DISEMBODIED VOICES humming doleful, alien tunes. Flickering bluish light emanating from cracks in the rocky walls. Giant icicles hanging from the ceiling, their shadows moving like animated daggers. It’s just relaxation music, themed interior decoration, and an electricity problem, but the overall effect is rather unsettling. And I’m all alone down here in the Glacier Cave.

Well, it’s hardly like anything life-threatening is going to happen to me in the spa of the Fankhauser Hotel. I guess I’m just messed up by jetlag. The ten-hour trip to Tyrol today has left me feeling all woozy.

My friends and I only flew in from LA this Sunday afternoon. An hour ago we checked into the hotel and decided to hit the spa right away to catch a little wellness before closing time. Jay and Carl are in the Finnish sauna for the Aufguss.

Since I didn’t feel up to facing ninety degrees centigrade, I opted for the vapor bath in the area called Glacier Cave instead. I’m the only one who did, it would seem; everybody else must be in the Finnish sauna.

The bath is at the far end of the Glacier Cave, beyond a low well that constitutes the room’s centerpiece and is filled with ice cubes. A bilingual sign attached to its coarse stone walls advises me to take some cubes with me into the vapor bath and to run them over my skin for an energizing effect. That seems to be exactly what I need. Digging into the well, I grab two handfuls of ice cubes and head for the vapor bath, toeing off my flip-flops as I go. I’m wearing nothing but a slipping towel around my hips now, in compliance with the sign at the spa’s main entrance that decrees No Clothing Beyond This Point.

Once I’ve closed the fogged glass door behind me with my elbow, I dump the ice cubes on the tiled bench, spread my towel next to them, sit down, and start rubbing at myself with the ice.

It feels rather disagreeable, really. My head is still swimming, but now I have goose bumps too. I shove the rest of the cubes from the bench to let them melt on the floor.

Leaning my head back against the wet wall, I close my eyes to soak up some warmth and think of the guy from reception for a bit.

A. Fankhauser. That’s what it said on his shirt pocket. It’s A for angel, in all likelihood. Honest to God, this man is the most beautiful guy I have ever laid eyes on, so beautiful I had trouble wrapping my head around it. I had expected a nice Austrian lady in a dirndl to book us in, the kind that was on the hotel home page. Not a supermodel.

God, he looked so damn trim in his black button-down and his horn-rimmed glasses and with his shiny dark hair slicked back over his pretty head.

I’ve moved my hand too close to my cock. It’s what happens when you’re relaxing on your own in a cozy place while being bare-ass naked. And I’ve got to stop this now. I’ve got to think of something else, and quickly.

Opening my eyes, I see another sign mounted to the wall opposite me, right above two bowls on a shelf. Squinting through the vapor wafts, I look for the part in English and learn that this is pine honey and rock salt, and that a honey-and-salt peeling will give me baby-soft skin.

It can never hurt to have baby-soft skin. I get up, slipping a bit on the melting ice cubes, and start slapping generous amounts of honey onto my chest, stomach, and back with a long wooden ladle. For good measure, I sprinkle a couple handfuls of salt onto the mess.

It quickly spreads everywhere, and I mean everywhere, causing a nasty itch where I need it least.

I still sit down and try to hold up for the sake of the promised effects, but after a minute or so I can’t take it anymore. Quickly I get up again, grab for the hose that’s attached to the wall next to the door, and switch on the water. Putting a foot onto the bench, I aim the jet straight at my ass to try and rinse the biting stuff away.

Phew, my blood pressure doesn’t seem to like this. And the tiles are even more slippery now with the honey-salt mix all over the place. Oh man, I need something to hold on to—

The next moment I’ve crashed to the floor in one smooth, curved motion.

As I struggle to process what just happened, I’m hit by a flash of brightness and a cool draft.

“Everything okay?”

Someone is in the doorway.

Through the vapor and the sweat running into my eyes, I can make out a tall figure looming above me. Must be Jay who came to look for me.

I rub at my eyes.

“It’s fine,” I say, looking up at Jay.

Only it isn’t Jay. It’s the angel from reception, without the glasses.

He seems to have frozen to the spot, staring down at me. Swallowing. And staring some more, like he’s trying to peel the salt-and-honey crust off me with just his gaze.

It’s a startling ice blue.

“Hey, dude, I’m fine,” I croak, scrambling to my knees. “You can stop the checking.”

He gives himself a shake.

“Sorry,” he says, abruptly stepping back. “I’m so sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to… I was just… I heard this noise, and I wanted to make sure you were okay….”

“Never better,” I say, getting up and giving him a good once-over while I sling my damp towel around my goo-covered hips.

He’s in shorts and a simple white T-shirt that shows off his athletic frame, and fuck, he’s gorgeous.

“Sorry again. I didn’t mean to stare at you,” he says stiffly.

“No harm done,” I say, grinning. “I like you too.”

“Seriously, I’m sorry….”

“Seriously, it’s okay. I can deal with a little ogling.”

He bites his lip, blushing, then fumbles around on the wall to turn off the faucet. The hose that’s been whipping about my ankles spouting water settles on the floor, lying still.

“You did ogle me, didn’t you? That’s what you’re apologizing for, isn’t it?” I ask, squinting at him to make sure I got this right.

He hectically looks over his shoulder, apparently to check there’s still nobody around.

“I’m not trying to put you on the spot,” I say, pushing my dissolving braids back and spreading a glob of the hellish honey all over my head in the process. “I’d just like to be sure I didn’t get this wrong, you know? Else I’ll feel like an idiot. I mean even more of an idiot.”

Grimacing, I pat the asscheek I landed on. It feels like it’s going to bruise worse than that time when I crashed on a pole jam in the terrain park back home.

His blush has deepened to a dark crimson. He’s looking down at the smeary floor.

“You’re just so… very good-looking, sir,” he says under his breath.

Wow, I love this.

This could become my best ever vacation.

“I’m Justin,” I say, not even trying to hide my sudden high spirits and smug satisfaction. “Listen, why don’t we move this conversation to the bar? Just give me half an hour to lose this sticky stuff and get my hair back to human, okay? I’ll tell my friends I met someone hot who thinks I’m hot too, and—”

“Please don’t tell anyone about this! Please, sir!”

I raise my palms, confused at this panicky plea.

“Chill man, I won’t, of course I won’t if it’s that important to you. It’s fine! Mum’s the word. This is just between you and me, promise. I like a little secret.”

I wink at him.

His eyelids flutter. Instead of answering, he turns on his heels and walks away.

He stops at the well to pick up a small tool kit from its rim, then disappears in a nook by the Glacier Cave’s exit. A few moments later, the light stops flickering. It’s a low-key cerulean blue now, pleasant and calming.

I’m still standing where he left me when he emerges from where he just fixed a broken LED driver or something. I guess I kind of expect a follow-up to our conversation. But he simply throws me a brief, feverish glance and leaves without looking back again.

Huh. This is weird. He hasn’t even responded to my invitation to meet up for a drink. Hasn’t said yes, hasn’t said no either. He just asked me not to tell on him, then basically fled the scene. I don’t really understand what’s going on.

But I did understand the staring, and that compliment.

You’re just so very good-looking, sir.

I guess the ball is still in my court.

 

 

SAPPHIRE-BLUE SKY, rows of epic mountain ranges in the hazy distance, and the prickle of tiny ice crystals melting on my face. Rotating my head, I take a deep breath.

Focus.

Frontside 360.

I push off and start the run down the terrain park, quickly picking up speed.

The slope is hard and icy and feels perfect under my board. It’s got just enough grip to it to provide that sense of groundedness you need to get airborne. If you don’t feel the harmony on the run-up, you’ll never nail the takeoff. Meaning you’ll not only fuck up your trick, but most probably end up with some nasty new bruises.

The ramp I’ve picked for my 360 is approaching fast. It’s of medium size, but it’s getting more imposing by the second. A rush of adrenaline, then my brain shuts down and my body takes over. I’m going up the ramp, just taut muscles and concentration of energy. The next second I’m propelled into the sky like by a coil spring, flinging my arm to the side and twisting into the spin.

Yeah. Oh yeah, this is it. This feeling in every fiber of your body and your board, this feeling that you are in total control of the craziness that is this trick.

180, 270, 360…

540!

I got so much airtime I could squeeze in another turn!—

My board hits the ground. It’s the best moment of all. The force of the impact, the rich punch the mountain deals me, like it rose to meet me. My body unfolding, and the cold air in my lungs feeling like my first breath ever, like I just landed on Earth coming in from another dimension.

Airtime is great, but there’s nothing more satisfying than a good touchdown.

Now I can hear Jay and Carl cheering for me. Letting out a hearty whoop myself and pushing my fist into the air, I carve down the rest of the slope to meet them.

When I’m right in front of them, I take a sharp turn that has them disappear in a cloud of powder.

“What the fuck, Justin!” Carl cries, shaking the snow off his chocolate bar.

“Fuck, Justin!” Jay echoes.

“Okay, that jump made both of you look really old, didn’t it,” I say, still gasping for breath. “I’d say I win this one!”

They shove me around between them until I lose my balance and sit down in the snow. Laughing and calling me a pest and a pain in the neck, they grab me by the arms and haul me back to my feet to finally give me my well-deserved high fives.

Jay and Carl. We’ve known each other since high school, since back in the days when it was still a big deal to hang with the gay kid. Because it was, West Coast or not. Yes, Jay and Carl are my best friends.

Straight but great, that about sums them up.

The sun is casting its pinkish late-afternoon shine across the mountainside, making the snow on the pine trees glitter like fairy dust. The summits of the glacier rising into the sky to the east glow as if they were made of gold.

Using my teeth to remove a glove, I pull my phone from my pocket to take a couple of photos. I do a panorama picture too, to get the Five Summits of Fitsch on one photo: Hexnjoch, Fitscher Spitze, Kleiner Kaiser, Samkogel, and the highest of the glacier tops, the Sunnzeiger. It’s Tyrolean for “sun needle,” and the fiery ice peak really does look like it’s reaching into space.

When we booked our trip to Austria a few weeks ago, I was convinced the pictures on the home page of the Ski and Snowboard Resort Fitsch 2000 had to be photoshopped. Turned out they’re not. All this gorgeousness is real.

It was so the right decision to dig into my savings like I did for this trip.

A wind has come up. Down in the valley, it’s probably nothing more than a light breeze, but up here at eight thousand feet, it has a nasty bite to it.

Jay pulls his hood over his head.

“It’s getting late. How about we go have a couple of hot chocolate shots in the lobby before dinner?”

What he means is “how about I hit on a couple of hot girls in the lobby before dinner.”

“Good idea. I’m starved,” Carl replies.

Carl is always starved. He isn’t going to settle for a few hot chocolate shots before dinner, he’s going to have an Apfelstrudel or two as well, complete with cream topping. It’s a miracle the man doesn’t weigh a ton. But Carl is as thin as a herring when he loses his baggy boarder gear. It’s Jay the lady-killer who’s the chubby one.

Both of them are so not interesting, physically, they could just as well be girls.

Which is a great foundation for a friendship with het guys, and a vital factor when it comes to sharing a hotel suite.

But even though Jay and Carl are the kind who wouldn’t dream of ever hitting the gym, they are quite fit on their snowboards. In fact, it’s really hard to outrace either of them.

And that’s another thing I love about my friends.

“Who’s first at the base station!” I cry.

We are already hopping toward the next ledge to race each other downhill when Jay suddenly stops in his tracks.

“Hey guys, look!”

Behind us, at the top of the terrain park, a snowboarder has appeared in the sky. That isn’t a jump, that’s a flight, and it takes him right to the middle of the slope. Landing like in butter, he rides on at top speed, going straight for the giant monster ramp in the center of the park.

The low sun illuminates the rider as if this were a movie set. But this isn’t a stuntman in an action film, this is simply a guy on the way home. His orange jacket and yellow trousers mark him as an instructor of the local ski and snowboarding school, Happy Powder.

And he certainly knows how to ride a board. Everything about his posture screams pro. In spite of his breakneck speed, he looks completely relaxed. Just the slight twist to his shoulders and the way he’s angling his hips betray what’s going to come.

And then he’s on his way up the improbably steep ramp. He reaches the knuckle and is launched into the air. Becoming a swirl of color against the blue of the sky, he keeps rotating for seconds on end before he touches down again as smoothly as a bird.

If birds could snowboard.

“Was that a triple cork?” Jay asks next to me, sounding a little numb.

“That was a quad backflip,” Carl corrects, still staring at the boarder, who is now doing a lazy front flip off a rainbow rail, like for a cooldown.

When the guy zooms past us, he doesn’t spare us as much as a glance. Rolling his shoulders and languidly switching edges as he goes, he disappears down the slope.

“What do you say, Justin?” Carl asks me. “What was that?”

“That was Andi,” I say through clenched teeth. “That was Andi fucking Fankhauser.”

“Andi who?” Carl asks.

“Fankhauser,” I repeat.

“What, like our hotel?”

Carl is supposed to be the cleverest of us. He was a straight-A student in high school and already has a degree in comparative sociology. But sometimes he’s just really slow.

“He’s the owner’s son, you muttonhead! He checked us into the hotel. Also he brought you your coffee and scrambled eggs this morning. And he’s also the guy who played the keyboard last night. He’s the leader of that combo, the Fitschtalers.”

But most of all, he’s the man who stared at me like he’d been struck by lightning when I was lying belly-up at his feet, covered in honey paste. The man I haven’t stopped thinking of ever since.

“How do you know all that?” Jay asks, looking at me from behind his bright orange snow goggles as if he were in total awe. “Seriously, dude! We’ve been in this place for less than twenty-four hours!”

He was far too busy getting into the skimpy pants of a curvy brunette from the Netherlands at the après-ski party in the Fankhauser’s nightclub, The Funk House, last night to even notice there was a band playing, I guess.

“Just a couple of questions I asked,” I say, shrugging inside my boarder hoodie.

Jay and Carl roll their eyes first at me, then at each other.

It has been less than twenty-four hours since I first set eyes on Andi Fankhauser, but yes, I have already done my research.

There’s no point in stalling when your time frame for a quality hookup is seven days.

I might lack in discipline when it comes to stuff like completing my bachelor’s degree, but I can be trusted to do a thorough job when it comes to hitting on a ten.

And Andi Fankhauser is a fucking twelve.

 

 

WHEN WE’VE put our boards into the ski room next to the hotel garage and step inside the spacious lobby of the Fankhauser, into the intense coziness emanating from resin-scented wood paneling, fluffy vintage couches, and softly illuminated Alpen-themed oil paintings, he is there.

Up on a ladder, helping an employee mount Easter decorations on a beam under the ceiling. He must have gone down that mountain at the speed of light.

Andi fucking Fankhauser.

The problem is, save for that one time in the Glacier Cave, he has never really looked at me so far. He acts as if I were invisible. Has been doing so from the start, from that moment when I first saw him standing behind the reception desk looking so improbably drop-dead perfect I felt like someone punched me in the gut.

He told us about meal times and the opening hours of the snowboarding school and shit, and all the time, he kept only addressing Jay and Carl. He didn’t even look at me when he handed me my key card and lift pass.

It was the same at breakfast today. He said good morning right over my head, then seemed to need all his concentration to enter our orders into his electronic waiter pad.

And now it’s happening again. On seeing us, he directs a vague nod at Jay and Carl, looking straight past me.

I rip off my hair band and shake out my mane.

It’s a blond platinum-highlighted surfer mane.

It’s a surefire move.

Without as much as blinking, Andi turns back to the stuffed Easter bunny in his hand to plant it on a hook on the beam.

He’s still in his snowboard pants and a tight-fitting sports shirt. I decide to take the downer I just got dealt in my stride and use the moment to treat myself to an eyeful of his backside.

He’s taller than me, but he isn’t as butch as I am. He’s more like the lean type. But I can tell he’s pure chiseled muscle under that shirt. Oh yes, I know he would offer the perfect view in bed. I love a bottom with good definition. There’s nothing more beautiful than the movement of shadow and light on a man’s back when he’s taking it up the ass.

I did an animated sketch of it on my graphic tablet once. It’s the most successful bit of doodling I’ve ever posted on my Jumbler blog. It’s probably still multiplying somewhere out there on the World Wide Web.

“Right, are we done ogling the natives now? Come on, I want my strudel,” Carl mutters under his breath.

“Yeah, Justin, come on,” Jay whispers. “Your man doesn’t seem to be in flirting mode. Or maybe he’s just not interested. You know.”

 

 

“HE HASN’T as much as looked at you so far, has he,” Carl says when we are in the elevator, going up to our suite. “Not a single time, has he.”

“He hasn’t, has he,” Jay says, nodding and shaking his head at the same time.

God, I hate them both, I really do.

I wish I could tell them about how Andi checked me out in the vapor bath. How he told me in so many words that he liked what he saw. But I basically swore an oath of silence, so it seems I’ll have to deal with my friends’ dumb comments for now.

It is getting a bit unsettling to be so consistently ignored after what happened, to be sure.

Well, I hope that’s all going to change very soon, as soon as I get the chance to talk to Andi again. He seemed kind of shy about his reaction to me. I guess I need to reassure him that I meant it when I said I liked him back. He’s probably afraid I might yet decide to go to his father and complain about him or something. Or he’s trying to play it cool after having been less than subtle at the outset. Or this is simply his way of playing.

At any rate, he seems to have decided that it’s up to me to make the next move.

“Justin?” Carl asks, observing me.

I shrug. He heaves an exaggerated sigh.

“He’s got the look,” he says to Jay. “The ‘I will win this’ look.”

“I will,” I affirm.

Because.

I will.

 

 

I AM going to win this little game. I will get Andi Fankhauser to look at me again and hopefully into bed too.

Why won’t I? He told me he liked my looks. And that’s not, like, totally surreal either, whatever might be Jay’s and Carl’s opinion on the matter. I have stuff going for me. My hair, my quarterback physique. My face isn’t bad either. Guys I’ve fucked have called me handsome. Sure, you shouldn’t put too much stock in what people say when they’ve just come into your fist with your cock up their ass, but there it is.

And also I simply know how to score.

Maybe I’m not the most intellectual guy on the planet, maybe I’m not the ultimate pro when it comes to conversations about the national product and shit, but I can do charming. And even more importantly, I’m no quitter.

 

 

“DON’T GET obsessed, Justin,” Jay says through the open bathroom door when we’re getting ready for dinner in our suite a little later.

He has already changed into his evening gear—blue dress pants and a GameFair T-shirt that doesn’t do his waistline any favors—and is applying the finishing touches to this appalling look in front of the bathroom mirror.

“Lots of fish in the sea,” he says, trying to force his thinning hair into a spiky style. “That’s what I live by, and my love life is flourishing.”

It is, funnily enough.

The man is a professional nerd, literally. He’s got his own gaming channel and claims he’s making a living out of it. In truth, “Jaymer” has like ten followers, and his bills are being paid by a doting aunt. Plus he’s a severe case of fashion challenged. And still he’s getting all the girls, so I guess he must possess some kind of secret dating superpower.

But I don’t have time for his wisdoms.

I’m sitting on my bed, touching up my own hair with the curling iron and contemplating a picture of Andi Fankhauser I found in the hotel brochure.

It’s a diagonal shot of him at the keyboard with his band. It’s quite the fancy image, blurry at the edges and with a purple tint. Only much too small. I hate that about analog pictures. You can’t resize them to your convenience. I angle the brochure to get a better view.

