Chapter 41 Drew
Drew
Drew jumped straight out of bed to go looking for Ari.
He’d spent the entire night tossing and turning as he thought back through their last few conversations and reckoned with his family’s mini intervention.
Thandie was right about him. Each time he got close to the life he wanted, he jumped ship to quit on his own terms. His whole life felt driven by his fear of failure.
But he didn’t want that to be the thing that made him lose Ari.
So, he got ready, stepped out into the snow, and searched the Village for the woman who’d been preoccupying his thoughts since New Year’s Eve.
They stood there for what felt like a lifetime. Ari showed no sign of wanting to let go.
Harrison looked up, spotted Drew, and locked eyes with him.
Drew couldn’t see Ari’s face, but Harrison’s looked satisfied.
There was a clear I told you so in his gaze.
Drew knew that Harrison was a grade-A asshole.
And he knew that Ari had fake-dated him for the specific purpose of getting Harrison off her back.
But maybe there was more to the story than he thought.
Ari had known Harrison for years, after all.
They played on the same team, knew the same people, and shared the same world.
Harrison and Ari made sense. They looked good together, had the same interests, and belonged to the same group of friends.
Like Ari, Harrison was athletic, ambitious, and accomplished.
Plus, Harrison had been in a real relationship with Ari. Which was more than Drew could say.
Maybe the plan had been to make Harrison jealous the whole time, and now that their arrangement was over, Ari was free to spend time with whomever she wanted to.
He didn’t want it to be true, but the longer he saw them together, the more accurate it seemed.
Drew wanted to walk over to them and say something, in the hope that his suspicions weren’t true.
But Ari had made it clear from the get-go that she didn’t want him to interfere.
So, he turned around and walked away. After all, Drew hadn’t come to Switzerland to chase after her, he’d come to pursue his professional dreams.
He had no idea whether he was going to go back to college or apply for the Leitner Productions job, but he did know that he was still on assignment with Zeus.
He needed to edit all the recent photos he’d taken and head to a figure-skating competition that afternoon.
So, he did his best to scrub the image of Ari and Harrison from his memory and get through all his tasks for the day.
Focusing felt like a nearly impossible task, because while he was supposed to be editing, he kept replaying their conversations in his mind and wondering what she would think of each athlete he’d photographed that day.
He walked to the ice rink for that afternoon’s competition, hoping it would take his mind off of things.
But he quickly realized that thinking it would distract him from Ari had been a mistake.
Why? Because ice dance was romantic as hell.
Drew watched from the sidelines as sparkly-costumed skaters glided across the ice with the strength of hardened athletes and elegance of classically trained dancers.
He snapped photos of each detail and watched each dance with pained admiration.
His breath caught as each athlete skated through the air, and he gritted his teeth as he watched them land spins that were just as beautiful as they were terrifying.
But it wasn’t the fragile bones and unforgiving moves that wowed him.
It was the couples on the ice. The intense stares into each other’s eyes, the subtle emotions on their faces, the confidence it took to trust each other with their lives.
He knew they were athletic partners, not usually romantic couples.
This was all for show. But each dance was a story.
A mesmerizing symbol of what it was to love and be loved.
Putting oneself on the line, entrusting the most vulnerable parts of oneself to somebody else, jumping with the faith that they would catch your fall.
Or at least believing the dance was worth the risk.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Hans Leitner as the dance ended and the audience took a break. Hans was standing just a few feet away in the press pit. But Drew had been so distracted thinking about Ari that he hadn’t even noticed.
“It is,” Drew said solemnly as he gazed out at the ice rink. His first impulse was to be embarrassed by his emotion, but Hans seemed to pick up on how Drew was feeling.
“I met my wife on an ice-skating rink. It was the Lake Placid Winter Games in 1980,” Hans said, gazing out at the ice rink, his eyes wistful.
“It was my first Olympics, and I’d spent the entire first week walking around, all wide eyed.
Once my competitions were over, I drove to the next town over.
I wanted to get away from the crowds for a moment, and that town has a lake that freezes up every year,” Hans said with a faraway look, as if he could see the memory with complete clarity in his mind.
Drew put his camera down and looked at Hans.
He’d been trying to get some behind-the-scenes photos of the skaters as they awaited their turns, but he was so distracted that he decided he was better off listening to the story Hans had to tell.
“I was skating and taking photos of the scenery when I noticed her. She had one of those smiles that lights up a room, and I could see it from the other side of the lake as she skated around with her friends. But I was a quiet man back then, way too shy to talk to her. Even now, I prefer using my camera to having an actual conversation.”
“Me too,” said Drew, thinking of how much more comfortable he’d felt around Ari that first night with his camera around his neck. “So, who was the woman on the ice?”
“Eliza,” Hans said with a twinkle in his eyes.
“While she looked graceful and majestic from a distance, she had never been ice skating before. She was trying her best, but the lake was on a bit of a slope, so once she started skating downhill, she couldn’t stop.
Next thing you know, she was screaming and skating at full speed down the lake,” he chuckled.
“Kids were running away, and families were jumping off the ice so as not to get caught in her path. But I didn’t, I couldn’t.
I had my camera out and kept pressing the shutter because she looked so mesmerizing in the early-morning light. ”
Drew immediately thought of Ari and how beautiful she’d looked in the early-morning light.
“Eliza was skating at full momentum, but in my trance, I forgot to move out of the way. So, she crashed right into me. We’ve been skating side by side ever since,” Hans said with a smile, then hefted the camera in his hands and switched his focus back to the ice rink.
“What do you wish you had known about love before you found it?” asked Drew. It had nothing to do with the Olympics, but it was the question he wanted the answer to most. Hans looked to the side for a second as if carefully thinking through the last seventy-two years of his life.
“Love only comes around a few times. So, when it finds you, don’t let it pass you by.”
With that, the speakers erupted with sound, announcing the start of the next dance.
The audience was intently focused on the rink again, and Hans had gone back to taking photos.
But Drew was frozen still. He knew that he was supposed to be out in the crowd capturing audience members and taking photos of the skaters Zeus had sponsored.
But as the song for the next skate began, Hans’s words played back in his mind: When it finds you, don’t let it pass you by.
Drew knew that there were no guarantees in life, and that lightning rarely struck twice in the same place.
He and Ari lived in different cities and on different continents and they occupied completely different worlds.
But by some beautiful twist of fate, they’d found each other again.
The Winter Olympics would be over in less than a week, and although there was a tiny chance he could end up back in London in the spring, in all likelihood he would never see her again.
As he watched the final moments of the next dance, he realized that if he didn’t go all in, something that had the potential to be great would pass him by.
Again. So, he put his camera into his pocket, walked out of the press pit, and ran out into the snow.