Chapter 2
The Line
ZLATA
By the time I finally let myself glide back down to the base, my legs have that good, used feeling, and my head feels pleasantly rinsed out.
The snow around the station has gone from crisp corduroy to chewed-up porridge.
Kids are digging in it like it’s a sandbox, ski school snakes are forming, and above all of it, the training lanes look even more deliberate than before—fenced-off corridors of clean, hard snow with coaches prowling the sides, radios in hand.
I skid to a stop near the main café and lift my goggles, breathing hard.
From here, I can see one of the GS sets clearly: red and blue gates stitched down the fall line, racers dropping in with that clipped, ruthless rhythm I only wish I could do.
A few people are clustered by the fence, phones out, narrating in whatever language tourists narrate in.
Eva’s voice pops up in my head: To Zlata—unhinged, wild, and definitely getting at least a selfie with her sad, hot Austrian. Anna’s mock-serious echo: Congratulations, you are now the main character of your own holiday.
If I’m really the main character, I can at least get a decent view and a hot drink.
I skate my way over to the café terrace, unclip my skis, and tuck them into a rack.
The sun has come out properly now, taking the edge off the cold; light bounces off every surface, too bright, too clean.
I queue for a coffee, peel off my gloves, and order in German.
The woman behind the counter slams a porcelain cup down on a saucer and slides it toward me.
Outside, I claim a table with a view of the hill and flop into the chair.
I’d already cracked the top buckles of my boots in the lift queue, but now I lean down and pop every catch open properly until the plastic sighs and my calves can breathe again.
Steam is curling up from my cup, and I tilt my face to the sun for a second, letting it warm the strip of skin between my buff and my helmet, watching the hill like it’s my personal TV channel.
Racers shoot out of the start one after another, in different colors and styles. It’s a little world inside the big mountain—serious, focused, completely indifferent to the tourist chaos below.
I scan the lanes automatically, and roll my eyes at myself as soon as I notice I’m doing it.
“Calm down,” I mutter into my cup. “You’re here for coffee, not a scavenger hunt.”
There’s no sign of any of the big names I recognize from TV—no familiar helmet designs, no instantly recognizable race suits. Whoever was in that lane before looks like they’re done; coaches are peeling banners off fences, and someone is hauling bundles of gates onto a sled. Training session over.
Fine. No World Cup circus, just me, sunshine, and a front-row seat to the cleanest snow on the hill.
I take a long sip of my cappuccino, lean back on the bench, and let the buzz of the terrace wash over me—cutlery clinking, accents I only half recognize, the soft whirr of the lift. For once, I’m not rushing to meet anyone, not checking my phone to see when I have to be somewhere else.
I’m exactly where I chose to be.
***
I’m halfway through my coffee when the energy on the terrace shifts.
It’s subtle at first: a couple of heads turning toward the lift, that low murmur people make when something interesting is happening, but they’re not sure if they’re allowed to stare yet. Then I see why.
A group of racers comes off the snow together, skis over shoulders, boots clomping on the packed snow. Race suits under jackets, sunburned noses, hair flattened from helmets.
Oh.
I don’t clock him first; I clock the way the people around me react.
A teenager at the next table elbows his dad and hisses something in German.
The barista steps closer to the window, drying a glass very slowly.
Two girls in rental helmets go very still, then start digging frantically in their pockets for their phones.
I follow their gaze, and there he is, as matter-of-fact as if he’d stepped out of my Instagram feed and onto the terrace.
Fabio Baier is shorter than he looks on TV, or maybe that’s just because he isn’t standing on some iconic finish slope with his arms in the air.
Out of the start gate context, he’s just a man in a red team jacket, race suit peeking out at the neck, skis slung casually over one shoulder.
His helmet dangles from his hand by the strap, stickers I recognize catching the light.
He doesn’t look around like a celebrity entering a room. He looks like someone thinking about something that happened three turns ago.
They stack their skis in a neat, practiced row by the wall, shake snow off their boots, and talk quickly in German. I only catch fragments. One of the coaches claps him on the shoulder, shows him something on a timing printout. He nods, brow furrowing, eyes still somewhere on the hill.
The terrace, meanwhile, has gone from normal busy to buzzing.
