Shooting for the Stars

  Since Tahoe.

  Nobody was thinking straight. And if Stella had convinced herself that being with him would make her happy, that was just the tragedy talking. When the bad shit happened, people clung to what was safe and familiar. Bear knew this firsthand, because he’d clung to the Lazarus family after his mother left.

  And they weren’t his to keep.

  If Stella, in her sorrow, took Bear as her personal security blanket, her parents sure wouldn’t approve. Not to mention Hank…

  Bear swallowed hard, just imagining that conversation. Even though you think your life is over, and your girlfriend just dumped you, I’m shacking up with your baby sister, because pain has clouded her judgment. Kay?

  He wouldn’t do that to Hank.

  Anyway, a year from now, Stella would be back out in the world, kicking ass and taking names. She wouldn’t need him anymore. And what would that blow feel like? Bear didn’t want to know. Shutting down Stella’s misguided attraction to him was the only thing to do.

  Beside him, wearing a very guarded expression on her pretty face, Stella was waiting for him to say something. Even now she wasn’t acting like herself. The Stella he knew didn’t wear a pining expression for anyone.

  What was it that Alexis had said less than a half hour ago? All my choices are bad ones. All of them.

  Yeah. That was eerily familiar.

  He turned his chin and looked right into Stella’s eyes. “It was just sex, Stell.” And it was. Sex that shouldn’t have happened.

  “I see,” Stella whispered. She stood up suddenly. “Thank you for clearing that up.”

  “Stell…!” He hesitated. An expression filled with hurt crossed her face. Shit. It didn’t mean that he didn’t care about her. Was there any way to explain?

  That’s when she’d turned and walked away.

  Now, as he steered into Hank’s driveway and killed the engine, he thought about all the times Stella had avoided him since that ugly day ten months ago. It was probably as many times as he’d spent wondering if what he’d said had been a total fuck-up, or exactly the right thing.

  Hopefully, Stella was over whatever temporary feelings she thought she had for him. She probably snubbed him just for pride’s sake, and he would have to live with that.

  Meanwhile, Hank had barely mentioned Alexis, even when she won a silver medal at the Olympics. But he must have seen her big news, or heard about it from a friend. Just because her name never came up didn’t mean that Hank had forgotten his ex, or the awful way they’d parted.

  Tonight, he hoped he could get Hank’s mind off those old troubles, and try to get him to think about filmmaking. They were going to have good tequila. And they were going to have a little talk.

  He hopped up onto Hank’s porch and let himself in after a quick tap on the front door. “’Sup, Hazardous?” he called. His eyes did a quick sweep of the room. Since Hank had a housekeeper who dropped by a couple of times a week, the condition of the room didn’t always tell him what he needed to know.

  His eyes landed on the man himself, sitting on the sofa in front of the football game. Bear gave him a quick once-over. Jeans. A T-shirt reading “Jackson Hole.” And a freshly shaved face.

  Bear had expected worse, given the news Hank had just received. There were days when he showed up to find Hank hunched over in his wheelchair, staring at the TV in his underwear. And that was on days without ugly news about his ex-girlfriend.

  Now, Hank muted the football game and tossed the remote aside. “Why do football pundits exist?” he asked. “They’re never right, anyway.”

  Bear didn’t want to talk football. He passed Hank by and walked over to the bar dividing the kitchen from the living room.

  With a quick press of his arms, Hank transferred himself from the couch to the wheelchair and followed Bear. He lifted the bottle of tequila and examined it. “Conmemorativo. That’s the good shit. Are we celebrating something?”

  “Maybe.” Bear reached for a couple of shot glasses in the drawer. The kitchen had been completely rebuilt to accommodate Hank — with clever storage in reach of a seated person and a tiered countertop surface. “Hazardous, let’s do this right. Do you have any limes?” There was a single plate in the sink and a whiff of supper in the air. Hank seemed to be doing okay today, even if his expression was flat.

