She settles onto the sled, boots braced, hands wrapped tight around the rope. She takes a breath that definitely sounds like a prayer… and pushes off.
For the first ten feet, it’s fine.
Then she spins.
She goes backward for a solid stretch, hair flying out from under her hat, yelping the whole time. She hits the one bump on the entire hill, goes airborne with an impressive scream, and vanishes into a drift at the bottom.
Fuck. "Mia!" I start running, but then she bursts from the snowbank, hat missing, cackling like a maniac.
“THAT WAS AWESOME!” she shouts. “Felix, get your ass down here!”
The tension drains from my shoulders. She's okay. And hell yeah, I'm going next.
I don't need to be told twice. I launch myself down, deliberately hitting the same bump she did. I catch air… then wipe out spectacularly, losing my sled and rolling the last twenty feet.
"Graceful," she smirks as I lay at her feet, upside down.
“That's me in a nutshell,” I wheeze, spitting out snow.
The next hour is pure, chaotic joy.
We race. Liam finds “optimal trajectories,” which Silas then body-blocks just to mess with him. I manage a full backward run without crashing and feel unreasonably proud. Silas tries to stand up mid-ride once and eats snow spectacularly.
Eventually, we decide to level up and all pile onto the biggest toboggan, because what could go wrong?
“I call front,” Naomi says immediately.
“You’ve only gone down this hill nine times,” Silas points out.
“And clearly I’m a prodigy. Get on, cowards.”
Against all logic, we listen. Naomi in front, me behind her, then Liam, then Silas anchoring us.
“Ready?” she calls.
“Wait—” Liam starts.
She shoves off.
The sled surges forward. We pick up speed frighteningly fast.
“NAOMI, YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO STEER!” I yell over the wind.
“I AM STEERING!”
“INTO WHAT?”
The world blurs into white and screaming. Somehow, we make it to the bottom upright, skid to a stop, and just sit there for a moment, panting, processing the fact that none of us flew into a tree.
“Again?” Naomi asks, voice bright.
“Absolutely not,” Silas says… but he’s grinning, snow in his hair.
We roll off the sled in a heap, and that’s when I notice it… The snow under my glove… it's perfect for packing.
Naomi is a few feet away now, back to me, brushing snow off her coat.
Perfect.
