Kiss Her Once for Me (74)

“Everyone falls their first time,” she says. “Hell, I’ll fall at least once today, and I’ve been skiing my whole life.”

“Why would anyone want to do something you’re guaranteed to fail at it?”

“I said fall, not fail. It is literally impossible to fail at skiing.”

“Unless you die,” I say.

“Unless you don’t try.”

“Wow. Always a living, breathing motivational poster.”

Her smile widens, only for a second, before she remembers she’s furious with me and tamps it down. Then, she sighs, clearly distressed by the sight of me holding onto these ski poles. “I’m going to have to actually help you, aren’t I?”

I do another arm-windmill, banana-peel, double-axis thing on my skis.

“I hate you right now,” she says, but then she’s at my side, showing me what to do, one hand on my lower back. “Like this. And then you’ll push like this.”

Everything is feeling dangerous again.

“I’m expected to move my legs and arms at the same time?”

Jack laughs her terrible, adorable, involuntary laugh. “Yes, it’s a full-body experience.”

I adjust my goggles over my glasses. “Okay. What now? Do we go to the chairlift?”

“No. You gotta crawl before you can walk.”

I do not expect her to mean this quite so literally, but I do, in fact, spend a considerable amount of time crawling in my skis over the course of the next two hours. Jack leads us to a clearing with a small hill where children are all learning how to move in their skis for the first time. Children and me.

Jack is, infuriatingly, an incredible teacher, even if she does hate me right now. Even if after today, we have to stop spending time together. She takes a solid thirty minutes just to help me move my skis and the poles at the same time, then another hour teaching me how to stop, how to turn, how to fall gracefully when falling is the only option. When we’re ready for actual skiing, we still don’t make our way to a chairlift, but to a leisurely trail with a steady decline called the West Leg Road.

Leisurely or not, I still find myself mildly horrified as we stand on the edge of a small downward slope. Sure, there are preteens here, eagerly taking off on their snowboards. Parents are helping their toddlers. And then there’s me, twenty-five and terrified, because I’m just supposed to trust gravity?

I might fly. I might fall. And I have no idea how to protect myself from failing, from having my heart splattered everywhere. Or my body splattered against the trunk of a tree. Beside the trailhead is a sign that reads, “Always Be in Control.”

“I can’t do this.”

“There’s only one way down,” she says. Surely that isn’t true. There must be a secret way off the mountain, an escape hatch for cowards. I can just take my skis and hightail it back to the car. “And honestly, this is more… across than down. We’ve got this,” Jack insists.

We. For at least one more day, we’re a we. “And I’ll be beside you the whole time, whether I want to be or not.”

I take a deep breath. Fly or fall.

“Should we go on the count of three? One… two…”

I push off on my poles at two, and let momentum pull me forward as my skis tilt onto the modest slope. And I’m flying, albeit at a rather leisurely speed. I barely have to move my legs—the mountain moves me, and wind and cold carry me as I glide along past everything. Past trees, past children, past Jack, even. The world somehow blurs and becomes more sharply focused at the same time, and this is new.

This is everything. I hunch lower, using my poles to move faster, to let my body exist in this new way. It protests slightly, unaccustomed to actual movement, but even as my muscles ache, my body also sings. I’ve been frozen for so long, and I feel like I’m climbing out of my icy confinements to rediscover the world isn’t as terrible as I remembered.

I turn my head to the left and see Jack there, where she said she’d be, right beside me. Looking at me, too. And I wonder how much longer I have to look at her.

It’s while I’m looking at her that I miss a small mound of densely packed snow. I hit it just right, and my right ski flies up and my left ski flies sideways, and if I am not mistaken, I think I do the splits midair before I fall firmly on my ass and roll several times before I come to a stop in the middle of the trail.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I hear Jack shout as she comes to a controlled stop beside me. She drops to her knees and rips her goggles off. “Are you okay? Elle, say something!”

I explode with laughter.

“Shit.” Jack shifts her weight so she’s no longer leaning over me like she’s about to administer CPR. “I thought you snapped your spinal cord or something.”

“I thought you said you were going to enjoy watching me fall?”

“Oh, fuck you.” But she’s smiling. And I’m smiling. I just skied for the first time. “Can you get up?”

I nod, but my sore ass begs to differ. Jack reaches out to grab my hand. In one effortless maneuver, she hoists me off the ground. It’s not at all sexy. The laughter doesn’t get caught in my throat or at this display of strength.

“Want to keep going?” she asks.

I absolutely do. If this is the last day I get to spend with Jack, I want to spend it flying down a mountain beside her.