They nodded and sped away.
I tossed my headphones on the seat and climbed out after the medics took Landon on the gurney. God, they were going to take him. What if he never woke up? They didn’t have his medical records here; they knew nothing of him.
He was just another tourist to them, another idiot who’d nearly gotten himself killed because he couldn’t respect the mountains they knew to fear.
We followed them into the hospital.
“You speak English?” I asked one of the doctors.
“I do,” he answered.
“His name is Landon Rhodes. He’s twenty-two years old. It was an avalanche, and he has a two-inch laceration inside his upper right arm. His pulse is strong, but he hasn’t woken up yet.”
We reached the swinging doors that had a universal sign for no entrance.
“Okay, we have him from here. You can stay in the waiting room down that hall,” the doctor said, pointing toward the well-lit hallway.
“No, I’m not done,” I nearly shouted, my chest tightening. That damn lump was in my throat again.
“Rachel…” Wilder warned.
“He’s O positive for blood. If you need to transfuse him, come get me. I’m the same. He had his ACL repaired when he was sixteen. Tonsils out when he was seven, and he’s allergic to penicillin.”
The doctor’s eyes softened. “Thank you.”
I nodded, my teeth slicing into my bottom lip as they wheeled him away. The doors swung shut, and as if they closed on my adrenaline, too, my body crashed, exhaustion and fear overwhelming me.
“Rachel,” Wilder whispered and gathered me into his arms as I started to sob. The cries were loud and ugly, giving voice to the wild emotions that had been penned up inside me.
If it hadn’t been for the avalanche, for Landon, for the blood, for the thought of almost losing him, I wouldn’t have been so weak. I would have stood on my own, walked away with my head high.
But that ridgeline had taken more than just my breath.
For the first time in years, I let the man I’d betrayed hold me.
Because he was in love with my best friend…and I wasn’t sure I’d ever stopped loving his.
I watched the seconds tick by on the face of the clock in the waiting room. They’d had him back there a half hour.
“He’s got to be waking up, right?” I asked Wilder as he handed me a steaming cup of coffee. “Thank you.”
“I know you’re a bigger tea fan, but I couldn’t find any.”
I blinked. “You remember that?”
He shrugged. “Leah said something about teapots.”
I smiled and sipped at the hot liquid, hoping that it would warm where my chest felt numb. “She’s amazing.”
“She is,” he agreed. “And…” He sighed. “And I know I have you to thank for that. After the accident, when she was hurt and her boyfriend died, I know you’re the one who pulled her through. Thank you.”
“I didn’t do it for you,” I said softly.
“I know.”
“You don’t. When Landon left…when he went back to you, she was all I had. If I pulled her through, it was only because she held me together, gave me something to do so I didn’t lose my mind.”
He unzipped his jacket and did a little juggling with his coffee to get it off. “Crazy how everything interweaves, right?”
“Yeah. If I’d never met Landon…never met you, I wouldn’t have been standing on that counter, trying to change a lightbulb in our brand-new apartment. I wouldn’t have fallen and broken my wrist and met Leah in the ortho office. Maybe we would have met at Dartmouth or not, but we were both so damaged that we kind of filled in each other’s cracks.”
His forehead puckered, and he tilted his head. “If you’d never met Landon…”
I sipped my coffee, cringing a little at the bitterness. “Right?”
“You said that first.”
I looked over at him and narrowed my eyes. “He never told you.”
“Told me…?” He shook his head.
I laughed softly. “I met Landon when I was seventeen. My dad was working on a Gremlin-sponsored event, he’d just taken over that division, and Landon was boarding—competing. I wasn’t good enough, of course, but I met him in Aspen over Christmas while we were on the slopes at a Gremlin competition.”
“But you met me in February at the skate park.”
I smiled. “Put it together, Wilder.”
His mouth dropped slightly. “You knew him first.”
I nodded. “Yes. I knew him first. We had that whole week together, but I wouldn’t give him my number. My dad was way against extreme athletes, given what he does, and Landon…”
“He’s the most extreme of us all.”
“Exactly.”
“And your dad is fucking scary,” he said.
“It’s that I-control-the-Gremlin-sponsorship-money thing.”
“It’s the I-know-how-to-use-a-gun-because-I-used-to-be-in-the-military thing.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that. So I returned home, and I met you…”
“Landon was gone most of that spring for competitions,” he said, filling in the gaps to himself. “Even then he was dreaming about getting to the Himalayas.”
“And when he walked into your house when he got back and I saw him…well…the rest is history. We never meant for it to happen. I swear. I know I’ve said it before, but it’s the truth. We talked a lot about our feelings, your feelings…but…”
He rubbed his hand over his forehead. “I get it. I don’t want to get it, but I do. If Leah had been with someone else, nothing would have stopped me. That kind of need is a force of nature. Why didn’t he tell me that he knew you?”
“Then? Because you were happy. He thought if he told you, you’d see right through us…and that was before anything had happened yet. It’s exactly what you said, a need. Animal, primal, and something neither of us could ever ignore.”
“Why not after? Why would he carry that?”
“My guess is that he refused to lessen his burden. He broke you, broke the team, and then broke me. Landon’s always been good at torturing himself. I’m just… I’m so sorry about what we did to you. It wasn’t right, and we hurt everyone in the process.”
That sharp look in his eyes he’d had since the day we were found out faded. “It was nothing compared to what I did to you guys. Everything he’s become…it’s because of me, because I made him choose between you and our team. If I had to walk away from Leah, I’d be the same kind of hollow shell, but I’d never—” He paled.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’d never walk away from Leah. She’s good and honest and brings out the best in people. I’m not Leah, and Landon walked away. I think he always will.”
That’s what it came down to. Knowing that it didn’t matter what he’d done, my soul would always reach for his, my body would always crave what I knew only he could give me. I knew that all with the certainty that if he were forced to choose between the Renegades and me, he’d walk again.
“Rachel, that’s not—”
“Rachel Dawson?” a young nurse asked.
“That’s me!” I said, standing up and sloshing coffee on the floor. “Shit,” I mumbled.
“Go, I got it,” Wilder said.
“You’ll be okay?”