From the Top

by Dani Collins

  The whole week went along like that. Nate even went so far as to invite her to go to Sacramento with him.

  I need to organize some things, she prevaricated. She had devolved into a troll who didn’t even bother getting dressed. Why on earth would she want to go to Sacramento and meet his family? Maybe if they had a child together, that would make sense, but they had nothing.

  Are you going back to Sweden?

  Yes, she replied. Soon as she finished staring at the wall with her knees to her chest and the covers pulled over her ears, she would be on her way.

  I’ll come say goodbye before I leave.

  Please don’t. She pulled the covers right over her head.

  He didn’t, and she hated him for that. Hated the whole fucking world.

  *

  Marvin had a busy week and an even busier weekend, not taking a breath until the latest group of telemark skiers had checked out on Monday morning. Even then, he still had paperwork to sign, orders to prepare, and a bar to run—not that anyone was in here looking thirsty. The lounge was empty, which was a blessing when he was playing catch-up.

  He set himself up on a stool at the end of the bar, opened his folder and tablet, then glanced into his notebook for the step-by-step instructions he’d been given by Yolanda, the consulting accountant Rolf had hired. She was a plump, middle-aged, high-energy woman with a self-proclaimed “fetish for order.” She was dividing her time between the lodge and the base, setting up parallel systems and helping with hiring so both teams would be ready and able to work together when the resort came online this fall.

  Marvin hadn’t liked paying someone to bully him into change. There were plenty willing to do that for free. Glory sided with Rolf in almost everything these days and Vivien was so annoyingly capable of talking him into things. Just meet with her, had turned into, You can’t do everything yourself so stop trying to.

  Then Yolanda had schmoozed a schmoozer and one week in, Marvin was privately thinking she might be worth every penny he had agreed to pay toward her fee.

  “Yolanda just texted me,” Vivien said as she entered the empty lounge.

  The way her voice and sudden appearance could make his blood jangle made him feel like a schoolboy. That was why he blushed nearly every time he saw her these days, he told himself. It wasn’t attraction, for God’s sake. He found her intrusive, bossy, and superior.

  Her words penetrated and he frowned in dread. Yolanda was actually willing to take time to show him things. He wasn’t losing her already, was he?

  “About?” he prompted.

  “She found a place to rent short-term in Haven so she doesn’t need a room. She’d rather be in town so her daughter can go to school there.”

  “Oh. Of course.” He sipped the beer he had poured for himself. “You scared me.”

  “Sweet on her, are you?” Vivien helped herself to a glass of wine, rings flashing, eyeliner accentuating the way she slid him a sharp glance.

  This woman disconcerted him on so many levels and he didn’t even have levels. But she spoke for Rolf—which really grabbed Marvin by the short and curlies—and had a better grasp of business dealings than he did. She was also rich and pithy about the lodge, as if it was beneath her. Now she was suggesting he had a thing for the woman she had insisted he hire and work with? All of it put him on his back foot.

  “Seems more in Trigg’s age bracket,” he retorted.

  Her elegant brows lifted. “She’s forty-three.”

  “I’m pushing sixty.”

  “When were you born?”

  “Sixty-one.”

  “You’re only a year older than me and I am nowhere near sixty,” Vivien informed haughtily. “You’re always talking about how old you are. Stop it. We’re barely middle-aged.”

  He chuckled, surprised he’d got a rise out of her, and sipped again. “You don’t look a day over forty. I mean that.”

  She gave a little, “Hmmph,” but her mouth softened. Her gaze slid toward him again. “She’s working out, though?”

  “Who?”

  “Yolanda?”

  “Please don’t gloat, Vivien.”

  She set down her glass. “I’m not. I’m trying to help you. I want to know that I am helping.”

  If he didn’t know better, he would think she sounded hurt.

  “Of course, you’re helping,” he said. “Yolanda wants to make all these changes, which I hate, but she’s willing to show me how to adapt, so you were right, if you want to hear it. Hiring her was a good thing.”

