Carry Your Heart (27 page)

“Thank you,” she says back.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

I wear the ring on a silver chain around my neck. I tape it down for practices back in Utah. I feel released from a burden, somehow, knowing Mrs. Keller thinks I deserve the ring still. Knowing that she thinks of me as her daughter-in-law.

And Lottie and I are friend again, truly, deeply friends. She plays with the ring when she sees it, twirling it in the sun. I wonder how I questioned her loyalty; she tells me she’s sorry and confused as to why she resented me for coming back.

And freed of that jealousy, we both keep winning like crazy.

Sometimes I think of the ring as my lucky charm, taped in an X with medical tape over my heart, I touch the cool bump, and I let fly.

After I win four races in one week, I get a drunken text message from Hunter. He flashes back into me like lightning.

kinda miss you

I roll my eyes.
Kinda
. I swallow.
Kinda?
I miss him terribly. Like I’m missing air or something. But I count what I have. I keep busy. I know what the stages of loss are. You have to keep busy or it will stop you in your tracks. I made the mistake of stopping once. I’m not going to do it again.

The Facebook photos of Laurel and Hunter are hard to take. Particularly the ones of them at a costume party, where she’s dressed up like…a playboy bunny maybe? And he’s Mickey Mouse.

“Stop torturing yourself,” Lottie snaps, walking into my room. “Death eater and douchebag are not worth your time.”

I laugh at her as she hands me an iced coffee. “How do you drink iced coffee in February?”

“I don’t like hot drinks,” she insists. “What is she supposed to be?”

“I was just wondering the same thing,” I say mildly.

“I can’t decide if she’s supposed to be a prostitute or if she didn’t know it was a costume party, so she came as herself.”

“High-end prostitute.”

“Not that high-end.”

“Why did we ever stop being friends?”

She laughs. “We’re both too competitive for our own good? I think we should go to meditation classes. Prevent the whole standoff girl fight from ever happening again. Alright, I don’t want to look at this evil shit.”

I sigh. “I still need to check my email.”

“So, check it and let’s go fucking backcountry it out.” Joe, Parker, Lottie, and I are finally headed out to the backcountry on a snow cat. I’m not nervous. I’m excited, and we took all the precautions, checking the snow report and talking to the director of activities at the lodge.

Should be a good day for powder.

I load my inbox impatiently, scrolling through an endless series of spam messages.

And then there’s something unusual.

Sponsorship Inquiry-Spyder

Hi Pippa:

My names Julia Thomas and I work in marketing at Spyder. We’re big fans of yours! Congrats on the comeback!

I was wondering if you had an agent we could get in touch with to discuss sponsoring you. Let me know!

Best wishes,

Julia

“Holy fucking shit,” I say.

“What?”

“Spyder wants to sponsor me,” I say breathlessly. “Oh my god.”

“Oh my god, that is
huge
,” Lottie says. She smiles. She’s already sponsored. “I’ll give you my agent’s number
right
now.”

“Okay. Okay. Gah.” I smile ridiculously wide and Lottie sends him an email from my inbox.

“Let’s celebrate, girl,” Lottie says.

I text my dad. Skiing is exactly what I need right now. I’m a bundle of nervous excitement.

There’s no fear when we get up there. I watch Parker go. I take a deep breath, and the second I feel the powder under my feet, I let it rip.

We’re all four of us flying—free, letting out war cries, just skiing for the hell of it, no question of first or last place, nothing but the insane rush of adrenaline in our veins as we swoop down the mountain.

I turn back and see Lottie, small and compact, zigzagging ferociously.

She comes to a stop by Joe, giggling uncontrollably. “Why don’t we do this every day?” she asks.

“It’s amazing out here,” Joe turns to look down the mountain. We have more snow to tear through and we’ll end up down on a remote corner of the mountain’s base with a long walk back to the lodge. We have time to stare at the view.

I see how Joe grips Lottie’s shoulders affectionately, and am grateful for these three friends. They’re not Hunter, they don’t make my heart beat faster, they don’t drive me wild, but they put me at ease. There’s such value in that. It’s more important than love, ease. Feeling secure. Like there are enough things binding you to the world so you don’t have to worry about falling again.

