Coming in from the Cold (12 page)

She dreaded telling him, but it had to be done.

Through the window, Willow watched Coach walk away. Her knees felt wobbly, but it was now or never. Without bothering to put on a jacket, she went outside and circled the Jeep.

She saw Dane watching her approach from the driver’s seat, where he sat with the door open. “Hi,” he said warily.

“Hi,” she said, her voice squeaking.

“About the other day…”

She held up a hand to silence him. “Forget the other day,” she said. “There’s something else I need to say.” She watched his face, but it revealed nothing. His face wore the same watchful, intense expression that she’d loved. There was no way he anticipated the bomb she was about to drop.

Willow cleared her throat. “I know you don’t need this right now, and I wouldn’t go there if I was sure I’d see you again…”

He didn’t say anything.

“…and there’s no easy way to say it.” Her throat clenched. “But I’m pregnant. And I thought you’d want me to tell you.”

The way the storm of anger overtook his face was frankly terrifying. First, his eyes grew cold. Then his jaw hardened into a clench. “It can’t be mine,” he said finally.

“It is, Dane,” she swallowed. “I’m sorry, and I don’t want you to feel…”

“That’s
not fucking possible
.” Each word was like a chip of ice. “You told me you were on birth control.”

“I…I made a mistake.” The chill in his eyes frightened her. “I lapsed a little…” She was too afraid to defend herself further. She could only stand there, quivering from stress.

“
Think
, Willow.” He licked his lips. “Did you climb into anyone else’s motor vehicle? Any guy’s bed? The bathroom in a bar? If you’d do it in the back of my Jeep, who knows where else you’ve…”

“
No
,” she said firmly, standing up for herself. “And I would never ask you that.”

“Good point—because I really don’t need to know. How about this—I’ll pay for your abortion either way. Even though you lied to me. We’ll just let that slide.”

Willow’s mouth went dry. This was so much worse than she’d even anticipated. Of all the disappointed things she’d imagined he might say, she hadn’t come close to guessing how downright mean he would be. But weirdly, his callousness helped. Because Willow saw it for what it was. A girl couldn’t study psychology for seven years and not hear the truth through the noise.

This isn’t about me
.

The realization made it easier for her to survive the next sixty seconds. She dug her fingers into her palms. “Dane, I’m sorry for my failure. I didn’t intend to lie, I just didn’t think the universe would be that cruel.”

What he did next surprised her again. He actually laughed, but the sound was bitter, and his face still wore a mask of disgust. “Willow, make no mistake. The universe is
very
cruel.”

Watching him, she’d forgotten to breathe. Now she sucked in air, taking a step backward. “I see,” she said. It would have been easy to start screaming at him then, to tell him exactly what she thought of his coldness. But that would only prolong their encounter. Whatever baggage Dane carried—and it must be considerable—she wouldn’t add to it. The right thing to do was to tell the truth, then take her leave. “I’m sorry. But what I’ve told you is true. And I don’t know what you…” She took a deep breath. “I think you’re better than this.”

“Then you really are a fuckup.”

Okay, we’re done here
, she told herself, beginning to walk away.

“Make the appointment. Promise me.”

She turned her back and accelerated toward her house. She would promise nothing. This really would be all her own decision.

“Hey! I’m still talking to you!” he called after her.

Willow made it all the way back inside her kitchen before she started to cry.

* * *

“Is there a problem?” Coach asked, when he got into the Jeep.

“No,” Dane said, staring into the distance over the steering wheel. He already had the engine running.

“I thought I heard shouting.” Coach pulled his door closed.

“I didn’t hear a thing,” Dane said. He reversed the Jeep in an arc so quickly that Coach put a hand on the dash to steady himself.

“Damn, kid. Where’s the fire?”

Dane turned onto the main road and accelerated toward town. It was a good thing he knew the route to the airport so well, because his mind was practically shutting down with disbelief.

This was bad. Very, very bad. He didn’t have a clue what to do about it.

And it was entirely his fault.

Willow lay on her sofa, staring up at the beams overhead. It was impressively quiet, except for the sounds an old house makes when it settles in for the night. She’d had twenty-four hours to process her awful conversation with Dane. But instead of feeling better, she had only become more depressed.

