“Chase.” The flutter of my eyelashes shatters glistening fragments over my vision. In my chest the pain tightens and brightens, a searing burn when I breathe. “Don’t.”
But Chase doesn’t stop. He can’t. I wanted him unrestrained, didn’t I? But not like this. He’s shaking with rage, latent violence quivering over all that muscle. He’s shouting properly now. Hanne must hear, even upstairs.
“I fucking killed her. I took a kid out on the mountain when I knew she couldn’t handle it. Her life was less important to me than one more stupid ride. I destroyed my parents’ marriage. They can’t even fucking look at me and I don’t blame them. JJ’s spine isn’t the first one I’ve broken. And none of this is any. Of. Your. Fucking. Business, because you have never, ever cared about me.”
After the avalanche of his rage, the quietness feels like a further violence.
We’re so close together. We’re so far apart. The only thing that we share is the heave of our breath.
Over Chase’s shoulders a shudder moves. His hands come up to press over his face, but when I reach for his elbow he bats my hand away.
“So there’s your crash reel, Brooke.” When he turns his eyes back to mine they’re still bright blue, but now it’s all wrong. “I hope it’s what you always dreamed of. I’m just sorry you can’t take a fucking photo of it.”
All that time we said we were being honest with each other, and yet it’s only now that I shake with the effort of really being true.
“It was never just about the photos.” I blink as hard as I can to clear the wetness from my eyes. “They don’t matter. They didn’t mean a fucking thing to me, Chase. I’m sorry for what I said at that hospital. I’m so sorry. About your sister. About your parents.” The words crack over the agony in my chest. Everything is wrong. How did this happen? How did I get it so wrong?
Strong. Be strong. I take a deep breath. “I just wanted …”
It all comes out, when you’re drunk. Why not this, too? When we stand in the wreckage of whatever we had. A thing I didn’t even recognize until it was broken.
Maybe it’s too late to be honest. Or maybe it’s just too late to be afraid.
“I wanted you to be there for me.”
Chase jerks away from me, his laughter a bark of viciousness. “Did you really? I thought you were smarter than that, Brooke. You’ve always made it so clear what was important to you. It was never me.”
“You were—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Chase slams his fists down to the table so hard that the wooden legs scream over the stone floor. “It doesn’t matter.” He punctuates each word with another impact, looking up at me with fire in his stare. “I don’t care. I wasn’t there for you. It was never serious.”
I don’t shake. I don’t step back. I look him straight in the eye, and I say: “Don’t lie.”
Because I know. I know more surely than I’ve ever known anything in my life.
“You were outside that hospital. You were a mess. You hate yourself for not being there. Look at you, Chase. You’re in pieces because you want to be here. For me. Because you care.”
Chase drops his head between the bracket of his arms. A breath swells over his torso, pressing the muscles of his back to his T-shirt.
I blink as fast as I can, swallowing against the lump in my throat. “You didn’t kill her. You were a kid and you made a mistake. You’re just fucked up and hurting. And it’s okay. We’re all fucked up. We’re just—we can do better.”
I’ve never felt so naked as I do in the silence after.
Chase doesn’t say a thing. He rubs one forearm over his eyes before he reaches for his bag. The zip is so loud in the quiet.
It might be the same Sharpie he used on that French girl’s tits. It seems a million years ago. It doesn’t matter at all.
“I ride.” Chase’s voice is turned down over the scrap of paper he scribbles on. “That’s it. That’s all I’m good for.” He digs the pen over the paper like a knife through flesh, jerking through the words.
When he throws the paper at me it has his signature on it, cut like a wound.
I give Brooke Larson permission to use whatever pictures of me she wants, forever, for any purpose.
“That’s it.” He’s panting. I can hear the rasp of his breath through his lungs. The burn of it. His chest heaves as he stares at me. “That’s all I can do for you.”
My eyes are burning again. I don’t want the paper that lies between us.
“I want you.” The wobble in my voice is so pathetic.
Chase looks at me, and looks, and then makes a grab for his bag.
His voice is cold as mine was outside that hospital.
“I don’t care.”
29
“Can I come in?”
Pop-pop’s voice is so gentle. I feel bad for pushing him away. But in my cocoon of bedsheets I just want to be left alone.
Especially when I’ve been crying since I got into bed.
Since Chase left.
“I’m fine.” My voice has a telltale rasp, even if it’s muffled by the comforter I’ve pulled up to my forehead. “Thank you. I just want to sleep.”
There’s a pause before the door clicks open. Quickly I brush my hand over my cheeks, wiping away traitorous tears.
“You don’t sound very fine.”
The bed sags as Pop-pop sits down beside me. The gravity of his body draws mine in. For a while I resist it, remaining curled and alone with my back to him—and then it’s too much. All of it. I’m clumsy and awkward, rolling with my arm in its cast. But I need more than anything to press my face into Pop-pop’s chest, just like I did when I was a little girl.
Pop-pop’s hand is familiar in my hair. His worn fingers stroke gently through my curls, separating out the strands, smoothing away knots.
Pop-pop, the man who never goes.
