Falling Snow (9 page)

Cason stood next to her. She watched the emotion play across Adler’s face just before she got up. “We can stop here. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

Adler handed her snowboard to her. “I’m not uncomfortable Cason.”

“Well, okay let’s get back to it then.”

Sixteen

Cason found herself standing at Adler’s door for the second time that day. She was equally as nervous as she had been twelve hours ago, only this time it was a very different kind of nervous. She hadn’t expected Adler to remember offering to cook for Cason, so she was surprised when they were in the SUV heading back from their snowboarding adventure and Adler asked her to come over for spaghetti dinner. She thought for sure Adler was having a hard time with her being a lesbian. Maybe she was misunderstood when she saw the confusion on Adler’s face up on the mountain.

“Hey stranger,” Adler smiled brightly when she opened the door. Cason handed her a bottle of wine. “You didn’t have to do that.” She winked and walked to the kitchen with the bottle. The smell of Italian food permeated the air. Cason’s stomach rumbled.

“Wow. It smells really good in here.” She said as she took her jacket, gloves, and hat off.

“Thanks.” Adler said as she was opening the bottle. “You can leave your boots by the door there with mine.”

Cason was glad she dressed lightly in jeans and a black t-shirt under a light blue sweater. Being around Adler seemed to heat her up lately and the last thing she wanted to do was start sweating. “Can I help you with anything?” She asked when she walked into the kitchen. Adler grinned and handed her a glass of wine.

“To you,” Adler said and touched her glass to Cason’s. “You did really well today. I’m impressed.”

“It was all you and your training skills.” Cason smiled and sipped her wine. “When you retire from competitive riding you should become a trainer.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about it. I still have a while though, I hope.”

“You’re what twenty-two, twenty-three. You have plenty more gold winning years to go.”

Adler almost choked on her wine. “I’m twenty-six. But, thanks for the compliment.”

Cason grinned. “You’re still a lot younger than me.”

“Oh come on. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, that’s not old.”

It was Cason’s turn to choke on her wine. “Seriously, I do not look twenty-eight.”

“What?” Adler laughed. “You don’t look thirty if you are.”

“I’m thirty-four.” Cason said.

“Get out, really?”

“Yes. I told you I was a lot older than you.”

“Oh big eight years,” Adler laughed and stirred the spaghetti sauce on the stove behind her.

“Eight long years,” Cason grinned. “You forget I was already practicing medicine while you were still in what junior high.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Adler turned to face her and was surprised to see the blue eyes looking directly at hers. “You better get in here and make your plate. I cook, but I don’t serve.”

The dinner was probably the best spaghetti Cason had ever tasted. Italian was her favorite food and so many restaurants always made the spaghetti dish so bland. Adler knew what spices use and she added a couple different kinds of cheese. She wasn’t sure if Cason was a vegetarian or not so she put the meatballs on the side. Cason eagerly added a handful of meatballs and stirred the entire pile of pasta in the bowl.

“You’re a great cook. It looks like you have something to fall back on if you quit your day job.” Cason teased.

“You think so?” Adler looked at her with a serious expression. “I’ve been thinking about becoming a chef. I’ve had about enough falling on my ass lately.”

Cason watched her face, studying the serious expression until a tiny crease appeared in the corner of her mouth where she was desperately trying to hide the grin that was creeping slowly into a full smile. She laughed. “If I fell on my ass as much as you do I’d quit my day job too.”

“Hey!” Adler tossed her cloth napkin at her. “I don’t fall that much. Usually, most of my falling is done on an airbag in training, but lately I’ve been on a streak of bad luck or something. I think it all started when I crashed into you and we fell.”

“Oh. I see, so I’m to blame for the recent wipe outs.” Cason stood and cleared her plate. Adler followed her and began to apologize when she saw that Cason wasn’t smiling. “Gotcha!” Cason teased and wiggled her eyebrows. “Two can play that little woe is me game.”

