Crash (The Wild Sequence Book 2) Read online

  Crash

  The Wild Sequence, Book Two

  Harper Dallas

  Copyright © 2019 Harper Dallas

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Though the locations in this book are real, they have been altered to serve the story. The people who appear inside the book are also imaginary. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.harperdallas.com

  Cover design by Natasha Snow Designs

  www.natashasnowdesigns.com

  Also by Harper Dallas

  The Wild Sequence

  Ride

  For everyone who has ever picked me up after my own crashes.

  Part 1

  Winter

  JJ

  I’m having the dream again.

  I’m in the helicopter, hovering above the peak. Around me the mountains spread, endless and pristine.

  The organizer nudges me. “Ready to go?”

  No, I want to say. I’m not ready. I don’t want to do this. Oh, God, I don’t want to do this at all.

  But my hand is moving. It unclips my harness. I watch myself shuffle to the helicopter’s door as the competition organizer slides it open.

  We’re dropped so low over the knife-edge ridge that the machine’s rotors disturb the snow. It makes roiling, fluttering movements like my stomach. Every atom in my body screams no, no, no.

  “Run begins when you drop,” the organizer says.

  I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to jump out of this helicopter. I’m going to stay inside. It’s going to fly me back down the mountain, and I’m going to find Raquel, and she’s not going to get on that plane.

  So why am I moving? Why am I dropping from this helicopter—and away from the person I love most in the world?

  “No,” I say, but I’ve already jumped.

  In dreams, you get pushed by forces you can’t control. You’re compelled to do things you don’t want to. Shoved into situations you can’t change.

  The worst bit is, even asleep I know this isn’t a dream.

  It’s a memory. The one I’ll never get away from.

  The one I don’t deserve to forget.

  JJ

  Why are we alive?

  There are people who wonder that. People who lie awake at night and worry about it.

  Me? I’ve never had to question it.

  I’m standing on a ridge, looking out over a winter playground. Above, a perfect bluebird sky spreads empty for hundreds of miles. Around me are rocky mountain peaks, dropping away over snowy slopes to valleys filled with evergreens.

  Between me and them is just my snowboard, and a mile of pure, pristine powder as deep as my thighs.

  My breath rasps in my chest. Simply being alive and here and about to drop is enough to make my soul sing.

  “We’ve got you in our sights.” The guys in the helicopter sound tinny through the speaker at my shoulder. “You’re ready to go.”

  “Hell yeah,” I say to myself, smiling so wide that it hurts. I raise one hand to press the transmit button on my walkie talkie. “Damn straight I’m ready.”

  And then I tilt my weight forward, feeling the first cut of my board into fresh powder, and I can’t help it: I shout with joy, the animal sound bursting out of me.

  I’m flying down the slope, adrenaline burning in me, and I’m so here, so now, and all that matters is this happiness.

  I’m meant to be here.

  This is where I belong.

  Click.

  I’m looking at the camera, laughing. “Are you ready to see something awesome?”

  “Didn’t get into this career to see boring stuff,” the cameraman laughs from behind the lens.

  Then he’s moving with me, holding the camera fixed on my body, as together we board down the slope.

  Except he’s not taking the jump. That’s only for me, curving my path onto the ramp of hard-packed snow, tucking my body and then launching with my legs—

  “Fuck yes,” the cameraman whoops, as I break into the sky, flying like I’m weightless, like I’m free, turning one perfect backflip against the blue sky.

  Click.

  Chase swears as he shucks off his clothing, hopping from foot to foot over the freezing stones.

  “Never letting you choose ‘dare’ again, Hanne,” he complains in mock anger through his gritted teeth, flicking his dark hair away from his eyes. “Shit, it’s cold.”

  Hanne almost spits her mouthful of beer with laughter, reaching up to wipe her eyes.

  “You too,” she says to me with a grin. “Or are you afraid?”

  “What idiot isn’t afraid of cold lakes,” I protest, but I’m grinning as I begin work on my pants.

  The photo flashes when we’re already running out to the water, hands clasped over our junk, and Chase shouts “fuck!”—because we’re hitting the water, or because Hanne just took a shot of our bare behinds about to jump into a British Columbian lake in early winter. One of the two.

  Click.

  The four of us are together, halfway up a hike and halfway buried in powder, our snowboards tied to our backs: Hunter, winking with his usual devilish flair; Chase, grinning his slow, quirked grin; Hanne, her blonde-and-pink hair somehow less bright than her smile and the flash of her tongue; me, laughing with pure happiness.

  Someone’s captioned it: False Kings ride forever.

  And we do, the four of us: best friends and the world’s most prestigious snowboarding crew. We share each other’s highs and lows. Between us, it’s ride or die—the kind of friendship some people aren’t lucky enough ever to experience.

