I almost break when she looks at me. She’s sleep rumpled and gorgeous, her hair tumbling down her back and her face creased with pillow lines and marks from the medical tape, which shouldn’t be sexy but somehow are, because they make me want to kiss them away. A secret smile is playing along her lips and I’m so happy to see her eyes again, clear and blue and blazing, that I almost let the mugs crash to the ground, so I can pull her back to bed and keep her there for days.

But I don’t, because we need to talk.

“You okay?” I ask again. I’ve been watching her for a few minutes, too enraptured by her joy at seeing the world through her new eyes to let her know I was here.

“Better than okay. I can see everything.” She beckons me over to the window and I’m a weak bastard, because I put the coffees down on the desk and go. She leans back against me, pressing tight so my chin can rest on the top of her head. She fits me perfectly.

“What are you looking at?”

She picks up my hand and holds my fingers up to point. “The trees. Yesterday they would have been blurry blotches, just blending into the sky. Today I can see every single line. They’re so beautiful.”

My breath catches, because for the first time since I’ve been back, I see it. The beauty. The hundreds of shades of gray in the winter sky and the wisps of whiter clouds rushing back and forth, like waves cresting in the ocean. I see shapes in the stark black lines of the trees; a crone’s fingers beckoning a scared child, a thin man running after an even thinner dog, the bones of summer holding strong and waiting for the flourish of spring. It’s all there, and Piper is showing it to me.

My fingers twitch for my camera, to capture this before it gets away, but I’m not even sure where I put it during my epic clean out. Fifteen months of practically sleeping with my hands wrapped around the thing, and now I don’t know where it is.

I don’t rush off looking, though, because Piper’s here in my arms, and I cannot seem to make myself move.

“Hey, Adam?”

“Yeah?”

“Please don’t leave.”

I jerk back and she turns to face me, her gaze strong and sure.

“I’m not going to leave,” I tell her, which I hope is the truth. Because the fact is I did think about going this morning. When I woke up wrapped around Piper, the smell of her all over and around me, her hands resting on my arms like she was trying to pull me closer, even in her sleep.

I woke up and I was so in love with her that I thought about running, because we crossed all the lines last night, and if she is feeling even fraction of what I’m feeling, then we’re going to break each other’s hearts.

“Promise me,” she says. “Until the end of the Olympics at least. Promise that you’ll be with me until then.”

I drop my forehead to touch hers and close my eyes. “It will only be delaying the inevitable, sweetheart. All the things we talked about before are still true.”

She pulls in a deep breath and lets it out in jagged puffs. “I know.”

“I can’t stay in Colorado.”

“I know.” Her voice is stronger this time, steady and even.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper. “And you can’t fix this.”

I don’t articulate what that means for us, but she knows what I’m getting at. She goes still in my arms and when I pull back so I can look at her she refuses to meet my gaze, staring out the window instead.

“We need to talk about Japan.” I whisper the words into her hair. “And that summer. We need to talk—really talk—about all of it.”

A quick nod. “We will.”

She’s not ready, and I don’t want to push. Hell, maybe there’s no point in hashing out all that sad old history anyway. We’re both adults. Our chemistry is insane and neither one of us is actively trying to hurt the other. Why shouldn’t we fuck like rabbits until the end of the Olympics and then go our separate ways? I want so badly to just say yes and toss her on the bed, but what if that’s just selfishness talking?

Or even worse, my fucked-up brain telling me what I want to hear?

Just one run. It isn’t even that dangerous.

Just until the end of the Olympics. You’ll say goodbye, and both be fine.

Damn. When I have a brain-risk question, I call Dr. Warne, but I somehow don’t think she’ll be able to help me with this one. It’s more of a heart-risk anyway, because as much as I don’t want to hurt Piper, I also have to protect myself. We’ve both been telling ourselves the story of our Japan break up for so long that its become canon in our memories: I chose snowboarding and Piper left. I fucked up and she called me on it.

But when I woke up this morning and wanted to run it was partly because I remembered, in excruciating detail, how it felt to lose her. The hollow feeling, like someone had scraped out my insides and all that was left was a shell. The hundreds of calls I made and messages I left that went unanswered.

At the time, I thought I deserved to be ghosted. I was the one who burned everything down, after all. I’m ready to own that and apologize, but I realize now that Piper needs to own her part as well or else we’ll never be able to truly move past it, as friends or anything else. Because I fucked up, but she did too. She ran into a problem she couldn’t fix, and instead of compromising or giving me a chance to explain, she quit.