Adler laughed full heartedly. Cason loved watching her when she was so happy. She lit up the room. Cason noticed the stereo that had been playing background from somewhere in the living room changed to Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat it’. She started singing along. She hadn’t heard his music in a while and she was a huge fan from her younger years and seeing him in concert. She still couldn’t believe he was gone.

“That’s my I-Pod. It’s hooked to the docking station by the TV.” Adler said.

“Are you even old enough to know who this is?” Cason joked and began moving to the music as she sipped the last of her glass of wine.

“Yes. I went to a concert once with my cousin. I had to have all of his C.D.’s when I got home.”

“What were like ten?”

Adler stuck her chin out. “Eleven.”

Cason laughed and followed her to the couch. The music changed again Lady Gaga started playing. Adler jumped up to adjust her playlist. “Do you even know who this is? Or are you too old?” She asked.

“Oh, ha, ha,” I think everyone knows Gaga. Hello.” It was only fitting that the song was ‘Bad Romance’. She was thinking how she and Adler sure could have a bad romance, right there on the couch she was sitting on.

When Adler found something a little mellower she sat back down. “So, tell me about Cason Macauley the infamous doctor that all the nurses want.”

Cason raised an eyebrow and shook her head. “You sound like my friend Warren. He calls me lesbian eye-candy.”

Adler laughed so hard she almost spilled her wine. “That’s hilarious. So the nurses do chase you around then.”

“No, the nurses don’t all want me, just one crazy one here that is married to some truck driver.” Cason sipped her wine.

“Uh huh,” Adler grinned. “That sounds a little scary. What about at the hospital in Denver?”

“What about it?”

“Is there anyone chasing you around that hospital?”

Cason looked into her eyes. “No.” Cason set her empty glass on the coffee table in front of her. “Tell me about you?”

“What about me?”

“How did you meet your husband?” Cason said and nearly jumped out of her skin when a white and grey cat appeared on the back of the couch between them. “Holy shit!”

Adler smiled. “This is Clyde. He usually hides in my bed when people are here, which is pretty rare so I guess he decided to check you out.” She shooed him off the couch. He paced around the living room looking at Cason, and then he meowed a couple of times and disappeared. Cason’s schedule was just too crazy for her to have pets. “Apparently, he approves.”

“Well, that’s good to know. I was wondering if he was going to claw my eyes out for a second there.”

“He’s all growl, but has no balls, literally.” She grinned.

Cason loved her beautiful smile, but she was really starting to like her sexy little grin. This gorgeous blond sitting two feet away was easily maneuvering her way inside without even knowing it and Cason had no idea how to stop it. Serena was right, she was going to get hurt. “He’s pretty good at changing the subject too.”

“I’m sorry. I guess…I don’t know…It’s still so new getting use to the fact that I’m getting divorced. Have you ever been married or in a committed relationship like a marriage?”

“Once. About ten years ago I met a girl in college and fell head over heels in love. We planned to move in together when I graduated med school. I thought it was forever, we lived together in an off-campus apartment. All of a sudden, almost two years later she tells me she’s pregnant and marrying the father of her baby, a guy who she had apparently been seeing for six or eight months. I never got the true number, it was probably longer.”

“Wow. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was a long time ago. I learned a big lesson in that mistake, don’t get mixed up with straight girls. Now, you see why I don’t get involved with nurse ‘touchy feely’.”

Adler laughed. “I guess so.” She set her empty wine glass next to Cason’s. “When I won my Olympic gold medal, Kevin, who is a writer for ESPN, asked to do a story on me. I was in Encinitas, California visiting a friend and surfing so I drove to L.A. and met him. We hit it off right away. I wound up staying in Cali a few extra weeks and he and I spent countless hours together surfing and walking the beach. It was an amazing summer. I usually go to New Zealand in the summer because it’s winter there and I get to snowboard about nine months out of the year if I do that. I didn’t go that summer. I spent a lot of time in the indoor training facility in Park City and traveling to L.A. when he wasn’t traveling here.” She laid her head back on the couch and rolled to the right to face Cason. “At the end of the summer he asked me to marry him. I said yes. Then, the snow fell and that’s when things changed.” She watched the snow falling silently outside the French doors. “Kevin hated the cold weather and despised the snow.”

