Shredded (26 page)

Not that I planned to stick around that long. A week is pretty much more commitment
than I’ve ever given a girl, any girl, so thinking about more—even if it is with Ophelia—seems crazy. And yet, as I look out at all those lights down below me, lights that feel so incredibly far away even though they really aren’t, I can’t help wishing she was here. Whether I deserve her or not.

Midnight rolls around. One o’clock in the morning. Two o’clock. Three o’clock, and still I sit out here staring into the darkness. Finally I say to hell with it. I’m going to go crazy if I just stay here for the rest of the night. I need to do something—anything—to distract me. Even if there’s nothing I
want
to do.

I walk down to the garage, think about taking out the Range Rover or my Harley, just going for a fast ride to nowhere over the newly salted streets. But that doesn’t appeal, either, so I pull my jacket closed, grab a scarf and a pair of gloves, and set off on foot, straight up the steepest mountain trail I can find.

It’s still dark out, dawn not even a thought on the horizon. It doesn’t take long for the glow of my yard lights to fade and then I’m hiking in the black, with nothing but the stars and my knowledge of the terrain to guide me. Which is fine. I’ve been up this trail hundreds, thousands of times in the last few years, mostly at night. One more time won’t kill me, even if I wish it would. But I’m a long way from hypothermia despite freezing my ass off.

The wind is fierce tonight and it’s ripping right through my clothes like they’re not even there. I don’t feel it so much when I’m shredding the mountain in my gear, but my jeans and this jacket are a long way from cutting it. I should turn around, but I know that if I go back into that house right now, I’ll lose my shit completely. Already the need to trash something is a razor blade inside me.

But not there. Not in front of Luc or Ash or Cam, all of whom are sacked out in the family room after our late-night planning session with Mitch. A planning session I wanted no part of but was somehow suckered into attending anyway. Between him and Ash, there are a million new plans being hatched for me, none of which I have any interest in whatsoever. Plans that include new, bigger sponsorships for me and the others, which is the only reason I don’t say no outright. I’m the only one of the group not living on my snowboarding sponsorships and endorsements. The only one with a big fat family fortune (courtesy of the tech industry) and a couple of trust funds (courtesy of my mom’s death and my dad’s determination not to have anything to do with me) to fall back on. And since bigger endorsements for me means bigger endorsements for them—from the beginning we’ve always made it clear that we’re a team—it’s almost impossible for me to say what I want to say. Which is not just no, but fuck no.

But again, I can’t say that. I can’t do that. Can’t do anything that I want to right now, not when my friends believe that things are finally getting better, that
I’m
finally getting better. I know what they’re thinking, know they’re figuring that hell week—the one week a year where I
totally lose my shit—is just about over and it’s time for me to get back to normal.

These days I know what they’re thinking as well as they do, and I’ve spent the last few years trying to live up to their expectations of me because it’s easier. And because it works, makes me look like I’m not so fucking broken.

Lately, though, I feel like living down to their fears instead. Everything would be so much easier. Because the truth is, I’m not getting any better. I’m just getting good at hiding how fucked up I am, for whatever that’s worth. Or at least I was. Funny how Ophelia, who’s only known me a week, seems to see me more clearly than my closest friends do. She sees right through the act I’ve spent years perfecting.

Because that thought gets me by the throat, I try to pretend it away. Or, if I can’t actually make it disappear, at least ignore it.

The trail I’m on narrows suddenly, and still I hike up it a few hundred more feet, taking a path only a mountain goat could easily follow. I slip and slide a few times as my boots lose traction, knock my shoulder hard against a tree, bang a knee on some large rocks. But the pain does it for me—it always has—and I work through it. Press on.

By the time I get to a decent-sized plateau I’m huffing and puffing, and I pause for a minute to catch my breath. As I do, a strong gale comes tearing across the terrain, rattling branches and bending some of the younger trees nearly to the ground. I brace for it, head down, shoulders hunched, feet firmly grounded, and still it almost levels me.

I fight to stay on my feet—I hate getting knocked around by anything but my own stupidity—and keep climbing when I succeed.

