Chapter 29
JETT
I thank my driver as he helps me to the front door, but I have no idea what to do once I get inside. Poppy is nearly half my size, so she’s no use to help support my weight to get me over to the couch.
She takes my keys out of the side pocket of my snow pants like I tell her to and opens the door. My driver gets me seated on the bench just inside in the entry way, but that’s where he leaves me.
“There’s an old pair of crutches in the garage,” I tell her, glad that I decided to keep them around after I tore my ACL, in case anything ever happened again.
I got pretty agile on them having to use them for so long after surgery. Even though I kept them, I’d hoped I’d never have to use them again.
Poppy nods, accepting her mission, and heads down the hall to the back entry and I hear the door to the garage open and shut.
After a couple minutes rummaging around in there, she’s back, crutches in hand. I take them from her, giving her a nod of thanks. I stand up and lean my weight onto them.
“I’m going to take a bath.” I tilt my head in the direction of the bedroom. Poppy shifts on her feet.
“Uh, okay…” Her gaze darts side to side. “Do you need help? Or…”
My mouth tilts upward. Despite my resistance to Poppy coming over after the event, and despite the lump of dread in my gut while I wait for Dan to text me with the final score, I can’t help but smile at Poppy’s offer.
“I’ll be okay on my own,” I say, a playful lilt in my voice. “But if you wanted to join me…”
Poppy’s eyes widen at the proposition. I’ve caught her off guard and she stammers, her mouth popping open in surprise.
“I’m kidding, Poppy. I’ll be fine.” I take a couple crutch-assisted steps toward my room, but I pause and look back at her as I reach the hallway. “You don’t have to stay, by the way. I know you’ve been wanting to get back to the café. Why don’t you take this time to go home, and check in.”
A feeling of wanting to hide away in my house like the Beast in his castle washes over me. I’m not used to anyone seeing me in this state. Not my family, and I don’t really have friends outside of Beck. Even they don’t see this side of me.
Fame is a lonely thing, and when you live with the reputation I do, it’s even lonelier. Only Mark has seen me at my worst during my rehab days, and even then, it’s strictly professional. We have one goal in mind, getting me back onto the slopes and getting me to Worlds.
Clearly, that’s easier said than done.
“The café can wait.” A smile softens Poppy’s face. “I think Ethan and Jaime are enjoying not having me hovering around them. I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to the café and the store.”
“No…” I say, astonished. “Not the Miss Bossy Boots I met in the car earlier…”
She laughs, and the sound of it does something funny to me. It makes a warm feeling bloom in my chest.
“Go have your bath,” she says, walking past me and into the kitchen. “Then you’re going to come and ice your knee.”
“Okay, Bossy Boots.”
I fumble down the hallway, getting accustomed to using the crutches again, and through the door to my bedroom. Somehow managing to get myself into the tub, I wash my hair and rinse off the sweat from my run, but all of it is much harder than I remember it being the first time around.
By the time I’ve towelled off, and clunkily walk down the hallway on the crutches, Poppy has set the living room up for me.
There’s a pillow on the sofa to elevate my leg, a cozy blanket all ready to crawl under, my usual post-competition snacks on the coffee table with a hot chocolate topped with whipped cream, and a movie ready to play on my flat screen.
She’s seated on the couch next to the spot she set up for me.
“Come sit.” She pats the sofa next to her. “You should rest your leg.”
That familiar warmth blooms again, the feeling of having someone care for you. I never had that growing up. After my mom died, my dad did too, in a way. He turned inward, shut the world out and pored himself into his work at the clinic until Mason took over for him.
It’s not like any of my previous relationships have been anything this deep, either. I’ve denied myself that kind of connection for as long as I can remember. Connection requires vulnerability, and vulnerability is terrifying.
But I realize now how badly I want it, crave it. Deep down, I think I’ve always known this is what was missing. I was just too afraid to let my guard down so I could find it.
I sit next to her, and she gets up, taking my crutches from me and laying them on the floor in case I need them later.
She suddenly looks as if she’s remembered something, and she scurries off to the kitchen, returning a couple seconds later with an ice pack that she places on my knee.
