Seduction on the Slopes

by Tamsen Parker

  This thing with Miles isn’t like either of those things, though, so I wait for him to make the call. I’m happy to be next to him, bare naked and satisfied. He’s also not bad to look at. If you like that kind of thing. Who doesn’t though? The man’s got a ridiculous body, he barely looks real. But he feels real, heat radiating off him, and fuck if he didn’t feel real when he was inside me.

  “Better?”

  His question is loud in the quiet even though his voice is soft. Better? Right. I’d told him something I’ve never said to anyone before, not even my boyfriends. They’ve, to a man, loved my parents, thought they were awesome, asked on the regular when they’d be coming through town again. I’d have to grit my teeth and tell them I didn’t know. Because I didn’t. Mostly my family would just . . . show up. Or I’d find out months later they’d been in the next town over and didn’t bother to drive the extra five miles.

  “Yeah.” Even as I say it, my muscles tense and Miles must notice.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked, I just . . .”

  “No, it’s fine.” I will myself to go pliant, slack, to recall the way I’d felt right after Miles had blown my mind. It works, sort of. What I’d like is a nice blunt to take the edge off, but that is not an option. Maybe in an attempt to distract the part of me that’s craving a smoke something fierce, curiosity overwhelms me. “What are your parents like?”

  Miles looks at me, confused probably, because why would I want to talk about his family right now. But I do. I’ve seen pictures of his parents before because they come to his big events, and now I want to know if they’re as perfect in real life as they look in those glossy magazine retrospectives.

  “My parents? Uh, they’re pretty cool. If they weren’t, I don’t think I’d still call Greenwich my home base.”

  Right. He travels a lot for training and competitions, but still lists Greenwich as his place of residence.

  “You still live with them?”

  He shrugs, looks kind of embarrassed. “I’m not in Connecticut all that much, seemed like a waste to have my own place, and my parents’ house is . . .”

  Big enough to house an army, but I don’t think he’s going to say that.

  “There’s, uh, plenty of space. So yeah, when I’m training, I have my own place, but when I go home I stay with them. They like having me around since I’m away so much.”

  What would that be like? To be thirty-one years old and still live with your parents because it made all of you happy? And in the same house you’ve lived in basically your whole life? No wonder Miles is so constant. He grew up on a rock with barnacles for parents. I don’t mean that in an insulting way either, even though being compared to barnacles isn’t usually flattering.

  “Did they want you to be a pro skier?”

  “Not particularly. Did you know my parents don’t even know how to ski? But they wanted me to learn so I wouldn’t be left out. Started me in lessons when I was four, and I swear I was the only black kid on the mountain until I was thirteen. I think they pictured me going out west with some prep school friends over winter break to resorts, but that’s not what happened, obviously. I never went to prep school.” He smiles, looking out into the distance, wistful. “But I guess that’s the cool thing about my parents? I loved skiing, and I wanted to be the best, so they helped me figure out how to do that. Drove me to mountains, sent me to camps, hired coaches, paid for equipment.”

  He trails off and looks at me. It’s in his face, what he’s thinking. All those things your parents didn’t or couldn’t do.

  “Anyway, they probably would’ve been happier if I were a brain surgeon or a senator or a professor or something. I know they worry about what I’m going to do with myself after . . . Well, after. But they’ve been really supportive. Still come to my big races and make signs and stuff. It used to embarrass the hell out of me, but now I can’t imagine racing without it, you know? They’re here now, you could meet them. If you wanted to.”

  Meet Miles’s parents? Whoa.

  “They never really outgrew the team-parent thing. They like knowing who I spend time with, and my mom makes me Skype with her whenever I move someplace new so I can show her where I’m staying. You missed it, they took the team out to dinner tonight. Used to be pizza when I was a kid, but they usually go a little more upscale now.”

