Unraveling Josh

by Edie Danford

  “Your hair,” I croaked.

  He shoved his glasses onto his nose and smiled crookedly. He ran his hand—his right hand with absolutely zero rings on his fingers—over it. It was slightly damp, a little bit wavy on the top and it gleamed like…well, like platinum, in the sun. The difference from how he used to look and the contrast between the dark scruff on his chin and the color on his head—wow. It did something to his eyes, to his cheekbones and maybe even his mouth. I couldn’t stop looking at him.

  “Yeah,” he said, a little bit sheepish. “I needed a change.”

  He looked both more and less like himself. More gorgeous and less gorgeous. He seemed—

  “So,” somebody said. I dragged my gaze away from Nick’s platinum shininess to see Aldrich of the snazzy gear adjusting his goggles. Which he wouldn’t need for these conditions. And that made him look like an angry alien grasshopper with a tiny head.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said in a snooty, nasal voice that hollered my parents named me Aldrich and so they must hate me. “When are we getting started?” he asked. “I have something scheduled directly after this.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. Sorry. Let’s get started.”

  I walked stiffly over to the bench where Frank had laid out the skis. “Do we all remember whose are whose?” I asked. Because, yes. Skis were a good place to start with a ski lesson.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the Hannahs helping Nick to his feet. They laughed together as she helped him brush snow off his pink puffy ass. He put his hat on his silvery hair, covering it completely.

  I cleared my throat and started what I hoped was a coherent explanation of getting one’s feet into one’s ski boots and then onto skis. It seemed to be working because within a few minutes we were at the base of the trail and everyone had skis on. Including me.

  I showed them some basic moves of classic skiing—how to fall, how to turn, how to stop, how to double pole—feeling incredibly self-conscious about every single move I made in my tight-fitting pants and jacket, hoping, praying I wouldn’t think the kind of thoughts that would make things uncomfortable—more uncomfortable—for me.

  After my demonstration, I had each person show me some moves individually. They were all young and relatively athletic and I didn’t foresee having to linger on the way, way beginner’s beginning stuff.

  The girls caught on right away, no problems. Aldrich needed some pointers, which he assimilated well, despite his blank stare as I explained things.

  Nick brought up the rear.

  He did well with the stop and start on the flat part of the trail, but as soon as he tried for a stop on the slight slope he faltered.

  “Easy,” I called. “Don’t flail.” Yes, this was my expert advice to my student who was on skis for the very first time.

  He started to go over backwards, but, yeah, the skis got in the way, and he fell heavily to his side, his pink poufy legs splaying in crazy angles.

  “God, Nick.” I was at his side in two strokes. “Are you okay?”

  He looked up at me and laughed. “Yeah. Sorry. Told you I was a klutz.”

  “Yeah, well. Some people have an easier time with balance than others. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with coordination or being a klutz or whatever.”

  He nodded. “Balance has always been difficult for me. When I’m trying my hardest to be steady—that’s when things always seem to get fucked up.”

  I blinked down at him.

  “Should we keep going, Josh?” one of the girls called from a couple dozen feet down the trail.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “Just take it slow.” Brilliant advice coming from this very brilliant instructor, for sure.

  I realized Nick was still lying in the snow and probably had no clue how to get up.

  Yep. My brilliance was blinding.

  I showed him the best way to get up and found myself laughing—a little too giddily—when he started to giggle. Another thing an instructor probably shouldn’t do—laugh hysterically as he helps his student to his feet. All while macking on said student in a big, bad way.

  “Thanks,” he said. His cheeks were flushed and the peachy-red color made his dark eyes seem darker. Or maybe it was just the effect of looking at him up close through polarized lenses. He rubbed a bead of sweat from his temple. It was about twenty-eight degrees. Too warm for what he was wearing.

  “You’re welcome. Um, Nick…”

  “Yeah?” He licked his lips. My gaze had drifted to his mouth and now it shot back up to his eyes. That “yeah” had been asked in his best I-wanna-fuck voice.