I’m going to be okay, I breathe. I touch the ring at my throat.
It’s going to be fine.

Chapter Forty

“We want to fly you to the X-Games,” Julia says. “Good Morning America is going to do an interview with you.”

“You know I’m a downhill skier?”

“We do. But this is a huge media event for winter sports—we don’t get much else like it,” Julia says.

“And the interview?” I ask cautiously. I’m not sure that I’m ready for that.

“We’ll talk over the details when you get there.”

“I’m not sure if I’m ready to talk about all the avalanche stuff.”

“We can make sure they don’t ask specifics.”

“Okay,” I bite my lip. “Okay.” I smile. I can do this.

“You can bring friends if you want,” she suggests. “We can get you four or five tickets and a few hotel rooms?”

“Just one,” I say. “For my friend Lottie.”

“Alright, email me her full name and all that.”

“I will,” I say.

Hunter will be there. Swarmed by attention and by woman and possibly with Laurel, if he is dating her, as all Facebook evidence suggests. It pisses me off that it was so easy for him to stop talking me. So easy to just write me off.

Well, my sponsors were flying me there. It wasn’t like I was flying out there to get him back.
If I were desperate I would do that,
I think dismissively.

Then I admit,
if I were a braver person, I would do that.

***

Spyder throws a big party a few days before the X-Games in Aspen, the glitziest winters sports town in America.

They tell me to dress up and Lottie and I have a thrill buying dresses and sky-high heels in town.

“If nothing else, Hunter is going to die when he sees you in that outfit,” she says, adjusting the necklace so it was centered. We’re not even sure he’ll be there, but I’m preparing for the night like he’s going to come.

“Do you really think I should wear this?” I ask, toying with the ring, which I haven’t taken off.

I mostly kept it hidden, taped during training, which consumes my life, or tucked underneath a t-shirt. The last time I
wore
a dress was to my fake date with Hunter. So, there haven’t been a lot of opportunities to people look at the engagement ring around my neck and ask me what it is.

“Absolutely,” she says. “Hunter is going to
die
when he sees you.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want that,” I say mildly.

Lottie looks amazing too, in a royal blue mini dress and wedges that made her slim legs look like they belonged to a runway model, not a skier.

We buy our dresses and retreat to the fancy lodge that Spyder had put us up in. Which was packed with gear that Spyder had given me.

“I could
definitely
get used to this,” I tell Lottie, who smiles knowingly. She’s been sponsored by Spyder for eight months now. She knows all about the perks of a sponsorship.

We eat voraciously in the dining room, laughing with excitement over the party, and talking about what I should say on Good Morning America.

He walks in. I’m not the only one who turns my head. There are a lot of big snowboarding fans out here, and more than a few women who simply appreciate the view. He’s alone. I’m sure he’s alone. He sits at a table in a corner and orders and eats quietly. I hold my breath, waiting for Laurel, for any woman to join him, but no one does. They bring him an appetizer and he’s still alone.

I can’t focus at all with him there. I get up to go to the restroom, clear my head, catch my breath. I wash my hands slowly and push through the door. It swings behind me, and I see him waiting. He looks at me cautiously.

“Hey,” I say after a second. I take a shaky breath, my stupid heart pounding like he’s Romeo and I’m Juliet.
Who do you think you are, Pippa? Taylor Swift?

“Hey,” he replies.

“Following me?” I ask archly. I don’t know why I’m so quick to jump down his throat. It’s amply clear he hasn’t been stalking me, considering he moved out of Utah and disappeared after we broke up.

“Yeah, kind of.” He looks at his feet and then steals a glance up at me. “Sorry. You don’t want to see me. I get it.” He smiles sheepishly. “I just wanted to say hi.”

I look at him. His green eyes are soft, dewy.

“Well,” I swallow thickly. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he whispers back, taking a tiny step to me, and I want to kiss him. I almost do. I step forward to him and reach for his shoulder.

“Hunter,” I whisper longingly.

He grabs my hand. “Don’t,” he says seriously. “I can’t, Pippa.”

I nod. “Right. Laurel.” I drop my hand. So he’s faithful to her now.

