“Can’t wait to see it.”
They were both breathing hard by the time they’d plowed through the shin-high powder leading to the first building.
“This was the office,” he said, “where the principal lived. Just like in regular school, you didn’t want to get sent to the office.”
“Which probably meant you spent a lot of time there.”
He grinned, shrugged, and turned to the right, approaching a big industrial building with metal roll-up doors. Stepping up to a window, he cupped his hands around his face to peer inside. Nostalgia washed over him as he scanned the workbenches and tool racks. “I learned to weld here. Learned to repair skis and snowboards. Even designed and built a board of my own.”
“That sounds cool.”
“It was. Very cool. The place was owned by a great couple, Matthew and Helena Rizzuto. They were better parents to me than my own ever were.”
They moved on to a row of small buildings, paint weathered, roof battered. “These are the classrooms.” They wandered past, peeking in the small windows to each room. Desks, chairs, and bookcases still filled the hollow space. “Feels sad to see it like this, so empty. It was always so full of life. Something was always going on.”
The memory gave Noah a spark of something that had been missing from his life for a long time. Something he hadn’t realized had been missing until he felt it again. This had been his home. The people running the school, the kids attending the school, were his family and friends. They’d built a community, one in which Noah had thrived, achieved, and gone on to do great things. And its current abandoned state bothered him.
By the time they’d traveled the length of the barracks and he peered through the window to the tiny room he’d shared with Finn and Jake while they’d all finished high school and trained for the Olympics, his ankle was definitely sore in a whole new way.
“You weren’t kidding about the small muscles. They’re toast.”
“The only way to strengthen them is by repetitive small movements, like what you get trying to maintain your balance on uneven ground. The snow adds a slippery element and makes you work harder. And I knew there was no way I was going to get you to sit in the gym and do the monotonous exercises needed to get the same result you’re getting here.”
He stepped back from the window and swung an arm around her neck. “Great idea. But why here? There’s snow all over Tahoe. We could have taken a walk along the lake.”
A slow, excited smile crossed her face. She grabbed his arm and pulled him around the front of the bunkhouse. “Because I wanted you to see this.”
She stopped and lifted her hand to the dorm. A four-foot-wide FOR SALE sign adorned the peeling wooden siding. Noah glanced at Julia, searching for a clue to this riddle, but he only saw her beautiful smile and the glint in her eye that appeared when she was really excited about something.
In this case, he couldn’t figure out what.
“Sorry, baby. I’m not catching what you’re throwing.”
“It’s for sale.” She stated the obvious, stepping close and clutching the open front of his jacket. “And I think it would be the perfect location and size for your base camp.”
“Base camp?” He felt like there was a black hole in his head. Like his brain was missing some critical information to make sense of what she was saying. “What base camp?”
“The one for your extreme snowboarding adventures.”
His brow pulled hard.
Julia released his jacket and gestured to the building. “The property backs up to Heavenly, and there’s more than enough space for you to build a superpipe. The old basketball courts behind the garage would be a perfect chopper pad for your backcountry excursions. What used to be a garage could be storage for all your gear. The dorms could be perfect for housing people during short clinics. It’s got an industrial kitchen, classrooms, meeting rooms. The bones of everything you could ever need to make your dream of an extreme adventure camp are here.”
Excitement grew from a spark to a flame, and he glanced around the property again, seeing it in a whole different way. The place might need a ton of work, but she was right, it had everything he needed and wanted in a base camp for that elusive dream that had been rolling around in the back of his head for years.
“Wow,” was all he managed to get out.
“Overwhelming?” she asked.
“Yeah. I mean, in a good way, I guess. I always saw it as someday, you know? Time passes so fast. I swear I was twenty-one yesterday. Now I’m thirty, at the tail end of my career and—bam—time to plan the rest of my life.”
She slid her arms around his waist and bundled close, her smile bright, her eyes warm. “It would be an awesome life for
you.”
But would it be an awesome life for you? lay on the tip of his tongue as he lowered his head to press a kiss to her cold lips. He wasn’t sure where her interest in his future had come from, but he liked it.
He lived his life from one event to the next. From one endorsement to the next. From one sponsor to the next, never knowing when the bottom would drop out. It was the gig of a lifetime for a twenty-year-old or even a twenty-five-year-old. But he was looking into his fourth decade of life, competing against guys barely out of their teens.