Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NATE
NOVEMBER
Copper Mountain, Colorado
I come to a stop at the bottom of the Giant Slalom practice course, next to Lyle and Jackson.
“Man,” Lyle says. “You get better every day. That’s two tenths of a second faster than your fastest GS time yesterday.”
“Yeah,” I pant, “that felt like a really good run.” I’m still trying to catch my breath when Jackson looks away, her eyes sweeping across the bottom of the run.
I follow the same path, wondering who she’s looking for.
About twenty different pairs of eyes are focused on me.
“Why are they all staring?” I ask, quietly enough that only she and Lyle can hear me.
She pauses, measuring her words in that way she has ever since she snuck out of that hotel suite two weeks ago—for reasons she refuses to talk about. “I’m going to be honest and you need to promise you won’t let it go to your head, okay?”
“Okay?” It comes out as a question because I have no idea what she’s getting at here.
“Everyone just stopped what they were doing to watch you ski. Like, they were all going about their business and then someone said your name and I swear you could hear a pin drop.”
“What?” I bark out a nervous laugh that’s very unlike me. “Why?”
She just rolls her eyes at me in response, and a small flame lights in my chest because for the first time, this finally feels real. I’m racing again, and despite over a decade away from it, I really am better than I ever was.
”Because,” Lyle says, while Jackson seems unwilling to answer my question, “they know they’re seeing greatness.”
I swallow down a laugh. “I appreciate the vote of confidence, but that seems a bit of a stretch.” This isn’t false modesty. I know that was a good run, but “seeing greatness” is ridiculous.
In men’s ski racing, we save that kind of terminology for the legends—for Bode Miller’s badass racing style that made him a household name and earned him the second most Olympic medals in the history of the sport, for Ingemar Stenmark holding the most World Cup wins ever, for Ted Ligety reinventing the art of the turn, or for Marcel Hirscher holding the most overall World Cup titles and retiring at the pinnacle of his career.
Those are the Greats. I’ve never even skied in a World Cup race. I do not deserve the terminology that is being used to flatter me at this moment.
“You are at the top of your game right now,” Jackson says as she shoves her hands into the pockets of her jacket. “Keep this up, and you are going to burst onto the World Cup stage. And the press will take notice.”
“Between how you’re skiing right now, your past social media presence, and all this,” Lyle says, waving his hand in front of my face as he rolls his eyes, “you’d better be prepared to deal with the media shitstorm.”
“I can hold my own with the press,” I assure them. Jackson nods in agreement. I was always the buffer between her and the press, so I have a lot of practice.
She pulls out her phone. “I’m going to send this video to Sierra for her to post on social.
” She hits play on the video, tilting the screen toward me.
I lean my head in to watch, and I’m so close I inhale that scent of her shampoo, because Jackson isn’t high maintenance enough to wear perfume.
“Here,” she says suddenly, handing me her phone and stepping away.
In addition to carefully measuring her words around me since leaving that hotel room, she’s also been keeping a physical distance whenever possible.
And ignoring me whenever she sees me outside of training, which is often because we’ve been living in the same house here at Copper Mountain for the last week.
I watch the video, impressed with myself when I see my run on film. That really was a solid performance, and I’m relieved my support team isn’t just blowing smoke up my ass.
When I hand the phone back to Jackson, she tells me, “Sierra will probably edit it together with some of the footage that was taken at different points on the mountain. It should go live in the next day or two.”
“I think we’re done for the day,” Lyle says as he glances up toward the fading sun. The light is starting to get flat, and it’s better to stop before the lack of contrast on the snow leads to error or injury. “See you back at the house.”
Lyle turns to leave and Jackson follows him, striking up a conversation which I’m confident is intended to prevent me from talking to her.
I’ve been trying to give her space, but this is getting ridiculous.
If I’m going to be successful here, I can’t be spending my time worrying about why she’s ignoring me or if I did something to upset her.
It’s been a month since I joined the team and I feel like any of the initial progress we’d made, especially the day we went on that run and then did yoga together, was somehow ruined by that night in the hotel suite.
And I’m still trying to figure out exactly what happened.
She seemed fine at dinner, she even let me apologize for some of what happened.