Andi is wearing Austrian lederhosen over a black tank top in the photo, and he looks incredibly dishy.

Maybe there are a lot of fish in the sea, but a guy as hot as this is a rarity. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember having come across someone in this league outside of movies or magazines, and I’ve been around the block a few times.

“Carl?” Jay says, apparently feeling he wants support.

Carl is rummaging in his closet, sorting through the stuff he saved from breakfast for emergencies. He did have his two strudels just an hour back, but apparently he needs another snack to prepare for the trip to the dining room.

“Jay’s right, man,” he says, emerging from the closet with something that’s wrapped in a fat-stained napkin in his hand . “Stop the pining, Justin. You’ve got other options. Have you seen the guy behind the bar, the one with the blue hair?”

I have seen the guy behind the bar with the blue hair. I know he’s interested. I know I have options, more than Jay and Carl here even know of.

There’s this couple in the room below ours, two guys from Germany. Thirtysomethings, hipster look. Not exactly tens, but well above average, both of them. Last night, when Jay and Carl were still down in the spa, they walked up to where I was sitting in the lounge by the fireplace and invited me to join them for a glass of Gletschergeist.

I had intended to have some fun with my graphic tablet, play around a bit with the photos I took when we flew into Innsbruck. My trip to the spa had left me kind of shaken and hyperawake, and I needed something to help me unwind. Drawing on my tablet relaxes me far more effectively than any old vapor bath. I’d say it’s my favorite pastime outside of sports and sex.

On the other hand, it’s always nice to have people tell you they would love to buy you a drink, especially when it’s in a tone that says “Great package, dude.”

The Gletschergeist turned out to be an apricot schnapps and nothing short of hellish. It tasted like the spray paint I use to give my board a fresh style each season. Or like I imagine spray paint would taste. Anyway, five minutes into our chitchat, the two Germans informed me they were absolutely open to “sreesomes.”

Which is well and good, obviously, but the simple fact is, I have no time for second best, not at the moment.

Not when there’s someone like Andi within flirting range.

Fuck, within sniffing range!

When Andi put my espresso in front of me at breakfast this morning, it nearly gave me a heart attack, and not just because of the overdose of caffeine I already had in my system from the two caffè lattes I’d ordered earlier.

That’s what the guy does to me: he makes me order drinks I don’t even want just for the chance to inhale his scent.

It’s woodsy and kind of super clean. Like snow on pine trees or something.

And speaking of pine. Justin Bennet doesn’t pine. He scores.

Pointedly ignoring my friends, I pick a neon green scarf from the selection I brought with me and tie my hair back, then put on a touch of turquoise eyeliner, checking the effect in my makeup mirror.

Perfect. The bright color of the scarf works nicely with my new glacier tan and fir-green glitter shirt, and the eyeliner makes the specks of emerald in my eyes pop, upgrading them from average muddy brown to mysteriously fascinating. Or at least to mildly interesting. Alas, muddy brown isn’t the sexiest of eye colors.

But then, at least in my experience, eyes are overrated when it comes to scoring. All you really need is a good body, a spandex shirt, and a pair of jeans that fit well. And mine do. I get up and take a turn in front of the mirror on the door to check again.

Carl is looking on, munching away on a Krapfen. I brace myself, and there it comes. Again.

“No offense, man, but I’m afraid you’re not his type. You did that thing with your hair, and he didn’t bat a lash.”

He doesn’t even mean to be bitchy. It’s just what he does, the skinny little prick: spell out painful truths.

“Why would you even think he’s gay? I understand he’s got a pretty face and all, but he still might be straight,” he goes on. “It happens, you know.”

“Well, he’s not.”

“And how would you know?”

I promised to keep silent about how I know, so I have to make something up.

“He hasn’t got a girlfriend,” I say.

“And how would you know that?”

That’s Jay.

“Maybe I’ve asked a few questions.”

I did too. I want to be sure he’s not in a relationship before I get involved. It’s what I call best practice. I want fun, not drama.

“No girlfriend doesn’t equal gay,” Carl observes, not one to let stuff go.

“It does too, when someone looks like Andi.”

All cheekbones and biceps and sky-blue eyes.

Oh my God, those eyes.

“But—”

“I do have gaydar, okay?”

I tune out Carl and Jay and their gratuitous opinions to focus on Andi’s picture in the flyer once more.

Oh yeah.

I’m not a champ when it comes to defending a point in a discussion; I wasn’t the president of the debate club at school like Carl was. And I’m not even sure there is such a thing as gaydar.

But I can discern beauty if nothing else, and Andi is it.

 

 

HE’S PLAYING again with the Fitschtalers tonight, in the Funk House.

In the tank top and the lederhosen.

They look even better on him in real life. They are knee-length, revealing his muscled calves, while the suspenders and the broad leather strap across his chest seem to have been specially designed to accentuate the perfect lines of his upper body.

And then there’s that pretty embroidered flap covering his midsection, the codpiece. He’s playing standing, and I don’t know how anyone can look at him and not think of undoing it.

I know I’m staring, but I don’t give a fuck.

Hell, he’s magnificent.

And so very different from what he’s like when he does his job around the hotel during the day.

His thick black hair won’t stay in place. It keeps falling into his eyes as he plays. Watching him in the dim, reddish light, drawn into the rhythm of the music, body swaying, fingers dancing across the keys—it’s enough to keep me half-hard all through the evening.

I can’t stop imagining him in bed with me. I imagine him swaying in the rhythm of getting fucked or using those deft fingers for a nice old-fashioned hand job on yours truly.

Maybe I am getting a bit obsessed.

Taking care to be discreet, I pull out my phone and take a couple of videos of him from where I’m sitting at a table by the dance floor with Carl. The music is too loud to allow Carl to comment, but he raises a very expressive eyebrow at me from across his bowl of potato chips.

At least Jay is too busy with his own shit to copy him. He means to score with the Dutch girl tonight and is giving his all on the dance floor.

I don’t know how he does it. With the first day of boarding like lead in my back and legs, I have trouble even moving in my seat. But I guess I should take a leaf out of Jay’s book and pull myself together for the greater good.

Yes. Instead of acting like a creep and pretending I don’t get what Carl’s problem is, I should try to impress Andi with some cool Cali hip-hop moves.

But the moment I get up from my seat, Andi takes the microphone from the singer and announces the band is going to take a fifteen-minute break. He switches on the stereo, and Rihanna’s “We Found Love” blasts through the room.

Okay. Even better. Fifteen minutes should be more than enough to finally get him to talk to me.

Time to act.

Jay comes back to our table with two ladies in tow. One of them is the Dutch girl, Antje. She’s giggling and laughing and has both her arms around Jay like she needs to hold on to his ample middle for balance. I leave my friends to their chicks and chips respectively and head for the stage.

The dance floor is still crowded, and it takes me a while to push my way through. When I’ve made it to the stage, Andi is gone.

Well, it’s not like I’m doing this kind of thing for the first time. There’s just one place people disappear to in bars.

Without missing a beat, I make for the hallway leading to the bathrooms.

Stepping from one foot onto the other, I wait for him in front of the door with the sign saying Herren. As a matter of fact, I’d really like to take a leak myself, but the urinal is obviously not how this works.

Trying to keep my calm, I focus on the fat scented candle glowing away inside its glass cover on the floor by the bathroom door. It exudes a strong cinnamon aroma. After a few minutes, I start to feel slightly nauseous.

Man, the guy is taking like forever in there! I won’t be able to hold it in much longer if he doesn’t speed up a bit—

With a bang, the door opens and Andi steps through. I jump and almost wet myself for seriously wrong reasons, then quickly step forward and say, “Hi!”

His eyes meet mine, opening wide, and for a couple of long moments I look into that strange, luminous blue.

I forget to breathe, I forget where we are and what I’m here for. He’s holding my gaze, and it’s like I’m losing myself in his eyes, it’s like he’s taking me along on a trip into eternity. But then something gives. His lids start to flutter, his gaze slips. It lingers on the expanse of glittering green spandex that is my chest for another moment or two. He’s breathing hard, biting his lip. Then he turns away from me, presenting me with his gorgeous profile and a vivid, blotchy blush on his neck and cheek.

My brain kicks back into gear. He just eye-fucked my soul or something, and I have to man up now. I have to seize the moment and do what I came to do. He gave me a compliment down in the Glacier Cave, and it’s time to return it.

Grateful I’m prepared, I say my next line.

He doesn’t say thanks or anything or even turn back to me. All he does is utter a kind of choking cough that could mean just about anything. Then he walks off. He simply walks off, down the hallway, tugging at his lederhosen like he needs to make sure they’re covering his butt.

And that’s it.

Fuck, why?

I know he got my meaning. Hell, how many ways are there to read “I really love your lederhosen”?

And it’s not like the guy doesn’t know any English. He talked completely fluently about eggs at breakfast this morning when Carl wanted all the dirty details about the options on offer. I was pretty impressed about that conversation, actually. It might have been about shit like the specifics of an omelet as opposed to scrambled eggs, but it left no doubt about the fact that Andi speaks English as if it were his mother tongue.

I myself don’t know any foreign languages. All I ever managed was a D in Spanish back in high school.

Hell, how could I not want to get Andi into bed?

Clever, great body, can play the piano. Plus he’s a half god on the snowboard.

And he does have the most beautiful profile—

 

 

I DON’T tell Jay and Carl about what happened. Who would want to share a story like that? But somehow they still get that something didn’t go right.

That’s the thing with friends. With sharing a suite with friends. They can see you fight the blues as you lie in bed and look at your phone in the dark, at the videos you secretly took of Andi fucking Fankhauser playing the keyboard.

Maybe it wasn’t quite correct that I did that; maybe it’s bordering on stalking. Maybe it is full-on stalking. But I can’t be expected to live on just a blurry photo with the wrong color filter in a frigging hotel flyer all through this vacation.

“He told you to fuck off, didn’t he,” Carl says, eyeing me from where he’s lying in his bed across the room. His face is eerily lit by the green neon shine seeping in from outside. There’s hardly a hotel in Fitsch that doesn’t boast a really large, really bright neon sign with its name on its roof.

“He did, didn’t he,” Jay echoes, raising his head from his pillow too. With his green-tinted hair spikes and somber face, he looks like a zombie contemplating rising from its grave.

“Did not,” I mumble, letting my phone slip under my blanket.

Jay and Carl exchange a look. I feel like a kid trying, and failing, to hide the sweets he’s hoarding under his mattress from his parents.

People have told me I’m easier to read than an open book, and apparently it’s true. It plain sucks.

“Listen, Justin. We know you don’t like to admit defeat, but this has the potential to ruin your vacation, and by extension, ours,” Carl says, then seems to decide he needs to dumb this down for me. “Just let it go, Justin, okay?”

“Yeah, let it go,” Jay says.

“You let the duchess go,” I grumble. That’s what Carl has dubbed Antje. In spite of all his efforts, she didn’t invite Jay into her bed tonight after all.

Looks like he needs a reminder.

“Doesn’t look like you’ll get any either, does it, Jay,” I say tartly.

“The difference being I can handle it,” Jay retorts, sitting up, bristling. “I’m moving on instead of keeping other people awake by watching stupid illegally obtained videos!”

“I can handle it too,” I say lamely.

Again, Jay and Carl exchange that knowing look.

I hate my friends, I really do.

 

 

I’VE TOLD Jay and Carl I can handle it. Only I can’t.

I thought about Andi when I rubbed one off under the shower earlier. Naturally. And I’ve been watching a couple of the videos I made of him to help me fall asleep. Not a big deal either.

But I still think about him when I’ve switched off the phone and lie in my bed in the dark, listening to my friends’ snoring, trying to fall asleep.

Instead of dozing off as would be normal after a day of boarding, and with the jet lag I still have in my bones too, I keep seeing Andi in my mind’s eye.

Disappearing through the exit of the Glacier Cave.

Passing me by on his snowboard, guiding it with just that subtle, sexy twist to his hips.

Walking away from me in the bathroom hallway.

All the time it feels like he’s on the brink of turning back to me.

But he never does.

 

 

WHEN WE arrive at the base station of the Gletscher Express the next morning, I instantly spot him in the crowd. He’s hard to miss with his orange-and-yellow instructor gear, his height, and his pretty head. He doesn’t see us; he’s busy herding a group of kids into a car.

The children’s groups usually stick to the easy slopes in the lower regions of the resort. On the ride up, I tell Jay and Carl I’ll get off at the middle station because I need a few hours on the beginners’ slopes to polish my front flip. They see right through me, but whatever. I let them tease me until I’m out of the car and the automatic doors close on them and their silly remarks.

I do practice my front flip for a bit, all the while watching out for Andi’s little group.

After half an hour or so, I stop the practicing. My front flip already is pretty much perfect, and also, my muscles are still sore from yesterday. And I can’t do cartwheels all morning, not with all the Speck and scrambled eggs I’ve had for breakfast. In case I manage to accidentally meet Andi, I intend to impress him with my stylish riding and maybe a smooth line or two I haven’t quite worked out yet, not be sick all over his snowboard.

I go past a number of Happy Powder instructors with their courses, but none of them is Andi.

After four rides on the Gletscher Express to the middle station, I stop at the sandwich bar by the exit to have a drink.

The bar is called Gletschergeist. When I tell the buxom lady at the checkout, Rosi, according to the name tag on her frilly blouse, that I’m happy they’re selling soda too and not just that unspeakable apricot schnapps, she responds with a genial smile and settles down on a stool for a chat. She tells me that Gletschergeist is not just the name of the schnapps traditionally distilled in the Fitschtal, but that the name is really derived from the old legends about a spirit living on the glacier. The moods of this spirit are supposed to influence the weather, she informs me. I observe that the geist seems to be feeling pretty chirpy right now, luckily for me and my friends. On that Rosi warns me in a dark tone that things can change at the blink of an eye up here and advises me to always be careful. Apparently there is a long list of people who have fallen victim to the Gletschergeist and its mood swings over the centuries.

I buy two Krapfen from the little tray by Rosi’s register for Carl. As she puts them into a paper bag, she asks me where we are staying. When I say the Fankhauser, she tells me Jacob Fankhauser owns half the hotels in Fitsch, and this bar too. It just takes an interested “is that so?” from me for her to proceed to fill me in on every detail she knows about the man.

Apparently Andi’s father is the mastermind behind the winter tourism in Fitsch. It was he who founded the company behind the ski resort twenty years ago and pushed the project through more or less single-handedly. He coined the phrase “Five Summits of Fitsch” and developed four of the five signature peaks framing the valley. For the Sunnzeiger, the highest of the summits, he set up a heliskiing service for those with some extra cash to spend.

His latest exploit is the Gletscher Express, a multimillion-dollar masterpiece of cable car engineering. The top station on the Hexnjoch that is housing the five-star Gletscher Hotel was designed by a team of world-famous architects and has won half a dozen international prizes, or so Rosi tells me. It would; it’s a turd-shaped glass-and-steel thing that’s teetering on a rocky cliff, looking like it’ll tumble down the drop-off at any moment.

Finally I get a short but full briefing on Fankhauser Senior’s private life. Apparently he raised his two sons as a single dad. With a mournful expression that suggests a history of failed romantic moves, Rosi observes there are those men who just won’t be saved from their lonesome ways.

I can relate to the disappointment ringing in her words, but I need to focus on my own problems. Leaving her to attend to the next customer, a wiry octogenarian who has started prodding his helmet into my butt to signal his unhappiness with the laggy service, I step out into the dazzling sunshine to idly glide through the scenic winter wonderland of Fitsch 2000 some more, scanning the slopes for my target.

In the end I’m lucky. I spot him at a short T-bar lift about a hundred yards below me, guiding the six kids of his course down the run, looking like a duck with its young. I’ve just stopped my board to look on for a bit when two of the kids crash into each other, both of them taking an epic tumble. Andi stops the group, kicks off his board, and climbs the slope to help.

As I watch him pick up the kids and check them for damage, comforting them, I find myself intensely wishing I was one of those clueless youngsters.

And at the same time, I suddenly see that Jay and Carl were right. This is getting me nowhere. Because I don’t want to be the guy who interferes with his job.

All six kids are crowding him now, shoving each other to get closer to him. It’s because he’s handing out candy. With the day being nearly windless, I can hear his soft, hoarse voice as he admonishes them to be considerate of each other.

I don’t know why, really, but watching him pat the kids’ oversized helmets, being all responsible and patient and nice with the little rascals, makes my stomach do the strangest things. It’s, like, rising into my chest, squeezing at my heart.

Hoping it’s just the front flips and the Speck, I quickly move my board to go downhill on another trail.

 

 

I MEET up with Jay and Carl in the sports shop at the base station. Jay needs to replace a broken binding. While he talks to a shop assistant, I sift through the assortment of scarves on a bargain counter. Carl is hovering around the cashier, feeding off the little chocolate eggs in the bowl on the man’s desk.

When I pay for my new scarf, satin with a pretty pink checker design, I notice the cashier looks a bit like Andi, especially from behind. He’s more the heavyset type, with wider shoulders and thicker arms, but he’s got the same wavy black hair. I kind of hate him for not having the right face.

The moment we are out of the shop, Carl says, “That was Andi Fankhauser’s brother, Max. They could be twins, they look so similar, don’t you think?”

“The cashier guy was Andi’s brother? How do you know?”

“I asked him,” Carl says smugly. “Their father owns the shop.”

Why am I not surprised?

I stuff my new scarf down my backpack and pull out the paper bag with the Krapfen I bought for Carl. His eyes lighting up, he quickly swallows the chocolate egg he’s been chewing on and takes the bag from my hand.

“Nice, man, thanks! What I mean to say is, why don’t you forget about Andi and give Max a shot instead? He seemed to like you.”

He did? We didn’t get to talk much when I paid for my scarf. In fact, I got the impression he had a bit of an issue with my choice of color. I notice these things. I guess he couldn’t know picking a pink scarf makes sense for me, seeing as my snowboard has pink butterflies on it.

“No offense, Carl, but you don’t know shit when it comes to who likes who,” I say. “Or did you ask him about his orientation too?”

“He had an earring,” Carl says defensively.

“An earring,” Jay echoes.

“Okay, het guys, two things. I think I’ve told you before someone wearing an earring so doesn’t mean they’re gay. Second, I don’t care either way, because he isn’t Andi.”

Carl opens his mouth to say something, but I talk over him. “Third, I didn’t get any vibes from this Max guy at. All.”

Carl looks a little confused, then swallows and says in a pretty catty tone, “But you’re so getting them from Andi.”

“I am.”

For the hundredth time, I see Andi in my mind’s eye, walking away from me.

It takes some strength, or stupidity, to keep the faith at this point that I’ll get him to talk to me for real, that much is true.

But he has also looked into my eyes like no one ever did before. Like I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to before now. Peeling back all the layers or something.

Nobody knows about that moment but him and me.

Standing here in the hustling main street of Fitsch in blazing daylight next to my two oblivious friends almost makes it seem like a dream.

 

 

I BROUGHT a whole year’s worth of Statistics for Business to Tyrol. I have to retake an exam at the beginning of the next semester. Which is in ten days exactly.

My mom talked a lot about how it wasn’t a great idea to go on vacation two weeks before an important test. I promised I’d download everything I needed to prepare for the exam onto my laptop and take it along on the trip. I had this idea I might go through stuff in the afternoons.