I don’t know where I’m going. Don’t know where I am or even where I’ve been. I know only that I don’t want to be who I am,
what
I am, one second longer.

I veer off the trail I know—it’s too easy, gives me too much time to think—and start climbing a sheer rock wall that is almost completely vertical. It’s a stupid move—there aren’t a lot of handholds and the ones I do find are slippery with ice and snow—but I don’t give a shit.

I slip a few times on my way up, end up clinging to the cliff with nothing but my fingertips and my will more times than I can count. This was a stupid idea, and for a second, just a second, I think about going back down. But I’m at that weird spot where I’m a little more than halfway up and it’s easier and safer now to keep climbing instead of turning back.

So that’s what I do, one perilous handhold at a time. I climb and climb and climb.

I’m only a few feet from the top, balanced precariously on a narrow shelf, when disaster strikes. I’m standing on my toes, pulling myself up with my left hand as I search for a place to put my right, when the chunk of ice I’m holding on to breaks off and crashes to the ground. I start to fall, and somehow—I don’t know how—I manage to find a handhold for my right hand.

But I’ve slipped down a few feet, and no matter how hard I try to find purchase for my
boots, there isn’t anything. Just a sheer, slick wall of ice covering the mountain and making it impossible for my feet to do anything but slip and slide across it.

Which means I’ve got nothing to stand on.

Which means the only thing standing between me and a thirty-foot drop to the hard, bumpy plateau below is the precarious grip my half-frozen fingers have on one icy rock.

The thought doesn’t scare me nearly as much as it should.

Still, the human body’s fight for self-preservation isn’t easily ignored. My heart is beating like the drums in a rock-and-roll anthem, adrenaline racing through my system. The whole fight-or-flight thing is totally kicking in, only I’ve got no one to fight and nowhere to run. I spend a few desperate seconds searching for another hold for my left hand—something, anything I can grab on to. But even as I’m doing it, even as I’m frantically looking for a way to stay alive, it occurs to me how easy things would be if I don’t find one.

How easy they would be if I just stop fighting.

I’m tired. I’m so goddamn tired of fighting. And I don’t have to be. I could just stop right here. Right now.

I’ve told myself a million times that if I could just curl up and die, I would. I’ve held my father’s gun to my head, boarded down the most dangerous slopes I could find, driven way too fast down deserted roads on the ice in my SUV or on my bike. I’ve spent years playing Russian roulette with my life, doing the stupidest shit imaginable in an effort to just wipe myself out without actually committing suicide. Without taking the selfish way out.

So maybe this is it. Maybe all that shit has finally caught up to me and this is my moment. The one fucking situation I just can’t escape from.

It seems so easy, so perfect.

Especially since I don’t really have to
do
anything. I could just hang here a little while, let gravity do its thing. Nobody would know. Nobody but me, and I’m sure as shit not telling anyone.

My hand slips a little more, and I let it. I take a deep breath, close my eyes, will myself to just let go.

But Ophelia’s face flashes in front of my eyes, and my fingers refuse to budge. And I can’t make them. Can’t will them to no matter how much I want to. Suicide is a coward’s way out, and that’s one thing—maybe the only thing—I’m not. I’m an asshole, a loser, a careless, reckless freak who doesn’t give two shits about himself or anyone else, but I am
not
a coward.

Besides, killing myself is way too easy, and if there’s one thing I don’t deserve, it’s to get off easy. Not when April never had that option.

An image of her—of my sweet, adorable little sister in her powder-pink dress and tap shoes—dances in front of my eyes, so real that I swear I could touch it. But it’s just a mirage,
just a hope that will never be realized, and I shove it down deep inside me, where it can fester some more.

My fingers are cramping up, and I know that in a minute, two at the outside, the choice is going to be out of my hands. Literally.

Fuck it. I reach out my left hand, skim it quickly over the rocks. I finally find a little indention about two feet above my head. It’s not much, but it’s slanted down and I can get fairly decent purchase with three of my fingers. So that’s what I do as I bend my knees and pull my feet up a few inches to try and find a place to rest them, too.

