“Yeah,” I admit, “although I don’t know if happy is the right word for it.”

“I know.” He puts his gloves back on, claps his hands together, which startles me into looking up. The chair is quickly approaching the top of the mountain.

“So serious talk is officially over. I brought you here to have fun.” He adjusts his ski poles. I do the same. The chair comes up to the top of the hill. I put my ski tips up the way Christian taught me last year. The chair levels out, and I stand up and push off, brush shoulders playfully with Christian as I slip easily by him. I’m a blue square girl now, not a newbie to the skiing thing anymore.

“My little prodigy,” he says with mock pride. He pulls his goggles down over his eyes. Smiles wickedly. “Let’s do it!”

I hardly think about my mom the entire morning. Christian and I braid patterns down the face of the slope, weaving back and forth, occasionally invading each other’s space, cutting each other off, playing around like kids. Sometimes we race, and Christian lets me get ahead a bit before he uses his super-racer powers to leave me in the snow, but he never goes very far without me. He skis at my pace, to my skill level. I appreciate that.

Then he takes me to this powder run he says he loves. We stand at the top, looking down. The sign posted at the side says this is a black diamond: not just difficult, but extra-super, you-might-die-if-you-don’t-know-what-you’re-doing difficult. I stare down at it with wide eyes.

“Oh come on, don’t chicken out now,” Christian practically dares me. “You’re an angel-blood. You’re virtually indestructible, remember? This will be a snap, trust me.”

I never did react well to being called a chicken.

Without saying another word I launch myself down the slope, whooping as I go. It’s a black diamond for a reason, I find. The hill is killer steep, for one thing. And it’s covered in nearly waist-deep fluffy powder that feels like a ton of concrete settling over my skis. Within about thirty seconds I’m completely out of control. In less than a minute I crash and burn. Total wipeout.

Christian whooshes up to me, spraying snow.

“Just so you know, this is the last time I ever trust you,” I say.

“But you’re so cute all covered in snow.”

“Shut up and help me find my ski.”

We search through the powder for a while, but don’t locate my missing ski. After ten fruitless minutes I’m convinced that the mountain has eaten it.

“Thank you so much, Christian.”

“Don’t worry, they might find it—come summer,” he says with a snicker.

He doesn’t expect the snowball I fling at him. It explodes into powdery bits on his chest.

“Hey!” he protests, looking down.

I lob another one at him. This one nails him right in the head. Whoops. “Oh, sorry, seriously. I wasn’t aiming at your . . .” My voice trails off as he calmly sticks his poles in the snow, reaches down to remove his skis, which he then also thrusts upright in the snowbank. “What are you doing?”

“Preparing,” he replies.

“For what?”

“For this,” he says, and then he yells and runs at me.

I scream as he picks me up and tosses me into the snow.

“Not in my coat!” I cry as he stuffs a handful of snow inside my collar. Icy water trickles down my neck. I grab a handful of snow and smear it into his face, pushing back his goggles, then use a burst of my angel strength to hurl him off me, flipping him onto his back and throwing my legs over his. He tries in vain to stop me, but I manage to pin down his arms and get a few clumps of snow into the neck of his jacket. I crow in victory.

“Time to surrender,” I laugh.

He smiles up at me. “Okay,” he says.

Oh.

I stop. We’re both breathing heavy, snow clinging to our hair, melting on our clothes. I stare down at him. Snow floats around us. His eyes are flooded with golden warmth. He’s letting me do this. He’s as strong as I am, or even stronger, but he’s stopped fighting me.

He sucks in his bottom lip for a second, the quickest, tiniest motion, to moisten it.

All I would have to do is close my eyes and let go.

Try it, he says without words, so softly it’s like the brush of a feather in my mind. Let’s find out what’s next.

But there’s hesitation in him too; I feel it.

I sling myself off him awkwardly, and do my best to pretend that what almost happened didn’t almost happen. He sits up and starts brushing snow from his shoulders. Then from the top of the hill a voice suddenly booms down on us. Ski patrol. “Everybody all right down there?”

“Yeah,” Christian calls back. “We’re fine.” He looks at me and his expression suddenly changes. “I found it,” he says, reaching into the snow beside him. “It was here all along.”

“What?” I ask a bit dazedly.

“Your ski.”

That and something else.

“You look like you’ve been having fun.” This from Tucker, who I happen to bump into in the lodge at lunchtime. I feel my cheeks burn, and for a moment I can hardly take a breath, although I try to act calm. Christian, thankfully, is off getting us some food.

“Yep, fun, fun, fun,” I finally respond. “I think I know what I’m doing now. On the slopes, I mean. I’m solidly blue square. Not sure I’m up to black diamonds yet.”

He grins. “I’m glad you finally decided to come up. You hardly ever use that fancy season pass your mom bought you at Christmas.” This is a serious accusation, coming from him. A season pass is more than two thousand smackers. Not using it is like tossing money into the fireplace. It’s a crime.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been kind of preoccupied lately.”

He immediately shifts gears into super-supportive-boyfriend mode.

“Everything going okay?” he asks. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s all right. Having a harder time getting around, I guess.”

“Anything I can do, you holler,” he says. “I’m here for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Want to ski later? I’m teaching Tiny Tot lessons until four, but then we can carve up this mountain. I bet I could still teach you a thing or two.”

“That sounds great, but . . .”

“You probably have to get home to your mom,” he assumes, his eyes sympathetic.

“No, I . . .”

Christian picks this minute to appear behind Tucker, carrying a tray.

“Sorry that took so long. I put everything on it,” he says, nodding at my cheeseburger. “I didn’t know what you liked.”

Tucker turns, looks at Christian, looks at the food, looks at Christian again. “She doesn’t like onions,” he says. He turns back to me. “You came up here with him?”

“Uh, he asked me and I thought it sounded like a good idea. I kind of needed to get out of the house for a while.”

Tucker nods absently, and I’m suddenly aware of how my hair is still wet from the snow melting into it, my cheeks flushed, my skin bright, and it’s not just from the cold.

Get a grip, Clara, I tell myself. Nothing happened. You and Christian are friends, and Tucker gets that, and it’s okay to go skiing with your friend. Nothing happened.

Sorry, Christian says in my head. I’m getting you in trouble, aren’t I?

No. It’s all good, I reply, mortified that he can hear me thinking right now, picking out the guilty thoughts from my brain.

“I was a bit afraid to ask her, frankly,” Christian says to Tucker.

Tucker crosses his arms. “Is that right?”

“I went skiing with her last year, and she almost killed us both.”

Hey, I protest silently. I did not almost kill us. Don’t tell him that.

“Come on, don’t bother denying it,” Christian aims at me.

“It was my first time on a chairlift. Cut me some slack,” I shoot back.

“Well, she was just telling me that she’s getting so much better now,” Tucker says.

“I took her up to Dog Face,” Christian tells him. “You should have seen the wipeout she had. Killer.”