Only it turns out that after a day of boarding, I never seem to feel quite up to it. And by night, well.

I couldn’t know I’d meet Andi. Let alone that it would take such an effort to get into his pants.

I can’t spend the night with Statistics for Business when the Fitschtalers are doing another gig in the Funk House. It said so in the Fankhauser News, the daily four-page hotel newspaper that lies on the breakfast tables in the restaurant every morning.

This is another chance for me to finally make some progress with Andi, and I don’t intend to let it pass.

I want to sleep with him, just once.

Or maybe twice.

I’ve mapped it all out in my head. He lives in the west wing of the hotel, in the family’s private quarters on the second floor. He’s sure to have a room of his own there, meaning we won’t have to use the suite and make Jay and Carl spend the night in a bar. Yeah, once we’ve talked and reached an understanding, I’ll join him in his bed for a fuck or two, or maybe three, and then I’ll tell him goodbye and leave this be.

The point being, the sooner I get this over and done with, the sooner I can start learning for my test. Hell, one way or another I’m going to pass that frigging exam, and then my mom won’t have any reason to ask nasty questions.

My mom wants to see me succeed. Guess it’s natural. Also I kind of owe her because she has given me a loan to get my degree. She set just one condition: that it would be in economics. She has a bachelor in economics herself, and she always says it’s the perfect foundation for a solid career like hers. She works in a real estate agency in LA, and she keeps saying I can absolutely hope to do the same one day. All I need to do is get my degree. Then I can apply for a job somewhere in the city and work my way up like she did. Just a little less football and much less doodling on the silly tablet and I’d be on track, she would say.

I’m not quite sure this is true. I know people who are pushing thirty and never slacked and still haven’t landed what my mom would call a real job. Even Carl is working as an intern and lives off the money he made with an app he built when we were still in high school, and he’s this genius that’s all focused and shit. The app is about school recess snacks; it helps optimize the nutritional value of people’s lunchboxes. I wish I could come up with something cool like that. Then I could forget my mom’s plans for my life and this frigging exam.

 

 

I MENTION the files on my laptop and my mom to Jay and Carl during dinner. Shouldn’t have. They make me tell them the whole ugly story, my promise to my mother, her problem with my graphic tablet.

And now they won’t stop trying to make me study.

They know my mom from back in our high school days and still seem to live in fear of her. I guess it’s the way she used to tell them things like to not log in to dating apps when we were supposed to be preparing a presentation for class (Jay), or have a tuna mayonnaise sandwich on the corduroy couch (Carl). She has this special knack of knowing what you’re up to and making you feel she isn’t happy with it.

Well, she’s six thousand miles away right now. And the Fitschtalers are going to play in the club tonight.

Considering what happened yesterday, some, or Jay and Carl, might say there’s little point in going to that gig. But I can’t not do it.

I want Andi, and I’ve only got five more nights to make it happen.

 

 

IT’S TEN thirty when we go down to the Funk House. Past time. When we were hanging out at the suite after dinner, I mentioned what I learned about Fankhauser Senior in the morning, and Carl took that as a cue to deliver a lengthy lecture on the history of the Fitschtal. All I remember of it is that a few hundred years back, apparently there were quite substantial deposits of gold frozen into the glacial ice, and that the local farmers used to fight their grim poverty with gold panning. Carl harped on for ages about how fascinating it was to think that the glacier was the foundation of the economic survival of the area to this very day.

Carl is always interested in socioeconomic backgrounds and shit, and with me being an econ student, he thinks I’m the person to share this kink with.

I had a few shots of Gletschergeist to tune him out. I bought a bottle in the hotel’s souvenir shop, figuring it might help boost my morale a bit after the bummer last night.

During the ride in the elevator down to the nightclub, I tell Jay and Carl all about it. Me complimenting Andi on his lederhosen, him leaving me standing there next to that stinky candle, wanting to cry.

Schnapps is supposed to make you loosen up, and it turns out that’s actually what it does.

When I’ve told my story, Carl nods soberly.

“Commenting on traditional clothing can be a tricky thing,” he informs Jay and me. “Locals can be quite touchy about such things. He might have felt you were seeing him as some kind of mannequin for the tourists. I’m sure he gets to deal with all kinds of arrogance and presumptuousness from customers on the job. He might have felt you were being condescending.”

Oh fuck.

“Come on, it’s just a pickup line!”

“Let me put it simply, then. It’s a crappy pickup line.”

At that Jay chimes in, saying, yes, it was the crappiest pickup line in human history, and that next time I should try “Is your name Earl Grey? Because you look like a hot tea.”

When I ask him how that isn’t crappy, he starts to explain this is witty because it sounds like you’re saying “hottie” while what you really say is “hot tea.”

When he sees I’m not convinced, he forces another one on me.

“Can I call you a keyboard? Because you are my type.”

I have no idea how he ever got a girl into bed.

But he just did it again, at least kind of. Apparently he met Antje the duchess in the restaurant at the top station this morning while Carl was having his second breakfast and got invited for a quickie in a bathroom stall.

I shouldn’t be jealous of a fuck in the ladies’, I know, but considering my total lack of headway with Andi so far, yeah. I kind of am.

 

 

WHEN WE enter the Funk House, the Fitschtalers are already playing. Andi is looking his usual mouthwatering self.

I can’t take my eyes off him as we walk past the stage. And suddenly he lifts his gaze from the keyboard, and our eyes meet. The world stops moving. A split second later, a sharp dissonance jars the harmonies of the Austrian rock song the band is performing. Andi flinches, and the guy with the guitar next to him flashes him a confused glance.

“Come on, man,” Carl hisses. I’m standing, dazed and unable to tear my gaze away from Andi. He’s focusing on his keyboard again, his hair falling over his eyes, but I could swear there’s another one of those lovely spotty blushes spreading from his neck to his face. Sadly, with the reddish light and Carl ruthlessly pulling me along now, I can’t be sure. And obviously Andi might simply be stressed because he isn’t used to hitting the wrong keys.

But he did hit the wrong keys, because of me. It makes me flutter all over.

Shit, I knew it; I knew I’ve still got a chance. Shit, I’ve never been this wired over a guy in my life.

The moment we sit down at a table, I order another Gletschergeist. The stuff has started to grow on me. And also this is a special situation. I don’t need alcohol to hit on people, normally. I’m the opposite of shy. Normally. But I already got the brush-off once. And I really, really want this man.

Oh shit, they have stopped playing and switched to the playlist on the stereo. Shit, I resolved to make my move the next time the band took a break. And they are doing it now. All five Fitschtalers are climbing down from the stage and walking over to their table on the side of the stage.

Andi sits down next to the drummer, laughing at some joke the guy just cracked. I remember he said the man’s name was Jo when he presented the band members to the audience last night.

He seems to be quite intimate with this Jo person, but Jo is balancing Eva, the singer, on one knee.

So far, so good.

Telling myself this is going to be my final attempt, I wait till Andi has finished his beer and Jo has turned to his girl for some recreational making out. Then I pull my V-neck tee in place, blank out my friends’ grimacing, and walk over.

“Hey, Andi. Would you like to join me for a glass of Gletschergeist?” I shout over the music. It might be a little rude to ignore everyone else at the table and push past Jo and his girl like I did, jostling them midkiss, but I need to be in talking distance to Andi, and I’m on a clock.

“And also, I didn’t mean any offense when I said I liked your lederhosen,” I add.

Andi is staring at me like a bunny at a snake. Now, as if the mention of his lederhosen were some kind of cue, he jumps up from his chair.

He mumbles something unintelligible and disappears in the crowd on the dance floor, leaving me standing there like a prize fool.

Everybody has seen this. His friends have seen it.

Worse, my friends have seen it.

“Seriously, dude, salvage your pride!” Jay cries the moment I’m back at our table. “Wow, that was hard to watch!”

“He actually got up and left the moment you tried to talk to him,” Carl observes.

Why does he have to spell things out like that, for fuck’s sake? God, I really hate him!

“The same moment,” Jay supplies.

“As if you have never been told to take a hike by a chick!” I flare up. “Where’s Antje, huh? Looks like she’s not so keen on a repeat!”

Antje is sitting on the lap of a guy wearing a bright orange Happy Powder shirt a few tables away from us, busy licking the man’s tonsils.

Up to now, I’ve kept tactfully silent about it.

At the second glance, I see the man is actually Andi’s brother. Complete with earring.

“It didn’t take you long to get yourself replaced, did it, Jay,” I snap. “And by a guy you told me was gay too!”

“At least I got her to sleep with me!” Jay cries, clearly stung.

“Fuck, I know how to get people to sleep with me too! I know how to make them see stars! People have told me! I’m the most popular top on campus, I—”

“TMI, dude,” Carl chimes in, pulling the bowl of french fries the waitress just brought to the table down onto his lap.

It’s true, though. I am the most popular top on campus, and for a reason too.

Only what do you do with all your hookup expertise and fuck skills when a guy simply refuses to talk to you?

Shit. Shit, this is starting to get to me. Shit, what’s that horrible pressure building behind my eyes? It must be the fucking schnapps. I’m not sad. I don’t do sad when it comes to hooking up. It doesn’t make sense.

“Maybe Austrian men aren’t up for casual sex,” Carl muses, making short work of a handful of french fries.

It’s always funny to listen to Carl talk about sex, a bit like when my mother talks about shoot-and-run games. Carl is a virgin that doesn’t even watch porn. The man has no sex life besides food.

But he isn’t done sharing his theories.

“Maybe people are mostly social conservatives here, and generally opposed to intercourse outside of a relationship—”

“That’s bullshit,” I cut him short, then blow my nose. “When I went on that trip across Europe with my mom two years ago, we spent a night in Vienna, and I hooked up with three different guys in less than eight hours!”

“And your mom?”

“No idea. Hey, why do you even ask!”

Carl has finished the french fries and digs a box of Mozart balls from his pocket.

“What I mean is, your mom didn’t mind you hitting the gay clubs?”

“Dude, my mom has known me since the day I was born, and she has known I’m gay for almost as long!”

“What I mean is, your mom took you to Vienna and didn’t mind you left her to go to the opera on her own?”

The man is making no sense tonight.

“The opera? My mom is a rock chick, you know that. And why are we talking about my mom all the time? Why aren’t we focusing on my problems here?”

Carl puts his chocolate box onto the table with an impatient-sounding thud.

“Okay, Justin, that’s what we’re doing only all the time.”

“Only all the time!” Jay echoes.

“You’re kind of ruining this, you know?” Carl goes on. “I didn’t want to say this, but you haven’t been fun to be with from the moment we came here!”

“Yeah, no fun at all,” Jay says. “And you’ve been really nasty to me just now too, you know that? You’re taking shit out on me, dude!”

“You are,” Carl says gravely. “Projecting your frustration onto a friend isn’t cool, Justin. And it isn’t like you. It isn’t like you at all.”

Okay. I’ve just suffered the worst kind of romantic rejection, and for the second time over too, and now my friends are pissed at me for being nasty and frustrated and projecting shit and ruining everyone’s vacation.

It’s kind of the last straw.

If only I could at least share the whole story with them!

“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry, dudes. I know I’ve been… I didn’t mean to…. Shit. It’s just that he… I just don’t get it! I mean, why would he keep brushing me off like that?”

I rub at my eyes with the back of my hand. Apparently I have trouble dealing with all the European-style smoking going on around us.

Looking alarmed, Jay shoves me in the arm. It hurts, but I know this is him trying to make up with me and comfort me, and I appreciate it.

Carl offers me a Mozart ball. I shake my head. I’ve had too much alcohol; even looking at the fatty thing gives me a queasy stomach.

“It might not even be you, you know,” Carl says. He stuffs the oversized chocolate ball into his own mouth. Talking around it, he continues, “I still think he isn’t playing for your team. Maybe your gaydar doesn’t work in Austria.”

“Yeah, you know, maybe it doesn’t,” Jay offers.

“Yeah, maybe,” I say weakly.

I’m through with this. This is the end. I’ll stop being a pain in everybody’s neck and forget about Andi.

The house track that’s been playing over the stereo comes to a choking halt, and the next moment, a swift cascade of keyboard harmonies sparkles from the speakers.

The band is back. Andi is back.

“Wanna go upstairs? Do a little gaming? Combat Force?” Carl asks.

“Yeah, let’s go play Combat Force,” Jay says.

We’ve been doing that quite a lot over the last two days, chilling on our beds and playing online games together. It’s great how you can do that when you’re together in the same room, no different from back home where everyone is living in a different town.

I’m ace at Combat Force. They know I’m going to seriously kick their asses, and they know how much I love doing that.

I love winning.

And I fucking love my friends. They’re straight but great, and I love them. Part of it is the Gletschergeist, I know that.

But the rest is fucking real.

 

 

I’M ALONE in the lounge. Outside, a thick fog has settled, filling the valley with smoky white.

Jay, Carl, and I hit the runs in the morning, but by noon, visibility had turned so poor we decided to call it a day and get back to the hotel.

Jay and Carl are down in the spa again. They tried to persuade me to join them, but I told them I’d rather sit in the lounge and draw for a bit.

Jay claims the lounge is for guests who are eighty or over only, with the harp music and the cupboards full of books. But I love this place. The thick fur rugs, the beeswax candles, the fluffy cushions with the red-and-white handwoven Tyrolean designs—even without a fire burning, the coziness borders on the obscene.

With a long playlist of chill EDM tracks on my phone and my earplugs blocking out the harp, I’m as fine as can be.

And I’m all alone, which makes things even better. I’m in the mood for some me time, not for conversation.

The two Germans left this morning, so I’m safe from any more of their overtures. It’s quite the relief, actually.

When we stepped into the elevator to go up to our suite last night, the two guys slipped in with us and invited me to join them in their suite for a little private farewell party. They kept mentioning that Leo the blue-haired barman was coming too. When I said sorry and I was with my friends, Jay and Carl said it was no problem, the two idiots, and as good as tried to marry me off to the Germans on the spot. For the rest of the night, they kept pushing me to quit playing Combat Force with them and go downstairs and “party” instead.

I know they meant well. All they want is to help me get Andi out of my system. I know they think I’m having a problem.

And I guess I do. It’s not typical for me to turn down a nice offer involving sexual debaucheries. I don’t even know why I did it. Guess I was being plain stupid. But I just know the thought of Andi would have ruined things for me.

At the moment it feels like the thought of Andi might ruin the rest of my life.

The problem is he’s even more perfect than I realized.

I only discovered this morning at breakfast it’s him who does the graphic design of the Fankhauser News. It says Layout: A. Fankhauser in very small print on the last page. Same with the hotel brochure. He hasn’t done anything wildly artsy with the design; there’s just some fancy initials, and he seems to like corner flourish swirls. It’s all rather retro, really. But still.

The idea of him sitting in front of his computer by night with his glasses on, adding this stuff to the text files, adjusting things till he’s satisfied with the effect—it makes me want to swoon with happy adoration.

Made me want to swoon. Yes, he’s perfect, and probably in more ways than I’ll ever know, but it’s over.

He has seen me buck naked and told me he liked the view, and he locked eyes with me in a way that completely rocked my world. With both of us fully dressed. It doesn’t even make sense.

But now he seems to have decided it was all a mistake. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let him look at me like that. From that close, and with me being swept off my feet like I was. He must have decided in that moment I wasn’t that great a catch after all.

Obviously, with his looks, he can have anyone. And he’s not only the son of a millionaire and, like, the prince of the valley, he’s also this whiz kid who speaks foreign languages and is all kinds of talented. Yeah, why would he care to be with someone who tries to chat him up with preplanned lines they wrote down to memorize them? With someone who’ll probably never get their act together? Sure, I never told him I’m this loser who flunks his college exams, but it feels like he knows anyway.

Oh shit.

All I want is to forget. And there has ever only been one thing that really does that for me: my graphic tablet.

I’ve brought it with me to the lounge again to work on some photos.

What I should have brought along is my laptop with my Statistics for Business books, obviously. I really should start going through those files like I promised my mom. But when I opened them just now, up in the suite, I felt the acute urge to close them again.

I didn’t fight it.

There is that retest, and in just a few days. But this is my vacation. I’ve paid a lot of money I don’t really have to be here. It doesn’t make sense to ruin this week for good by studying fucking statistics.

Pushing the thought of bar charts, tests, and my mom firmly to the back of my head, I switch on my tablet and open the picture folder labeled Fitsch.

There’s one really fine photo of the glacier in the evening light, with the Sunnzeiger as the centerpiece. It’s from our first day, from shortly before we saw Andi do that mega jump in the fun park. The snow-covered summits look as if they weren’t from this world, majestic and like dusted with gold.

Letting the stylus take the lead, I start drawing, working on shadow and light until the contours begin to pop like I want them to. Next I play around with colors for a while.

It’s funny how colors that seem completely wrong for a snowy mountain, like green or brown, can bring out its true beauty.

And those clouds need a bit of yellow, maybe a touch of purple. Yeah.

I’ve got this eagle man in my head, so I let him take shape on the screen too, a fiery, mystical shadow against the backdrop of the glimmering mountainside.

I stop for a bit to contemplate the picture.

Those wings need more definition. I bend over again to start shading them.

A movement in the corner of my eye makes me look up.

Someone is standing behind the bar.

It’s the original Eagle Man. In a green loden jacket.

Andi fucking Fankhauser.

It’s a funny thing with the tablet. Whenever I start drawing on it, I get, like, sucked into it. To the point of missing the moment my target moves into the range of operation.

And really looks at me for once too.

Or rather stares. Because that’s what he’s doing; he’s staring at me and has been doing so for God knows how long!

Okay.

I might have told my friends I’d heed their advice and let this go. I might have told myself the same thing. I might have decided to write off Andi as a lost cause.

But this is a game changer. He has sent me so many mixed signals I’ve started to doubt my memory. But there’s nothing mixed about that look he just gave me. He knows I noticed, and his lids have started to flutter, but it seems he still can’t make himself turn away.

With my pulse at two hundred or something, I pop out my earbuds and run a hand through my hair, giving him what I hope is an inviting yet nonthreatening smile.

On no account must I give him a reason to run off on me again.

He quickly looks away, continuing to wipe down the counter, or pretending to do so.

His hair has fallen into his face, but even in the candlelight, I can see he has turned a delightful shade of scarlet.

Right. Do something, Justin.

“Andi?” I call out. “May I have a drink? A hot chocolate? Please?”

I’ve learned my lesson. If you order drinks for strategic purposes, don’t go for caffeinated.

Andi clears his throat.

“Of course. Sir.”

He busies himself with preparing a mug of hot chocolate, clattering the dishes, shuffling through cupboards.

Feeling nervous like a bride at the altar, I wait for the moment when he’ll come over.

When he finally does, edging past a chair blocking his way, I’m struck again by his elegant way of moving. I so have a thing for his strong, slim hips. And they are right at my eye level when he places the mug on the coffee table in front of me.

He’s simply serving me a drink, and I know he’s as strung up as I am, or probably more so, but even now there’s that special air of controlled power about him that makes his boarding stand out like it does. It gives me a weird feeling to be sitting there with him towering over me. It makes me acutely aware of the fact I’m shorter than him, and I don’t know why, but I really like that.

Surreptitiously I inhale the fragrance of outdoorsy freshness surrounding him. Oh man, I could get high on just that scent of his.