“No. Not Laurel. It’s just I can’t,” he says, his voice clearer, sturdier. He bites his lip. “What are you doing here?”

“My sponsors flew me out,” I say. “I’m doing some Good Morning America interview.”

“Yeah, you’ve really been killing it,” he says.

“You’re competing? Obviously, you’re competing. Stupid question.”

He laughs. “Yeah, yeah. I am.”

“Well, good luck,” I say. “Good to see you. All that jazz.”

He grabs my wrist as I turn away and the contact is like a flame on my skin, tight and intense.

I burn with a need to be held by him. To be his, for him to be mine, for him to not go do things like run off to Canada for no reason, and then just disappear. I need him to fight for us instead.

“I never cheated on you,” he says throatily.

“I…”

“I don’t want to fight. But you should know that. I didn’t cheat.”

He lets me go and turns into the bathroom himself. I stand there, half of me wanting to barge right after him into the men’s room. But I don’t. He said
I can’t
and whatever that means, it was a pretty clear rejection of my advances.

“Did you talk to him?” Lottie asks when I get back to the table. “He got up as soon as he saw you leaving.”

“Yeah,” I say dreamily.

“What did he say?”

“That he never cheated on me.”

“Do you believe him?”

I hesitate. Looking at her. “It was never about sex. I never thought that he slept with her. I thought that he went to see her, to make sure. Or something…”

Chapter Forty-One

Pregaming in high altitude isn’t something I’ve done in a while. So the fact that the minibar-sized alcohol bottles turned out to be
lethal
when mixed with my lightweight bloodstream takes me by surprise.

“Ooh. You are definitely drunk,” Lottie giggles, pleased with this development.”

“Shut up.”

“Stop trying to do your make up,” she says, sitting me down and taking over.

“How are you so sober?”

“I’m not that sober.”

“You are the size of a peanut.”

“Thank you?”

“Fun-sized.”

“Close your eyes,” she orders, gently doing my eyeliner and mascara.

“Pint-sized.”

“Uh-huh,” she says.

“Halfpint-sized. iPod Mini. I mean Nano. Nano. You are Nano-Sized.”

“All done, you little alcoholic,” she says. “Have some water or soda.”

I drink another gin and tonic instead.

“Well,
this
is going to be interesting,” she pronounces.

“You know what I like about Hunter?”

“What?”

“Nothing. He’s just
so
annoying. And like, why is he so tall? Nobody needs to be that tall. Plus, I thought he had this really great hair and when I saw him at dinner last night, I was like he doesn’t even
have
that great of hair anymore. I don’t know if he changed conditioners or if he stopped using conditioner altogether…”

“Pippa.”

“Yes?”

“Get your shit together. You sound like an idiot. Hunter has amazing hair.”

“Well, it’s still stupid to be that tall.”

She laughs. We clatter through the lobby and jump into the limo which will take us to the swanky restaurant they’ve transformed into a winter wonderland party.

Every big extreme athlete is here. Skiers, snowboarders, snow mobilers, the tattooed, death-defying adrenaline seekers of the world. People paid to be reckless with their own lives, but who would do it for free anyways.

People like Hunter.

My eyes go to him right away, signing autographs for a young woman, who I think evil thoughts about based on nothing but the alcohol. And my pathetically jealous personality.

I catch his eye across the room, wondering if I look as drunk as I feel.

We stop on the miniature red carpet for a few pictures, our hands around each others’ waists. And I see him taking a beer. Maybe he’s as drunk as I feel.

Maybe we can black out, hook up, and get each other out of our systems.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere,” I say, leaving her to go over to Hunter.

He puts his hand on the hip of the snowboarder he’s talking to, excusing himself and stepping to me.

“Pippa,” he smiles. “How are you?” Friendly polite.

“Drunk,” I say flatly. He laughs.

“Alright, I can work with that.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you can,” I say. I stare at him. “Do you want to know something?”

He glances around, like he’s nervous I’m going to do something crazy, before he looks back at me with an uneasy smile.

You’re a fucking asshole for doing this to me.
I don’t say that though.
You broke my heart and it was already broken, but you broke it worse.