Page 7 of One Last Run

Izzy and Pete had been best friends back in college. They’d been inseparable, whereas Kiera and Danica were also closer to one another than the rest of the group. Maggie was close with everyone, like some twenty-year-old Mercutio who had never had a bad word said about her. Maggie got along well with Izzy, but Izzy had never warmed to Danica, regardless of how much Danica tried to get along with her. Kiera had always thought it was because Izzy had feelings for Pete, but Maggie was confident that it was because Izzy was jealous of Danica’s grades and achievements.

That theory had never sat quite right for Danica though. Danica had been a straight A student on the pre-med track, she’d worked her ass off for scholarships, and she tutored other students on the side. But Izzy was more of a free spirit, a communications major — whatever that meant — and often skipped classes because she was too high to do anything but lie on her bed and listen to music.

Really, Danica chalked it up to the fact that they had almost nothing in common. There was only one tiny sliver of overlap in their friendship Venn diagram, and that overlap was Pete.

Pete was easy to love. She was fun and spontaneous and kind. She was always laughing. It also helped that Pete was stunning, just one of those annoyingly beautiful people. Pete and Maggie had been directly across the hall from Kiera and Danica in their first year of college at Colorado State University. Izzy lived just down the hall, but became practically a third roommate to Maggie and Pete that first year. She slept more often on the futon in their dorm than in her own room. The friendship between the five of them was set in stone on their very first day, when Kiera had suggested they go to the mall to get pet fish for their rooms. They rode the bus to the mall — none of them hadbrought their cars to school — and bought fish and small tanks. On the bus ride home, the bumpy ride was a death sentence for most of their fish, and their night ended with four fishy funerals in the bathroom. Pete was the only one who had managed to keep her fish alive, and so her fish became their communal fish, a shared daughter who lived three entire years, despite the not-exactly-nurturing environment of a freshman college dorm.

“Hey, what was our fish’s name?” Danica called out to Kiera. “I can’t remember.”

“Gilly Joel?” Maggie called out.

“No, that was our fish in the house during our last year. Pete named the first fish George,” Kiera said.

“It was Georgia O’Reef, thank you very much,” Pete said, her voice startlingly close.

Having no idea that Pete had caught up to them, Danica jumped in surprise. She didn’t consider herself a normally clumsy person, and she hated the way skis and ice had now twice made her lose control of her legs. She lost her balance, flailing her poles as she fell sideways onto her hip, her ankles screaming in pain as they bent in her boots. Damn, she’d been proud of herself for not falling more than seven times already, which was her best record. Being a casual skier, at least in her case, meant that she spent the first two days of any ski trip trying desperately to remember what she was meant to be doing.

Pete looked effortlessly cool as she slid to a stop near Danica, bending down and unhooking her binding before stepping off her snowboard with one boot. “You good?” she asked, reaching out to help Danica up.

Danica waved away the hand that was offered to her. “I was fine until you crept up on me like a... creeping creep.”

“A creeping creep,” Pete said, her eyes widening in amusement as she lifted her goggles onto her helmet to look at Danica. “Wordsmith Wendell with the deep cuts here.”

Kiera, Maggie, and Izzy stood near the side of the run, watching. “Are you hurt, Dani?” Kiera asked.

“Just my pride,” Danica responded with a groan, her skis sliding awkwardly as she moved to get up.

Pete reached out again and Danica waved her off, her own annoyance growing. “I don’t need you,” Danica bit out, then paused at the surprise on Pete’s face. She cleared her throat. “I don’t need your help.”

Pete straightened, looking down at her gloves as if she needed to fix them. Her expression was tight, like she was holding back a reply. She bent and reclipped her bindings, her dark curls barely peeking out from the bottom of her helmet.

“How’d you even find us?” Danica attempted a graceful redirection away from her annoyed tone while also ungracefully rolling onto her belly and letting her skis fall to either side of her body, their tips facing up. She pushed herself onto her hands, raising her hips in the air as she shimmied her feet closer together until she felt balanced enough to lean back and stand up. Was it dignified? No. Was it the easiest way she knew how to stand up in skis? Yes. She wasn’t taking any chances of falling in front of Pete again.

Pete fucking Pancott. Danica hated how she had instantly turned into a mood swinging, clumsy mess around the woman. Pete was an ex she hadn’t seen in fifteen years, but those fifteen years made the present moment feel even more odd — she didn’t entirely know where she stood with Pete, or if Pete was just going to pretend they didn’t have a history together. The most irritating part of being around Pete was how attracted Danica still was, which made her feel stupid. Now, her one chance to look polished and put together, she was tripping and short-tempered and awkwardly trying to stand up with two waxed sleds tied to each foot. It wasn’t a recipe for dignified sex appeal,that was for sure. The snow crunched under her skis as she stepped sideways to grab her poles.

“That was like watching a baby giraffe take its first steps,” Izzy piped up while laughing, and Danica was grateful that her goggles concealed her disdain.

“Maggie shared her location in the group chat,” Pete said with a shrug. “We were on See Forever and thought we’d stop seeing forever and instead see if anyone wants to take a break and grab food, though not necessarily in that order.”

That sounded heavenly, and Danica glanced toward Kiera and Maggie. “Do you want to take a lunch break?”

Maggie nodded immediately, and Kiera watched her, as if waiting to follow Danica’s lead.

“Did you want to stay around the slopes or go into town?” Danica asked.

“Probably slopes,” Pete said. “The gondola into town takes forever.”

“Dani, you’d mentioned a place you wanted to try in town, right?” Kiera asked, and Danica could hear the unspoken way Kiera was offering Danica an excuse to spend some more time away from Pete if she needed. Danica tallied it as reason number 483 why Kiera was her favorite person: She’d always been able to read Danica like a book.

She was an idiot when it came to that woman, and she couldn’t trust herself. As soon as she’d seen Pete the day before, a wave of emotions and attraction and memories flooded her senses. Even now, she realized with dismay that the familiar butterflies of excitement appeared when Pete was nearby.

A half hour later, she and Kiera had ditched their gear at the condo, jumped on the gondola into town, and were walking along one of the main streets of downtown, a charming strip of brick buildings with shops and food that blended small town with luxury resort. Ahead of them, the San Juan mountains werewhite tipped, their steep peaks reaching up toward the bright blue sky.

“So, want to talk about your little episode on the mountain?” Kiera asked as they walked through the door of a brewpub. Danica had lived in Denver long enough to know you couldn’t throw a stone in a Colorado mountain town without hitting a brewpub. Most had good beer but extremely average food. The ambiance of this particular establishment was rustic, with long wooden tables and wood paneled walls. Ancient skis and snowshoes hung above black and white photos of people skiing or hiking in what looked like the 1940s. Like most brewpubs, it smelled like yeast and fried foods, and the table was only slightly sticky in places.

“Episode? When I fell?” Danica asked, unwinding her scarf and taking off her beanie, running her hands through her hair to revive her hat-flattened locks. The bangs were new and she wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about them yet. She checked her phone to read a text from her favorite colleague, saying that the baby she’d been texting about the day before was still strong and stable. Even hundreds of miles away, she’d never learned to stop worrying about her patients.

“No, when you yelled at Pete for helping you,” Kiera clarified, giving her a pointed look that could only come from years of practice as a mother and a middle school teacher.

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