Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
NATE
Park City, Utah
Jackson has me meet her in her office instead of out in the training room, and the way she’s sitting behind that huge desk of hers when I enter lets me know that she needs a physical barrier to hide behind.
Good. Because she’s fearless in the face of anger, and never backs down from a challenge. She doesn’t hide unless she’s scared.
If she were only mad about me being here, she’d be up in arms challenging me every step of the way. The fact that she’s scared has all my sensors turned on high alert, hoping she’s fighting her own feelings for me.
“Have a seat,” she says without even looking at me. She turns a page in my medical file, her thick pale pink lips pursed.
I sit, watching her flip through the file, intentionally mute.
It’s like her silence is begging me to speak, to say anything just so she can shut me down like she did at her front door last night.
But if she thinks I’m going to be the first to crack, she’s dead wrong.
I’m playing the long game, and I could sit here looking at that beautiful face, her gorgeous dark hair in its side braid, that seductive crevice where her neck and collarbones meet .
. . yeah, I could stare at this view all day.
And if she won’t tell me what she’s so scared about, I’ll just have to figure it out on my own.
Is she worried about her job? There is no doubt I’m an asshole for putting her in this position, where she’s being forced to work with me against her will.
If there was any other way, I would have taken it.
But it took me so much longer to get to this point than I had planned, and now this backdoor into the National Ski Team feels like the only way back into her life.
Is she worried about her relationship with Marco?
I sure as hell hope she’s worried that my reappearance will spark the flames of what we used to have, and dim whatever misplaced feelings she has for him.
Because if there’s anything I’m one hundred percent certain about, it’s that her feelings for Marco are misplaced and I’m happy to be the one to prove that to her.
She clears her throat, but it’s not an invitation into conversation as her eyes are still focused on my file.
“How are your parents?” I ask her as she drags a finger across a page. Guess I’m the first to crack after all. Some things never change.
She inhales sharply, pauses a beat too long. “They’re fine,” she says without looking up.
Are they? Her mom has been living with cancer since we were juniors in high school.
In fact, the first time Jackson ever let her guard down with me was the night she found out her mom was fighting a recurrence from the breast cancer she’d beaten when Jackson was in elementary school.
Since then, she’s been a success story for a gene therapy that stopped her cancer’s growth and allowed her to live a pretty normal life.
But that pause before Jackson’s response could mean many things. A lot can happen in five years, and she’d feel no reason at this point to let me in on the private details of her life.
“Your brother?” I ask, trying to engage her in conversation.
She keeps her eyes focused on the pages in front of her when she says, “Last I heard he was in Switzerland.”
“Still snowboarding?”
“And partying,” she says, a tinge of bitterness in her voice.
Beau Shanahan, a professional snowboarder in his mid-twenties, doesn’t seem to be growing out of the party scene.
I ran into him last year at a ski resort in Canada, but I don’t mention that to Jackson.
For years Beau has been competing in the X Games and other similar snowboarding events and using the prize money to fuel his lifestyle of women, booze, and snowboarding.
Probably exactly what Jackson thinks I’ve been doing with skiing the past few years, but nothing could be further from the truth.
She’s not inclined to give me any more information, so we sit in silence for a few minutes until she drags her finger over part of the page she’s reading and asks, “What caused the kidney infection?”
“What?” I know what she’s referring to, I just want to get her to look up at me.
She raises her eyes—a bright Kelly green around the edges of her irises and a lighter green near her pupils, surrounded by thick black lashes—and holds my gaze before squinting at me like she’s trying to read my mind. “Last year, you had a kidney infection. What happened?”
“My kidney got infected.”
She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, biting it while she takes a deep breath. On an exhale she says, “Yes, how?”
“Bacteria got into my urinary tract and infected it.” I cross my arms over my chest. Yes, I’m being purposefully obtuse, but she knows how kidney infections happen. Why is she asking?
“UTIs and kidney infections are incredibly rare in males.”
