My legs shook when I stood, but I didn’t want to risk being around when Tyler woke up. Emotions boiled inside me like some botched chemistry experiment…fear, anger, embarrassment. Skye was right, I barely knew Tyler, and I had heard about these situations a million times, but he had seemed harmless in the glow of the fire. I wondered where Skye had come from that she could have heard me struggling and appeared so quickly. And then there was my mother. She’d be disappointed, and in utter disbelief that I hadn’t listened to anything she’d told me. She’d call Tyler’s parents, she’d call the school and the police. My life as anyone normal would be over. And yet, I still wanted so badly to run to her now, to let her hold me and tell me that she was going to take care of everything, that it would all be okay.
I glanced around the clearing, remembering the path Skye had pointed out, and at first couldn’t find it. Finally, I looked up into the sky, scanning the stars, imagining what they looked like as I stood on the deck outside the lodge, and began to orient myself. I started walking.
The adrenaline still lingering in my veins kept me warm as I tried to force my breath into slow rhythm with my footsteps. I was calming a little now, my mind beginning to sort thoughts and feelings from the rubble. Nothing happened, I told myself, it could’ve, but it didn’t. And Skye was right. Tyler wouldn’t tell anybody. He would wait to see who I would tell, what I would say. I didn’t want to think about it now.
The evergreens closed in thick around me, hiding me in their darkness. I couldn’t see the lights of the resort yet, but the path was clear and worn, rounded footprints of all sizes and treads matted the trampled snow. As the wind blew, white drifts from the high branches swirled down and circled me. The flakes landed in my hair and on my clothes, and I imagined being buried in them, camouflaged, transformed into part of the wintery night. It was a peaceful thought, and in it, I found my first steady breaths.
I unzipped my jacket, stopped and closed my eyes. Nothing happened, I thought.
After a moment, the crunch of footsteps broke the silence.
Tyler. My heart tripped. My eyes opened wide.
Relief.
Bren stood a few feet away, searching my face, his eyes blazing. He didn’t have his board, but he was wearing his boots and a thick blue hoodie, unzipped, sleeves pushed up. His hair was windswept, his cheeks red.
I sighed and closed my eyes again, then stared back at him.
“You scared the hell out of me.” I had forced a casual tone into my voice, but what I wanted more than anything was for him to hold me, to feel his sweatshirt against my face, to know what he smelled like. Maybe I shouldn’t have wanted anyone to touch me after what had just happened, but there it was.
“Are you all right?” He asked.
“I’m fine. I was just at the bonfire. I’m headed back toward the lodge.”
He scanned my body all the way to the ground and back up, his gaze stopping on the waist of my jeans, the collar of my sweater, my hair. Then he took a gentle step closer to me, as if he were trying not to scare a rabbit, and looked into my eyes. “What happened?”
My stomach clenched. How could he have known? How could he have gotten to me so fast?
“What are you doing out here?” I asked him. “Where’s your board?”
“What happened, Jenna?” The forced softness was gone from his voice. He held my gaze.
“Nothing, it was stupid.” I said.
I watched the rise of his chest as he took in a long breath. He waited.
“I was at the bonfire,” I said, "and it was getting loud and a little wild, so this guy I know from school asked me if I wanted to go for a walk. To get away from the noise for a few minutes.”
He was still as stone, his stare so heavy I felt like I would buckle underneath it. When he didn’t speak, I continued.
“So, stupidly, I went.” I shrugged, grasping for words. “I didn’t think he was drunk. I mean, he didn’t seem it. Anyway, we ended up in this clearing, and we were just sitting on a rock talking, and then all of a sudden , out of nowhere, he just, you know, he tried to kiss me.”
I didn’t want to relive what had happened, not one word or thought, but the force of Bren’s gaze, the set of his jaw, the way he loomed so huge in my vision…not even my father could have commanded that kind of obedience. So I went on.