  Probably lobster and champagne and shit. I don’t even have clothes I could wear someplace like that. But I’d like to meet them. I bet Miles’s dad has that same way of talking as he does. Kind of slow, but not because he’s dumb; just the opposite. I bet they’re both precise and use big words. And I bet he got his smile from his mom. It’ll be like being blinded by the sun to have them both look at me, but worth it, probably. Or maybe his way of talking is from his mom and his smile is from his dad? Now that’s going to bug me. Until I know.

  And also I feel like crap because I’d been so in my own head after my mom had called that I’d forgotten about dinner. Didn’t even text. I’m an asshole. “Shit, dinner. I’m so sorry I missed it. And didn’t even let you know I wouldn’t be there—”

  Miles cuts me off with a shrug and he stares up at the ceiling. “It’s okay. I wish you would’ve told me you were going to see your folks. I would’ve understood. But anyway, they’ll be around for a while. You’ll get another shot.”

  He really doesn’t seem mad, which I would understand if he were. But I want to make sure he knows it wasn’t about him. At all. “Yeah, I’d like to meet them. Maybe after the race.”

  Miles strokes a hand down the side of my ribs almost all the way down to my ass. His fingers are in that weird zone where it’s hard to tell what exactly to call it. But it feels good.

  “What about your parents? What are they like? I’m imagining flower children who collect crystals and eat bean sprouts and make their own kombucha. Am I close?”

  “Yeah, basically.” My voice sounds hollow in my own ears. Like I’m talking from far away. This is where I hide when people talk about my family, like I must’ve grown up on some love-in commune and being some kind of free spirit kid was awesome. No real school, no rules, who wouldn’t want to be Peter Pan?

  “Hey.” He squeezes my hip/ass and rolls on his side to look at me. “I don’t mean to tease. Everyone’s family is different. Mine probably sounds super boring and stuffy to you.”

  Miles

  Crash probably thinks we’re like the goddamn Banks family of Greenwich, but without the Fresh Prince anywhere in sight. He wouldn’t be entirely wrong, except our family wasn’t that big and my dad took the train into Manhattan every day for his job as a TV exec, and doesn’t sit on a bench as a judge.

  But Crash is acting weird again. I don’t know what it is about his family that freaks him out, but there’s significant evidence that it does. And because I’m an asshole, I can’t just let it be. “So what are they actually like? I showed you mine, now show me yours.”

  I’m trying to kid with him, but if I’m reading the way he turns to look at me with those big hazel eyes right, he doesn’t feel like I’m joking. This is hurting him and I should stop, but I can’t. For everything I’ve done for him, I want something, and there’s some sadistic part of me that’s decided it’s this particular pound of flesh that I want in return. Because asshole.

  And because he’s Crash and the kid doesn’t know how to say no to me for better or for worse, he answers. “They’re probably a lot like how you’d imagine. Smoke a lot, do the whole hippie free love thing. I’m probably lucky I was born during a thunderstorm and my sister was already named Rain, because who knows what other shit they could’ve come up with?”

  I had wondered about that. If it were back east, it wouldn’t be impossible to know someone named Crash, but it would be far more likely that their full name was Charles Sherbourne Drake V, and all the sensible nicknames had been used up already. But no, the guy’s name is honest-to-god Crash.

  Awesome name for an extreme athlete—again, he couldn’t have bee
n a snowboarder, why?—but growing up it couldn’t have been easy. Lot of pressure that name. To be loud, to make an impact, be kind of crazy, reckless.

  “You know they moved around a lot, and I . . .” His usually carefree face gets lined with uncertainty and discomfort.

  I should tell him to stop, but I don’t want to. I’m going to be greedy, because that’s who I am. More, more, always wanting better, more.

  “Sometimes I just wanted to stay. I’d make a friend, or I’d like my room when we actually got an apartment, or I’d find a decent place to ski. And just as we’d settle, we’d move again. I probably have outstanding library fines in half a dozen states.”

  He smiles, but it’s weak. Not his usual exuberance. I smile back, because it’s kind of funny, imagining mini-Crash reading anything at all, never mind going out of his way to get a library card and being distraught when his parents packed them up suddenly and he couldn’t return his books. Actually, the idea gives me hives.