I almost forget to say thank you. He doesn’t answer when I do, he just gives a nod and retreats, much too quickly.

But he doesn’t leave the room. Instead, he moves over to the fireplace to sweep ashes into a copper bucket, then starts building an intricate structure out of new logs inside the fireplace.

This is my chance to talk to him. I’ve got to say something, now. Something witty and casual—

“Why didn’t you talk to me last night?” I blurt out to his back. “What did I do wrong?”

He stops moving, then turns around for a fraction of an inch, still looking away from me.

“You mustn’t walk up to me like you did.”

Says the man who has as good as undressed me with his gaze three times in total now. Or two times, to be fair, since a honey-and-salt crust isn’t technically clothes.

But I don’t want to fight with him. What I want is very much the contrary.

How could I ever decide to give up on him? He’s a wet dream even when wearing a loden jacket, which should rightfully be impossible. And there’s something there between us, something that I know could be out-of-this-world amazing and that’s only just beyond reach. All I have to do is say the right thing now.

All I have to do is make him see it would be madness for both of us to miss out on this.

If only I were a little better at making an argument!

I wish I were Carl. Or even Jay with his unfathomable sex magic.

Sitting up, I flatten my hair. Usually I’m proud of my hair, but he hasn’t yet offered an opinion on it. Maybe there’s a problem here. Maybe he doesn’t like my hair. First impressions are said to be vital, after all, and he first saw it in a state of total disarray and dripping honey.

Okay, no point in regretting the past. He’s still here. He isn’t looking at me, but instead of walking away, he’s hovering in front of the fireplace as if he were waiting for the fire to start itself. Giving me another chance to say something.

“I’m sorry if I made a mistake there,” I venture. “I didn’t mean to annoy you when I invited you for a drink.”

“You didn’t annoy me.”

“But you ran away!”

He shifts uncomfortably. I try again.

“Listen, all I wanted was talk—”

“Did you?” he says in a low voice.

“Well, I wouldn’t have said no to some après-ski action, obviously.”

He quickly looks to the door as if he expects someone to walk through, then pushes his hair back, shaking his head.

“Yeah, sorry, that won’t happen,” he says curtly.

“But—”

“I can’t have people watching us… do shit, okay?” he says roughly.

“But everybody was doing it! Making out, I mean! Except for Carl, maybe.”

He gives a wary scoff. “It’s what the guests do. That’s après-ski.”

“Your brother was pretty busy last night too. And he didn’t seem to mind an audience either.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

Okay. I’m starting to get what this is about.

“Is it because you aren’t out?”

He doesn’t answer. He just gives a small shrug that says it all.

Right. If he isn’t out, then the last thing he wants is to be seen fooling around with a male guest. Or even just flirting. Right. Wow.

I guess I should have seen this sooner. This is why he’s constantly scanning the surroundings when we talk. This is why he didn’t want to talk to me in front of his friends down in the club. He doesn’t want anyone to pick up on what’s going on between us. And he’s clearly suffering from the strain of having to hide like this.

He might even be a virgin.

What if he’s a virgin?

I wish I had more experience with closeted folks. Oh man, I wish I were somehow equipped for this.

“Maybe, if you stop hiding, it won’t even be such a big deal? Maybe people will be cooler about it than you think?” I offer. “Maybe, if you just—”

“Listen, Bennet,” he interrupts. “I know I started this, down in the vapor bath. I should have stepped back out the door the moment I saw you weren’t hurt. I didn’t, and it was wrong.”

“It wasn’t! It was fantastic, and—”

“You don’t understand.”

Voices drift over from the reception area. Someone calls his name.

This conversation clearly needs to be shifted to neutral territory. To somewhere that’s not his workplace and where he isn’t on everybody’s radar.

He’s already moving toward the door.

With a neat jump across the couch, I block his way.

“You know this bar down the street, the Snowball?” I quickly say. “It looks quite nice, and… how about we meet up there tonight, just you and I?”

He has stopped in his tracks, apparently fazed by my cat-style move. His gaze travels to my middle. And gets stuck there.

Sure, my leopard jeggings weren’t designed to hide stuff. But you don’t look at a guy’s junk like that. Unless you do. Guys have looked at me like this in clubs often enough. I can read that burning glitter. I know what it means when a guy is devouring you with his eyes.

And Andi knows he’s doing it, even though he’s trying his hardest to stop.

“Come on, man,” I whisper. “Tell me I’m wrong, but I’m getting the impression you like my leopard jeggings just as much as I like your lederhosen!”

His jaw works, and he has turned away again. Hell, picking up a guy is supposed to be the easiest thing in the world! This is like a high-wire act.

His gaze is glued to the dead fireplace now as if he were trying to hold on to it. Bright red spots have appeared on his neck and cheeks.

“Andi?” I say, floundering, needing him to tell me to fuck off or else what to do next.

Again, someone calls out for him from beyond the open doors.

He marches past me. He’s already by the door when he tosses me a curt “see you.”

Then he walks on.

From behind he looks like an android. An especially attractive and well-made android, but still a machine, unfeeling and unreachable.

Well, I know for a fact he is neither.

Fuck, he wants this as much as I do!

Only what am I going to do about it?

Fuck, I want him, I want to see him with his hair ruffled up as I kiss him senseless, I want to see him come apart as I jerk him off. I want to fuck him into a mattress while he’s begging me to fill his ass with my come.

God, I want to make him see stars.

At least this time he said goodbye before leaving.

Not the kind of progress we might need with just three more days to go, but I guess it’s something.

 

 

JAY AND Carl refuse to share in my newfound optimism.

Jay especially seems to feel I need some reining in. He acts as if I were an out-of-control fifteen-year-old and he my dad.

When we get ready for dinner, he looks at me askance as I take a turn in front of the mirror.

“Why don’t you choose something more appropriate for a country hotel restaurant for a change? Do you want to burn his eyes out with that shirt?”

It’s a perfectly regular semitransparent satin shirt in magenta. If people tend to look at stuff that’s magenta, that’s hardly my fault.

Jay struggles to make the ends of the belt of his dress pants meet over his stomach.

When Antje moved on, it didn’t take him long to redirect his amorous efforts toward an Italian girl who sits at the table next to ours at dinner every night. She’s with her parents. It’s him who should stop being inappropriate, chatting up people while their parents are watching and while wearing blue dress pants with cowboy boots. And this man has the nerve to comment on my outfit.

Ignoring him, I sit down on my bed and put in my heart-shaped pink rhinestone earrings. I got them at Innsbruck airport, so what could be a more appropriate choice of jewelry for a Tyrolean hotel?

In the mirror I can see Jay give Carl a pointed look, as usual when he feels he needs support. Carl, who’s lounging on his bed with a selection of snacks, gives a tiny nod in response and noisily swallows a chunk of Sachertorte. They’ve been talking about me, the bastards.

“We don’t mean to rain on your parade, dude,” Carl begins, confirming my suspicions, “but what about your studying? Did you get stuff done today?”

Fuck. He knows full well that, no, I didn’t.

“Not to spoil your evening,” he goes on. “But we think that you should get started. Like tonight. You won’t be happy if you fail that test again.”

“So not happy!” Jay affirms.

“I won’t fail! I have time enough for studying on the flight home!”

They exchange a glance that is nothing short of infuriating. Fuck, this is like being on vacation with two fucking parents! I could just as well be that poor Italian chick!

“Okay, dudes, here’s the thing. I have more important stuff to do at the moment than focus on my future. Stuff that can only be done while I’m still here. And you know what I’m talking about.”

“He doesn’t want you!” Jay exclaims, sounding almost hysterical. “Forget it, Justin!”

“What’s so special about him anyway?” Carl mutters, shaking his head and opening a bag of chips.

I lean back against my bed’s headboard, interlacing my fingers behind my head.

Jay moans.

“Why did you have to ask him that, Carl!”

“It’s his looks, obviously, but that’s only part of it,” I say to Carl, turning my back on Jay. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think it’s this mix of grounded and aloof. You know? He’s got this kind of cool superiority, but underneath I can sense something else, a warmth, like a hearth fire, or—”

“Carl, stop him!” Jay cries.

“Let’s go to dinner,” Carl says. He puts the bag of chips back into his drawer with the special tender care he reserves for his provisions and gets up from his bed. “I’m starved.”

 

 

ANDI HASN’T been on the service team at dinner. When I step into the lobby afterward, just to have a look around, I discover why.

The Fankhauser family has congregated for a party in the lounge. There’s a sign saying Privat, but the doors are open so the waiters can go in and out, and it’s easily possible to take a peek into the room from the lobby.

I sit down in one of the extrabroad, extracomfy armchairs, behind a man-sized vase full of pussy willow branches. Jay and Carl are already back upstairs. I’ve told them my mom is expecting me to give her a call and that the signal is best in the lobby. All of which is true.

Only I’ve got no plans to actually phone her, of course. She’d ask after my progress with Statistics for Business, and it’s impossible for me to lie to my mom. Not for moral reasons, but because she sees through people, and because I’m useless at hiding shit. And what good could possibly come of it if she learned that I’m busy stalking someone instead of studying?

I only wish I’d listened to Jay and put on something less flashy than my magenta shirt. I crane my neck to get a better view of what’s going on in the lounge, taking care to keep hidden behind the vase.

Some matriarch of the family has turned seventy-five, judging from the pink-and-silver number on the giant cake on the table.

There are about fifty people of all ages gathered in the lounge, many of them in dirndls or lederhosen and pink-checkered blouses or shirts. This must be the traditional costume of the Fitschtal, the Tracht.

Andi is wearing it too. He’s hugging an old lady, probably the birthday girl, right in my line of sight.

Man, I love him in his Tracht. The look suits him just so well. I definitely have a lederhosen kink. And I love the pink-checkered shirt on him too. The color contrasts so nicely with his black hair, and the rolled-up sleeves reveal his toned forearms in the best of ways.

He doesn’t look like a mannequin at all. The fact is he looks way more dressed up in his black waiter’s uniform than in this fancy, colorful outfit that was quite obviously tailor-made to perfectly fit his fine physique.

Sadly, now my vision is being blocked by other Fankhausers crowding the old lady.

I spot Fankhauser Senior and Andi’s brother Max from the sports store. He isn’t Andi, but I have to admit he’s quite a looker in his lederhosen too. He’s a real bear, with a frame like a weight lifter and wiry black chest hair curling from his open collar.

I recognize the lady who runs the Snowball too. The woman must be a relative as well; probably an aunt or something. So much for neutral territory.

Neutral territory doesn’t seem to exist in this valley as far as the Fankhauser clan is concerned. Andi Fankhauser is surrounded by family 24-7. For better or for worse.

Yes, he’s under surveillance around the clock. And I can just feel how everyone is expecting Andi, their nephew or brother or son or grandson, to present a girlfriend one day and eventually marry and enlarge the family. Whether they mean to do it or not, they effectively keep him from coming out.

I might have my mom to deal with, but he has got a whole tribe that’s laying a claim to him.

But I can also see how happy he is to be part of this vibrant, oversized clan. He looks completely relaxed as he moves about the room talking to his folks, his face lit up by an easy, radiant smile.

It’s only now that I realize I haven’t seen him smile before, not like this. As I observe him fooling around with a bunch of kids who must be his cousins or nieces and nephews and who quite obviously adore him, I understand what his problem is.

I understand what Carl meant the other night when he gave a monologue about the sociological implications of being born and raised in rural Austria.

The locals here are descendants of farmers who settled in this harsh world centuries ago, when only the fittest survived, Carl said. Today they deal with customers from around the globe; they pocket their money, then move on to make the next bold investment, build the next funicular up a glacier or five-star hotel in a glass cube on a mountaintop. They aren’t peasants anymore, they are businesspeople.

But at the same time, they’re still deeply rooted in the rocky soil of their secluded valleys, determined to hold on to their traditions and their folks. It’s a question of survival for them to preserve their identity in the fast-paced industry that is Tyrolean tourism, Carl said. He called it the challenge of social development, and a permanent act of balance.

I guess it is. And I guess that same as with most things, it’s just a little bit harder when you’re gay.

Naturally Andi is afraid of losing his foothold in his family when he feels it’s what keeps him sane. Naturally he feels it’s safest for him to pretend he’s the same as everyone else.

If his family drops him, there will be no rainbow community nearby waiting to welcome him home. He’d have nothing.

For a moment I feel I should leave him alone.

But no.

No, that can’t be the answer.

He definitely can’t go on like this. At some point in their lives, people need to start to be all of themselves, including their orientation. That’s what I’ve heard said, and it sure rings true.

And one thing is clear. If I leave him be, he’s going to download some app one day, go to a big city for the weekend, and lose his virginity to some asshole who isn’t me.

He’s talking to a little girl. She seems to be telling him jokes. The full, happy sound of his laughter travels over to where I’m sitting behind the willow branches.

Instead of going straight to my groin, as would be normal, it hits me in the chest, then kind of lingers there.

It’s scary. Just a little bit, but scary nonetheless.

I need to cut out the sentimentality, and all the thinking too. Now.

I’ll encourage him to take a walk on the wild side for a night or two, I’ll ask him to take a chance on me. And if he does, I’ll take him to bed, and make him see stars, and then I’ll be done with whatever this is and fly home.

 

 

“HEY.”

Someone is tugging at my sleeve. With a start, I sit up straight.

I’m in the lobby; I’ve fallen asleep in my chair.

And the man stepping back from me is none other than Andi. Looking all crisp in his Tracht, like he just popped out of a catalog for traditional Tyrolean party wear.

There are voices from the lounge. Apparently the festivities are still going.

I look up at him standing there framed by the willow branches, because it’s just too hard not to. I don’t say anything. If I’ve learned one thing in the past days it’s that he doesn’t want to talk to me with people around. And there’s a whole roomful of Fankhausers just a few yards behind this flowerpot.

And he just woke me, so he probably came to tell me something. Like, “Stop watching my grandma’s birthday party, Bennet, it’s not a show for the guests.”

But he only looks down at me with a weird expression on his face.

I blink to get rid of the lingering sleepiness, my pulse quickening. He looks so…. Yeah, like maybe he’s about to say something entirely different.

Someone is calling from the lounge.

“Andi?”

Man, why does he have to be in constant demand like this? Why is it that he’s never granted a minute of peace and quiet to talk to me?

“Come meet me in the ski room around midnight,” he says in a low voice. “Just to talk.”

I nod, feeling a little dazed by this unexpected suggestion, or order. A surge of elation wells up inside me.

He made a date with me. As good as.

Oh my God, I can’t believe it. My heart is pounding, and its happy beat feels as if it were trying to get me to jump out of my seat and break into dance steps.

This must be what it feels like to receive an offer of marriage.

 

 

I’M WAITING in the ski room. It’s windowless and very stark; all gray concrete lit up by strip lights. Definitely not the place you’d choose if you intended to meet someone for making out. He must have meant it when he said “just talking.”

At least the room is comfortably warm from floor heating and the long rows of heated boot holders that line the walls. The circular bench in the middle of the room I’m lounging on is just plain wood, and I’ve started to think of my soft bed and red-checkered comforter up in our suite with a quiet, fond yearning.

I’ve been back to the suite to change out of my magenta shirt before I came here. It would hardly have been the right choice for a secret nighttime rendezvous. I’ve put on a black T-shirt and an open-front cardigan instead and complemented the look with my camo trousers. My camos are super baggy. I wanted something that’s a statement, yet as far away as possible from my leopard jeggings. The jeggings were too much for him earlier. It’s obvious that it doesn’t make sense to flash him with my equipment at this point.

I also refreshed my eyeliner and did my hair. I decided on a bun. It’s a cool, classy style, and luckily I’m a guy who can pull it off. I told Jay and Carl I needed the bathroom for waxing to be sure they’d leave me alone and not start asking questions or give me some more of their endless, unnerving advice.

I stayed on in the bathroom after I was done with my preparations for the same reason, gaming for a bit on my phone. I created two more accounts on Jay’s gaming site too, to surprise him with some new followers in the morning. Carl had checked out Jaymer’s channel over dinner, and I just couldn’t take Jay’s expression when Carl pointed out there wasn’t much growth in terms of an audience, was there. Jay even nodded along to that, the way he does, saying no, there wasn’t. His gaming channel is his dream, and it’s really the worst to see him like that, all defeated. Yeah, about half of Jaymer’s followership is me.

A few minutes to midnight, I left the suite. Both Jay and Carl were fast asleep.

When I passed through the lobby, it was deserted. The party guests seemed to have long since left, and Andi himself must have disappeared to somewhere in the bowels of the hotel to help clean up or God knows what.

Does he never sleep? How can he be working this late when he taught snowboard classes from morning till afternoon, has waitered and stuff in the hotel till nightfall, and is expected to be back on the slopes with clients by nine o’clock tomorrow?

I’ve got trouble keeping my eyes open as I’m sitting here adding touches to the eagle picture on my tablet, and I’ve just been lazy all day.

Or has he maybe forgotten what he said and gone to bed already? Or what if I’ve simply hallucinated he invited me here? At this point I wouldn’t even be surprised at that, with all the mixed messages he has sent my way. It’s certainly enough to drive a guy around the bend.

The door clicks. He’s there; he has come.

Feeling my stomach lurch as my system floods with adrenaline, I get up from the bench.

He’s dressed in gray sweatpants and a threadbare, comfy-looking hoodie, and somehow I find him even hotter in these worn clothes than I did before. Somehow he manages to look more swoonworthy every time I see him.

“Hi,” he says. His voice is a little hoarser than usual, and oh my God, how can a single syllable send my heart right through the roof?

He has sized me up with a quick glance and is already looking at the floor again.

When he steps into the bright neon light, I realize he looks tired. I quickly gesture at the bench to make him sit down. I myself am too keyed up to sit.

He collapses onto the bench with a small sigh of exhaustion, running a hand down the side of his neck and tilting his head back like he’s trying to rub the tension from his muscles.

How I’d love to do that for him, how I’d love to be the one to give him an after-work massage. Help him recover from a hard day. I’m not even thinking about sex, I realize with a twitch of surprise.

“Sorry I kept you waiting,” he says, blinking up at me.

“That’s fine!”

“You aren’t the type to get bored, are you,” he says, nodding at my tablet. It’s lying on the bench, with the eagle file still open. Quickly I pick the tablet up and plunge it down my trouser pocket.

He can’t know the eagle is him, but I have the suspicion he sees more than other mortals with those electric blue eyes. He’s definitely someone who puts two and two together, and I don’t want him to. It’s one thing to tell someone you want to hook up with them, it’s another thing completely to draw pictures of them that show them as a fantasy mountain superhero.

“You’ve had a long night,” I say. “I wouldn’t want to keep you up.”

“That’s okay. I think we need to talk.”

“Yes, yes, we do,” I say a bit too eagerly. I’ve really thought things through while I waited for him, and I’ve come up with a whole line of argument.

“You go first, then,” he says. He still seems to be avoiding my gaze, but I don’t miss the slight smile that crinkles up the corners of his eyes. It gives me the courage I need.

“I’ve been thinking,” I begin. “I don’t want you to feel stressed out or pressured because I’m a guest in your father’s hotel. Carl said tourists can often be a bit…. He said I shouldn’t have said anything about your pants, and…. What I mean is, I don’t want to come across as condescending or presuming or anything, I….”

