Chapter 13 #2
I huff out a breath. “You know we’re absolutely ending up on someone’s Instagram reel, right?”
He shrugs, unbothered. “They can film. The media might speculate, but they won’t know anything. You’re an unknown woman from Czechia who skis okay GS. They won’t track you down.”
He says it like it’s a shield: anonymity as protection. It should make me feel safer. In a way, it does.
But there’s a tiny sting I don’t expect, a little cold edge at the back of my throat. Unknown woman. Of course, that’s what I am here. That’s what I signed up to be.
His girl, but only in the spaces that don’t exist on paper.
I push the thought away, hard, like catching an edge and forcing the ski back under me. Not now. Not here on this perfect white slope with my legs buzzing and his voice still in my ears.
“I’ll take an anonymous GS girl,” I say lightly. “As long as I don’t fall on camera.”
He grins. “Then don’t fall.”
He nudges my ski with his. I nudge back. The girls stare; someone definitely films.
I turn back toward the start, heart thudding, trying to fix the feeling of being coached by him, of being seen by him, in my muscle memory. I know this is borrowed time. A little pocket universe on Reiteralm, made of gates and wax and stolen looks.
Later, on the train, I’ll replay that word—unknown—and finally let it land where it’s been aiming all along.
For now, I plant my poles, hear him call my name, and push back into the course.
***
We’re standing by the car in the Reiteralm parking lot, skis already loaded, the kind of grey, flat light that means the day is over even if the sun hasn’t set yet.
He slams the trunk shut and, for a second, just leans his hands on it, head down. I clutch my gloves like they’re something important to say.
“So,” I start, eloquent as ever.
“So,” he echoes, looking up. There are faint goggle marks on his face. I want to kiss them away. Instead, I clear my throat.
“Look,” I say, “before the train station, before everything goes back to… normal… we should probably admit this is complicated.”
His jaw tics. “Because?”
I tick them off in my head like bullets. “Different countries. Your World Cup schedule. My job. The age gap. The fact that your life is basically airports and hotel rooms and mine is language school websites and overdue invoices.”
He doesn’t argue. Just waits.
“And because of all that,” I push on, “you should probably back away. I have things to figure out. I can’t… I can’t be the girl waiting by the phone for the guy who lives on planes.”
There. Said. It comes out steadier than I expected, but my heart is pounding in my ribs.
He blows out a breath and laughs once, without humor. “You know what I’m really afraid of?”
“Enlighten me.”
“That I blink and I’m fifty, and I’m sitting in some team meeting talking about line choice, and I realize I let things like this go because it was the ‘wrong time’.
” He makes air quotes with his fingers, angry at the phrase.
“Wrong time, wrong country, wrong schedule. I don’t want to wake up one day and realize I spent my whole life only turning around gates. ”
His words land somewhere low in my chest, heavy and hot. For a second, I almost give in. Then another picture cuts in line: Peter, his suit jacket always half over a chair, my name never on any guest list, me standing at the back of the room while people who mattered shook his hand.
“You know what I’m afraid of?” I say quietly.
He nods once. “Tell me.”
“I spent years standing in line for Peter,” I say. “Literal lines—events, receptions, airports—and the invisible one too. Always behind his job, his calendar, his ambitions. I was ‘the girlfriend’. Not a person with her own life, just an accessory that looked decent in photos.”
His eyes flash, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“I’m not doing that again,” I continue. “I’m not losing myself waiting for your races to end or refreshing live timing just to feel like I exist in your world.
I love skiing, but I also love my work, my language school plan, and my stupid apartment in Prague.
I can’t disappear into someone else’s life again, no matter how nice the view is. ”
The wind tugs at a strand of my hair. He reaches out and tucks it under my hat, fingers careful, as if he’s thinking instead of reacting.
“Okay,” he says at last. “Then don’t.”
I blink. “That’s the big plan?”
He huffs out a breath. “You don’t stand in line for me. I stand in line for you sometimes. I come to Prague when I can. I help you find a club near you if you want to keep skiing gates. I don’t block the language school thing—you go, I cheer from afar. I send stupid videos. Helmet sponsor package.”
