I think he was referring to my handling of his partners. However, I was still thinking about his soft lips on my forehead. I said, “I’ll say.”

“I hope I set a good example for my dad,” Nick said. “He’s flying down to Phoenix tonight for a Valentine’s date with my mother.”

“Nick, that’s so great!” I squealed. Wait a minute. It was great that Nick’s parents were making an effort to get back together. But did Nick mean that’s the only reason he’d kissed me? That was not great at all!

The crowd had paused when we stopped to talk to Nick’s dad, but now they moved with us toward the jump. I noticed a couple of film crews had arrived, probably from the resort and the local TV station. No pressure.

An out-of-control Chloe barreled out of the crowd, dragging Liz by the hand. They threatened to run me down. Nick caught Chloe by the hand as she slid past, and Liz was able to swing them both around in front of me.

“We’ll go up the lift with you for moral support, Hayden,” Chloe said. “We’ll coach you off the jump.”

“Great. Thank you!” I said, shaking imaginary snow out of my hair. I couldn’t give Liz a meaningful look through my goggles, but I hoped she would get the message. I did not want Chloe’s “help.” Not today.

“Let’s wait for her at the bottom, Chloe,” Liz suggested. “That way we won’t distract her, and we can hug her when she wins. Come on!” They followed the rest of the crowd sliding toward the bottom of the jump, leaving Nick and me to go up the lift alone.

As soon as the chair left the ground, he said quietly, “I’m going to give you the speech the football coach gives us.”

I sniffed a long noseful of cold air. “Okay.”

“Everything up until now has been practice,” he said. “Regardless of how good or how bad you’ve looked in practice, you’re starting over now. The game is what matters. And a single game has never meant more than this one means to you.”

“True.” Going off this jump might make the difference between my career as a professional snowboarder and my life in a convent. Or behind a desk, a place I had never been in my life (I did my homework on a beanbag chair).

So I should be focusing on the trick I was about to do, not on the warmth of Nick beside me, soaking through my BOY TOY jeans and long underwear and into my thigh. I wondered whether kissing my forehead and calling me his girlfriend and talking about true love were really all just examples for his father, or whether Nick had meant them.

“Speaking of starting over,” he said quietly. “Hayden, can you and I start over?”

I looked up at him in astonishment.

He grinned, and I wished I could see his eyes behind his goggles. “I would rather walk across hot coals than go through seventh grade again, I have to tell you. I mean, can we say that everything up until now between you and me has been practice?”

Staring up at his superhero jaw, I enjoyed the tingles spreading across my chest and savored the moment. These were the words I’d waited for him to say since he’d sat next to me in the hall eight days before. I scooted toward him as well as I could with my board hanging heavily from my feet. “Absolutely. I’m ready to play this game with you.”

He kissed me, his warm mouth on my mouth. This didn’t work very well with his goggles hitting mine, so he pulled up mine and I pulled up his, and we kissed more deeply. It wasn’t the most private kiss we’d ever shared, or the longest, or the most romantic. But it mattered the most. Our connection mattered. When we reached the station and boarded off the lift, my heart was racing like I’d just finished the slalom.

We couldn’t stop grinning at each other as we returned downhill to the jump. We pulled up and gazed down the long slope at the white ramp jutting into the clear blue sky. Beyond that, way down the hill, the crowd was even bigger than it had been at the half-pipe. They were very far away, but I thought I recognized my parents’ ski clothes, which they didn’t pull out of storage very often. They must have gotten back from Boulder and come out to support my comp—what great parents! And ever so faintly, I could hear Josh rapping to his posse’s beat. I couldn’t make out most of what he was saying, but I thought I caught the word prepubescent.

“Do you want to go first?” Nick asked me.

“No, I want you to go first.” I wanted to see what trick he landed. Might as well pile as much pressure on myself as possible.

And, truth be told, I wanted to know that I could do this jump all by myself, without him up here coaching me.

“Okay, pep talk before I go.” He put his gloves on my shoulders and squeezed. “Don’t look at the crowd down there. Don’t think about the jump at all. Concentrate on the sick trick you’ll do when you go off.” He pressed his goggles to my goggles. “Feel the 900.”

“900!” I scoffed. “I’m feeling the 1080.”

He let me go and stood back, eyeing me. I could tell he didn’t want to say anything to destroy my confidence, but he was afraid he’d created a monster.

“Don’t worry. I’m ready to play the game.” I nodded solemnly.

“One more thing,” he said. “If you do fall—”

I cringed. Some pep talk!

“—if something terrible happens, you still won’t lose everything. Now you have good friends, and nothing will ever change that. You’re not that girl.”

“Oh, Nick.” I threw myself at him, literally. He wrapped me in his arms and brushed my hair aside to kiss my forehead again.

I squeezed him hard, then drew away and punched him on his padded arm. “Go ahead, and don’t break a leg.”

Without fanfare, he steered onto the slope and sped off the jump. A nice 540, or possibly even a 720! I couldn’t see his rotations when he disappeared over the edge. Anyway, all that really mattered to me was that he landed safely. I boarded a few feet to one side and leaned over until I saw him downhill, sliding to a stop, upright. The crowd all waved their arms, and faintly I heard their bells and voices.

My turn. I could do this. I inhaled through my nose and felt my lungs fill with air. My blood spread the life-giving oxygen throughout my body.

I exhaled through my mouth and felt gravity pull the energy from my heart down through my legs, through my boots and snowboard, through the snow, to the rocks below. I was one with the mountain.

I touched my remaining lucky earring.