“That’s a little crazy.” Cason said.

“Yeah no kidding. He barely saw me the entire winter. In fact, he didn’t go to any of my competitions. The only time we saw each other was if I went to see him. He always blamed it on his work schedule because he traveled so much.” She shook her head. “I look back on it now and see all the signs that I overlooked.”

“It’s easy to get blinded by love.”

“We got married as soon as spring rolled into summer. He kept his house in L.A. and I kept this place. We commuted for two years stealing time when we could. I think he’s been to maybe two or three of my competitions, not including this past X Games appearance. In the summer he came up to see me for a little bit before I went to New Zealand, but he barely came here at all in the winter and most of the time it was me going to see him.” She faced Cason again. “I wonder how long it had been going on and how many there actually were. He swore this was the first and only time, but I don’t believe it. He’s had basically three years to do whatever with whomever without me knowing.”

“How did you find out?” Cason asked.

Adler bit her bottom lip and shook her head. “I called to see if he was coming to Winter X and a girl answered his cell phone. He was apparently in the shower. I heard him in the background telling her to get back in there to suck his hard dick.”

“Oh god,”

“Yeah, I wanted to kill him. I threw my phone out the window going down the road.”

“So that’s why you were phoneless.”

“Uh huh,” Adler looked back at the snow. “It was also the same day I came into the hospital.”

“Your concussion?”

“I know better than to ride pipe if I’m not focused. That’s how people get killed. I made a stupid decision and let anger cloud my judgment.”

“You took your second run at X Games pretty upset too. I saw you.”

Adler turned back towards her. “I know. I saw you too.” She looked in her eyes. “I took my run because I knew you were there to take care of me if something happened. I know it was stupid, but as mad as I was I just put all of that energy into the run. I didn’t want him to see how he affected me. I wasn’t going to let him take my gold. Seeing you somehow gave me confidence.”

Cason held her breath. She wasn’t expecting that. “I’m glad I didn’t have to use my life saving skills that night. I wanted to punch him out and go after you, but I knew you were going to ride anyway. You have no fear Adler and sometimes that can be so dangerous. I trusted you knew what you were doing, so I went back to my post and watched you throw down the run of your life.” She smiled. “Don’t scare me like that again.” She teased.

“You know, at first I thought maybe that was why he didn’t go to my competitions because it scared him watching me put my life on the line time and time again. Then, I realized he just wasn’t interested and hated the winter and everything about it, everything that I loved.”

“People always say everything happens for a reason, sometimes it just takes a while to figure that reason out.” Cason stood and stretched her back. “I should probably get going before it gets too bad out there.”

Seventeen

Cason started her shift without checking the rest of the schedule, something she never did. She always wanted to know who was scheduled to work with her in case she did get that one traumatic emergency. It seemed to always make things go a lot smoother. Of course, she’d only had two trauma situations the entire five weeks she had been there. Still, it didn’t hurt to remain prepared. She only had three more weeks to go and she wished she could add another two months to that. She really enjoyed spending time with Adler. If someone told her she was going to become friends with Adler Troy, the famous snowboarder, she would’ve told them to go pound snow. She wasn’t sure when she would see her again. They didn’t make any definite plans and Adler was traveling soon with the Dew Tour and other competitions.

“Hey doc,” Serena said from the other side of the small doctor’s lounge. “It looks like we’re working together again.” Cason slammed her locker closed and mentally chided herself for not looking at the schedule board.

“Is that so? I hadn’t noticed.” She said with as much cordiality as she could muster.

“You haven’t noticed much of anything lately. I think that snowboarder has your head in the clouds.” Serena sneered.

“My personal life really isn’t any of your business Serena.” Cason said as she tried to walk past the shorter woman, but Serena stepped directly into her path.

“You’re fucking her aren’t you?” She snarled.

Cason gritted her teeth and balled her hands into fists to keep from shoving the dumb bimbo out of her way. “Move out of my way Serena before I cause a very big scene.” She watched Serena put her hands up in defeat and step to the side.