Shredded

Chapter 18 Ophelia

Closing that door on Z is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Especially with the way he was looking at me, as though in trying to take care of myself I had managed to totally shred him.

Just the thought has me swiping my hands across my cheeks, collecting the hot tears that started flowing without my knowledge or permission. Who knew? Looks like I’m pretty shredded myself.

Which is stupid. I haven’t even known this guy a week. How could he creep inside me so quickly? How could he turn me inside out without any explanation? It’s not like I didn’t know, not like I wasn’t warned. By Cam. By my uncle. By all the many, many stories I’ve heard about him in just the two weeks I’ve worked here.

And it’s not as if I haven’t been down this road before, with Remi. Remi. His absence is still a black hole within me eleven months later. One would think I would’ve learned, yet here I am again, courting disaster with Z.

Z, who I can already tell has the potential to be so much more than an emotional void.

Z, who when shit goes bad won’t just turn into a black hole. He’ll go supernova and burn everything around him to a crisp. Even me.

Especially me.

I glance at my watch, realize it’s almost time for my break to be over. I’ve got just enough time to rinse my face in the bathroom and then I’ve got to head back. Which sucks. The last thing I want to do is make coffee for the next three hours, especially when every time I close my eyes I can see Z’s smile as he stands near my Keurig, brewing coffee for me two mornings in a row.

As expected, the rest of the afternoon drags, and by the time I head out to my car I’m totally beat. Yes, I drove this morning, and while it was nerve-racking being behind the wheel of my car again, I did it—thanks to Z, who not only made me face my fear and drive a car again but also brought my car to the shop early this morning to have snow tires and chains put on it.

Just thinking about it shreds me all over again. Remi would have made sure I knew to get snow tires, would have hounded me until I did it, but he still would have expected me to do it. Not like Z, who just did it for me. Not because he doesn’t think I’m capable, but because that’s who he is. He takes care of me when I don’t even know I want to be taken care of.

No one has ever treated me like that in my life, not really, and the fact that Z—crazy, fucked-up Z—is the one who thinks of me, who treats me like I’m precious, blows my mind. It also makes me wonder if I was too harsh earlier. If I’d been so caught up in my worry over Z’s ride that I let it bleed all over my ability to be rational.

I don’t know, and right now I don’t want to think about it. All I want to do is go back to my room, get into my pajamas, and fall asleep watching TV. It’s not how I planned on spending the evening, but it’ll do. Better than spending the whole night moping about something that probably never had a chance of working out anyway.

Except once I’m in my room and in my pajamas, I can’t settle. I keep thinking about Z and that video and wondering if I overreacted. So finally, because I can’t stop myself, I get on my laptop and Google Z’s ride. But the second I do, I swear the whole freaking Net explodes in front of me.

No wonder Sports Illustrated was calling, along with everyone else in the known world. The thing’s only been up a day and a half and already it’s got one and a half million hits. And the comments are insane. Totally insane. I knew Z was talented—everyone keeps saying it, so I figure it must be true—but I guess what he does in this video is totally off the charts.

A little research teaches me that there’s only one or two other riders in the world who can land the tricks he lands, and that’s in the controlled environment of the half-pipe. The fact that he did it backcountry—after having literally thrown himself off the side of a mountain—is pretty much unheard of.

So maybe I did judge him too harshly. This kind of talent has to breed confidence. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing. In which case he’s an adrenaline junkie but not a total moron.

But even as I try to convince myself of that, Cam’s scream at the beginning haunts me. It also tells me there was no preparation here at all. Z went off that mountain with no warning, no planning, no nothing. And that is worse than being a junkie or an idiot. It reveals a total lack of concern about his personal safety. I know, because I’ve been down this road before with Remi. I know exactly what it looks like.

After I watch the video about fifteen times—and manage to do nothing but scare the hell out of myself—I start looking for other videos of Z. Him riding backcountry or in competition or just stuff he does on the slopes here in Park City. It turns out there’s a lot of stuff about him out there—he’s more famous in the snowboarding world than I ever imagined. Between YouTube, the major snowboarding sites, and the website that he, Ash, and Luc have together, I find out more about him than I ever wanted to know. Especially the fact that there’s a different girl—or three—in every single video and they’re all looking at Z like he hung the fucking moon.

Then again, if he could give each of them ten orgasms in a night, is there any wonder they think he’s amazing? Even if he did dump their asses the morning after. God knows, two nights in his arms and I’ve fallen pretty damn hard myself.

I watch all the footage I can of Z. Competition footage, GoPro footage, phone video cameras. I watch it all. And what I find startles me—and freaks me out more than I could ever have imagined. Because when it comes to snowboarding, there are two very distinct Zs who show up: the Z who’s out there going balls to the wall because he wants to have a good time and get his adrenaline on, and the Z who’s out there because he wants to punish himself.

It takes me a while to pick up on it, but the fourth or fifth time I see the face, I start to recognize it. Before he even leaves the top of the pipe or the hill, I can tell how the run is going to go. And I’m right every time.

He starts out nailing whatever it is he’s doing, getting huge air, landing big tricks, and everything looks great. The commentators are excited, they’re talking about how he’s going to do it this time, how he’s going to break the curse, how he’s totally in podium contention … and then he blows it. He overextends or he overrotates or he lands wrong—and inevitably he ends up getting hurt.

A torn rotator cuff. A concussion. Busted ribs. Even a broken jaw eighteen months ago. All pretty normal injuries for snowboarders, a result of normal mistakes made by normal riders all the time. But Z isn’t a normal rider, and when he’s on his game, he’s fucking flawless. He doesn’t make mistakes. He doesn’t give up a quarter of a point. And he sure as hell doesn’t overrotate. The problem is, those days are few and far between. Much more regularly, you can see the self-loathing in his eyes before the ride and you can predict it’s going to go badly.

And, inevitably, it does. So much so that the commentators talk about him being cursed. About his rough childhood and the difficult time he’s had since then. No one says any more than that, but everyone seems to know what’s going on with him. Everyone, that is, but me.

I start to poke around some more, to find out what it is about his early life that has everyone giving him a pass. I mean, yes, he’s really charming when he wants to be. And yes, he’s smart and funny, charismatic, and very good-looking (which, I know, a lot of people say is enough to forgive him anything).

But is that really the truth? Does it not matter that he throws his talent away, that he deliberately tries to hurt himself? Or is there something else there, something that makes even the most unforgivable behavior forgivable?

It has to be the latter, has to be that there’s something I don’t know. But I figure that if it’s as bad as all that, he should be the one to tell me himself. I’d hate for him to dig around online and come up with stories about what happened with Remi instead of just asking me about it, so I figure I need to give him the same courtesy, no matter how much I want to know the truth.

Which is why, even though I’m dying to find out what’s haunting Z, I step away from the laptop. I close it up, put it away, try to focus on something else. Anything else.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, and when I fall asleep two hours later, it’s to memories of Z—what I’ve observed and what I suspect blending together in one nightmarish dream that feels an awful lot like what I imagine hell to be.