When I carried her into the bedroom after she fell asleep, she wasn’t mad at me, she was grateful.
I tucked her in, and then she disappeared the next morning and has kept me at a distance ever since.
At least she seems to finally be on board with training me—there have been no more mentions of her not being my PT for the season.
“Jackson,” I bark at her retreating back.
“I’ll catch up with you later,” she says to Lyle before she stops and turns toward me. She doesn’t speak though, just waits with her arms crossed over her chest. There’s a hurricane of emotion swirling in those emerald eyes.
“My lower back is bothering me a bit.” It’s not a total lie. It’s sore on one side, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Racing is a tremendous strain on the body, over and over again. But today, my sore back is the excuse I need to force us into closer proximity.
“All right, let’s have a look. Want to stop in the lodge? Or back at the house?”
“The lodge is good,” I say. There’s a room they’ve designated for our team that we’ve been using for physical therapy, and hopefully no one else will be using it. The house is too close quarters with the other six people staying there. It’s impossible to have a private conversation.
She turns and walks toward the lodge.
“Really?” I call out. She’s not even going to wait for me to get my skis off?
“I’ll meet you in there,” she says without even turning to look at me over her shoulder.
It takes me a few minutes to get all my gear packed up in the mammoth ski bag that houses my protective equipment. I lug both pairs of skis I needed today—my Slalom and Giant Slalom skis—and trudge through the hard-packed snow to the lodge.
I find Jackson settled in the room we’ve been using for PT.
She’s already taken her snow pants and ski jacket off; she’s just wearing her base layer leggings and a zip-up hoodie.
Her brown waves are up in a bun on top of her head and her cheeks are flushed pink from the transition from the cold outside air to the warm, dry inside air.
For a moment it feels like we just stepped back in time, it could be five years ago or a decade, in any one of a hundred ski lodges we’ve been in together.
Our skiing lives are intertwined like tracks crossing on freshly fallen snow .
. . eventually there are enough tracks that they become indistinguishable from each other.
“So?” she asks putting her hands on her hips.
She has the casual, effortless look that I can’t stop being attracted to. She’s never realized how beautiful she is. Even when we were teenagers, she was competitive, strong, and more concerned with substance than appearance.
Her eyes travel over the length of my body. “Where’s it hurt?”
There are so many jokes I could make right now, but they’d just piss her off so I swallow them down. Instead, I walk toward her and she takes a step back. What the hell is that? “Did I do something, Jackson?” Confusion flickers in her eyes. “You’re acting like you’re afraid of me.”
“I’m not scared of you, Nate. I just don’t want to be near you any more than I absolutely have to.”
I focus on keeping my hands loose at my side instead of balling them into fists. She can be so infuriating. “You know, words like that could wound a guy. Make him doubt himself. Totally kill his confidence.”
“Yeah well, lucky for you, your arrogance is unshakable.”
“Is it, though?” I ask, taking a small step closer.
“Nate,” she warns, her voice low and throaty. She swallows, a lump bobbing in the elegant cylindrical column beneath her jawline, and her cotton candy lips parting as she takes another breath.
“Jackson,” I reply in the same tone, but I don’t come any closer.
“I’ll step outside so you can get undressed,” she says, changing course quickly. “Take off everything but your base layer bottoms.” And with that, she slips right past me and races out the door.
When she returns, I’m sitting on the treatment table in the compression leggings I wear under my race suit.
“Okay, show me exactly where the pain is,” she says, her voice softer, kinder than it has been in weeks. Her deep, slow breathing reverberates across my shoulder blades and my skin rejoices in the sensation.
“Right here,” I say, putting my fingertips along the ridge of muscle that’s particularly tight.
Gently, she moves my hand back to the table and uses her fingers to probe in a circular pattern around the muscle while asking about different pain points.
“Well,” she says finally, “it seems like you just have a knot in your back. Probably from the strain of the past week. There’s no real inflammation, except right at the knot, so I don’t think you’ve pulled anything. ”
“So what can I do about it? Heat and stretching?”
“Yeah, that’ll help. Have you ever done dry needling?”
“Not even sure what that is,” I tell her.