Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

CODY

“ A ren’t you concerned that your sweet, precious baby sister has been alone with Mr. Bohemian Man Slut in there for about two hours now?” Darcy asks me as she takes a nonchalant sip from her margarita.

She glances at me out of the corner of her eye, and I swear I see a glimmer of mischief. She has a valid point. I should be concerned about my sister’s new admirer. However, I am more concerned with what Maya will do to me if I interfere. It’s every man for himself when it comes to my sister. She is a sweetheart and a lover. She falls in love hard and fast. But…she also falls out of love just as quickly. If Louis is dumb enough to put himself in the line of fire and become the new shiny object of Maya’s affections, there’s nothing I can do to help, though God knows I want to. I mean, come on— Louis ?

Of all people. Louis.

My sister sure knows how to pick them. Leave it to her to find the biggest womanizer in the resort and try to domesticate him.

I expertly change the subject. “Aren’t you concerned that we’ve been left alone for two hours now, and you haven’t clawed my eyes out with your bare hands yet?”

Darcy takes another sip. She looks at me with a smirk that makes it hard to distinguish whether she’s joking or not when she says, “I don’t typically commit felonies until I’ve had at least three drinks, but who knows? Maybe I’ll snap early.”

By my count we’re at least four drinks in now and my inhibitions are lowering by the minute.

I’m man enough to admit that Darcy is a lot cooler than I initially thought she could ever be. She’s got awesome music taste, she makes crude jokes (and laughs at my crude jokes), and she’s fun to debate with about almost anything. But most of all, she’s just easy to be around. I forgot what that felt like. It’s not like with everyone else. I don’t have to act like Mr. Polite Ski Instructor, who doesn’t have an unprofessional bone in his body. Though, I’m not exactly good at that role all of the time.

If I was getting drinks with anyone else in this resort, the silences between us would be uncomfortable. I would likely try to start a new conversation or fill the empty voids. But with Darcy, the silence isn’t nearly as loud and suffocating. It’s… well, easy. It takes me back to being fourteen, sitting with her in my parents’ basement. Maya would be off designing a dress or writing a play, and it would just be the two of us. We’d just sit there in the sweetest silence for hours. She would read a book, and I would sketch her, paying attention to every little detail of her face when she was too comfortable to notice. I still have those drawings somewhere. I never told her about them. I think it might be too late now.

I hope she doesn’t notice my nervous gulp. It’s not that I’m scared of Darcy per se, but, well… I’ve seen what this woman can do to a man. In high school, a little while after we stopped speaking and starting hating each other, her date to the homecoming dance left in tears after she tore him to pieces on the dance floor for ogling the cheerleaders, and she was only a freshman at the time. That’s when I realized she wasn’t as dorky as I thought. That’s when I saw her in a new light. In the way all the other boys at school saw her. I had felt so confused before, after we kissed in junior high and I started seeing her differently. I didn’t like it. She had always been nerdy, bookworm Darcy to me. The little kid I’d grown up with.

I’d hate to imagine what became of the boys who dared to fight for her attention when she got older. Although, I suppose that side of her isn’t quite as prominent anymore; it hasn’t been since junior year, when she met Milo. I remember Milo—well. In fact, we were friends for the first couple of years of high school until I quit athletics as a junior. We were on the wrestling team together. He was a real macho, tough guy. He was big for his age, handsome and confident and arrogant as could be. But the girls loved him. They literally tripped over their feet to even be near him. All except for one. Darcy. Darcy did not trip over her feet for anyone. I think that’s part of what made her so appealing to everyone.

Humans inherently want what they can’t have, and no one could have Darcy. She was notorious for agreeing to a single date and then dumping the poor bastard as soon as he paid for her dinner. Or at least, those were the rumors. It’s hard to say just how true they were. Our school loved to talk, especially about the redheaded girl with a temper as fiery as her hair. Milo was the only one to ever really break through her walls, and boy , did he have to work for it. Maya would come home every day and swoon over the new elaborate way Milo asked Darcy out, just for Darcy to say no and for Milo to promise to try again the next day. If I remember correctly—and I almost always do—he finally won her over with a truly terrible interpretation of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” He never was all that bright, but somehow, he accomplished something that no one else ever could—winning Darcy’s heart. And then the fool so easily gave it away.

I don’t understand it. I don’t think I ever will. I’m sitting here, and I’m looking at her, and she’s beautiful. But even more than that, Darcy is the kind of person who makes you feel truly seen when she looks at you. She listens and she reacts and she cares. She’s quick to judge and stubborn as hell but she cares . Most people don’t care anymore. Milo is the biggest idiot in the world for giving this up. For giving her up.

