Chapter 29
Three Words Can Warm the Coldest Storm
Aria
For the first time since I’ve been back, I haven’t avoided Wyatt’s street.
There’s no pain inside me, no stinging sensation, no drilling in my chest as I steer the car onto Buttermilk Mountain Avenue.
Ever since we got going, Wyatt’s been tapping the button on the center console at regular ten-second intervals to find a good song on the radio.
I’d almost forgotten that he always does this, but suddenly this gesture is so familiar, so completely normal to me, that it feels like the past two years had never happened.
He makes me not care about what Paxton did at all, and that’s pretty incredible.
When Wyatt’s around, there’s just Wyatt, nobody else.
There isn’t a second I think about Paxton whatsoever.
But as soon as I’m alone, I get angry. Really angry.
I want to call Paxton up and make him angry, shout at him, and even go over to his house just to shout at him even more.
“That’s a good song.” James Arthur’s “Quite Miss Home” comes on. “Leave it.”
Wyatt leans back and grins. “I’d almost forgotten how much you dig these melancholy tunes.”
I’d love to sing along, but that’d be too much, so I just hum instead. “I used to listen to him at Brown all the time.”
He stretches out his finger and taps the miniature cup dangling from a ribbon on the rearview mirror. The handle is green, just like the turtle that’s on it. It’s holding a little heart in its hand with a grim look on its face, and underneath it’s labeled, YOU’RE MY FAVORITE IDIOT.
“You kept it.”
We pass his house. Nothing in me makes a sound. It’s just his house, just like it was before, but with such happy and heavenly memories attached to it that I’m filled with a warm feeling of bliss.
“Hello? That’s a no-point cup!” I park the car at the start of the path that leads to Buttermilk Mountain. “You don’t throw those away.”
“But it’s from me.”
With a sigh, I push the button for the handbrake and turn off the car. “Mom held onto it. I probably would’ve thrown it off our ledge on Ute Trail.”
“Ouch.”
We get out. The cold immediately digs into my limbs even though I’m wearing my whole set of cap, scarf, and gloves.
Wyatt has traded his baseball hat for a red-and-black bobble hat.
As he comes around the car, his face buried up to his mouth in the fur of his Canada Goose jacket, I feel like I’m hallucinating or something because I’m floating.
Seriously, it feels like my feet are being lifted off the ground.
It only lasts a few seconds, but it’s a feeling you don’t ever forget.
Wyatt is pulling on his gloves when he stops. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like I was a piece of cheesecake from Patricia’s. The good one with grated lemon peel.”
“I could never look at anyone like that.”
Laughing, he nods in the direction of the mountain. “Come on, Ari. Let’s go.”
“Any idea where we’re headed?”
“No. Just walking.”
“Just walking?”
“Yep.” He casts me an amused glance from the corner of his eye. “Why is this all so strange? We always used to do this.”
He’s right. We did. Lately, there just hasn’t been any other man who wanted to go for a walk with me who could have reminded me.
To our left, the snow-covered firs start to clear, and we can see the icy lake in the distance. “You want to go to Silver Lake?”
Wyatt shakes his head. He nods into the distance. “Let’s keep on walking straight.”
“But all that’s there are mountains.”
He laughs. “You just don’t want to go because it’s uphill.”
Wyatt knows I love to hike. All the same, I go along with him.
“Yeah, no doubt. You ever see me playing any kind of sports?”
He thinks for a moment. “Not after that volleyball tournament in ninth grade, no.”
“Oh God, that.” I cover my eyes with my gloves. “I dove into the net by accident when trying to get the ball.” My shoe gets caught on a piece of rock beneath the snow. Wyatt grabs my arm and keeps me upright.
“Yeeeah. That aside, you weren’t that bad.” His eyes blaze. “I dug your hotpants.”
The ascent gets steeper and steeper. By now, I’m getting side stitches and wheezing at every other step. I used to be able to hike forever without getting exhausted. But two years off and you can kiss all that goodbye.
“I don’t need to play sports to wear hotpants.”
“Is that a promise, Moore?”
Man, how can his penetrating gaze make me so hot even though it’s cold as hell out here?
“Just an observation, Lopez.”
He laughs again, real soft, real husky, a magical sound that drifts off over the snow.
“Just a little bit more till we reach the ledge,” Wyatt says after a while. He sounds so relaxed compared to me. Naturally, as a hockey player, he’s in much better shape; nevertheless, my burning cheeks are embarrassing.
When we finally make it, I fall to my knees and cool my overheated face with snow. Breathing heavily, I roll onto my back and look up at the mountains, their peaks disappearing into the black-blue veil of the sky.
Wyatt drops down beside me. Snow lands on his lips as he turns his head to look at me. He licks it off with his tongue. The sight triggers a strong pulsing between my legs.
“We going to make a snow angel?” I ask.
“You and your love of snow angels.”
“They’re nice.”
“You’re nice.”
Three blinks of the eye. Two heart-stopping seconds. One thought.
Kiss me.
His face approaches mine—above us the sky and around us nothing but freedom. Cold lips graze my cheekbones, the corners of my mouth, and my jaw. I gasp, but not from exertion this time. Kiss me, I think, Just kiss me.
But once again his touches leave my mouth out. Instead, he puts a finger on my chin, pressing lightly so that I tilt my head forward. Snow spreads across my temple as he places a hand there, leans forward, and lowers his lips to my forehead.
I keep my eyes open. I am too surprised.
Too overwhelmed. This moment is so intense, so explosive, it’s as if his touch has made the sun shine.
In these few seconds, I perceive everything twice and three times over.
The smell of snow that surrounds us. The echoing cry of the falcon swooping past the mountains.
His scent of fir and mint, most of which comes from the soft skin on his neck where he has applied cologne.
