Piper doesn’t say a word, just trails after me as I lead the way through the parking lot to the trail that dumps skiers out in town. I stop at the edge for a minute, remembering the hundreds of times I cut through the trees right here on my way back to the condo at the end of the day. Or sometimes in the middle of the day, to grab lunch or meet Piper in her warm bed while everyone else was still on the mountain.

“You and Ben could ride all the way to the front door,” Piper says. “I couldn’t keep up. Always ground to a halt at the edge of the parking lot.”

She reaches for my hand, which is already halfway frozen. I rigged her up but forgot a hat and gloves for myself. Shit. I’d like to blame a brain glitch but in truth I was desperate to get away, to take Piper somewhere quiet and breathe with her, even if the air is icy.

I keep hold of her hand and pull her onto the trail. The groomers have been through and the packed snow crunches under our feet as we start to hike up. The trees on either side of the trail are shadowy, but it’s a clear night and the moonlight reflecting off the snow lets us see well enough. We hike fast, trying to keep warm, our breath puffing out in little clouds. It’s all so completely familiar: the way the tips of my ears and nose go numb, the smell of the trees and the snow, the bite of the cold, dry air as it hits my lungs. Someone could drop me on this trail in ten years, blindfolded, and I swear I’d be able to tell them exactly where I was in five seconds.

I know this place, and after the endless onslaught of new over the last fifteen months it’s tempting as hell to let myself slide into the easiness of that familiarity. To open the gates and let the memories come, because it’s only been five days and holding them back has already exhausted me.

Like staying away from Piper has exhausted me.

“Sorry if I was an ass back there,” I say quietly. “I shouldn’t have asked about you and Tom. It’s none of my business, it’s just…”

She squeezes my hand. “Just that you wanted to smother his perky breasts in a puffy snowsuit and then throw him off the balcony?”

“Something like that, but it was less a perky breast issue and more of a dick meets butcher knife kind of thing.”

“Yeah, well, Chuckles took care of that. He interrupted Tom and a friend at an intimate moment and it wasn’t pretty. Tom won’t be sitting down for a couple days and he might be off blowjobs for life.”

I wince. “Harsh. That cat does not fuck around.”

She opens her mouth to answer, but a pack of kids come around a corner and whizz past us on snowskates, laughing and tossing shouted insults back and forth, and when it’s quiet again, the moment is gone, so we just keep hiking.

At first we can see the light of other condos and houses twinkling through the barren trees, and occasionally catch scattered voices of people heading inside or lounging around in hot tubs on their decks, but after a while we pass out of the populated area and into the resort. Total silence except for the soft crunch of our footsteps and the huff of our breath. Then Piper gasps and pulls me to a stop. She silently points to the trail ahead, where a fox is slipping out of the trees, head to the ground as he glides across the snow.

We follow him up the hill, keeping up with his lazy pace for a few minutes until he suddenly cocks his head and takes off into the forest.

“Wow,” Piper breathes.

“Yeah,” I answer. But I’m not looking at the gap in the trees where the fox disappeared. I only have eyes for the girl in front of me.

She pushes the heavy hat back on her forehead and stares back at me. Her face is winter-pale and the reflected light from the snow makes her light blue eyes shine an otherworldly silver.

“We’re not friends,” she says again.

I shake my head.

“So what are we?”

“What do you want to be?” I ask.

She shivers, and I fight the urge to pull her into my arms. We keep staring at each other, and I watch my own feelings play out on her beautiful face. The longing. The desperate hope. The resignation.

“I don’t think it matters,” she finally says, and her voice breaks my heart. “I’m staying in Colorado and you’re leaving. We’re heading in opposite directions.”

“We’re here now,” I say. A wild bird of reckless hope is beating its wings against the cage of my chest, demanding to be let out into the world, no matter the danger.

She lowers her eyes and stares at her boots, stomping her left foot to make a peacock tail pattern in the snow. “It’s not enough,” she says. “Syd told me today that I never got over you, and she’s right. I should probably start moving forward. We both should.”

“I’ll go stay with my parents tomorrow,” she adds. “It’ll be easier for both of us.”

A short scream echoes out of the trees. The fox found her dinner.

“Should we head back?” Her teeth are chattering and the spot on my toes where I once had frostbite is aching, but I’m not quite ready to go back. Not yet. I take her hand again and pull her across the trail, searching for the trail sign nailed to a tree. When I find it, I run my hands down the gnarly trunk, brushing snow aside when I near the bottom.

“What are you looking for?”

“Ben and Brody and I hiked up here for a little moonlight riding that night,” I say.

