Crash (The Wild Sequence Book 2)

by Harper Dallas

I’m thirty-one, and Raquel looks down at me with a smile like an angel. Suntouched, glowing, her hair in a wild mass of waves about her face. “You’re going to drop me.”

  I shake my head, feeling the control in my muscles where I hold her above me. Acro-yoga was a joke, I know. She didn’t think I’d take her up on it. But it looked awesome, and so here we are: me on my back, Raquel above me, her hips on my raised feet above my right-angled legs, her hands holding mine.

  “You are.” But she’s wavering, her tiny fingers untwisting from mine, getting ready to spread out so that I can toss her.

  “Raquel,” I tell her, “I’m never going to let you fall.”

  And she smiles as she trusts me to hold her, and lets go.

  After all that time arguing to go back to my home, we eventually agree I’ll fly from Vancouver to a hospital back in Wyoming. At least it’s in the right state.

  Anyway, now that Raquel’s back in Jackson, I’ve lost some of my will to fight.

  There’s nothing I want more in the world than to go back to that house and be loved by her, be taken care of by her.

  There’s nothing I want less in the world than to have her see me like this, shattered and sutured.

  Anyway, there’s one good thing about my stay at the residential care facility: it means I can’t think about her all the time.

  Obviously, that doesn’t mean I don’t find way too many hours to do it. I think about her when I’m lying in bed. When I’m trying to poke food around my plate, struggling against having no fucking appetite at all. When I’m in the shower and trying to work out how in the hell I’m supposed to clean myself when I can hardly move.

  But at least I can’t think much about her when a physiotherapist’s getting me to do something that makes pain spike up and down my back like the devil himself just impaled me on a hot poker.

  Which means that every time he walks into my room, I can’t decide if I’m freaking elated or if I’m going to be preemptively sick.

  “How are you doing, JJ?”

  Like every day, I want to tell him. Angry and fucked up and so damn scared.

  The physio’s a nice guy. I try to give him the smile he deserves. It's not his fault that how I'm doing is “in pain and grumpy with it.” I know they’d give me more meds, if I asked. But the last thing I want is to be taking more pills than I need to. I’ve seen the way that road goes, and being a pro athlete isn't any protection against it.

  “Hanging together.” My smile rings false around the grit of my teeth. “What are we doing today?”

  I pull together everything I have, and I force myself through the pain. I hold on to it like some sort of golden thread and think: powder, power, powder.

  I’ve got ten months to get back on it, and I need to be out there.

  I have to be boarding again next winter. The idea of a whole season without snow is more than unbearable. It’s unthinkable. I can’t even begin to imagine what my life would be like without it.

  All these months, snowboarding has been all I have.

  Like hell am I accepting that I’ll never get back to it. The doctors can fuck themselves: not only am I getting back on the snow, I’m doing it before this time next year.

  I’ve told the physio that. He’s too smart to disagree with me. He just gives me exercises like walking around the long corridors of the hospital.

  But this time, when I’ve managed to get on my own goddamn socks, he hangs back.

  “You’re not coming?”

  He shakes his head. “You’ve got a visitor who’ll walk with you.”

  For one moment my heart leaps in my chest. I can’t stop myself imagining her in the corridor waiting for me, tiny and neat.

  Back here for me. Back in love with me. Back—

  Chase is standing in the corridor, turning his beanie over and over between his hands.

  It’s been over a week since he left me in that hospital. Since my best friend—my brother—didn’t come to see how I was, or stand beside me when I was told that I was potentially fucked beyond repair.

  I know why Chase did it. I know he can’t bear to be near hospitals even when he’s the one injured. I know he’s got trauma that goes deep.

  I’m also seriously pissed off.

  Chase looks like shit, which at least means he cares. Like sleepless dark eyes and sallow skin are proof of the guilt he feels. His almost-black hair is lanky and unwashed, his normally bright blue eyes somehow faded.