  “I asked them to leave me sometimes—or tried to run away and hide so they’d have to pack up and go without me, and I could stay—but they wouldn’t, for the longest time. I just wanted, no matter how shitty it would’ve been, to have a place to call ours, you know? But that wasn’t something they could hack. It took me a long time, but I finally figured out one of the reasons we would leave someplace was that they owed someone money and couldn’t pay. We didn’t have a cell phone, no permanent address, no computer.”

  What he’s describing is so very foreign to me it’s almost in another language. I wouldn’t have thought that would bother Crash so much, but maybe his seemingly laid-back nature is a defense mechanism instead of his natural inclinations. It was how he had to be to survive and not lose his mind while his parents traipsed all over the place and dragged him with them.

  “So, you know the end of the story—when I was sixteen, we were in a ski town in Colorado, and I loved it. I put my foot down, told them I wanted to stay, that I wasn’t leaving with them. They tried to talk me out of it, said we’d go to another ski town if I wanted, but we had to leave. When I said no again, they didn’t argue. Just unloaded my stuff from the van, handed me fifty bucks, and told me they’d try to find me when they passed through town again.”

  Christ almighty. He’d told me nearly as much before, but hearing it so baldly makes my stomach clench. Fifty dollars? They left him with a duffel bag and fifty goddamn dollars when he was sixteen years old, and didn’t know if they’d ever see him again? And now that he’s a SIG athlete, they’ve come sniffing around again? Fuck no. I will beat them back with my ski poles if I have to, but there is no way in hell they’re getting close to Crash again. Over my dead body.

  It’s odd that seconds before I wanted to dig my claws in him, make him bleed for me, but now that someone else might hurt him I want to rip their heads off and throw them down a mountain, sending their decapitated bodies down the other side. Morbid much, Miles?

  But maybe that’s what it is. He’s mine to hurt, mine to boss around, because at the end of the day, I want what’s best for him, too. I want him to succeed and I’m going to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Those people, though, couldn’t be bothered. Crash is worth bothering over.

  “I’m lucky ski bums are pretty cool. I couch-surfed for a while, until I could pick up enough odd jobs to rent a room, and then I stayed there. Had my own little world and I could do whatever I wanted to. It wasn’t pretty, but it was mine. And, you know, turned out okay.”

  He smiles again, and it kills me. Because he means this one. Like his family abandoning him when he was a pimply-faced kid was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Depressingly, maybe it was.

  Who knows if he would’ve ever made it so far if he’d kept living out of a van and wandering the country? Who’s to say his parents wouldn’t have gotten sick of the mountains and moved to fucking Nebraska, or gotten sick of the cold and gone to Florida? The world would’ve missed out on its chance to see Crash Delaney ski, and that would be a crying shame, because this man on skis is a thing of beauty.

  So I do the only thing I can think of and roll on top of him, pinning his hands to his sides and kissing him. I have too many feelings colliding in my head to make sense of them all, and at the moment, he feels too goddamn good between my thighs, our cocks rubbing against each other and getting hard. Screw feelings right now. Crash doesn’t want my sympathy anyhow, so I’ll tell him in the only way I’ve got that I think he’s the greatest.

  I’ll love him with my body until he’s not thinking about that goddamn van, about being left on a street corner in some random-ass mountain town with his life on the ground in front of him and having to figure it all out when he probably hadn’t even gotten a driver’s license yet.

  All he needs to figure out is what I want from him, and right now, I want his slim but strong limbs tangling with mine, his hot wet mouth opening for my kiss, and the small desperate noises he makes when I’ve hauled him up the mountain on my back, but haven’t yet pushed him down the slope.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Crash

  It’s the morning of our first race, and no, there’s not any press first thing, not until we’ve made our way down the mountain—but honestly, we’ve been doing this for over a week, and it seems routine, but also like something both of us enjoy. Not that we’re, like, dating or something. But I’d like to think maybe we could?