Then I pressed all my weight forward for speed and raced toward the jump, the white edge, the blue sky beyond, the town below, the mountains in the distance. I went off.

Dancing at the Poseur concert had been fun at first, but then Josh and his posse pulled Nick and me into the mosh pit. We needed a break. While Nick snagged us a lawn chair on the ski lodge deck above the concert, I bought us a couple of hot chocolates—and passed Gavin and Chloe at the teller machine. She rubbed her gloves together gleefully, then held them out while Gavin counted the cash into her hands.

“Hayden!” she exclaimed as I walked up, but her eyes didn’t leave the money. Clearly, she didn’t trust Gavin. “I went ahead and bought us tickets to be safe in case the concert was sold out, and now Gavin is paying—me—back—ha!” She tapped his cheek playfully with the stack of bills. He closed one eye against the attack.

“Not that you thought I would lose or anything,” I said suspiciously.

She innocently fluttered her eyelashes at me. “Of course not!”

“We shouldn’t have doubted you,” Gavin said. “I have never seen anybody short of a pro ride the pipe like that.”

I glared at him. Because the words were coming from his mouth, I expected them to be sarcastic. But his face was friendly and open. For once, he seemed genuine.

“And a 1080 off the jump?” he went on. “That was savage.”

Chloe widened her eyes at him. “Why are you being nice? Has your body been taken over by aliens?”

“You’ll find out tonight, baby.”

I stopped the tickle fest I felt coming on between them by handing them each a hot chocolate. “Hold this. My phone’s beeping.” I took it out of my pocket and peered at the text message.

Nick: Do u want 2 b n people?

“People,” I murmured as if he could hear me. “As in the magazine?” I peered up onto the deck and saw him standing next to our lounge chair, talking with a group of adults with cameras. “Oh my God, paparazzi? No way!”

“Way,” Gavin said. “I saw them talking to Daisy Delaney earlier. They must have followed Poseur here, then realized there were more celebrities they could milk.”

“Nick isn’t that kind of celebrity,” I said.

“I’ll bet they want him for a special theme issue,” Chloe suggested. “How the richest bachelors in America spent Valentine’s Day.”

I glanced dubiously toward the mosh pit. Then I looked toward Nick again and strained to hear what he was saying over the Poseur tune.

“Are you here alone?” one of the men asked him. “Are you seeing anyone?”

“Yes, I’m seeing someone,” Nick said, standing beside them but hardly acknowledging them. He was watching for my answer on his phone.

“For how long?” a woman asked.

About an hour, I thought. Or did we officially start seeing each other on the ski lift this morning? Ten hours. I smiled, remembering the sunny afternoon we’d spent boarding with Daisy Delaney and her boyfriend. Or … what did “seeing each other” mean, anyway? If nearly making out in the sauna counted, we’d been seeing each other for five days.

“Four years,” I heard him say.

“Aww!” I squealed. Then I turned to Chloe. “Do I want to be in People?”

“No,” she said firmly. “Nick is hot.”

Gavin frowned and poked her in the side. “Hey.”

She ducked away from his finger. “Facts are facts. Nick is hot, and when girls read People and see he’s dating you, they will call you a skank ho. You and I have mooned over Prince William. We know the deal.”

“True.” When Nick glanced slyly down at me, I shook my head no.

For a few more minutes, I talked with Chloe and Gavin, and we all watched Liz and Davis swaying romantically to a rare slow song from Poseur. What a happy Valentine’s Day. Then, when the paparazzi had cleared out, I climbed the steps to the deck and handed a cup of hot chocolate to Nick. He sat down in the lawn chair and unzipped his parka. I settled back against his warm shirt.

“I bought you a Valentine’s Day present,” he said in my ear, sending shivers through me despite all my layers. He rocked to one side in the chair and pulled something from his back pocket.

I took it in my gloved hands and peered at it in the dusky light from the stage and the stars. It was a sew-on patch with a black diamond in the center, the symbol for a dangerous ski slope. “Nick, that’s so cool! I love it!”

“That’s not all.” He rocked to his other side and pulled out another patch. This one had a four-leaf clover. “To replace the luck you’re missing.”

“Nick.” I stared at the patches in my mittens, trying not to tear up. “This is sweet of you.”

“I really like you in those ‘BOY TOY’ jeans,” he said, “but this needs to go on top of ‘BOY.’” He took the black diamond from me and shook it. “And the clover goes on top of ‘TOY.’”

“Deal.” I slipped the patches into my coat pocket. Then I sipped my hot chocolate and sighed, enjoying his warmth behind me. “We’ve been dating for four years, huh? I don’t think Fiona will like that answer.”

“You’ve always had my heart.” He kissed my earlobe—the one without a bandage. The one that was still lucky. “You know, you’re going to be in People anyway when you make the Olympic snowboarding team. ESPN will ask you, ‘Hayden O’Malley, you came from nowhere at age seventeen. Where have you been?’ And you’ll answer, ‘Oh, I had a few acrophobic issues to work through.’”

Laughing, I poked him for his embarrassingly accurate imitation of my southern drawl.

He continued in my voice, “‘Then one night my boyfriend was being an ass and I challenged him to a comp. I had to do a front 1080 off a jump just to show him up, and the rest is history.’”

“I hope so.”

“I know so.” He kissed my cheek.

I reached back to run my fingers through his long hair. “Right now I want to lie low, have a normal life, and hang out with my boyfriend. I’ll meet you in People in a few years.”

He chuckled, making my insides sparkle with anticipation. “It’s a date.”