  Hanne, my second sister; Chase, my brother; Hunter, the kid sibling who irritates the fuck out of you and you love him just the same.

  Click. Click. Click.

  One by one I go through the photos and videos on my laptop, and for each one I’m there. Remembering the moment so clearly I can feel it.

  So clearly I can almost be that happy again.

  Almost.

  Here’s the thing about night: it brings out who you really are.

  Or I guess, it’s one of the ways. The other way is being with the person you love. But it’s not like that’s happening anymore.

  I shouldn’t be going through Instagram at midnight. I’m in a luxury lodge in the mountains of British Columbia. I’m on a shoot for a film that will have an international release and probably win some awards. Everyone else is upstairs asleep: the film crew. Chase and Hanne. Brooke, the new photographer.

  Perhaps Brooke is part of why I’m down here. Seeing her and Chase in their endless game of push and pull… I can’t deal with it. Sure, I’m happy two of my most emotionally damaged friends have not-subtly fallen for each other.

  But watching them fuck up their chance at happiness? That stings.

  Still: I should be in bed like them. We’re out in the helicopters again tomorrow, finding another face to ride. You’d think that a life-risking activity would be enough to focus my mind. It sure used to be. Now…

  That’s the crazy thing. You make a choice between two impossible options, and the one you go for ends up fucked anyway.

  The house is silent at this time of night. It’s all silent. Outside the black forest and the white mountains stretch for miles and miles with no one else there. I’d be reluctant to drive even the few miles to Bella Coola at this time of year, and it’s not like I can take one of the helicopters. So here I am: insomniac. Drinking. Wandering back through my timeline unti
l I reach what maybe I was looking for all along.

  My ex.

  I click like I don’t know exactly what date I’ll see the last photo of us, standing together at a post-filming celebration, laughing at the camera.

  From there, it’s only one click to her profile.

  I shouldn’t go looking. But of course I know goddamn well that was always exactly what I was going to do.

  Raquel is looking great. I mean, she always did, when we were together. Objectively great. I-love-her great. And she still is. I flick through photo after photo of her, reminding myself of the way her thick dark hair falls. The bump of her nose. The dark of her eyes. The light tan of her skin. The compact strength of her petite body, those neat athletic lines that she still has eight years after her career as a college gymnast ended.

  I obsess over her in yoga pants—but I have to click away from that one before my thoughts go to the wrong places.

  Over a year, and I haven’t been able to touch another woman. Thirty-four is not a great time to be celibate for this long. It’s not like when you’re seventeen. Not that I would know: being a pro snowboarder made being seventeen a lot easier than most guys have it. Who was I dating then? Emma? Hilary? All the names blend together. None of them mattered, once I met Raquel.

  One rule I have, though: I’m not going to go and jerk one out over the memory of my ex.

  At least not until I’m drunk enough to have no shame.

  There are men in her pictures. I’m pretty sure they’re all clients. And if there’s one thing I know about Raquel, she keeps an iron curtain between clients and dates. So it’s doubly irrational, this jealousy I’m feeling—because Raquel’s a grown woman, and she can do what she wants. Because what she wants to do is not date clients.

  Still, I wouldn’t mind punching the guy tagged “Greg Whittaker” in the face. He looks like an asshole.

  Occasionally I look at the tab for my emails. I guess that’s what tonight is about: psyching myself up enough to forward the realtor’s email to Raquel.

  If I went back in my outbox—the time travel of email—I’d be able to find everything she ever typed to me. I never wrote much back. I’m not the best with writing stuff out. But I kept all her notes. I don’t even have to read them now; I’ve read them so often that I remember every line.

  I’m having a great time, but I miss you so much. NYC—the city that never sleeps. I don’t, either. Not without you here.

  That was from a work trip, once. Year two.

  My mom’s already making helpful suggestions about baby names. She likes Delphine. Pro tip: we are not calling any future child Delphine.

  Year four, after our engagement, when we’d just moved into the house.

  And always, always, at the end:

  Big love.

  I should have written it to her more, too. So she’d have these old emails. All the things I said to her—they’ve disappeared in time. But if I’d written them out…

  But fuck that. And it’s not those emails I need to send, anyway. I need to grow some balls, and I need to send Raquel the valuation on the house. That’s the only way we’ve communicated over the last year, anyway.

  I’ve swallowed all the other words I want to say, and for the last twelve months we’ve communicated in empty emails marked forward or high priority. Other people’s words, shuttled between us, because it’s all gone and we don’t talk anymore.

  It’s just a valuation. The sale will go ahead anyway. Just like everything has gone ahead anyway, whether I want it to or not, for all of these months.

  Since I made that decision. Since I jumped out of that helicopter, and everything changed.

