Page 61 of The Lodge

“One for now, thanks.”

He loads it onto my plate, passes me the maple syrup and the butter. “So your wrist is still hurting pretty badly?”

“It’s actually not too bad at the moment,” I say, pleasantly surprisedto realize I haven’t really noticed it in at least ten minutes. “I slept on it funny, and then Puffin jumped on it, but I think my ice pack helped a lot this morning.”

“Such a bummer you can’t ski for a bit,” he says, loading both of our plates with two long strips of bacon. “You were just about to level up, too.”

“Guess the double blacks will have to wait until the weekend,” I say with an exaggerated sigh for effect.

He laughs. “Yeah, it’s really too bad—you were on track to compete with Olympians by the end of the month.”

We devour our breakfast. The view is amazing, the food is even better, and it’s simultaneously the loveliest and strangest breakfast I’ve ever had in my entire life. I sense that this is a big deal for him, inviting me into his private world like this, and then there’s the additional layer of me knowing his most tightly kept secret—but he doesn’tknowthat I know. I keep looking for cracks in Tyler, for any glimpse of Jett Beckett just beneath the surface, but the man at the table with me seems wholly sincere, entirely reborn from the ashes of the past he so thoroughly torched.

I want very badly to ask him about it.

I also don’t want to ruin breakfast or make him completely shut down—or shut me out—by forcing him to talk about it before he’s ready.

So I eat my waffle and drink my coffee and enjoy the view—not just the mountain, but Tyler himself, his smile and his laugh and his eyes that crinkle at the corners, and his rumpled shirt that makes me hope he’ll have some sort of syrup malfunction that results in him taking it off so I can see what’s underneath again. Those perfect abs, it occurs to me, must be the product not only of years on the slopes but also years on the stage and in the dance studio. Tyler was known more for his vocals than for his dancing,but it makes sense now that River was always the best dancer in the group, thanks to his years of pairs skating with Julie.

When we finish, Tyler walks me to the door.

“I’ll miss giving you a lesson today,” he says, taking my hand in his and pulling me into a big warm bear hug.

I rest my face against his strong chest, feel his heartbeat quicken just underneath. Mine picks up to match—

I could live in this hug.

He promises to come by later if I need anything, and I promise to not push my wrist too hard today while I’m working.

An hour later, I’m set up at the café for a change of scenery, and also because I won’t have to make my own lunch or snacks. Makenna puts my honey nut latte in a to-go cup this time, even though I plan to sit here for hours.

“No laptop disasters today,” she says, sliding it across the counter along with a bag of maple candies I didn’t order.

When I question it, she waves it off and says, “On the house! How’s your project going? Looks like your computer’s okay?”

“Unfortunately, mine’s a corpse now—this one’s Tyler’s.”

Her brows shoot up, but mercifully, she doesn’t comment.

She doesn’t have to: it’s written all over my face how far I’ve fallen for him. Which is a problem, because didn’t Ijustestablish that falling for Tyler is a very bad idea?

File:sebgreen_meetingtheband.mp3

Duration:12:16

Date Recorded:February 7, 2025

SG:

I’ll never forget our first day as a band: the five of us, together for the first time, and our manager. Jason. I loved him at the time—he was like a dad to me. I trusted him like a dad. I still believed he had my best interests in mind, even though the pivot from solo artist to boy band wasn’t at all on my radar when we started working together.

I didn’t know about Jett yet, before that first meeting. Didn’t know Jason had fed him the same pile of lies he’d fed me, the same empty promises—I wouldn’t learn that for a while.

Jason found us all in different ways.

Ayo had a video go viral where he’d layered his own vocals and beatboxing on top of each other, then danced along to the track. He knew a way to perform all the parts live at the same time, this pedal that would loop his parts back on themselves, but his gimmick got old fast. Really, his stuff worked better for a group—he was the first to say yes when Jason eventually floated the idea of the band.

I was next. Jason and I had already started working on my studio album when he discovered Ayo, all those endless months out in LA listening to demos and recording countless songs that were supposedly in the running to be my first single. Jett was apparently doing the same thing at a studio down the street. Jason was working with both of us, even gave us some of the same songs to record. He and the label were never satisfied with any of our takes and ultimately didn’t like either of us as individuals as much as they liked the idea of us in a group. Ayo said yes, and so did I. Jett was harder to convince.

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