Page 33 of Good as Gold
She wouldn’t, though, if she knew all the details. He’s not about to admit that, not with the warm glow of her praise settling inside his chest.
Sure, his job is very cool. He works for Cat Tracks Tours—an Aspen company that runs private ski and snowboard excursions into the wilderness. Seven hundred dollars gets you a day of backcountry skiing on a snow cat—a heavyweight vehicle that’s a cross between a tank and a tractor. It carries eight skiers and their gear uphill at four miles per hour.
Matteo is paid twenty dollars an hour—plus tips—to ski at the back of the customer groups to make sure they get down the terrain without getting lost or injured. If he’s lucky, he’ll be promoted to be a full-on guide next year. And if that goes well, he can start angling to work on helicopter tours, too.
But living on his own is so much harder than he’d expected. He’s already on his third job, because the first two were unbearable. For the first few weeks he’d sharpened skis in a windowless room on the ski mountain. The pay was bad, and the manager was always yelling at him to work faster.
By the second week, he’d mentally torn up the business plan he’d shown Lyle Giltmaker. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life waxing other people’s skis. He’d traded up to a shift in an on-mountain cafeteria. It had been fun riding the chairlift to work and riding his board down afterwards. But the money was terrible, and everyone who worked there cared only about the next kegger and the cheapest weed.
Thank God for the snow cat gig. Now he’s paid to be outside all day, and the owner of the company is an interesting man. He’s figured out how to charge hundreds of dollars an hour for bringing tourists to land hedoesn’t even own. Best scam ever.
When the chairlift arrives at the summit, he follows Leila down an exhilarating run. Before Colorado, he hadn’t known that a ski run could be so steep. Blankets of snow over endless terrain.
He lets Leila have first tracks, of course, just as if he were shepherding tourists at work. By now, he’s anexcellentsnowboarder. Good thing, since it’s really his only life skill.
Today it’s all that matters, though. He and Leila areflying. Her cheeks are pink, and she can’t stop smiling. So he doesn’t either.
On the next lift, he tells her about the teenage boy he had to coax down the hill, turn by turn, after the poor kid had a panic attack at the top. He tells her about the oldest clients he’s met so far. “Seventy-four years young and married for fifty years.”
“Whoa!” She grips the safety bar and laughs. “I want to be those old people someday. Still having fun.”
“Yeah, me too.”
He doesn’t tell her everything, though. Like how hungry he is sometimes on his strict twenty-dollars-a-day budget. Or the way his wallet was pickpocketed the only time he went to a party with the stoners.
How scary it is to suddenly have nothing, and no one.
He doesn’t describe the icky bunkroom he calls home. Or the way that it always smells like feet. Those details feel unimportant today, anyway. There’s only the mountain and the sound of Leila’s laughter.
They ride for hours, until Leila claims to be dying of hunger. So they waste part of the last hour of the ski day sitting at a table in an on-mountain cafeteria, where Leila buys him a four-dollar cup of soup in spite of his claims that he isn’t hungry.
He devours it, of course, while watching her dip Fritos into her chili.
“This is a perfect day, isn’t it?” she says as they look out the window at the ski slope.
“Pretty much,” he says. But that’s an understatement. It’s the best dayever. The sun is shining, and he has her all to himself.
Leila drops her plastic spoon into her empty chili bowl and says something startling. “Look, I don’t have any right to ask. But you’ll come back to Vermont someday, won’t you?”
“Why? Is everything okay?”
“Well, yeah, but…” She props her head in her hand and studies him with big eyes. “I miss you. Kind of a lot.”
His heart explodes.
“And so does Rory.”
He deflates just as quickly.
“It’s just not the same,” she says, looking down at her empty bowl. “I know that’s just life. I won’t even be around next year.”
“You’ll be in Burlington,” he clarifies, because she’s going to college in the fall.
“Right.” She shreds the wrapper from her straw into tiny pieces. “But I just… I can’t stand the idea that we might not be close anymore. It just feels wrong. And I wondered if you felt that way, too.”
When she lifts her vulnerable brown eyes to his, he almost can’t breathe. “Absolutely,” he says. “You’re way too important to me.”
Her face does something complicated. Her eyes warm to his, and he has to clamp his jaw shut to avoid saying anything even more revealing.