  “Hey,” he says, tilting his jaw in acknowledgment. He stands like he’s braced against whatever I’ll throw at him. A shout or a punch.

  He stands like he’ll take it. Like he’ll take it and accept it and stay.

  The air between us is heavy with all the things I could say. Fuck you, or how could you?

  But you can’t convince yourself out of the truth. And I could no more deny the truth than I could decide to stop my heart beating.

  I’ve missed him so fucking much, and I want him here.

  Chase stands there and stands there until it’s clear that I won’t say anything. Something moves through him, a shudder that relaxes the hard line of his shoulders. The guilt lined over his forehead mixes with relief.

  When he steps forward to grip my shoulder, he holds on too tight. Like he didn’t think he’d get to hold me again, and is still worried I’ll go.

  “The physio said you need someone to lean on.”

  I do. And no matter how bad Chase fucked up, I know I can lean on him.

  We walk about four times as far as the physio wanted. After a lifetime of pushing each other, Chase doesn’t try to stop me. He’s just there, his body a bulk I can lean against when I need a break from the searing pain in my back.

  We finish up by some vending machines, where Chase grips my hand as I ease myself into a chair.

  All this time, we haven’t talked about the important stuff. We’ve shot the shit, sure.

  But it’s only now, as Chase pops a soda and hands it to me, that we touch on it.

  Even though I’m the one with the broken back, I’m still the one who has to start. Chase isn’t exactly the most emotionally open of guys.

  “You and Brooke?”

  Chase grunts. He’s sprawled in the seat beside mine, but instead of looking at me he keeps his eyes fixed forward—out the window and into the garden outside.

  “Nope.”

  This time I’m not arguing with him. I’m not gonna say go after her. I’m not going to say, don’t give up.

  I still believe that they’re right for each other. I still love Brooke like a kid sister, and Chase is still my brother.

  But my heart is too tired to fight for them to be together.

  Chase shifts his long legs as if he’s uncomfortable. When he finally forces the words out his mouth is thin.

  “Thanks for not…”

  “Telling you you’re an asshole?”

  He flicks a look at me sidelong. It’s only an echo of his old smile, but I’m still glad to see it.

  “Yeah. That.”

  I’m sure there are plenty of people who would say that I’m crazy to forgive him so easy. I don’t give a damn. We both get it, and that’s all that matters.

  Chase and I have been friends for more than twenty years. We’ve had each other’s backs through thick and thin. We work together at a job that puts us face to face with death or serious injury on the regular.

  A job that’s the expression of the thing we love most in the world.

  Other people might not understand that level of brotherhood. But we do.

  More silence. I take a swig of the soda before brushing the back of my hand over my mouth. Out in the garden a squirrel tries to steal from the bird feeder.

  “You’re gonna board again,” Chase says finally, out of nowhere. “They can’t tell you shit. They don’t know you.”

  He doesn’t know that’s basically exactly what I said to the doctor. I turn my head with a grin, about to tell him that—and instead I’m shut up b
y the fleeting thing I see pass over Chase’s face.

  For just one moment, it looks like he doesn’t believe it.

  My stomach twists in on itself before turning a full, sickening flip.

  But it must be wrong, because the grin that spreads for me is real.

  “I hope you’re ready for me to visit every day. Your room is nicer than my hotel.”

  Raquel

  We never get to go back.

  That’s just a truth of life. You can’t step in the same river twice. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and there’s no bringing it back.

  The whole journey to Jackson I feel the emptiness at my ring finger. The cold, crisp air of late February in Wyoming seems to ask: where is it now?

  The object that used to be so important, and now is gone.

  There’s nothing like the air in Wyoming. It was JJ who wanted most to move here; it was his career, his calling, that made a place like Jackson important. But I liked it from my first visit, and with time I think I would have loved it more than he does. I ask the taxi driver if he minds me keeping the window open, even though it’s freezing, and I rest my cheek against the seat so I can stare out there at the town I know so well. The feet-high snowdrifts. The trucks. The cars with ski and board racks.

