The Winter Games

by Sharp, Dr. Rebecca

  “How are your brothers?”

  I smiled. I had two twin brothers—Mick and Miles. Well, not my biological brothers, but I rarely made that distinction for people. Before me, my parents tried for years to have kids but with no luck. After numerous miscarriages, they’d decided to stop trying and foster children. Just months before my mom realized she was pregnant with me, they’d decided to adopt a set of twin boys who were only five at the time and had lost both of their parents.

  I cringed at the barebones details of their story that my mom had later told me. M and M (my nickname for the two of them) had been in the car at the time their birth mom tried to drive their dad to the hospital because he had overdosed on cocaine. Unfortunately, she was also high and ended up getting into an accident and not surviving. Thankfully, the boys had been ok—old enough to realize that their parents had died in a car accident, but young enough to not realize why the accident had occurred. My parents had taken them in and hadn’t been able to let them go.

  To me, they would always be two overprotective terrors and two-hundred-percent trouble. The truth was that they were older and they were protective, but they weren’t overbearing. Because of the age difference, we weren’t that close growing up before I was living up here for high school. When I moved back to Texas though, they’d come in handy a few times while I was at college and we’d grown closer, to the point where if they knew that I was living with Chance, they’d probably fly up to have a few choice words with him.

  “They are good,” I answered. “They have their own masonry and construction business now, but I think they want to get out of Texas. I think they want to head farther west.”

  “I could see that.” He nodded. “How old are they now?”

  I had to think for a minute. “Thirty-one.”

  He nodded. “Was college everything that you hoped for?”

  “It was good. So many more people than high school which was a change, but I made a lot of friends. There were a few more people there who shared my voodoo-hippie interests.” I grinned.

  “I’m sure it was a lot more fun without a boyfriend tagging along.”

  I reached for my bottle of La Croix that he’d gotten out for me and took a sip to hide my discomfort.

  “That’s not what I went there for.” And not the reason I left you.

  Like a geyser, the need to blurt out the truth of what happened that night bubbled up inside of me about to erupt. I opened my mouth about to say something—to start somewhere—but then he asked, “You want a drink?”

  I looked down at my empty plate, swallowing the words that were in my mouth.

  “Sure,” I answered weakly.

  He picked up the plates and walked into the kitchen, rinsing them in the sink and putting them in the dishwasher.

  “Still reading your cards?” He continued his calm interrogation as he reached under the counter and pulled out a bottle of gin. I sat mesmerized for a moment, watching him muddle some blueberries into the bottom of each glass before pouring in a healthy amount of the gin.

  Note to self: Drink slowly.

  “Sometimes.” I rested my elbow over the edge of the chair and my chin on my arm. I’d only just begun learning when we’d been together. I hadn’t felt confident enough to read him at that point.

  “Still too afraid to read me?” he teased. I raised an eyebrow. I’d never offered to read him because I wasn’t comfortable with my skills—but he’d never asked either.

  “Do you want me to?” My heart thumped heavily in surprise.

  “I might be curious.” He opened the fridge and pulled out some tonic water, pouring it into the cups.

  “Well then, I might consider it,” I returned.

  He chuckled, bringing the drinks back over to the table.

  Taking the glass from his hand, it was my turn to ask questions. “Have you talked to your sister?”

  “Which one?” He took a sip, his lips thinning as he swallowed.

  “The one who wants you to work with her.” The burning fizz of the gin and tonic bubbled down my throat, followed by the subtle sweetness of the fruit.

  “No.” His stare on me hardened, but I wasn’t going to let it go.

  “I just don’t understand.” I sighed, taking another large sip far too soon after the first one. Fine. I had plenty more questions that I wanted to know about. He’d asked about my past, now I wanted to know about his. “So, where did you go? All those months after your accident?”

  When I looked up, his gaze was out the back sliding-door. The sun had set so there really wasn’t much to look at—just darkness.

  “What? Is something out there?”

  “Yeah.”

  My pulse jumped. “Wait, what? What’s out there? What did you see?” I asked frantically.

  He looked back to me with a smile. I should have known we’d gone for too long without something to alleviate the tension between us.

  “A hot tub.”

  “No,” I replied immediately. “I’m good.”

  “You sure about that?” His eyes roamed down my body, making me want to feel better. “We always have a good time in the hot tub, Jessa.”

  “Which is exactly why I’m going to have to say no.” At least until I figured out a way to dissociate my heart from my body.

  “Get in the hot tub with me,” he pressed, eyes darkening to the blue of the sky just before the sun completely sets, “and I’ll answer any question that you want.”

  My mouth dropped. “Are you really bribing me right now? What if I don’t want to know that badly?”

  “Too bad I know that you do.” He smirked and drained the rest of his glass.

  I continued to stare at him, raising my glass in response and gulping down the liquid. I knew what this meant for me, as much as I was going to try to deny it—to resist it. I did want to know that badly. More than that, he needed to talk about it and I selfishly wanted him to talk about it to me. He kept burying his past down deeper and deeper, ignoring the bad that had happened while at the same time letting his anger about it overrun him. He needed to open up. But was I willing to sacrifice myself to make that happen?