It’s already feeling better having taken the weight off it, but I know that the ice is crucial if I have a shot in hell at going to the World Cup Final.
“What happened out there today?” She asks, covering me up with the fluffy faux fur blanket.
I consider her question, still trying to make sense of it myself. It happened so fast, and I don’t think I even know. Nothing tore, nothing dislocated, but when I landed, a sharp pang shot up my leg. I know it compromised my landing and cost me points.
“I just landed wrong, I guess. Mark didn’t seem overly worried when he looked at it initially, but it hurt like a bitch.”
“You stiffened up when it happened,” Poppy points out.
Something in what she’s said tweaks my curiosity. I tilt my head askance.
“When I got to the bottom, you asked me right away if I was hurt,” I say. I know for a fact that I covered it up well, only a trained eye would have noticed that my landing wasn’t as smooth as it should have been. “How did you know?”
Poppy tucks her hands in her sleeves and curls her fingers around the fabric.
“I’ve watched you ski a lot, Jett,” she admits, casting her gaze downward.
“You’re a big deal in Heartwood. We always watched you on TV.
And I don’t know, between that and the handful of times I’ve watched you ski in real life…
I knew something was off. You’re always so cool and aloof. This time you just seemed… stiff.”
Something about Poppy watching me ski causes a swelling feeling behind my ribs. Not that she watched me compete, she watched me. Learned my quirks and mannerisms enough that she knows when I’m not myself. Caring.
“Are you a Jett Landry fangirl?” I ask her, and she still refuses to meet my gaze. But a smile takes over my face.
“You have enough of those already. Your ego is so big, your head can barely fit through the doorway.” She finally glances up at me, and there’s a playful smirk on her lips, too.
“It’s been getting smaller and smaller these days,” I admit. “Did you see how many points it cost me?”
Poppy shakes her head, no.
“I was too focused on getting you over to Mark and getting you out of there. I think they were reviewing when we left.” She looks at me for a moment, her mouth twisting to one side before she speaks again. “Don’t worry about that right now, just focus on resting and getting better.”
“I just want to know if this puts me out of the running for the final.” A pit lands in my gut with a thud.
I look around for my phone so I can see if there’s a message from Dan, or if the scores have been finalized and posted online. Of course, I won’t know my rank until the event is over later today. I was one of the first competitors of the day.
“What you need is to take care of yourself. You’ll only end up hurting yourself worse at the next one if you don’t take time to heal right now,” she says.
We both know the words are loaded. The next event is in a week, and even if I do qualify to move onto the next event, I don’t know if I can yet.
“You sound an awful lot like Mark when he’s chastising me.”
“Mark chastises you about this because he cares,” she snaps back. She’s right, of course, and I think maybe more people care about me than I realized. I just don’t know what to do with it.
“So, what’s that plan for the afternoon?” I ask, changing the subject, and gesturing to the movie paused on the TV.
“My ideal sick day lineup,” she explains. “I’m kind of an expert in sick days.”
Her admission reminds me of all the days that Poppy was absent in school, how when she came back her arms would be covered with bruises from blood work and getting medications through an IV.
She seems to manage her illness better now, but I know she still has a lot of hard days. My heart clenches for a second, and guilt settles in my gut when I consider all that Poppy has had to go through, how she’s done it all with a smile on her face, a positive outlook.
And here I am complaining about how a knee injury might stop me from being officially declared the best skier in the world. It’s all relative, but it stops me in my self-pitying tracks.
“Tell me,” I say, enjoying that Poppy is letting me in on this little aspect of her world. One that she’s only ever kept private. “What’s the play?”
“It depends on how much time we have.”
I gesture down at my leg. “Looks like we have all day.”
Cordelia sashays over to the couch and hops up, making herself cozy on my lap.
“In that case, first you need a sick day buddy. My buddy was my cat, Grumpy, growing up. Now I have Cordelia, but we don’t have those days very often anymore, thankfully.
So today, we can be your sick day buddies,” she explains.
“If time isn’t a consideration, we can do the whole lineup. First a horror movie.”
I wrinkle my nose. Horror isn’t my thing, but I know Poppy loves it, so I’ll watch it if she wants to.