Up in the Air
Table of Contents
Your Book Beverage
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Winter Games Series, Book 1
By Dr. Rebecca Sharp
Copyright2017 for Dr. Rebecca Sharp
All rights reserved.
This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by the United Stated of America copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgements
This book means a lot to me. Ok, ok, they all do. But this one is special to me because it hits so close to home. I’m not good at sports. None of them except snowboarding. Snowboarding has been my passion ever since the first year I could join ski club. From that point forward, winter became synonymous with the mountain. I’d rather be cold than hot, on the snow rather than on the sand. I am no expert that is for sure, but I do love this sport. I hope this book – aside from the love story – gives you a sense of just how much the mountain means to me.
M.W. – Thanks for agreeing to take snowboarding lessons with me the first year we did ski club – over 15 years ago. (We won’t be too specific haha.) Here’s to all the mountain dew and lodge food and hot chocolate (but only from the lower lodge!) that we lived on during the season. Remember the time we snowboarded with bunny ears on? #snowbunnies. What else? The bra tree? Hidden flasks? Risking our lives to make it to the mountain for the fresh snow. Oh, and here’s to the time we got caught on Cliffhanger (a double black) that was a sheet of ice and you broke my tailbone. I still love you.
N.B. – This goes out to you for that one night. Ski Club. High school. The night it was so FRIGID that our lift tickets (back when they were stickers) wouldn’t even stick to the little metal holder because it was so cold. The night that my nose was so cold that I couldn’t even suck in air through it without my nostrils collapsing. The night that I successfully landed my first frontside grab and you dubbed me ‘the Queen’ of the mountain… loudly… for everyone on the park (and probably on the whole mountain) to hear. Thank you.
A.R. – Thanks for letting me teach you how to snowboard and showing me that it can be completely normal for someone to be on the park doing rails and jumps on their third day on the mountain. #sonotnormal
To my husband – thank you for letting me suck you in to this world so eagerly. Thank you for not being too mad when I leave you on the beginner trails with our friends so that I can make my way to the top of the mountain and try to get some windburn on my face coming back down. Thank you for not yelling at me when I tell you that I can’t feel my feet anymore because they are so cold, but to ‘please just let me do one more run?’
Ok. Almost done.
Lastly, I want to thank the mountain. Thank you for teaching me hard lessons. Thank you for grounding me. And thank you for teaching me how to fly.
Thank you, my lovely readers, for taking a chance on me! I hope you enjoy the ride!
Xx, Rebecca
“Although I do love oceans, desert, and other wild landscapes, it is only the mountains that beckon me with the sort of painful magnetic pull to walk deeper and deeper into their beauty. They keep me continuously wanting to know more, feel more, see more. To become more.”
– Victoria Erickson
Table of contents
Your Book Beverage
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Your Book Beverage
Effen Good Martini
Ingredients:
Muddled cucumber slices
2 oz. Effen Cucumber vodka
1 oz. freshly-squeezed lime juice
½ oz. agave syrup
5 leaves of fresh mint
Preparation:
Combine ingredients in shaker with ice.
Shake well.
Strain into martini glass.
Garnish with a cucumber wedge.
Enjoy.
Chapter 1
Channing
“You can’t do that, Channing!” My younger sister yelled after me as I slammed the door to my blue Wrangler. I heard her struggle to get out of the passenger side and try to catch up to me. Yanking my snowboard down off the roof, I trudged along the loose-stone path, letting the board hang behind me as some sort of shield against her disapproving tirade.
I knew what she was going to say, but it was too late. I’d already made my decision.
“Alice, you can save your breath; I’m not changing my mind.” My head tilted over my shoulder to inform her. I used her full name as a deterrent, trying to exert my older sister authority over someone who would never listen to me.
“You can’t do this. They are going to find out – and that’s going to be the least of your problems. When Chance finds out, he’s going to kill you,” she continued relentlessly as I opened the garage door of our mountain home – a cabin-esque chalet with large windows to take in the view of the mountains no matter which room you were in.
“He’s not going to find out,” I countered calmly, setting my board up against the wall of the garage, before walking into the house. “Unless you plan on telling him?” With that question, I spun and gave her my very best ice-cold stare.
She had the decency to stop dead in her tracks, eyes widening as she debated how to answer my question – and how to choose between her two siblings.
“No…” The word was soft and reluctant, drawn out just like the thoughts in her head of how to persuade me otherwise. “But, he’s going to find out, Chan.”