  Even though my mind was fighting it, my body was willing to make the sacrifice.

  There was a decision to be made—knowing what the consequences would be. There was a poll going on inside of me: Choose Chance or Choose Caution—and my body and my mind were each weighing in on opposite sides.

  Only later would I realize that my heart had stuffed the darn ballot box with the answer: ‘Chance, please!’

  “I-I don’t have a bathing suit.” All of those were still at my old apartment.

  “Well—“

  “Nevermind! I’m sure Ally has one upstairs somewhere,” I quickly interrupted him, seeing the devilish glint in his eyes and realized that I’d walked myself right into the trap of him suggesting that a bathing suit wasn’t required.

  “I’ll make another round of drinks.” He grinned and as he stood, I knew that he knew what I’d agreed to. I saw the muscles of his chest harden almost imperceptibly, but it was the growing bulge in the front of his sweats that really gave it away.

  I’d already made the bad decision—another drink would hopefully serve to ease the anxiety I had about making it.

  “You’re going to put a suit on, too, right?” I paused on the stairs, arms over my chest in my best attempt to be firm with him. Honestly, it was unreal how much I enjoyed this man’s birthday suit…

  He laughed. “It’s in the laundry room.” Nodding over towards the door to the garage, opposite of which was the laundry room, I realized that he must have washed and hung it up to dry after his appointment this afternoon.

  One more barrier to work through.

  It wasn’t going to prevent the inevitable—but it would delay it.

  Back in Ally’s room, I began to dig through her drawers for any sign of a swimsuit. You’d think that the girl who moved from Florida would have one lying around here somewhere… />
  “Ah-ha!” Tucked in the back of the bottom drawer was a small stash of tiny patches of clothing that passed for swimwear.

  My options were slim: yellow, black, or navy. I wasn’t a fan of dark, but the yellow one looked like I might as well have gone out there naked so black it was.

  Well, this one isn’t much better.

  Examining myself in the mirror, I realized just how little there was to the suit. Pulling it from the drawer might have felt like there was more material since it was made out of some sort of crocheted fabric, but all that did when worn (especially over my chest) was reveal the holes in the pattern and the skin underneath. And forget supporting my breasts in any reasonable fashion, the top barely covered my nipples. The bottom… well… let’s just say that I needed to just get out there and be submerged in the water as fast as possible.

  And that wasn’t the only reason.

  All of my tattoos were visible with this on.

  The flag of Texas stood out against the skin on the top of my foot—a reminder of my roots and of where I had come from; it was the first one I’d gotten when I moved back home, my family and my brothers somehow filling the void that I’d created within myself by leaving Chance.

  Moving up to the juncture between my torso and my left thigh, peeking out from underneath the bikini string was a full rendition of the first card in the Tarot Deck, The Fool. Card number zero because when I started school, I was filled with the sense of unlimited potential. The rising sun showing the beginning of my journey. The white rose a symbol of purity and innocence (ok, not quite the truth in certain areas.) Most importantly, the mountains in the background representing the realm of the Spirit that he (and I) had just left and would spend my life trying to regain. And here I was, back in the mountains…

  It was also the card that I’d drawn from the deck… the one I’d picked when I was searching for myself in a new place full of new people.

  Next came the one partially obscured in the crook of my left elbow—it was the only one that really needed to be hidden: a heart, half of which was made of a blue and pink ribbon, the symbol for a miscarriage.

  And finally, the most recent addition to my body art was the coordinates of Aspen: 39° 11’ 27.9492’’ N on one line and then 106° 49’ 3.1260’’ W written below it. They were etched on my chest, right over my heart—because it was here where my heart belonged. I’d gotten that one a few weeks after moving back and picking up my friendship with Ally and Tammy. They had given me that—the sense of home that I had been searching for.

  What a sight. I looked like a comic-con comic book character with my bright pink hair and the far-too-sexy swimsuit.

  Groaning, I darted into the bathroom to grab a towel.

  Note to self: no more darting in this bathing suit.

  I paused at the top of the stairs to quickly rearrange all the bits of me that had fallen out of the material in my hasty maneuver.

  Moving carefully down the staircase, I paused as soon as I saw Chance, standing by the back sliding-door, drinks in hand, gazing out the window. With a swimsuit on.

  My fingers dug into the fabric of the towel at my side wishing that they were digging into him.

  He turned and his eyes caught sight of me, practically bulging out of his head. His suit that was already tight across his front, strained further as his gaze roamed down over me. The black triangles of the top only concealing the center of my breasts and not the way that they spilled out from every other edge.

  Side-boob… Under-boob… I had every kind of boob coming out of this swimsuit.

  And even though it barely covered them, at least the fabric of the top obscured the fact that my nipples hardened painfully under his eyes. The color of the suit managed to disguise the reaction to him happening lower on my body, but that was about all it disguised; the bottoms barely covered the slit in my sex.

  Or it wasn’t a problem until that tiny bit of fabric slipped right in there because what the hell else was is going to do when I moved?

