Page 82 of Last Summer

When Nathan reaches Scott, the Canadian couple follows, then Trey, until eventually, they all reach the PZ. Scott comes over the com, giving Cam the signal they’re ready for a pickup.

Nathan loads first and their eyes meet. She can tell he wants to tell her how epically awesome it was, but his words would only get lost in the noise of the copter. Instead, they share a smile. He’ll tell her all about it when they get back to base.

They follow this pattern for another three drops, until they reach the highest ridge of the day, where they’ll be able to cut lines in a sixteen-hundred-foot run at almost a fifty-degree angle. After they unload at the LZ, landing zone, Scott gives the signal and Cam lifts off. They fly down the mountainside and cut a wide circle so that Ella can watch. Scott takes off, and when he reaches the first safety zone, she has her camera ready.

Nathan descends the mountainside, following Scott’s trail. Ella lifts her camera and the good vibe inside the helicopter plummets. Cam swears.

Ella lowers her camera and looks around, thinking something’s wrong with the helicopter. But Cam’s attention isn’t on the controls. It’s locked outside.

Ella looks in the same direction and gasps. Her chest clenches as her mind tries to catch up with what she’s seeing. Scott, skiing for his life, with Nathan right behind. The entire mountainside has ripped out from under them. Avalanche. And the wave of snowpack is gaining on Nathan.

Scott, who has a couple hundred yards on Nathan, quickly skis out of the avalanche’s path. He radios in to Cam. “You seeing this?”

“Yep. Coming in.” Cam closes in on the mountain, ready for the pickup when they’ll need it. “Ski, you bastard,” Cam mutters into the com. There isn’t anything he or Ella can do but watch in silent horror as Nathan tries to outski the rushing snow.

Ella realizes that watching an avalanche as it’s happening is a whole different game than playing a YouTube video where she can speed ahead to skip the horrific parts or stop it and walk away. She couldn’t look away even if she tried. She can only watch, stunned speechless, as Nathan points his skis downhill and furiously digs in his poles to get away. But the avalanche consumes him, and suddenly, he’s tumbling, flipping head over skis, over and over and over.

The last thing Ella hears before Nathan disappears under a white sheet are Scott’s clipped words over the com. “He’s heavy. Going down hard.”

“You keep that up and we won’t get any sleep.”

After spending the afternoon at the medical clinic and a better part of the evening downstairs with Scott and his crew as they exchanged tales of their own near-death experiences, Ella finally has Nathan alone in their room. He’s whole, he’s alive, and she can’t stop touching him. His body isn’t having issues reacting to her ministrations either.

“Sorry.” She adjusts his flannel sleep pants so that the elastic waistband doesn’t press into the large contusion on his left hip.

Aside from a couple of bruised ribs, some contusions, and a dislocated shoulder, compliments of an old motorbike injury, Nathan survived the avalanche unscathed. On the grand scale of avalanches, it was minor. Just a shelf of snow that broke off, triggered on Nathan’s descent. As soon as the snowpack had slowed and Nathan stopped sliding, he radioed to Scott that he was okay, even dug himself out before Scott could ski to him. Nathan was already standing and talking about the burn in his shoulder before the Canadian couple and Trey skied down the mountainside after him.

A lot of things come into play to trigger an avalanche, but Scott thinks this one happened because the fresh powder fell onto a section of harder packed snow.

Small avalanche or not, it’s not something Ella wants to witness again. Her hands shake as she helps Nathan into his shirt since his arm’s in a sling. No wonder Stephanie worried for Nathan. She can’t imagine feeling this way every time he left the house.

Ella tugs his shirt to his waist and Nathan sinks onto the bed. “I ache.”

So does she. Dead center in her chest.

She bites into her lower lip and distracts herself by adjusting the bedcovers over Nathan. Between the business deal with Scott, his pending divorce, and his injuries, Nathan has enough to contend with. The last thing he needs is a blubbering mess hovering over him.

But she can’t help it. The scene on the mountain keeps replaying in her head. Nathan tumbling, on the wrong side of control, disappearing, buried alive under a layer of snow. Who cares if those layers were only inches of loosely packed powder and all he had to do was lift his head and shake off the snow? It was still scary to witness. A tear glides down her cheek, and another slides and clings to her chin. Nathan watches her curiously. Embarrassed, she turns away and wipes her face.

“Hey,” he murmurs.

She turns back to him, dragging her sleeve-covered fist across her cheekbone.

“Come here.” Nathan stretches his arm across the pillow, inviting her into bed.

She slides under the covers and snuggles up against him, mindful of his bruises. He smells of the hospital, antiseptic and bleach, and she’s unexpectedly taken back to the morning she forgot Simon, those same smells fresh in her nose. She buries her face into his shirt and cries.

“Why do you do these things?”

He lifts a hand to her hair, massages the back of her head. “I want to feel alive.”

Heli-skiing, wingsuit flying, even speedgliding, a crazy-insane parachuting and skiing mash-up. He’s done so much and even though he told her during their sessions that he wishes he could do more—Everest, BASE jumping, and Antarctica trekking, to name a few—he swore to himself that he was done. But now that he is divorcing Stephanie and has had a taste of the extreme again after a long hiatus, Ella wonders if he’ll be able to abstain.

“Is it worth getting yourself killed in the process?”

The words are out before she can think otherwise. Nathan tenses underneath her. She already knows why. It’s something Stephanie would have said to him.

“You aren’t thirty years old anymore,” she risks saying. “Actually, you’re closer to forty than thirty,” she says, trying for levity.

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