  Was he flirting with me? Oh damn. That fall he’d just taken—had it been on purpose? It was obvious that Mr. I Don’t Do Sports had somehow found out I was teaching this class and he’d signed up for it. On purpose. To see me. Right?

  I stared at him, searching for clues. I remembered Zach’s warning. He’s gonna realize what he’s missing, and he’ll come crawling back. I’d tell him to fuck off but I know you won’t wanna do that—so be friends if you have to, but don’t let him fuck you again.

  I didn’t see seduction in his eyes. The only thing I saw there was hope. And maybe something else. Affection? Longing? I blinked. No. I was probably just imagining that shit—projecting or something.

  “Next time…” I said slowly, watching his mouth. The tip of his talented tongue darted quickly over the contour of his lower lip—a contour I’d gotten to know rather well with my own tongue. I tried to catch his gaze again but his eyes seemed to be focused on…my thighs and my crotch.

  God. Yeah. Okay. He was working me over here, and I’d been too slow to catch on.

  Tension threaded a tight wire across my shoulders. I put a polite, instructor-esque smile on my face. “Next time, lose the pink poufy shit. You don’t need to make a statement out here. If you don’t have workout gear then plain old sweats would be better. Unless there’s a foot or more of fresh snow and it’s ten degrees out. And then we probably wouldn’t be having class.” I coughed a bit, realizing I was probably sounding like a know-it-all ass.

  His teeth came down on his plump lower lip. He looked down at himself. “Lena lent this to me. Her mom ordered it because it was way on sale, but turns out it’s ginormous on her. Lena thought it might work for me.” He glanced at me and shrugged. “But she’s from Rio, so maybe her idea of cold protection is skewed?”

  “Um…yeah.” Now I had no clue what he was doing—flirting, working me over, being clueless, being cute as fuck. Definitely that last thing. Because Lena helping Nick to try on her snow gear was a very cute image.

  I tipped my head toward his rapidly disappearing classmates. “I need to catch up. There are other people in the class.” Duh. What the heck was wrong with me? My tone was terse, impatient. I needed to calm the hell down.

  “Okay.”

  I looked back at him. He’d begun to move again but he was being way too tentative. Bolder strokes with a more definitive weight shift would help him feel steadier on his feet. Laughter drifted back to us from the girls—they were really starting to book. In fact, I’d lost sight of them.

  I abruptly realized teaching was eighty times more difficult when you had a single student whose skills were way behind the others’. This was my first attempt at teaching beginners how to ski and I’d done all my academic teaching at Harvard and Ellery, where—spoiled brat that I was—my students were all stellar overachievers.

  “Are you going to be all right?” I asked. “Why don’t you hang here while I go check on the others and I’ll be back? Then I can show you a few more tips for getting started…and stopping.”

  He nodded. But his gaze kept shifting down to his skis, to the tracks in the snow in front of us and then back to the lodge. He didn’t seem steady.

  “I’ll be fast,” I promised.

  His smile was one I didn’t recognize. Tentative. Slightly embarrassed. When he noticed I was watching, the smile widened in a plastered-on kind of way.

&
nbsp; “That’s cool,” he said. “No worries.”

  I ended up taking longer than I’d thought I would, and when I got back to the beginning of the trail, Nick was gone. I wanted to book toward the lodge and parking area, but the rest of the class was behind me and I had to go slow. We got to the benches and, as I made sure everyone was good getting out of their skis and returning their gear, I kept trying to catch a glimpse of hot pink.

  “What happened to Nick?” one of the Hannahs asked.

  “Um, I’m not actually sure,” I said, taking myself down another several shades from “brilliant”. I’d lost one of my students on our first outing.

  “Oh,” Hannah said, gesturing toward the end of the parking area. “There he is. Talking to Frank.”

  I followed the direction of her gaze. Yeah, there he was. No more pink, but his bright silver hair was a beacon. He had on the same bulky purple sweater he’d worn to class yesterday and a big tote over his shoulder. As we watched, he smiled and saluted Frank and headed up the path leading to the pond and campus.

