Chapter 12
Jack
The hill announced itself gradually, the way the worst ones did.
It started as a gentle increase in grade that Jack’s legs absorbed without complaint, then gradually became something that required attention. The road curved upward into the trees and kept going. He shifted his weight forward, found a shorter stride, and kept moving.
Beside him, Steph adjusted without breaking rhythm. That was the thing he kept noticing about her. There was no wasted motion, no visible effort in the adjustment itself. She simply changed what needed changing and continued.
He focused on his breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth, keeping it controlled.
His legs were working hard, and the sled’s weight had become a different kind of presence on the uphill, pulling back instead of just pulling.
He leaned into the waist harness as the realization of why Steph wore a chest harness settled over him.
The load distribution had to be better for her.
She’d been right. She was right about most things, which he was finding terribly easy to accept. Becky from the coffee shop had called her a winter warrior, and she hadn’t been exaggerating.
Steph was a half step ahead of him. He could hear her breathing, steady and metered, and the rhythmic sound of her sled behind her. She wasn’t talking, and he wasn’t either, and the hill went on longer than it looked like it would from the bottom.
He thought about cross-country. Hours on skis, climbing grades comparable to this, but usually not as long.
He was comfortable in cold and with sustained effort.
That much hadn’t changed. But skiing and running used different muscles and pulled at the body differently, and the sled was its own specific challenge.
He could feel it in his hips and knew much longer and they’d be screaming.
The top of the hill leveled off, and he came to a stop beside her. The headlamps caught the snowfall, the flakes coming straight down in the still air, small and steady. Below them, the road disappeared into the darkness.
“Good hill,” he said.
“There are bigger ones.”
“I assumed.”
She looked at the slope below them for a moment, then back up at him. “Have you ever ridden a sled down something like this?”
“As a kid.”
“Not like that.” She unclipped her harness. “Watch.”
She sat down on the sled, knees bent, feet out front. She looked back at him once and then pushed off.
He watched her go.
She moved fast down the hill, heels digging into the snow to steer, controlling her line. She hit the flat at the bottom, stood, and looked up at him. A huge smile spread across her face as she gave him a thumbs-up.
He was already unclipping his harness and positioning himself as she had. Mostly.
“Feet out in front,” she called. “Not to the sides. You steer with your heels, not your whole foot.”
“How much pressure?”
“Enough. You’ll figure out what enough is.”
He pushed off.
The first thing he noticed was how fast it happened.
The sled accelerated quickly on the packed surface, and his instinct was to brake with both heels, which slowed him but also pulled him sideways.
He overcorrected with the opposite heel, and the whole thing went a bit sideways before he remembered small inputs and let himself settle into the sled.
By the bottom, he was somewhat in control. Not the same kind of control Steph had, not the smooth, deliberate thing she’d done, but functional.
She clapped as he stood. “Not bad. There’s another hill, so you can try it again. I love riding on the downhills, especially when I’m tired. It gives me a rest and a jolt of adrenaline.”
“Smart,” he agreed as he rehooked his sled to his harness.
She was already reclipped to her harness. “Sometimes riding isn’t smart. Especially when you’re exhausted and your judgment is compromised, or when the grade is steeper and the surface is less predictable.”
“I understand.”
“You understand it right now. Understanding it at hour forty is different.” She paused as he gave a nod. “Ready to run?” She gestured toward the next hill.
This one was steeper. They’d be at the top faster, but he knew the exertion would cost him.
“Let’s do it.” His legs registered the climb differently now, a useful ache that told him he was working the right things.
He watched her move.
She’d coached him on the sledding without condescension, without performance, without any of the edge she carried when they were talking about the running club or the Jingle Run or anything that lived in the space between their two worlds.
Out here, she was amazingly competent and completely comfortable, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to look at anything else.
Steph knew when to push and when to let the body work at its own pace.
She knew how to read the road surface from the way her headlamp hit it.
She knew when the cold was changing and adjusted before it became a problem.
Earlier, he’d watched her pull a neck gaiter up another inch before he even registered the temperature drop.
He thought about the videos he’d watched of her, the interviews, the footage from previous races. He’d noticed her competence in those, too, but footage was a flat thing. Being beside it was different.
Being beside her was different.
She’d done this alone before. Multiple times. That sat with him. Hours in the dark wilderness, solo, a sled behind her, bear spray on her hip, and nothing else between her and whatever the wilderness decided to do.
He’d spent years in difficult conditions himself, had been cold and exhausted, and he understood what it took to choose that voluntarily and keep choosing it.
