“Jefferoo and that tribe are good heads,” Dag said. “But I need to be out of the whole scene. Maybe it’s just for now, maybe forever.” He shrugged.
Heather laughed. “I’m not on you any more, dude. I meant, how’s Jeff doing?” She pumped him for what she’d been dying to know, and Dag gave it up. He told her how many girlfriends Jeff had had (none, just casual encounters) since their breakup. Heather wasn’t all lovesick or stalker, she just wanted to measure up whether she was doing better than him romantically, especially since she wasn’t with anybody at the moment. She’d had somebody steady for a while last year, but she’d been kind of waiting to see what was going on with Mohammed. It seemed like he liked her, but he never made an overture. She hoped it wasn’t the ethnic thing. Skiing was full of white North Americans. Mohammed’s accent and dark looks appealed to Heather as a refreshing change. Getting on so well with Mohammed was one of the few reasons she kept working at BlackArts, because god knew the work wasn’t all that inspiring.
Dag felt like a bud right away. As in, he let her monopolize the conversation, which Heather knew she kind of tended to do anyway. She sprang for a pitcher for their second round.
Dag initiated one conversational thread. “I’d have known you were still skiing just by your hair,” he said. “You have serious skier hair, Heather. Girl skiers all have the same hair. About this long—” He gestured between his jaw and shoulder.
“Yeah, I know,” she said, flipping her dirty-blonde hair self-consciously. He knew what he was talking about. “No-maintenance, because it’s always under a hat or helmet, getting sweaty and showered a couple of times a day. Just long enough to tie back.”
“And you guys never chop it off super-short,” he said. “Even though that would be easiest of all.”
“Because we desperately want to hang onto some femininity.” Especially Heather, who knew she wasn’t a major babe or anything, just a classic girl-jock. A little taller than average, no curves, but at least she was a hardbody, if a little broad. She also had a plain, open face and wore her dirty-blonde hair straight, cut just below her jaw.
“I think short-short hair is sexy,” he said, “but none of the athletic girls I’ve known would go for it. I went out a couple of times over the summer with one of the waitresses at the country club, who wasn’t an athlete. Her hair was dyed super-black and just down to the nape of her neck. That was cool.” He sounded wistful.
“I cut my hair that short, and I’d look like a boy,” Heather said. “I think I’ve seen that girl around the village. You aren’t still with her?”
“She went back to UBC. It wasn’t serious.”
Heather doubted it would take him long to find someone else to go out with. He had those nice blue eyes with the long Bambi eyelashes going for him. Funny how she still couldn’t place him from before, though.
After they’d shared a second pitcher, he invited her back to his place. Heather had no delusions as to what it meant. Sexual recreation, snowboarder-style. It meant he thought she was a bud, too.
• • •
The sex was okay, not great. He kept asking how’s this, how’s that, when Heather would have preferred to just get on with it, cut the gabbing. For a guy on the snowboard scene, where the casual sex flew around like fresh powder, to Heather he still seemed to be working on his moves. Nice job on the oral, though, she had to give him that. Otherwise, they bashed knees and elbows a lot. Maybe the bruises on him, now turning Technicolor, weren’t from wack air at all, just ungainly sex.
It was a kind of relief when they finished and she could untangle herself to go down the hall and use the john. He shared the house with a bunch of other guys, so she slipped on her underwear and sweatshirt to leave the room. When she came back, since she was half-dressed already, she resisted sliding back into the bed and perched on the rickety wooden chair in front of his computer. “Can I use this?” she said, firing up his browser.
“Whatcha doing?” he asked.
“Checking tomorrow’s weather.”
“Hoping it’s crap for training?” he said. “So you can skip it with the hangover you’re going to have?”
“I don’t skip training,” Heather said, reading. “Sometimes I’m late, but I don’t skip.” His homepage was set to a minimalist page. Blank background, with a single line of text:
“You mean you don’t skip training any more,” Dag said.
She barely registered that. “What’s this?” Heather asked, pointing to the screen.
“My new motto,” Dag said. “Gonna get it on a T-shirt.”
“Really?”
“No. That’s just some guy’s blog.”
She read the header. “The Hero of the Teeming Masses? Who’s he?”
“Who’s anybody with a blog? Some self-important shmuck who thinks somebody else actually cares what he thinks.”
“I guess you do, if it’s your home page.”
“Well, I like that motto. Do you want to stay over?”
Not in a single bed with a six-foot guy. Not if she didn’t want to wake up totally cricked before she even started to work out. “No, thanks.”
“You’re different now, Heathen,” he said.
“Heather,” she corrected him. “What are you talking about? You don’t remember me.”
“I know you don’t remember me, but I remember you. Heathen the party animal. You had this pink hair and the crazier toques than the boarders. The worst Abominable Snow Slider around.”
He’d graciously refrained from the acronym: ASS. Anyone on the slopes who wears a really stupid-looking hat to get attention. And he sure knew a surprising, and kind of disturbing lot about her. “I still use a neon orange helmet,” she said. “And I was not a party girl.”
“Anybody who teaches bar servers sign language so they can shave five minutes off their drinking time is totally a party girl.” He sat up in bed. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s bad that you reinvented yourself, I was just noticing it.”
She was glad that it was dim enough that he couldn’t see her flush. “I could make the national team by the end of this season,” she said, “and be in the Olympics here in 2010. I’m trying to be more serious about my sport.”
“So that’s why you don’t have pink hair any more,” he said. “You want to look respectable when CBC comes around to do an Athlete’s Diary segment on you.”
She felt her face go even redder. “It could happen. And it’s Heather, not Heathen.”
“Because Heathen sounds too wildchild for the IOC?” he said.
“Shut up,” she said. Heather hated being teased. “And I remember you now, too,” she said, trying to tease back, even though she really didn’t. “Sort of, anyway.” One small fragment had come back to her, either aided by, or in spite of the beer. “Dangler Dag, right? Why’d they call you that again?”
“A commentator used that once about me at a meet,” he said. “Because of my incredible hang time. I just dangled up there.”
“I thought there was something else.”
“No, that was it,