Page 36 of Born in the Spring

It’s not a prod to just get me back out there. We’ve done that before. Anusmoment.

“I know you don’t,” she states with her same patience, at the same time I say, “I’m sorry.”

I sigh, holding her stare again. “I know you’re just trying to help, and I love you for it. . .” My heart skips to the beat of those three words, as I go back to the first time I told her I love her. She’s told me she loves me too—one of my split second wide beam moments, because in the next, I knew it wasn’t deeper than friendship. Now, I’m going nuts, feeling like maybe I didn’t know anything.

In my pause, she waits, her lips parting like she might say something to fill this beating silence, but she looks ahead again, leaning to graze her shoulder into mine as she assures me, “It’s okay.”

To love you?my head asks again at those two damn words that are keeping me stuck in my realm of possibilities.To still want you?

I’m shifting closer to her before I even realize it, and I run a finger over the back of her hand. Her cool skin warms under my touch, and her eyes flit down, watching me trace along her knuckles,not pulling away. The sounds around us shut off to my ears as her body stills, little mist showing from her shallowed breathing.

She’s not going to say anything. She’s not going to do anything. She’s just going to let me touch her.

Why does she let me?

I pull my hand back, our surroundings rushing back too, but I stay in the place this put my head, thinking maybe that’s where her head has gone too. “Remember your first lesson?”

It was at night. Like Shepherd’s last ride. But we were sober. And on a flatter, much easier slope.

Elara smiles, her inhale deep and released in a full cloud, and I smile too.Thatwould’ve been the perfect night to flirt over if that was our first date. But she’d officially been dating my brother for two years. It didn’t matter that it felt like a date. It felt likesomething. It felt different.

“It was our only lesson,” she points out, and the reminder sinks me.

“Shepherd came back and…made up for missing it.” The words are a muttered thought, taking me even lower for still wishing he hadn’t.

“He just finished what you started.” Her voice drops with a sadness, then rises as she tells me, “I learned from you, Jasper.Youtaught me. And you’re a damn good teacher.” I breathe a laugh through the sudden blush heating my cheeks. “You are needed out there.”

Elara says it and I believe it.

I don’t know if I can still get back on the slopes, but hearingthose words from her mouth pushes me closer.

“Thank you,” I murmur as I push up from the railing, needing her in my arms, and as she copies my movement, I wrap her in a hug, breathing in her scent of winter air and spring sunshine, my body instantly warmed by hers.

And that’s something else—when I hug her, she mostly lets me hold her as long as I want.

My lungs feel like they’re being squeezed as I feel my next thought as the strongest certainty, this flood drowning me, and the only way to breathe is to give it air.

“You never had to say you like being in my arms.”

I’ve pulled back enough to press my mouth to her ear, like I’m trying to shield the released words from the rest of the world, from someone who can’t even hear them, as nerves seize my body, tensing my muscles and churning my stomach, my heart racing out of my chest.

It’s okay.

Elara’s stilled again with me, her hands on my shoulders and mine on her hips, my pulled breaths wavering in waiting—waiting for her to deny it while praying she doesn’t, knowing how far overusI’ve taken a gesture we’ve always done, a step intoherheart, a direction we’re still not moving from.

Until she does, pulling back the rest of the way, with her smile.

She wouldn’t lie to me. So she smiles and says nothing.

My hands, still on her hips, press into her more at the thought, that she can’t deny it, against the next thought that’s saying just because she likes being in my arms doesn’t mean she wants to be with me.

“You give good hugs,” she tells me, giving me something a bit more, but it’s blown past her lips just like anothercompliment, a verbal waving away of what just happened.

Then it’s waved away completely when a throat clears, separating us, and my mom walks up with her shininghappy to see yousmile, but her eyes ping-pong between us in question—probably at the way we jolted apart.

“I’m glad I found you both.”

“What can we do?” Elara asks, always ready to jump in and help—or to stay busier than her head—but Mom’s not about to ask for it. Her voice is steady, but there’s some effort behind it. And while she keeps her eyes on my mom, I can’t take mine off that pink in her cheeks. Deeper, not from the cold.

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