Chapter 12 #3
“A picture of us drinking together in a hotel in Italy, looking at each other like that?” He drops his voice lower as he says, “Nate will care. Trust me.” His dark eyes bore into mine, one eyebrow quirked as if challenging me to disagree.
“He would have cared, back then,” I correct him. Back when we were so crazy in love that his possessive jealousy made him stupid. “But it’s been years, Marco. He won’t care now.”
“We’ll see.” He shrugs.
But will we? Even if he was jealous, how would I ever know?
It sounds like someone is jackhammering right outside my hotel room door. Bang, bang . . . bang, bang. Then a pause, then bang, bang . . . bang, bang all over again. I glance at the clock, alarmed that it’s already nine thirty in the morning.
What the hell time did I get back to my room?
I try to remember what time it was when Marco and I left the bar.
It had to be close to two in the morning.
The fragmented memories of Marco helping me back to my hotel room flash through my head.
I think he may have held my hair back while I threw up, or maybe I was holding my own hair back with one arm while hugging the toilet with the other.
Those memories are too fuzzy, and too embarrassing, to recall.
But I woke up alone in my bed. Like I always do.
Bang, bang . . . bang, bang.
I’m about to grab a pillow and put it over my head when I hear Marco’s voice. “Jackson, wake up.”
I spring out of bed, which is a mistake because the whole room tilts sideways and I have to put one hand down on the edge of the bed and one against the closest wall to steady myself.
This is not good. I have to be packed and downstairs for the van to the airport in an hour, and I can hardly stand up straight.
I stumble to the door and check the little view hole. Sure enough Marco is standing on the other side, his fist raised like he’s going to start banging down my door again. I reach for the handle, swinging the door open and narrowly missing my big toe.
“Please . . .” I groan. “Stop pounding on my door.”
He steps in, shutting it quickly behind him, then lets his gaze travel the length of my body. His eyes return to my face and he looks like he just saw a train wreck.
“That bad, huh?” I say.
“Did you just get up?”
“I think I’m dying,” I croak.
“No whiskey next time,” he says as he reaches out and slides his hand over my head before gently squeezing the back of my neck fondly, “eh?”
“Never again.” My voice is so raspy I hardly recognize the sound.
“I see that you don’t feel well,” he says, hesitating just a second for me to anticipate a but, “but we need to talk. It’s important.”
The worried note in his voice gives me pause, but my bladder makes its immediate needs known. “Okay. I’ve just got to use the bathroom first.”
“Take your time,” he says. But I don’t have time. I have a lot to do to pack up and get ready to fly, and I can’t be late when the airport transport vans arrive.
When I come out of the bathroom, bladder empty, teeth brushed, and face washed, Marco is sitting on one of the two chairs next to the window.
“You could have told me I looked like a clown,” I say. My reflection in the bathroom mirror had been nothing less than terrifying—mascara streaks down my cheeks, blotchy red skin, and my dark wavy hair tangled and ratty.
He ignores my clown comparison. “You need to see this,” he says, holding out his phone.
“Is this about the picture you posted last night?” I ask as I walk across the hotel room. I really don’t care how many likes the photo ended up getting. Unless Nate responded? And that’s what I’m expecting to see as I take the last few steps to him.
“Swipe through them,” Marco says as he hands me his phone.
The screenshot shows the front page of an Italian paper, and under the headline Has Marco Antonio Finally Found Love?
is a short paragraph outlining certain “facts” about last night.
As best I can read the Italian paper, it says: Perpetual bachelor Marco Antonio, best known as the reigning world champion of men’s alpine racing, posted this photo of himself and former US gold medal skier Jackson Shanahan.
Witnesses claim to have seen them leaving a hotel bar and heading upstairs together.
Despite his playboy status, Antonio keeps his love life extremely private, until now.
I scroll to the next screenshot. And the next. And the next. They all include the photo Marco posted last night, and a grainy photo of us walking across the lobby with his arm wrapped around my waist. They also all include varyingly alarmist headlines.
I zoom in on the photo, and I see what I should have seen last night, but likely missed because of the alcohol. With our heads less than a foot apart and our eyes locked in a gaze, it looks like we’re about to head to the bedroom.
“Shit,” I say, sitting on the chair across from him and handing him back his phone. “I should never have taken that stupid photo. My job could be at stake here, Marco. I work for the US National Ski Team and you’re the competition. If people think we’re secretly together . . . it’s bad.”
“Everyone knows you’re my best friend. Do they object to that?” he asks. Why is he so freaking calm about this?
“I mean, sometimes they give me crap, but it’s not a problem.”
“Then why would it be a problem if they think we’re dating?
” Marco rubs his hand across the dark stubble on his jaw, the rough sound is like sandpaper across wood in the silence of my hotel room.
His lips turn down at the corners as his eyes sweep over me.
Sometimes looking at Marco, I can’t believe I’ve never felt more than friendship toward him.
He’s devastatingly handsome—the kind of man that women throw themselves at—but he’s always been more like a brother to me.
“I don’t know.” I sigh. “Maybe it wouldn’t be. But if the people I work with think I’ve been dating you and lying to them about it. . .”
“The media clearly thinks something is happening between us, and I think people are likely to believe it,” he says.
“But we can just tell the truth. We’ve been friends for almost a decade.”
“You want to engage the media in speculation about what’s happening behind closed doors? Because I think you know how that goes.”