Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SIERRA
I’m lying in Beau’s arms trying to commit every second of this feeling to memory and thinking about all the reasons I wish he wasn’t leaving. Two more nights together after tonight. That’s all we have.
I want to take the next two days off work and spend every minute with him, but that isn’t realistic because he’ll be at the mountain practicing.
I know his coach has been up his ass since he got back from Vegas, but it sounds like he’s finally making the progress he’d been hoping to make.
His quad cork for Big Air is solid, and he seems like he’s confident about Slopestyle, too, even though he won’t know what that course is like until he gets to Aspen.
He hugs me to him, pressing his lips into the hair on the top of my head. “I don’t want to leave,” he whispers. I pull back and look up at him, shocked at his words. He must see the question on my face because he quickly says, “I have to. But I wish I didn’t.”
“You probably say that to all the ladies,” I tease.
His nostrils flare and his voice is hard when he says, “I’ve never said that to anyone. I’ve never even thought it.”
I reach up and cup his cheek with my hand. “I was just teasing, Beau. I wish you weren’t leaving too, and it’s easier to joke about it than to think that in three days you’ll be gone.” I swallow deeply to push that lump in my throat down. I am not going to cry about this.
“Then come with me,” he says.
My lips part, but no sound comes out. “How would that work?” I finally ask.
“I don’t know, but I want you in Aspen with me. I know you probably can’t come for the whole week, but take a few days off and come over. I’m not ready to let you go yet.”
I hear the vulnerability in his voice, and I believe him that this feeling is new for him. The desire to follow someone, no matter where that journey would take me, is totally new to me too. But that’s not what he’s asking of me. He just wants a few more days in Aspen.
He’s not ready to let me go yet. That ‘yet’ speaks volumes, because what he’s not saying is that eventually he will be ready to let me go.
The thought of being without him, of not coming home to find him cooking dinner, of not having him here walking around in nothing but his sweats, of not having him to cuddle up to every night, to share secrets and dreams with—it’s one hundred times harder than it was when Peter left.
But going to Aspen with him would just be prolonging the inevitable, and won’t it hurt more in the end if we keep stringing it out like this?
“I have this big work fundraiser next weekend,” I tell him. “I have to be here this week for the planning, and I can’t get out of attending the event.”
“Oh.” Such a simple word, yet it guts me.
“Can I be honest?”
His lips trace my forehead as he whispers, “Always.”
“It’s going to hurt when you leave Park City.
I know we said we’d be adults about this, and we knew there was an expiration date.
But I’m still going to miss you when you leave.
And even if I didn’t have this work thing and I could go to Aspen, Beau, you’d still leave me again after that.
I don’t know if I could do the leaving part twice. ”
He’ll always be leaving, I remind myself.
He says nothing, just holds me to him. “I understand,” he finally says, running his hand down my back and holding me even tighter. “Maybe you’re right and that would just make it harder. For both of us.”
My lips find his and I try to lose myself in the feeling of being with him. In the here and now, without focusing on the future.
I’d be lying to myself if I said that him leaving isn’t going to destroy me. But even though I’m fairly sure it will, I’m not willing to lose a second with him between now and then.
“I swear you two are saints,” Lauren says as she opens the tall wooden door with the arched top and ushers us out of the cold and into her two-story entryway. The stone floors are heated and melt the snow off our boots as we leave them by the door.
“Nope, just bringing our favorite new mom her favorite food,” Petra says as I hold out the bag of Indian food. The aroma fills the entryway and Lauren sighs with pleasure as she takes the bag and leads us into the kitchen.
“The girls went down okay, I take it?” I ask.
It’s just about seven at night and her house is silent except for the sound of white noise coming across the baby monitor.
I peek at it where it sits on the counter, two angels in fleece sleepers, cozied up next to each other and sound asleep. “Look at those little cherubs,” I coo.
“Don’t let them fool you. They are beautiful when they’re sleeping but holy terrors when they are awake. If they hadn’t both napped today, I think I would have lost it!”
“When does Josh get back?” Petra asks.
“Two more days. If I’d had any idea before they were born just how hard this would be, I’d have said no to this trip back when he was planning it.
” The twins are six months old, so obviously this backcountry ski trip has been in the works for some time.