  “I’m not doing it so I can say, ‘I’m right.’ I want you to succeed, Marvin. We all do.”

  “I know.” He frowned at the bills in front of him with Ilke’s initials indicating they’d been checked. Things were ticking along, but he was a little wistful for last year, when Glory had been scribbling on everything. She’d done it resentfully, sure, but at least they’d been a partnership. “I just wish Glory had wanted this as well.”

  “We don’t have them so they’ll live our lives. They have to live their own,” she said gently.

  “I know. But you must have felt something like this with the boys. Did they gravitate to your husband after a certain age?”

  “Oh, my situation was different. Rolf was so angry with all of us, he gravitated to the yetis and disappeared into the snow.”

  Marvin chuckled. So that was what had happened to his daughter. She’d been kidnapped by a yeti.

  “Oskar wasn’t a hands-on father. It was all I could do to get him to watch the boys compete. He loved them, was terribly proud of them, but he was a workaholic. Whether she realizes it or not, Glory is really lucky that you’ve always wanted to spend time with her.”

  He felt himself blushing again, responding to her praise like a damned orphan finally getting a warm meal.

  “I think—” He cleared his throat and shook his head. “Forget it.”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I think I put too much on her. My marriage was not…” He picked up his beer to wet his dry throat. He shouldn’t have started this, but he was here now and forced himself to finish his confession.

  “Kathleen and I were like roommates. You want to talk about a workaholic. She was obsessive when it came to her writing. The only way Glory got into the door of her office was by working for her. I’m glad that she had that. I am.”

  He glanced toward the entrance of the lounge, ensuring his daughter wasn’t sneaking up to hear him criticize her mother.

  “But in the early days, Glory was as disenfranchised as I was. We needed each other. I wasn’t about to look elsewhere for companionship. I didn’t want a divorce. I wanted to be married. But ours wasn’t a great marriage. You kind of let hope carry you along, thinking it will improve, and suddenly two decades have gone by and your wife is sick and… This is my first one, I swear.” He indicated his half-finished beer, truly embarrassed now. “Something about sitting on this side of the bar, I suppose.”

  “No, it’s fine. I guess I imagined that your life must have been like one of her books, that you were living happily ever after.”

  “No,” he said disdainfully. “Nothing like that.”

  “I’m sorry.” She touched his wrist and her gaze was so full of compassion, it bordered on pity.

  He carefully drew his arm away. “In any case, I think I put too much pressure on Glory to fill the gap. I wanted her to want this.” He let his glance flicker around to the beams and old-world décor that filled him with such pride. “At least she’s here. And happy. But it feels very much as though I will be giving her away with the wedding.” His voice cracked and he grew misty.

  “Oh, Marvin.” Vivien rushed around the end of the bar and threw her arm around him, pressing her breast into his shoulder and surrounding him in her warm, floral fragrance. “It will be fine. I promise.”

  “Please,” he protested, completely embarrassed, especially because his lap was springing to life.

  “Oh shit. Sorry—!”

&
nbsp; *

  Vivien jerked from embracing Marvin to see Nate’s back retreating from the lounge.

  “Oh, Nate! Come back. I need to speak to you.” She was flustered, though, having just thrown herself across Marvin like she was taking a bullet for him.

  But a man in touch with his emotions? She’d been a moth to a flame.

  Nate reluctantly came back, gaze averted to the ceiling, hands in his pockets. “I just got back. Thought I’d grab a beer and unpack. I didn’t mean—”

  “That was a friendly hug. We’re commiserating on growing old. Forget it.” She didn’t look at Marvin to see how he was reacting.

  Nate’s chin-dip assured her he would scrub the incident from his mind as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

  “Did you have a nice trip? How was the party?” she hurried to ask.

  “Good. Typical trip. Ate too much.” He slapped his flat belly. “Aiden got into the last of the cake first thing this morning, had a nuclear meltdown on the plane. We’re probably barred for life. What did you want to talk to me about?”

  Right. It was a delicate matter.