“How? He’s not even here and who knows when he’ll be back.” I spun away from her again, unable to hide the lingering resentment in my tone, heading back through the hall straight for the basement stairs towards my twin brother’s room.
Three months ago, Chance had injured himself on the mountain – to the poin
t where the doctors weren’t sure that he’d ever be able to ride again. To say that he’d taken it hard would be the understatement of the century; I was his twin and a snowboarder, and I still couldn’t begin to imagine how he had felt at the news. From the time we were three, we’d been out on the snow, riding mountains. Before school. After school. During school. The mountain called to us and breathed her life into our lungs. After Chance broke his knee, that life support had been ripped from him and as soon as he’d been cleared from the hospital, he’d left Hope Creek; he’d left me.
I clenched my jaw, annoyed at the stinging pain that burned in my chest. He’d left without a word, a warning, a method of contacting him, or a care for the rest of us who were left devastated. He left without saying good-bye. After all of that, saying that no one had heard from him since would be superfluous.
He… We… were turning twenty-five this year – adults by every measure. And we had been for a while. Chance and I had been basically living on our own for the past five years. Lynn and Jason Ryder, while loving parents, had always been more hands-off than helicopter. When we turned twenty, they handed us the keys to the house, hugged us goodbye, and began their comfortable retirement in the warm sun of Delray Beach, Florida, leaving us the mountain retreat that had been our family home for the last twenty years.
I didn’t blame my parents for moving and leaving us. They’d sacrificed a lot when they realized the talents that Chance and I had. They’d uprooted their whole lives when we were four to move to the unpredictable climate of Colorado so that we would have unfettered access to some of the best mountains in the country. Our school was used to students in our situation and made accommodations to our studies so that if it was a good day to be on the mountain, we could be there. They’d supported us, sacrificing jobs, friends, and family so that we could pursue our dreams. When it became clear that we were responsible enough to take care of ourselves, they finally did something for themselves. If anything, I admired them for it.
There hadn’t been a big debate when they’d announced the move. I saw it in my mother’s face that she wanted to ask us to go with them, but knew the question would be pointless; Chance and I would refuse – with every ounce of our beings. We belonged in the cold, on top of a mountain, strapped to a board. Alice, on the other hand, hadn’t been as lucky. She was four-and-a-half years younger than us, which meant that she was under eighteen at the time.
Mom and dad hadn’t given her a choice.
Ally had been upset at first to leave us – even though she didn’t love the snow like we did. Adjusting had been hard for her, but she was only a teen. Change was the norm for that phase of life. It only took a few weeks for her to tan right up. That, combined with a bikini, her bright blonde hair, and the Ryder blue eyes had made her the picture-perfect addition to every beach in the vicinity.
After a few years in the sun and sand, visiting us with our parents during the holidays for a white Christmas, she’d surprisingly asked to move back out here right after graduation. It had come a little out of the blue, but I wouldn’t complain about having another girl in the house; it had been Chance and me for so long, I wasn’t sure I even knew what makeup or women’s clothes looked like anymore. When I asked, Ally told me that it was just because she missed us and wanted a change; she was lying. But, it had been almost five years; how could I expect her to open up easily to someone who wasn’t close to her like that anymore?
Ok, maybe not lying, but there was more to the story that my little sister wasn’t sharing.
“Fine.” Ally huffed behind me. “Chance may or may not find out, but you don’t think the judges will? You don’t think anyone at the competition is going to realize?”
“How would they?” I opened the door to my twin’s room. Everything was exactly where it had been before he left. I hadn’t touched anything, assuming he would be back in a day or two. Well, two days turned into a week and a week turned into a month. And, now, we were on month number three, quickly approaching number four, and there was still no word from him.
Well, today, his time was up.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because Chance was medevacked off whatever mountain you were on and every indication was that he wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.” Ally crossed her arms over her chest as I scanned the room. “You don’t think it’s going to look suspicious that he’s magically better enough to compete?”
No, I thought. It had been over the summer so we’d been up in Canada when he’d fallen, which meant that no one around here knew for sure what happened or the final verdict. I walked over to Chance’s desk, shuffling through the papers, opening up all the drawers.
“Where the hell would he have left it?” I mumbled to myself, rifling through my brother’s personal belongings. Maybe I should have felt like I was intruding, but in my mind, he deserved it for deserting me. Asshole.
