Page 36 of Love Worth Gold
“You’re focused on everything except what’s actually happening in your head.” Tess stepped closer. “You won gold two days ago. You should be riding that high straight into the downhill. Instead, you’re out here skiing reckless lines like you’ve got something to prove to someone who isn’t even on your team. You need to get Isaline Senn out of your fucking head.”
The sound of Isaline’s name hung between them, unspoken but impossible to miss.
Blaire looked away. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you?” Tess’s voice softened without losing its steel. “Because from where I’m standing, you’re about to blow your last Olympic downhill because you’re too stubborn to admit you want something you won’t let yourself have. And if that something is real, it will wait until this race is over.”
The words landed like a fist to the sternum.
“This is your last shot to choose how your story ends,” Tess continued. “You want to go out flying into nets? Fine. But if you keep trying to outrun your own feelings with your skis, you’re going out on a stretcher, not a podium, Hollis.”
Silence stretched taut between them.
“Figure out what you actually want before you stand in that start again, Blaire,” Tess said sternly. Then she turned and walked out, leaving Blaire alone with her throbbing bruises and the truth she’d been dodging since St. Moritz.
Blaire limped back to her room as the village settled into evening routines. Through windows, she glimpsed teammates laughing over card games and recovery shakes. The dining hall glowed with warmth and noise that she had no capacity to join.
She grabbed a protein bar from her stash and ate it standing at the window as she watched snow fall in lazy spirals onto the trees.
Her shoulder was still throbbing where the fence had caught her. The ice pack Jordy had pressed into her hand before she left the venue sat melting on the desk, forgotten. Pain was familiar. She knew how to manage it, catalog it, push through it.
What she didn’t know how to manage was the feeling that had lodged itself under her ribs since a certain Swiss skier had slid into her heart and refused to be trained away.
Blaire dropped onto the narrow bed. The crash replayed behind her eyes—not the mechanics of the fall, but the moment before. The choice to press early. The reckless commitment born from wanting to prove she could still dominate, still own the hill, still be untouchable.
Except she wasn’t untouchable anymore. Isaline had already gotten under her skin, into her head, and past every defense Blaire had spent twenty years perfecting.
She’d told herself for months that compartmentalizing worked. Feelings in one box, performance in another, never letting them bleed together. That lie had put her into the safety netting at eighty miles per hour.
Tess’s words echoed in her head:Figure out what you actually want.
Blaire let herself answer honestly for the first time.
She wanted the downhill gold. Not as another medal to stack, but as the final, chosen punctuation mark on a career that had given her everything and cost her just as much. She wanted to stand in that start gate one last time like she owned that mountain and every medal that it ever gave out.
She also wanted Isaline. Wanted her in ways that didn’t fit any of the rules Blaire had built to keep herself safe. She wanted Isaline’s laugh and her fire and the way she looked at Blaire like she saw past the headlines to the real woman underneath.
Those two wants weren’t going to cancel each other out just because she pretended they lived in separate worlds.
The downhill was tomorrow. She could keep lying to herself, keep trying to shove Isaline into the distraction column, and ski the way she had today—tight, defensive, chasing ghosts instead of the finish.
Or she could walk into that start gate with both truths sitting heavy in her chest and trust herself not to flinch.
Blaire locked her eyes on the gold medal hanging from her gear rack. It was gleaming perfectly, and yet somehow not enough.
She stood up slowly, ignoring the protest from bruised ribs, and began laying out her downhill gear with deliberate care. Suit. Boots. Helmet. Each piece was placed exactly where it needed to be.
Blaire lay back down and closed her eyes and breathed through the ache in her ribs and the sharper one in her chest. Tomorrow, the course would get all of her. The wanting could wait its turn. If Isaline was the type of gold that lasted, she’d still be there at the bottom of the hill when the race was over.
Chapter Sixteen
She’d kept herself upright during the training run today. She just wasn’t sure she’d kept herself honest.
Before bedtime, Isaline and her dad were in a quieter corner of the Swiss team room where course maps were tacked to the wall, and a video monitor sat dark.
Matthias waited until the room cleared before he pulled a chair across from Isaline and sat. He didn’t open with video analysis or split times. He simply looked at her in that way he always had, the one that made her feel twelve years old and completely transparent.
“You skied well enough for training,” he said.