You cannot trust your own brain, Adam. Maybe not. But I can choose to try. And I can choose to trust that Piper will be as careful with my heart as I plan to be with hers. That she’ll hold it so close and carefully during the coming weeks that when she gives it back to me it won’t be shattered. Maybe dinged, but not completely broken.

I can choose to take this risk.

I trusted her with my body last night and that worked out pretty damn well. It might not have been the manliest performance, but Piper didn’t seem to care. In fact, she seemed to enjoy it just as much as I did.

Well, maybe not quite as much as I did.

“I love that smile,” Piper tells me.

“Do you?” I lean in and kiss the corner of her mouth.

“Yes. Because it usually means you’re about to do something very, very naughty. Hopefully to me.”

I pick her up, squeezing her against my chest, and spin her around. “You have an early appointment with your eye doctor, remember? You have barely enough time to shower and change. I’ll run you to his office and then I’m taking you to brunch at Momo’s. Veggie omelet with extra cheese, the best hash browns in the high country, and all the coffee you can drink.”

Piper’s face softens. “You remember.”

“Of course,” I tell her. I trust my brain on that, even if everything else is a goddamn crapshoot.

“So, you’re staying?”

I put her down, letting her slide along my body so she’ll have no doubt about how much I’d rather take her back to bed instead of getting dressed and heading out to Dr. Denham’s Eyeball-Sanding Emporium.

“Are you sure this is what you want?” I ask. “Just until the end of the Olympics? Then I’ll head back to summer and you’ll go to Europe for your internship?”

She nods, quick and certain. “I’m sure.”

“And we’ll end up friends when it’s over? Or at least not enemies?”

“Of course.”

“Then I guess I’m staying.”

And I will. I can keep myself off the mountain until the Olympics, especially with Piper here to distract me. But the itch is still there, and I can feel it building. There’s no way I could live in Colorado full-time, not when everything inside me wants to be back on snow. It would be like an alcoholic moving into a brewery. Too much temptation.

After the eye appointment and brunch, we wander down to watch the snow sculpture competitors at work. Every year Breck hosts a competition that brings in teams from all over the world who take a twenty-ton block of snow and carve it into something unique and magical. The judging is tomorrow, and a lot of the artists are planning on staying up all night to finish the detail work, so the party vibe has started even though it’s only early afternoon. There’s music playing, and one team has used a big chunk of hacked off snow to carve a beer fridge, which is stocked.

The gray clouds from this morning have been blown away and the sky is that bright, deep blue that looks too rich to be real. The mountains jut up in front of us, pure and white, and Piper and I are both drinking it all in. She keeps testing her eyes and pointing out details and exclaiming at the crispness of the lines against the sky. Everywhere she turns, she sees something new.

I’m looking at the same things I saw yesterday, but my gaze is different too. It’s like someone gave me a filter, and all of a sudden everything is beautiful. Then again, maybe it’s not my eyes. Maybe it’s my heart.

“Look at that one!” Piper has always loved the snow sculptures, and she’s totally into this. She’s pointing out a huge Viking ship with a dragon or a sea serpent rising up to form the prow. Rows of oars are angled down toward the ground and a fat sail billows forward, like the ship is racing along with the wind. A Viking warrior stands tall and proud right behind the dragon, one hand resting on its scaly back.

Piper giggles. “Remind you of anyone?”

I take a closer look and snicker. “Holy shit. It’s Brody. I have to get a shot of this.”

There wasn’t time this morning to dig out my camera, so I snap a few pictures with my phone, then keep it out to capture the next sculpture, which consists of a man’s head, standing at least twenty feet tall, with twisty ropes of hair swirling behind him.

“It’s Old Man Winter,” Piper says, reading the little sign the artists have put up.

I crane up to check out his eyes, which sit under a stern brow and have eyeballs crafted out of elaborately carved snowflakes. His lips are open, his cheeks puffed out, and waves of wind are coming from his mouth, more snowflakes dancing in their wake.

“This one will be cool at night when everything’s lit up,” Piper says.

“We should come back,” I answer instantly. Because I want that shot, the icy snowflakes glowing as Old Man Winter glares out onto the world and does his best to inflict his will in the form of ice and snow.

“Really?”

“Yeah, it’ll be fun. We can get you one of those sweet coffee things with mountains of whipped cream and wander around. I want to take some pictures.” I pull her close, so I can whisper in her ear. “And then I want to put the whipped cream all over your body and lick it off.”