But in his case, he was rarely far from help. When skiing, he was with a coach or a team. The biathlon courses were smaller and tighter. Even the expedition he’d done, the one he’d touted as experience to qualify him for The Frozen Divide, was carefully controlled.
She was in her element, though. Being out here didn’t bother her. She radiated confidence.
He wanted to tell her that but wasn’t sure he could get the words to come out right without turning it into a jumbled mess . . . like he usually did when talking to her.
They crested the rise, and she stopped to check her watch—a quick glance at the distance and the time, then ran whatever calculation she used to know where they were against the plan.
“How’s the hip?” She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking straight ahead.
He hadn’t mentioned his hip. He’d been aware of it for the last mile, the right hip flexor pulling slightly from the sled harness at a different angle than he was used to. He’d been compensating, and apparently she’d seen it.
“Tight.”
“Waist belt.” She glanced at him. “The harness distributes it better, though it’s still not perfect. The longer you’re out here, the more you’ll feel it.”
“I’ll get a harness.”
“Before your next overnight,” she agreed. “Not optional.”
He noted that she’d said next overnight. As if there would be one. As if this one was going well enough that another made sense. He wasn’t sure she’d meant to imply that, and he wasn’t going to point it out.
They rode the sleds down the hill, his control better this time.
“We’ve got a good mile or so of flat now.” She gestured toward the bend in the road. “This is a good place to practice your speed with the sled.”
They set out at a tempo running pace. Several inches of crusted snow covered the road, no longer groomed like it had been by Silver Mane’s Lodge. Snowmobiles had cut a path through it, and they kept to those tracks.
Snow was still coming down, straight and small, and the headlamps caught it in a way that made the world feel closer and quieter than it already was.
His legs had found the rhythm they’d lost on the hill work, and everything was working again, sled and feet and breathing all tuned to the same frequency.
As they ran, at a pace he found challenging with the conditions and pulling a sled, but which seemed perfect for Steph and her abilities, his mind drifted.
He thought of the Elkridge Endurance, the event that was supposed to put his new company on the map and give him a second career.
Registration launched on the first of January, and they’d been doing some heavy promotions.
He’d even had an interview with Joe Monroe, who wrote for an online Wyoming paper that he developed, as well as selling articles to several other news outlets.
Monroe said he’d heard a rumor there were issues with the permits and the sheriff’s department asked for a delay while they investigated. Jack wasn’t sure where the reporter got his information, but he had denied it, saying the process had started but it was still early to receive the permits.
That was what Liam had told him to say, anyway.
Now he wondered if there was more to it, and if Joe Monroe knew something Jack didn’t.
Liam and his family name, and the complications that came with it, might be a problem as far as Sheriff Hepner was concerned.
Or the holdup could be a result of the poachers, somewhere in this same wilderness, operating and unidentified.
Either way, Jack knew they had time. It was only the middle of December, and the Elkridge Endurance wasn’t until the last weekend in August. None of that mattered right now.
Steph was six inches to his left and three years ahead of him on everything that mattered out here.
He tried to work through his feelings for Steph the same way he did when he was attempting to be rational and kept arriving at the same result.
Jack was walking through the dark in the snow, beside a woman who didn’t like him, who was good at everything, and he couldn’t look at the road ahead without seeing her at the edge of his vision.
He wasn’t sure this was a problem he could think his way out of.
She pointed her lamp at a section of icy road ahead as she slowed her pace. “Stay left. The runoff from that bank freezes across the right side. I hit it last year and went down.”
He moved left.
She’d been here before, in this exact place, and she remembered the ice on the right side of the road from a training run a year ago. She carried that kind of information the way other people carried useful facts, ready and available.
He wanted to impress her. He recognized that the way he recognized most things he’d rather not have to deal with—clearly and a little too late.
Jack wanted to do the sled run the way she’d done it, clean and controlled. He wanted to answer her gear questions correctly and get his layers right and keep pace without making it look like effort.
He wanted her to look at him the way she looked at the road when it was doing what it was supposed to do. Like it made sense. Like it belonged there. Maybe even think he made sense, that he belonged.
He wanted even more than that, but he pushed those thoughts down as best he could.
Jack kept to the left side of the road, matched her pace, and said nothing about any of it.
“Good,” she said, about nothing in particular. Or maybe about the road. Or the night. Or the fact that they were both still moving and the sled was tracking right and the cold was manageable and everything was working the way it was supposed to.
He decided to take it as something more than that.