(rivals to lovers, small town, sports) [WATTYS 2024 SHORTLIST] (Season 3 coming soon) After a devastating Olympic loss puts her career in a downward spiral, an aging skier returns to her laid-back mountain hometown to rediscover her love of her spor...
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Summer did not go back to the studio the next morning, or the one after. She didn't trust Juniper's newfound friendliness. Worse, she didn't trust herself.
Yes, it had been weird to sit there with Juniper like they were supporting each other, and if she'd had her choice of meditation partner, she would have picked no one at all. But that hadn't always been true. Young Summer had thought that joining the national team would mean finally having teammates on her level. She had imagined meeting women who could challenge her but who could also be there for her on the tough days. Things hadn't worked out that way, of course. The team had never felt much like a team to her. Usually she was fine with that, but maybe some small part of her still craved that connection she had once hoped for.
Because when she had opened that studio door and seen Juniper looking... afraid. Unguarded. Vulnerable in a way that Summer had rarely seen from any of her other teammates and had never seen from Juniper, not even once- When she saw that, it was hard to walk away.
That fear was a feeling Summer had recognized instantly. She knew it as the fear of not good enough. The terror of not living up to expectations. The horrible, inescapable knowledge that no matter how mentally resilient you were, you couldn't just will yourself onto the top spot of the podium.
Or to a knee that worked exactly like it used to.
Past Summer would have laughed if anyone had asked her if she was ever afraid. Since her crash, though, she had become well acquainted with fear. It was her new partner in life, and for the long, isolated months of her recovery, she had felt completely alone in it. Her mother supported her, but she didn't really get it.
Summer couldn't imagine anyone else understanding how she felt until she saw that same feeling on Juniper's face. An unfortunate turn of events. Juniper was the last person in the world who she wanted to share that sort of vulnerability with.
Even if meditating with her had actually been sort of nice.
Instead of going back to the studio, she rolled out her mat alone in front of the ceiling-high windows in the lovely two-bedroom loft suite that Holly had insisted she take at a truly outrageous discount. By the second day of this, though, she had to admit that it had been much easier to focus in the studio, with Juniper sitting there ready to judge her for getting distracted and without the sound of Jie's hairdryer running upstairs.
The room came with a fabulous view of the mountain, supposedly, but she hadn't seen it yet. So far those huge windows had shown her nothing but the blankness of blowing snowstorms, white during the day and a deep indigo now in the pre-sunrise darkness. Big, fluffy flakes swirled up against the glass. She tried to estimate how deep the snow base might be. Enough to cover all those rocks on the lowest run? The fresh snow would be too soft for speed and visibility would be zero, but at this point she would not have cared at all. She craved nothing more than to lay down the first tracks in some knee-deep powder.
