“Who did Hank find to teach you?” The mountain had dozens of ski instructors on staff.
Callie pointed one index finger at Hank and another one at Bear.
“What?” Stella gasped. “You know they haven’t worn skis in fifteen years, right? That, and they’re terrible teachers.”
Hank clutched his heart in mock distress. “Little girl, we taught you everything you know.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Stella said, trying to flag down a passing waitress, but the poor overworked soul did not spot her. “See, all those times you said, ‘just jump off of it, Stella. Don’t be a baby,’ did not actually teach me much about technique. It only taught me that bruises heal, and I’d better grow up quick and kick both your asses.”
Hank and Bear both burst out laughing, and again, Stella marveled. She hadn’t heard unrestrained glee from her brother in far too long. And the fact that everyone was smiling made it just a little easier to be near Bear today.
Stella smiled back at them, feeling lighter than she had in a long time. Outside the window, snow was still falling in pretty, little flakes. If she could only get a drink, this afternoon would be perfect. “I’m going to go over to the bar. Anyone need anything?” She slid off her stool.
“I’ll come with you,” Bear said.
Stella maneuvered through the crowd, parking herself at the only available corner of the bar. Seconds later, she felt Bear slide in behind her, grazing the backs of her legs with his own. He was so close that she could feel the heat of his body at her back.
“What do you think?” he whispered.
Who could think at all with him so close? Stella took a steadying breath, and fingered the twenty dollar bill in her hand. “I can’t believe how happy he looks,” she said.
“I know, right? Listening to them making plans today… It sounds like the real deal.”
“Basically,” Stella taunted him, “you’ve spent months trying to cheer him up. And all he needed was a little nookie.”
Bear laughed, and his nearness meant she could feel the rumble in her chest. God. What she wouldn’t give to feel the scruff of his beard again as he kissed her neck…
Enough, she coached herself. You’re only making yourself crazy.
“You know it hurts me to agree with you about anything, but it seems that a little lovin’ has made Hank into a brand new man,” Bear said.
She tipped her chin back, catching an oblique view of his face. “Shame it didn’t work on you, though.”
His eyes went wide. “Stella.”
“What — I can’t even make a little joke?” The bartender materialized in front of her, and she had to turn her attention to him. “I’d like a Heady Topper, and whatever this guy wants.” She jerked her thumb toward Bear, who ordered a beer and two sodas.
Bear cleared his throat. “You’ll never guess what Hank told me this morning.”
“What?”
“He wants to do my movie.”
Stella was so surprised she spun around to see him properly. “Seriously?”
Bear swallowed — something Stella noticed because they were full frontal now. Stella’s girlie parts quivered from the proximity. “That’s what he said.” Bear’s voice was gruff.
Stella reached up to put a hand on his chest. “That’s great. Does that mean you get to call OverSight and tell them to cut you a check?”
Bear didn’t answer right away. He seemed distracted, his eyes flicking down to where her hand rested on his shirt. “Probably,” he whispered. They stared at each other for a long second. The nearness of Bear’s mouth was making Stella’s brain short circuit. Finally, Bear’s gaze lifted, catching on something over Stella’s shoulder. “The drinks are ready.”
Right.
Stella turned around and plucked two glasses off the bar. Bear reached around her to grab the other two. For one glorious second, he was wrapped around her, the way she’d always wanted.
Then he put his credit card down on the bar, lifted the glasses, and disappeared into the crowd.
Stella stood there a moment longer, gathering her wits. She was just going to have to get better at covering up her reactions to him. She closed her hands around the two drinks she was meant to carry, and steered herself back to their table.
When she sat back down, Stella gave Callie a smile. She tried to make it a friendly one. But it may have also implied, if you break my brother’s heart, I will kill you in your sleep.
“So, back to this movie…” her brother said.
Bear grinned over the rim of his glass. “For two months I can’t get you to talk about it. Now it’s your only topic.”