  I open the email with a vicious click. Right. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

  Hi James,

  Attached is the most recent valuation of the house. Great to see it’s gone up so much in value. I know nothing makes this process easy, but it’s harder with less $.

  Please forward to Raquel. If she’s okay with this then you two can progress with the buyout.

  Best wishes,

  Wendy

  I click forward and delete Wendy’s message about “this process” before typing “r” into the recipient field. Raquel still autocorrects, even though my own mom is a Robin.

  My fingers hover over the keys, and everything I want to say crowds around my chest, and I’m too fucking stupid to write it out.

  My breath hurts in my lungs.

  I still lo

  The red squiggle beneath the third word taunts me.

  I delete it all and stab the send key before I can think about it anymore.

  There’s not enough whiskey in the world to survive this feeling.

  Raquel

  “Do you ever stop working?”

  Greg Whittaker is leaning around the door of the conference room, looking at me—my coffee and my laptop, my three separate notepads and my seven colored highlighters.

  I laugh. I’ve been accused of being a workaholic before. “Not so much.”

  “Well, now you can have a rest.” Greg grins. He’s flushed with the success of his day. The last time we spoke, in the morning before the meeting, he was pale and tense with nerves. Now he glows with the good work he’s done—the good work I’ve helped him to do, preparing him over the last several months for this important pitch.

  I smile as I close up my notepad and begin to stand. After a ten-hour day, my feet ache in my heels. “I’m not sure it’s a rest. I’m flying back to LA tomorrow.”

  Greg tilts his head as if confused. “You won’t stay and enjoy Paris? I told you, you can fly back anytime. You’ve more than earned it.”

  I know. Business class both ways—when he asked me to come and support him on the ground, he made it clear that I would be comfortable. But I only shrug, straightening my skirt with a discreet pinch of my fingers. “I have clients waiting for me.”

  Greg must know by now that I’m as much a workaholic as he is, but still he tilts his head, that charming grin on full display. He’s a handsome man, with dark hair and eyes, and a British accent that would have made teenage me weak at the knees. The classically tailored suit only helps.

  “You’re not even going to celebrate?” When I don’t reply, he adds: “I guess this doesn’t feel very important after your old job.”

  Your old job.

  He couldn’t know that my old job is why I work so hard at this new one. Why I bury myself in sixty-hour weeks at a minimum, so that all the emails and calls and visualization sessions might bury thoughts of what I used to do.

  Of what happened.

  My hand fumbles as I reach for my pens. Rather than look at him walking to the end of the conference table, I focus on sliding my notepad into its pocket in my burgundy leather tote, slipping my pens in beside it. “Why wouldn’t this be important?” I laugh. “You just secured over a million dollars in funding.”

  Greg moves to lean his thighs against the table a little to my side, his hands clasping at the edge as he leans back to look at me. He doesn’t seem aware of what he’s stumbled on to. “I mean—I’m not an athlete. It must be higher adrenaline to work with them.”

  “I guess you could say that.” I turn him a bright smile. “But I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

  And I don’t want to discuss it, either. I don’t want to get into what happened, and why I left the Vertex High Performance Program. There was a time when I thought helping professional athletes achieve their dreams was my calling. I learned differently. I exchanged helping people to win gold medals for helping people to secure funding for start-ups or non-profits or new products.

  It might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s the change I need.

  Greg’s look turns bashful. “Sorry. That was too personal, wasn’t it? It’s none of my business why you changed fields.” His smile spreads. “I should just be grateful to be so lucky.”

  Suddenly I can’t move fast enough. I slip my camel coat over my
shoulders and button it down the front before tying the belt.

  “You’re not lucky. I’m just doing my job.”

  “And you did it amazingly. Thank you.”

  I’m frozen by the touch of his hand on mine as I reach for my bag. For a moment I can’t take my eyes away from his fingers where they rest on my own.

  When I look to his face, his gaze is fixed on mine. “Listen—I hope this isn’t inappropriate. But now we’re not working together anymore, I was wondering if you would like to go out for a drink. To celebrate.”

  It was only a brief touch. His hand is gone, and I’m able to take up my bag, sliding its straps over my shoulders. Getting them settled around the lapels of my coat gives me a moment to think.

  I should say yes. I know that. Greg is charming, successful, and intelligent. He’s kind and generous and stable. The kind of man you can rely on.

  The kind of man whose career will keep him safe and healthy.

  The kind of man who’s nothing like the one I’ve been running from for the last year.

  I’ve always been good at doing what I decide to do. And yet now, for some reason, my smile stays fixed and untrue.

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Ah.” Greg’s smile turns rueful. “Admirable. I guess I should assume that’s also you saying no to my incredibly unsubtle offer of a date.”

  I should say yes to him. I should prove that I’ve moved on—to myself, to my friends, to my family. I should refuse to be trapped here by the ghost of a man who made his decision entirely clear.