  That was encouraging, right? Bear allowed himself to hope that maybe today was the day when they both turned the corner. He cut limes and rehearsed the speech he wanted to give Hank in his head. For once he’d hit upon a project which had the potential to pull both of them out of the swan-dive that was their lives. Finally.

  Once they were set up, drinks in hand, Bear took a breath. Leaning forward, he tried to tamp down the excitement in his voice while he told Hank his plan. “I want to make a feature-length snowboarding film,” he told Hank.

  The inevitable silence followed, during which he tried to read Hank’s face.

  His friend’s first response was a thoughtful one. “Hasn’t that been done before?”

  “Not by us,” Bear said. “You’re going to be the face of the project. I can make a great film, but I need your cred.” It was perfect, really. He and Hank could stay close to a sport they both loved, without having to be the center of attention.

  But Hank began to look bitter. “I don’t have any cred. I’m a cripple. I have cripple cred.” He reached for the tequila.

  That was exactly the attitude Bear needed to correct. “Listen, asshole.” He held the bottle out of his friend’s reach. “You’ll narrate it, and I guarantee we’ll have a blast. Guys want to hear what you have to say about the amped-up shit I’m going to film. And the ladies would throw their panties at the screen. You and I would get a couple of free heli trips out west. What’s not to love?”

  Hank set down his shot glass with a thunk. “Let me get this straight. You would drag my ass to the top of some sick peak, and then wave goodbye on your board? Why would I bother, if I’m only taking the heli back down?”

  Bear shook his head. “I’d be filming, not riding. And you don’t have to come up in the copter if you don’t want to. In fact, you can just do the post-production, if that’s how you want to play it. But the partying is better in Alaska than in an editing room.”

  “I don’t think I’m interested.”

  Bear set the bottle on the table and tried not to feel too discouraged. He understood Hank’s pain, and maybe it was too soon to suggest the film. But winter was coming. Fast.

  There wasn’t any manual for this. He didn’t know the proper mourning period for one’s entire career. But Hank hadn’t shown interest in anything for so long, and Bear knew this idea was a good one. He’d spent the whole summer and fall trying to come up with the right Plan B for the two of them. He’d spent hours thinking through different possibilities — opening a restaurant, designing snowboarding gear.

  But this idea? This was it.

  “Hazardous,” he said, his voice low and serious. “I need you on this. I want to film it this season, and the first snowfall is only six weeks out. We’ll edit next summer and tour it a year from now. We can hit the college campuses and enter part of the film in the Banff festival. It will be awesome.”

  But Hank had no reply. Furthermore, he tipped the bottle toward his glass. And the night began its downward spiral.

  Eleven

  STELLA HAD ALREADY FINISHED her first beer by the time Anya showed up at the bar.

  “Sorry I’m late!” Anya called. “You know how the work days go in October. There’s always some fire to put out.”

  “You’re just coming from work now?” Stella checked her watch. It was seven already.

  Anya handed Stella the sweater lying over the adjacent bar stool and hopped onto the seat. “Thanks for saving me a spot.”

  “I fended off about twenty people for you,” Stella said. “Travis is pissed at me.”

  Anya watched their friend scoop ice into five glasses in a row, then use two soda guns at
once to fill them. “He doesn’t look pissed, he looks stressed out. This place is mobbed.”

  “The new girl quit last week to go work on a cruise ship. Travis is short-handed.” Stella tossed a pretzel into her mouth. “I almost volunteered to go back there and help out. It makes me tired just watching him.”

  “You can’t be tired. I’m the one who worked ten hours on a Saturday.”

  Stella pointed a pretzel at her friend. “That’s your own fault. Nobody asked you to work quite that much.”

  “Wave down Travis, and I’ll tell you what I was working on.”

  Stella glanced down the bar at their friend, who was blending a frozen margarita with one hand and uncapping beers with his other. “What are you drinking?”

  “Something on tap. Switchback, I guess.”

  “Save my seat.” Stella slid off her stool. She ducked under the bar, grabbed a pint glass and dispensed a draft for her friend.

