leans down to pick up her towel remembering William’s words—twelve days and we’ll be together. Always a countdown—backward to Max’s eighteenth or forward to leaving her parents and her loaded trust behind, or forward again to Nevis, and seeing William. As she picks up the towel, Max grabs it from her, slips it behind her, and pulls her forward with it until she’s pressed into him. He kisses her with so much intensity and tenderness she feels she could be back there, dancing at his party, in her lilac dress, her hair long, her future still steady.
“Stop.” She pushes away. “I can’t.”
Max bites his lower lip and stares at her. “I know you, Lily. Dove. You could change your name a million times and it won’t erase what we had.”
“We had nothing—we had you carrying around the knowledge that I liked you and you did nothing with it. We have you running off at your party with my supposed best friend. We have me finding you both—in bed. Together.”
Max stands up and walks away from her. “That night is filled with the most regrets I have. I never should have questioned you—I never should have believed Claire.”
“Then why did you?” Dove asks, wondering if it’s because Claire was the girl—that girl that every boy at school wanted in some way or form—that girl had behind her a mass of power and beauty, and a persuasiveness that never failed.
“Because I thought there wasn’t any chance that you would feel the same about me.” Max hides his blush with the photograph, taking it out to study it.
“So rather than wallow for two seconds in your perceived sorrow over me you went to bed with Claire?”
Max turns. “I never said I slept with her.”
“Max, I did in fact find you in the bed with her—you’re telling me nothing happened?”
“I can’t tell you nothing happened, Dove. But I can tell you that I regret it. That making a quick decision—drunk or not—to be with someone who isn’t your first choice—is a terrible thing. For all involved.”
“And now?” asks Dove, wondering whether even she knows the answer.
Downstairs, the party filters out into the snow, with people retreating for their own chalets, or final dinners. Melissa looks at Gabe. “We should get out—I’m getting all pruny.” She studies her wrinkled palms and fingers. “Plus … I have to make the final dinner. Weird. Our week here is almost all over.”
Gabe looks at her, swimming to her so their arms are touching. “Is it? Don’t we have all next week and so on?”
Melissa looks at him, unsure what to do. “What are you saying?”
“Just this.” With a push of a button Gabe turns on the jet sprays and envelops Melissa in a kiss.
“Changeover Day’s tomorrow—hectic haze that it is.” Melissa kisses him back, enjoying it, enjoying the feeling of being free in her potentially unflattering thong but not caring, feeling glad to be with someone who likes her so much. Someone whom she liked first who liked her back.
“And what’s the plan for tomorrow, then? And I know you have to go clean up the mess from this—I’ll help.” Gabe stares at her.
“Thanks—we’ll need a crew to get it back in order. And in terms of tomorrow? I read what it says in the informational packet—cleaning, packing, organizing, making lists for shopping, that sort of thing—but it doesn’t cover the realities of saying good-bye and dealing with the transition.”
Gabe nods. “I guess you’ll have to see.”
Melissa nods bac
k, wondering if she should kiss him, if they are together, if he wants to be, if she does or if he’s only a second choice—or even if that’s true, if it’s okay. “I guess we’ll see what happens in the light of day.”
21
Changeover Day is more complicated than you think.
MELISSA, HARLEY, AND DOVE finish their last shifts for the week—some guests will stay on, others will leave. A foot of fresh powder has fallen and the sun glints off the snow.
“Should we go for a quickie run?” Dove asks, peering up at Melissa on the top bunk.
Harley nods from her bed. “Count me in.”
Dove slips out of her bed, her white flannel pajamas blowing in the air that seeps through the cracks. “What time is it, anyway?”
“Past breakfast. Almost eight!” Melissa hops down onto the floor. “Oh, it’s so weird not to have to make breakfast for everyone this morning. I felt almost guilty setting out a buffet … but then it felt so good to get back in bed.” Melissa thinks back to burning things, making croissants, learning to melt jam for sauces, learning just about everything all so fast she hardly had time to keep track of her newfound knowledge. She looks forward to her tip envelope. Maybe she’ll do something extravagant—or save it—or travel somewhere. “I guess next week should be easier—now that I have a vague notion of how to cook.” She remembers a recent attempt at a kung pao sauce and revises her words. “Make that very vague.”
“I hope everything’s easier,” Dove says. “But … not to be the voice of pessimism—it is Holiday Week with capital H and W coming up. Cons for you are that people really expect gourmet cuisine that’s holiday-oriented.”
“And the upside of that?” Melissa asks.
Harley and Dove overlap. “Drinks and mistletoe.”
Melissa thinks back to Gabe, to his drunk kiss, the session in the snow, and wonders what it means. She knows now she enjoyed it. A lot. But sleep with him? That seemed like a whole other level. She remembers walking by where they’d kissed. In the morning you could still see snow-prints.
Dove goes on. “Holiday Week is notorious for the overimbibing … so if you make something bad or something doesn’t turn out just right, make sure you offer starters that have lots of brandy.”
Balancing Acts Page 19