“Wait, you’re complaining?” Hank winked at his new girlfriend.
“No.” Bear’s eyes were dancing. Stella couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him so happy, either. There must be something in the water.
“Did OverSight fund you yet?”
“Not quite.” Bear picked up his drink. “Honestly, I’d use somebody else if I could. I got pissed at them last week.”
“Why?”
Bear’s expression darkened. “They wanted me to pressure you into signing on.”
Hank’s eyebrows shot up. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“No kidding. It was a D.M. on their part. And sharing that with you about it would be a D.M. on my part.”
“What’s a D.M.?” Callie broke in.
Hank, Bear and Stella answered in unison. “A dick move.”
Callie laughed. “I can’t always follow the smack talk. I didn’t grow up in Vermont.”
“I don’t think it’s a Vermont thing,” Stella explained. “It’s a big brother thing. Did you have one?”
“I’m an only child.”
“Ah.” What a pity. Even when he was infuriating, Stella would never wish Hank away. A life as Hank’s little sister wasn’t easy, but it was still great. Even if it meant a lifetime of pining for his hunky best friend.
“I’m tempted to shop the film around to other sponsors,” Bear was saying. “But I’ve run out of time.”
“And it’s not like OverSight is perfect or anything,” Stella said, focusing her attention on the conversation once again. “A camera company funding a film…”
Hank reached up to give Stella’s ponytail a tug. It was a move he’d perfected at about age seven. “It’s just the usual sponsor bullshit, Bear. Go on. Take the money.”
“Are you sure, man? I’m offended for both of us.”
Hank chuckled. “Take the money and run. Do I need to sing the Steve Miller Band song? People will point and stare.”
Bear held up a hand. “Not necessary.”
Hank started humming anyway, and Stella decided he was only moments away from breaking out the air guitar.
“Are you really sure, Hank?” Bear asked suddenly. “Now I feel like I pushed you into it.”
Hank broke off from humming and looked at each of them in turn. “I think I can do it. See…” He broke off for a second, looking thoughtful. “It might suck to be out there shooting stuff that I can no longer do. But the alternative is to sit at home and mope. And I already proved that it isn’t any way to live.”
Bear’s gaze shifted into his beer.
“Besides,” Hank said roughly, “if this winter is just fucking awful for me, at least I’ll get to be near you guys.”
Stella’s throat felt rough then. She grabbed Hank’s hand and squeezed it. Callie put a hand on his other arm. And Bear gave Hank a sad grin.
Outside the window, snow continued to fall. Winter was coming whether the people at this table were ready for it or not.
Stella chanced a glance at Bear, wondering how it would all play out. Were they really going to work on a film together? And pretend like nothing had happened last year? Could she do that?
She’d have to. Because she would always feel stuck on him. That was just a fact she’d have to live with. T samehe way some people lived with partial deafness, or bunions.
&n
bsp; If only there was an orthotic which corrected for yearning.
It was quite possible that Stella was better off this way — loving someone who did not love her back. It saved her the heartache of wading deep into a relationship, only to find out later that her partner needed her to be something she couldn’t become.
Stella took another sip of her beer and tried to wrap the day’s victories around herself like a blanket against the cold.
March
Seventeen
BEAR PUSHED “PLAY” ON another video file, and felt his friends lean in behind him. The screen dissolved to a shot of Duku standing on top of an abandoned train station outside of Ketchum, Idaho. The on-screen Duku clipped into his board, while, behind Bear, the real-life Duku flicked the catch on his cigarette lighter.
“No smoking in here,” Bear said automatically.
“You’re killing me,” the snowboarder groused over his shoulder.
“The cigarettes are killing you,” Stella argued from against the wall. “And the rest of us, too.”
“I’ll kill you both if you don’t stop arguing,” Hank countered from Bear’s other side.
They’d spent a whole lot of time in tight quarters lately, and the strain was beginning to show.
