Chapter 19
Grayson
The first ten minutes of the drive out to Colchester Ski Resort are quiet enough that I start hearing myself recount every mistake I've made with this woman in surround sound inside my head.
I don’t usually mind silence. I like it, most days, and prefer it to pointless chatter and people filling space for the sake of hearing themselves talk.
But this silence has edges. It sits in the car with us, sharp and deliberate, built out of two careful weeks of distance and restraint and pretending the line we crossed hasn’t been etched in the back of my skull.
Two weeks.
Two weeks of keeping it professional.
Two weeks of meetings, calendars, school pickup logistics, design revisions, dinner schedules, and the particular kind of self-control that starts to feel less like discipline and more like slowly strangling myself with my own tie.
I've told myself over and over that it was the right move. It still is.
What happened with Carly cannot happen again.
That thought is easier to hold onto in the office, where there are people around and work to do and a dozen ways to remind myself who I’m supposed to be.
At home, it's murkier. She moves through the kitchen in leggings or shorts and oversized shirts, laughs with Penelope over cartoons, ties her hair up when she’s concentrating, and turns my entire fucking house into something warmer than it used to be.
I glance at her sitting beside me. She’s looking out the passenger window, one boot tucked under her thigh, bundled into a cream sweater, her dark coat discarded in the back seat.
Her hair is down today, brown waves falling loose over one shoulder.
She’s gone quiet on me again, guarded and hard to read, always different with me than she is with everyone else.
I don't know what I expected bringing her to Cole's party.
I'd wanted her to feel comfortable, but it had been a surprise that she hadn't clung to the wall, smiled politely, and only spoken when prompted.
She'd been nervous at the start, but she'd melted like butter into that funny, easy version of herself so quickly it almost gave me whiplash.
Everyone liked her. Of course they did.
Cole liked her immediately, which should have irritated me, but unfortunately didn’t. Mandy practically adopted her into the circle. Even Wade was weirdly normal and chummy with her. By the end of the night, Carly looked like she belonged there.
I accepted the invitation to Colchester for sensible reasons. Mostly sensible reasons.
Ski towns burn through athleisure like college programs do.
Layers, thermals, gloves, training gear, branded winter lines.
A weekend up there with Wade isn’t a waste of time, professionally speaking.
There are conversations worth having, opportunities worth feeling out, and if I'm honest with myself, I need a break — a break from work, from routine, from emails, from being needed every second of the day by employees, partners, coaches, staff, and a four-year-old with the negotiating tactics of a hostage specialist.
Penelope is staying with Halsey this weekend, which is miracle enough on its own that I don’t want to be too grateful for fear the universe will realize it's gone easy on me and ruin it.
Two quiet days in the mountains should be enough, and it should feel simple. But the only complication is one I brought on myself, and she's sitting close enough that I could wrap my hand around her thigh if I gave in to my instincts.
We leave Boulder behind, the roads starting to wind and the air feeling thinner, cleaner, a sharp incline up the side of a mountain to our right and a sloping cliff of snow-coated spruce trees on our left.
Carly shifts in her seat and glances at the stereo screen. “You listen to a weird amount of nineties music for someone so grumpy.”
I look at her. “I’m sorry, are you under the impression that grumpy people don’t appreciate Nirvana? I'm pretty sure I'm exactly the target demographic.”
Her mouth twitches. “That's fair. Guess it suits you since you act like the idea of fun is personally offensive to you.”
I huff a chuckle before I can stop it. “That right?”
“Mhm.” She gestures vaguely toward me. “You’ve got a very specific... energy.”
I try to keep the grin tugging at my lips at bay. “And what energy is that, exactly?”
“Divorced football kingpin who hides how much he cares from everyone but his kid, and secretly enjoys being miserable.”
A real laugh punches out of me, low and surprised, and her head turns toward me fully. “Wow,” I say, keeping my eyes on the road to avoid looking at her. “That’s annoyingly specific.”
“I pay attention.”
The conversation should die there. To my absolute surprise, it doesn’t. The claws of tension loosen around it instead.
“What did you listen to in college?” she asks.
I glance at her. “Why?”
“Because you seem like you’d either say something impossibly cool or something deeply embarrassing. I'm desperate to know which.”
I exhale through my nose. “Fine. There was a bad country phase. Not even the good stuff or the classics, but more like, ‘She thinks my tractor’s sexy.’”
She turns in her seat so fast it’s almost violent. “No.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Her laugh comes out bright and disbelieving. “You had a country phase?”
“In my defense, it was contagious.”
“Explain.”
“It was the early Broncos years. Half the locker room had terrible taste and it spread like a disease.”
She laughs hard enough that her hand comes up to cover her mouth, and I hate how the sound of it makes my chest constrict. “I'm so sorry. That must have been hard for you.”
I snort. “I survived it.”
“You got lucky.”
I shake my head. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What did you listen to in college?”
She makes a face. “Can’t we keep talking about your tastes?”