She sat up and reached for the phone, dialing Callie at home.

“Willow! How are you doing? I’ve been thinking about you all week.”

She sighed. “Callie, I told him. And it could not have gone worse.”

“Oh no,” her friend sighed. “What did he say?”

“I…” Willow realized she didn’t want to repeat it aloud. She didn’t want to revisit his cruelty, it was just so mortifying, to have put herself in that position. “He was mean, Callie. Not a shred of empathy.”

“Bastard!” Callie yelped.

“I wasn’t expecting much—I told you that before. But it was truly awful. And now I’m embarrassed. Because I liked this guy—I really did…” her voice broke.

“Oh, sweetie. I’m so sorry.”

“I thought I was a good judge of character,” she cried. “I think I had this silly idea…” she couldn’t even finish the sentence. But it was true. A tiny little part of Willow’s heart had hoped that he would come around. She’d had no reason to think that he would—only the peculiar notion that he’d been as affected by her as she had by him.

It was ridiculous. And he’d turned out to be rotten.

Callie began to sound teary, too. “Honesty is supposed to be the best policy. But sometimes honesty bites us in the ass.”

“He made it very clear that he expects me to get an abortion.”

“Oh, my God. He
expects
you to? Isn’t that your decision?”

“Of
course
it’s my decision. But hearing him…ouch. It’s harder to make my own decision now that I know how he really feels. I wish I could un-know it. I wish I could un-hear him say those words to me. He was scary, Callie. I’ve never seen anyone get so angry and cold.”

“Wait—scary how? Did he threaten you?”

Willow wiped her face with her sleeve. “No. Not at all. It’s hard to explain, now that I think about it.” She shivered, picturing the change on his face—eyes going from lit and intelligent to cold-blooded rage. The place he’d gone inside his head…it was somewhere primal.

“You know what bothers me about that?” Callie asked. “Travis. Remember how he said the family was nuts? People say that all the time. But you think he meant it literally?”

“That sounds too Victorian, Callie. Like a chapter from
Wuthering
Heights
. Mental illness isn’t like hair color—jumping neatly from one kid to the next.”

“You’re the shrink.”

“I’m the shrink who doesn’t know what to think. I’m a bad Dr. Seuss rhyme.”

“Willow, you have to hang in there, okay? This is the low point. You’re going to take some very deep breaths. And when you’re good and ready, you’ll make your decision.”

“The hardest part?” Willow swallowed. “One of the things he said feels true.”

Callie sighed. “I’ll bet it isn’t.”

“He said, ‘You really are a fuckup.’ And it’s hard to argue the point.”

“No, it isn’t,” Callie argued. “Deep breaths, Willow. I mean it.”

“Callie, a lot of things have gone wrong for me this year. But every one of them could be at least partially explained away by bad luck. But this one is all on me.”

“Semantics. There were two people in that…Jeep.”

“Bed, actually. Round two was when he said ‘we don’t have another condom’ and I said ‘it doesn’t matter.’” Willow blew out a breath. Saying it out loud was bracing. “Only it
did
matter.” She began crying again.

“Oh, Willow,” Callie said again.

* * *

Dane had a splitting headache during the course inspection.

“And now we discover the pitfalls of training at low altitudes,” Coach said, handing Dane another bottle of Evian water.

“Don’t,” Dane said, taking a swig. “I don’t need you piling on me, too.”

“Who’s piling on you?” Coach asked. “I’m on your side, here. Let’s get a better look at the fourth pitch,” Coach suggested, sidestepping downhill. “I like the left side of the big jump.” He put his thumbs together, palms out, as if framing a photograph. “That sets you up on the fall line into the carousel turn.”

“Right.” Dane rolled his head to the left and shook out his neck. He had to get his head in the game. Dane watched the competitors around him, leaning forward on their ski poles, moving their arms in a hypnotic way, like jellyfish tentacles, as they visualized hightailing it down the course. This was a Super-G course, meaning that the gates were few and far between, and speed rather than agility would win the day.

The usual race day mayhem surrounded them. Dane was never thrown off by the hundreds of people lined up just beyond the orange safety netting. He was never thrown off by competitors determined to beat him. And he was never thrown off by fear.