  “Hope he’s not dropping out,” Hannah said. She had a slightly dreamy look in her eyes as she regarded Nick—a look I understood well.

  “Yeah, me too,” I said.

  After saying goodbye and packing up my gear, I headed to the vending area where Frank was currently holding court.

  “How did it go?” he asked, smiling at me in greeting.

  “Ah…not as smoothly as I hoped.”

  He raised his brows.

  I shrugged. “Turns out teaching skiing might be harder than doing it?”

  He laughed. “You’ll get the hang of it. Every worthwhile thing takes time.” He gestured at the coffee bar. “Can I buy you one?”

  “That would be great, thanks. I’ll treat next time.”

  “You got it.”

  After getting our mugs and doctoring them up with cream and sugar, we sat at a nearby table. “So,” I said, “I’m embarrassed to say I lost track of one of the students on the first run—Nick McQueen.”

  Frank raised his bushy brows again.

  “The guy who was decked out in pink?” I gestured to where I’d last seen him. “I saw you talking with him after.”

  “Ah, right. He said he wasn’t sure he was advanced enough to be a beginner yet.” Frank chuckled. “I told him there was no way to know that after an hour-long session. I think I convinced him not to quit. But only after I told him that if he quits then the class gets cancelled.”

  “Oh. Maybe I should contact him and let him know I can give him pointers before or after class?”

  “Sure. But don’t stress about it. We’re lucky to have you for the time we have you. And you know how students are—sometimes they get an idea they want to do something and, when it’s not what they expect right away, they move on.” He shrugged. “Happens all the time.”

  I nodded as fragments of conversations I’d had with Nick played their usual bash-and-crash games in my brain. Today’s match-up had a few new nuances. As my dad likes to say—I don’t have a lot of stick-to-itiveness. When I’m trying my hardest to be steady—that’s when things always seem to get fucked up. It’s okay if you don’t remember me, Josh.

  “So tell me about this injury of yours,” Frank said. “And what your plans are to get back in shape.”

  I settled back in the metal chair and tried to come up with coherent answers to questions I’d asked myself a thousand times in the last several months.

  Nick

  I WAS SHAKING out my borrowed snow pants and jacket in my room—luckily my sweat didn’t seem to have made it through my T-shirt and sweater—when I heard Kelsey’s distinctive knock on my door.

  “Come in,” I said.

  She was carrying Todd—who had yet another new chew toy in his chompers—and smiling. When I straightened and met her eyes, her smile faded.

  “That bad, huh?” She put Todd on the floor and plopped on my bed.

  “Oh yeah.” I took off my sweater and winced at the condition of my tee. Ugh. Nervous sweat was so rank.

  “What happened?”

  I shrugged. “He seemed gobsmacked I was there. And not in a good way. Things got worse when the skiing started. I suck. I wiped out. He had to haul my ass out of the snow.” I thought back to the sound of his laughter as he’d tried to upright me. And how that awesome sound had fired up all kinds of hopeful things in my head and heart and body.

  And then I remembered how his eyes had fixed on my mouth. I’d known exactly what he’d been thinking about. Sex. Kissing, sucking, tonguing, biting, licking—any and all of that stuff. And I’d seen the exact moment when he’d remembered my skanky slimeball status when it came to all things sex-related. The way his beautiful eyes had shut down on me had hurt way more than it had hurt to wipe out on those super-slippery, treacherous waxed pieces of wood called skis.

  In fact, I’d take 803,458 wipeouts over having to see that look on Josh Pahlke’s face.

  “But it’s good that you’re bad at skiing, right? That means you need lots of help. From the hot instructor.”

  I snorted. “The hot instructor is a professional. There are other people in the class who needed his help. So mollycoddling the loser in the pink suit was not his only priority. Thank God.”

  “So you’re just gonna quit? Move on to part two of phase two?”

  “Nah, I’m not gonna quit.”

