He looked right into my eyes as he said it. “I know, Aurora.”
Chapter 23
The next three weeks went by in basically a blur.
With the changing colors of the leaves, something inside of me changed right along with them. Maybe it was the sheer fear I’d experienced on the Hike from Hell that had been the catalyst, or maybe it was just something in the cool air, but I felt some part of myself growing. Settling too. This place that I had come back to, where I had spent some of my best times and the single worst moment of my life, embedded itself into my skin even deeper with each passing day.
I wanted to live. It wasn’t like that was a new thought, but there was a difference between living and living, and I wanted the latter. I wanted the latter more than anything. An entire life could change in a single moment, with one action, and in a way, I had forgotten that.
Maybe every day wouldn’t be perfect and it was na?ve to expect that, but every day could be good.
This place was where I wanted to be, and I found myself embracing everything even closer than before. I absorbed even more of my relationship with Clara and my friendship with customers who sure started to feel more like friends. I appreciated my teenage friends even more too.
In fact, the only thing I hadn’t embraced had been Rhodes.
It had been two weeks by that point since he’d left, and he hadn’t managed to come visit yet. Supposedly, he’d been on his way to visit for the day when he’d gotten called back to Colorado Springs—a four-hour drive away—with an emergency. I still saw Amos just about every day between getting dropped off by the school bus and picked up by his uncle. He told me all about his dad calling him every day and had even—not so subtly—mentioned how Rhodes asked about me too.
But Rhodes didn’t call me or text me, and I knew he had my number.
I thought that everything that had happened with us before had been some kind of turning point, I was sure it was, but… maybe he was extra busy. And I tried not to wallow in worrying about things I couldn’t control. And how someone felt about you was one of those.
I was just trying to keep on living my life and settling in even more in the meantime, and that was exactly why that morning, three weeks after the Hike from Hell, I found myself getting a dubious look from Amos as I clutched my helmet, trying to give him a reassuring smile.
“Are you sure?” he asked, putting on the wrist guards that I was sure Rhodes had insisted he wear when he’d given him permission to go to the ski resort with me. I had mentioned to him two days before that I wanted to go. I had never been snowboarding. I knew for sure I’d gone skiing with my mom back when I’d been younger, but that was it. It hadn’t snowed in town yet, but a couple of nights had dropped enough snow this high in the mountains to open some parts of the resort.
I focused back on the teenager in front of me in a matching green jacket and helmet he’d explained that his mom and other dad had bought him last season. “Yes, I’m sure. Go with your friends. I’m sure I can figure it out.”
He didn’t believe me, and he wasn’t even trying to pretend otherwise. “Do you remember what I told you? About using your toes and heels?”
I nodded.
“Keeping your knees bent?”
I nodded again, but his features stayed reluctant. “I promise. It’s fine. Go. See? Your friends are waving at you.”
“I can go down with you once to make sure. Getting off the lift is kind of tricky—”
This was exactly why I loved this kid. He could be so quiet, stubborn and surly—just like his dad—but he had a heart of gold too. “I just saw a little four or five-year-old do it. It can’t be that hard.”
Amos opened his mouth, but I beat him to it again.
“Look, if it’s going really bad, I’ll text you, deal? Go with your friends. I got this.”
“K.” He looked like he wanted to keep arguing but barely stopped himself from it. Amos turned around to grab his snowboard from the rack he’d propped it on and muttered in a way that made me feel like he genuinely thought he would never see me again, “Bye.”
Well, that didn’t sound foreboding.
I snapped my helmet on, tugged my gloves on over the wrist guards I’d put on while waiting for Amos to buy his season pass, and trudged over to the lift that would lead up to the top of the bunny hill after grabbing my own rented snowboard from the rack. I’d rented it from the shop at an extremely discounted rate. I’d spent the night before looking up videos for how to snowboard, and it didn’t look that hard. I had decent balance. I’d taken a couple of surfing lessons with Yuki before, and they had gone pretty well… at least until the surfboard had clipped me in the face and my nose had started bleeding the last time.