You know all of those cliché twin-thing questions that always get asked? Can you read each other’s minds? Do you know what the other is thinking? Is there really such a thing as a ‘twin-thing’? Well, my answer to all of them was always ‘yes’. We’d always been inseparable, even before we started snowboarding. But once that began, we’d almost become the same person. Our classes in school were the same. We had the same snowboard instructors. We went to the same camps. We bought the same boards.
Yes, technically, I should have been riding a women’s board, but I’d always been afraid that Chance was going to leave me in the dust. I was always afraid he was going to be better than me and I wasn’t going to take any chances at putting myself at a disadvantage – so I always bought the same gear that he did. We helped each other, competed with each other, and encouraged each other – always pushing the other to accomplish the next big trick.
There weren’t a lot of females into boarding. Let me rephrase. There were a lot of girls into boarders, not boarding. You know, the kind of girls that curl their hair and do their makeup before heading out on the slopes? The kind that are more worried about a selfie in the snow, rather than experiencing the mountain? Yeah, those. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about girls that are really into riding – those brave souls are few and far between. Living in Aspen – or the outskirts of it – probably put me into contact with more women snowboarders, but after being around my brother and his friends for so long, even when I met those other female boarders, I just didn’t know how to fit in and didn’t have the time or desire to figure it out.
Plus, they weren’t as good as I was. Not to be conceited, but it was the truth. I’d trained with the boys all my life and they were merciless. Especially Chance and his friends; they weren’t dubbed the SnowmassHoles for nothing.
Assholes of Aspen.
Snowmass Assholes.
SnowMassive Assholes.
SnowmassHoles. Of Aspen.
Some things stick with you well after high school has ended.
Anyway, it wasn’t just female snowboarders that I stayed away from; it may have been females in general. In trying to be just like Chance, I seemed to have bypassed all those things that other women seem to enjoy and now, it seemed like just too much work for me to learn how to relate.
I caught sight of myself in the mirror that Chance had hanging on the wall opposite his bed – its particular location serving a purpose that I’d rather not think about. Gray TOMS sneakers, skinny jeans, a loose cotton Henley tee – I looked younger than I was; I also looked like a boy. The tee was loose and long enough to hide the more womanly curve of my ass and the distinctly lacking swells of my breasts. That combined with my androgynously short blonde hair – buzzed on the sides with only a few inches on the top – always had people doing a double take – wondering if Chance and I were twin brothers. Sure, if you looked hard enough, my eyes were slightly more almond-shaped than his, my lips a little fuller, and – if you caught me on an inhale – you might be able to see the hint of my sad excuse for a chest.
I was the tomboy. I was the girl who hate
d makeup and dresses. The girl who drank whiskey with the guys and helped them pick up chicks. I was the girl who preferred snowboots to stilettos.
I didn’t know how to flirt or be coy or play hard-to-get. I knew how to be one of the guys. And I knew how to snowboard.
Ally, who was glaring at me through the glass, was the complete opposite. She, on the other hand, was a girly-girl, the snowboard-gene skipping her entirely. She’d moved out here a year ago and already she had more female friends than I did. I tended to stick with Chance and the other SnowmassHoles from the mountain – Emmett and Nick. Even though I’d gone out with Ally and her girlfriends a few times, I stuck out like a sore thumb. I’d had to borrow some of her clothes and she insisted putting that makeup shit on my face. My face had been streaked with the stuff the next morning and the guys had given me crap for it – mostly Emmett; it was horrible.
I’d been out with the two of them last night, grabbing drinks after a long day on the slopes. Neither of them had heard from Chance, but we’d gotten to reminiscing about all the good times that we’d had on the mountain. Nick had brought up the makeup incident. He’d said that the only thing good about it was that at least people were able to tell Chance and me apart for once.
And just like catching the front edge of your board, his words had me falling flat on my face, and the potential in his joke knocked the wind right out of me. His thoughtless words had inspired my current problematic plan.
The reality was that when we had our gear on, I can’t even count how many times people mistook me for Chance’s identical twin brother – and that was if we were together; by myself, half the time I was mistaken for him.
Even though I was slightly smaller in stature, the nature of snow gear is that it tends to obscure almost everything about a person – except the eyes, only until the goggles went on. Thankfully, all three of us had inherited our father’s bright blue stare. Now, most of the locals at Snowmass knew me because I’d been riding there basically my entire life; they knew that I was Chance’s female twin. Because when you live in a resort town, if you make it through one off-season, everyone learns your name. And I didn’t just make it through an off-season. I was part of a pair that had won countless local and several national snowboarding competitions. Just a local celebrity – no big deal.