“This isn’t just about the avalanche, is it.”
It’s not a question. Pop-pop knows. And I can’t lie anymore, anyway. Not like I did in the airport, or on the ride home, or over dinner when I kept that blank look plastered to my face.
I hunch up in a tangle of limbs and sob into his shirt.
“I thought he—I thought he—and he doesn’t. I fucked it all up, and he doesn’t.”
Pop-pop’s whiskery beard tickles over my forehead as he presses a kiss to my hairline. His voice is a soothing rumble deep in his chest. “The one you spoke about every time you called home?”
I’m so upset that I even fail at being properly embarrassed.
“Mr. Austin,” Pop-pop murmurs thoughtfully. “With that Christmas present. And you”—he pauses for delicacy—“mucked it all up.”
I don’t wail. That’s not who I am. I don’t sob. I definitely don’t need my Pop-pop to hold me like a little girl.
But I do all of those things, because it hurts so much. Because even if we can make our words lie, our bodies tell the truth.
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know something and I—I’m so stupid. I knew what would happen. I knew. He was always going to go.”
Pop-pop listens, his arms slowly wrapping tighter about my body as he begins to rock gently back and forth, his chin coming to rest lightly on the crown of my head.
“You’re not stupid.”
I shake my head, tears shattering to fall over my cheeks. “But it happened to Mom. And Peter walked out. And—I said I wouldn’t do this again. I promised myself. And I’m still here.”
I don’t want Pop-pop to go. As he leans back I chase the comforting warmth of his vest against my cheek for as long as I can. Only once he’s far back do I turn my face up toward him. Snot is sticky under my nose and my cheeks are damp with tears. I know how much of a mess I must look.
Pop-pop brushes his thumb along the line of my cheek, sweeping away the wetness.
Seeing him almost every day, it’s easy to look at his face and see the man who chased me around the yard when I was a little girl and who taught me to ski, held u
p between his legs.
But in this moment I see him as he really is.
He’s always been proud of not losing his hair, but it’s entirely gray now. Tufts of it sprout from his ears. His face is worn with lines. Good lines. Lines from the sun and the snow, from that deep booming laugh that sounds like home. Lines from a life well lived.
A life he’s already lived most of.
His smile is radiant with tenderness, and the concern crinkled over his forehead isn’t separate from that. It’s part of the same love, too. “I do worry about that mother of yours. Twenty-four years alone.”
“She’s got us,” I protest.
Pop-pop laughs, a low chuckle. “I know she does. But I remember …”
His sigh seems to come from years away.
“I loved your nana. Being with the most perfect person for forty years … That’s all God gave us, and I’m grateful for it, but I would have had forty thousand if I could. Because you know, you don’t remember the bad bits. And in a long marriage, there are always a few.” He tilts a wry grin at me. “I don’t remember the women before her. I don’t remember the times we fought. I remember how she looked at twenty-one on the day I met her. I remember how she looked when she held your mom for the first time. And all the hurts along the way …”
I’m entranced. Just watching, listening, as the man I’ve always looked up to opens his heart.
“It’s one thing to love and lose. But to have never had that? To never have really loved someone, and been loved back?” He sighs. “That’s no way to live a life. So afraid of bad things happening to you that you never let anything happen to you at all. Your mom …”
But it’s me he looks at.
“Sometimes love hurts us,” Pop-pop says, his eyes fixed to mine as if he hands over something precious. “Sometimes we make a hash of it. But you have to be brave, Bumble. Because if you think it’s real …”
He tweaks my nose like he has since I was a little girl.
“Taking risks is what your heart is for.”
All the days blend into each other, and all the nights are aching.
At least I have Alex, who’s at my house more often than her own. And there are all the texts and calls from Hanne, who’s gone to see Hunter compete at the Air+Style competition in Austria. She sends me photos of the terrifyingly huge jump, and continues lighting up my phone for hours: the awards ceremony, the after-party, every shot showing Hunter with a different blonde bombshell on his arm.
Most precious of all there are the calls from JJ. In all the shit that is my life now, it’s pure happiness to hear that he’s walking and his prognosis is improving. First he transfers back to a local hospital in his home state, and a week after that he lets me know he’s moving back into his house in Jackson’s Hole, Wyoming.
I didn’t even know he had a house. It’s hard to imagine any of the crew having a permanent residence when they spend all of their year traveling the world.
There are still things we don’t talk about. I don’t know how to make the words, and his occasional dark silences warn me away from trying. How can I talk about boarding, when he’s been told he’ll never do it again?
When JJ mentions Chase in passing I don’t say a thing about that, either.
But I miss him. Chase.
At night I touch myself and think of what it was like when he touched me. He gave me more pleasure than I ever thought I could feel, our bodies moving so perfectly together that the lines between us seemed not to matter anymore. I remember how I burned with want, and how as we tangled in the darkness all of our edges blurred so that his bliss sparked beneath my skin, and his appetite made me hungry.
But though those are the easiest memories to bear, they’re not the only ones that I cling to even as they hurt.
