Chapter 27
The Ice Is Burning
Knox
This oracle—one of William’s great ideas, naturally—could’ve chosen anyone. Truly anyone.
Now I’m sitting here with Paisley, crammed into a tiny nutshell attached to a cable, and I have no idea what to say. Or if I should say anything at all.
I don’t like her sitting so close to me and her breath fogging up the window. It forces me to think about her, and I don’t want to think about her. Because if I do, I’ll start imagining her breath wetting my skin instead of the windowpane, her lips gently brushing my ear…
“Do you want to act as if I don’t exist from now on or something?”
She asks this amusedly, with a soft laugh in her voice, but she doesn’t really find it funny, and neither do I.
I don’t want to pretend that she doesn’t exist, but I don’t want to look at her either, I don’t want my heart to suddenly make unnatural movements, I want to pull her close to me, even though hugs have never been my thing. I don’t want something if she doesn’t.
I finally look up. Ouch. I wasn’t prepared for her hurt expression. It makes me choke up. Her eyes are big and full of hope, two little pieces of heaven set in her face.
I look away again. “Don’t be goofy.”
She flares her nostrils. “You’re ignoring me, Knox. You’ve been ignoring me for days.”
I try to move away from her a bit, but it’s impossible. I lean back with a sigh and run a finger over the corrugated ankle strap of my board. “You’re my chalet girl. Nothing more. And that’s how I’m treating you.” I turn to face her.
Paisley looks like I’ve smacked her. “I’m your chalet girl and nothing more?”
“You didn’t want to be anything else,” I remind her. “It was your decision.”
For a moment, it looks like she’s wrestling with herself.
Her cheeks turn pink and blotched, and the sensitive part of her neck tells me her pulse is racing.
I love when that happens. A frighteningly large part of me wants to put my lips on that very spot and enjoy feeling the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
“This isn’t all that easy,” Paisley says.
She seems to have put her nervousness aside, because now she straightens up, but the dignified posture is somewhat ruined by the pads all over her body.
They’re the ones you usually wear to play rugby—on your knees, shins, thighs, arms…
There’s even a larger one across her upper body.
At the last city council meeting, William insisted that we get these things.
“You wander through life, and everything just falls into your hands. I mean, Knox, the superstar. Knox, the millionaire’s son.
Knox, the stud. You get what you want because everything has always been easy for you.
” She takes a deep breath, puffs out her chest, her face real small in her armor.
“But it wasn’t the case for all of us, you know?
It’s not easy for everyone. Some people have things they need to work through, Knox, for some people things are really dirty. ”
“You have no idea how I’m doing, Paisley.” Her words hit home. They cover my heart like a dark veil that tightens with every breath. “You have no idea what I’ve got to work through.”
Paisley turns white. A bit gray and opaque, like the sky on particularly snowy days.
She is looking at me as if she knows something, but there’s no way.
Her eyes make me even angrier, I’ve got to catch my breath before continuing.
“You pigeonhole people, you know that? Could be that you have a horrible fucking past, Paisley. Could be that you’re broken, totally done.
But that does not give you the right to judge others as if you know them, though you clearly do not. ”
“Knox…”
“No, you wait. I’m sick of the two of us circling each other like two lions before a fight.
I’m sick of constantly being worried about you, wondering whether you’re okay, only to have you hit me over the head.
You don’t want me, fine, no big deal, but stop going on and on about how I’m just treating you like a chalet girl. ”
At that moment the gondola reaches the middle station. Before Paisley can say anything, I slide the door open and step outside. The fresh air smells like new snow and black night. I breathe it in deep, enjoying the burning cold in my nostrils. Up here, it’s dead quiet.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Paisley having trouble getting out of the gondola with all her pads on. I could help her, a part of me even wants to, but it doesn’t matter because the very next second she lands knee-deep in the snow and trudges over to me.
I could eat her alive. First and foremost, of course, I’m pissed off and hurt. But God, the way she’s doddering across the slope in her thick armor… I have to look up at the sky and take another deep breath to get the twitching of the corner of my mouth under control.
“Knox, listen…” Paisley wheezes upon reaching me.