Unfortunately, Lauren’s family is in Maine, where she’s from, and even though Josh’s parents are close by, they aren’t the kind of warm, supportive in-laws Lauren needs.
“Where are they?” I ask. “British Columbia?”
“Yeah, they did Whistler yesterday, and Blackcomb today,” Lauren says as she unpacks the takeout containers onto her table. “They’re headed to somewhere like an hour north of there tomorrow. Then back to Vancouver.”
“I love Whistler Blackcomb,” Petra says. “I need to get back up there soon.”
“Not enough terrain for you at America’s largest ski resort?” I tease. Now that Park City Mountain and Canyons are connected, you could ski for days and never do the same run twice.
“I haven’t seen you on the mountain recently,” she says. Petra runs her own company, so she creates her own schedule. She’s generally on the slopes at least a few afternoons a week, but it’s almost impossible for me to join her unless I take an afternoon off.
“Work’s been busy, and I’ve only been home one of the last three weekends and the mountain was closed one of those weekend days for high winds. Maybe this coming weekend?”
She nods, and I wish we could invite Lauren to join us, but she really doesn’t ski. And keeping up with a former Olympic skier is not for the faint of heart. Despite years on my high school and college race teams, Petra makes me look like a complete novice.
“Speaking of being gone,” Lauren chimes in, “you’ve told us nothing about Vegas. Was it fun?”
We move around each other in the kitchen, grabbing plates and glasses and silverware as we set the table for our dinner. “Yeah. It was way better than I expected it to be.”
My eyes flick over to Petra as she sits down at the table, and that was a mistake because she’s watching me like she can read my mind. “Oh yeah,” she says casually, “what made it better than you expected?”
I’m saved from answering her question by the shrill ring of my phone. I can feel my entire face light up as I tell my friends, “It’s Jackson.” As the one who brought all three of us together, her absence is felt deeply. “Hey, Jackson, how are you?”
“I’m fine,” she says, her words clipped. Clearly, she is not fine. “But I need to talk to you. Is now a good time?”
“Uh, sure,” I say. “Give me one second.” I mute the phone and let Petra and Lauren know that I’ll be back in a minute and they should start eating without me.
I walk back toward the front of the house and take a seat in the den off the entryway.
Jackson sounds mad, and I pray that she and Nate haven’t had a fight.
Their early twenties were punctuated with consistent ups and downs, fight after fight, always making up and promising each other they wouldn’t fight again.
It was exhausting. But after a five-year break, they reunited and have been so on the same page about everything since that it’s almost eerie.
“Sorry, I’m back. What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
“I need to ask you a question that I never in a million years thought I’d be asking you.”
My stomach plummets, then slowly I feel the bile seeping into my esophagus, burning its way up my chest until I swallow hard, forcing it back down again. “Okay,” I squeak. She can’t know. There’s no way she knows.
“Is something going on with you and Beau?”
“What? Why would you think that?” I don’t have to feign the shock. How the hell could she know?
“Kind of a long story, but Nate and I are considering getting a dog once we get through ski season. I was scrolling social media this morning, searching through all the dog-related hashtags and, in multiple instances, I came across this beautiful chocolate lab named Winston.”
I had no idea it was possible for my heart to beat so hard and fast that it could feel like it might break my ribcage. I don’t trust myself to speak, so I just wait to see what she’ll say next.
“In one of the pictures I was like ‘wow, that girl playing with him looks like Sierra.’ And that’s when I looked a bit closer and realized that it was you, playing with him, in my living room.”
I don’t know what to say, so I focus on the dog, hoping she’ll forget about Beau. “I’m so sorry I didn’t ask you if it was okay to have a dog at your place.”
I tell her about how I ended up fostering him unexpectedly, and she laughs and says, “Only you, Sierra. But I don’t care about the dog, as long as he’s not ruining my furniture or peeing on my rugs?”
“Nope, he’s obsessed with shoes, but furniture is safe. Besides, we crate him during the day when we’re not home.”
“We?”
Shit.
“See,” she says. “That’s what I was worried about. The way you describe you and Beau as ‘Winston’s humans,’ and those photos of you two in Vegas, and the half-hearted attempts to quiet your followers’ insistence that you two should be together. Sierra, are you sleeping with my brother?”