Enjoy the Ride (Winter Games Book 3) Page 11

  She scoffed. “Totally not the same deal, Chance. Frost can be a bigger ass than all of you combined, of course you get frustrated with him. If I didn’t know any better, he was probably goading you on purpose.”

  She had a point there.

  “Look, I’m not asking you to sign your life away here to our school. I’m just saying that you are a fucking good snowboarder, Ryder, and I know that the last few months have been shit; I know you have no clue what getting back on the board is going to be like, but I think if you put one-tenth of the determination you had to win the X Games into this,” he tapped his fingers on the countertop, “I think that you could make a much larger impact here than you ever could with a medal around your neck.”

  My eyes narrowed on the both of them as they looked at me expectantly.

  Expectantly.

  Just like Frost, they should have known better than to have any expectations for me. Lately, the only thing I was good at was falling short on those.

  “Just say you’ll think about it.” Channing’s blue eyes met mine. She knew I’d been about to turn them down again. “We purchased the old Snowmass resort lodge—the one that’s a few miles further down the same road. The plans were approved by zoning while we were away, construction has started, and we’re hoping the renovations will be complete by summer so that we can start getting kids in right away. So, you have some time to think. Maybe get back on the mountain a little before the season ends.”

  My fist clenched at my side. On the mountain. I tried not to think about that phrase. My jaw twitching, I just nodded, no longer in the mood for an argument. I needed a smoke.

  “Thanks for the pizza.” I stood and they both did as well.

  “We’ll talk soon.” Wyatt stayed behind as Channing walked me to the door.

  “Chance…” I turned to face her. “You know I love you, right?”

  “Even when I’m being a stubborn asshole?” I couldn’t help my half-smile.

  She grinned. “Even then.”

  “Love you, too, Lil.” I pulled her in for another hug. No matter what shit was going on in my life, this would never change. “I’m happy for you.”

  Pulling back, she looked up at me and said, “And I want you to be happy for you. Chance, you and I know better than most that snowboarding is like life. Sometimes you fall and you fucking yard-sale out, but just because you lose everything, doesn’t mean you can’t get back up, get back on your board, and make it to the bottom of the mountain. Just because you fall doesn’t mean you can’t get back up and enjoy the ride.”

  “Goodnight, Lil.” I pulled her back in and kissed her forehead before letting myself out the door.

  For the first time since I’d come back, I began driving as though I were going to my house instead of Frost’s. About a mile out I realized and quickly pulled a U-Turn, driving away from one more reminder about who I no longer was—and what I no longer had. Including the pink-haired girl who’d given me her virginity in my bed in the basement.

  ‘Get back on the mountain.’

  My self-deprecating laugh was audible over the hum of the radio. Under the cover of night, in the solitude of my Cherokee, I acknowledged what really bothered me about their offer.

  I was afraid to find out what would happen if I got back on a snowboard.

  What if Olsen was wrong? What if I literally couldn’t fucking board at all anymore? What if it was all gone?

  They assumed that I would have skill enough to teach. I’d assumed that I’d be competing in the X Games. Assumptions fuck you big time.

  Hitting the button, I waited for the gate to open to Frost’s place, wondering just what kind of shit-show I’d be walking in on tonight. I pulled past the main house, noticing two cars parked out front that usually weren’t there, continuing slowly on over towards the guest house that I parked in front of.

  Silence.

  Strange. I shut off the engine. By now, I should hear either music or moaning, depending on just how far gone my good friend was. He’d wait until his daughter, Lila, was asleep before coming back here. He couldn’t stand to be in the main house when his mom and step-dad, Stone were there.

  Frost hated them but he couldn’t take Lila and leave. He was stuck here in purgatory as a condition of his parole. But that time was soon coming to an end and if I knew Frost, it was going to end with a bang. There was more going on between him and his parents than even I knew about, but he’d share the rest of the story when the time came. That was the blessing and the curse about Frost: full-disclosure wasn’t always required.