I remember the fluttering happiness of being swung onto his back, struggling against his hold without wanting to escape at all. I remember the stolen moments I watched him making glühwein in Laax, and the mornings waking up next to him in Bella Coola. I remember snowball fights and poker lessons and Clif-bar peace offerings.
I remember all the hours we spent in silence together, watching the mountains and knowing that we didn’t have to speak, because there was nothing words could say. We already knew.
But not all the memories are bittersweet. Some of them are only bitter.
Most of all I think about that night we argued outside the hospital. When he reached for me, and I pushed him away before I even heard his side of the story. When I made sure that I was hard, and invulnerable, and closed. When maybe he might have been something else, if I let him.
My kind of crazy.
I think of the way he’d hold me when no one was watching. His hand finding mine under tables. In the dark. On the snow.
Not serious. I know we said it over and over. But in the dark, it’s easier to think that maybe, just maybe, I was lying to myself.
Maybe there are truths we tell with our mouths, but the truths we tell with our bodies are stronger.
It’s mid-March when my cast is removed. They all say I shouldn’t board again so soon. The stern-faced doctor. Mom. Alex. Only Pop-pop seems to accept my decision. I wonder if he sees straight through me. Maybe he knows I’m afraid that if I don’t ride now, I’ll never get over the fear.
Boarding has been so much a part of me for so long. I can’t lose it. Not even if the snow I’ve loved my whole life has become a threat, each innocent flake dousing me in panic like freezing water.
When I get off the chairlift I have to sit down, my heart hammering in my chest and my breath trapped tight in my throat.
“It’s okay,” Alex murmurs as she strokes the small of my back. “Just breathe. We don’t have to do this if you don’t want.”
I look down at the slopes. I think of Chase. Of Hanne. Of JJ, who loved the ride so much that he was willing to give anything for it.
JJ, who’s now lost the thing that gave his life meaning.
And I think of what Pop-pop said, too. That risk is what your heart is for.
I push to my feet, ignoring the nausea and the tremble in my hands. This time I’m not going to let what I’m afraid of hold me back.
Because hiding from things just fucks them up, too.
No matter what happens, you have to get back on the slope and ride again.
Or else why are we here?
It feels like a hundred years since I was turned down for Wild. An age ago that I went to Laax on the hunt for Illuminations photos. In truth, it was only a few weeks ago that I thought about the deadline every day.
Now it’s here, and I feel listless about it. This should mean more than anything to me. It’s all I’ve wanted for years. And yet it doesn’t feel very important anymore.
I know the photo I’m going to send in. It’s one of Hanne back in Laax. We’re high up in the mountains, and she’s flying through the sky. It’s a beautiful photo: a tiny woman in a huge landscape, the flow of her bright pink hair a challenge to the whole indifferent world.
But once I’ve tapped my contact information into the submission form, I hesitate. My fingers twitch over my MacBook’s keyboard, searching through the files. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.
Not until I’m there.
I can’t remember when I edited the photo. I must have done it in a fit of pique. There’s a logical part of my brain that thinks—I did well. In my anger and my hurt I made something striking, something bold.
But most of me is simply breathless.
It’s not a lovely photo. It’s not pretty. It’s not nice. It’s savage and raw, brutally uncompromising. Chase stares directly at the camera. Through the camera, and into me. His eyes are so brightly blue, and the bloody mess of his face so vibrantly red. All that life, dripping out of him and onto the snow. It trickles from his nose. It wells from his split lip.
And the look he gives me …
It’s not sweet tender kisses.
It’s honest enough to burn.
> And I see more, after all that’s happened. I understand the intensity that I couldn’t name when I lifted the camera to my face to catch Chase’s defiance and his rage. I see his pain. I see his crumbling defenses.
I see the yearning in his eyes. Reaching. Seeking. Hoping beyond hope for me to …
It doesn’t matter anymore.
What matters is that the look is true.
And it’s serious.
At least—then, it was serious. Before I pushed him away.
Before I realized that not serious was safe … but maybe it wasn’t what I needed.
I like to capture the moment someone is perfect. That’s what I said to Chase. But I look at this photo, this amazing, unbelievable photo, and I think—that’s not true.
I like to capture the things that are real.
It’s too late for me to write a long email. Maybe that’s a relief. I don’t know what I’d say, anyway.
We’ve never been very good at using words.
This is the photo. I know you signed a release in Bella Coola, but I need a proper one. Please sign the attachment.
I hope you’re okay.
B
I don’t expect Chase to reply so quickly. I’m only just back from getting a hot chocolate when I hear the delicate ping from my MacBook.
The release is attached, his signature on it like a scar. Am I surprised to see it? Not really. But I am surprised by my lack of surprise. That somehow I knew he’d do this, even if we’ll do nothing else for each other anymore.
From: Chase Austin
To: Brooke Larson
Attch: release.pdf
30
“Brooke! Come through.”
I lean against the wall to toe off my boots, slipping my keys into my pocket. My thumb lingers over the leather loop of the key chain Chase gave me. It’s almost unthinking now. Almost.
“I’m coming,” I shout back. “Just let me—”
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