Shooting for the Stars (4 page)

She’d been friend-zoned since childhood. It wasn’t exactly news.

Stella had been in love with Bear since the year she was eight and he was ten. That had been the unfortunate year when she’d had to spend too much time indoors. She’d been ill a lot that fall with a fever that never seemed to go away. Her frantic mother had taken her from one doctor to another asking for tests.

Stella was a brave girl even then. So the blood tests didn’t scare her as much as they inconvenienced her. Winter had just arrived, and she ought to have been playing with Hank and Bear on the snowy slope between their homes, not sitting in waiting rooms.

But one awful afternoon her father came home from work early. From behind their bedroom door, she heard her parents’ anguished voices. A chill settled over Stella, and she went into her bedroom, climbing on the bed and pulling her favorite stuffy into her lap. Eventually, her tearful parents came in to tell her that the doctor had figured out what was wrong with Stella. It was something called leukemia, and she was going to have to get very strong medicine that might make her sick.
 

“Everything is going to be
fine
,” her mother had promised, dabbing the corners of her eyes.

Of course it was. Stella wasn’t a worrier. And at eight, she didn’t know anybody who’d died, especially not a child. Her mother told her that she was going to miss some school, and that her hair might fall out. “But it will grow back,” she promised.

It was all very confusing, and Stella began to get a bad feeling about what winter held. She was supposed to compete for the very first time in a juniors snowboarding contest in December. The way her mother fussed, it sounded as if she’d never be allowed outside again.

The Lazarus home became horribly quiet. There were more whispered discussions behind closed doors, and Stella had the sinking feeling that they were talking about her. Even Hank had acted weird. He was too nice to her, bringing her things and watching her in a funny way that made Stella uncomfortable. So she did the obvious thing. She punched him.

“Ow!” Hank yelled. He gave her a firm pinch in return.

“Stop!” their mother wailed. “She’ll bruise easily!” The ever-present tears appeared in her eyes, and Hank looked stricken, slipping away, hanging his head.

Sheepishly, Stella retreated to her bedroom, taking up a position in the middle of her big purple bedspread. She was bored, and everyone was acting freakishly. But twenty minutes later, Bear turned up, banging into Stella’s room with a frown. “It’s
raining
,” he complained.

Stella shared his disgust with this development. He and Hank had been building a jump from the early snow in the yard, eager to have their own practice spot for aerials. Rain would melt their efforts.

“Where is everybody?” Bear asked. And by “everybody” she knew he meant Hank.

Stella just shrugged.

Bear looked around for a second. Then he went over to Stella’s bookshelf and grabbed the Uno cards. “Play you for a quarter a game.”

Her heart lifted then.
Finally
. Here was someone who wasn’t acting strangely. “Fifty cents,” she’d countered. (She’d loved risk, even at age eight.)

“Fine.” He dropped his coat on her bedroom floor and climbed onto the bed. “But no whining when I win.”

That winter, they played a lot of cards, in part because it wasn’t a good year for snow. “You’re not missing much,” Hank would say after a Saturday spent at the hill while Stella was bedridden. “The gladed trails aren’t even open.”

But Stella knew a white lie when she heard one. Even
bad
snowboarding was better than no snowboarding, and Hank knew it. Most everything stunk for Stella that winter. There were long hours spent at the hospital. She threw up into a weird little plastic tray they provided during her chemotherapy treatments. When her hair finally did fall out, in terrifying chunks onto the shower drain, her mother’s sobs echoed against the bathroom tiles.

Stella did not dare look in the mirror. Instead, she put her favorite ski hat on her head, pulling it down to cover her embarrassingly bald scalp. When Bear thumped into the room that afternoon, chucking a wooden case down on the bed, he didn’t give her head a second glance. “Have you played this?” he asked.

The box read
Backgammon
on its side. “I can figure it out,” was her reply.