  It was only when I went to punch in the code that I heard yelling coming from the main house. I was tempted to stay and listen, but I’d had enough fucking drama for one day. I needed to relax.

  A few minutes later, I was naked in bed, a blunt in one hand, my dick in the other, and Jessa’s drenched pussy and perfect tits on my mind.

  I swear to God, if I caught her wearing underwear again, there would be hell to pay.

  The Hanged Man: You are feeling stuck or restricted in your life. You need to get in touch with why you are feeling this way and release yourself from those restrictions. In this way, the Hanged Man is about letting go in order to find an emotional release. You need to accept present circumstances, become more vulnerable, and give up your need for control. When you let go of these concerns, they will let go of you.

  “HEY, JESS. WHAT’S UP?” ALLY answered before I even heard a ring.

  “Wow. Hey. Sorry, I hit your name and you answered right away. So weird.” I shook my head, hopping into my truck. Wincing as I sat down. I’d just done legs—and they were already sore. Not a good sign. “I wanted to talk to you about what you said the other weekend.”

  “About Chance?” The warming lamp inside my body turned on.

  “No. About me maybe being about to stay at your house until I find a new place.” There was a loud crash and I heard Ally curse underneath her breath. “You ok?”

  “Yeah,” she whined—clearly only a minor injury. “I’m actually there now, if you just want to come over and chat.”

  “Sure. I’ll be there in fifteen.”

  I wasn’t expecting the offer, but I’d be glad to take her up on it especially after the afternoon I had with her brother—not that I was really planning on going into detail about that.

  Guiltily, I’d begun to dread going back to Tammy’s—not because of anything that she’d done, but because I was too much in my own head right now, swimming in the sea of asshole that I’d submersed myself in.

  Tammy was going through something and I didn’t know how to help her. I should be able to be there for her, talk to her, and try to ease some of her concern, but I couldn’t focus on anything but Chance.

  And even if I could, she wouldn’t want my help—that was what grated on me the most. For Tammy to ask for help would be more shocking than Atlas asking for a hand to help hold up the world. She alone was responsible for her world, no matter how many hands raised in assistance.

  My back tires sliding on the snow jarred me from my thoughts. They caught traction a second later and pulled me up Ally’s driveway.

  “Hello!” I yelled, knocking on the front door even as I opened it. My body shuddered as I walked into the hallway; it always did. One of the many reasons why we usually hung out elsewhere when it was girls’ night. For some reason, my body insisted on reminding me that this house was where I’d lost my virginity.

  And my heart.

  “In here!” Ally’s voice echoed from the kitchen.

  “Oh my God! Does Emmett know this is what you are here doing?” I exclaimed at the sight of her. The girl was standing on the countertop, pulling down appliances from the higher-up shelves.

  Her head jerked to me, eyes wide, “Don’t even think about telling him unless you want to be homeless,” she threatened.

  Crap.

  “What are you looking for?” If she wasn’t going to get down, I was at least going to spot her; Emmett would hav
e my head if something happened.

  “Appliances and kitchen utensils to take with me to Emmett’s. The man literally has nothing… and I refuse to let him buy stuff that I have.” She huffed, finally locking her fingers around a stack of mixing bowls and pulling them off the shelf, handing them to me. “So, what’s going on? Tammy finally kicking your messy butt out?”

  “No.” I sighed loudly. “But, I got the official notice from my landlord at work today saying that the building is going to be out of commission for the foreseeable future and that all residents will need to look for housing elsewhere.”

  It was the cherry on top of my already disaster dessert of a day.

  “Oh my God! Seriously?” She turned and crouched down, hopping back onto the floor. “I can’t believe you even moved in there. He better be giving you more than your deposit back.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. Doubtful. This is what happens when you’re living on student loans; you don’t have much of a choice.”