I’ve lost my thread. It’s his mouth. It’s twitching, almost as if he’s suppressing a laugh.

“Your friend is right about the guests,” he says. “There are those who treat staff as if they were included in the room rate. Some regard our valley, like, as a supermarket to take from whatever they want, people included, because they don’t see us as real human beings with a life of our own I guess, beyond the tourism…. Okay, I guess I’m rambling. Sorry. This cannot make much sense to you.”

“No, no, it does,” I say, silently apologizing to Carl for never having properly appreciated his insights. “It makes a lot of sense. And I just want you to know…. I wouldn’t want you to think that I….”

“I know that’s not you,” he simply says.

He doesn’t think I think people are included in the room rate; he doesn’t think I’m a john. Feeling disproportionally uplifted, I dive right in now and tell him all I’ve come up with by way of reasons why it’s a good idea for him to hop into bed with me.

“I get you aren’t out, and you don’t want to do anything here in your father’s hotel. Perfectly understandable. But here’s what we could do. How about we go to Innsbruck tomorrow night and rent a room in the youth hostel? It’s just a two-hour drive, but at a safe distance from here. It would be all discreet. No one would ever know.”

That’s the central point of the speech I’ve prepared.

He’s still listening. It’s great, but also a bit unnerving.

“Here’s the thing,” I plow on. “I think, in case you want to start, like, exploring your options, I might be just the right guy for you.”

He sharply inhales.

“For experimenting, I mean,” I quickly clarify. “Like, I’m this random dude? I’m going to leave in three days’ time? What I mean is, with me, there’s zero expectations. No strings attached and all that. Please, Andi. Say yes?”

I stand before him, eagerly waiting for his response.

When he finally looks up at me, his eyes are very bright. He quickly casts them down again and gets up from the bench, walking a few steps away from me.

“You’re making this harder than it has to be, Bennet.”

The sinking feeling is so strong I feel I might slip right through the concrete floor.

“But I thought you found me attractive! You said… I thought… I’ve been hoping….”

I break off, choked by the unexpected force of my feelings.

He gives me a quick, loaded glance. For a short, crazy moment I feel he’s about to close the distance between us and pull me in for a kiss. I feel ready to swoon, as if this were an ancient Hollywood romance movie.

But the movie kiss doesn’t happen. He doesn’t step up to me or try to touch me. He just stands with his hands clenched into fists, looking at the floor again. Eventually he says, “You are super hot, and you know it.”

“So you do find me attractive.”

“I like you, okay?”

Before I can think about whether he might actually mean by this that he likes me, like, as a person or something, he goes on, a little breathless.

“But I’m not interested in sneaking off to grab a quickie with a tourist. I’m not the type who’d sneak off to some shady corner for five minutes of sex, okay? Or for a night. I’ve never done it, and I won’t start now. It’s not what I’m looking for.”

He looks at me almost like he’s challenging me. The angles of his face are very pronounced in the neon light. It brings out the tired lines around his eyes, but also the determined set of his jaw. There’s a sort of steely clarity to his words.

“The point is, you want me because I’m gay, and around. For you, it’s all about fun and not missing out on an opportunity. This is not an accusation, it’s just how it is. You and me, that doesn’t make sense.”

Okay.

Okay, this sounds like not being out and his family potentially freaking out and all that is just part of the problem. This sounds like he wants someone who brings more to the table than just girth, muscle, and a good fashion sense. This sounds like he’s looking for a relationship.

And he doesn’t see me as someone who’d qualify for that.

“Maybe I want more too,” I say, floundering, feeling at sea. What he just said about me summed up my attitude about making out pretty accurately. Or what has been my attitude up to now.

He’s shaking his head at me.

“You just told me the best thing about you is that you’re going to be gone in three days’ time!”

I did, but I only said that because I thought he thought it was the best thing about me; I hoped it might tip the scales in my favor. Apparently it did the opposite. Fuck, I’m not used to having to navigate my way around all kinds of pitfalls in presex conversation, I’m not used to having to argue so much with guys who told me they liked me just to get them to act on it!

If he goes on like this, I’m going to crack and say something like I dream of you all the time, and I think I love you. And that wouldn’t be good. No matter how much he’s haunting my nights, no matter what that means, he just basically told me he sees me as this shallow slut. He said he liked me, but he never gave me a reason to think he might, I don’t know, love me back or anything. And that much I understand about romance: you don’t want to be the one who’s in love when the other guy isn’t.

Shit, why can’t this be simple and just about the sex? Sex isn’t complicated, it’s the one thing in life that isn’t. Or it’s supposed to be.

“I like you. You like me. We could have some fun together. What’s the big deal?” I plead.

He shakes his head like I just proved all his points.

“I think it’s best if we just try and stay out of each other’s way until you’re gone.”

He sounds cool and detached. But by now I’ve learned he’s good at many things, and a master when it comes to keeping his feelings to himself. By now I’m picking up on the subtler signs: the brief hint of tension in his voice, the fleeting darkness shadowing his blue gaze.

He turns away, making it impossible for me to go on reading his eyes and convince myself he didn’t just say this.

Fuck, why does this hurt so much?

“I think it’s best if we just try and stay out of each other’s way until you’re gone.”

“Andi—”

My voice cracks. He wrings his hands, like hearing his name physically hurt him. Or like he needs to stop himself from reaching out to me.

“It’s better this way, Bennet. Bye.”

 

 

HE DISMISSED me.

He sought me out; he came to talk to me after an eighteen-hour day just to dismiss me. To tell me he doesn’t want to see me again.

I wanted this conversation. Now it happened.

And I’m further away from what I want than ever.

With numb fingers, I pull my cardigan tighter around myself. I’m out in the parking lot, restlessly wandering about in the cold between the silent hulking silhouettes of snowed-in cars. I’ve mulled over what he said for almost an hour now.

He really is a virgin. He doesn’t want casual sex because he’s still in the closet and hates the idea of engaging in stealth and secrecy.

That proud tilt of his head.

That pain in his voice when he told me goodbye.

I look up at the five summits of Fitsch, at the magnificent skyline sprawling under the starry universe.

So much open space, and here we are, caught up in constraints that seem to be of our own making yet impossible to resolve.

“It’s better this way, Bennet. Bye.”

“You and me, that doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s better this way, Bennet. Bye.”

“Bye.”

 

 

I HAD a dream of him, and in the dream, it was him who asked me to sleep with him. We were in the family wing of the Fankhauser, and he invited me into his room and was being super nice to me, and we were kind of together.

How pathetic is that.

I’m only grateful I don’t talk in my sleep. It would be just frigging great if Jay and Carl heard me babble shit like “I love you, baby.”

Because I’m pretty sure I said that to him in my dream.

 

 

IT’S FIVE o’clock in the afternoon.

I’m alone in the suite. Jay has gone down to the restaurant to make a move on the Italian girl over a hot chocolate and a Topfenstrudel, with Carl as his wingman. I can’t imagine Carl being of much use as a wingman. He’s going to be completely absorbed by his strudel.

The weather has cleared up, and we had another perfect day of boarding. But Andi wasn’t around at breakfast, and he still wasn’t there when we came back to the hotel in the afternoon. And when I finally managed to make Carl ask after him, the girl at the reception desk told him Andi had called in sick.

The idea of Andi ill, maybe even seriously so, worries me crazy. He looked so tired last night.

But what if he isn’t sick at all, and this is really about him trying not to have to see me again before I leave? What if this means he hates me?

What if this means he cares more about me than he admitted?

What if I’ll never see him again?

Is this being in love? Imagining tragedy, trying to analyze every tiny bit of information, and always thinking everything is about you? Suffering, like, all the fucking time?

Yeah, if this is love, it’s no fun.

I’ve started working on another photo to take my mind off things. The image is from the video I made in the Funk House the other night; Andi at the keyboard, backlit by the stage lighting. It’s a bit like the shot in the information brochure. But he needs a different tint. That purple isn’t him.

He’s blue and gold.

I’ve already adjusted the background, and now I’m going to take the plunge and get to work on his eyes.

My phone rings.

It’s my mom.

 

 

“HAVING FUN?” she asks, her voice sounding as distinct as if she were in the room with me.

“Yeah,” I say. “Snow’s fantastic. Hotel’s good too.”

“But?”

“Nothing but.”

She chuckles.

“But you miss your gay bars and clubs.”

That’s not really what it is, but I won’t tell her that.

I’m not uncomfortable with discussing stuff like cruising with my mom. She’s extremely laid back when it comes to subjects like sex and hookups.

It’s just that I know she’d instantly change from chill to high alert if I gave her the slightest reason to suspect there was a boyfriend on the horizon. Even if it’s just a dream boyfriend. Got to do with her own boyfriend history, I guess, which is basically my dad. The guy’s a bit of a scumbag. Got my mom pregnant, then left with half her money.

Don’t make the mistakes I made, Justin, that’s what she’s been telling me for half my life.

Well, I don’t intend to. I have no money besides what I earn at the campus coffee shop anyway, nor a uterus, so I’d say there’s little danger of history repeating itself.

Still, every couple of weeks, my mom will remind me there’s nothing worse than projecting soppy ideas of romance onto a hookup. And I haven’t even had someone who’d qualify as a boyfriend up to now. But she’s got a sixth sense for when I like a guy.

And I don’t just like Andi, I can’t stop thinking about him. I dream about him; I fucking dream about being with him.

And people say I’m easier to read than an open book.

If I as much as mention him now, she’s going to know. She’s going to say something like “Oh dear, a vacation crush, how classic.” I don’t need to hear how sweet that is when what she really means is stupid. I don’t need her to tell me to not do anything I’ll only regret later.

Like falling in love.

“Justin?”

“I’m fine, Mom. I’ll be home in three days’ time, anyway,” I say offhandedly.

My own words send a weird twinge through my insides. While I listen to my mom giving me an update of what’s going on at home, trouble with colleagues at the agency, my college roommate calling to talk about splitting the costs for a minifridge, I realize I don’t want to be back in three days’ time.

“Justin? You still there? How’s the studying going? Are you on schedule?”

“Sure.”

“I hope you don’t waste your time doodling on that tablet of yours. You’re too old for kids’ stuff like drawing.”

“Sure,” I repeat, pushing the tablet under the bedsheets as if I were a twelve-year-old and she were about to walk right in on me.

“Justin!”

Oh man, she never fails to pick up on it when I’m trying to fool her. There’s a fucking ocean between us, and she still does it.

“Listen,” she says in a stern tone. “Maybe you’ve got to work a little harder for your grades than others. But you’ve always been the most competitive kid in the playground. I expect you to direct a little bit of that ambition toward your studies.”

“Sorry, Mom, didn’t catch much of that. Cell reception really sucks in these valleys. Gotta go now. Love you.”

I don’t wait for her response and just hit End Call.

I do love her.

But hell.

 

 

HE ISN’T in the restaurant at breakfast again. But when we do our first run down from the top station, we pass a Happy Powder instructor, and when I look back to check, it’s Andi.

He isn’t sick. He’s as tan and agile on his board as ever, radiating strength and superiority like he has to. I feel my whole face lift in a grin of relief under my visor.

He’s being followed by a middle-aged man in an expensive-looking outfit who keeps losing his edge. A client taking a private lesson. As I watch the guy sit down on his ass in the snow, it hits me.

I don’t really know why I didn’t think of this earlier. I’ve known Andi is a snowboarding instructor since my very first day in Fitsch.

It’s so simple.

I’ll take lessons with him. Private freeriding lessons.

We’ll finally have some real space to be together, without another soul within hearing range. He’ll see I’m fun; he’ll see there’s no reason for him not to take advantage of the situation, and the rest is going to take care of itself.

He told me we didn’t make sense, but hey, I think we absolutely do. Why shouldn’t he have fun with me while he’s waiting for the right guy to come along? And get a little practice while he’s at it too? He likes me and thinks I’m hot, so really he has nothing to lose.

Sure, he told me we shouldn’t see each other again, because he thinks he’s this guy who doesn’t do one-night stands and apparently doesn’t trust himself to act accordingly when I’m around.

Well, it’s not my job to save him from temptation. I’d say it’s to challenge his self-control for a bit.

Yes, he piqued my pride when he made it sound like I had none, sleeping around like I do. Perhaps he needs to see he isn’t that much better when he’s free to do as he likes.

He made me feel a little cheap for wanting to sleep with him, and yeah, sorry, now the game is on. I’d like to know which one of us is actually, truly more desperate for it to happen. Once we are all alone and there’s no reason to hold back, which one of us is going to crack and ask the other for sex first? Yeah, I’d very much like to show him that it’s not me.

If he keeps up his deal and makes no move on me, he wins. But if it turns out he isn’t so chaste and impervious to a well-built, willing guy’s charms after all, if it turns out that passion I’ve seen in his eyes is real, and that he can’t rein it in when he’s got no good reason to—so much the better.

A few hours of boarding together might be just the thing to make him see he wants to take me to some shady corner after all, maybe to some handy derelict stable in the woods or something. Or he’ll even spend that night in Innsbruck with me. My last night.

Yeah, I’m going to book him for a lesson.

I get all excited at the prospect. I already see myself talking to him about tricks and joking around with him as we ride together. He’s going to loosen up, I’m sure of it. It’s what people do when they go boarding.

I want his easy, open smile on me. God, I want it almost more than that fuck.

Yeah, hiring him as my instructor is the way to go. I might even learn a thing or two, like jumping technique and shit. He is quite the prodigy on the board. If he’s only half as gifted in bed—

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

 

TEN MINUTES later I enter the little log cabin with the Happy Powder sign on the door next to the base station of the Gletscher Express to tell the girl behind the counter what I want.

At least the G-rated part of it.

She’s busy texting, but her orange shirt says she’s Susi and happy to help.

“Wait a moment, let me check my cousin’s schedule,” she mumbles, blowing her pink bangs out of her face and putting her phone to the side with some reluctance.

Her cousin. Everyone is fucking related to him. Shit, half of Fitsch is part of the Fankhauser clan. I understand better than ever why he hasn’t had the nerve to come out yet. Literally everyone in the frigging valley is going to be massively interested when it happens at last.

“Sorry, Andi’s got no free slots. He’s booked out for the whole week,” she says, her eyes already back on her phone.

No! This can’t be it.

As I rack my brains trying to come up with a plan B, a poster on the wall behind Susi catches my eye. It’s a photo of Fitsch Glacier at sunrise with a caption saying Heliskiing: Hubschrauber-Erlebnistouren. Ski und Snowboard. Glacier Silver und Glacier Gold.

This must be the helicopter thingy Rosi from the Gletschergeist mentioned to me the other day.

“What’s this about, Susi? Glacier Silver….”

Looking surprised I’m still there, Susi follows my gaze, then translates, “Helicopter adventure tours for ski and snowboard. Glacier Silver or Glacier Gold.”

She hands me a flyer. It’s in German, Dutch, and English, but suddenly she seems determined to demonstrate her language skills.

“It’s a special offer for advanced boarders only. A helicopter takes you to the top of the Hexnjoch or the Sunnzeiger, and you go downhill all the way back to the valley, with one of our instructors as your guide. If you want my cousin, we’ll see to it that he’s free on your day of choice.”

In a matter of seconds, I seem to have been upgraded to a whole other category of customers. Rich guy who is to be satisfied.

“Right,” I say, trying to sound like a bored millionaire, skimming through the flyer.

The caption on the front page reads “Test your strength and tame the glacier.” And it would seem some serious strength and glacier-taming skills are actually required for these tours.

Glacier Silver is a four-to-five-hour tour down the Hexnjoch, while Glacier Gold is a full day of freeriding downhill from the Sunnzeiger, including a lunch break in the Mangeihütte.

A lonely mountain cabin. Hell, this is exactly what we need!

“It’s a log cabin,” Susi explains. “Nothing fancy. It’s got bunk beds for four people to spend the night, but we offer that only in the summer. There’s no electricity and no heating. Just a wood-burning stove for cooking tea or coffee. Lunch is sandwiches. You’ll take them with you in your backpacks.”

The prices are on the back of the booklet. She doesn’t have to translate those.

€999. That’s this season’s special offer for Glacier Gold.

Pretty steep.

But Andi and I are going to be alone in the Mangeihütte. With those bunk beds.

“You can go in a group, then it’s going to be less expensive, depending on the number of participants,” Susi says brightly. “If you’re traveling with friends, it would make sense to bring them!”

It so wouldn’t. With Jay and Carl around, all romance that might yet develop between Andi and me is going to go down the toilet faster than you can say “basic concepts of social development,” or “boobs.”

Talk about defeating the purpose of spending one thousand euros.

Technically it will be Carl and Jay who’ll be spending that money. I’ll have to ask them to help me with my account balance, else the overdraft fees will kill me. But I’ll worry about that later.

“I’m going alone, and I want your cousin,” I say firmly. “Tomorrow.”

“Fine,” she says, looking quite enthusiastic as she moves over to the computer to enter my information. Apparently it doesn’t happen all that often that someone is deluded enough to just walk in here and sign up for Glacier Gold.

Everything is so incredibly easy and simple I can’t believe it’s happening.

Susi alerts me to Happy Powder’s policy of advance payment with regard to heliboarding tours. I am about to get out my credit card and overdraw it like never before, focusing my mind on Andi’s fancy jawline and trim hips, when there’s a jingle behind me, and the man himself steps into the shop.

On seeing me, he stops dead. I grin at him, feeling a solid dose of nerves.

He told me we shouldn’t see each other again.

But he’s going to realize you did him a favor eventually, I remind myself. You are going to show him how to spice up a lunch break, and he’s going to thank you in the end.

“What are you doing here?” he asks as if it were a capital offense for a tourist to be in the local ski school.

“Booking a day of boarding,” I reply, aiming for cool and failing. He’s really imposing when he stands close to you. He’s six feet plus of pure athlete. And those ice-blue eyes. They look like he could use them to freeze people when they try to ignore his orders, like some superhero in the movies.

Fucking nerves.

“I just put you down for Glacier Gold with Mr. Bennet tomorrow, Andi,” Susi says from behind him, clearly expecting him to be thrilled.

“Glacier Gold,” he echoes.

“You didn’t get to do any heliboarding this season yet, did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” he says, his eyes on me. I can feel my face glow with stress and the thrill of simply seeing him again.

He steps behind the desk as if he needed something solid to separate us. He clears his throat.

“I’m afraid the weather is going to turn,” he says. “It’s in the forecast. I really think we shouldn’t do this, Mr. Bennet.”

“Well, I really think we should.”

That moment a door in the corner of the shop is pushed open. There’s a sign on it that says Management. And the big, bristle-haired man who steps through is none other than Fankhauser Senior.

Shit. Happy Powder belongs to Andi’s dad. Shit, the man owns every last brick in this valley, it would seem. Guess I should have known.

“Andreas?” he says in a questioning tone.

Andi does some explaining, pointing at a screen showing the weather forecast in a corner under the ceiling.

Fankhauser Senior shakes his head and says something in German that sounds really bossy. Turning to me, seamlessly switching from super patriarch to obliging service provider, he tells me the weather isn’t going to be a problem.

Well, I guess he didn’t become the biggest player in the valley by allowing people to fool him and letting one thousand euros slip away right from under his nose.

I’d much rather have done this just with Susi. She would have told Andi about it later, and after that everything would have been just between him and me. He could still have ducked out of this challenge. It seems the instructors are eager for the chance to do some heliboarding, so if he’s serious about his vow of no-après-ski and doesn’t trust himself to keep his hands and other parts to himself in the Mangeihütte, he could easily have passed me on to a colleague.

