56. Chapter Fifty-Six
Percy
I wake to the weight of her sleeping across my chest, and for one blurred second, I don’t know where we are.
An old instinct takes the wheel before I’m awake enough to stop it.
Wake her. Get her up and gone before the house catches her in your bed.
My whole body tightens around the thought the way it tightened for years, the reflex worn so far down into me that it fires before my eyes are even open.
Then I open them, and I see Stanley face down on the next bed with Aspen tucked under his arm, and I remember where I am, and I let the breath go.
Nobody’s coming to catch us. There’s nothing left to catch.
A year ago this fear ran my whole life, and now I lie here in the gray mountain light with her heartbeat going slow against my ribs, and I can’t quite reach it anymore.
Now that I’m awake, I don’t actually remember how it felt to be that scared all the time.
I’ve made a rough kind of peace with the two years I wasted too afraid to hold the exact thing I’m holding right now.
I don’t get them back. But I stopped. I finally stopped.
I pull her in tighter and kick the blanket off both of us, letting the cold air come in and drink up the heat we’ve made.
Stanley shifts on the next bed, and when I glance over, he’s cracked one eye open and caught me.
“The hell, Mon Petit Percy.” His voice is thick with sleep. “Are you watching us sleep, you freak?”
I put a finger to my lips. The last thing I need at six in the morning is Stanley loose on the Mon Petit Percy material — the little pet name he gave me years back.
It’s French, technically, so it lands in the one part of me that language usually only reaches to wound — except out of Stanley’s mouth it doesn’t wound.
It’s just his. My father gave me the words, and Stanley gave them somewhere soft to come down.
“Aspen.” He noses into her hair, loud enough to wake the whole floor. “Why don’t you ever snuggle me like that, huh? Baby girl.”
I sigh.
“Leave them alone,” Aspen mumbles into the pillow.
“You never let me hold you like that—”
“Because you kick.”
“I won’t kick you. Not right now, I promise.” He hauls her body up onto his chest, lets out a long, contented sigh — and then shoves her straight back off. “Okay. Get off me, you’re heavy.”
Aspen laughs into the mattress.
Penelope stirs against me, laughing before she’s even got her eyes open.
Stanley launches a pillow that misses us by a foot and takes out the lamp, and the day officially starts when Benson materializes in the doorway, fully dressed, dead silent, watching all of us.
“Good,” he says. “You’re up. Time to hit the slopes.”
“It’s a bunny hill, Pers,” Stanley says. “You’re gonna love it.”
Benson smacks the end of my bed, then Stanley’s. “Get up. Both of you.”
Turns out I’m terrible at snowboarding.
Getting off the lift is a humiliation all its own, and I ride most of the run clamped onto Penelope’s arm like a drowning man until I catch Stanley grinning and let her go, because I’d sooner eat snow than embarrass her in front of everyone.
Stanley and Aspen carve off down the mountain like they were born on it.
Benson’s got Lucy by both hands, snowboarding backward, catching her every time she slides out.
Blue’s holding Melly up by the elbows, the two of them wobbling and quiet.
Gianna’s just standing there openly laughing at all of us.
I strap my back foot in while Penelope waits — patient, poised, in absolutely no danger of falling over.
I stand up and go.
That’s the one real gift of being an athlete: I pick things up fast, my body learns quick.
What I don’t account for is the drag of the wet snow and the whole ordeal of steering around forty other people, so I turn wrong, the nose of the board bites down into the slush, and I go down hard enough to feel it in my teeth.
Penelope slides to a clean stop above me on her skis. Not a hair out of place. Not remotely out of breath.
“Are you okay?”
“Okay,” I say, flat on my back in the snow.
“You said — and I want to quote you exactly here — ‘how hard can it be?’” She’s fighting a smile and losing badly. “You said, ‘I’m athletic, Penelope.’”
“I’m rethinking a number of things.”
And she laughs at me.
She laughs at me for the next full hour.
She grew up doing this — some childhood stacked with mountains and lessons and money, a whole life away from the one I had — and she makes it look like breathing, elegant the entire way down while I fall too many times to count.
Her cheeks have gone pink. Her hair’s escaping her beanie in pieces.
And every single time I drag myself back upright, she’s already waiting there, ready to watch me eat it again.
But I get better. Run by run, I fall less. That’s how it’s always gone with me and hard things — I’m ugly at them right up until I’m not.
