Page 12 of Crashing into Love

“Uh… I guess just a beer.”

“No way. Get something good. I want all the stories and tour gossip.”

Drew laughed again and thought back to the days when she used to come in after a long day on the mountain, have a few cocktails, and tell anyone in the room stories about her races or the gossip on the tour. She let Becks buy her a gin and tonic, her preferred drink, and she walked with her back toward the tables where Jo was standing with the friends whose names Drew had forgotten. By the time Drew had finished her first drink, Becks had another ready for her, and halfway through that one, Drew had started to feel the alcohol.

“In training, he kept scratching himself, so we were all like, ‘Dude, stop,’ and wondering what the hell was going on,” Drew continued her story about one of the Team USA boarders. “It turns out, one of the other guys had put itching powder in his suit, and only in that area.”

The group of about ten people, who had congregated around her on the sofas now, all burst out laughing.

“He had no idea, and he’d been asking the guys if any of them were having issues with their suits. He thought he’d developed some kind of allergy to the material.”

They laughed some more.

“The funniest part was that they didn’t just do it to that suit. He put on a different one the next day, and he figured it out, but he was already on the snow, so he had to go all the way back to his room to shower and change.” Drew took a sip of her drink, shook her head, and added, “The women don’t haze the newbies like that.”

“What do you do?” Jo asked.

“We’re women. We just gossip about each other and say, ‘You can’t sit here at the lunch table.’” She chuckled. “No, I’m kidding. We don’t do that. We don’t do much of anything, really. Most of the time, we’re really welcoming. There was this one time, though, when a new woman on the team was in her first USA competition with us, and we were in the same semi-heat. She was so young; maybe sixteen or seventeen. This was about five years ago, I think. Anyway, I won the heat by a large margin. I’m talking, like, three whole seconds. She came in second and made it through, but when we got to the finish line and I was taking off my goggles, she started coming at me, mad because she said I blocked her from passing me, which I didn’t. I was just better and kicked her ass.” Drew laughed. “The others decided that she needed to be put in her place, and they–”

She looked past Jo and Becks, who were sitting on the sofa, and saw Selma standing there. The woman must have joined in at some point, and Drew hadn’t noticed her.

“They what?” Becks asked.

“Uh… They messed up her room. They wrote the number three on her mirror in her own lipstick since I’d kicked her ass by three seconds. The other four in the heat were even farther behind. I rocked that course that season. She stopped racing a year later.”

“Shit. Drew,” Becks said.

“I didn’t mess up her room. They did. I didn’t have anything to do with it. And if she’s going to come up to the team captain and accuse me of something in front of someone, she better have the evidence to back her ass up, which she didn’t. I didn’t block her at all. I watched that video. I was too far ahead of her the whole race to block her from doing anything other than losing.”

A few people laughed, but Selma Driscoll wasn’t one of them. Selma crossed her arms over her chest, and it reminded Drew of how her coach did the same pose when he wasn’t all that happy with her.

“Anyway,” Drew began. “That wasn’t even my best time that year. She wouldn’t have been able to keep up, like pretty much everyone else in the world. If they can even get close enough to me, they’re still not usually good enough to get past me.” She finished her gin and tonic.

“Damn, Drew!” Becks laughed.

“When are you racing again?” one of the other people there asked.

“I’ll keep you posted,” she replied with a wink. “Playing that close to the vest right now. I don’t want people to know when to expect me.”

That was a lie, and a weird one, but the alcohol had kicked in fully, and Selma was still staring at her with that almost motherly look of disapproval, which was also weird.

“Anyway…” Drew leaned back against the sofa.

Selma looked at her for another moment before she turned and walked off.

CHAPTER 6

“You can take off now, Olivia. We don’t have anyone else checking in, and I can take care of anything else that comes up. We’ve got Howie on later.”

“Yeah? Cool. Thanks,” Olivia replied. “Wait… Are you sure? Have you even had a break today? What about Gia?”

“What about her?”

“I feel like you never see her.”

“Olivia, I appreciate the concern, but that’s a little inappropriate, don’t you think?”

“You’re right. Sorry. I’ll go home now and worry about myself.”

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