I had a woman as strong and fearless as Darcy once, and if I could go back and keep her with me, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I would never let her go. But here Darcy is, completely alone because the person she devoted everything to sold her out. He gave it all up so freely. So now, what’s left? Her light is gone. She’s like an angel with clipped wings, trapped with her immortal pain while the couples, so full of love and life, pass her by like only her time is standing still and theirs is moving on, full speed ahead.

“Can I ask you something?” Darcy enquires, yanking me from my quickly derailing thoughts.

A stray lock of her fiery hair falls across her cheek, and I have to fight the urge to brush it away. My fingers twitch with the desire to touch her.

I notice how her lips move as she talks, pink and inviting. The way she gestures animatedly, her slender fingers cutting through the air. I catch a whiff of her perfume – something floral and intoxicating.

Suddenly, I realize how close we've gotten. I can see the faint dusting of freckles across her nose, count each of her eyelashes. My heart races, and I quickly take a swig of my drink to hide my reaction.

Darcy's words falter, and I wonder if she feels it too – this crackling tension between us. Her eyes meet mine, and for a moment, I forget how to breathe. I clear my throat, trying to focus on what she's saying and not on how badly I want to close the distance between us.

"Sorry," I mumble, leaning back slightly. "What were you saying?"

Darcy blinks, seeming to come back to herself. "Oh, um, right. I was just seeing if I could ask you something?”

I gather myself, blinking the image of Darcy from my mind, and nod. “Yeah, ‘course.”

“Why are you here? And I don’t mean here in this bar. I mean here , in this resort, in Colorado, over a thousand miles away from home. You could’ve gone anywhere. You could’ve stayed in Ohio. Why are you here?”

The question catches me off guard. I don’t think I know the answer to it. Not really. I know why I left home initially—I wanted to explore. Become my own person and see the world a bit before settling down. But that was years ago. I’ve explored. I’ve grown. I’ve fallen in love, and I’ve had my heart broken. I’ve picked apart every piece of myself until I knew myself inside and out. And yet, I’m still here, in a dim bar on a snowy mountain.

“This place…” I start, then I stop because the words I was about to utter don’t feel right. I don’t think any words will be enough to properly express what this place means to me. “A lot has changed since I last saw you,” I finally say. “I’ve changed. This place has changed with me. It fits in a way that home just doesn’t anymore. Being back there feels like being a rat in a cage. I’m free here—for the most part, anyway. I don’t know if I’ll always be happy here. I doubt it. But for now, I am. And in my fickle twenty-five years of life experience, true happiness can be hard to find. Once you get it, you don’t ever let it go.” Darcy’s looking at me in a way that no one has looked at me in a very long time. I hate it. The last person who looked at me like that…

No.

This is too hard. It was easy when Darcy just wanted to fight. It was natural and comfortable and... not this . This is utter misery. This feels like someone is clawing at my chest and squeezing my heart until it bursts. Why is she looking at me like that?

Before I can even really think of what I’m doing, I stand up. The movement is so abrupt that the stool I was sitting on teeters and threatens to tip over.

Darcy’s brows furrow together. I want to tell her that it’s not her fault, but it is her fault. Because she’s so beautiful and I can’t help but think that she might be the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. But I can’t think that. I’m not allowed, for so many miserable reasons. So I need to leave.

“I’m gonna go check on Maya,” I sputter out and walk away before Darcy can say anything to stop me.

My heart pounds in my ears. My chest is heavy. My stomach rolls. The last woman to make me this utterly sick…

This isn’t happening again. It can’t. I won’t let it. These kinds of things never end well, especially not when it comes to my baby sister’s best friend. That’s all Darcy is to me. That’s all she’s ever been. All that she can be. She’s not a beautiful woman. She’s not inquisitive or smart or breathtaking. She’s just Darcy. Maya’s Darcy. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s how it has to be.

I find Maya lounging on the couch in the employee lounge with Louis rubbing her “hurt ankle”. She’s most certainly lying about the severity of the injury to get Louis to dote on her. That’s Maya’s M.O. and I can’t even blame her for it. If I could get someone to do anything I wanted with the mere snap of my fingers, I absolutely would.

“Enjoying yourself?” I ask my sister, sitting down next to her and throwing my arm around her shoulders.

She barely hides a smirk and nudges my side with her elbow. “I’m just in so much pain. Louis was so sweet to offer to massage my leg for me.”

I hum. “Well, that’s Louis for you. Most considerate guy in the resort.”