  “Let me show you.” She drew him away from Marvin, toward the doors to the patio. “I know this isn’t your area of expertise, but we can’t fit everyone inside the dining room or lounge for the wedding dinner. We’ll need to do it outdoors. Can you organize equipment to clear a space by the pond for a tent? Otherwise, it will be the front parking lot.”

  It was pitch black outside and cold as a witch’s tit, but she opened the door and dragged him onto the patio. It was kept shoveled, but they both halted under the overhang.

  “Um, sure,” he said as the door slammed behind them. “But we don’t need to be out here. We can talk about it in the morning.” He folded his arms, breath fogging in the light cast from inside the lounge.

  “I’m worried about Ilke,” she stated bluntly. “She barely leaves her room.”

  “She’s still here?” He sounded shocked. “She told me she was going back to Sweden. I thought she must be traveling and that’s why she wasn’t answering my texts.”

  “No.” She hugged herself, shuddering against the wind that tried to cut her in half. “I tried to coax her out and she said she might go to her mother’s, but—” Vivien had put the kibosh on that. “I told her to stay here, but I don’t think she’s eating the food I bring her.”

  “Oh, fuck,” he breathed, adding a muttered, “Sorry.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to say how sorry I am, Nate.” She squeezed his wrist. “I’m sure some amount of depression is normal, but—”

  Marvin swung the lounge door open to give them a look that suggested they needed their heads examined. “What are you two doing out here? You’ll catch your death.”

  Vivien shot into the lounge, shivering convulsively.

  Nate followed, expression grave. “Leave that with me,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you.” As she watched him go, something warm draped over her shoulders. Marvin’s cardigan. It was a scratchy wool that held the scent of his aftershave and the heat of his body. The weight was comforting, the old-fashioned gesture more so.

  “I’ve already talked to Rolf about buying a tent,” Marvin said with a hint of affront. “We’ll need one for future weddings. You should have asked me first.”

  Oh, this man and his extremely tender pride. She wanted to hug him all over again.

  Which was so disconcerting, she blushed and made an excuse about going to her room, completely forgetting to give him back his cardigan.

  *

  The knock on her door didn’t sound like Vivien’s gentle request for entry or the polite inquiry from housekeeping. It was way too early for either of them, anyway.

  Ilke rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

  “Ilke,” Nate said, voice a command.

  She ignored him, just as she had his text last night that had read, “You up?” and the one from this morning that said, “Meet me for breakfast.”

  “Speak. Give me proof of life, at least,” he said through the door.

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “Let me in.”

  “I’m sleeping,” she insisted.

  A key sounded in the lock.

  She lifted her head off the pillow. “How—You can’t do that.” She sat up and pulled the covers up to her chin.

  He flashed her a dark glare of frustrated impatience. Then he scanned her room, the one housekeeping hadn’t been allowed to enter. She hadn’t put her dishes in the hallway lately so they were littering the floor and night table. Laundry was something else she was putting off, which was why she was in leggings and a T-shirt under the blankets. Her pajamas were on the floor with her jeans and all the underwear she owned.

  He sighed, gaze snagging on the stack of clean towels she’d taken from housekeeping, but hadn’t used because she hadn’t showered in a couple of days. Maybe more than that.

  She had been convinced it didn’t matter, but now she was really embarrassed of her greasy hair and body odor.

  “Get out,” she said.

  “Get dressed.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Anything but these four walls.”

  “I’m good.”

  “You are not good.” He dipped his chin, brows stern.

  She scratched the side of her face, shoving a hank of hair behind her ear. “There’s nothing wrong with binge-watching sitcoms for a few days. It’s called ‘self-care.’”

  “Is that what this is?” His lip curled as he glanced into a bowl that she may or may not have tasted. She definitely couldn’t remember what it contained.

  “Okay, it’s a pity-party.” She knew she was a mess. Every time she tried to pull herself together, she grew so tired and overwhelmed and scared, she couldn’t face any of it. “I’m allowed one.”

