Chapter 23
Carly
Eight Weeks
I know I’m in trouble the second we get to the slopes.
Not because I fall getting off the shuttle from the lodge, though that should probably be my first clue. Not because every single person in our group looks disgustingly competent in ski gear either.
No. It’s because the second we stop near the racks and Wade starts talking about which run they should warm up on, everyone nods like he is speaking English, and I smile along like I’m not about three seconds away from being exposed as a fraud.
There are people everywhere. Skiers sliding straight down bright white slopes, kids no older than seven weaving around adults like tiny winter Olympians, snowboarders gliding over packed snow. The cold air bites at every inch of my uncovered skin, sharp and clean in my lungs.
I should be excited. I am excited.
But I'm also increasingly aware that I may have made a terrible mistake.
Mandy adjusts her goggles on top of her head and grins at me. “This is going to be so fun.”
“Totally,” I say, trying not to let my voice wobble.
Dana at least has the grace to look a little less aggressively athletic than the others. “You good?”
“Mhm.” The lie comes out way too fast.
Grayson glances over at me, one brow cocked like he can hear the lie in my voice.
He’s got on a black jacket and black snow pants, his face hidden partly behind the mask over his mouth. There is something deeply offensive about a man being this attractive while also clicking into skis like he was born doing it.
Wade points off toward one of the runs. “We’ll head over there first before the lines pile up. Can only pull the owner of Colchester card a few times for a group this big.”
Jackson nods. Cole claps his gloves together. Mandy looks ready to launch herself up the mountain for sport.
I stare at the slope Wade is pointing at and feel genuine fear bloom in my chest. It looks steep, too steep, like a beautiful, scenic way to die in front of a crowd.
I laugh on instinct to cover the rising panic in my body. “Okay, so, weird question.”
Everyone looks at me.
I clear my throat. “How hard is that one?”
Wade lifts his goggles. “That one?”
“Yeah.”
“Blue square,” Wade says. “Not too hard.”
Dana’s brows lift. “Oh.”
Oh no.
Mandy clomps across the snow in her skis toward me. “Wait. Have you never skied before?”
I wince as the fear morphs into humiliation. “My parents paid for me to take a lesson when I was a kid,” I admit. “But I threw a fit and refused to even put them on.”
Wade recoils, his mouth pulling back at the corners like he's just now realizing how he's practically invited me to a death trap. “Have you ice skated? Some of those skills transfer.”
“Nope.”
“You've never skied?” Cole asks, grinning already.
“Cole, if I had, do you think this conversation would be happening?”
That gets a snort out of Dana and Jackson, but it doesn’t do much for the prickle of fear and discomfort creeping up my neck.
Everyone here belongs. Everyone here knows what they’re doing. Even Dana, who claims she’s rusty, still looks comfortable clipped into expensive skis like a normal rich Colorado person.
I feel like a kid who wandered into the wrong class and sat down, hoping no one would notice.
And Grayson — god, Grayson is going to be so annoying about this. I brace for it as I feel him shift beside me.
He jerks his chin toward a gentler slope off to the side. “We’ll go over to the bunny hill. I’ll teach you.”
For a second, I just stare. He's not shaming me. He's not shocked.
What the fuck is going on?
“We?” I repeat.
“Yeah.”
Wade immediately points between us. “That’s actually perfect. We can take a few laps and meet you guys after.”
Dana smiles at me. “You’ll be fine. It’s easier than it looks once you get the hang of it.”
“That feels like a lie people tell to someone right before they get a concussion.”
Grayson is already shifting to the side, poles in hand. “Come on.”
The bunny hill is, blessedly, much less terrifying up close.
Still snowy, still sloped, still objectively a bad place to strap planks to my feet and hope for the best. But it's at least less likely to end in me taking out a family of four.
Grayson stops beside me and plants his poles. “All right. First thing, you need to learn how to stand without looking like you’re being held hostage.”
I glare at him. “I knew Sweet Grayson was too good to last.”
His mouth twitches. “Bend your knees a little.”
“Like this?”
“No. Less corpse, more athlete.”
“Wow. You should teach preschoolers. You’re very encouraging.”
“Thanks, I taught Pen. She's four and can ski down a green circle easily.”
He steps closer before I can decipher if he's mocking me or telling the truth, reaches out, and puts his hands on my hips. I briefly forget how to breathe.
“Like this,” he says, voice lower now.
He shifts me gently, adjusting my stance until my weight settles differently over the skis. His gloves are thick, the contact muted by layers, and it still hits me like a live wire.
“There,” he says.
I swallow. “Okay.”
“Pizza to slow down.” His ski nudges mine, angling the tips of my skis inward. “French fries to go faster.”
I look down. “Who named these?”
“Does it matter? Pen can remember it, so can you.”
He walks me through it piece by piece after that. How to balance. How to shift my weight. How to stop without panicking and flinging a pole into the distance. It should probably be embarrassing how quickly I go from dreading this to… not having a terrible time.
It's mostly because he’s being weirdly patient in the same way I've seen him be patient with Penny. And every now and then, when I do something right, there’s this flicker in his expression that almost looks like pride. It's ridiculous. I am not a child, I'm not a golden retriever learning to sit.
Even if I do want his approval in a way that is probably psychologically concerning.
