Crash (The Wild Sequence Book 2)

by Harper Dallas

  I guess there it is. The truth of it.

  Maybe she’s right.

  Maybe this really is it.

  I’ve lost boarding.

  I’ve lost her.

  I’ve thrown away everything that really matters.

  “James,” she whispers as I move past her.

  “Don’t follow me,” I tell her.

  “Hey, man. How’s it going?”

  It’s a rhetorical question. Chase doesn’t wait for the answer that isn’t coming before he flops into the couch beside me.

  “Was gonna bring you a beer,” he says without looking at me as he pulls off his beanie and drops it on the couch, “but I figured you’re still teetotal, huh.”

  I laugh blackly. “If I enjoy something it’s a fairly good bet that I’m either not allowed it, or it’s impossible for me.”

  “Sucks to be you,” Chase agrees.

  I’ve always liked that about him. When shit’s bad, you don’t need someone spouting blatantly untrue platitudes. You just want them to agree: yeah, that’s fucked. “That” being “your life.”

  For a long moment neither of us say anything. Chase just sits with me. I can feel him looking at me now and again, but I keep my eyes fixed on the hockey game on the TV. It’s a replay, but I don’t care.

  “Raquel wasn’t looking her best,” Chase says finally. “You two had a real blowout, eh.”

  It’s easy to forget Chase is half-Canadian—his mom is from Saskatchewan—and then he reminds you with shit like that. Eh. I can’t help but have a flicker of a grin, the first I’ve had in god knows how long.

  “Anyway.” Chase grunts. Something touches my arm, and I look down to see that he’s poking me with a heating pad. “Thought that might help you out. Didn’t realize you could sit for this long.”

  “I can’t.” With him, I don’t feel a huge need to pretend. “You mind…?”

  Chase doesn’t make me give him more detail, sliding the warm pack in carefully behind my lower spine. “There you go.”

  More silence. The announcer calls out a few plays.

  “Not used to being on this side of it,” Chase says finally, apropos nothing. It’s true: I’m usually the one chasing him down, checking that he’s okay, making him talk about shit once in a blue moon.

  “You’re doing fine.”

  Chase grunts as if he isn’t convinced. “You wanna talk about it?”

  Want to hang out? That’s what I texted him. And he replied: See you in a half hour.

  And somehow he’s worked it out. Or he talked to Raquel, maybe. Who knows. I haven’t exactly checked up on where she is. I left the main floor for her, and came down here to the game room opposite the gym. My space. “The man cave,” she used to tease me, which basically just means it’s a place I didn’t get around to decorating so much. It has a big couch and a pool table and a wet bar, and that’s about all it needs, to my mind.

  Do I want to talk about it? I don’t know. Instead I ask: “How are you doing?”

  Finally I look properly at him, letting my head fall back onto the couch and turning my face to him. Chase isn’t looking that hot himself. He hasn’t looked great since the accident.

  His lips thin for a moment. “Holding together,” he says carefully. “What would be wrong?”

  I raise my eyebrows. “I wonder.”

  “I’m fine.” Chase looks away, and then back to me, and then away again. “Not everything in my life is about her.”

  It clearly is, because we both know exactly who he means by her. We both know exactly why he’s hanging out in his house—the house he hardly visits—drinking beers in the middle of the day. It’s not like Chase not to be boarding. It’s not like Chase to be here. He’s usually out in the world, hitting gnarly powder, getting it on with random women.

  And instead he’s just hanging out in his place, as if he’s trapped like I am. All because he’s having a fight with the girl he’s crazy for, and they haven’t spoken since the avalanche.

  Sure, he wants to be here to support me. But he needs to keep working. He lives for pow.

  He can be such an idiot, pushing away the perfect woman for him.

  Chase looks toward the screen for a moment, watching the puck move over the ice. “You and Raquel fight about the obvious?”

  My grin feels uncomfortable, something painful dug up from me. “Yep.”