  “You are,” he agreed. “But the police just arrived and the party’s over. Get dressed.”

  “Nate—”

  “Ilke,” he said in a voice halfway between angry and tender. If she didn’t know better, she would call it tough love. Whatever it was, it made her heart tremble like a brittle leaf under the heat of the sun. “This sucks. Wall-to-wall sucks. But there is no other way through it except through it. You get back to whatever you were doing before it happened, even if you’re only going through the motions.”

  She swallowed. “I can’t.” Saying it aloud made her throat burn. No one was going to want her. The thing that she’d been doing, the thing that she loved, was nothing but closed doors. It didn’t want her.

  “Do you need me to help you?” The steel underlying his tone made it more threat than kindness.

  Her lips wouldn’t stay steady. “You can’t.” She hugged her knees, dropping her forehead onto them, hiding from the wasteland that her life had become.

  He dragged at the blankets, jostling her into lifting her head. Then he took her by the arm.

  “Don’t.” She shook him off. Part of it was reflex. She didn’t let men touch her unless she wanted them too, but Nate was different. He broke all her rules. He was the exception to them, and she hadn’t found a way to deal with that. All she knew was that rather than being repelled by his touch, which was why she normally would have jerked away from a man, today it was the other way around. “I’m disgusting.”

  “Shower, then. I’ll wait.”

  She saw nothing but patient determination in his gaze. This was probably how he looked when Aiden kicked up a fuss. If she had had it in her, she might have tried a tantrum, but there was nothing in her. No fight. She sighed, but it was more of a sob, then she climbed from the bed.

  She didn’t want to draw this out. She skipped the shower and washed her face, brushed her teeth, then combed her stringy hair off her face.

  Walking out to the bedroom, she saw he’d stacked the dishes and set them outside the door and gathered her laundry into a pi
le. She dug through it for her hat, to hide her hair, then pulled on dirty socks and zipped a hoodie over her T-shirt without bothering with a bra.

  “I’m not hungry,” she informed him. Maybe she was. Mostly she was starving for hope and those cupboards were bare.

  “Jeans,” he said. “And boots.”

  She sighed, feeling persecuted. Hadn’t life kicked her around enough lately? She didn’t even bother taking off her leggings, just stepped into her rumpled jeans and let him know with a look how beleaguered she felt.

  He nodded as if to say, “That’ll do,” and took her jacket off the back of the door then held the door open.

  She hesitated. He didn’t understand. Leaving this room wouldn’t help. She had nothing.

  He touched her shoulder, lightly pushing her across the threshold, then crowded her all the way out, closing the door behind them. Catching her hand, he dragged her toward the stairs and down them.

  She shook off his hold, finding it too disturbing. Too easy to cling to when she’d been feeling neglected by him and rejected by their baby and dejected by the sport that had always been her salvation.

  He paused at the lobby desk where Paula was covering for Marvin. Vivien had told Ilke she wasn’t needed, which Ilke knew deep down was meant as a kindness. Vivien was giving her time to grieve and recover, but the net result had been one more rebuff.

  “Thanks, Paula.” Nate handed in the key he’d stolen. “Can you see that Ilke’s room gets some attention this morning?”

  “Of course.” She followed them with a curious gaze as Nate led Ilke down the hall and into the kitchen where he asked if they had any leftover breakfast sandwiches.

  “I’m not hungry,” Ilke insisted, but he nodded agreement that a piece of sourdough cut in half and filled with scrambled eggs and a slice of cheddar was fine.

  Nate handed it to her and said, “Eat.”

  She munched on what tasted like sawdust as she followed him outside.

  It was a stunning day of scudding clouds against a true-blue sky, incredibly inviting, but an April Fool’s joke, because it might be above freezing, but that was an arctic outflow wind. It was so cold, her nostrils stung and her eyes watered. Her fingers started to hurt.

  “Need this?” He held her jacket for her and she threaded one arm in, then the other, moving the sandwich back and forth. She dug for the gloves she usually left in her jacket pockets.