“So I said ‘no’ and he didn’t stop. I tried every way I could to say ‘no,’ but he didn’t stop. And then Skye was there and she…I don’t know, I think she hit him with something. She knocked him out.” I opened my mouth to say that Tyler was still there, for all I knew, and thought better of it. “And now here I am.”
He stared at me for what seemed like a long time, every muscle frozen, then he closed his eyes and exhaled in a slow, controlled stream. When he looked at me again, his focus was still intense, but less furious. A second later he threw a glance over my shoulder. I turned to the empty path behind me.
“He’s probably back at the bonfire by now,” I said quickly. “There are a lot of kids up there.”
His jaw tightened again as he eyed me. Then a tiny, contemptuous grin curled his lips. “He’s not getting away with it.”
“I don’t want you to do anything.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
“I mean it,” I said, a twinge of panic in my voice. “I haven’t figured out how I want to handle it yet. And nothing happened. I mean, it was stopped.”
“But he wasn’t. Do you understand that?” He started toward me but pulled himself back.
I did understand. But my legs were shaking and I was, literally, not out of the woods yet, and this decision was mine and I needed it. I needed it to lean on, to keep me from falling face first into a breakdown.
I hadn’t answered him, but he made some small gesture - not a nod, exactly, but a reluctant acceptance. Then he hissed through his teeth, put his hands on his hips and shook his head at the ground.
This small breath of control that he relinquished to me on the cold, still air seemed to rush inside me like a first gasp, as if I had almost drown in my own helplessness. For the first time, I felt what Tyler had tried to take from me. What I had almost lost. Where would I have been in this very moment, who would I have been, if things had gone differently? My heart raced again and tears blurred my sight. I tilted my head to keep them from brimming and watched the stars stretch into silver streaks above me.
“Jenna.” His voice was a close, rough whisper.
I lowered my gaze, a tear falling onto each cheek. He pushed his fingers into my hair. His skin was so warm, his eyes so grave as they locked onto mine. He grazed my jaw with his thumb and leaned back to search my face. His lips parted as if he was going to speak, and then he went still. His face was a sketch by moonlight - his eyes deep wells with shimmering pools, his hair slashing his forehead in dark jags, the lines of his mouth full and frozen on an unformed thought - and I imagined his arms around me, my face against his shoulder as the drifts from the trees fell white and soft around us.
He shook his head back and forth almost imperceptibly, then grasped my shoulders and pulled me into him so that I lost my breath and didn’t care if I ever got it back.
I closed my eyes and let my head drop onto his chest, wound my arms around him. Beneath the soft padding of his sweatshirt he was solid and strong. I breathed him in. His scent was pine and mint, but sweet like Christmas, and then, as a tuft of his hair brushed my forehead, I caught wood smoke and something exotic and herby. He tightened his hold and I pressed my fingers into him. His heart was beating fast, mine faster. He slid a hand up my back and through my hair, his body warming me like red coals. I let myself rise and fall with his breath.
“It’s okay now.” His words hummed against my ear.
I nodded against him. “I know.” My voice was thick. I was afraid to say anything that would make him pull away. As if he had heard my thought, he curled his arm low around my waist and
tugged me closer. The gesture was instinctual. There was more than consolation in it, and my stomach fluttered. Before I could stop myself, I let out a hard, fast breath.
He took half a step back and moved his hand to my upper arm, pressed his face into my hair. “Sorry,” he whispered.
I was chilled by the sudden space between us. I lifted my head to look at him. It felt like it weighed a million pounds.
“Sorry,” he said again. “I…”
“No, it’s okay.’
“You’re shaking.”
As I looked down at my hands, he laced his fingers through mine. A snowflake fell between us, then another. We glanced up at the sky, still an endless deep and full of jagged, glinting stars.
“I’ll walk you back,” he said. He released one of my hands and began to lead me forward. I didn’t want to go back, but as cold as it was, the moment itself did not freeze.