  Chase pulls a face that means ugh and sorry and figures, all at once. “She still staying?”

  “Unless you hear her car pull out.” It hangs for a moment before I have to add: “I’d probably deserve it.”

  Chase shrugs. “Guess neither of you are at your best.”

  I snort. “You could say that, yeah.”

  Chase taps his finger against the bottle. “Pretty good of her to come back here though, huh.”

  It flickers through me again, that anger. “To clear the last of her stuff out of the house? She just wants to be rid of me, Chase. That’s all.”

  Chase shrugs. “If you say so.”

  I do say so. I want to tell him that. But instead it twists inside of me, that awful hope thing I promised I’d have no more of. And something worse: guilt.

  Because if Raquel would ever consider having me back, the way I’ve acted in the last few weeks is pretty likely to have put an end to that.

  She doesn’t deserve the way I’ve spoken to her. No one does. But especially not Raquel.

  I close my eyes and pass my hand over them. When I look again, Chase’s gaze is fixed on me, and it takes him a second to look away.

  Concern. It’s not a common look for Chase’s face. We’ve known each other since we in elementary school, and I haven’t seen much of it.

  I pull my face away, tilting my jaw toward the match. “What do you think of their new coach? Not sure what I think of him.”

  That’s it. Conversation closed.

  Chase knows what I need. He doesn’t complain. He just settles into the couch beside me and hangs out for the next couple hours. We order a pizza. As it gets dark he vaults easily over the back of the couch and comes back from the kitchen with two cold beers—one regular, for him, and one light, for me. I shouldn’t take it, but Chase just shrugs.

  “I doubt one is gonna fuck you up any more than you already are.”

  When I’m with him, I feel like I can live with this. Our whole lives he’s been with me—my brother from another mother, my partner in crime, my best friend, my team mate. Sure, mostly he’s been with me out on the powder. But the same way he supports me in riding, he supports me with this shit. He helps me up when I need to stand for a while. When I need to go walk around a bit, he comes with me without asking or commenting.

  When Chase is around, I feel like stuff is manageable.

  When he’s gone, I can’t hide from everything else that I’ve lost. My health. My career. Raquel.

  “You need help getting upstairs?” he asks in the foyer as he’s tugging on his puffy winter gear, ready for the walk back to his place.

  It’s one sickening jolt of a reminder, but I manage to keep my smile steady.

  “Nah. Still taking the elevator. I could get up the stairs if I had to, but it’d probably kill me.”

  I’m half joking. Last time I was determined to get up there, I ended up having a ten minute break in the middle, close to vomiting with pain.

  Chase’s mouth quirks before he corrects the look to a grin.

  “You really got fucked up, didn’t you?”

  “No shit.”

  He grabs my out-held hand the way he always has, our fists bunching together as he steps in. Instead of slapping my back he grips my shoulder for a moment before stepping back.

  “Call if you need shit. I fly out Thursday.”

  It takes all I have to hold my smile together. I don’t have to ask where he’s going. I was meant to fly out and film, too.

  “Got it. Don’t freeze on the way home.”

  “Never do.”

  And then he’s go
ne, and I’m slowly, slowly heading down the hall to my room.

  As I pass the main floor lounge, I can see the corner of the TV, and suddenly hear very quietly the voice of some actor. It’s an emotional scene. I think he’s crying in the rain.

  Probably because he’s lost everything, and it’s his own goddamn fault.

  She’s in there. I can feel all the air between us, sure as if I were crawling every last one of these inches.

  Does she know I see her when I close my eyes?

  She’s in there, curled up on the couch, watching some movie that will just make her cry. Does that mean she’s happy, or that she’s sad? That she’s got over our argument, or she hasn’t?

  I’m sorry, I want to say. I never meant to hurt you. Not with any of it.

  It’s just seemed to happen, anyway. No, I have to take responsibility for it: I’ve just done it anyway. Hurt her. The one person in the world I love so absolutely that I’d lie down and die for her without a question or a doubt.

