7
‘Hi,’ I squeak, clutching my skis in front of me like they could protect me from the wave of embarrassment I feel from running into him again.
I watch as Rory’s mouth opens, and I wait anxiously for him to say something – anything – so I can judge how to play this.
But he only smirks like he finds this situation amusing.
Like he doesn’t find this meeting awkward at all, just moderately surprising, meanwhile I feel even more disoriented than I did falling down the slope a minute ago.
He seamlessly settles into ‘teacher’ mode and consults his clipboard.
‘So, it’s the booking for Lottie, Tilly and Meghan, right?’ he asks, glancing at my friends on either side of me.
Tilly lurches forward before I manage to stop her and I’m immediately regretting telling her anything about what happened that night.
‘That’s right. And you’re Rory, we’ve heard all about you and your d—’
I shoot her daggers and it’s enough to shut her up before she finishes that sentence. I don’t want to believe what word was going to come out of her mouth next. She freezes, mouth still forming the beginning of the word before switching course.
‘Your dog. You have a dog, right? The other instructor mentioned it.’
I sigh, still annoyed at her but thanking god she didn’t come out with anything more inappropriate. Rory seems to know exactly where she’d been going with that statement but gracefully plays along without comment.
‘I do, although she stays with my friend’s family when I’m not in London, so I guess she’s only half mine.’
‘Ooh you have a dog? We have a wee Yorkie back home in Aberdeen.’
The owner of the voice appears, standing at the other end of the crescent we’ve formed around Rory.
She smiles at me, and my first thought is that she has a very kind face.
Crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes paint her as someone often joyful, and my heart warms as she reminds me of my mum.
Her ski jacket is a patchwork of colour, like someone’s taken a canvas and painted bursts of every colour of the rainbow on it before blending them all together.
She passes her poles to the man on her right and reaches a hand out towards me. ‘Hello, I’m Penny.’
‘Lottie,’ I reply, taking it, and she squeezes mine tightly before pointing her thumb towards the man next to her. In contrast, his ski jacket can be described in one word: beige.
‘And this is my husband, Bill. Don’t mind his grumpy old face, he still hasn’t forgiven me for dragging us on this holiday in the first place.’
‘Maybe because I’m sixty-five with two barely functioning knees and you’ve put me in skis for the first time in twenty years. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get rid of me.’
Penny leans towards me and cups her hand over her mouth.
‘I think he’s onto me,’ she says with a wink, and I like her already.
There’s only one other person in our group, a guy who’s standing partially out of view behind Bill. He lifts one of his hands to wave, seeming to forget the ski pole he’s holding and nearly knocks Penny on the head with it.
‘Crumbs, I’m so sorry. Uh, I’m Stephen.’
‘Hi, Stephen,’ we all say back in a chorus, which leaves him hugging his arms around himself, slightly terrified. He quickly reverts to his earlier hiding place.
‘Bless him, he’s like a little lost puppy,’ Meghan whispers in my ear.
‘Group mission to get him dancing on the tables at après before the end of the week,’ Tilly chimes in and I hide my laugh behind a cough as I try to picture that.
‘Now that introductions are all done, who’s ready to start skiing?’ Rory asks, which elicits a series of cheers from the whole group, apart from me. I’m still too shocked to register what’s going on.
Rory continues saying things that I should probably be listening to, but instead I try to figure out how best to handle this.
After a few dazed minutes, I decide there and then that the best way to play this is to carry on pretending Rory and I have never met.
It’ll be fine, easy even. We’ve barely spent any time together anyway, only one evening that I’ll admit I’ve thought about more than I should’ve.
I get a flashback to last night, lying in my bed in the chalet, but I shut it down and pray I haven’t flushed as red as a tomato.
I’m definitely keeping that a secret, otherwise Tilly might lose her mind.
I’ll see him in a purely professional light. This is nothing more than a teacher-student relationship. Not relationship – that’s the wrong word. A teacher-student dynamic.
