“Okay, so the best way to do this is to start slow,” I told him.
Turned out, for all his athletic prowess, Ben wasn’t a fast learner when it came to skiing. His parents and I laughed and teased him good-naturedly while he struggled.
“Should have hit that elliptical machine a little harder,” I told him.
“Did you put the breaks down on these things?” he shot back.
I decided to let up on him. We said goodbye to his parents and then got down to learning how to ski.
“Are you sure I’m doing this right?” he asked me ten minutes later. “Your feet are more turned out than mine.”
The house was still visible through the trees. We’d maybe gone a hundred yards. Instead of gliding forward, he was ski-lunging, pulling himself forward with his poles, knees dipping nearly to the ground. I was starting to worry that he might pull something critical, and then I’d be the girl who let a world-famous athlete get injured on her watch.
“What I’m doing is the advanced version,” I told him. “Where you have to push both forward and sideways at the same time while lifting the backs of your skis over each other. You think you’re ready for that right now, hotshot?”
He shook his head in an emphatic NO.
“Let’s just focus on moving forward any way possible,” I said. I pushed off my poles and slid back toward him. When we were even, I lifted them. “These things are your best friends. Don’t use them one at a time like you have been. It’ll unbalance you. Try sticking them both in the ground on either side and shove off from them.”
He planted his poles in the ground and raised his gaze to mine. “Okay”
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
“On three. One, two, three.”
We shoved off together. Or, I shoved off. I don’t know what the hell Ben did that made him lurch sideways toward me.
If this was a movie, Ben and I would fall together in slow-mo, with more than enough time for him to – with superhuman agility – turn in midair so that it was his large body that absorbed the impact instead of mine. We would land together in the snow, artfully splayed, our limbs conveniently intertwined, our faces just inches apart. The perfect set-up for a kiss.
This was not a movie.
The second I realized he was falling, I dropped my poles and tried to steady him. It was futile. He weighed too much, and he was too unbalanced. Like the coward I was, I let him go and tried to save myself instead, sliding away and to the right. Unfortunately, Ben jerked in the same direction and I took his shoulder to the chin.
Owww.
“Fuck. Sorry,” he said.
We stumbled together, tripped up by our gear. His legs slid back and forth as he tried to regain his balance on the unfamiliar skis. He grabbed me to steady himself, but it just made everything so muchworse. We fought to stay upright, our movements desperate and jerky. Then he pitched sideways and popped free from one of his bindings. The sudden, unexpected freedom sealed our fate.
We lost the battle and down we went.
Ben didn’t turn midair. Our limbs were not artfully splayed. I took an elbow to the left boob during the fall and accidentally bashed my knee into his crotch. I hit the ground first and had no chance to roll away before he came crashing down, half on top of me. My breath exploded out of my lungs. I was left gulping like a fish out of water.
Instead of leaning in for a kiss, we rolled away from each other, both groaning in pain.
“Goddamn it,” I gasped, clutching my ribs. He might have seriously bruised a couple.
“Ow,fuck,” Ben said, curling into himself.
Yup, I definitely nailed him in the balls. And not in a good way.
To make matters worse, the dogs gleefully descended upon on us, yipping and barking and whining and licking our faces because we were too slow to cover them.
“You opportunistic little shit,” I wheezed up at Fred, pushing him away from me.
“Sam, no, boy,” Ben said, rolling back toward me.