  “Can I get a Bud?” a white-bearded guy inquired just as Anya’s pint was filled to the top.

  “Um… sure.” She glanced at Travis. He was still busy at the other end of the bar.

  “Lady, where is my beer?” Anya hollered theatrically. “I’ve been waiting hours.”

  Stella gave her the stink eye. “Very funny.” She dispensed a beer for Santa Claus and then ducked back to her seat before anyone else mistook her for the help.

  “Thanks,” Travis said on a drive-by. “I’m getting my ass kicked.”

  “So this morning…” Anya began. She was bouncing on the barstool, clearly bursting to tell Stella a story. “You’ll never guess who I spent a few hours with.”

  Uh oh. “I have no idea.” She had a hunch, though. She and Anya had been friends since high school. These days their desks at the ski mountain were twenty feet apart, and for months Anya had been trying to figure out why Stella was avoiding a certain ex-pro-snowboarder.

  “Bear,” Anya said with a catty grin. “He was looking especially fine today in a dark blue thermal shirt and jeans that just hugged his…”

  “Is there a story here?” Stella interrupted. She was already familiar with all the ways that Bear filled out a pair of jeans.

  “I’m just trying to set the scene,” Anya said, sipping her beer. “Anyway, we hiked up Upper Hazardous to reposition one of the snow cams, and I fell behind a little, so I could admire his ass…”

  Stella took a long pull of her beer to keep herself from commenting.

  “…And then afterwards I had the brilliant idea of asking him to make two training videos for the mountain. One for the lifties and one for the new ski instructors. For the next six weeks, he’s going to be working with the ops guys and the education department.”

  “That’s nice,” Stella said carefully. But inside, she was yelling, fuck, no! Her job was painful enough without having the man who rejected her wandering in and out of the office all week.

  “I asked him out, too,” Anya added. “And he said ‘oh, Anya, you beat me to it. I was thinking that we should have dinner together.’”

  Stella tried to keep the wince off her face. She was probably at least fifty-percent successful.

  “He said that he liked blue in a girl’s hair especially, and that it probably meant we should get married next week and have four children.”

  Stella’s heart finally restarted when she understood Anya was teasing her. “You are such a bitch.”

  “Gotcha!” Her friend giggled. “I wouldn’t have to pull these stunts if you would just level with me. Something happened with Bear, and you won’t tell me what it was. But you are not over it.”

  Wasn’t that the truth?. “You can ask him all about it when the two of you have dinner,” Stella teased, reaching for the pretzels.

  Anya grabbed the basket and held them up out of Stella’s reach. “You believed me for a minute, didn’t you? The pretzels are held hostage until you spill your guts.”

  “Keep them. I’m only going to get fat anyway since I’m not an athlete anymore.”

  She’d dropped out of all the rest of the freeriding competitions last winter in order to be near Hank. The result was that even the modest sponsorships she’d won had quickly evaporated. So she was back to zero again, and her parents wouldn’t help finance her. “We’d really like to have you around again this season,” was one of their standard lines. “The foundation needs you,” was their other one. Stella didn’t actually for the Windsor Resort itself, even though her desk was in the administrative office. Stella was employed by the Lazarus Family Foundation, a charitable organization that funded her mother’s favorite causes.

  “I don’t get why you can’t compete,” Anya said, setting the pretzels down on the counter. “Why don’t you just nick some foundation money into your own bank account?”

  “Gosh, I don’t know. Maybe because embezzlement is a crime?”

  “Ask for a raise?” Anya suggested.

  “I can’t even work during the winter if I’m competing. There wouldn’t be a paycheck to raise. I think the only thing that will get the point across is if I go for the nuclear option.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Quitting,” she heard herself say.

  “That will fix the cash problem,” Anya teased.

  “But I’m just so stuck! My parents have me tethered to the desk so I won’t go off and maim myself like Hank did. They’re trying to smoke me out, basically. Tie me down until I say ‘uncle’ and go back to school full time.”