But the crazy shots they’d gotten earlier would keep everyone on the right side of agreeable. Viewing video in a skeevy little room in the basement of their cheap hotel had become a nightly ritual. Before dinner, Bear, Hank and whichever snowboarders they’d corralled into appearing in the film would review the day’s raw footage together.
On the screen in front of them, the digital Duku balanced his snowboard on top of a brick chimney. The five feet of snow Idaho had just received had made a ramp of snow down the chimney and onto the roof. With a hop, Duku launched himself into action. The board skidded across the flat portion of the roof, then down the pitched roof line. Bear had composed the shot in a way which made the viewer uncertain about just how far Duku would fall from the rooftop. But then his board landed on another angled pitch, and he leaped across a yawning gap to another roof.
“Sick,” Hank whispered.
The shot did not end until after Duku skated over a shed and down a ramp of piled-up snow to the parking lot below.
“Wait. Back that one up,” Hank insisted. “To the jump.” When Bear complied, Hank pointed at the screen. “Check it out. Duku, did you lose your hat between the buildings?”
Bear backed up, and they all saw that Hank was right. “Good eye, Hazardous. He’s wearing it here… and then it’s gone. It must have landed there. Right about where my corpse would be found if I attempted that run.”
Stella laughed but Duku swore. “I always liked that hat. I shoplifted it from a snooty store in Aspen when I was a teenager.”
“See? Karma is real,” Stella teased.
“Yeah?” Duku muttered. “Then the hat is the least of my troubles.”
Bear rolled his head, trying to stretch out his neck. It had been an incredibly long day, and it wasn’t over yet. “Okay. Let’s review Stella’s footage.”
“I can’t wait to see this,” Duku said. “It’s going to be awesome.”
Bear only grunted. This shot had better be spectacular. Because getting it had taken a year off his life.
“I’ll ride switch through that chute,” Stella had proposed that afternoon as they were setting up the shot, “to hook an aerial off that rock.”
“Which rock?” Bear had asked. All he’d seen was a fifteen-foot cliff.
“Um, that one right in front of your face?”
Bear had shaken his head immediately. “How are you going to spot the landing?”
“With my eyes?” she’d returned, her tone full of sass. “I’ve ridden this face before, Bear. Two years ago, the Iron Ore Invitational was right on this spot.”
But two years ago the surface of the snow would have been completely different, and they both knew it. “Did you back-flip it in competition?”
“No,” Stella scoffed. “But what difference does it make? You just set up a shot where Duku jumped off a building.”
Fuck me, I did, Bear had growled to himself. But Duku was a rangy, surly-faced trickster. That dude couldn’t even make it through the day without risking his life in some way or another. Whereas Stella was… Stella. He’d brought her out to Idaho to make great footage. The trouble was that great footage meant risk-taking. And watching Stella fling herself upside-down over a cliff would probably shatter him.
Bear had lost the argument, though, when Stella had promised to take it easy on her first run down the face. “I’ll just feel it out,” she’d promised.
Apparently, “feeling it out” meant she’d rip the flip anyway, without warning, and then take the rest of the run at nearly supersonic speed. She’d kicked up a small avalanche, too, and Bear had nearly turned blue from holding his breath until she’d popped out of the moving powder, still making turns on her board.
When she’d finally come to a stop in front of him, he hadn’t known whether to hug her or strangle her. (He’d settled for yelling, and she hadn’t appreciated it.)
Now, in the tight confines of their pre-dinner replay session, Bear muted the volume on his laptop. He didn’t want the others to hear the string of curses he’d sputtered when Stella practically stopped his heart from beating.
He pressed “play,” and the onscreen Stella dropped onto the steep slope, her ponytail flying out from behind her helmet. Much of the Sun Valley resort was above the tree line, giving the shot a dramatic, surface-of-the-moon effect. Watching Stella rip down those steeps was a breathtaking thing.
