From anyone else, it would be rude. But I’ve shared everything with these girls, from really embarrassing hookups in college to lineup of boyfriends I had through my twenties. They’re allowed to ask some blunt questions.
I tug my lip through my teeth. “Like I said. We’re taking it slow.”
“With the man you were engaged to? Come on, Raquel.” Diane looks at me skeptically. “Be real.”
Meaghan tilts her head. She’s better than Diane at seeing me. “You still feel the same way for him.”
I sigh. “Yes. I mean—it’s complicated.”
“You can say that again,” Brenna’s voice says from behind me over the sound of potato chips crunching between her teeth. She appears a half-second later, coming to put the bowls of snacks down on the table at the end of our loungers before perching at the edge of mine. She nudges my feet with her elbow. “You’re so good for each other.”
“We’re not nineteen anymore,” Diane offers. “It’s not always going to be simple.”
“You can love someone and it’s not enough, I get it.” Brenna waves her hand. “But come on—it kind of is.”
I shake my head. Sure, her husband’s deployments also risk his life—but that’s where the similarities end. “It’s not—it’s not the same as you and Ari.”
Brenna shrugs. “No. But I don’t know if it’s as different as him being a… banker, or whatever.”
“It’s not the same,” I say, and it comes out closer to a snap than I mean. “JJ isn’t doing this for his country. He’s doing it for…”
Meaghan’s eyebrow raises as she watches me, waiting for the words I can’t find.
They’re all watching me.
Brenna catches it before it’s too awkward, squeezing my knee as she leans past for another handful of chips. In college she only ate veggies, but a life beyond athletics is agreeing with her: she’s glowing with health and clearly enjoying the snacks.
“I didn’t mean to upset you. We love you. We support you in whatever you wanna do.”
Meaghan’s hand finds my arm for a squeeze, and as our eyes meet she smiles. “We love you.” And it’s true, but mostly she means: I love you. And that’s true, too.
So why do I find it so hard to tell her how frightened I am? How in love?
How the thing I most need and the thing I’m most afraid of are tearing me apart, piece by piece.
* * *
Over the hours, the years fall away. We order pizza, the others drink booze. We get into our jammies and slob out in the huge TV room, covering the floor with cushions and blankets, watching back-to-back comedies on the huge screens. One by one the girls dip out to make goodnight calls to the people in the lives they’ve grown after college, and then they slip back into the room where we sprawl together like college students again. As if we have no cares in the world.
My own phone buzzes late.
Up for a goodnight call?
I slip out onto the deck, sliding the door shut after me, leaving the girls in their brightly lit, cozy bubble. Outside a breeze has picked up, and the deck is cooling under my feet as I pick my way round out of sight from the others where they’re watching their TV.
JJ picks up on the first ring.
“Hello, gorgeous.”
As soon as I hear his voice, it hits me. My voice is stolen by whatever has lodged itself in my stomach. A twist of too-much-something. Of love, so much love that it drowns me, and fear, a terror that breaks my skin into a cold sweat.
It takes me a moment to force a smile, which he’ll hear even if he can’t see it. “Hey.” My voice sounds strange to me. Hopefully it will be all right over the line. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine, just missing you.” In the background is the lonely sound of the TV. “Are you having a great time with the girls?”
I love him so much. Love doesn’t even seem to cover it. He’s my everything. My family, my future, my hope, my joy. My anchor in bad times. The one I’m always looking for.
And he’s going to—going to—
“Raquel? Are you okay?”
I shake my head pointlessly. “I’m fine. Sorry, I was distracted. Yep, I’m having an amazing time. It’s great to see them all. I can’t believe it’s been a whole year.”
“It’s always the same with your best friends,” JJ says. He doesn’t have the warmth he would if he were thinking of the crew though—of Chase and Hanne, the friends he’s had since he was a teenager. He sounds distracted. There’s a click and then silence, as if he’s stepped out of the TV room. “Are you sure you’re all right? Nothing’s happened?”
“No. No, nothing. I just—we’re in the middle of a film.”
I can hear him wilt, and see how he’s trying to make himself smile, and that makes it hurt worse, this thing that is opening up inside of me, this wound and this fear.
“Sure, I get it. You go have a great time.”
It takes all of my strength to keep my voice steady, to stop myself whirling apart. “I will.”
“Well, give me a call when you next get a chance, I guess.”
I can’t find the words. They’re stuck. The silence hovers.
I can hear his sadness and his confusion. “Uhm. Goodnight?”
“I love you.” The words burst out of me, like the most important thing he can possibly hear. Which they are. Whether they’re begging or just so he knows or—I can’t even tell anymore. But I have to say it. “I love you so much.”
“Hey. Hey, baby. I know.” His voice drops softer, as if he’s trying to get closer to me. If he were here, he’d wrap his arms around me, and I’d be able to collapse into them. “I know, Kel. And I love you.” He pauses, and then like we always used to say: “Big love. Always.”
Big love. It was a description and a promise and it’s still true—it’s still always been true.
But he’s going to choose boarding.
He’s going to try to get out there again.
And if he does, he’s going to die.