  It hurts, dragging myself away. It hurts walking down the hall after a whole day of being in pain anyway. It hurts when I splash water over my face, considering the scraggly growth of my facial hair. I haven’t been able to summon the will to do anything about it. As if that might justify why she doesn’t want me. An easier excuse than the fact that I’ve broken my spine and turned into an asshole.

  I lower myself deliberately roughly into bed and feel the pain burning up my back like some sort of penance.

  She’ll never want me back. It’s what I wanted to say to Chase, and couldn’t, because I’m great at getting him to talk about his shit—but I never, ever talk about my own. People don’t notice, if you’re good with their emotions. They never notice the gaps.

  Raquel will never want me again.

  She recoiled when I tried to touch her. It’s just like she said: one day I’d be a cripple. And that day is today, and of course she doesn’t want me. Who would want a husband—a father—like that? When it’s my own fault. When I chose this. Not some accident or twist of fate. I decided every day I went up on that mountain.

  Just thinking about her pulling away from my touch hurts.

  I love her so much.

  I’ve always loved her.

  I always will.

  And she doesn’t want me, not when I’m all of her worst nightmares come true.

  Not now she’s right, and I’m broken.

  I lie in the dark, my eyes closed as tight as I can, and squeeze my fists into balls so that they ache, ache, ache, and it joins in with the pain in my back and the pain in my chest and it’s so much that I hope it might obliterate me, might distract me from everything else.

  My life has been defined by crashes. This avalanche changed everything. But it’s happened before, too. I’ve blown out my knees and had limbs pinned back together. I’ve been in hospitals all over the world, had dislocations and fractures, compound and hairline.

  My life has been defined by crashes. None of them hit as hard as her.

  In the darkness, my love for her is all that’s left.

  I’m going to get back out there.

  I’m going to get better.

  And I’m going to…

  I can’t hope for that. She’s a free, adult woman. She can choose what she wants.

  But I’m going to get better.

  Promise.

  Raquel

  The day after the fight, there’s a note on the kitchen island when I come back from my morning work session.

  Sorry for shouting at you.

  You don’t deserve it.

  I crumple it up before I’m not able to, forcing myself to put it in the trash. I’m glad that JJ’s apologized. But that’s all it is—the bare minimum.

  Anyway, I didn’t cover myself in glory.

  The people we used to be still run around this house, I sometimes feel. Their laughter echoes along the staircases and in the quiet rooms we once planned for our children. Ghosts of the happiness we used to have, still expecting a future we stand in the wreckage of.

  Compared to even the ghosts, JJ and I are quiet. And perhaps that quietness is how we move past the fight, in the end. It wasn’t the fight, the one that ended us. After that, everything else is muted.

  Once you’ve seen the worst thing that could happen, not much else frightens you anymore.

  Together and alone, mostly in silence, the bruises heal and we slide into living with each other with an ease we can only have from living together as a couple for so long—and a particular unease that can only come from that, too.

  It’s amazing how much you can not see someone despite living in the same house as them. Of course, it helps to have a big house. But JJ and I have retreated to the status of guests in a bed-and-breakfast: making polite noises as we pass each other on the stairs, otherwise keeping out of each other’s way.

  But unlinked travelers coincidentally in the same place have never known each other like we do. A stranger wouldn’t leave all of my favorite flavor San Pellegrino for me. I wouldn’t think to find the cell phone a man I don’t know keeps leaving lying around and put it back somewhere visible every time.

  The days fall into a rhythm dictated by our distance, as if we are planets orbiting the same star. I wake early, like we both used to—but now JJ doesn’t emerge until I’ve already eaten and moved into the office to work. Now he can make his own food I leave him easy things: yogurt with honey, bagels. If he wants his bacon, he knows where it is in the fridge.

  I hear him sometimes moving about through the strains of my classical music as I’m working. Once I hear the sound of him slowly making his way to the gym I head through to the kitchen and make a salad for lunch, eating it at my desk. In the afternoon I work on getting the house ready, the first step of which has been finding leftover belongings and shipping them to my parents’ place. I might not want to move back, but even I can’t deny that it’s practical to send them there.