“Okay.” He flipped open the latch and began to explain how the little pieces were supposed to move around the board. While they played, Stella studied the furrow between his brows when he was trying to decide something. Sometimes he ran a hand absently through his thick hair. Even at ten years old, there was something irresistibly sturdy about Bear. That ugly year, he was her favorite person. Even when she was cranky and nauseous, she always looked forward to the afternoons he turned up for dinner or a quick game. Some days they didn’t get to play, because Hank and Bear would be in the middle of some epic video game battle in the den. But Stella felt calmer when Bear was around.

It had only taken Stella two rounds of chemo to beat back her childhood cancer. So the next winter found her back on the ski hill, frustrated that she couldn’t get as much air off the jumps as Hank and Bear.
Yet
.

But she’d never stopped loving Bear. It would be years before she would begin to look at Bear
that
way. But when he was in eighth grade, and she was in sixth, the girls began to swarm around Bear. Stella was instantly jealous. She just knew in her gut that he was meant to be hers.

Bear, unfortunately,
didn’t
know it. There had been a steady stream of girlfriends, and Stella had been gritting her teeth for fifteen years now.

Worse, after Hank left to compete out west, Bear had taken over the big brother role, spending a great deal of effort ruining teen-aged Stella’s fun. He threw away the joint that she’d managed to score at a gravel pit party. “You are too young for that,” he’d said. And Stella’s cheeks had burned with embarrassment.

And then? When she finally had a boyfriend of her own (one not quite as hot as Bear, because nobody was) he took the boy’s car keys away from him at parties. When the boyfriend complained, Bear would just stare him down. “I don’t trust you,” he’d say. Once he’d added, “She’s precious cargo.”

Not only was it totally infuriating to be treated like a baby, it was confusing, too. Stella loved Bear precisely because he
hadn’t
babied her when everyone else had. Their relationship changed during her teen years, and not for the better. The competitive part of their friendship was still alive and well. They’d put away the Uno deck long ago in favor of poker. They were well matched at the card table. But they’d found it was possible to be competitive about many things: Snowboarding (Bear could outdo her in the terrain park, but Stella now ruled the steeps and the glades.) Rock climbing (Stella could climb faster, and Bear insisted that her smaller frame was the reason. He was probably right, but she never admitted it.)
 

So at least they still had that. But Stella lost to Bear sometimes out of sheer distraction. He’d only grown more attractive every year she knew him. He’d always been a fairly big boy, but at seventeen he shot up. At eighteen, his shoulders grew deliciously broad. Stella wanted to lay her head in the crook of his neck and feel all that solid mass beneath her cheek.

She stared and stared, and he never seemed to notice.

Only once had Stella gone a little crazy and actually thrown herself at him. It was more than ten years ago now, on the night of Bear’s high school graduation. She’d been so proud of him, and so sad that he’d leave in the fall to follow Hank out west. To mark the occasion, she’d stolen a bottle of champagne out of her father’s wine cellar and chilled it in the stream which ran downhill from the Lazarus home to Bear’s house.

God, she’d tried so hard to impress him. She’d even bought wine glasses at a store in town, because her mother was much more observant than her father, and the temporary theft of stemware would have been noticed. And she’d needed
nice
glasses, because this was meant to be a special moment.

She’d cornered him that evening after the ceremony, before he was ready to leave for a night’s worth of partying with his friends. At sixteen, Stella already knew how to uncork champagne. And when she’d heard that satisfying pop, and then carefully poured two flutes full of bubbly, everything had been going perfectly. They’d sipped and joked their way through a glass each.

That’s when Stella had made her move. She’d set her glass down on the flat rock behind Bear’s little log cabin. Then she’d gotten up and proceeded to sit on his lap.

Bear’s chin had snapped up, and his eyebrows flew upwards. She should have stopped to read the signs. But Stella had always been a fearless girl, even in the face of probable defeat. At sixteen, she’d already figured out that the only way to get what you wanted was to take a few risks. So she’d put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.

For a few golden moments, everything had been glorious. His lips were softer than she’d expected. And from the back of his throat came a startled little sound.
Yes,
her heart chanted.
Finally
. He’d taken control of the kiss, and the slow slide of his tongue had taken her breath away. High on her own bravery, Stella had leaned into him, wrapping her arms around his broad body.

That’s when everything stopped.