  My parents had offered to pay my living expenses until I got a job, but I wanted to do this on my own. Even in Texas, I’d refused to let them help me pay for anything while I was in school. I needed to be self-sufficient; I needed to be independent. I’d needed to know that I could stand on my own after leaving Chance had taken me to my knees.

  “Well, you are absolutely welcome to stay here. Both Channing and my rooms are open.” It went unsaid that so was Chance’s.

  “Thanks. I don’t have that much, so I’ll probably be able to get it all here by the end of the week. I don’t plan on staying long. It’s just been so crazy with the new job,” and your brother, “that I’ve been terrible at looking for a new place.”

  “Seriously, Jessa, don’t worry about it. Channing and Wyatt have their condo. Emmett would chain me to his bed if I even mentioned leaving. And Chance avoids this place like the plague. So, you are welcome to it,” she said with an oomph.

  “Thanks, Al.” I ran my hands through my hair that was wavy in all the wrong places from how I’d had it tied up on the top of my head all day. “Tammy hasn’t talked to you, has she?”

  “No. Why?” She spun to face me, concern etched on her face. “Is everything ok?”

  I let out a pained laugh. “That’s why I was asking you. I haven’t really talked to her. I mean, I’ve tried. But even when she’s there… she’s not. I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m not trying hard enough, like I should be doing something more—”

  “Jessa.” Ally’s stern voice stopped my train of thought. “You know her, even more than I do, so you know that she will take care of herself to the bitter end—only telling us what is absolutely necessary so that we don’t worry. It’s not your fault.”

  Our best friend’s need to always be self-sufficient, to never ask for help, was weighing on both of us.

  “I wish we could just make her tell us. I feel like it would be such a huge weight off of her shoulders.”

  “Well, we could threaten to mess up her apartment again.”

  “Yeah… think I’ve already got that covered and she isn’t breaking,” I laughed ruefully.

  Her arms crossed over her chest. “Why are you really feeling guilty?”

  Channing had once said—only partially in jest—that her sister sometimes had these moments where she just perceived more than most. Sometimes, Ally was like a human tarot card, giving a name or a face to a situation that was hard to decipher.

  “Do you have any wine here? I feel like I need wine.” Elbows on the counter, my head dropped into my hands. “Actually, forget that.” Spinning, I walked into the living room, reaching into the entertainment center behind the tuner and pulling out Chance’s bottle of Powers.

  I returned to the kitchen—and to Ally’s arched eyebrow. “Don’t judge me.”

  “Looking mighty guilty there, Jess.”

  “I am.” I groaned and took a sip right from the bottle. “I’m feeling guilty because I think I’ve been a terrible friend to her. She’s going through something and instead of pushing her to let me in, I’ve just recoiled into my own quickly-unraveling life.”

  “You mean because of Chance?” Damn her perception.

  “Asshole.” Another swig of the whiskey burned down my throat. “But that’s not the only reason.” I was crumbling before my very own eyes. “I’m afraid to talk to her because I’m afraid that she resents me for her reality and I don’t want to remind her of that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I stared a hole through the granite. Even all these years later, talking about it made the wound feel fresh.

  “The whole endometriosis diagnosis. And the fact that I was pregnant. And the fact that somehow Chance has worked his way back into my life.”

  “But you lost the baby,” she whispered softly. I could count on one hand the number of times those words had been said aloud.

  The same number of times a little piece inside of me died.

  “Still… I was still able to have one,” I confessed. “I will be able to have one.”

  The doctors couldn’t give me a good reason for why I lost my baby. They ran every test. They took blood from every extremity. I was whole and healthy. I could have told them though, a broken heart makes for a broken body.

  The stress of moving, of leaving Chance, of finding out a month into the Texas sunshine that I was pregnant… it all took a toll that couldn’t be measured.

  And that was my fear. That Tammy’s silence around us was my fault. That I was just the constant reminder of someone who almost had—and still could have—everything that she could only dream of.