  When we pull up at the house, I try not to look at it. I pay the taxi driver and thank him for carrying my bag to the porch, and then I wait until he’s driven away to turn back to the house.

  The memories crowd in on me, filling my mouth with the salt taste of longing.

  We follow the realtor in a rented truck. I curl in the passenger seat, craning my neck to watch the properties we pass, and JJ keeps one hand lightly on my knee as he drives. From the radio comes country music. The snow crunches beneath the wheels of the truck as we turn the corner onto the drive, and JJ leans forward to peer out of the windscreen, squeezing my knee tighter.

  “You excited?”

  I smile and rest my hand over his, nudging my fingers into the gaps of his own. “Of course.”

  “We’re going to have to teach you how to drive in real weather, Ms. SoCal.”

  I pretend to push his hand away in a huff. “I can drive in the snow.”

  “No more Prius,” JJ continues with a grin. “Time for you to buy a proper all-American gas-guzzling F-150.”

  I grin at him. “Why not go all the way and get me a dog team.”

  “The lady wants, the lady will have,” JJ says as he flicks off the ignition. He braces his hold against the wheel as he twists towards me, catching my lips in a kiss that stops all of my protests.

  “Love you,” he murmurs before he leaves the car, and for the first time we see the house we’ll buy—for us. For the family we want. For the children we’ll have.

  The ghosts of us linger there, just stepping out of that car, forever. I remember what it felt like, knowing that JJ would hold me in a moment. That like always he’d step out of the vehicle, or into a room, and sling an arm around my shoulders. I was never far away from his touch.

  Now I’m further away from that than anything in the world. It feels like a different life.

  I take a deep breath and turn to face my past.

  Our home—the house—looks like it used to. A beautiful fusion of the old and the new. A mountain lodge of hard wood and dark stone, closed to this side, but I know it’s open on the other with walls of endless glass, looking out over the valley and the mountains beyond.

  Somehow I never got around to taking the key off my chain. I knew I was meant to. But I was always thinking of something else. How often do you go into your purse and think, I need to remove the reminders of my old life?

  At least it makes it easy to get in. I check the garage first. The two trucks are still there. A door leads through to his gear room where I can see the shadowed outlines of mountain bikes and snowboards, snowmobiles and swag.

  I’m wasting time. I know that. I’m delaying the moment until I step through the garage door into the place that was meant to be our forever home. The place we’d raise the children we’ll now never have.

  The memories crowd so close around me that I’m drowning in them. They’re all I can feel.

  “Wait.”

  I’m distracted from grabbing my purse from the seat as JJ jogs back from the doorway, the keys rattling in his hand, hooked with one metal circle over his finger. “What?”

  JJ grabs me, and I laugh as I pretend to fight him. “What are you doing? We have to get the overnight bag.”

  “Carrying you over the threshold.” JJ swings me into a bridal lift, checking my door with his hip so that it slams shut. “I thought you’d like it.”

  “You do that after the wedding.”

  JJ shrugs, holding me easily as he steps over the garage’s concrete floor towards the door. “We can do it then, too.”

  It’s our first night here. The moving trucks aren’t even coming until the weekend. It’s just us, with two backpacks, ready for a sleepover, excited as two kids playing house. Except we’re not playing anything. This is real—more real than everything has ever been.

  JJ pushes open the door with his foot, and even though my stomach swoops at the way he sways, I’m not afraid at all. I’m holding onto him, and I’ll never let go. And he’d never give me up, or let me down.

  JJ turns in a circle, when we reach the hall, a dizzying spin that makes me laugh. His eyes are sparkling, his smile so bright.

  “Welcome home.”

  When we kiss, my heart almost bursts with happiness.

  I stand in the cold, dark hall, and can’t breathe for the memory.