  Kelsey grinned. “Yay. That’s the right attitude, fella.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not gonna quit because when I told Frank—the guy who organizes all the classes—that I quit, he told me that if I did then the class would be cancelled because it’s too small. And because I don’t want to deny five of my fellow Ellery students the splendor that is Josh Pahlke in skin-tight ski togs, I said I’d come back next week.”

  “Aww,” Kelsey said, laughing. “You’re a saint.”

  “Hardly,” I said, kicking off my sweat-soaked long underwear. “I’m headed to the shower. Where I will be jacking off at least twice while thinking of my teacher.”

  “Gross! How could you think of an old man like Ira Pearlstein like that?”

  I threw a pillow at her and missed. Todd barked. Kelsey scooped him up and followed me out the door. “Have fun,” she called as I headed down the hall to the bathroom.

  “Most fun I’ll have all week,” I said. Might’ve been funny if it hadn’t been true.

  Josh

  WHEN I SAW Nick at the fitness center on Friday I was torn between happiness and dismay. Earlier in the week I’d tried to contact him about what had happened with skiing—I’d wanted to apologize for being weird and to offer him some time before or after class to work on the basics. I’d checked in with the History Department’s secretary for his contact info, and I’d learned they’d put a tag on his data—something stating he preferred to be contacted via a phone number for Vegan House, through campus snail mail, or in person during class. He didn’t have a phone. Which was weird. Because, I mean, why? Was he making some kind of statement? Had he developed some kind of phobia or concern about wireless waves or battery-caused brain damage?

  I just couldn’t imagine Nick afflicted by any of those things.

  But I also couldn’t imagine Nick working out at Ellery’s high-tech, deluxe fitness center, either. I couldn’t help but think: The dude is officially stalking me—first the history seminar, then the skiing, now the fitness center. Why the hell else would he be here late on a Friday afternoon?

  But after I’d settled onto a bench to start working my quads, I noticed he wasn’t just loitering or furtively watching the door. No, he was actually doing some lifting. And getting the full treatment—the very full treatment—by one of the trainers.

  They moved from butterflies to quad lifts to lat rows. And by the time he was on the floor with the ball doing Russian twists—and looking none too shabby in compression shorts and a tight tank—I was ready to walk over and ask the trainer what the hell he thought he was doing.

&n
bsp; I’d worked with plenty of trainers in my life. And I knew the difference between a healing touch, a teaching touch and a touch that said, “I want to fuck you like there’s an asteroid headed for earth and we have ten minutes to live.”

  This guy—he was squat, built (of course), had a shaved head, a beard and a big-time bear vibe—was definitely blurring the lines between teaching Nick and warning him about impending asteroids.

  Plus, he was like fifty years old. He needed to keep his hands off my boy. Um, not my boy. But any guy at Ellery. Or girl. Really. It was just unprofessional.

  I got off the bench and strode over.

  Nick grunted softly as his torso twisted in time to the numbers the bear was chanting. “One-two, three-four…”

  The sounds he was making and the sight of his abs twisting was doing twisty things to my own damn body parts. And then there was his hair. God. I wanted to put my hands on it so bad. See if felt as shiny as it looked. See if the short waves felt similar to the long ones.

  “So you think old Vlad Putin does this Russian twist thing?” Nick was asking in his husky-sexy Nick voice. His dark eyes gleamed under the weight room’s bright, recessed lighting.

  The guy laughed. His pecs moved under his mesh shirt like waves lapping against hard-packed sand. “I’m sure he does. Every day. So how does that feel, Nick? Remember, we don’t want to overdo it this first time. Nothing happens unless you keep coming back—”

  Nick finally noticed me. “Josh!” He dropped the ball on his gut with an oof. He shoved it off. “I wasn’t expecting you until—I mean, I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What’s going on?” I looked pointedly at Bear Dude’s hand. Which was clasping Nick’s knobby ankle.

  “Um…” He shot a glance at Bear Dude. Then he looked back up at me. Guiltily? Sheepishly? I couldn’t tell. But he sure as hell was uncomfortable with seeing me here. “I’m working out?”

  He said it like a question. So I answered it that way. “I don’t know. Are you?”