Slashed (Extreme Risk 3)

Chapter 1

Cam

I don’t like being ignored. Or, more specifically, I don’t like being ignored by Luc.

The guy who’s been my best friend since I was four years old.

The guy who taught me how to ride my very first snowboard.

The guy who knows everything about me—and who I know everything about.

Or at least I did. Now, as he sits across from me talking and joking around with anyone and everyone but me, I’m not sure I know anything about him anymore. He sure as hell doesn’t want to know anything about me. He won’t even look at me. And if he puts any more distance between us, he’s going to end up falling off the back of the damn boat the first time we hit a rough wave.

Which at the moment, I might actually pay good money to see. Especially when he glances up from his super intense conversation with Ash, and our eyes meet for the first time in way too long. I start to smile, but he yanks his gaze away before he sees it. And I’m left feeling like a total idiot.

And the worst part is, it’s all my fault. The weirdness, the awkwardness, Luc’s inability to even look at me—I’m responsible for all of it. I’m the one who got drunk a few months ago when Z first got together with Ophelia. I’m the one who threw myself at Luc when he was equally drunk, who kept pushing and pushing until he took me back to his place. And I’m the one who freaked out so completely when I woke up in bed with him the next morning. He’d tried to be cool, to be nice—and I had lost it completely.

Nothing has been the same since.

I’ve spent the last few months trying to clean up the mess I made—doing anything and everything I could think of to get us back on even ground—but it isn’t working. We used to practically live in each other’s pockets, and now we only hang out when the others are around. When he can use Z and Ash and Tansy and Ophelia as a buffer between us. And only when he doesn’t have to say more than one or two sentences to me at any given time.

It’s driving me absolutely, totally, completely, batshit crazy.

Part of me wants to apologize—again—for freaking out on him instead of just going the whole one-time friends-with-benefits route, especially since I’m the one who initiated everything. But there’s another part of me that wants to slap the hell out of him. I mean, yes, I handled the morning after badly. But, really, one mistake and sixteen years of friendship are suddenly null and void?

Just the thought makes me mad. I’d never shut him out like this—I wouldn’t even know how. The fact that he’s doing it so easily hurts me more than I want to admit, even to myself.

“So, who’s up first?” Ash calls from where he’s lounging against the side of the boat, his girlfriend, Tansy, balanced on his lap.

“I am,” I tell him, reaching for my wakeboard.

“That’s my girl!” Z whoops as he starts to slow the speedboat down. “Get out there early, show ’em how it’s done!”

“Oh, I plan to.”

Z’s girlfriend, Ophelia, laughs even as she holds her hand up for a high five. “Ten bucks says Cam can stay up longer than any of the guys.”

“No bet there,” Ash tells her. “Cam fucking rules on a wakeboard.”

I shoot him a look. “Almost as much as I rule on a snowboard.”

“Hey now, it’s a little early for trash talking, isn’t it?” Z asks.

“It’s not trash talking if it’s true,” Ash’s younger brother, Logan, says. He flashes me a huge smile and I can’t resist giving him a quick, one-armed hug. I love this fourteen-year-old kid so much it’s ridiculous, and the fact that he can still smile, still be so upbeat even with everything he’s had to handle in the last year, blows my mind completely. Not only did he lose his parents in a horrific car wreck, he also lost the use of his legs in that same wreck. And yet, here he is, laughing and joking around like the total badass that he is.

“At least Logan knows the truth,” I tell him with a wink. “And that’s all that matters.”

“Can you teach me?” Tansy asks as Z brings the boat to a stop.

“Sure. I—”

“Hey, I’ll teach you, babe,” Ash tells her.

“But you just said that Cam’s better than you,” she tells him, eyes wide and innocent. “And I want to learn from the best.”

I crack up. I can’t help it—the way Ash’s mouth drops open is absolutely priceless, and for a second, I wish my phone were out so I could get a picture of it. I glance at Luc, wanting to share the joke, but he’s looking out over the water. Deliberately not looking at me. Deliberately not joining in the conversation about me.

I freaking hate it.

But now’s not the time—or the place—to dwell on the disaster that is our friendship. So I make my way to the back of the boat, climb up on the seat. I make sure to bump into Luc as I do. It works. For a second, just a second, he’s looking at me. And this time when our eyes meet, he smiles a little.

“Stomp it out there.”

Relief sweeps through me and I smile, probably way more than his comment warrants.

“I plan on it.”

I fasten my wakeboard onto my feet, then slide over the side of the boat and into the water with a splash. I gasp a little at the chill of it—it’s only September, but up here in the mountains, the water is already pretty cold. Not cold enough for a wetsuit, but definitely cold enough to make me shiver at first contact.

“You ready?” Z calls.

I grab the line, get myself in position with my knees pulled toward my chest and the board on its side, running parallel to the back of the boat.

“Hit it!” I tell him.

He laughs a little maniacally, but when he starts moving forward, he keeps it slow and steady. But that’s Z for you. He’s an adrenaline junkie who will try just about anything once—even stuff that’s almost guaranteed to kill him—but when it comes to the

rest of us, he’s totally rock solid, totally responsible.

It’s one of the things I love about him. One of the things that used to make me think I was in love with him even though it was really more infatuation than anything else. There aren’t many people in my life who try to take care of me—the fact that Z always did made him special. But confusing that kind of friendship with love was stupid on my part, and something I totally got over once I accepted Ophelia wasn’t going anywhere. Because she loves Z for real and he loves her the same way. What she’s done for him—how she’s helped him come to grips with all the shit in his own life—matters more to me than any feelings I might have had for him way back when.

“Hey, faster,” I call, when he seems determined to be all old lady about the speed thing. “We’re barely moving!”

He lets out another maniacal laugh, but waves his hand in acknowledgement. And then we’re moving, cruising through the water at a speed that’s enough to get my adrenaline pumping.

I shift my hips, let the board sink like it’s been wanting to since we started moving. I can feel the pull in my shoulders now, but resist standing up. Not yet, not yet, not yet…

We hit what feels like about twenty miles an hour, and that’s when I pull up. We’re racing across the lake now, and I’m laughing as water sprays up into my face. For long seconds, I keep my arms relaxed, my knees bent, and just ride. We’re going fast, and the boat is kicking the water up, making it a little choppy. But I like it that way—and as Z lays on the speed, I shift my weight and pop a couple Ollies.

Logan cheers, and I laugh, but settle in to do a couple more tricks for him—a corked spin followed by a monkey spin, an invert, a couple different turns. Z guns it then, gets the boat up to what I’m guessing is twenty-three or so miles per hour as he doubles, then triples up.

I’m grinning like a crazy person now, but I love riding when he does that, love what it feels like when the wakes cross and hit three times normal size. Lowering my shoulders, I tuck in, then when it feels right, when it feels perfect, I jump. I catch mad air, just like I’d hoped, and I do a double inverted cork that I land perfectly, despite the huge wake.

It’s a great fucking feeling. The trick. The landing. The rush.