But today he was just plain thrown.

“Dane, are you going to be okay?” Coach asked for the hundredth time.

“Stop fucking asking me,” he growled.

The truth was he was far from okay. Willow’s announcement had rattled him to the core. Dane absolutely could
not
have a child. If he did, that meant that some poor kid would grow up just like him—waiting in dread for the symptoms to show up and tear his body apart. And Willow would have to watch it all happen. She’d outlive her child by a good twenty years at least.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. When Dane died, the family illness would stop killing people. He meant to be its very last victim.

He didn’t sleep last night—he couldn’t stop thinking about Willow. Her announcement had put him in the perverse position of hoping that she really
had
been sleeping around. It would be better for everyone if she was pregnant by someone else and only hoping to pin it on him. He tried to imagine that it was possible—that she’d done the math—figuring he’d made millions in endorsement money after the last Olympics.

Christ. She wasn’t the type. She would never be the type.

Her unluckiest day was the day she’d met him.

Dane’s headache had only partly receded by the time he made it into the start house. He was starting tenth, and the first seven were already down. There had been only one crash so far—an unlucky Norwegian who’d caught an edge on the second pitch, flying ass first into the safety netting. Dane bounced up and down in his ski boots to keep his feet warm.

“Danger.”

He turned around to find one of his so-called teammates, a guy named J.P., calling to him. J.P. had scored a twelfth place start, better than he usually got.

“Yeah?” Why would the guy want to chitchat when he was three minutes from launch?

“I just heard the Germans radio up that the second jump is chewed on the left,” J.P. said.

Dane stared him down. “Are you sure that’s what they said?”

“
Ja. Absolut.
My mother is German.” J.P. winked.

Dane flexed his knees, trying to think. He turned back to J.P. “Why isn’t Harvey calling it up?”

J.P. shrugged. “No clue. But I’m taking the right side. Makes a nastier radius into the carousel, but if it keeps me on my feet….”

Fuck
. Was this guy pulling his chain? Dane had already plotted his course. This asshole was probably just trying to rattle him. J.P. had never beat Dane in a race. But this year, the younger man was performing better than ever. Perhaps feeding a few doubts to Dane was part of his big strategy.

Dane heard his name called by the judge in the start house. He stepped forward, and his long boards were slammed onto the snow in front of him. Dane clipped in, staring down the course, clenching his jaw.

Coach hustled over, checking Dane’s bindings. “What’s the matter?” he asked quickly.

“Nothing. Fuck it,” Dane said, snapping his goggles down. He shook out his quads, gripped the starting gate and stared on to the course. He focused his gaze right between the blue lines, while the start counter began to beep its warning pitch.

Behind him, his competitors began to call out. “Kill it, Dane! Like a boss!”

When the start counter chimed, he launched himself forward, poling madly to accelerate. Then gravity kicked in, the icy pitch slanting away beneath him until he felt the familiar roller-coaster drop. Dane tucked his poles under and bore down into an aerodynamic bullet position. The first turn was to the left. He rolled his skis onto their edges, his legs and boards hugging the slope, his muscles stepping up to handle the g-force of the sudden curve.

His headache forgotten, years of training and muscle memory kicked in. The next two turns came in quick succession, and he held his line. He was entering the fastest part of the course now. A lesser skier would lose his nerve, dialing back to keep things in check. But Dane watched the first jump rush up at him. He leaned his shoulders forward and welcomed the air. Over the years, dozens of journalists had used the phrase “death wish” to describe his aggressive style. In Dane’s world, there were only two certainties—death and gravity. Every other human being on the planet lived with the same constraints, of course. It was just that Dane was more keenly aware of them than most other people ever were.

Dying in a high-speed crash would be no worse than wasting away in a nursing home. Any risk was justifiable when no one depended on you. Who would it even hurt?

Willow
.

Even as he reached seventy-five miles an hour, the image of her shot through his guilty brain. And even that infinitesimally brief flicker of her was enough to alter his consciousness. As he landed the first jump, his skis hit the snow at almost the same nanosecond. Almost, but not quite. There was a bobble in his right ski. He squared his shoulders and corrected his position, preparing for a hard turn to the right.