“You’re dodging the question.” I tear my eyes off the road for a second to glance at her sitting sideways in the passenger seat, leaning on the door. “I’ll assume your taste was bad, then.”
She huffs a little, offended breath. “It was complex.”
I snort. “Complex?”
“Yeah.” She sighs and looks out the windshield again. “I liked a lot of indie bands. Acoustic men whining about winter and the girlfriend that left them, as if it definitely wasn’t their fault. Things like that.”
“That sounds miserable.”
“Excuse me, it was art.”
“It sounds like depression with a guitar.”
“So does Nirvana,” she retorts, pointing at me. “But I did have one very aggressive pop era that I will not be apologizing for.”
I look at her. “Aggressive how?”
Her eyes narrow. “Don’t worry about it.”
“So we’re talking normal pop—”
“—Grayson—”
“—or full bubblegum glitter-mania?”
She groans and drops her head back against the window. “I’m not answering that.”
“Then I’m going to assume the worst.”
“You're annoying.”
“You’re evasive.”
“Sue me.”
I glance over just in time to catch the smile she’s trying to hide behind her hand, and for fucks sake, it hits me harder than it should. I still like making her smile, even if she's trying to hide it.
By the time we’re forty minutes into the drive, we’re talking easier than we have in days, somehow about both things that don't matter and things that do.
She tells me she used to sketch designs in the margins of her school notebooks when she got bored.
I tell her Penelope has recently told me in confidence that she wants to learn how to roller-skate because she saw some kids at the park doing it when Carly took her a few days ago, and how much the idea of a set of wheels beneath my child's feet sets my teeth on edge.
Carly tells me that she used to play soccer as a kid but hated every second of it, so much so that they made her the goalie since she refused to run around after the ball.
I nearly choke on my own spit when she says she couldn't bring herself to be good at that, either.
“You barely had to move!”
She grins at me across the center console. “I know! I just didn't care! I was off in my own world and dreaming about the oranges I'd get to eat on break.”
I find myself saying things I didn’t plan to say.
Not necessarily big things, but more than I'd usually let loose.
I tell her that I used to disappear into the equipment room at university when I wanted quiet, that I hate flying commercial because too many people approach me in airports, and that I don't ski nearly as well as everyone assumes I do.
She looks over at that. “Wait. Seriously?”
“I can ski.”
“That is not what you just said.”
I glance at her. “I said I don’t ski nearly as well as people would expect. There's a difference.”
“So you accepted a weekend at a ski resort, in public, where people will probably recognize you, to... what? Embarrass yourself?”
“I accepted a weekend in a luxury lodge with good whiskey, expensive food, and plausible business reasons attached to it. And because I needed a break from Dad Mode for a couple of days.”
“But you brought me along.” Her grin flashes, quick and bright, before she covers it again to hide the hint of pink on her cheeks.
I glance at her briefly. “Yeah. I did. You were invited.”
“You didn't have to bring me.”
“I know.”
The road climbs higher. Snow thickens at the edges of the asphalt, thick between the trees. The tops of the mountains are no longer above us but around us, all stone and bright reflected sunlight off the snow.
Carly goes quiet again, but this time it isn’t tense. She tips her head back against the window, watching the view, the line between her brows soft and her lips just slightly parted. She's relaxed.
I glance at her more times than I should.
This is the problem. Not the sex, though that was problem enough — it's this. The easy conversation, the way she keeps surprising me, the way my guard drops without permission when she looks at me with a grin on her face that I put there.
I expected attraction. Had it, fought it, lost the war to it for one reckless night and paid for it ever since.
I didn’t expect to like her this much.
The sign for Colchester Ski Resort appears around the next bend, elegant black lettering carved into stone half-buried in snow. A long private road winds up toward the main lodge.
Carly straightens in her seat. “Oh, wow.”
The lodge comes into view a minute later, all timber and glass and dark stone tucked against the mountain.
Staff move at the entrance, a shuttle rolls past, and smoke curls up from one of countless chimneys.
It's peak season, so it's busy, and I'm honestly surprised that Wade had enough spare rooms for all of us.
I pull the car to a stop out front. Before I can even consider taking off my seatbelt, Carly is already out of the passenger side.
The cold blasts into the car when she steps out, harsh enough to make my breath pause. She turns in a slow circle beside the car, boots crunching in fresh powder, face tipped up to the air.
And then she smiles. Wide and beautiful and giddy. Just because she’s here.
I stay behind the wheel for a second, hand still resting on the shifter, and watch her through the windshield.
She draws in a deep breath like she means to keep the whole mountain in her lungs. Her cheeks are already pink from the cold, loose strands of hair lifting in the wind.
I rub at my cheek and jaw with one hand, covering the way my mouth wants to curve upward at just the sight of her excitement, swallowing to try to curb the fondness eating away at me.
Fucks sake. It’s been an hour and a half alone with her, and I'm already tempted to tear down walls.