I snort. “Helmet sponsor?”
He shrugs, mouth tilting. “I send money for your race helmet, and I get my name on it. Best deal of my career.”
It’s so ridiculous I actually laugh, the tension in my chest cracking. “You can’t afford my helmet,” I say. “Top-tier Czech amateur brand.”
He smiles, but his eyes are serious. “I’m not asking you to give everything up.”
Silence again, but softer this time. Cars come and go around us; someone laughs near a bus. The world goes on.
“Why?” I ask finally, almost whispering. “Why me, apart from the sex?”
His answer is immediate. “Because when you ski, you look… free. I like that person. I want to see her more often.”
I look away, across the lot, at some random van with a local club logo on it. This is dangerously close to the word we’re both avoiding.
“I still don’t know how this would work,” I say.
“Me neither,” he admits. “But I’d rather try and fail than not try at all because the calendar looks scary.”
He steps closer, close enough that I can see the day’s stubble, the fatigue around his eyes, the little flecks of melted snow on his lashes.
I should tell him what I feel, don’t let him hope this could work. But he’s standing close, and here in the skiing paradise, I almost feel it could work. I want to. I need distance to figure it out.
The train time is getting closer. I can feel it like a clock in my ribs.
“So…” I say again.
“So,” he echoes.
We step into each other at the same time.
The kiss isn’t frantic like the ones in his apartment, or reckless like the one in the ski depot.
It’s slow, deep, a little desperate underneath.
When we finally pull apart, his hand stays on the back of my neck for a second longer. Then he clears his throat.
“You’ll come to races if you can?” he asks.
“If I can,” I say. “And you’ll be brilliant even if I’m not there.”
“Deal.”
He opens the passenger door for me. I climb in, heart too full, already hearing the rattle of the train tracks in my future and the argument I’ll have with myself there.
For now, I shut the door, watch the mountain shrink in the side mirror, and hold his words like a hot stone in my pocket. But I know I have to think without his presence weighing on me.
***
The train hums like white noise under my feet, a long, metal exhale carrying me away from the mountains and back into my life.
I spread my planner out on the tiny table, pen in hand, and start doing what I always do when I’m anxious: I organize. World Cup calendar on one side of my mind, my lessons and language school plans on the other.
Okay, if he’s in Lenzerheide that weekend, I could move those two intensive blocks. Maybe do extra work the week before, shift the Saturday group online. If he’s in Norway, traveling will be hell, but I could—
My pen freezes mid-arrow.
I know this feeling. The slow, creeping rearrangement.
My life bending itself silently around someone else’s dates, someone else’s dreams. It starts with “just this once” and “it’s only for a season,” and one day you wake up and realize every page of your calendar has his name on it, and yours has vanished.
This is exactly how it began with Peter. Little compromises, disguised as practical decisions. And then I was the woman whose every answer began with “I’ll have to see what Peter is doing.”
A chill runs through me that has nothing to do with the air conditioning.
I put the pen down. Flatten my hands on the paper. Breathe.
Fabio is not Peter. He has never asked me to wait, or stand in line, or make myself small. He’s offered to come to Prague, to find me lanes to train in, to stand at the bottom of the hill and shout my name like it matters.
And I am still, instinctively, doing this. Twisting myself into shapes around a man’s calendar without him even asking.
The problem isn’t him. It’s me.
My chest tightens. I close the planner, hard, and let it sit there like an unanswered question.
If I don’t fix this—this reflex, this fear, this hollow where my own life should feel solid—then it doesn’t matter how decent he is. We’ll end in the same place: me resenting, him confused, both of us wounded by old ghosts.
My phone is on the table, face down. I turn it over. Our chat is still open; his last message is a selfie from the finish area, cheeks red, hair damp, tongue out in mock exhaustion. I trace it with my thumb like an idiot.
I could pretend a little longer. I could ride this high, go to races, keep shoving down the panic every time I book a ticket with his name in mind.
Instead, I open a new message. My fingers hover. They shake.
