Page 18 of Head Over Skis

‘Ooh you have a dog? We have a wee Yorkie back home in Aberdeen.’

The owner of the voice appears, standing at the other end of the crescent we’ve formed around Rory. She smiles at me, and my first thought is that she has a very kind face. Crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes paint her as someone often joyful, and my heart warms as she reminds me of my mum. Her ski jacket is a patchwork of colour, like someone’s taken a canvas and painted bursts of every colour of the rainbow on it before blending them all together. She passes her poles to the man on her right and reaches a hand out towards me. ‘Hello, I’m Penny.’

‘Lottie,’ I reply, taking it, and she squeezes mine tightly before pointing her thumb towards the man next to her. In contrast, his ski jacket can be described in one word: beige.

‘And this is my husband, Bill. Don’t mind his grumpy old face, he still hasn’t forgiven me for dragging us on this holiday in the first place.’

‘Maybe because I’m sixty-five with two barely functioning knees and you’ve put me in skis for the first time in twenty years. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get rid of me.’

Penny leans towards me and cups her hand over her mouth.

‘I think he’s onto me,’ she says with a wink, and I like her already.

There’s only one other person in our group, a guy who’s standing partially out of view behind Bill. He lifts one of his hands to wave, seeming to forget the ski pole he’s holding and nearly knocks Penny on the head with it.

‘Crumbs, I’m so sorry. Uh, I’m Stephen.’

‘Hi, Stephen,’ we all say back in a chorus, which leaves him hugging his arms around himself, slightly terrified. He quickly reverts to his earlier hiding place.

‘Bless him, he’s like a little lost puppy,’ Meghan whispers in my ear.

‘Group mission to get him dancing on the tables at après before the end of the week,’ Tilly chimes in and I hide my laugh behind a cough as I try to picture that.

‘Now that introductions are all done, who’s ready to start skiing?’ Rory asks, which elicits a series of cheers from the whole group, apart from me. I’m still too shocked to register what’s going on.

Rory continues saying things that I should probably be listening to, but instead I try to figure out how best to handle this.

After a few dazed minutes, I decide there and then that the best way to play this is to carry on pretending Rory and I have never met. It’ll be fine, easy even. We’ve barely spent any time together anyway, only one evening that I’ll admit I’ve thought about more than I should’ve. I get a flashback to last night, lying in my bed in the chalet, but I shut it down and pray I haven’t flushed as red as a tomato. I’m definitely keeping that a secret, otherwise Tilly might lose her mind.

I’ll see him in a purely professional light. This is nothing more than a teacher-student relationship. Not relationship – that’s the wrong word. A teacher-student dynamic.

Yeah, that sounds doable.

I’m in my own head so much that I don’t notice Rory’s standing directly in front of me until he clears his throat, poised as if waiting for me to answer a question.

‘I’m sorry, what was that?’

‘He asked you to flip over,’ Tilly chimes in and my mouth gapes open.

‘Your skis,’ Rory clarifies, the corners of his lips twitching with amusement. The whole thing makes me want to disappear.

‘Can you flip over your skis so I can wax them? It’ll help with today’s snow.’

My face is burning up even though it’s -5°C, and I shoot Tilly a stern glare.

‘Oh, uh yeah, of course,’ I say, handing my skis over to him bottom side out, and searing out any images Tilly’s words have conjured in my head of him flipping me over two days ago. Thinking back on that night, I realise there were clues everywhere that he could’ve been a ski instructor. That painting for starters, which I could swear is a painting of this place. And I realise that odd look he gave me when I joked about him having skis in one of his bedrooms was because he most likely did have skis lying around the house.

‘You’re good to go,’ he says, handing them back and flashing me an easy smile.

Tilly brushes her gloved hand down my ski before nodding. ‘Look at you, Lottie, all slick and ready.’

I die inside, and Meghan fails to restrain herself from laughing as I frantically search for where Rory is standing and pray he was out of earshot. It’s clear from Meghan’s face that Tilly’s filled her in on who Rory is.

‘Can you two stop with that? God, this whole thing is embarrassing enough without the two of you trying to turn everything into an innuendo.’

‘Oh, come on, Lottie, don’t be so boring. Wait until the boys find out about this!’ Tilly’s eyebrows dance and I point my finger at her conniving little face.

‘No, no, no. No one is finding out about anything, got it?’ I glance from her to Meghan, mostly directing this at her as she’s usually incapable of withholding gossip, but she’s trying weirdly hard to avoid my eye.