I don’t know how I get through our goodbyes. It’s all a blur. It’s only when I hang up that I realize that Meaghan is here. I don’t know when she arrived. I just know that she’s holding me suddenly, and I can’t hold in my tears anymore. I’m sobbing against her shoulder, curling up inside of the strong grip of her arms.
“Shh,” she whispers. “I’m here. I’m here, sweetheart.”
In her arms, I let it all out. All of that tension. All of that fear. All of this everything that has been sweeping over me for so long. The feelings I tried to walk away from for a whole year. The feelings I’ve let back in. This love and all the painful, scary things caught up in it.
“I can’t lose him,” I sob messily against her. “I can’t. Meaghan, I can’t survive knowing that—knowing that every time he goes it might be forever and—what if he dies, what if he…”
“I know,” Meaghan whispers. She presses her face to the top of my head, tilting it so that she can press a kiss to my hair. “I know how afraid you are.”
“How can he choose doing this over keeping me safe? How can he choose it over me?”
Any other time, it would sound so pathetic. Now I can let it all swamp me. I can show it, all this fear I keep so tightly hidden. Because my best friend is here, and she’s never letting me go.
“I know, baby. I know.” She squeezes me tighter, and it feels good to be breathless and pinned in her arms. Like this is safety.
“I love him,” I sob. “I love him so much.”
I can feel the breath sigh from her. She turns her head, shifting her grip around me, as if she comes to settle here—with my forehead pressed to her neck, and her looking out at the world.
“He loves you too.”
But the way she says it, it’s not an answer.
It doesn’t need to be. All I need to know is that she’s here, right at my side. Looking after me. Loving me. No matter what.
“I can’t do this again, Meaghan,” I whisper. “I can’t lose him
again.”
She doesn’t have anything to say to that. There isn’t anything to say. She just holds me, on and on in the growing blackness, and we stand together in the night.
We’re rooming like we used to be, and she reaches out in the darkness across the gap between our beds so that we can hold hands, just like we did when we were students together.
JJ
She’s leaving again.
I can hear it in the silences in our phone calls. I can hear it in the way she struggles to control her breathing. The way she struggles to control herself. To hide herself from me.
She picks up every night, or calls herself. But something is changing. Something is growing between us, and I can’t bear it. Can’t bear her pain or mine. Can’t bear that there’s this thing between us that we can’t talk about it, even if we try.
I can feel her pulling away from me, and it’s killing me slowly, one breath at a time.
Once again I’m watching something big and hungry race toward me, and I can’t stop it. I can’t escape. I can only stand here and watch as it comes to destroy everything I love.
At night I dream of it again—the darkness and the pressure and the whirling. The feeling of drowning in cold.
She’s going to go. She’s going to leave me. All this time—all the way we’ve come—and she’s going to choose a life that isn’t ours.
I walk around in a daze. Even the physiotherapist comments that I don’t seem myself. And I’m not. I stop partway through my homework when he’s away, just staring out of the window at the valley and the mountains beyond.
We’re tied so closely together, the two of us, that I can feel her pulling at the other end of the line between us. I can feel her cutting at the bonds between us. I can feel her trying to steel herself for that jump.
Just like I did in that helicopter all those months ago.
I try to tell myself that it isn’t true.
But there are some things you don’t get to decide. Sometimes you don’t get to decide what hits you.
When Chase and Brooke get back, he calls to ask if I want to come over to dinner—but I don’t. I really don’t want to see Brooke. It’s nothing personal. She’s one of us. But the idea of seeing her and Chase together, in love and a couple and…
Chase doesn’t ask any questions. “Sure. You wanna hit up a bar?”
“Yes,” I surprised myself by saying, and so that’s why I’m here: sitting at a table in the closest thing Jackson has to a dive, slowly turning my sleeve of a local IPA around and around.
“Raquel having a good time in Tahoe?”
Of course it was always going to come around to this. We’ve spoken about Brooke and Chase’s vacation (sickeningly happy) and their plans for the next few days (here, to hang out with me, perhaps to head out on a hike.) There was always going to be this moment, when Chase looks at me past the lick of his dark hair.
“Yeah. It’s good for her to see the girls. Be able to talk to someone about this. You know. Taking care of me.”
“It’s been a time,” Chase agrees. It’s the understatement of the century. He leaves the air free for me, space for me to continue saying whatever it is that I need to get off my chest.
“It’s killing me having her away,” I say finally, looking down at the bubbles of my beer.
“Of course you miss her, man. After all that happened…”
I shake my head. “No. I mean, yeah. But it’s not just…”
Chase keeps watching me as he takes another huge mouthful of beer.
“She’s gonna go,” I say finally. I have to take a deep breath for it and then it all comes out in a rush: shesgonnago, one push. And then it’s like the floodgates are opened, and I’m pushing on, hunched over my beer, as if I can make myself so small that no one can see me, even in this booth the two of us hardly fit in, our legs bumping each other under the table. “She’s going to leave me again. She’s going to decide that she can’t do this, like she decided last time, and then…” I dip my head, scraping my fingers through my hair. “Fuck.”