I encounter a tiny shelf a few inches to my right, put my foot on it, and push up as hard as I can. Then I reach up, find another handhold, and pull. Hands, feet. Hands, feet.

I do this three more times before I get to the top of the cliff. I pull myself over and collapse on the snow-covered ground. I turn my head, draw deep breaths into my lungs as the adrenaline finally stops rocketing through my veins, then roll over and stare up at the sky.

I start to laugh, deep, painful bellows—out of relief or agony or pure, unadulterated hysteria—I don’t know. But once I start, I can’t stop.

I don’t know how long I lie there staring up at the night sky, laughing my fucking ass off.

Long enough for the cold wet of the snow to seep through my jeans and sink into my bones.

Long enough for the stars to slowly fade away as the red and violet tendrils of dawn streak slowly across the sky.

More than long enough for thoughts of Ophelia to sneak back into my consciousness. An image of her, empty coffee cup in hand and green eyes sparking with triumph, flashes through my mind, and I stop laughing. Start wondering.

What’s she doing right now?

What’s she thinking about?

Then I snort at my own stupidity. It’s barely four-thirty in the morning. She’s sleeping, tucked up nice and snug and cozy in her bed. Another image works its way into my brain, this one of Ophelia in a sexy little nightie curled up under the covers. Or, better yet, sprawled across the bed, legs open and nightgown creeping up her thighs so I can see … everything.

Her blond hair spread out across the pillow.

Her creamy skin flushed pink with heat.

Her perfect tits straining against the tight lace of her gown while her pu—

Lust slams into me with all the finesse of a snowplow at high speed. In an instant I’m rock hard and ready, hands shaking with the force of the need ripping through me.

What the fuck?

I’m half frozen and minutes out of one of the deadliest situations I’ve ever been in, and
still I want this girl so badly that I can barely breathe with it. I’ve had her—over and over and over again, I’ve had her—and still I’m tied up in knots because of her. Still I’m jonesing for more. There are a thousand girls out there I can tap with no more than a smile. What is it about Ophelia that makes me want her so bad?

Correction—what makes me want to fuck her so bad? Wanting
her
 … that’s a whole different story, and one I refuse to have any part of. Not when it’s so easy for her to kick me out of her life.

A wolf howls in the distance, a long, sad, lonely sound that chills me in a way the frozen ground never could. I sit up, slowly push my shivering body to its feet, and begin to walk. With dawn slowly rising around me, it’s easy to see where the new trail—and climb—have taken me. I’m on Lost Canyon property, less than a mile from the first ski lift and the employee lodge.

I wonder if Ophelia really is sleeping or if she’s wide awake, too.

Once the thought enters my head, I can’t shake it. And even though I deliberately turn in the other direction, I find myself circling back round toward the lodge. Back toward her. It’s like there’s a string around my waist, one that draws me to her even when I want to be anywhere else.

I start to fight it, to turn around and go somewhere else, but in the end I’m standing in the hallway outside her door—someone must have left the outside door propped open for a midnight booty call who never showed—telling myself to walk away. To just walk away.

I don’t know how long I stand there, thinking, waiting, trying to figure out the right thing to do. Walk away or knock. Knock or walk away.

And in the end I do exactly what I always knew I would do, exactly what I have to do to stay sane.

I turn and walk away.

Chapter 20

Ophelia

It’s a little after four-thirty in the morning when I finish folding the last of my laundry and start the long trek back up to my room with my laundry basket in front of my face. This is the perfect time to wash clothes—everyone’s asleep and I had all the machines to myself—but at the same time, it’s going to be a long day. The two hours of sleep I managed to grab aren’t going to do me much good come afternoon rush at the coffee bar.

I’m on the stairs, on the landing halfway between the second floor and the third, laundry basket in front of my face, when I bump into a solid wall of … something. For a second I freak out as images of Harvey flip through my head at lightning speed. But before I can do more than register my fear, two strong,
cold
hands reach out and grab my shoulders to steady me. And though I still can’t see who it is, I can tell from the way he’s touching me that it’s Z in front of me.