Yeah, that sounds doable.
I’m in my own head so much that I don’t notice Rory’s standing directly in front of me until he clears his throat, poised as if waiting for me to answer a question.
‘I’m sorry, what was that?’
‘He asked you to flip over,’ Tilly chimes in and my mouth gapes open.
‘Your skis,’ Rory clarifies, the corners of his lips twitching with amusement. The whole thing makes me want to disappear.
‘Can you flip over your skis so I can wax them? It’ll help with today’s snow.’
My face is burning up even though it’s -5°C, and I shoot Tilly a stern glare.
‘Oh, uh yeah, of course,’ I say, handing my skis over to him bottom side out, and searing out any images Tilly’s words have conjured in my head of him flipping me over two days ago.
Thinking back on that night, I realise there were clues everywhere that he could’ve been a ski instructor.
That painting for starters, which I could swear is a painting of this place.
And I realise that odd look he gave me when I joked about him having skis in one of his bedrooms was because he most likely did have skis lying around the house.
‘You’re good to go,’ he says, handing them back and flashing me an easy smile.
Tilly brushes her gloved hand down my ski before nodding. ‘Look at you, Lottie, all slick and ready.’
I die inside, and Meghan fails to restrain herself from laughing as I frantically search for where Rory is standing and pray he was out of earshot. It’s clear from Meghan’s face that Tilly’s filled her in on who Rory is.
‘Can you two stop with that? God, this whole thing is embarrassing enough without the two of you trying to turn everything into an innuendo.’
‘Oh, come on, Lottie, don’t be so boring. Wait until the boys find out about this!’ Tilly’s eyebrows dance and I point my finger at her conniving little face.
‘No, no, no. No one is finding out about anything, got it?’ I glance from her to Meghan, mostly directing this at her as she’s usually incapable of withholding gossip, but she’s trying weirdly hard to avoid my eye.
‘Meghan?’ I ask, dreading where this is going.
She places both of her skis in front of her and takes a step backwards before she speaks. ‘Um, yeah about that… I may have already texted Lucas.’
For a moment, they are both silent, with Meghan barely visible behind the ski-shield she’s constructed. Then I’m lunging towards her, the skis doing nothing to protect her from my flailing arms as I reach towards her pocket.
‘Give me the phone!’
‘Ouch, get off me!’
‘Calm down, Lottie, this will all be fine…’
We stop when we hear someone pointedly cough behind us. I freeze, one hand still prising open the zip of Meghan’s coat, the other barely holding my skis upright.
‘Ready to start your first lesson, ladies?’
None of us say anything in response to what I take as a rhetorical question from Rory. Instead, we silently rearrange ourselves back into a line and I keep my head down, concentrating firmly on the snow by my feet, feeling like I’ve been told off for fighting on the school playground.
‘I’ve deleted the message,’ Meghan whispers a few seconds later. ‘It was on WhatsApp and it was unread so you should be in the clear.’
I sigh with relief, whispering a thank you back, glad that I can avoid at least some of the teasing this situation is bringing. But something tells me I won’t get a break from it from the two girls behind me.
Rory stands in front of us with his arms folded, trying to appear stern, but his pursed lips are a dead giveaway that he’s trying really hard not to smile. I swear I don’t have a kink for the whole teacher-student thing, but with Rory standing in front of me now, I could convince myself I do.
I spend the next ten minutes trying to focus as Rory instructs us on how to position ourselves and our skis to make it down the hill without dying, laughing whenever Penny pokes her husband with one of her poles and tells him to cheer up.
While he talks, Rory takes care to address each of us individually, but pays me no more attention than any of his other students.
If I needed confirmation on how unaffected he is by this whole situation, I have it.
Am I offended at his obvious indifference? Maybe a little. Will I now make it my mission to play it equally as cool? Absolutely.
Not that there’s anything going on anyway. It was one inconsequential night, and now I’m here to learn how to ski.
That’s all there is to it, so I finally start paying attention.