The second Stella had connected with Bear’s warm chest, he seemed to freeze as solid as the slabs of granite that her father used on his building projects. Then Bear had lifted Stella off of his lap, and stood up. When he’d spoken, his voice had been a rough whisper. “You shouldn’t do that, Stella-Bell.”

And with that, he’d walked away, into the house that he shared with his dad.

She’d been absolutely mortified.

That night, she’d finished the bottle of champagne by herself. She’d kicked off the dainty shoes she’d worn for the occasion (they weren’t very comfortable anyway) and polished off the wine straight from the bottle. As a result, she’d puked in the woods before she went inside to bed, and woke up with a nasty headache the next morning.

But it did not compare with the ache in her heart, or the shame of rejection burning under her skin.

For ten days afterwards, she’d ducked Bear. Then her brother came home for the summer, which meant that Bear was around, too. The three of them had always hung out together, and if Stella had gone on avoiding Bear, everyone in town would have wondered why. So she had to show her face the first time he came over for dinner.

That night she’d taken extra care in selecting her outfit. She’d even gone so far as to smear a little lipstick on, which for Stella was quite an extraordinary effort. Dinner had seemed to last forever, too.

But then afterwards, Bear had come up to her in the family room at a moment when Hank had ducked into the bathroom, damn him. And she’d braced herself for an awkward conversation.

“Hey,” Bear had said. “Do you want to play some ping pong?”

It had taken her a half second to decide that ping pong with Bear was better than nothing. “Okay. Loser cranks the ice cream. Winner picks the flavor.”

“Deal,” he’d agreed.

That night she’d won all three of the games they’d played, and Stella had come away with the suspicion that he’d let her win, so that at least she could win at something. She’d chosen peach ice cream just to spite him because Bear was a chocolate man.

The past ten years hadn’t changed much. It was as if they’d been playing one very long game of ping pong, with Stella’s heart as the ball.

He’d moved out west, anyway. So her heartache was the long-distance kind, which helped. He had a little condo in Utah near Hank’s. And during the winter, the two guys traveled together on the Freestyle Tour. Stella graduated eventually, too. Then she spent winters traveling to whichever big mountain events she could afford to string together. During the warmer months she took college courses and worked for her father.

These days, it took a rare coincidence to bring Stella and Bear to the same corner of California for competitions a mere forty miles apart on the same weekend. So Stella approached the hotel lobby with a spring in her step. She found Bear at a corner of the long, hammered-copper bar in the Birch Room. Another snowboarder from the tour — his nickname was Duku, and she didn’t think she’d ever heard him called anything else — had his elbows on the bar. He and Bear had their heads bowed in quiet conversation. In front of Duku was a frosty looking margarita on the rocks, and Stella hoped that it was meant for her.

Both men stopped talking when Stella arrived. Duku’s narrow face broke open into a smile. “Hey, girl! I hear congratulations are in order. Nicely done!” He grabbed her into a bony hug.

“Thanks. It still doesn’t seem real.”

Duku had the toothiest grin in North America. He wasn’t traditionally handsome, but there was something lively in his face that fans always found irresistible. “The first big win is an awesome feeling. It makes you say, ‘so
that’s
why I busted my ass all those years.’”

“Something like that,” Stella agreed.

“I’m proud of you, girl. I’m going to make some calls and find some food. Maybe I’ll hook up with you two in a little while?” He gave Stella’s shoulder a squeeze and gave Bear a fist bump. “Hang in there, man,” he said. With a final salute, Duku disappeared through the crowd.

“What was that about?” Stella asked as she slid onto the waiting bar stool.

“Nothing,” Bear said, lifting his own glass. “Congratulations, Stell. You rock. Today and always.” He smiled at her then, and Stella’s throat went tight. He was waiting for her to pick up her drink and toast with him. But she let the moment linger because it was a rare thing to have Bear all to herself, and to have those silver eyes shining down on her and her alone.
 

She’d freeze this moment in amber if she could.

“Salud,” Stella said finally, lifting her glass to touch it to his. She held his eyes and took a sip as tradition required. It was all too easy to just fall into his gaze.