We were quiet as we trudged along. I wondered what he was thinking, ached already with the memory of his body against mine, his breath in my hair. I wanted to walk forever, to be alone with him in the stillness of the woods, but then we rounded a curve in the path and the lights of the resort began to emerge, reflecting off the smooth field of snow unrolling before us.
I stopped before the last stand of trees. Bren took another two paces, turned toward me, and stepped back again.
“What is it?” He asked.
I shook my head. “I just don’t want to go back.”
He watched me struggle for an explanation.
“My mother…” I said when the silence had gone on too long. “I just don’t want to see anybody right now.”
“You don’t have to explain anything tonight. Not if you don’t want to.” His voice was gentle.
“It’s not that. I feel better now.” And I did. Standing here with Bren, with the resort lit up and glowing just beyond us, the whole incident with Tyler could have been a bad dream.
I didn’t know what to say to him. The truth was, I didn’t want to contaminate my thoughts - my world - with anything ordinary right now. I wanted to burn everything I could remember about these last few moments with Bren into my mind. I knew I couldn’t ask for another chance. How could I betray Skye after what she had done for me?
“Why don’t you want to go home?” He asked. And before I could answer, he narrowed his eyes and peered into mine, as if trying to draw out some detail.
“What?” I matched his expression.
“How much did you drink tonight? Is that the reason you don’t want to see your mother?”
I gaped at him, caught off guard. “I wasn’t drinking.” And then I thought of the beer I had taken from Tyler. “Not really.”
He raised a brow.
I flushed, thinking of the way it had tasted and smelled on Tyler. Crude and unstable. “I only had a few sips.” I sounded pathetic. “Not even half of one.” Pathetic.
He stared at me. “That stuff is garbage.”
“I don’t drink.” I shrugged a shoulder. “I never drink. I don’t even like beer.”
“Then why were you drinking tonight?”
I fixed him with an annoyed glare. The truth was, I was drinking because I was angry that I hadn’t seen him in days…that some beautiful pixie had just strolled up and claimed him with a few sharp words and a pissed off flip of her hair. And more than any of that, that he hadn’t bothered to look for me since. I had been drinking out of spite. Yes. Pathetic.
“You’ll poison yourself with that stuff.” He said.
And just like that he had scaled my defensive wall and was standing in the toxic garden of my temper.
I stepped toward him and glowered up into his face. “What are you, some kind of walking Losers Anonymous meeting? Aren’t all you snowboarders supposed to be drinkers and potheads? I hear them talking about it all the time around here. They get stoned on the lift. They get drunk to cure their hangovers. I mean, where’s your team spirit? Your whole culture is depending on you.”
“My culture?” When he was finished laughing, he took a step closer to me. “Jenna, I’m going to tell you something that's going to sound every bit as arrogant as it is. I’m not like them.” He lifted his arms away from his sides and flipped his palms at me. “I am awesome. And my awesomeness is not fueled by alcohol and pot.” He let his arms drop.
“Thank you for that public service announcement.” I said. “I can see now that there is really no room in your body for illegal substances, what with the size of your ego.”
He laughed again. “It’s not ego if the awesomeness is available to anyone.”
“Then why isn’t everyone awesome?” I gave the word a dramatic hiss.
“Fear.”
“Fear.”
“Right. Look what you’ve been through trying to conquer your fear of one small mountain.”
Immediately, the bruises on my body began to ache, the pulled muscle in my neck, the strain in my ankle.
He said, “Most people want to take the easy way out…change something outside of themselves first. Like, you might have thought the mountain was too steep, or too icy, or whatever. But if you change yourself, lose your fear, the mountain changes, too.”
“You had me until ‘the mountain changes.’ It doesn’t change. It’s exactly the same.”
“Not true. Because eventually, it’s no longer too steep, or too icy. Right?” He grinned at me.
“Nice, Buddha.” For a moment, my irritation at him began to slide away.
Then he said, “And that’s why I don’t help weakness and failure by poisoning myself.”
And new anger burst inside me like a firework.