  For all that I’m determined to close this chapter of my life, I find that I can’t plan the next step of it yet. I will get JJ on his feet again. I will sell him my share of this house.

  Beyond that, everything is vague, and I—always meticulously organized, the girl who blocked out her planner in high school with color-coded fifteen-minute sections—find that my mind always slips away from thinking about what happens next.

  Somehow, despite everything, being here feels like succumbing to a sort of gravity. There’s an easiness to it, sliding into an old groove that has been worn deep by constant repetition over years.

  If it’s not peace, it’s a truce. Neither of us want to be here—I’m sure he can’t want to be here, and I can’t want to be here—and so we make it work, somehow.

  At nights I listen to him and Chase downstairs, shooting the shit as they watch an action film or sports. You’d think athletes would have enough sport in their lives, but apparently they don’t. They’ve always been able to watch endless hours of whatever’s in season. Even the sports they haven’t tried themselves—which are limited—they still have some set of opinions on, based on their own knowledge of their bodies and their limits.

  I’m so used to that sound, it almost doesn’t feel strange to go into the main lounge by myself and curl up under a wool knit throw to watch reality TV or more of The Good Wife. We used to do this when we were together, too, except then after JJ would come upstairs and, once he’d let Chase out, curl beside me to kiss, to tease, eventually to carry me to bed.

  The idea of JJ carrying me anywhere—to bed, over the threshold—is something I try not to think of, anymore.

  Late March, and spring begins to reach its fingers for Jackson, even if it can’t yet grasp it. The air feels fresher; the skies seem to blush in the moments before dusk, and somehow in the silence as I walk in the yard I can hear an expectant sort of hush, a delicate waiting that knows change is promised.

  I take my time looking out over the view, my shopping bags still over my arms, before I let myself insid
e. I re-stack the fridge before remembering that the laundry will be done. JJ can now cook basic meals for himself, if everything is laid out; he can dress himself but for lacing shoes. You couldn’t see him and make the mistake of thinking that he’s well again—but he’s not the man who arrived at this house, either, let alone the shattered husk I saw in that hospital bed.

  So much so that it doesn’t surprise me to hear the sound of music coming from the gym as I go to pass it on the way to the stairs. The song might be newer than anything JJ listen to before we broke up, but the similarity of the moment still doesn’t fail to stop me dead in my tracks, my heart for a moment in my throat.

  I rest my hand against the wall, and listen to the music I’d never choose myself, and feel an ache in my chest that’s painful and yet I never want it to end. It makes me feel more than myself.

  Bittersweet.

  I shouldn’t. I can’t stop myself. If I step forward just a fraction, I can see through the crack in the door. See through to the mirrors on the side wall, and in them, see James.

  God, he’s handsome. It hits me like a lurch in a pure animal way that it hasn’t for so long—because I’ve seen him as a person hurt, rather than a person capable. His injuries, rather than himself.

  I’m taken back, back, back.

  “I call this the Perfection Lab,” Sarah says as she opens the door for me. “Here’s where our number-crunching scientists do their best. Perhaps it feels like their worst, for the athletes getting poked and prodded. Here’s where we handle bio-mechanics, the chemistry. Stuff like that. The real nuts and bolts of the human machine. That over there is Priyanka—she’s the lab director—and that’s Leo Gelbmann. He’s here from Berkeley working with us for the summer. I’ll introduce you…”

  I can hardly get through the introductions. All I can see is the man on the treadmill.

  He’s shirtless, his tanned skin glowing with sweat and health and the flush of exercise. The black band of the heart rate monitor snug under his pecs accentuates the neat ridges of muscle which move down over his abdomen to the V which disappears beneath his track pants. His movement is fluid, effortless, somehow endless. He makes running look beautiful in a way only athletes can—a poetry they lend to motion.