This week he’d spent hours peering at her through the lens of his cameras. On the one hand, it made staring at her completely legal. Yet it had also torn him apart, little by little. He felt battered by the strain of being so close to her. It was torture.
“Shiiiiiit!” Duku exclaimed when Stella flipped off the cliff.
Bear only sighed.
“I think you’re going to like the angle I got on the drone cam,” Hank said. It turned out Hank was good at flying OverSight’s toy. The shots he took gave Bear a choice of takes when editing film.
“Cool,” Bear mumbled. “We’ll watch that one next.”
Hank had enjoyed himself today. Hazardous had traveled to every shoot for the film except for one. The fact that Hank liked camera work made Bear’s job easier.
Not much else did.
It was exhausting to be both producer and director. Every detail was his to arrange — their travel plans, their schedule, the local people they hired to help get permission for their shoots. It was all on him. And he was afraid to delegate the work because the budget was excruciatingly tight. No one else cared as much about saving every last dollar, so nobody else could be put in charge of the details.
Bear cued up Hank’s shot of Stella and played it through. “Nice shot, Hank,” he complimented his friend. He cleared his throat. “All that terrain behind her is striking.” Every time he spoke about Stella, he felt utterly transparent. It seemed impossible to conceal how she made him feel.
“I know, right?” Hank chuckled easily. “Can we eat now? I’m dying.”
“Good plan,” Stella said, standing. “I don’t need to watch any more. I saw it earlier in the flesh.”
In the flesh. Bear felt a little prickle of awareness on the back of his neck as she stood up behind him.
Hank reversed his wheelchair and steered himself around to face the door. “Coming, Bear?”
“Um, I’m going to try on a couple of edits for a few minutes,” he said. “Order me a burger or something?”
“Sure,” Duku agreed, following the others out. “But don’t forget to come upstairs to eat it.”
Alone, Bear watched the footage from Stella’s helmet cam. The run she’d chosen was so steep her on-board camera gave the illusion she’d been standing on the edge of the world. He made a couple of splices, sewing Hank’s shots together with Stella’s and hi
s own. He replayed this new cut, sitting back in his seat to watch. Moments like this, he could feel the intersection between sport and art. He was watching Stella do something incredibly athletic, but the arc of her body leaning hard toward the surface of the snow was also graceful and gorgeous.
Whether it was right or wrong, when he watched Stella’s footage, it was with a lover’s eyes.
Until last week, he hadn’t seen much of her. Back in Vermont, she’d worked her butt off until just after New Year’s, slinging beers at Travis Rupert’s bar and saving up her money. Then, she’d bought a ticket to a big mountain competition in the Swiss Alps and told her parents she would hitchhike across Europe if she had to in order to make her way around the competition circuit.
They relented and funded her trip. Stella won two out of the three events she’d entered. She’d even picked up a couple of modest sponsorships, which made her almost self-sufficient on the road. “At least in a shoe-string budget sort of way,” was how she’d put it to him.
Bear was intimately familiar with shoe-string budgets. And getting more so every day. He and Hank had worked hard on the film all winter. Bear had conned nearly a dozen of their old tour pals into riding in his film. They’d done shoots in Colorado in January and in Utah in February. Those shoots had featured freestyle tricksters, so Stella hadn’t been involved.
Bear had saved the big mountain shots for last because he knew they’d require the most difficult camera work. He wanted as much experience as possible before he had to drag his video equipment to a remote peak.
But he hadn’t factored in his own exhaustion. Now, at the moment when he felt utterly stressed-out and emotionally depleted, Stella had waltzed back into his life. Unlike Bear, she looked livelier than ever. Her smoky laugh drifted into every room he entered. More than once he’d broken out in a sweat when she stood nearby.
He found himself avoiding her eyes when he was laying out the day’s schedule or giving her instructions. Stella was a sharp girl, and she’d be able to read his discomfort.
For all these reasons, Bear sat alone while he edited the footage.