Her breath catches, and I know she remembers exactly which night I’m talking about. The night I knocked on her window, still in my gear, and was so desperate to get inside that I forgot my board in a snow bank until morning. The night we made love for the first time.

There’s just enough light for her to see the initials I carved on the tree while Ben and Brody went back for one more run. She takes off her glove and reaches out to trace the first letters of our names.

“That was a good night,” she whispers.

“The best.”

“Why did you bring me up here?” she asks.

I watch her fingers go over the letters, again and again, for a long time before I can find the words to answer.

“I wanted to remember what it felt like,” I finally say. “To be at the beginning of something. I’m sick to fucking death of endings.”

Her fingers still and she places the palm of her hand on the crooked heart I carved into the tree all those years ago. When she looks up at me, tears are running down her cheeks.

“I wish I knew what to say to make it better,” she whispers. “That I had some awesome deep quote about endings being beginnings in disguise or something, but I don’t. I’m sorry. I had this plan that I’d help you, you know? That I’d be able to—”

“Fix me?”

She nods.

“You can’t fix this, Pipes. It is what it is, and I need to live with it.” I crouch down beside her and wipe the tears off her cheeks with my thumb. “I shouldn’t have brought you up here. I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair. I can never be who I was. That’s why it’s easier to stay away.”

“From me?”

“From everybody.” Shit, even Ben. Everybody looks at me and all they see is a headline: Snowboarder Adam Westlake in Hospital after Horror Crash. Snowboarder Adam Westlake in Coma. All I am is my injury. I exist as my limitations, like all the years of hard work and all the success I had was only a prelude to a tragedy, not the main event.

My thumbs are brushing back and forth on her cheeks, and Piper grabs my hands and holds on like I’m her lifeline. Or maybe she’s mine.

“All any of us want you to be is yourself, Adam, exactly as you are right now.”

I bow my head until our foreheads touch and rest there a minute, the clouds of our breath mingling together. “I don’t know who that is without snowboarding,” I admit.

“I can help you figure it out.”

I know she would, or at least she’d try her damnedest. Piper lives to fix things and I’m still broken after nearly two years. But I’m not going to hold her back to play nursemaid to me. I love her too much for that, and I don’t want to be that guy.

“It doesn’t work that way,” I say, shaking my head.

She sighs, and my skin is so cold that I can barely feel the warmth of her breath on my skin.

“I love you,” she says, but there’s no joy in her voice. No warmth or promise. Not like any of the times I’ve heard those words from her before. Piper was never stingy with her affection or her declarations: she’d yell out those three words from the chairlift as she rode over the terrain park where I was waiting to drop into the pipe. She’d whisper them in my ear when I was moving inside her and then drop them casually later when I handed her the menu at dinner.

They lit me up every single time, but now all I feel is dark and cold.

“I love you too,” I tell her. It’s the truest thing I’ve said in years, and also the most heartbreaking. Because she’s right, we’re heading in two different directions, and neither one of us is prepared to change course.

Piper takes the lead on the way back to the condo, pulling me down the trail and clucking about how I should’ve worn a hat. We make good time and neither one of us speaks until we hit the little turn off to the parking lot.

“I could show you,” I offer.

“Show me what?”

“How to ride all the way to the front door. You said you never made it, remember?”

We leave the darkness of the woods and step into the parking lot. Her cheeks are flushed red from the cold and her bright hair tumbles out from under that ridiculous hat in waves down her back. She’s so beautiful I want to grab her and never let go.

“I haven’t been on a board since Japan,” she says.

I stop suddenly, shocked still. Because we’ve never so much as mentioned Japan, even during that long, hot summer in the hospital when we saw each other almost every single day. Never talked about the ultimatum she gave me or the choice I made, and sure as shit never discussed the way I made an ass of myself on Japanese television. Fuck. I still can’t watch Sesame Street without my stomach heaving at the remembered taste of tequila.

We’ve also never talked about what happened when I finally did come back: the harsh reality of what happens when Piper hits a wall and can’t fix something.

But tonight has already been a dumpster fire, and there is no way I can deal with any of that history while standing half frozen in a parking lot. So, I focus on what she said about riding instead.

“Why haven’t you been out on your board?”

“Because snowboarding took a lot of shit from me,” she says. “I just didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. I never loved it the way you guys did.”

“And yet you’re about to make a career out of following snowboarders around the world.”

She shrugs. “Can’t escape your destiny I guess.”

Nope. “I can vouch for that.”

“It’s just an internship, anyway. The opportunity came up and I took it, but my career doesn’t have to be about snowboarding.”

“Mine either,” I try to joke.

Her smile fades. “You were always more to me than a guy who could snowboard back then, and you’re more than a guy who can’t snowboard to me now. You know that, right?”

