Coming In From the Cold(19)

Watching him, she'd forgotten to breathe. Now she sucked in air, taking a  step backward. "I see," she said. It would have been easy to start  screaming at him then, to tell him exactly what she thought of his  coldness. But that would only prolong their encounter. Whatever baggage  Dane carried-and it must be considerable-she wouldn't add to it. The  right thing to do was to tell the truth, then take her leave. "I'm  sorry. But what I've told you is true. And I don't know what you … " She  took a deep breath. "I think you're better than this."

He swallowed roughly. "Then I guess you really are a fuck-up."

Okay, we're done here, she told herself, beginning to walk away.

"I'm not kidding. You can't have this baby."

She turned her back and accelerated toward her house. She would promise nothing. This really would be all her own decision.

"Hey! We're still talking, here!" he called after her.

Willow made it all the way back inside her kitchen before she started to cry.





* * *



"Is there a problem?" Coach asked, when he got into the Jeep.

"No," Dane said, staring into the distance over the steering wheel. He already had the engine running.

"I thought I heard shouting." Coach pulled his door closed.

"I didn't hear a thing," Dane said. He reversed the Jeep in an arc so  quickly that Coach put a hand on the dash to steady himself.

"Damn, kid. Where's the fire?"

Dane turned onto the main road and accelerated toward town. It was a  good thing he knew the route to the airport so well, because his mind  was practically shutting down with disbelief.

This was bad. Impossibly bad. He didn't have a clue what to do about it.

And it was entirely his fault.





Fourteen





Willow lay on her sofa, staring up at the beams overhead. It was  impressively quiet, except for the sounds an old house makes when it  settles in for the night. She'd had twenty-four hours to process her  awful conversation with Dane. But instead of feeling better, she had  only become more depressed.

She sat up and reached for the phone, dialing Callie at home.

"Willow! How are you doing? I've been thinking about you all week."

She sighed. "Callie, I told him. And it could not have gone worse."

"Oh no," her friend sighed. "What did he say?"

"I … " Willow realized she didn't want to repeat it aloud. She didn't want  to revisit his cruelty, it was just so mortifying, to have put herself  in that position. "He was cold, Callie. Not a shred of empathy."

"Bastard!" Callie yelped.

"I wasn't expecting much-I told you that before. But it was truly awful.  And now I'm embarrassed. Because I liked this guy-I really did … " her  voice broke.

"Oh, sweetie. I'm so sorry."

"I thought I was a good judge of character," she cried. "I think I had  this silly idea … " she couldn't even finish the sentence. But it was  true. A tiny little part of Willow's heart had hoped that he would come  around. She'd had no reason to think that he would-only the peculiar  notion that he'd been as affected by her as she had by him.

It was ridiculous. And he'd turned out to be rotten.

Callie began to sound teary, too. "Honesty is supposed to be the best policy. But sometimes honesty bites us in the ass."

"He made it very clear that he expects me to terminate."

"Oh, my God. He expects you to? Isn't that your decision?"

"Of course it's my decision. But hearing him … ouch. It's harder to make  my own decision now that I know how he really feels. I wish I could  un-know it. I wish I could un-hear him say those words to me. He was  scary, Callie. His face just died when I told him."                       
       
           



       

"Wait-scary how? Did he threaten you?"

Willow wiped her face with her sleeve. "No. Not at all. It's hard to  explain, now that I think about it." She shivered, picturing the change  on his face-eyes going from lit and intelligent to flat and dead. The  place he'd gone inside his head … it was somewhere primal.

"You know what bothers me about that?" Callie asked. "Travis. Remember  how he said the family was nuts? People say that all the time. But you  think he meant it literally?"

"That sounds too Victorian, Callie. Like a chapter from Wuthering  Heights. Mental illness isn't like hair color-jumping neatly from one  kid to the next."

"You're the shrink."

"I'm the shrink who doesn't know what to think. I'm a bad Dr. Seuss rhyme."

"Willow, you have to hang in there, okay? This is the low point. You're  going to take some very deep breaths. And when you're good and ready,  you'll make your decision."

"The hardest part?" Willow swallowed. "One of the things he said feels true."

Callie sighed. "I'll bet it isn't."

"He said, ‘You really are a fuckup.' And it's hard to argue the point."

"No, it isn't," Callie argued. "Deep breaths, Willow. I mean it."

"Callie, a lot of things have gone wrong for me this year. But every one  of them could be at least partially explained away by bad luck. But  this one is all on me."

"Semantics. There were two people in that … Jeep."

"Bed, actually. Round two was when he said ‘we don't have another  condom' and I said ‘it doesn't matter.'" Willow blew out a breath.  Saying it out loud was bracing. "Only it did matter." She began crying  again.

"Oh, Willow," Callie said again.



* * *



Dane had a splitting headache all the way across the Atlantic. A day  later, he still suffered from it during the course inspection.

"And now we discover the pitfalls of training at low altitudes," Coach said, handing Dane another bottle of Evian water.

"Don't," Dane said, taking a swig. "I don't need you piling on me, too."

"Who's piling on you?" Coach asked. "I'm on your side, here. Let's get a  better look at the fourth pitch," Coach suggested, sidestepping  downhill. "I like the left side of the big jump." He put his thumbs  together, palms out, as if framing a photograph. "That sets you up on  the fall line into the carousel turn."

"Right." Dane rolled his head to the left and shook out his neck. He had  to get his head in the game. Dane watched the competitors around him,  leaning forward on their ski poles, moving their arms in a hypnotic way,  like jellyfish tentacles, as they visualized hightailing it down the  course. This was a Super-G course, meaning that the gates were few and  far between, and speed rather than agility would win the day.

The usual race day mayhem surrounded them. Dane was never thrown off by  the hundreds of people lined up just beyond the orange safety netting.  He was never thrown off by competitors determined to beat him. And he  was never thrown off by fear.

But today he was just plain thrown.

"Dane, are you going to be okay?" Coach asked for the hundredth time.

"Stop fucking asking me," he growled.

The truth was he was far from okay. Willow's announcement had rattled  him to the core. Dane absolutely could not have a child. If he did, that  meant that some poor kid would grow up just like him-waiting in dread  for the symptoms to show up and tear his body apart. Watching the rest  of the world get on with their lives.

And Willow would have to watch it all happen. She'd outlive her child by a good twenty years at least.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. When Dane died, the family  illness would stop killing people. He meant to be its very last victim.

He didn't sleep last night-he couldn't stop thinking about Willow. Her  announcement had put him in the perverse position of hoping that she  really had been sleeping around. It would be better for everyone if she  was pregnant by someone else and only hoping to pin it on him. He tried  to imagine that it was possible-that she'd done the math-figuring he'd  made millions in endorsement money after the last Olympics.

Christ. She wasn't the type. She would never be the type.

Her unluckiest day was the day she'd met him.

Dane's headache had only partly receded by the time he made it into the  start house. He was starting tenth, and the first seven were already  down. There had been only one crash so far-an unlucky Norwegian who'd  caught an edge on the second pitch, flying ass first into the safety  netting. Dane bounced up and down in his ski boots to keep his feet  warm.                       
       
           



       

"Danger."

He turned around to find one of his so-called teammates, a guy named  J.P., calling to him. J.P. had scored a twelfth place start, better than  he usually got.