ZLATA
He gave me my own drawer in the ski depot for my boots and a stupid little hook for my jacket, and somehow that feels more intimate than everything we did on that workbench last night.
I wake up in his bed with wax still faintly in my hair and muscles that ache in very specific, very satisfying ways. For once, my brain doesn’t rush straight to worst-case scenarios. It just notes the sunlight on the ceiling, his warm weight behind me, the quiet of an off-day morning. I let myself stay there. I’m allowed to be happyfor a time, right?
On snow, he’s different. Sharper, more precise, but calmer too—as if everything in his head finally lines up when there are gates in his peripheral vision and edges under his feet. I follow him down the first warm-up run, legs still heavy, but my turns are less panicked with every run. My body remembers faster than I expect.
He stops halfway down, plants his poles, and waits for me. When I slide up beside him, breathing a little hard, he lifts his chin toward the slope.
“Again,” he says. “This time, think about where your shin presses.”
No flirting, no wink. Coach mode.
Something in me straightens in response. I nod, push off, and try it. It’s such a small adjustment—angling my shins into the tongues of my boots a fraction earlier, letting the ski roll instead of forcing it—but suddenly the turn comes to me instead of me fighting for it. The edges bite, the ski arcs, and for a few glorious seconds I feel… competent. Maybe even good.
When I pull up at the bottom, I’m grinning like an idiot. He skis in behind me, stops close enough that our tips almost cross.
“You felt that?” he asks.
I just nod, still high on it.
He doesn’t gush, doesn’t make a big deal of it. “Again,” he repeats. “Lock that feeling in.”
So we do. Run after run. Sometimes he skis just ahead of me, sometimes behind. Every few lifts, he gives me one precise cue—weight here, hands there, eyes up, trust the edge—and I latch onto each one like a lifeline. It’s weirdly easy not to push back. When he’s like this, I don’t want to spar with him, or pokeat his ego, or test where his limits are. I just want to learn. Skiing advice from his mouth is as precious to me as time in his bed.
On the chairlift, the air bites at my cheeks, but my thighs are pleasantly burning, and the world is white and clean. Our boots knock together every time the chair sways.
“You’re bossy,” I tell him, but there’s no spice in it, just a smile.
He shrugs, looking at the line of the piste below us. “You said you wanted to ski, not just slide.”
Touché.
We go quiet for a minute. The mountain opens under us—valleys, lifts, tiny colored jackets tracing lines in the snow. I shift on the chair, push it away. I’m allowed to be happy for a time. The expiry date can stay blurry for now.
At the top, he pulls his phone out. “One more from behind,” he says. “I’ll film it.”
I roll my eyes. “Fan content?”
“For you,” he says simply. “So you can see how good you look when you’re not terrified.”
My stomach does a small, unhelpful flip at that. I ski the run with his lens on me—hands steady, turns rounder than they’ve been in years. At the bottom, he skis up, pulls out his phone, and we stand hip to hip while he replays it. My head position is tragic, my technique still a mess in places, but there’s something in my face I don’t recognize at first: joy.
“See?” he says quietly. “You belong here.”
For a second, that thought slams into the other, darker one: the image of us in the depot, my hands on the bench, the sheer recklessness of it. What happens when this stops being fun?When someone sees us? When the season moves on, and I’m just another story he tells about that one-off-season girl who thought she could keep up?
I feel the panic start to rise and shove it back down, hard. Not now. Later. On the train, when I have distance and no wax in my hair and no view of his shoulders moving under his jacket.
“Reiteralm Masters at the end of the season,” he says suddenly, as if he’s just remembered it. “There’s an amateur giant slalom. You could do it.”
I bark out a laugh. “Yeah, sure. I’ll just casually race in front of your whole little ski world.”
He looks at me, completely serious. “You could,” he says. “If you keep working like this.”
The worst part is—I believe him. A tiny, traitorous part of me immediately starts mapping training days and imagining a bib with a number that’s mine. Another version of myself, sharper and braver, standing in a start gate.
I let myself hold the image for a second before they evaporate. For now, I ski. I listen when he talks. I let myself love the way his voice sharpens on my name when I get something right, and the way his hand steadies my elbow when I nearly trip getting off the lift.