Now, with his father in the picture, neither of us has got much of a choice anymore. If I backpedal now, for no apparent reason, he’s probably going to grill Andi later to find out what’s the deal. And I might end up being the reason why Andi has to come out to his dad.

When Fankhauser Senior is done typing some stuff into the computer, tells me the day is booked, and to swipe my credit card right through here, please, I just do it.

Andi stands next to Susi looking on, his arms crossed over his chest, his expression unreadable. Susi looks rather mystified. Fankhauser Senior might not have picked up on any weird vibes, but she sure did.

She only stops looking back and forth between Andi and me when Andi’s father hands me the receipt with a certain flourish and a genial thank you, then turns to her, starting to talk in German. Together they walk over to the window to inspect a table full of trophy cups and medals. Apparently Susi prepared those for the victory ceremony for the kids’ skiing races that were held on the Samkogel earlier today.

“I’m looking forward to tomorrow,” I say to Andi. “And I think it makes a lot of sense for us to do this. Test your strength and so on, you know?”

I casually flick my bandana off my head and toss my hair back, letting the sun coming in through the window catch the highlights. He can’t not like my hair.

Andi briefly closes his eyes and visibly clenches his jaw.

He thinks I’m a wacko. Or simply a whore that doesn’t understand the concept of committed sex.

I don’t know what I am anymore. But I can’t stop imagining him and me alone in that hut over the clouds.

Even if he pulls through with the no-sex-with-the-tourist thing, I know he won’t deny me a kiss. That much hold I do have over him. He almost kissed me once already.

Here’s a vow I’ve just taken: I’m going to ask him for it. If nothing happens between us up there on the glacier, I’ll forget my pride and ask for a kiss as a booby prize, and as a memory for both of us.

At least then, when I’ll be gone, he’ll remember me.

I want that. Even if I’m just this random tourist to him who can never have a place in his life, I want him to think of me with just a little bit of the longing that I feel for him.

It hurts like an icicle slowly revolving in my open heart.

God.

What do I do if it’ll never pass?

 

 

“YOU BOOKED a solo tour down the glacier with him,” Carl says for the umpteenth time. We’re lying in our beds in the nightly neon shine of Fitsch. I’m trying to get some rest before the big day tomorrow, but my friends don’t seem to be ready to stop discussing my business anytime soon.

“Because you just don’t know how to give up,” Jay says.

“Why should I?”

Carl scoffs.

“Because he’s been ignoring you for five days straight?”

“And even ran from you one time?” Jay supplies, forever helpful. He seems to like to bring up this moment a lot. I suspect it’s because he’s secretly still not over Antje. “If you ask me, he might yet cancel the whole thing once he hears what you did,” he adds smugly.

“Well, he already knows. He was there.”

“He was?” Carl asks, lifting his head off his pillow. “And what did he say?”

“Yeah, tell us,” Jay says a little too expectantly.

I don’t really want to, but then they’re suspecting the worst anyway.

“He said there was a storm coming in and that we shouldn’t go.”

“Oookay,” Jay says.

“And you still think this is a good idea,” Carl says.

“That storm isn’t due till in two days’ time….”

“You know what we mean.”

“Listen, if you’re having second thoughts about lending me all this money, I understand,” I say. “You obviously don’t have to do this for me. I’ll find another way—”

“It’s not about the money,” Carl interrupts.

They don’t know about anything that happened between Andi and me during this vacation. Because against all the odds, I’ve managed to keep silent. It’s still starting to irk me that they don’t seem to be able to imagine that Andi might feel anything for me but irritation.

“Okay, I can’t tell you why, but I happen to know that he likes me. At least from the neck down.”

“Oh, Justin, don’t you get it?” Carl exclaims. “We just don’t want to have to pick up the pieces when you come home after a whole day of him giving you the cold shoulder!”

With a soft groan of contentment, Jay wiggles himself yet more snugly under his comforter. He’s holding his phone in his hand. He has kept checking Jaymer’s new follower count all day long since yesterday, and he’s probably doing it yet again.

“Yeah, because maybe he will, you know,” he says. “Give you the cold shoulder. You know.”

“Maybe he won’t, and then you’ll look real dumb!” I cry.

“You haven’t done that much freeriding, have you,” Carl observes, biting into the sandwich he always keeps on his nightstand for nighttime snacking.

I’ve been thinking about that too.

“I can do it! All you need for a tour like this is stamina and the will to do it, and I’ve got that!”

They sigh in unison, and Carl says, “You sure do.”

Well, I never asked my friends for their blessing. I did ask them to help me balance my bank account, and that they already did.

 

 

NINE O’CLOCK. I’m at the helipad, a small patch of asphalt near the base station of the Gletscher Express.

There’s just Andi, the pilot, and me. And the helicopter.

We’ve stored our boards away in the loading area in its belly. Turns out I am at a place where seeing my board lying under Andi’s with the bindings tangled together is a turn-on.

Andi stared a bit at the boards too. I don’t think he noticed the pink butterflies on mine before.

His own is a sleek black.

“I used a stencil for my board design,” I tell him when we are inside the helicopter, fastening our seat belts, as if he had asked me about it. “If you want, I can do up your board too. Anytime. Just say the word, bro.”

I’m babbling, obviously, but hell, I feel like I’ve got a hundred butterflies bustling about not just on my board, but in my stomach too.

It’s not as nice a feeling as the pop songs make it sound.

He doesn’t answer. Of course he doesn’t. He just gives a noncommittal shake of the head.

Yet again I tell myself that if nothing else comes of this, at least I’ll get to cross heliboarding off my bucket list.

 

 

WE ZOOM past snowy slopes and pinewood forests, quickly gaining height. Soon the trees become scarcer until there are only rocks and skiing runs and lifts beneath us. I spot the top station of the Gletscher Express. The Gletscher Hotel’s large panes of steel and glass gleam in the sun.

A little bit farther up, we pass the last bit of human technology, the old, rusty T-bar lift leading up to the top of the Hexnjoch.

Then civilization falls away below us, and we are where there is only snow and ice and sky.

There isn’t a speck of a cloud marring the azure blue around us. The weather is going to change over the next few days. Andi didn’t make that up. Apparently there is a low-pressure system approaching. According to the forecast this morning, it’s going to hit the region of Fitsch sometime tomorrow afternoon. There will be strong winds, and they’ve even issued a heavy snowfall warning.

Jay and Carl tried to make me cancel until the last minute, arguing it wasn’t worth the risk. I know they really meant to save me from making a fool of myself.

In spite of what I said to them, I’m aware that might be exactly what I’m doing. But hell, I couldn’t possibly have chickened out of this, not when the Gletschergeist has decided to put off his depression thingy for another day, giving me the chance to follow through with my plan. I told Jay and Carl it was a sure sign the legendary spirit was favorable toward my goals.

It certainly feels like it is.

The glacier stretches out till the horizon, its summits glittering and sparkling in the sunlight, full of promise. This is a playground up in the sky, a giant canvas waiting for us to draw on it.

Hell, just a few more minutes, and I’ll be riding down these untouched planes of crystal white.

Anticipation is bubbling up inside me, and I can’t keep it in. I feel like a bottle of soda that took a good shake.

“Oh man, this is fucking fantastic!” I exclaim. “Wow, all that space! All those sick slopes! Wow! I want to do every single one of them!”

“You’d need months to do that,” Andi says coolly. “Probably years. And you’re going to be gone by tomorrow.”

He has quite obviously been counting the days. And he got it right too—this is my last day.

In an instant I’m back to focusing on the job at hand. Make him crack and show me his true colors.

Putting on my best flirty tone, I say, “I could stay longer. I might, you know. There are lots of things in the Fitschtal that I really like.”

After darting a look at the pilot in front of us, who’s wearing a headset and couldn’t listen in on us if he wanted to, Andi looks out the window, straight past my sultry half smile and hooded eyes.

Yeah, should have waited with this till later. Should have waited till when there’ll be no one else around anymore, when there’ll finally be just him and me.

I expect him to ignore me, like he always does, and all but jump in my seat when he suddenly speaks.

“What about that exam in statistics?” he asks as if he were addressing no one in particular, still looking past me.

That exam in statistics?

He listened in when I talked about that with Jay and Carl! Ha, not so disinterested after all, it would seem.

I only wish he hadn’t reminded me of that frigging exam.

And then suddenly he shifts in his seat and settles his gaze on me. It feels like cold laser light.

“Shouldn’t you be studying right now?” he asks levelly. “It’s a retest, isn’t it?”

What the…?

For the first time he’s actually asking me stuff, only to basically tell me I’m going to fuck up my exam?

“If you heard that, I’m sure you also heard that I’m thinking of quitting college,” I say irritably. “I might do that, you know.” And on a sudden inspiration, I add, “I might start working as a snowboard instructor here in Fitsch instead. I have a license, you know. Then I could stay on indefinitely.”

I shoot him a challenging glare.

“Why would you want to quit college?” he asks, still looking back at me, not batting an eyelash.

Fuck those husky eyes.

“Perhaps I’m not a born academic?” I snap.

He tilts his head, raising one brow.

Shit, why did I say that?

“I might change programs,” I say. “Switch to something I like better than economics.”

It sounds pretty feeble in my own ears. Why the heck did I start discussing private shit with him?

All I meant to do was alert him to the fact I’ve got an instructor’s license. I wanted to make him see I’m a cool guy like him, not just an average tourist.

Now he thinks I’m a stupid loser instead.

Fuck.

 

 

WE STAND on top of the Sunnzeiger, the sun needle, and it feels like being on top of the world.

The helicopter has left in a whirl of snow and noise. It’s going west, rapidly becoming smaller, taking its sharp, echoing rattle with it.

And then it’s just Andi, me, the blazing white around us, and silence.

This is what the Alps are meant to be.

Fitsch 2000 is cool, with its buzzing lifts and groomed runs and fancy restaurants. But at the end of the day, everything man-made just corrupts the beauty of these mountains.

Up here their pristine grandness is simply overwhelming. It literally takes my breath away.

Or maybe it’s the thin air. We are at over twelve thousand feet. And it’s freezing cold too. I forgot to put my jacket on before leaving the helicopter, and the cold bites into me like a living thing. Scenery overload or not, I guess that’s enough of a reason for having trouble getting enough oxygen into your system.

I should stop looking around and get my jacket out of my backpack. And I will as soon as I’m ready. I’m not, not quite yet.

Sure, I’ve seen the Alps from above before, from out of the airplane and the helicopter. But this is different. Because I’m standing in the middle of this otherworld, of this symphony of blue and white and gold and all the shades in between. Because I’m part of it.

Together with Andi.

When I look over at him, I meet his gaze. He’s been watching me.

I guess he can see how plain floored I am. Stupid gaping tourist, that’s what he’s probably thinking of me right now. Frigging rich guy using his money to try to buy the magic of the glacier.

Fuck, I don’t mind what he thinks of me. I don’t mind as long as I get to ride my board down this glacier.

And later, him.

If he keeps up the cold fish act, yeah, I’ll have no choice but to forget it. But if he finds he wants to use the opportunity, if he realizes he wants to lose his virginity to a tolerably endowed guy who knows what he’s doing after all, I’m still up for helping him out.

I still trust he’ll come around. He definitely likes my body. I know perfectly well why he’s staring—it’s my slim-fitting thermal shirt. It’s a pity it’s not an option to do this tour in my underwear. That might actually be the one thing that would do the trick and make him snap. But I’ve already started to seriously shiver by now, so I quickly pull my jacket from my backpack and slip it on, not without some extended gratuitous stretching and flexing of shoulders to give Andi something to look at.

When I try to catch his gaze again, he quickly looks away, then slips his helmet on. His eyes disappear behind the mirrored black visor.

There’s just me now.

“Come on, what are you waiting for, Bennet? Put your helmet on and get on the board,” he calls out.

Giving orders sure comes naturally to him. Before I’ve made up my mind about whether this should irk me or not, he shouts, “Stay in my track!”

And without another look back, he gets going, carving down the powdery slope waiting for us, leaving a cloud of sparkling white in his wake.

Quickly I fasten the bindings to my boots and go after him. I don’t want to lose him.

I don’t want to lose him because I’ve got plans for him, but also, I’d probably never find my way back down into the valley without him as my guide. For all of Fitsch Glacier’s supernatural beauty, it wouldn’t be cool to get stranded up here.

As I swoosh downhill after Andi, struggling to keep up with his speed, I can’t help but admire his skill.

He’s riding a fast, super fluid line. The way he owns these precipices, working with the terrain as he goes, radiating complete and utter mastership—it’s like a billion years of evolution in this secluded corner of the earth have only had one single purpose: design this man to go boarding on this glacier.

But I’m good too. Hell, I am!

Considering I’ve never done anything like this, I manage pretty well. It’s a challenge to be sure. I have to focus on my footwork, take care to keep track of the permanently changing gradient and fabric of the ground under my board.

But I feel strong and fit, and the glacier is my friend.

There’s a fat layer of powder over the glacier’s ice, soft and responsive and inviting me to play. Oh yes, this tour is called Glacier Gold for a reason.

Going after Andi, I give myself over to the rhythm he sets, following the sweeping arcs he paints into the snow.

 

 

MY MUSCLES are burning, and my visor is fogged up from perspiration. We’ve been going down, down, down, for over an hour now. Andi doesn’t seem to intend to grant me as much as a pee break.

I get what he’s doing.

He means to show me just what it means to go boarding with him. Yes. This is him getting back at me. Trying to make me regret I made this happen, trying to make me regret talking about his strength needing testing.

But if he thinks I’m not the athlete he is….

There, he’s stopping. He turns around, his pose on the steep mountain flank as chill as if he were waiting at the bus stop. When I’ve closed the distance but for a couple of yards, he flips open his visor and calls out to me.

“Getting tired, Bennet?”

Fuck, I’ll show you tired, Fankhauser!

I go past him, just like that, never slowing down, leaving him standing covered in snow.

He shouts something, and then I hear him come after me. A few seconds later, he passes me with mortifying ease. I don’t know how he does it; I’m going at top speed. But I have no time to think about it. With a sharp turn, he comes to a full stop right in front of me. I have to perform a rather awkward turn uphill to avoid crashing into him and land on my butt in the snow.

“Hey, listen, dude—”

“You listen to me, Bennet! I told you to stay behind me, and that was a fucking order! Fuck, you don’t pass the tour guide, ever! This is glacier boarding, and if you don’t stay behind me at all times, you can break your damn neck! This is no fucking amusement park! Do you understand, man? Tell me! Do you understand?”

He seems to be seriously mad at me. It’s quite unnerving to have him shout at me like this, and while sitting up to my chest in the snow too.

“Okay,” I mumble, struggling to get upright again, feeling as if I were an especially badly behaved kid in his course. He doesn’t offer me any help to get out of the snow. He just waits till I’m back on my feet, then gives a curt nod. With a single, graceful jump, he directs his board back into the fall line.

Then he’s off again.

 

 

AFTER TWO more hours, I’m exhausted like never before in my life.

Andi has simply kept going, never reducing his sick speed. Seemingly a stranger to human needs like drinking, peeing, or having a Landjäger.

I have a couple of those in my pocket. Carl forced them on me back at the suite this morning, claiming you never knew when you might need some calories. Turns out he was so right. I’ve started to think about those sausages a lot, and about the water bottle in my backpack too. But Andi hasn’t stopped again to ask me if I needed a break. And I can’t just take a break by myself. I’m perfectly aware there’s one thing that would be even worse than dying of a lack of water and Landjägers—losing sight of my guide in this endless desert of ice.

That’s how I’ve come to think of Fitsch Glacier in the last hour or so. It’s kind of hard to keep appreciating scenic beauty when you’re fighting for sheer survival.

Andi is punishing me.

Fuck, I got the message!—“You thought you could test me with this trip and make me crack, Bennet? News flash: it’s you who’s going to crack, tourist. You thought you’d get to make some memories during lunch break? By noon you’ll be too wiped out to even remember why you came here!”

Well, fine by me.

All I’m interested in by now is surviving the day and getting back to the hotel and into my bed to sleep for ten hours.

Alone.

 

 

ANDI HAS stopped. I come to a halt by his side, panting, grateful for the chance to catch my breath, not even bothering anymore to appear anything like chill and relaxed.

He takes a few swigs from his water bottle. While I pull mine from my backpack to do the same, I notice he keeps looking upward, like he’s checking for signs in the sky.

It has changed color. It’s a hazy, gloomy gray now, with wisps of white sailing past high above the towering glacier tops. Those clouds seem to move at a crazy fast pace, while the air around us is weirdly still.

“You think it’s going to start snowing?” I ask.

He shrugs and bites his lip.

The lip-biting isn’t a good sign. He doesn’t seem to get nervous easily outside of situations where he’s being hit on; I know that much.

Pushing the cap back onto his water bottle with the heel of his gloved hand, he says, “Right, Bennet. Let’s be on our way.”

Perhaps he hasn’t been setting this murderous pace just for my sake. Perhaps all he wants is to be down from the glacier before the weather turns.

It’s hard to say whether this is good news or bad news.

 

 

WE’VE STOPPED at the top of a slope that looks pretty nasty from where we stand. At the foot of the descent, some three hundred yards below, there’s a vast plateau, maybe half a mile wide. To the east of it, I can make out the outlines of a cabin. It’s half-buried in the snow and seems to have been built from nothing but weather-beaten wood and raw rocks.

The Mangeihütte.

It couldn’t be more different from the sleek, hypermodern buildings down in the ski resort. I fumble my phone from my pocket to take a photo, ignoring Andi, who’s probably smirking at my touristy behavior behind his mirrored visor. I don’t care. I like taking photos, and I like the looks of this hut.

And we’re going to have our sandwiches in there. Finally.

I really, really need those sandwiches. I’m craving them. If this is what Carl feels like all the time, small wonder he has no interest in sex. Right now I’m so hungry I have trouble thinking of anything other than my empty stomach, even though Andi is standing right next to me. And looking like he just stepped out of his model wardrobe for a photo shoot too.

He has opened his visor, revealing his fancy features and a pretty flush on his tanned cheeks. That touch of red is the only sign he has engaged in any physical activity recently.

I can only imagine what I look like myself, with my lips chapped from the exertion and the sweat running from my bangs into my eyes, making them sting.

Well, I’m beyond caring.

“Listen,” Andi says. “We won’t go straight down to the plateau. We’ll just do the first fifty meters or so. See the part where the slope gets really steep, the part with the boulders in it? We won’t go through there; we’ll traverse to the east, then take a little detour to reach the hut. The terrain is safer. Understood?”

The lower part of the slope really does look brutally steep, probably fifty degrees or more. It’s dotted with big pieces of rock that are covered in ice. Going down there is definitely going to be a nasty bit of boarding. But I know I can do it.

The sight of the Mangeihütte, the prospect of lunch and of getting to rest my bones for a bit, has imbued me with new vigor.

Andi has been pushing me to the limit for the last four hours to show me I made a mistake. He has made his point; he has made me see I don’t want to seduce him on this blasted glacier after all.

But if he thinks I can’t manage a little steepness or find my way around a couple of rocks, he’s wrong.