Maya grins and looks around me, scanning the area. “You and Darcy have been gone awhile, and I can’t help but notice that she isn’t with you. You didn’t kill her, did you?”

“Oh, not yet. I’ve got her tied up in the janitor’s closet. She just would not stop yapping about climate change, so I had to shut her up somehow.”

Maya giggles and exclaims in exasperation, “Cody!”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” I assure her amusedly. “For the most part, anyway. She did talk about climate change for twenty-five minutes, but she’s safe and sound at the lounge bar. Think she wants you to join her. She got tired of my shitty company.”

“You are great company,” Maya tells me. “But you’re probably right. I promised her that I wouldn’t leave her alone on this trip. Especially not after our last trip—you remember? I took her to L.A. and?—”

“And you disappeared with Ash the Surfer Bro for three days?” I fill in, smiling at the memory. Maya said that Darcy didn’t talk to her for two weeks after that—rightfully so. But Maya certainly didn’t mean anything bad by it. She just gets distracted so easily. She takes after our mother in that respect. No matter how hard they try, they just like to wander.

“I know, it was so bad,” Maya groans. “And now I’m doing it again! But I can’t help it.” She frowns down at the boy on his literal knees for her. “He’s so cute. And so sweet. And I do really, really think we’re soulmates. Right, Lou?”

Louis looks up upon hearing his name and beams at Maya. “Right, gorgeous.”

If you were to tell me that Maya was secretly a witch or a siren, capturing men and putting them under her spell, I would not be surprised in the slightest.

“So,” I say, “should I go break the news to Darcy that she’s going to have to entertain herself for the foreseeable future?”

Maya smiles sheepishly. “Yes, please. But tell her it’s just for tonight! Starting tomorrow, it’s just me and her. The perfect girls trip, I promise.”

“Don’t promise me,” I tell my sister. “Promise Darcy. ‘Cause she’s gonna be pissed.”

Maya grimaces. “Don’t I know it.”

I push myself off the couch. “I’ll pass along the message for my poor broken soldier. Then I’m heading to my room. See you in the morning?”

Maya nods. “See you in the morning.”

The last thing I want to do is show my face around Darcy after I made such an utter fool of myself before, but she deserves an explanation for why she’s spending the night alone. Really, it should be my sister explaining, but I suppose I’ll have to do.

The plan is to find her, tell her where Maya is, and then get the hell out before I can be pulled into her gravitational force again.

But as my plans typically do, they get a little off track.

She’s right where I left her, of course. Nursing the same margarita at the bar. I sit down next to her and pretend like nothing happened before, smiling and greeting her as usual. Thankfully she doesn’t push about me leaving so strangely. I tell her that Maya won’t be very good company for the night and probably the rest of the trip, if I had to guess. She takes it well—she’s not surprised—but when I start to walk away, I see her stare down into her drink with the kind of agony that only true loneliness can bring. And I know I can’t leave. What kind of person would I be if I left her like that?

So I stay.

I sit next to her for the next three hours, and we talk about everything. We talk about home, our travels, our lives. The conversation doesn’t get deep enough to truly terrify me, but it’s enough to make me antsy. It’s like she’s my friend again. Like she never wasn’t. I’m not sure how to feel about it. Everything always felt so easy with her. I could tell Darcy any and everything our entire childhoods. And it still somehow feels the same, even though I left. Even though she doesn’t see me as someone to be trusted anymore. I never realized how much I really missed her until now. And it’s even harder because she’s better now. She’s exactly how she used to be, but stronger. Like a more concentrated version of herself.

And when the night is over, and I’m walking her up to her room, it dawns on me that I don’t want to part with her.

“Ya know, you can come out on the slopes with me,” I tell her. “Since Maya seems to be kind of preoccupied. I mean, you don’t have to, obviously, but if you don’t want to be cooped up in this room all week, come join me.”

Darcy smiles, and I’m so sure she’s going to say yes. She’s going to be so grateful that I’m there, and she’s going to become my best companion.

But then her smile fades.

“Thank you, Cody, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I’d really rather just hang out here and wait for Maya to come back. But again, thank you. I do appreciate the offer.”

My cheeks heat but I keep my face neutral.

“Yeah, right. Of course.” I clear my throat, hoping it might relieve a bit of the building tension between us, but it doesn’t. I don’t think there’s anything that can ease this awkward moment. “I’m just gonna… I’m gonna go. I’ll see you tomorrow. Or not. Ya know. Whatever works.”

Whatever works?

I’m hopeless.