She shivers. “You always have the best plans.”

I kiss her cold nose and she smiles, then reaches up to pull my beanie a little lower on my forehead. “You finally accepted that it’s January in Colorado and put on a hat. I like it.”

“Yeah, well, I remember how long you take looking at these things. Didn’t want to freeze.”

She tweaks the beanie down over my eyes and pulls me in for a kiss. I laugh, and she licks into my open mouth, sliding her tongue against mine and humming happily when I hug her closer and angle my head so I can kiss her deeper.

She’s flushed and smiling when I finally let her go. “I’m going to get one of those coffees right now. Didn’t get much sleep last night. Want anything?”

“Do they have anything that isn’t so sugary the spoon stands up by itself? Because the thing Nat made me drink just about killed me.”

“I wouldn’t know, but I’ll check for you.”

“Thanks.” I hold up my phone. “I’m gonna stay here and send that shot to Brody.”

“Tell him to kiss Thor for me.”

I nod, even though I have no intention of telling my buddy to make out with a dog. Instead, I send him the picture of his alter ego and laugh when he sends one back of himself in the same pose, standing in front of his fucked-up little house.

I’m not surprised when the phone rings a minute later. Brody’s been calling on the regular to talk about ideas for the movie: first questions about my injury, then asking me for funding ideas. The last few times he’s been urging me to join the crew, and Brody is relentless when it comes to going after what he wants. He seems chill on the outside, but he’s the most determined fucker I’ve ever met.

“How’s the build going?” I ask. “Spotted the pink hammer in the background of your shot. Allie still helping?”

“She’s still giving me shit,” Brody says.

No doubt that’s the truth. Allie cleared out pretty fast when Ben and I showed up at the house, but she stayed long enough to finish yelling at Brody about letting her help with the rebuild, and if she’s anything like her sister, it’s pretty much a given that she’ll get her way in the end.

“She there?”

“Nope. Syd came by and took her to goat yoga, or some shit like that. I wasn’t really listening, to be honest.”

“What the fuck is goat yoga?”

“I don’t know, man. Yoga in a barn while breathing in the smell of goat shit, I’m guessing.”

“Interesting.”

“See you’ve got your camera out again. About time. Thought any more about what we talked about?”

“Still planning on heading out after the Olympics,” I tell him. “But I had another thought.”

Out of nowhere my heart starts racing and adrenaline floods my system just like when I was talking to Gabe. It’s fucking hilarious if you think about it: that saying a few measly words is this scary for a guy who used to throw himself into flips over twenty feet in the air with a board strapped to his feet every day. I should probably think about this a little more before I say anything, but then I’ll have time to talk myself out of it. And, hey, if I’m choosing to take a risk with Piper I can choose to try this out.

“Yeah? Hit me.”

“I could do some behind the scenes stuff at the Games for you if you want. Nothing formal—just some casual shit. You said Zeke was doing on your next trip, right? I could get some film of him if it would help. Shots of him training or whatever.”

Brody doesn’t hesitate. “Hell yes that would help. Thanks, man. You need any equipment?”

“I’ll find what I’ve got and let you know.” I spot Piper heading along the path, a grin on her face and two paper cups in her hands. “I’ve got to go. Talk to you later.”

She trips up to me, happy and bubbly and probably half-high on sugar already. “Plain black coffee.”

Steam is rising from the little hole in the top of the cup and I cradle it, savoring the warmth and the smell. “Thanks.”

“Did you give Brody my message?”

“Sorry, nope. Forgot.”

“Then what were you talking about?”

“I offered to shoot a little behind the scenes stuff of Zeke when we’re in Korea.” I keep my tone casual, but there’s that adrenaline buzz again.

Piper gulps down a huge sip of coffee. “Really?”

I lean forward and lick the whipped cream off her lip. “Yeah. The kid’s going hard. It’ll be cool to hang out a little, see what his training is like.”

She snorts. “Knowing Zeke, it’s probably mostly sitting on the sofa playing video games.”

“Still haven’t forgiven him for that rubber snake in your carry-on, huh?”

She glares at Old Man Winter. “That asshat knew I’d watched Snakes on a Plane the night before.”

I laugh. “Let it go, feisty-boots.”

“Never.” But she’s smiling as she says it. “Let’s check out the rest of the sculptures and head back so you can get your camera.”