 

 

FOR THE first fifty yards downhill, I stay behind him as is expected of me. A few yards above the area with the boulders, he slows down. Below us the slope drops away at an almost vertical angle.

Andi comes to a halt, putting one hand to the ground for balance. I do the same. We don’t have to bend over to reach the ice; we can touch it standing. This is the steepest bitch of a slope I’ve ever been on.

With a curt gesture, Andi indicates to me we’re going to start traversing the hillside now.

When I push myself off the ground, turning my board south, he gives a shout of surprise.

Ignoring him, I dive right into the abyss.

Control. It’s all about control, and I’ve got that. You’ve got to select your line, you’ve got to focus on riding in wide arcs and avoid any sudden turns.

You want to forget about fear. All you need is an awareness of the terrain and of the limit of the speed you can control.

I’ll be fine. Already I’m more than halfway down this little hill. Just a few more seconds, and I’ll have reached the plateau.

Ha, and he thought I couldn’t deal with these fucking fifty degrees! Now I’m approaching the plateau, and the grade has already become much milder. This is easy carving now, almost like on a normal slope. I’ve done it. Just a few more turns—

From one moment to the next, I’m, like, switched off. No ground under my board, no thought in my head, just gravity hitting, sucking me straight down into nothing.

When my brain starts working again, I’m fifteen feet underground, surrounded by an eerie bluish twilight and solid walls of ice.

With a couple of seconds’ delay, I understand what has happened.

This is a crevasse. I fell into a crevasse.

It’s just three or four yards wide. How deep, I’ve got no idea. I landed on a narrow ledge protruding from one wall. A few inches from the tip of my board, there’s an abyss of blue blackness. This thing might be like hundreds of feet deep. Or deeper.

I was lucky. I could be dead now.

I could die.

If this ledge comes loose, I’ll drop to my death and stay caught in the bowels of Fitsch Glacier as a frozen corpse forever.

I sit, crouching there like paralyzed, praying the ledge won’t give way under my weight. With my gloved fingers, I keep searching for purchase in the wall behind me and slipping off the ice.

I want to call for help, but my vocal chords won’t obey me. I hear my own hitching breathing.

“Justin!—Justin!”

Someone is screaming my name. It’s a shrill, agonized sound, alien and terrible and much too far above me. That’s Andi, Andi who has come after me.

I wouldn’t recognize his voice if I didn’t know it was him.

“Oh Gott, oh Justin! Oh verdammt, Justin!”

I look up, and there’s the outline of his head against the gray of the sky.

“Justin! Are you hurt?”

I shake my head, still unable to form any words.

“I’m getting you out of there. Don’t panic. Don’t move.”

He talks to me with brusque resolution. Like he would. The frightening screaming I heard before can’t have been him. Must have been the blood in my ears or something.

Andi’s head disappears. Staring up into the clouds, I hear snapping sounds. That’s him stepping out of his bindings.

After some endless seconds, his head reappears, and a red rope comes slithering down toward me.

“Grab the sling, Justin!”

I do it, heart hammering. One wrong move on the slippery ledge, and I’m history.

“Good. Well done, Justin. Now lose the backpack and fasten the sling around your chest.”

I obey.

“Very good. You’re doing good, Justin. Now lose the board.”

I don’t want to. My board feels like the last solid thing between me and the void. But obviously I need to do as he says; obviously I’ll need my legs to climb. Oh my God, I’m going to climb up this ice wall with nothing but a piece of rope and Andi’s strength to keep me alive.

“Lose the board, Justin, do you hear me? Do it now!”

His tone brooks no resistance. I bend over to flick open the levers that keep the board attached to my boots. My hands are shaking, and it takes me half an eternity.

Finally the second binding snaps open, and the same moment, the board drops away from me. For a few seconds, it’s poised on the edge of the stretch of ice that separates me from the afterlife, then it slowly tilts. With a soft scrunch, it starts slipping, and then it disappears down the crevasse.

There’s no sound of an impact.

I try not to think about what that means.

 

 

THE CLIMBING is so much worse than I imagined.

I keep slipping. Again and again, I find myself skidding back down the slippery ice wall, losing what modest headway I have made, the rope brutally cutting into my armpits.

Always knowing that if Andi can’t withstand the pull of my two hundred pounds anymore, I’m lost.

How much longer will he be able to stand the strain? How long till he’ll have to let go?

But he doesn’t let go. There’s this one, terrifying moment when I feel the pull on the rope suddenly abate, and I skid back down till almost to the ledge, slightly to the side of it. But I stop there, swaying above the abyss, desperately angling for a foothold in the ice.

And then I’m moving upward again. The pace is excruciatingly slow, but this time around, I do much better. I find dents and chasms in the wall to dig my boots into, and a few knobbly bits of protruding ice I can use as handles.

While I’m going up, half climbing, half being pulled, a scary sound fills my ears, like a distant singing or whining. I’ve got no idea whether it’s the panic playing a trick on me, or the Gletschergeist.

Eventually there are just a few inches left to conquer, just a few more inches, and my head will be above the ground.

There. There, I can see the world again.

And Andi.

He’s crouching behind a giant ice block, his feet propped up against it for leverage. His face is a mask of utter strain. The rope is wound around his stomach, and he’s holding on to it with both his hands, still pulling me upward.

Now my chest is at ground level. Now I can put a hand on the ground.

Gathering my last reserves of strength, I dig my fingers into the snow and haul myself over the edge. Quickly I scramble away from it on all fours, then collapse onto my stomach, panting and shaking and relishing the feel of flat solidity under my body.

The rope has gone slack. Gingerly sitting up, I loosen the sling around my chest and pull it over my head. I can feel my underwear cling to my body. I’m soaked in sweat.

A wind has come up. It’s pushing at me with relentless fierceness, quickly cooling me down. I realize this is what must have caused the sounds I heard inside the crevasse.

Andi hasn’t come over yet to greet me. He’s still sitting behind that big ice block. He must be completely worn out.

And also he probably doesn’t want to talk to me right now. He told me to keep behind him at all times, and I completely understand why now. But I didn’t follow his orders and behaved like a total fool instead, forcing him to pull me back out of that crevasse and save my life. His hands are probably ruined.

I am trying to pluck up the courage to walk over to him and apologize when I hear him utter a low, terrible groan.

That is when I understand something isn’t right.

As quickly as my wobbly legs will carry me, I stumble toward him.

He’s lying on his back in the snow, his face a grimace of pain.

“God, Andi, what…”

Hastily I kneel down next to him to loosen the rope that is still wound much too tightly around his middle. Only then I see his right leg is twisted at an odd angle.

It’s his right foot. It’s trapped under the ice block, and he can’t pull it free.

In some part of my brain, I do the math and understand his foot must have gotten caught in a gap between the block and the ground in that moment when I felt the rope go slack. He’s been stuck like this for at least fifteen minutes. He has held on to the rope and saved my ass while he had his bones slowly twisted and crushed under that rock.

“Wait, I’ll move that thing off of you….”

The block is about double my height, an estimated half a ton of rock and ice. I push at the thing with all I’ve got. It won’t budge.

Andi has stopped moaning. He clenches his jaw, fighting his pain.

Kneeling down by his side again, I start frantically digging at the ground with my hands to free his trapped boot. The avalanche shovel attached to Andi’s backpack isn’t sharp enough to be of any use with this. What I’d need is a pickaxe. But all I’ve got is my bare hands, so I’m using them, just like Andi did for me earlier.

The snow feels like concrete under my fingers. After half a minute, my gloves start tearing. But slowly, slowly I manage to delve deeper until I can wedge a hand in next to his boot. I try to pull, and he screams.

“Sorry, man, sorry!”

“Try again,” he hisses. But I don’t do that. Instead I resume the digging, ignoring the vicious sting of the cold in my bleeding fingertips. It’s the only way.

And finally, finally I’ve created a hollow that’s big enough to allow me to get a grip on his boot and pull it free.

He hasn’t screamed again, but he’s as white as the snow. And that must be frozen tears glimmering in his lashes, tears of pain.

“I’ll call the emergency services,” I say, fighting down a surge of anguished compassion. “They’re going to send a helicopter. They’re going to take you down to the valley, to the hospital.”

I’m about to get out my phone. Thank the Lord I put it into the back pocket of my pants instead of into the backpack—

“It’s no use. They can’t come get us.”

He has whispered it into the howl of the wind.

“Why, what do you mean?”

Letting his head fall back into the snow and closing his eyes, Andi points a gloved hand to the sky.

I’ve been so desperate to get his foot out from under the damn ice block that I haven’t paid any attention to much else. Only now I see the sky is no longer gray.

It’s a leaden coal black. I’ve never seen a color like this. It spans over us, a menacing vastness, like a dome of doom.

“What’s happening? What is that?”

“We’ve got to get to the cabin,” Andi says. “Now.”

 

 

HE CAN’T walk. He can only limp, heavily leaning on me.

And then it starts to snow. Only this isn’t snow. These are fat pieces of ice raining down on us, banging onto our helmets like they mean to smash the plastic. And it’s getting worse by the second. Within less than a minute, we are in the middle of a full-fledged hailstorm.

I wouldn’t stand the slightest chance of finding the Mangeihütte in this chaos if I didn’t have Andi by my side, guiding me, telling me where to go. With his arm slung around my neck for support, he limps along by my side, shouting directions at me while I pull him along through the hip-deep snow.

It’s a stretch of flat terrain of no more than three hundred yards or so that separates us from the cabin, but it’s the longest distance I’ve ever had to cover.

The snow is almost too deep to keep going, and the hail is everywhere. After a while Andi’s arm starts to slip from my shoulder. Eventually he stumbles and breaks to his knees. Desperate to keep him with me, I haul him back up to his feet. With a cry of pain that reaches me even through the din of the storm, he doubles over. When I open my visor to tell him I’m sorry, I swallow a mouthful of ice.

I struggle to keep him upright and to somehow catch a glimpse of his face to see how he’s doing.

He lifts a hand to try to open his visor too. With stiff fingers, I help him, trying to shield his face from the hail with my flat hand.

“Forget my foot, Bennet!” he shouts at me over the storm. “Just use your muscle now and pull me along. I don’t care if it hurts, okay? Just get us out of here!”

I signal to him that I got it, then close his visor. My own visor is stuck and won’t shut properly anymore. I can’t see anything through the hail anyway. I’ve got no idea where the cabin is, so I just plow ahead, hoping I’m still on track.

Andi is dragging himself along next to me, but he has stopped talking. The trouble with the tripping has gotten worse. It’s not just his injury apparently; something doesn’t seem to be right with his coordination.

When he collapses yet again, something spears through me, pure agony at seeing him like this. It’s followed by a burst of fierce determination. Hoisting him up from the ground, I take him into my arms.

Keeping him pressed to my chest as if he were a child, I walk on. I’m slipping and stumbling, swaying under his weight, but I keep moving.

Andi feels almost lifeless in my arms. I don’t stop to check if he has passed out. I know I have to find the way on my own now. Blindly I struggle on through the spearing hail. The storm echoes in my head, an all-invading, triumphant clamor, an evil force that wants to see me fail.

But I don’t.

I don’t know how it happens, but suddenly we are there, right in front of the hut. I almost bump my head against the low roof. Tears of relief well up in my eyes, instantly freezing to my skin, adding to the mask of ice and frozen snot on my numb face.

Unseeing, I feel for the door, for a handle. There is a wooden frame; there is something that feels like an iron bolt. Adjusting my grip on Andi’s limp body in my arms, I slip the bolt back with one hand and use my shoulder to push at the door, expecting it to resist.

But it opens without the slightest hitch, like the cabin has been waiting for us, ready to give us shelter.

I collapse in the doorway. Letting Andi slip to the floor, I turn around, too exhausted to even get up. Still on my knees, I push the door shut on the raging storm.

 

 

THE CEILING of the cabin is so low I can’t stand up straight. The walls consist of coarse, splintery beams. The furniture is two bunk beds, a wooden table with two rickety benches, some shelves and a cupboard, and an ancient-looking oven in the corner.

Susi said the Mangeihütte wasn’t fancy, and indeed it isn’t.

But it’s solid and dry, and it saved our lives.

For now.

I’ve helped Andi remove his helmet and lie down on a bottom bunk.

He’s still in his damp boarding gear. Those clothes might be high-tech snow wear, but they aren’t designed to withstand a blizzard. Soaked like they are, they offer no protection against the cold in the cabin. But it won’t help if he gets out of them either.

There are no blankets anywhere, not even sheets. There’s nothing but the bare mattresses.

Andi is awake, and his gaze is clear, but he’s obviously in pain. Again and again he utters suppressed moans. It seems he can’t rest his foot on the bed. He has drawn up his leg, holding his knee, awkwardly balancing his foot in the air.

I stand a few feet away, uncertainly looking down at him.

“Tell me, what can I do?” I ask at last.

It seems to cost him a great deal of strength to just turn his head to look at me.

“Maybe you could try and find something you could use for splinting my foot?” he says hoarsely.

“Yeah, okay,” I reply, grateful there’s something I actually can do.

I search for a bit in the basket of firewood next to the oven and find a flat log that’s about ten inches long. Using a knife I find in a drawer, I rip up my neck warmer to create a makeshift bandage.

Kneeling on the floor next to Andi, I untie his boot and then carefully slip it off his foot. I remove the damp sock too, then, trying to make my touch as light as feathers, I take his ice-cold heel into the palm of my hand, place the log lengthwise to the inside of his ankle, and start fastening it to his foot with the neck warmer. Carefully I wrap the elastic fabric around his foot and ankle until it seems to be reasonably stabilized.

Supporting his calf with one hand, I gently lower his foot onto the mattress.

“Okay?” I ask, anxiously watching his face.

“Yeah. Yeah, that worked,” he says, gingerly settling back, exhaling with obvious relief. “Thank you.”

“Great,” I say, but I keep kneeling on the floor next to him, like I’m waiting for more instructions.

I am waiting for more instructions.

“Do you still have your phone?” he asks, his voice not much more than a whisper. “Call the Mountain Rescue Service: 140.”

I pull my phone from my pocket and dial the number. Thankfully, the lady taking the call speaks English. When I tell her what happened, she asks me to wait a moment. I put my cell on speakerphone. When she’s back, she tells me they’ll send a helicopter to come get us as soon as possible. But that’s not going to happen before the storm lets up. Until then, there’s nothing they can do for us. With just a few more hours to go till sunset, that means we’ll most probably have to wait for the helicopter till the next morning.

I’m still digesting this information when she asks if we need medical counseling. I look at Andi, and he shakes his head. He looks a sick gray in the twilight.

I tell the woman it’s okay.

Fuck, it so isn’t.

 

 

I CALL Carl next. The boys need to know I’m alive and to tell Mr. Fankhauser his son is too.

“Oh my God,” Carl keeps saying. He doesn’t say, “If only you’d listened to us.”

If only I had. This feels like it might be the last time we’ll ever talk. This feels like the end, with the blizzard raging like a cosmic monster outside and the hut at minus twenty degrees or something, and no one anywhere near us to help.

And Andi has closed his eyes.

 

 

HE HAS drifted off for just two minutes or so when he stirs again. In a weak, cracked voice, he asks me to help him go take a leak.

There’s a tiny cubicle in one corner of the hut containing a primitive toilet. It’s just wood and dampness and newspapers instead of toilet paper. No light. The saving grace of this excuse for a bathroom is that it doesn’t smell. It would seem it’s just too damn cold for that.

The darkness is a good thing too, obviously. Andi needs me to support him to prevent him from losing his balance standing on one foot, but all I catch from the proceedings is a faint gurgle in the depth of the toilet. He pulls his snow-soaked pants up himself.

When I help him lie down on the bunk bed again, I feel that he’s shivering. In the scarce twilight coming in through the windows, his lips look a blackish blue.

Shit, he’s much more vulnerable to the vicious cold than I am. He hasn’t got my muscle mass, plus with his injury, he hasn’t been able to move and keep warm like I have. His body temperature has clearly dropped way below what’s healthy.

I don’t know much about medicine, but I’ve seen enough movies to know exposure and hypothermia and shit can kill a person.

I wish there were something, just something in this darned cabin that could be used as a blanket. Something he could wrap around himself in place of his damp clothes. But there’s nothing, not even a towel.

He tries to say something. He’s having trouble talking through his chattering teeth, and it takes me a while to understand what he’s asking.

He wants me to check the first aid cabinet in the cupboard and look for a space blanket.

There’s a flashlight on the oven. I switch it on and put it on the table. Like this I’m able to see what I’m doing without wasting my phone battery.

After a bit of rummaging, I pull a plastic bag containing a folded piece of silver fabric from the cabinet. It’s a man-sized sleeping bag complete with thermal insulation.

This is good, this is very good.

I’m going to get him inside this bag now.

He’s got to strip down for that first, though.

When he tries to slip out of his jacket, he can’t do it. His hands won’t obey him. Part of it is the strain he suffered when he pulled me from the crevasse, I suppose, but for the most part, it seems to be the cold. It’s affecting his movements.

It’s pretty obvious it’s me who’s got to undress him, and soon. But I don’t dare say it. Eventually he asks me for help again. His speech is slurred. I don’t know shit about medicine, but even I get that this is a really bad sign.

Shit, I’ve got to get him into that bag, and quickly.

I start with his jacket and shirt. Clumsily I pull and tug at sleeves and hems. Eventually he sits on the edge of the bunk bed, bare-chested, trembling all over, his skin covered in goose bumps. I swear I’ve never undressed anyone in worse circumstances.

I tell him to lie down on his back, then quickly unbutton his snowboard trousers and try to pull them down without hurting his foot. Surprisingly I manage it at the first try.

Okay, next the thermal leggings. This is going to be the trickiest part.

When I reach for the waistband, he bites his lip. The waistband resists, like it would, forcing me to slide a finger underneath to make it move. I’m touching his pleasure trail. All I can do is focus on keeping my hands away from his dick. I can clearly see its outline under his boxer briefs. The damp elastic fabric reveals more than it hides.

He draws a shuddering breath. For a second our eyes meet. Fuck, this is so bad I feel tears prick behind my eyeballs.

And to think this is what I wanted, damn it. Getting to strip him down in this damned mountain cabin! When I knew he wasn’t ready, choosing to believe I knew better than him what was good for him.

To think that that is why we are here.

It’s me and my stupidity that landed us here, with Andi injured and hurting and about to freeze to death.

I’m a monster.

“I’m sorry,” I croak. “I’m so sorry.”

And I mean everything, every part of my fucked-up plan to get him to sleep with me.

“Just do it, Bennet,” he mumbles. “Just get it over with and get me into the damn bag.”

Yeah, obviously this isn’t the time for remorse and asking forgiveness and shit. Without any more ado, I peel his leggings and briefs off him. Somehow I manage to not brush against his groin and to keep his ankle safe too.

When he’s finally lying on the bunk bed, naked but for my neck warmer around his foot, I hastily grab for the sleeping bag and pull it up around him. He’s trying to help, awkwardly scrambling into the bag, hampered by his splinted foot.

At long last he’s safely inside the silver wrap, with the hood covering his head.

All that’s still visible of him is his face.

I’m so relieved I feel like we’ve resolved all our problems.

Until he mumbles, “What about you?”

It’s only then I feel the heaviness of my own soaked clothes. I shrug out of my jacket and trousers. It doesn’t do much good; now I’m standing in the cold in just my drenched underwear. It feels like it’s already starting to freeze to my skin.