“I said I do not drink. I took a few sips of beer tonight and that was all. And anyway,” I went on, feeling scolded and trying to keep a note of maturity in my voice to offset the pettiness of what I was about to say, “Brianna was drunk and heading for sloshed, and you don’t seem to mind her at all.”
This time, his laugh was hearty. I folded my arms across my chest and raised my eyebrows at him. We stared at each other like this through the lazy snow until Bren finally let his amusement wind down and shook his head back and forth, his cheeks and lips still blushed with humor.
“Don't you hold yourself to a higher standard than Brianna?”
And there it was. What Dillon had said about Bren making all of his answers questions. I cut around this one and tried another route.
“What about Skye?” I asked.
He pulled his head back and frowned, and a point of hope jabbed at me like an icepick.
“Aren’t you two together?”
“Have you hooked me up with every girl in the place? I thought you said I was with Brianna.”
“I thought you said you weren’t.”
“I did,” he said. He took a step toward me and ran his hand through his hair. I watched the tufts slide between his fingers and remembered the smell of smoke and herbs. In that gesture I could have forgotten everything, but I kept my head clear.
“And Skye?” I moved on. Brianna was a mess to sort out at another time.
“Nothing,” he said. “Ever.”
“Then who is she?” It just seemed natural to me that they would join forces and take over the universe.
“She’s like us."
“Does she live with you?”
“Sometimes. She’s a bit of a free spirit. She does what she wants.”
I hated the idea of Skye living in the apartment with Bren - sleeping there, showering, flaunting herself all over the place.
“So she never had a thing for you?”
He hesitated and my stomach tightened. He tilted his head to the side, seemed to consider, then made small counterclockwise circles in the air with one finger as if he were backing up a car. At first I didn’t get it. I watched his hand, trying to figure out if maybe he was writing something he didn’t want to say out loud, but then it dawned on me.
I looked up at him.
“The other way around,” I said. “You never had feelings for her.”
He nodded and gave me a flat, embarrassed smile. In one moment, he had informed me without the slightest self-consciousness of his own awesomeness, and in the next, he was too humble to admit that a beautiful girl wanted him and he didn’t want her back.
He slid his hands into his pockets, glanced down and then back up at me. I realized then that I was no longer angry at him, or afraid of Tyler, or worried about my mother.
“I think Skye hates me.” I told him.
“She doesn’t hate you,” he said softly. “She just doesn’t travel well.”
“Well, she saved my butt either way,” I said. When his expression didn’t change, I went on. “I don’t even know what she was doing there. The glades are closed at night, aren’t they? And she was on her board. Besides,” I paused until I was sure I had his attention, “I saw a fire in the woods farther up the hill, and I thought you’d all be up there together.”
“Did you?” His lips curled up at the corners. “Well it’s a good thing we weren’t.”
We stared at each other, the night growing colder, bits of white lace sailing aimlessly in the air around us. Over Bren’s shoulder, the lights of the resort promised warmth and shelter and comfort. But those little hearth fires were nothing compared to the blaze in Bren’s eyes, the warm, lulling whoosh of his pulse.
I felt his hand slip into mine.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Bren walked me all the way to the doors of the main hotel. I glanced through the glass to make sure my mother wasn’t at the desk, and then turned to face him. His eyes searched mine, and I could not imagine a way to step away from this, to brace myself for the moment when the indoors would rush around me in a cruel gust.
“I’m not sure when I’ll see you.” I felt my cheeks flush and looked down at my feet.
I listened to him breathe, tense and waiting, until he finally reached out and pulled me against him. I closed my eyes. He buried his face in my hair.
“I’ll find you tomorrow,” he said, his breath warm on the top of my head. Then he released me quickly, turned, and walked away.
I watched him until he reached the bottom of the stairs, until the space he left around me froze and there was nothing left to do but go inside. I found my way to the suite, relieved to find it empty, and fell onto my bed. My last conscious thought before sleep pulled me under was of his scent. Pine and mint. And fire.
Chapter 10