  I would have to ask Ally later exactly how this was supposed to be worn with any degree of comfort.

  “Christ, J-bird,” he rasped. A thrill shot through my body as he dragged his eyes down over me, fucking each inch of my body with that ice-blue stare. “That belongs to my sister?”

  Ace of Cups (Upright): This card represents the beginning of love and happiness in a relationship—the kind where you feel butterflies in your stomach. The card says to give and accept love on a new level and open your heart to what is around you.

  EVEN WITH THE TENSION RUNNING through me, I managed a small laugh at his response and nodded as I stepped off of the last stair.

  Granted, Ally was slightly smaller in all the places that the teeny-tiny bikini tried to cover—which meant that it was exponentially more revealing on me. But still.

  “Yeah. Either you can take that with you when you move or I’m going to burn it. No way in fucking hell I’m giving her the option to wear that for King,” he spat protectively as I walked towards him and the door outside.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was probably a reason she’d left these suits here—either she took the far skimpier ones with her or she had no need to wear a suit around Emmett.

  “Is it turned on?” I asked, peeking outside where the chill in the air easily slipped through the opening.

  “Yes—and it’s not the only thing,” came his hoarse reply as he pushed the door open with a spare finger, stepping to the side to let me walk through first.

  Keeping my eyes on the bubbling and steaming Jacuzzi, I stepped out into the cold. There wasn’t much snow on the deck, but the stone still felt colder than frozen underneath my bare feet.

  Another reason to move quickly.

  Darting to the edge of the tub, I lifted one leg over the edge and submerged my right foot. Shit, I hissed as the hot water registered on my skin. The temperature change from incredibly cold to incredibly hot was incredibly painful. Turning my head, I caught Chance staring at me, his eyes dripping with desire. Glancing down, I then realized why.

  I’d darted again.

  And that meant that my top had slipped to the point where the fabric was literally caught on the hardness of my nipple.

  “I-I’ll take it with me; Ally will never know,” I stuttered, quickly adjusting myself and swinging my other leg up and over into the water. As I began to slide down into the scalding water, I then realized the implication of what he—and I—had said.

  I would be leaving. At some point. The dark doubt that coiled in my stomach sparked with hurt. Just because I was getting in this tub… just because my defenses to him were slowly crumbling… didn’t mean that things between us were fixed. I was staying at his house as a guest. I wouldn’t hold onto hope that a future between us was possible, not when there was so much of our past weighing us down.

  You know this, Jessa. Don’t be hurt by something that you know is coming.

  “Actually, in that case, I think I’d rather burn it.”

  My head spun to see him standing right behind me against the tub. The possessiveness that fueled his comment quickly extinguished the gnawing inside of me; he didn’t want anyone else seeing me in this suit.

  Handing me my drink, I watched as he walked to the other side of the tub and swung himself over the edge.

  I wonder if I’ll ever tire of watching the way his muscles move…

  Probably not.

  I sipped the burning liquid and waited for him to make the next move.

  “Where is that?” He stared at the tattoo on my chest.

  “Here.”

  “This hot tub? I didn’t realize that night was so memorable for you. Then again, your ass is one of the most memorable places that I’ve been,” he smirked.

  I rolled my eyes. “Not the hot tub. Aspen.”

  “Why?” His turbulent eyes narrowed on me.

  “Because this is my home. This is where I belong.”

  “Then why did you
go back to Texas?”

  “Because sometimes you don’t realize just what something meant to you until it’s gone.” My words had so many meanings—so many that I wanted to tell him and yet so many that I knew he was too proud and too resentful to ask. I watched his gaze become murky through the fog of steam rising up off the water.

  “Alright, Miss Madison, what do you want to know?” He smiled and took a swig of his drink.

  “Did you land the quad?” I started with something simple, but even that made his face shutter.

  “Yes.” He took another drink. “But not in competition.”

  And that meant that no one knew about it.

  “What was it like?” I wondered, my brain drifting—imagining—what his life was like all the years that I was away at college. “Being famous,” I clarified.

  “Fucking fantastic,” he sneered. “Everybody wants to know you. Everybody wants to fuck you. Literally the King of the Mountain. Emmett missed his calling.”

  My heart cramped at the way he spoke and I can’t stop my gaze from dropping to the rippling surface of the water just above my breasts as I imagine just how many women his popularity had gained him.

  “Don’t.” His voice cut through the fog like a knife.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t act like you didn’t fuck anyone else while you were in Texas,” he answered. My mouth parted in surprise. He tried to sound casually cold for the sake of being honest, but I could see the way his lip twitched; he hated thinking about the reverse just as much as I did.

  But I could only hold his gaze, knowing that he spoke the truth. I could nit-pick and insist that the two guys I’d dated and slept with were nothing compared to the countless women he made it seem like he’d had. But I didn’t because it didn’t matter; it only hurt.

  “Fame is like a drug—only good as long as you’re riding the high. The crash back to reality is paralyzing.”

  “So, why did you leave?” I asked. If he’d told anyone this, it hadn’t gotten back to me. “The way you left hurt so many people that cared about you. They were all so worried. It made no sense…”