A kid in a too-big helmet slides up, clutching a phone and a slip of paper.
“Excuse me… a Photo?” he asks, voice wobbling.
Fabio’s expression flips without effort: tired lines smoothing into an easy, practiced smile.
He ruffles the kid’s helmet, bends down, they pose, click, done.
“Gladly,” he says, and the kid skates away like he just won gold.
That’s all it takes. One brave soul, and suddenly there’s a loose curve of people forming near the steps—phones out, eyes bright, bodies held in that weird mix of shyness and entitlement that comes with being a fan.
No official rope, no security, just the natural gravity of a man who spends his life on TV.
I watch from my little sun-warmed island of table, heart doing that treacherous double beat.
This is literally the scenario we invented in the hut. Snow, hut, tragic season, volunteer consolation prize. Eva would be vibrating. Anna would already be scripting my opening line.
What’s the plan?
I hear her voice as clearly as if she were sitting opposite me instead of gliding toward Planai. Then mine, from a few hours ago, half joke, half dare: I’m definitely going to ask a world champ for his dick.
My mouth goes dry around my coffee.
“Relax,” I tell myself under my breath. “Nobody’s asking for anything. It’s just a photo.”
Just a photo. The extremely tame, PG-13 version. One quick click and then I can go back to my skis and my quiet, main-character holiday, and in ten years I can pull the picture up on my phone and say “oh, that was the year he trained at Reiteralm and I pretended to be a real skier.”
He’s working his way through the first cluster—signing something for a man in a vintage team jacket, taking a selfie with two women in matching pink beanies, smiling in the same polite way in each one. It’s like watching a reel of my explore page, only live.
If I’m ever going to do this, it’s now.
Before I can think better of it, I put my cup down, stand up, and walk over to the back of the informal line. My boots thud against the terrace boards. No one looks twice; I’m just another fan with helmet hair and a phone.
I find my place behind a trio of boys in race suits debating in English whether he’ll make the overall globe this season. Their voices blend with the clink of crockery and the low hum of the lift. Ahead of me, the line shuffles forward a little as another selfie gets taken.
I pull my phone out of my pocket, open the camera, and hold it in my gloved hand. The screen reflects my own face back at me, flushed, wind-reddened, eyes a little too wide.
As I settle into the slow, awkward advance—step, wait, step—something familiar curls in my stomach. Not excitement. Not just.
My body remembers this posture.
Waiting. Straightening my shoulders. Pretending I’m not counting down the people in front of me until it’s my turn to be noticed.
I’ve stood like this before.
Not on a wooden terrace with skis stacked by the wall and the smell of coffee and sunscreen in the air, but in a club in Prague where the air was thick enough to drink, and the bass rattled my teeth.
In my head, the cold, thin mountain light folds into colored strobes. The smell of wax and fried onions is replaced by sweat, cheap perfume, and spilled vodka. The low murmur of German and English turns into a roar of voices shouting over a bad remix.
Peter was on the little stage at the back, headphones on, one hand in the air, bathed in blue and red lights like he’d paid for them himself.
People moved around him the way snow moves around a rock in a river—spiraling in, colliding, peeling off again.
Girls edged closer to the DJ booth, forming an unspoken queue along the side of it, pretending they were just dancing near the speakers.
I’d been one of them, clutching a sticky plastic cup, pretending I didn’t care whether he saw me.
Every few minutes, he’d lean forward, gesture someone up.
A girl would squeal, climb the two steps, and he’d pull her into his orbit for one song—hand on her waist, his mouth near her ear, like she’d just won some prize.
Then the next track would start, and he’d spin away, and she’d be back in the crowd, glowing and dazed.
When his eyes had finally landed on me, it had felt like sunlight breaking through smoke.
You, he’d mouthed, pointing, like there was any chance he meant someone else. I’d laughed, the sound lost in the music, and climbed the steps with my heart in my throat. He’d taken my hand, spun me clumsily, leaned in to say something I couldn’t hear, and I’d thought: he picked me.
I’d glowed on that for weeks.
That night with Peter turned into seven years of that same dynamic, just in different lighting.
Text messages that weren’t questions so much as commands: Don’t wear that dress, it’s too much, pinging onto my phone before a party.