Chapter 2
Wade
“GPS says there's only thirty minutes left.”
“Yeah Wade! We're so close I can smell the mountain air.” My best friend Lucky’s voice echoed through my truck’s Bluetooth speakers as I followed her Subaru up a steep mountain pass.
We’d talked the whole way about anything and everything, keeping each other motivated, planning breaks.
Not quite my dream road trip, since we were in separate cars, but it was fun.
“So, what’s the plan? Can you stay a little, or do you have to turn around and drive back to Nebraska?”
“Right.” My stomach lurched as I told myself for the five-hundredth time that I needed to tell Lucky the truth about the move.
And I would. I just needed to find the right moment.
Unfortunately, I’d been waiting for the right moment for about three weeks.
You’d think the right moment would simply present itself.
Every time I tried to tell her about my job opportunity in the tiny ski town she was moving to, different words came out instead.
Words about the scenery, or the snacks, or whether we needed gas.
I was excellent at bringing up whether or not we needed gas.
Why was I so afraid? It wasn’t like I was stalking her… that much. I had a legitimate job opportunity, and I wanted to get out of Nebraska as much as she did. And if we ended up in the same town, well, you might as well just call that fate. Or destiny.
With a healthy side of specifically targeted job applications.
“You still there?” Lucky asked.
“Yeah, I’m here. Have you looked to the left recently?”
“I’m driving, Wade.”
“Okay, but when you get a chance. There’s a thing happening with the mountains that I think you should be aware of.”
The thing happening with the mountains was that they were enormous and everywhere and had been getting progressively more enormous and more everywhere.
An hour ago, the road had cut southwest through a tiny bit of Wyoming and crossed the Colorado border into an open, desolate plain edged by mountains.
For hours, the mountains had been in the far distance, not getting any bigger, but suddenly, they were on top of us.
The road started cutting up the side of the mountain, in steep, short switchbacks. The rented moving trailer I was towing swayed on every turn enough to make me wonder if I’d underestimated the physics of a mountain pass while packing it.
We crested the summit of Elkhead Pass and the road tipped downward. The valley opened up below us, green and gold and spread wide between ridge lines. Across the valley, I could see the ski area, Elkhead Butte, and the town clustered in the valley floor, small from this distance.
“Lucks. Are you seeing this?”
“I’m seeing it.”
“This is where you’re going to live!” And me, too, if I was being honest, which I wasn’t.
“I’m aware.”
“This is insane. Lucks, the mountains are so big there’s snow on them. In September.”
“That’s how mountains work, Wade. It’s possible you need to leave Nebraska more often.”
I laughed, big and stupid, because I couldn’t help it. The road wound down through tall pines and stands of aspens that flickered silver and green. With every switchback, the valley got closer and more real.
This would be the place that changed everything.
We drove through downtown Elkhead, which was fucking charming, like a movie set of a historic Western town.
There was a creek running through the middle of things, sunlight catching on the clear water.
The people were all in outdoor-style clothing, like they’d finished a hike or were about to start one.
I saw a coffee shop, a pizza place, and a brewery in what resembled an old barn.
I wanted to stop at every single one of them.
“This town is incredible,” I said.
“Mmhm.”
We turned off the main drag and started winding uphill toward the ski area, and the houses got bigger and shinier. They had massive timber frames and huge picture windows and looked like they cost a fortune.
“Umm, Lucks.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you sure your GPS is right? This neighborhood looks well out of our tax bracket.”
“It’s the address Sachi gave me.”
“This does not look like a fifteen-hundred-a-month situation. This looks like a fifteen-hundred-a-day situation. Are you sure you got the rent right?”
“We’re here,” she said. “I’m hanging up.”
The connection cut off, and I squinted through the windshield as Lucky’s brake lights came on ahead of me, then her turn signal, as she guided her little car into a driveway.
I pulled in behind her and put the truck in park and sat for a second with the engine running, staring through the windshield at the most upscale mountain home I’d ever seen. Not that I spent a lot of time in this kind of place. Or any, really.
I turned off the engine, climbed down from the cab, and stood in the driveway with my mouth hanging open.
Lucky was already out of her Subaru, hands on her hips, looking around.
“Are you sure we’re at the right place?”
“This is the address,” she said, a huge smile breaking out across her face. She stretched her arms wide and spun. “We made it!”
Lucky’s face lit up in a way I hadn’t seen since she’d gotten the Moriko job offer.
She was stunning, full of a joy and excitement that was rare for someone typically so calm.
A bright ache moved through me, gone before I could name it, but I didn’t need to.
I’d been managing my feelings for nine years with patience and deflection and an increasingly questionable theory about waiting for the perfect timing.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and grinned at her. “Lucks. What the fuck?”
She eyed the truck behind me and raised an eyebrow. “What the fuck yourself. You were supposed to back the trailer into the driveway.”
“Oh.” I looked at her trailer, and grimaced. “I can fix it. I’ve gotten marginally better at backing up with the trailer.”
She tilted her head. “You sure about that?”
“I’m telling you, that tree by the gas station leaped out of nowhere!”
“Did it, though?” She fought off the smile for a full ten seconds then squealed and clapped, bouncing up and down in a decidedly un-Lucky way. “Whatever, we’ll worry about that later, when you have two hours to do a sixty-seven-point turn. Right now? We’re going to check out my new digs.”