  “They mean well,” Anya said softly. “They think they know what’s best for your future.”

  “Just like Hitler.”

  Anya snorted. “Enough about them, then. Let’s talk about Bear. The way he walks into the office lately is interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you know that shed behind my house? In the summertime, there’s a snake living underneath it. Every time I go in there to get my bike, I’m freaking out a little bit, hoping it doesn’t dart out and touch me. That’s how Bear looks when he checks your desk chair.”

  “I’m not going to slither up and bite him. And your snake can’t hurt you, either. Rattlers are rare in Vermont.”

  Anya planted an elbow on the bar and leaned in closely. “Honey, what happened? Did you guys have a thing?”

  Stella sighed. “If by a ‘thing’ you mean an eight-hour sex marathon, then yes. We had a thing. But he obviously did not enjoy it as much as I did. He made it pretty clear that we’re never doing that again.”

  Anya’s eyes became dreamy. “Oh, damn. I can see why that would be hard to get over. But… eight hours?” She picked up the cardboard coaster her beer had rested on, and fanned herself with it. “Doesn’t that pretty much guarantee he was into it? Who wouldn’t want a repeat?”

  “Him. That’s who.” Stella drained her beer. “He said, ‘it was just sex.’”

  Her friend’s eyebrows disappeared behind her bangs. “That’s cold.”

  Stella had thought so too, at the time. But there was something about Bear’s brush-off that just hadn’t rung true. Except… Maybe that was just a lifetime’s worth of foolish optimism talking.

  Last winter had been awful, and Stella would just as soon forget everything that had happened then. Stella remembered feeling hollow for three weeks straight. As if someone could push her over with a proverbial feather. Before her depressing conversation with Bear on the hospital bench, they’d spent a lot of time at the hospital together. And Bear had looked absolutely shattered sitting there under the ugly hospital lighting. Every time Stella moved closer to him, he seemed to shut down a little further. Sure, he’d put an arm around her shoulders, and make sure she got something to eat every few hours.

  But when he looked at her, it was with guilty eyes. And that had frightened her almost as much as her brother’s terrifying medical condition. Her whole life, they’d been there for each other when things got rough.

  Eventually, they were able stop worrying about whether Hank would survive, and mo
ve on to the long-term questions: things like which rehab facility he’d go to, and which wheelchair he needed. That’s when Stella had finally brought it up. “We should talk,” she’d said.

  From the look on his face, she knew that the conversation wouldn’t go well. And she wasn’t wrong. When he finally said, “it was just sex,” she wanted to die right there outside the parking lot entrance.

  But even as his words shredded her with their callousness, the expression on his face didn’t match. And every time she’d accidentally met his eyes since, there was something else there. Something pained. And it hurt her to see it.

  She hadn’t brought it up again, though. How many times could a girl throw herself at the same guy? She was pretty sure she’d already hit the limit. And Stella was smart enough to know that you couldn’t convince someone to love you.

  The last ten months had been horribly lonely. She’d hung around her brother a lot at the beginning. The trouble was that Bear had the same idea. He’d practically pasted himself to Hank, especially after Hank moved into the house on South Hill that their father renovated for him.

  During the past few months, Stella had aborted quite a few missions to visit Hank, because Bear had beat her to it.

  “Stella?”

  She looked up, focusing on Anya’s face again. “Sorry. What did you say?”

  Her friend smiled. “I asked if your brother knows. Did you tell Hank about your tryst?”

  “God no. And I never will.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem, sweetie. It’s against the guy code, you know? Thou shalt not have a sex marathon why thy best friend’s little sister. And those two are really close. Your dad is always saying what a great friend Bear has been since the accident.”

  Stella groaned. “It’s not like I haven’t considered that. Bear has appointed himself my brother’s personal servant and savior. And sure — our extracurricular activities would make for one very awkward conversation. But that excuse only works up to a point, you know? If he actually cared about me, it wouldn’t matter what Hank thought.”