Chase grunts as he watches me down about half of my beer.
“You don’t know that,” he says when I’m done.
“I can feel it,” I bite back, “every time we speak on the phone it’s like I can—feel her getting further away from me.”
Thank god Chase doesn’t make an obvious joke about Tahoe already being pretty far away. Instead I can see the line of his jaw moving as he carefully works out what he’s going to say.
“She’s head over heels for you,” he says. “You’re wild about her. You two are meant to be together. You’ve just gotta work it out.”
How do I tell him? That the issue isn’t how in love we are. I can hear it in her voice every night on the phone, the desperate way she says I love you. Like she’s trying to convince herself it’s enough.
Or trying to remind me, like some sort of sick comfort, before she pushes me away for good.
The thought lodges in my guts like a fist, sending a wave of nausea through me.
Chase’s hand is surprising at my shoulder. I look at it for a moment as if to check what it is. His grip is lingering, firm. When I follow the line of his arms to his face I find his eyes intense, fixed on me.
“Hey. We don’t get endless second chances.”
I laugh at him. “Tell me about it.”
Maybe it’s not what he means. His lips thin for a moment, but he doesn’t say a thing.
“She’s going to leave me,” I say to the beer. “I’ve lost her. I’ve—maybe I’ve lost riding. I didn’t think that at first, I was so goddamned angry, but now I think maybe—”
“I know I’m the last one who you’d figure would be pointing this out,” Chase interrupts, “but you know… It’s interesting that you had to remind yourself that you’re upset about maybe losing riding.”
I stare at him.
Chase shrugs as if he didn’t just drop a bomb. “Kinda says something, doesn’t it?”
Dam straight he’s the last one I’d expect to point it out. One, Chase literally didn’t have a girlfriend until a couple months ago.
Two, Chase knows that riding is my whole life.
Of all people, Chase is meant to understand that. Him, Hanne, Hunter—they’re the ones who’re meant to get without questioning what I mean. Why I need this. Why it’s so important to me. They know what it’s like. They ride too. They know what it means.
They’re not meant to be the ones who look at me with tears in their eyes and say: why does this matter so much to you?
Chase shrugs. The hand that has left my shoulder raises, palm up, in a gesture of: easy. Cool it. “It just seems like what you’re having a breakdown about isn’t the riding.”
Is that what I’m doing? Having a breakdown in a bar. I take a deep breath, trying to steady it through my lungs. It doesn’t even hurt anymore. I can do all sorts of shit now. Sure, I can’t do even half of what I used to do. But I’m getting stronger every day. I’m getting better.
My mouth is gaping like a fish as I try to find words.
“This is who I am. She’s always known that. She was fine with it before.”
“Harry O’Donnell,” Chase says. “Annabelle Doucet. Sándor Kovács.”
I just stare at him.
I loved all these people. Loved them the way you love other people who share a great passion with you. They weren’t always my best friends. They weren’t any of my crew. But they mattered to me. To all of us. We were mates, colleagues, competitors. We filmed together, shared podiums together, hung out together in bars below the slopes.
And I’ve been to all of their funerals after their bodies were taken in bags down off a mountain.
Chase’s smile is tiny and sad, only a flicker of his lips. “It’s a dangerous thing that we do.”
For Chase of all people to be bringing this up… but Felicity’s is not a name I’m going to mention.
“This is what I love,” I say finally. “What we love.�
��
Chase nods. “I couldn’t live without it.” He looks down, and then finally shrugs. “I bet that Hanne would give you better advice.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
We sit there in silence.
She’s going to go. She’s already getting ready to pull away from me. At the darkest edges I even think—does she? Does she really love me? If she did, why would she—
Chase looks up with a start as the table bounces against my thighs when I stand up.
“I’m going for a piss.”
I don’t, though. I slip out the back staff door, out into the cool of the night. I need to take deep breaths of fresh air. To try to get my head on straight again.
All I can see is her. Smiling, laughing, crying.
Over and over, crying.
I lean back against the wall and let my head flop back against it, rocking my neck so that the back of my skull grinds over the brick.
Fuck.
The lamplights glisten. I rub the heel of my hand over my face, closing my eyes before taking a deep breath. At my sides I bunch my hands to fists, tightening until they hurt. As if that might let me focus on the pain there rather than the pain in my chest.
I love Raquel more than life itself. And she’s going to go. She’s going to—
She might not, I try to tell myself. Maybe she’s just got cold feet. That’s okay. Maybe…
But I can feel the dread settling in me.
I’m so afraid.
For one moment, I want to call my mom and just cry to her.
Everything swamps in, and I can feel it all.
Raquel hanging above me, held on my feet, as we do that crazy acro-yoga.
“You’re going to drop me.”
But I’m not.
“I’m never going to let you fall.”
She’s tear-streaked and pale at that competition, shaking as she stands before me, moments before it all ends.
“It’s now or never.”
Her face in the half light, smiling and dreamy, and her kiss to the tip of my nose as she agrees: “Big love. Forever.”
Crash: The Wild Sequence, Book Two Page 24