With that, she turned and knocked on the massive, ostentatious slab of wood that was acting as a door. It was at least eight feet tall and four feet wide. I wondered if it was heavy. We stood for a minute, waiting for a response.
Nothing happened.
She backed up, searching around the door for a doorbell, then pressed it twice, and after another long pause that had Lucky looking a tiny bit more nervous, the door opened.
The guy on the other side was tall and lean, with tan skin and dark, messy hair going in several directions at once.
He had the appearance of someone who had been horizontal for a meaningful stretch of time, down to the pillow crease in his left cheek.
He was wearing a ratty gray hoodie with a hole near the left cuff and pajama pants with cartoon turtles on them.
He gave us each a slow once-over.
“I assume you’re the roommate my mom’s foisting on me.”
Lucky beamed at him. Her cheer could not be struck down by anything at this point. “Hi! That’s me, new roommate! I’m Lucky Venkataraman. We’ve been emailing. You got my deposit and lease?”
“Yep. Deposit and lease for one person.” He narrowed his eyes at me.
“Oh! This is my friend Wade. He’s not moving in, just here to help me move.”
“Bode.” He gave a tiny salute. “The spare bedrooms are upstairs. Pick whatever.”
“This is amazing!” she said. “What a stunning place!”
“It’s stunning. So cool!” I said. “Roommates, yay!”
“Yeah. Yay,” Bode said in a thoroughly un-yay tone. “Spare keys are in the bowl. The garage door opener is… somewhere. I don’t know. Shoes off inside.”
“My family is Indian, I get it.” Lucky was already toeing off her sneakers. “And don’t worry, we’ve trained Wade too, mostly.”
He turned around, walked to an enormous couch in what I could already see was an absolutely unbelievable great room, lay down on it, and pulled his hood over his face.
Lucky and I stood in the doorway.
I looked at Lucky. Lucky looked at me. Her expression neutral, but her eyes were busy.
“Cool,” she said, and promptly toed off her sneakers. “Let’s pick a room?”
I kicked off my shoes and followed her, trying to take in every detail of the incredible house.
The great room was so big and so overwhelming that my brain needed a second to catch up to what my eyes were doing.
The ceiling was taller than my parents’ house, supported by massive timber beams. Four floor-to-ceiling windows dominated the back wall, and through them I could see a ski run, covered in grass and wildflowers, and beyond that, the corner of a chairlift.
There was clutter: pizza boxes, books scattered across a dining table that could seat ten, coffee cups in various stages of abandonment. But I couldn’t register any of it because of the views. I stopped in the middle of the room and turned in a slow circle, taking it all in.
“Lucks, this place is insane.”
“I can see that.” She was already heading for the stairs.
I followed her up. The staircase was open, rising from the great room to an upper floor with a hallway and a series of doors on each side.
We peeked into them, finding a bathroom, a linen closet, a tiny guest room, a room full of random exercise equipment and snowboards, and in the corner, a huge, striking bedroom with windows on two sides facing the mountain.
“This one.” She walked in, eyes wide. “This is the one!”
“I’ll check and see what the other one is like.” I peeked into the other door at the end of the hall.
It was another big bedroom, empty except for a big log bed, and clean. A window faced a stand of aspens and the valley beyond, with afternoon light coming through in gold-green stripes. There was a sticker on the doorframe from some energy drink brand.
My brain did the thing where an idea arrives fully formed, no assembly required, a complete and shining certainty filling my entire chest before my rational mind had any chance to weigh in.
“I’ll go get the… stuff,” I said, jogging down the hallway, down the stairs, across the great room to where Bode lay on the couch. I stopped in front of him, out of breath, grinning and unable to do anything about it.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you need another roommate?”
The hood didn’t move for a beat. It tipped back, and Bode’s dark eyes blinked up at me from the couch cushion, narrowed.
“Rent’s twenty-five hundred,” he said.
“Done!” I pumped my fist in the air with a whoop and started dancing.
Not good dancing. The kind of dancing that happens when a six-foot-three man with the coordination of a golden retriever receives news so good that his skeleton can’t contain it, a sort of hip-swaying, arm-waving, shuffling celebration.
“Yes. Oh, yeah. Moving to the mountains, living my best life.”
I caught Bode watching me from under his hood. He’d propped himself up on one elbow. The corner of his mouth was tilted up.
“You always like this?” he asked.
“Pretty much.” I kept dancing. “I’m Wade, by the way. Wade Kowalski. You should know that if I’m going to live in your house. Do you have a lease? Security deposit?”
“I didn’t expect you to say yes to $2500 a month. I was fucking with you.”
“Can’t change your mind now.” I continued dancing.
With a groan, Bode lay back down and pulled his hood over his face again, but the smirk was still there. I saw it, it was on the record.
“That’s a thousand dollars more than what I’m paying.” Lucky’s voice was deadly quiet, and my stomach dropped.
“He seemed like a sucker,” Bode said.
“Wade. You can’t move here. What about your career?” Her hard expression told me I was screwed, and yet… kind of horny for it. Then she narrowed her eyes, and the screwed overtook the horny.
Shit. Why hadn’t I told her? “I needed a place anyway. My job starts in two days.”
“Your job? What the fuck, Wade?”
“Okay,” I said. “So. Funny story. And complete, non-stalkery coincidence.”
Bode snorted.