  “Jessa,” Ally breathed my name and reached for my hand. “She would never resent you for that.” Even though her incredulous exhale emphasized how right she was, I was still terrified of hurting my best friend. “You know she would never do that. I think you’re the only one putting those thoughts out there. And why would she care about Chance?”

  Water of Life.

  That’s what the old Gaelic word for whiskey comes from. I’d only taken a few sips (I think) and I could feel that water seeping in and flushing out all the dark little secrets that I’d tried to turn to dust. I’d wanted a fresh start in a familiar place, but it looked like the familiarity only served to fuel my confessions.

  “Ally, there’s something that I have to tell you.”

  Was I crying?

  “Jessa,” I felt her hands on my shoulders, “what’s wrong? I’m sorry. Did I say something…” I shook my head frantically. “I know you don’t like to talk about it—I didn’t mean—“

  “It was his, Al. Chance was the father,” I blurted out.

  I saw the instant it registered as the color seeped from her face.

  When I’d moved back and started hanging out with Ally and Tam, we’d had one girls’ night where we got drunk and some secrets were revealed. Ally confessed about what happened with her ex-boyfriend, Dylan; Tammy spoke freely for the first time about her endometriosis and potential infertility. And I… I shared that I realized I was pregnant when I was in Texas only to, about a month later, lose the baby. Tammy already knew all of it; but she was the only one who knew that I’d gotten pregnant before I left for Texas, even though I didn’t know at the time of moving. She was also the only one who knew who the father had been.

  She’d been the first person to hear the words—‘I lost the baby’—out loud.

  That girls’ night, I’d left the part about Chance out. Ally was his sister—and already distraught that he had disappeared. There were too many layers that admission would have added to the conversation, layers that neither of us wanted to visit at that time.

  And not the cake kind of layers, not the good kind. More like onion layers—strong, potent, and sure to make you cry.

  But here we were, peeling onions.

  “I don’t understand,” she finally said softly.

  “The baby was Chance’s. I didn’t know when I moved and then after I did… after everything that ha
ppened… I was the last person he wanted to speak to.”

  “So… you never told him? He has no idea?”

  “I tried to… once. But I-I didn’t… get ahold of him.” Fact: I’d called him the second I realized. And in the next second, when some girl answered his phone with, ‘Chance is a little busy at the moment’ between moans and grunts, I realized what a mistake it had been.

  Not just because he hated me, but because I’d left for a reason. If loving me was enough to entice him to give up on his dream, I was afraid what a baby would do. Instead, I took a step back, thinking I would regroup—get the shock of being pregnant and starting college under control, give him some time to cool off, and then call him again.

  But then I lost her… or him.

  No baby. No Chance. Just Jessa.

  Ally squeezed me tightly and I came out of my memories to realize that she’d wrapped me in a hug—and that I was crying into her shoulder.

  This was not what I’d planned on happening when I came over here tonight.

  “I’m sorry, Ally. I should—“ Hiccup. “—have told you before.”

  Just take a deep breath, Jessa.

  “Everything about that time in my life was so painful. What happened between Chance and me—and the thought of telling you about it. Most days, I think it was the right thing to do. But sometimes, I-I really wonder if it was. Or if I just made everything worse.”

  “Jessa, I can’t begin to imagine everything about how you feel. I know what it’s like to lose someone, but not someone that was physically a part of me. I know that words probably can’t help, but I can’t not say anything.” She reached over to hand me a tissue, letting me wipe the mess off of my face. “I will tell you what a very strong woman told me a few months ago, sitting in front of a spread of Tarot cards: When people are hurting, they don’t think straight.”

  Those had been my words to her in reference to Emmett.

  “Whether that means then or now. Whether that means you or him. It is the truth.”

  “I know, Al.” My watery attempt at a smile was only marginally successful. “I’m sorry for keeping it from you, but he’s your brother, and with what happened between us… I didn’t want you to hate me, too.”