I type, delete, type again, trying to keep it honest without making it about his failures, because this isn’t about him failing me. It’s about me not being ready, not to fail myself.
In the end, the words are simple:
ZLA: I’m falling for you, and that’s exactly why I need to stop now. I have to learn how not to disappear into someone else’s life before I can be in yours. I need to figure myself out first.
I stare at it until the letters blur. It feels dramatic and not enough and too much, all at once.
Then I hit send.
The message flies off into the little void in the corner. I feel physically ill, like I’ve just stepped off a cliff I wasn’t ready for. My body hums with the urge to snatch it back, to call him, to say I didn’t mean it, that I’m just tired and scared and I’ll be fine.
I don’t. I put the phone face down again and press my forehead to the cool window. Fields smear by in winter colors; station names flicker and vanish. Somewhere out there, he’s reading that text, and I can almost feel the flare of his anger from a distance.
The phone buzzes. Once, then again. I don’t look. Not yet.
An hour out from Prague, I finally flip it over.
His replies are exactly what I expected and somehow worse.
FAB: So that’s it? Over text?
FAB: We said we’d try. You don’t even want to see what “try” looks like?
FAB: What are you so afraid of?
I swallow around the lump in my throat. He sounds annoyed, hurt, and confused.
Rejected. Every line is tinged with that sharp, competitive frustration I’ve seen on his face after a bad run—only this time, I’m the missed gate.
Text is a terrible medium for this; half his tone I’m filling in between the words.
He doesn’t understand, of course, he doesn’t. How could he?
Before I can decide what to say, the phone buzzes again—this time with a different notification.
ANNA: Don’t freak out, but Peter is in our apartment.
My vision tunnels for a second. The letters might as well be carved into the glass.
Another message follows quickly, as if she’s trying to cushion it:
ANNA: He says he wants to return the money he owes you. If you’re home soon, I can let him in?
Just his name is enough to send a cold shiver down my spine. My body remembers things my mind pretends not to: the way my stomach used to knot before we met, the way my voice went smaller around his impatience.
I check the time. We’re less than an hour from Prague now. Close enough.
I do need the money. I do want that chapter closed. I am so, so tired of ghosts.
I can tell her to send him away, that I’m not ready to meet him. But the new me knows better. If I could brave the storm of snow, the sneers of girls ten years younger and ten times better than me, I can brave this meeting.
My thumb hovers over the keyboard. This, right here, is the hinge: run from it or face it. Keep my life messy and undefined, or start cleaning up the wreckage properly.
I type:
ZLA: Let him in. I’ll be there soon.
And I know, with a strange, painful clarity, that this is the real decision. Not the text to Fabio. Not the calendar. This. Choosing to walk back into the old battlefield not to stay, but to pack up what’s mine and leave it on my terms.
The phone buzzes again—Fabio.
FAB: I’m not him. Stop pushing me away like I am.
He’s right. He’s not. And yet I can feel the same old pattern winding up inside me, ready to play out with a different man in a different sport. If I don’t break it now, I never will.
My hands move before my doubts can catch up.
ZLA: I know you’re not Peter. That’s why I’m doing this. I need to fix the part of me that keeps twisting itself around men before I can stand next to you without resenting you. Maybe you also need to stop pushing so hard when someone says “not yet.”
I stare at the screen. It’s probably unfair. It’s also brutally the closest I can get to the truth right now.
I send it.
Outside, the landscape shifts; suburban edges start to appear. I close my planner, shove it back into my bag, and stand up to get my things from the rack. My legs feel shaky, like I’ve skied too many runs.
The train pulls into Prague. The brakes scream; the carriage shudders. People start moving, jostling, collecting luggage.
My phone is still in my hand. No new messages yet. Maybe he’s furious. Maybe he’s thinking. Maybe he’s done. Maybe he finally realized that I’m too much of a mess for his own good.
But it does not matter for now. For the first time in years, I’m not making my next move based on what a man on the other end of the line might do.
The doors hiss open. Cold city air floods in. I step onto the platform, heart pounding, into a life that is suddenly, terrifyingly, mine to sort out.