  There’s the bowl where I used to leave my house keys once I came inside. The house plant is gone—JJ was never very good at caring for them. When I delicately push open the walk-in closet, I find JJ’s shoes and, left abandoned on a hanger, the coat I haven’t been able to find anywhere.

  He didn’t tell me he had it. He just let it stay here, gathering dust.

  I step through the rooms, hardly daring to breathe, trying to be silent as if I might wake a sleeper. But what sleeps here?

  Everything is like I remembered and not. Through a glass, darkly. Underwater. I’m an imposter in my home.

  What used to be my home, until I left it.

  The huge U-shaped sectional we fought forever about where to place. The painting we bought from the gallery down in Jackson. The XBox under the TV.

  He’s here, everywhere. JJ. It’s hard to see the evidence of him living alone. Similar, but not the same, to when we were together. He left sweaters and beanies thrown over random pieces of furniture—I can tell, because they’re all piled neatly on the couch. He must still have the cleaner coming. There’s his food in the pantry, and the TV is tuned to his Netflix account, and on the fridge are pictures of his sister and her wife, their son. JJ’s parents.

  It's so quiet.

  I stop before the stairs, reaching out for the banister. The wood is smooth beneath my hand.

  It would be so easy to go up. To follow the mezzanine and then the hall, right to the end, to the bedroom we used to share.

  My breathing has stopped and in its place my heart beats double time.

  I shake my head and go to take my bag through to one of the guest rooms.

  Around me the house is silent, in the way things are when they're listening and trying very hard not to breathe.

  Raquel

  Outside the house a storm gathers over the mountains. High-climbing clouds pile up together, rising far into the heavens. They’re illuminated by flashes of lightning and, long delayed, the far-off roll of thunder.

  Inside the house, I can feel the pressure of it inside of my head. A growing ache in my skull and a pain in my ribcage. Tight, here, right between the bones.

  For a week this house has been my sanctuary. It’s been easy to feel like nothing has changed, that this is the place I left behind one year ago. The snow falls the same way. The deciduous trees have the same bare-picking shroud of leaves, alm
ost gone. If it weren’t for the fact that my things are gone I could believe that I had just walked out of here yesterday. That I had left expecting to come back, and that my absence was only a held-breath pause. A break in the natural order of things. A rhythm, rather than an ending.

  I’ve moved in the spaces that our relationship left, and wondered what time really means. If it folds back on itself when we visit the places that used to be important. If our ghosts are here, mine and JJ’s, and if those ghosts can be felt like a touch. Or if the only way they’re experienced is that ache inside of us, and the frisson that old people say means someone is walking over your grave.

  But it wasn’t a person buried here. It was a dream. A hope. A future. And left behind...

  Ghosts are all in our head. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t real.

  I’ve tried to keep myself busy: arranging with the cleaner and with the home help woman, with the best local physio- and sports massage therapists. I’ve cleaned and neatened, bought groceries and stocked cupboards with JJ’s favorite things—the treats he might as well eat now, since he isn’t training. Kettle chips. Hummus. Reese’s Pieces. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Dr. Pepper.

  Still the last few hours are empty, and when I hear a truck coming down the drive I’m on my feet in a moment.

  When I come out onto the porch Hanne’s hopping out of the driver’s seat, sliding the keys into the pocket of her board jacket.

  She doesn’t come to hug me. Neither does Hunter, who flicks me a wave as he jumps from the passenger seat and moves round to the tailgate, swinging bags out of the lockbox.

  I understand. It’s awkward. I’m JJ’s ex, and JJ’s in that car, and…

  I slide my hands into my pockets and try not to feel sick. My heart hammers in my chest. “Hey.”

  “Can you get the front door open?” Hanne doesn’t look to me. She’s pulling open a passenger door. “We don’t need to be fiddling with that...”

  I don’t know what I imagined. Maybe my two visions of JJ couldn’t be squared together, made into one cohesive whole.