  Miles was the first one out of bed this morning, and is taking his sweet time in the bathroom. Hope he didn’t eat something that disagreed with him last night, but we ate the same thing and I’m fine. Yes, I have a basically iron stomach because it’s been honed by years of gas station chili fries and vending machine snacks, plus fast food when we could afford it. Maybe Miles’s more refined palate is troubled by the dining hall food, but I think it’s pretty good.

  I’m about to give a shout when he emerges, looking robotic and twitchy. Is Miles actually nervous? Part of me finds deep satisfaction in this because holy shit, he’s actually human, but another part of me finds it terrifying. If Miles is freaking out, what should I be doing? Running around the village screaming with my hair on fire? He’s so much cooler than I am, and yet . . .

  Thing is, I know a pretty good cure for nerves. So I get out of bed, cursing when my bare feet hit the cold floor, and sidle on up to him, laying my hands on his hips, pressing a kiss to his shoulder. Instead of melting, turning around and kissing me like I’m the air he needs to breathe, he stiffens, and not in the fun way.

  “Not today.” His words are clipped, but the punch they deliver doesn’t feel pulled. In fact, I feel as though his fist has sunk into my stomach. What does he mean, “not today”? And because I’m a glutton for punishment, I can’t help but open my stupid mouth and ask.

  “Why not?”

  He shakes me off and turns around, hands resting below the waist of those goddamn pajama pants. I swear to god, every time I see plaid flannel from now on, I’m going to get hard. “I know we’ve been fooling around, but there isn’t a press event this morning. You don’t need it. You’ve said yourself, you do fine after races because you have something to talk about.”

  Another punch. I’d thought we’d gotten to a place where he enjoyed this. I don’t want to get all mushy or serious or anything, but it had felt like we were getting kind of . . . close, in a way. Not like intimate in the way those TV Dr. Phil-types talk about it, but still. I’d thought there was something. Maybe I was wrong.

  “Yeah, but I thought you might, I don’t know, want to.”

  Miles gives me his back, that broad, beautifully muscled back, and heads to his dresser. “I don’t.”

  Right. The hits keep on coming, and I am too fucking stupid to know when to quit.

  “How come?”

  He turns on me then, eyes practically on fire, or maybe it just feels that way because they’re burning right through me.

  “I can’t do this right now. You’re still my teammate, but you�
�re also my competitor, my enemy for the next few days, and I can’t . . . I have given up my entire life for this. This—” He flings his arms around, encompassing the room but the rest of the SIGs as well. “This is all I have, and I have fuck all idea what I’m going to do when this is over.”

  I’ve seen Miles angry before, but never quite like this. He has just flat-out lost it. And Miles isn’t like some of the people I know who didn’t have much to lose. Miles . . . Miles has all the things, or he usually does, and now he’s lost every single last one. It’s kinda freaking me out, especially since this has happened literally overnight. Did the race getting so close finally poke the sleeping competitive giant inside him? Or is it something else?

  “This isn’t all you have. You have your parents. And . . . friends.”

  I think Miles has friends? But outside of people he knows through skiing, is that true? He and Coach Miller are annoyingly close, but will that keep being true when Miles isn’t on the team? Same with the other people on the team, except he’s not so much friends with them as he is a mentor. So . . .

  “I don’t have friends who don’t ski competitively. Or who don’t coach or train. So yes, I have my parents. I am thirty-fucking-one years old and the only thing I have to show for my time on earth is a functional relationship with my family and a few pieces of metal. That is it, Crash, and you want to take that away from me.”

  Whoa. I hadn’t realized that he feels that way. Under all that slick and easy Miles-y-ish-ness, he’s as insecure as the rest of us. It’s just that no one sees it because he’s never had to be anything but a professional skier. It’s not really fair of him though to act like this is personal. I no more want to take those medals away from him than he wants to take them away from any of our competitors. He just . . . wants it. Why can’t he see my hunger the same way? I only ever wanted to be like him, modeled myself after him in everything I did, to the extent I even could.