Stanley, meanwhile, is having the best day of his entire life at my expense.
“The goalie is down,” he bellows from a chairlift somewhere over my head. “The man stops a puck for a living — and cannot — stop — himself —”
“I’ve got it all on video,” Benson calls from the chair behind him. “Gonna post it. Put it on a loop in the living room. Play it at parties.”
Rowan sprays a wall of snow over me as he flies past. “You’re so bad at this, Pers!”
“You’re all going to kiss my ass,” I call up at them, hauling myself vertical again, “when I lose focus on the net and get into snowboarding––”
“He’s threatening us!” Stanley clutches the safety bar. “Our baby’s grown up and started making threats! Don’t you dare lose focus on us, Pers!”
“Let’s see you ski, big boy!” Benson shouts, and the whole chairlift full of them comes apart.
Penelope skis over, unbothered by any of it. “You’re getting better, Pers. Don’t let them get to your head.”
“You’re the only one in my head.”
It lands on her the way I meant it to. She ducks it with a small smile and crouches down and lays her cold hands over mine where they’re braced on the edge of the board, and she talks me through it — where to set my weight, how to read the give of the snow, how to quit fighting the snow and let it carry me instead.
She did this once before. In a kitchen when we had Hawthorne all to ourselves once upon a time.
Her hands over mine on the handle of a knife, standing close at my back, patient, telling me exactly what to do while I did it wrong and she didn’t laugh — or didn’t only laugh.
She’s wearing the same face now that she wore then.
The focused one. The teacher one. The one she puts on when she’s decided to care about me.
And I just look at her. Her hands are freezing.
Her nose has gone red at the tip. She’s close enough that for a second the whole loud mountain drops away to nothing, and it’s only her cold hands over mine and the small crease between her eyebrows while she gives me her best tips.
I could stand right here and let her teach me the same run forever.
Then Stanley eats it forty feet up the hill — a full, catastrophic yard sale, skis going one way and both poles the other, screaming the entire way down — and the spell breaks. Penelope’s laughing again with her forehead dropped against my shoulder.
Stanley is skiing with Aspen laughing her head off right behind him, and I gotta give it to the man. He knows how to keep her on her toes. She’s loving it. He grabs Aspen, and they both fall down. Benson stops right behind them, laughing.
“You’re hopeless, Sterm.” Then he’s taking off down the mountain.
“I’d like to see you ski, Reeve!” Stanley shouts after him. He picks himself up and says to Aspen, “I thought you said this was easy.”
She puts herself together. “It is. Come on, Penelope. The boys will figure it out.”
Penelope waves at me with a soft smile and skis down with Aspen.
Stanley is suddenly beside me. “Man, this is great, isn’t it?”
There’s no joke in his tone, so I nod. “Yeah.”
He hits me in the chest. “Last man down is the loser.”
I make it down a whole run without going down once, and Stanley is hopeless just like Benson said.
Penelope’s waiting at the bottom, and when I skid to a stop beside her, upright and intact and breathing hard, she looks at me with so much pride on her face you’d think I’d won something. A cup. A title. Not one clean run down a beginner slope.
“There,” she says. “That was good.”
Then I fall flat on my ass trying to get the board off my feet, and she loses it completely — and watching her laughing in the snow loosens my chest.
The hot tub sits out on the deck in the middle of the snow, steaming into the cold, and Gianna’s carried everyone a drink out in the bedazzled wine glasses she smuggled all the way from Hawthorne.
The girls climb in with Gianna’s wine, and it’s going exactly the way Stanley promised them it would back in the Hawthorne kitchen when he was selling this whole trip — that they’d sit out here like queens, steam coming off the water, the mountain gone dark blue behind them with the bedazzled wine glasses.
I’m perched on the edge with my feet in, and Penelope is leaning against my shins, and the whole crew’s crammed into a tub built for half of us.
Stanley’s running some game whose rules change the instant he starts losing.
Somebody tries to start a snowball fight from inside the water, which does not work in any way, and now everyone’s drink has snow in it.
At some point, I look around at all of them without meaning to.
Benson with his arm hooked around Lucy. Blue and Melly are folded quiet into the corner. Rowan losing an argument to Aspen he was never going to win. Gianna guarding her wine glass with her life. Stanley in the middle of a story, both arms up, the whole tub his audience.
And it lands on me, sitting there in the steam, that most of them are gone in five months.