I do, and I wish I could see myself through her eyes, but when I try to see myself, it’s like I’m a vampire looking in the mirror. Blank. And I’m the only one who can fix that. If only I had a fucking clue where to start.

“Come on.” She leads me through the garage, ignoring the sounds of the party still happening upstairs. It’s quieter now, we’ve been gone awhile, but there are still people up there drinking and laughing. Piper opens the door to her room and draws me in, closing it gently after me and turning the lock so we won’t be disturbed. I stumble after her, my icy skin starting to prickle and sting in the warmth. She turns off the overhead light and shucks off her hat and mittens, leaving them on the floor. Her coat’s next, and then she kicks her boots into the corner and moves on to me.

“Piper,” I protest, because I don’t know where she’s going with this, but it screams of a bad idea. I’ve slammed the door on all that reckless hope from earlier because I had no right to let it out, especially not around her. We can’t be together and pretending anything different will only hurt us both more in the long run.

She brings her fingers up and presses them against my lips. “We’re not going to do anything. I just want to be next to you, okay? I know you don’t want me to fix you but let me take care of you. Just for a little while.”

Maybe I should tell her no, but the thought of being close to her is too intoxicating. So I stay perfectly still and let her cradle my hands between her smaller ones, rubbing the feeling back into them before she unzips my jacket and peels it off me, one arm at a time. It joins hers in a heap on the floor, and then she reaches for the hem of my shirt.

Shit. My brain knows nothing is going to happen between us—nothing can happen—but my dick can’t help but be interested in her warm hands grazing my stomach. Yes, we’ve just shared the most depressing declarations of love known to man and figured out we’re doomed to be apart, which should be a complete and total boner-killer, but somebody missed that memo because my blood is rushing south like it’s on a mission from god.

Piper lifts my shirt over my head, but she’s too short to finish the job, so she rises up on her tiptoes, trying to reach. Then she loses her balance and falls into me with a soft “oof,” crushing her soft breasts against my chest. My face is covered in fabric, my arms tangled in my sleeves and pinned above my head, so I can’t reach out to catch her, but I can feel her heart beating wildly, like it’s trying to knock its way out of her chest into mine. And I can smell her, sweet peaches mixed with the crisp winter air that clings to snow and ice.

“Sorry.”

She pulls back, and I reach behind my head to yank the shirt off. We stare at each other, both flushed and breathing hard, and then she reaches for the button on my jeans.

Too much.

I shake my head, because if she touches me there, she’s going to feel a whole lot more than my pants.

“I got it,” I say, backing up a few steps.

She bites her lip and nods. “I’ll be right back,” she says, her voice low and husky. Then she grabs some clothes off a chair and hauls ass out the door.

I scrub my hand over my face, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. A smart man would gather his clothes and go, but if she’s leaving for her parents’ place tomorrow, then this might be the last time I see her for who knows how long. It will certainly be the last time I see her like this, with any sort of openness and honesty between us.

Plus, my feet are still fucking freezing and Piper has an electric blanket, so I strip off my jeans and wet boots and socks and crawl under the covers in my boxer briefs. I bury my face in the pillow that smells like her, and I even give Chuckles a few careful pats when he crawls up on the bed, his face set in a scowl, and settles in next to me to wash his furry ass.

When Piper gets back, I’m feeling more relaxed than I have for months, maybe even since the accident. Maybe even since the last time I was in this bed waiting for her to come to me. She walks in carefully, wearing a tank top and a pair of pink flannel sleep shorts with purple unicorns on them, carrying two steaming mugs of hot chocolate. She’s fucking adorable.

“Nice jammies.”

Her cheeks turn pink and I stifle a groan, remembering the way I used to tease her, so I could chase that blush down her body with my lips.

“Hold this,” she tells me, holding out one of the mugs. I pull myself up to sitting and take it, relishing the warmth on my hands. Piper puts the other mug on her bedside table and grabs the computer off her desk.

“Are we actually going to Netflix and chill?” I ask, grinning.

“Yup,” she says. “Scott Pilgrim?”

“Perfect.” We’ve seen it a hundred times before and the part about the vegan superpowers always makes her giggle, which makes me happy because it’s the best sound in the world.

She cues up the movie and climbs into bed. She’s next to me, but Chuckles is between us—the world’s most cranky-ass chaperone—and after a few minutes I’m no longer afraid that she’s going to glance over and notice the little blanket fort I’m making in my shorts. We sip hot chocolate and laugh at all the jokes we know are coming and the past and the future disappear. There are no regrets and or worries, only me and Piper, and for right now it’s enough.