My own pulse thundering in my ears. And finally, the sound of his lips as they peel away from my cool forehead.
His eyes are bright and clear as he looks at me. “Let’s take a photo.”
I can’t say anything in response because I’m still stuck in the moment that just passed.
He takes his phone out of his jacket pocket, and we look into the camera, the backs of our heads in the snow, he with a broad smile on his face, me with a quiet one—I still haven’t quite arrived in the here and now.
He presses the camera symbol with his thumb, and it’s only when I look at the picture that my head slowly clears.
It’s a beautiful photo. Our pupils are small from the flash, our irises just big blobs of color; his eyes are a nice honey-brown, a little golden, and mine are that bright, piercing green he loves so much.
The first thing I think when I look at our faces is, Oh, Aria, you two, you are just so in love with each other.
“And now let’s make that snow angel of yours.
” Wyatt tucks his phone back into his pants, rolls onto his side to make space, and starts moving his arms and legs.
I have to laugh. The way he’s lying there is just too funny; he looks like a little wooden doll whose limbs start to move as soon as you pull a string.
When he sees me, he indignantly opens his mouth. “Are you laughing at… Stop laughing at me!”
“I can’t. You look so funny!”
“Funny, Moore? Funny? Come on over here. I’ll show you what funny looks like.” He digs into the snow, makes a ball, and lets it fly. It lands right next to my nose. I laugh even more, stumble to my feet, trudge through the snow, and tackle him.
“You’re going to pay for that!”
He squirms beneath me as I try to soap his face, but he’s got to laugh, too—it’s so loud that it gets carried into the air, all the way to the mountains.
And then he gets snow in his mouth and almost chokes, but he keeps on laughing anyway, and so do I, because the moment is just too beautiful.
He stops resisting, and my gloved fingers brush his cheeks as our laughter dies down; all that’s left is our quick breaths as we stare at each other, his hand around my waist, mine in the snow at either side of his head.
It would be the perfect moment to kiss, really, like in the movies where there’s music and laughter and fun until all of a sudden everything gets more serious and the melody quiets down.
And if that’s how it happens in the movies, then that’s what’s got to happen now, right?
Wrong. Wyatt picks us up and the moment is gone. I don’t want to admit it, but the disappointment hits me so unexpectedly hard that I can no longer pretend that I don’t want this again. His closeness. His lips. His smell. His touches. His jokes. His heart. Him.
“Look,” he says, pointing past me into the distance. His other arm is still around my waist as I sit on his lap. I turn my back to him, my shoulders against his chest, to see what he means.
Beneath us—surrounded by the wooded, snow-covered mountains and spanned by the azure, star-studded night sky—our little town is glowing warmly. The downtown is the brightest, like a real sun, with multiple small, widely spaced patches spreading outward from it.
“Wild, huh? That’s our home, Aria. Our home.”
I nod. My cap rubs his jacket. “Aspen is magic in every breath.”
Wyatt’s lips graze my ear. “Just like you.”
My emotions are on a roller-coaster ride because I don’t know what this is all about.
Wyatt wants to spend time with me. Does he want to be more than friends?
But he won’t kiss me on the lips, even though he’s never, ever been able to keep his hands off me.
Maybe he just wants to be friends? But there are touches.
Like just now, or, I don’t know, always, if I’m being honest. The little teases, these most definitely ambiguous statements… More than friends?
Ugh. Can someone please come and stop these thoughts?
The worst thing is my own thoughts, which keep on telling me that I shouldn’t care.
That all we are is friends and nothing more.
But deep down I know that this friendzone thing between me and him is the biggest bullshit of the century.
I want him. With my heart and mind and feelings and everything. Period.
Some moments are timeless. Like this one. I don’t know how long we’ve been sitting like this, with our pants completely soaked. I mean, all we really wanted to do was make snow angels. But now my whole body is shaking, and we can no longer ignore the snowflakes swirling around us.
So at some point I crawl off Wyatt’s lap and stand up. Then we start on back.
“Am I going blind, or do you see next to nothing, too?” Wyatt asks after a while.
“I was just wondering the same thing. Just now I thought I was about to fall into some crevasse or something, but… Shit. I’m caught again.”
“How do you manage to do that all the time?” It takes Wyatt a second to find me; in the meantime, it’s started to snow so heavily, but then he helps me. I dig my fingers into his arm because now I really am afraid of falling into a crevasse.
“I’ve got small feet.”
“Yeah, and?”
“You and your clown feet make it everywhere. I can’t.”
“I’m afraid of clowns.”
“I know.” The snow has developed into a real blizzard, pulling at every inch of my body, and the wind is blowing so hard that we hardly make any progress. “Do you know where we are?”
Wyatt squints. “Near Silver Lake, I think. It’s not that far now.”
“I feel like a ghost.”
“Why?”
“Everything’s numb. Every centimeter. I can’t feel a thing.”
Wyatt drags me on. Without his incredible strength, I wouldn’t make it. I’d simply sink into the snow and freeze to death. Colorado’s snowstorms are no joke. They’re dangerous.
“You think that’s the way it is? I mean, that ghosts don’t feel anything?”
“They don’t have a body to feel with.” My teeth chatter as I try to speak. “I want to go straight into the bath, Wyatt. And then a hot-water bottle. And tea. Man, I would kill for some tea.”
The path down the mountain just keeps getting steeper and steeper. Wyatt holds onto me when our feet slip. It’s so dark we can hardly see our hands in front of us.
“When we get to the B I’m not a ghost, because my heart is in my throat.
“What is it?”
Wyatt is looking into the distance. I follow his eyes but can’t recognize a thing in this darkness.
“Fuck!” Wyatt’s voice is hardly more than a tiny whisper torn away by the storm, but I can hear the fear within it. “Aria, there’s a grizzly!”