I can see her chest rising and falling while she looks at me as if she wants to say something really meaningful.
Two strands of hair are hanging over her face.
Her fingernails brush her cheek as she tucks them back under her cap, leaving two red streaks. “I, umm, don’t know how to snowboard.”
Yep. Real meaningful.
Just one big step and I’m standing right in front of her.
Paisley has to look up at me, but she’s not looking into my eyes.
Instead, she’s staring at my snowboard jacket, at the huge X that separates the letters D-O-P-E.
The brand that sponsors me. If they only knew how well that jacket described my current life…
It takes a while for Paisley to let out her held breath.
When I put my index finger to her chin and force her to look me in the eyes, she shudders.
I grin, real short, uncontrollably, an angel’s smile, then run the tip of my finger along her face, stopping right under the sensitive spot right beneath her ear, there, where her cap ends.
It feels like I’m painting her, and I like it.
I like it so much. My finger wanders farther, caresses the delicate bridge of her nose and explores the curve of her lower lip.
She opens her mouth a crack, licks her lips with the tip of her tongue and, oh fuck, my little guy down there begins to throb.
I can feel her breath on my face. It would be so easy to kiss her.
So easy to just overcome the last inch and let her breath become mine.
Paisley fogs my mind. I know myself and at the same time don’t anymore.
I don’t know who I am at all. Suddenly she is everything that defines me, and that fact supersedes any rational thought as to why I shouldn’t be holding her chin right now, why I shouldn’t have my hands around her face, my fingertips beneath her cap, between her cold lips, in her warm hair.
Paisley looks at me. I think she sees it all.
I don’t think she sees a thing. But maybe more than I do, because, right now, I have no idea who or what I am.
I only know that Paisley is here, right in front of me, a hundred miles away.
Something isn’t right with her. No, something isn’t right with both of us, but I want us to find out together what that is.
I want us to find out together and then decide what we want to be.
Broken together, lonely together, or simply Paisley and Knox.
I swallow. My throat feels raw. We are so close that my lips are touching the corner of her mouth when I talk. “I won’t kiss you,” I mumble. It’s cold, but Paisley’s skin is on fire. “Not today, Paisley.”
When I take a step backward, I can see all the tension leave her body. Her shoulders sink. She’s standing there ruffled up in her body armor in the middle of the slope beneath the pitch-black sky, looking at me like I’ve abandoned her.
“Why not?”
The words are hardly more than a whisper, but they hover above us for what seems like forever, before fading at the peak of Buttermilk Mountain.
The corner of my mouth twitches again, but this time I’m unable to keep it down, and I break into a grin. I look to the ground, push a bit of snow to the side with the tip of my boot, then look back up. “You’re a cassowary bird, that’s why.”
“I’m a…what?”
“A cassowary.”
“A cassowary,” she repeats, as if she wanted to see how the word tasted. “What’s that?”
“Look it up.”
She just stands there, confused, looking at me, but doesn’t say a thing. My snowboard makes a dull sound as I let it drop onto the ground, ending our moment. If we even had one. I think so. With Paisley and I, this is how things are. We collect moments. Moments, but nothing more.
“I don’t know how to snowboard, Knox,” she repeats, her eyes on the board before shifting to the slope. She swallows.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m good enough for both of us. My discipline is really the half-pipe, but I can make it down a mountain, too. Easy peasy.”
Her mouth is agape. “You are so full of yourself.”
I kneel down to open the bindings and wave to her to get on. “Nothing wrong with being full of yourself when you know how to do something.”
Her breath comes in bursts. She looks down the slope again, kneads her hands, exhales trembling. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can do this. What if I break something? Or throw a concussion into the mix? I wouldn’t be able to skate anymore, I wouldn’t know who I was, and…”
“Hey.” Her hand is in mine; without noticing, I must’ve grabbed it.
Her delicate fingers jerk for a second, as though she wanted to pull them away, but she doesn’t.
I should take her hand more often, now that I know I can.
“You’re riding with me. I can count the number of falls I’ve had on one hand.
On top of it, this here’s the first slope.
It’s not a long way down. Just a few minutes. Trust me.”