“And yet I got lucky,” I respond, my voice hard and flat because she’s trying to make something out of nothing.
I’m sure she wants some excuse to find me unfit to race.
But the infection wasn’t related to me giving away one of my kidneys, it was just shit luck that was made worse by the fact that I only have one kidney now, so it was that much harder on my body.
She sighs, because she knows I’m not going to give her any more information. Two can play this game.
“Your file says you became a vegan after the infection?”
“I did,” I confirm. “My specialist and I agreed that there was enough evidence showing that a vegan diet can help with kidney issues to warrant giving it a try.”
“How long did that last?” She barely contains her eye roll. The man she dated would never have been a vegan, but I’m not really him anymore.
“Well, I guess it’s been about fifteen months or so.”
Her head snaps back a bit, like she’s been slapped.
“Wait? You’re still a vegan?” Her eyes move from my face, slowly scrolling down my body. Her look is impossible to read. That’s new. She could never hide her emotions before, a reality that was sometimes difficult for her when it came to interviews with the press after a bad race.
This closed off, guarded look she has now is probably hard earned, and I can’t help but wonder if I was the cause of this new skill set she’s developed.
That possibility twists my stomach with guilt again.
I didn’t do anything that wasn’t necessary at the time, but it kills me that I’ve caused her pain and that I’ve missed these years with her.
“Yes, still a vegan. You seem surprised.”
“I didn’t think . . .” She pauses and her eyes sweep down across my arms and my chest. “You have more muscle mass than I would have expected given the lack of animal protein.”
“I think you’ll find I’m stronger than ever. Better endurance too,” I assure her with a smirk.
“Hmph,” she responds, looking back down at my medical file, her cheeks turning pink. It’s good to know that a bit of sexual innuendo still has the same effect.
There’s so much we need to talk about, but she’s closed off and I’m going to have to slow roll this.
She needs to trust me before she’ll open up at all, before she’ll allow this to be anything more than a strictly professional relationship.
Plus, she has a boyfriend—for now. I relax into the chair, accepting that this is the beginning of a long uphill battle.
Her silence gives me the opportunity to scan her office, looking for clues to who she is now, and what the past few years have been like for her.
Her undergrad degree from Danforth is hanging on the wall, and I was there for that graduation, but next to it is her doctorate from the University of Utah, where she eventually got her PhD in physical therapy.
While we were still together, she’d already been taking grad classes online during the off-season, so she obviously decided to pursue the doctorate after she recovered from her accident. I was out of the picture by then.
On the credenza behind her desk, under her single, large window facing the mountains, sits a row of picture frames.
Most of them are blocked by her chair, but the one on the end catches my eye and I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.
It’s a picture of Jackson and my mom, about a month before she died.
We were in St. Moritz for a race, and my parents flew over to Europe because it was a crucial race for Jax, and because they’d met at a race in St. Moritz back when my mom skied for Canada’s National Ski Team.
Jackson had come in second that day, giving her enough race points to move her into first place overall for the season.
We were wildly happy and given that both sets of our parents were there, I’d wanted to propose to her at dinner that night.
I’d already been carrying the ring around with me for a year at that point.
But she’d caught onto my plan before we left the hotel room to head out, and she reminded me that I promised I’d wait until she secured an overall World Cup title.
It was the same fight we always had, me ready to put a ring on her finger after seven years of dating and her setting her own goals and expecting me to adhere to her timeline.
Dinner was tense that night, but the photo of her and my mom, their heads tucked close in conversation and both of them with huge smiles on their faces, makes me realize that maybe that dinner holds different memories for her.
She’d always had a special relationship with my mom, who loved Jackson from the start not only because they had so much in common, but because Jackson brought out the best in me.
That weekend was the last time she saw my parents.
Jackson must have looked up at me while I was staring at that photo because when my eyes turn to her, she glances over her shoulder to see what I’m looking at. It takes her a moment to turn back to me, like she’s trying to figure out whether this is a conversation she wants to have.