“All right,” he says after a few practice starts and stops. “Try gliding down a little farther.”
I eye the slope. “Define farther.”
“Ten feet.”
“That feels... slightly manageable.”
“It is manageable.”
“You're saying that to someone who was bad at being a goalie.”
He huffs out a laugh and pulls his face mask down beneath his chin. “Go.”
I push off.
For a few glorious seconds, it feels right, like I'm flying, gliding across the snow. I’m moving. I’m balanced. I’m doing it.
“Oh my God,” I say, half laughing already. “I’m doing it, Gray! I’m actually—”
My weight shifts wrong. One ski edges too far out, catching on one of the metal posts holding up the mesh separating the bunny slope from the woods.
It happens fast and hard. One second I’m upright, the next I’m down in the snow with a surprised yelp, my head hitting the next metal post along, poles sticking up from the snow and my pride nowhere to be found.
“Carly!”
I hear him before I see him, his skis cutting through the powder and throwing fresh snow over my legs when he abruptly stops.
“Hey, shit, are you hurt?”
His voice is different now, concern lacing through it so clearly that for half a second I almost forget to answer. He kneels down beside me and pulls his visor off, dropping it into the snow, and rips one of his gloves off.
Shit. He looks genuinely alarmed.
His hand comes up to the back of my head where it's resting in the snow, lifting it slightly, his gaze flicking between his hand and the impression of my skull in the ice.
And for some reason, maybe because the fall itself didn’t hurt, maybe because I’m high on cold air and adrenaline and the way he's looking at me like he cares, I burst out laughing.
His brows crease immediately.
“I’m okay,” I laugh.
He frowns down at me, tugging gently on my hair tie to release my bun, then running his fingers over my skull. Is he seriously checking me for an injury? “You sure?”
“Yes.” I wipe at the tears budding on the corners of my eyes from wheezing at him. “Oh my God, you're so worried. Look at your face.”
“My face?”
“You looked like I’d been shot.”
He stares down at me, those lines between his brows deepening, his mouth parted like he's trying to work out a solid response.
But his shoulders loosen as his fingers stop their exploration at the back of my head. They don't leave, though.
“You scared the shit out of me, Carly. You whacked your head on the stake.”
Something in my chest twists just a bit, enough for the giggles to start to calm. I tilt my head back against his hand and grin up at him. “That’s kind of nice.”
His brows lift. “What, my hand in your hair?”
“No. That you care.”
The words are out before I can stop them, and I can feel the change in the air immediately. It's not dramatic, but it comes all at once, just enough that the cold feels sharper and the proximity feels like too much and not enough at the same time.
He lets go of my head before I can really take it in, and holds out his hand instead. “Come on.”
I reach up to take it. The second he braces to lift both himself and me, one of his skis slips out from under him.
“Shit—”
I'm cackling before he even hits the snow.
Grayson groans as he rolls onto his back with a look of profound irritation aimed at the sky. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I’m laughing too hard to breathe properly. “Did you just — Did you fall trying to rescue me?”
He stares directly up. “No.”
“You absolutely did, Gray.”
His head turns toward me.
And he laughs.
It’s not the short huff of amusement I usually get from him. Not the restrained version. This is real laughter, warm and unguarded and bright, the laugh I get to see occasionally on good days with Penny. It knocks into me harder than the fall did.
For a second, neither of us moves. We’re just lying there in the snow like idiots, laughing, faces turned toward each other.
“You keep calling me that.”
“Calling you what?”
“Gray.”
Heat climbs into my face so fast it almost burns worse than the cold. “Have I?”
His grin kicks a little wider, genuine and boyish and unfair on him. “Since yesterday. When I was getting the bags out of the car, before you ate shit on the bunny slope, then just now.”
I let out a horrified laugh. “Wow. Thanks. Very supportive. Do you tell Penny she ate shit when she falls?”
“Dodging my point,” he says, still looking right at me, his grin fading into something softer. “Sounds nice when you say it.”
His hair is mussed and sticking to his forehead, his cheeks pink from the cold. There’s snow clinging to one shoulder of his jacket.
And he is looking at me. There's no irritation, no restraint right now. He's just... looking.
My laughter fades, and the world narrows strangely — down to the distant scrape of skis, kids giggling and laughing, wind moving through the mountain, the trees shivering.
But here, in this little pocket of body-imprinted snow and bright sun, it feels like there’s only him.
And the heat suddenly building low in my stomach.
And the way his eyes flick to my mouth.
I don’t think either of us decides anything. It just happens. The slow shift, the way he lifts himself up onto his elbow, the hand that pushes a stray wave out of my face.
I don't know which one of us leans first. I just know that one second we're looking at each other, and the next we're moving closer, pulled in by a lack of common sense and the mutual forgetting of last night's argument.
His mouth is a breath from mine, so close that I can feel the warmth against my freezing lips, that I'm breathing in his puffed breaths.
“She fall?”
We jerk apart so fast it’s almost violent. Cole skis up alongside us looking smug enough that I immediately want to pelt him with ice.
I clear my throat and sit up too quickly. “Yeah.”
Grayson is already pushing himself upright, all traces of laughter wiped clean off his face. “She's fine.”
Cole’s eyes move between us once, taking in way too much. “Mhm.”
I want the mountain to open up and swallow me whole.