“I’m fine,” I say, putting the jacket and trousers back on. “Listen. I’m sorry I went down that slope when you’d told me not to….”

He utters something that almost sounds like a snort.

“I could have known, I guess,” he says. “I shouldn’t have pushed you like I did all day. It wasn’t smart to do that, with you being, well.”

“Being what?”

“Being set on winning at stuff at all costs?”

It makes me sound like a five-year-old.

“Sorry,” I mutter.

“Hey, do me a favor, Bennet. Stop apologizing all the time,” he says. He’s still having trouble forming words.

“Sorry I made you do this in the first place,” I say miserably. He has just told me to stop wallowing in my wretchedness, but I simply can’t. “I know your father made you go with me,” I go on. “I had no business putting you in that position. I had no right to put you at risk. With the storm coming in and everything.”

“My father didn’t make me do this,” he says. I look at him, not following.

He seems to be attempting a shrug.

“We discussed it this morning when we were checking the forecast. He was a bit concerned, actually, but since I was the guide, he accepted it was up to me whether I’d go through with this trip.” Something like an apologetic smirk ghosts across his pallid face. “There didn’t seem to be a risk at the time, so I decided to do it.”

I’m confused. He chose to go on this trip with me, then?

I don’t have time to think about it.

Fuck, he’s still trembling with cold, even though he’s inside the bag.

“You aren’t getting warmer, are you? Is there anything else I can do?” I ask. He looks up at me, and in spite of everything, I’m struck yet again by the beauty of his surreal eyes.

He can freeze someone with that husky gaze, but he can also make them forget they’ve ever felt cold in their life.

There’s a small, laden pause I cannot read. Then he says, “Could you maybe make me a hot tea?”

But you already are a hottie.

It’s Jay’s fault I’m thinking such nonsense.

Andi is asking me to make him tea.

This is my chance to prepare a drink for him, same as he did for me so often all through the last week.

“Sure, I can make you a tea,” I say brightly, then realize I have no clue how to do it. There’s no electric kettle in sight, no immersion heater. There’s just the iron oven in the corner. It looks plain forbidding, and it’s not attached to anything like a power outlet.

Andi’s gaze has followed mine.

“I’ll tell you how to do it, okay?”

Feeling like a complete idiot, I nod.

And once again I find myself following his instructions.

Open the chute of the oven. Rip up newspaper, crunch it up, put it in the oven. Get an armful of logs from the basket of firewood. Get a handful of kindling. Make a little stack over the paper balls in the oven, like for a bonfire. Find the little green cubes in the bag saying Anzündwürfel in the cupboard. Put two of those in the middle of the kindling in the oven. Find the matchbox. Light a match.

Turns out I can’t light a match. They all break between my ice-cold fingers. In the end there are only three matches left in the box.

Why am I such a frigging loser? Why can’t I even light a match to make tea? I have to turn away from Andi so he won’t see my face.

“Try again. Quick, with feeling,” he says behind me.

And it works. Aiming a quick grin at him over my shoulder, I reach into the oven with the burning match and light the Anzündwürfel.

 

 

THE FIRE is burning. I got that prehistoric monster of an oven to work. Now to the actual tea. Get a pot from the cupboard. Take it outside and fill it with snow to make water.

Simple enough.

Outside, the hail has changed to thick sheets of snow. I bend down to scoop up a few handfuls of the stuff, hating it with a fervor that should melt it without the need of a fire.

When I’m back inside the cabin and have shaken the snow from my hair and clothes, Andi says, “Now put the pot on the oven. Wait till the water boils, then get a tea bag from the box on the shelf and put it in the water.”

I would have known how to do that last bit without his help. When I finally offer him the mug of tea that took me so long to prepare, I feel more like a fool than ever.

“Thanks,” he says.

He empties the mug in no time. While I give him a refill, I surreptitiously check his complexion, trying to gauge whether his circulation is improving. He’s still pale, but his lips seem to look a little less blue.

“Thanks,” he says again. “You did a good job with the oven. That thing is a bitch.”

It’s the first nice thing he has said to me all day. Or basically ever, apart from those moments of madness when he told me I was hot. He said I did a good job because I got the bitchy oven to boil water. It’s not much by way of a compliment, but I still have to bite down a grin, it makes me so happy. Hell, I did help him get better with making that tea. His speech sounds almost back to normal.

“You did pretty great with finding the hut too,” he says, then breaks off, blushing. He’s probably thinking of how I carried him.

Making it through that storm with him unconscious was one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do. But I feel as if I’d like to go through everything all over again, just for the chance to listen to him praise me some more. I feel like I just grew an inch or two. His gaze has slipped past me again. His eyes have crinkled up at the corners.

“And thanks for the splinting. My foot hardly hurts anymore.”

I want to tell him how wonderful that is, but I sneeze instead.

By now it has gone completely dark outside, and with night falling, it seems the temperature has dropped another ten or twenty degrees. The oven seems to be pretty much useless as a heater.

Furrowing his brow, Andi holds the mug out to me.

“Here, have some tea too,” he says. I take a sip. It tastes like cat piss. Or like I imagine cat piss would taste.

If only we had something to eat too. I think of the Saturday Night Gala Dinner that was announced in the Fankhauser News this morning and that’s being served in the restaurant probably just now. Schweinsbraten, Bratkartoffeln, Knödel…. Carl read it all out to Jay and me over breakfast. I had scrambled eggs with Speck. I’m so hungry, the memory makes my eyes water. If only we still had our sandwiches! They are safely in our backpacks, mine sitting on the ledge in the crevasse, Andi’s where we left it behind, probably buried five feet deep in snow by now.

I pour some more tea into the mug and return it to Andi. When I sit down at the table to think of food some more, I feel something hard dig into my buttcheek.

Carl’s Landjägers. I dig the sausages from my back pocket and peel the tinfoil off them. There are six of them. They are soggy and rather flat because I sat on them. It’s still like finding a handful of gold nuggets in an unexpected place. Better.

We share the sausages between us. They aren’t much, but they do calm my grumbling stomach. I only wish the things weren’t half-frozen. I’m covered in goose bumps, and eating iced Landjägers isn’t helping with that. The tea hasn’t done much to warm me up either.

I once read about that special technique against being cold. It seems you’re supposed to be able to up your body temperature by creating mental images of things related to fire. The Fitscher Saturday Night Fireworks. I’m going to think of the Fitscher Saturday Night Fireworks. I’ve read about those in the Fankhauser News this morning too. It said they light up the snowy mountains in an explosion of colors, showcasing each of the five summits in its own shade of Bengal light. It sounded like something exactly up my alley. Trying to conjure the image of burning-hot Bengal lights, I console myself with the thought that, with the snowstorm raging, the fireworks surely got cancelled, so everyone is missing out.

Fuck, the cold is seriously creeping up on me. My teeth have even started to chatter. I never knew they could do that.

Andi is watching me from under the hood of the sleeping bag, his eyes like two snippets of sky in the dark. For some reason, he has started chewing on his lip again.

I start walking about in the tiny space between the beds and the table, rubbing at my arms.

“Okay, you’ve got to get in here with me, Bennet,” Andi suddenly says, his voice shockingly clear, startling me. My brain seems to have slowed down somehow. It takes a few seconds for the meaning of his words to sink in. But then—

“No! No, no.” I vigorously shake my head. “No. No, definitely not, I won’t—”

“You don’t want to be dead by morning, do you?” he interrupts in that same clear voice. “Justin.”

It’s the most disconcerting thing to hear him call me by my given name.

Briefly, I think of how I heard him scream for me after I had fallen into the crevasse. Something shifted between us in that moment, I only realize that now. I don’t know what it is, but it scares me.

“I’m fine,” I say. “I won’t—”

“I won’t have a paying customer die on a trip.”

He’s cracking a joke. Or maybe it isn’t even a joke.

I utter a laugh that has an edge of hysteria to it and ends in another sneeze.

“Seriously, man. The thing is, I’m not really getting warm in here on my own.”

“Oh,” I say. Fuck, of course. I’m so dumb. Everyone has heard of how people suffering from hypothermia can be warmed up by another person’s body heat. He must think me such a dimwit, refusing to help like I did just now. This is about his health, obviously, nothing else.

“Didn’t think of that. Sorry. Sorry.”

Blanking out the awkwardness, I shimmy out of my hoodie without further ado, then yank off my snowboard pants. My phone slips out of the back pocket. I forgot to close the zipper after I made the call to Carl. The phone clatters to the floor. The screen lights up, and there’s Andi at his keyboard.

My wallpaper.

It looks like a painting now, totally different from the original photo. It’s mostly shapes of blue and gold. I didn’t go for likeness; I wanted to bring out what I saw in him. The cool and the warmth.

But his exquisite profile is unmistakable.

Quickly, without looking at him, I fumble for the phone and put it on the nightstand next to the bed, facedown.

Then, my back toward the bunk bed, I strip down completely.

Andi has turned onto his side, facing away from me to give me space, I guess, and to make room for me. Setting my jaw, I start crawling into the bag behind him.

He feels like an icicle. Shit, he was right. He needed me in here much sooner. I shiver just from the feel of the cold skin of his back against my legs as I ease them down the bag behind him.

With a jolt of fear, I realize I haven’t yet saved his life. I’ve got to warm him up as fast as possible. Quickly I wriggle myself deeper into the bag until I’m fully inside, my front pressed flush against his back.

This is spooning. I would lie on my back so he’d just have to deal with the side of my body, but I have to focus on making sure he survives.

Trying to quash my worries about how much this must stress him out, I press up against him, focusing on willing what body heat I have left in my system to seep into his.

If only I knew where to put my hands. Eventually I cautiously rest one on his shoulder and the other on his clammy thigh, hoping my palms will work as heating pads.

Andi seems to have stopped breathing.

I try to do the same. Lying there, feeling every inch of the body of the man I’ve lusted after for a whole week, all I want is to not freak him out.

I keep as still as if he were a bomb that might blow up at the slightest jolt. The whole situation is so stressful that my groin is, like, switched off. The temperature is helping with that too. Instead of me warming him up, the polar cold he seems to have stored in his body is invading mine.

Minutes tick by. Suddenly the flashlight on the table starts flickering. A few seconds later, it gives out, leaving us in complete darkness.

Now that I can’t see anything at all, I can hear Andi’s breathing.

It seems to me his body is a little bit warmer. From a medical point of view, it would probably be a good idea to rub his arms and legs or something. But I don’t dare move as much as a finger.

The back of Andi’s head is right in front of my face. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I can make out a few strands of black hair curling above his ear.

It’s just a tiny detail of him, and it makes me ache with helpless tenderness.

And with shame.

I’ve got a lot of time to think about the last week. A lot of time to feel bad about myself. I tried to get a guy to have a one-night stand with me when he had told me it wasn’t for him. Just to gratify my crazy craving for him.

At least this whole bag-sharing thing seems to be working. He’s definitely warmer now.

His scent is coming back, crawling into my nose. It’s sharper than usual with all the dampness and sweat, and it travels straight to my cock.

Fuck no. Focusing what mental powers I’ve got left, I concentrate on making the stirring go away, trying to breathe through my mouth.

It doesn’t work.

Cursing in my head, I mumble an apology. Predictably, I get no answer.

Shit.

No way can I go on prodding my throbbing dick into his buttcheeks like I am. This has to stop, for his sake as much as my own. If we stay like this for even another minute, I’m going to implode and die from the strain of trying to keep my body in check. Or worse, come all over his backside.

With another muddled apology, I start to shift and wriggle inside the bag until I’ve kicked him in all the possible places and said sorry like a million times. Shit, this is definitely the trickiest 180 I’ve ever performed. But at long last, I’ve done it. I’ve turned fully around, facing safely away from him.

It’s much less warm and cozy like this, and that’s a good thing too. This is the only way to do this. Hugging myself to stop the fresh breakout of goose bumps on my chest and stomach, I try to focus my mind on Bengal lights again. With less success than ever.

His asscheeks feel way too good, muscled and silky and pressed flush against mine as they are. But the material point is, my dick is out of harm’s way. It’s still painfully hard, twitching against the lining of the bag like it’s searching for the ass it got to poke earlier and liked so much.

Andi’s body is giving off such heat now that I start worrying. Do people get a fever from a sprained ankle? Or from a broken bone? Or is this already something like pneumonia setting in?

If only I weren’t this total dumbass. If only I knew some shit!

He’s breathing too hard. That can’t be normal. His whole body is heaving with it.

I turn my head.

“You okay? Your foot hurting again?” I ask in a low voice, anxious not to startle him. His ear is just an inch from my mouth.

He doesn’t answer.

I start to get seriously worried now.

“Andi?”

It’s a shock like nothing I’ve experienced in my life when suddenly he rears and turns around inside the bag in one violent motion, nearly pushing the both of us off the bed.

Then his hands are all over me, on my stomach, my chest, my thighs, and he presses his body down on me as if he meant to crush my every bone.

Digging his fingers into my skin, he pushes me facedown onto the mattress and is gasping into my hair. The next moment he pulls back, grabs me by a hip and a shoulder, and forces me to turn over. At two hundred pounds, I’m not exactly easy to haul about, especially when I’m stuck inside a super tight sleeping bag. But he’s strong, and I’m too confused and overwhelmed to resist him.

Finally we are face-to-face. I get a glimpse of his eyes glinting in the darkness.

I haven’t even begun to wrap my brain around what’s happening when his lips come crashing down on mine, full of wild, greedy intent.

The kiss lasts for a second or ten. I can’t tell.

However long, it has solved my problem with the cold conclusively, with no mental effort required at all. My blood is thrumming through my veins, hot like mulled wine.

Eventually he pulls away from me to draw breath, keeping me pressed against him with his hands on my ass, fingers clawing into my flesh, bruising me. Our erect dicks are squashed together between our stomachs.

My head might have trouble catching up with what’s going on, but not my dick. Oh no, on the contrary.

Andi is reaching a hand down between us, and at the first moment of feeling his fingers on me, I come, right into his palm.

I want to stop myself, because if there’s one thing I still know, it’s that I’m supposed to show more control than this.

I don’t stand a chance. I’m moaning like a bad actor in a porn movie, much too loudly, but I only hear Andi’s excited, breathless gasping. There’s a chuckle mixed into it.

It seems he likes my overpowering reaction to his touch, to the point of being amused by it. It’s humiliating and weirdly exhilarating, and I want to go on shooting into his fist, held captive in his arms and exposed to the core, forever.

I always imagined that when it happened, it would be me fucking him. I guess it’s simply because I’ve ever only been a top. With me being the textbook quarterback, everyone has always kind of expected me to do the fucking. And I never minded either. It’s nice to put your dick in someone’s ass, and it always seemed to be the natural choice for me.

But suddenly now, with Andi, I’m not so sure anymore.

Not so sure at all.

Suddenly nothing is what it was.

I can’t see him. It’s not the darkness, it’s my hair that fell into my face.

With some difficulty, he wriggles an arm out of the bag and pushes the stray strands from my eyes.

There’s his blue gaze again, and a flash of white that’s a row of perfect front teeth. He’s smiling at me in the dark. Then he’s kissing me again.

 

 

HE PUTS my hand on him. He’s uncut; I can feel his foreskin move under my fingers. He feels silky and hot, and fuck, he’s big. Finding he’s actually way bigger than I am has a funny effect on me. I would have expected to feel jealous, or embarrassed and a little inferior. But all I can think of is what this power tool would feel like in my ass.

Yes, I imagine him fucking me. I imagine him stretching me to the limit and thrusting into me and telling me shit like “You asked for this, now shut up and be good.”

My hole gives a greedy twitch, and in a surge of heat, my dick comes back to life.

Oh fuck.

I’m a bottom for Andi Fankhauser.

He squeezes my hand on his cock. I comply with his wordless demand and start pumping his shaft in a quick rhythm. Fucking into my grip, groaning, he puts his hand back on my ass and roughly pulls me closer. There’s no room between us for anything like technique. All I can do is try to keep him enclosed in my hand, but then that seems to be all he needs. Holding me in a death grip, furiously pushing and grinding against me, his cock throbbing in my hand, he rapidly approaches his climax.

And then he’s shooting off. I can feel his load squirt through my fingers as he buries his face in the crook of my shoulder, stifling his shout of orgasm.

It’s rough and primal and at the same time more intimate than anything I’ve ever done with a guy. The lack of space, the sweaty hotness of his body against mine inside the confines of the bag. The impossibility of doing anything about the profuse load of come that’s spreading between our stomachs. His flushed face right in front of me as he struggles to calm down.

His heavy breathing mingles with mine in the icy inch of air between our faces, a little cloud of warmth, a shadow of silvery mist.

In an animation, this little patch of sliver would have just one meaning: the merging of two lovers’ souls.

 

 

WE LIE in tight embrace, breathing together, and as I lazily marvel at this new reality and think of all the things we might do next, I fall asleep.

 

 

I WAKE up to the light of dawn spilling through crooked shutters.

For a few moments, I’m disoriented. My left hand feels like a big, fat, prickling cushion. Something is lying on my shoulder, cutting off the circulation. I wriggle my arm to free it. There’s the sound of sleepy protest, a softly uttered expletive in a language I don’t understand.

That’s German.

That’s Andi, waking up.

That’s Andi’s head on my shoulder, Andi’s hair tickling my nose, Andi’s wonderful, warm body snuggled up against mine.

That’s Andi’s cock clinging to my hip, sticky with come.

I never really thought past the sex when I planned on getting to sleep with Andi. But if I had foreseen we’d be spending the whole night together, like actually sleep-sleep together in the same bed, I guess I would have expected things to be awkward in the morning.

But when our eyes meet in the pale light filtering in from outside, and I see his cautious smile, so full of suppressed happiness, so perfectly matching what I feel myself—yeah. Awkward isn’t even a category.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” he replies.

It’s the first word he’s said to me since I joined him in this magical sleeping bag.

He smooths my hair back from my face like he did last night. The gesture is so tender and possessive. No one has ever touched me like that. I have no name for what it does to me, but it makes my heart want to burst from my rib cage.

“Good morning, gorgeous,” he whispers.

I want to say it back, but I can’t speak. He kisses me slowly, languidly.

“Looks like the storm has passed,” he says eventually. “They’ll be able to come and take us back to the village now.”

That moment, my phone rings. I try to get hold of it without leaving the warmth of the sleeping bag. Without leaving Andi. When I’ve finally managed it, the call has gone to voicemail. It’s the Mountain Rescue Service.

I give Andi the phone to call back. He talks to the guy from the rescue service in German for a couple of minutes, then ends the call, reaching over my head to put the phone back onto the nightstand.

“They’ll be here by nine,” he says.

He lets his hand tangle into my hair.

“Nine,” I echo.

“It’s seven thirty,” he says, looking me straight in the eye.

Somehow it’s the most erotic line anyone has ever said to me. Because his meaning is clear.

He’s up for another round.

My body reacts with such enthusiasm it scares me. It’s not just my groin. My whole body tingles, and my heart has gone into overdrive. I want to think it’s because my blood is needed south, but the truth is, I can’t tell the sex from my feelings anymore.

“How’s the ankle?” I ask hoarsely, trying to keep my perky cock trapped between my thighs and my heart inside my chest.

“It feels like it’s twice the size of the other one. But it hardly hurts. You did a great job with that splint. You’re really good with your hands, do you know that? You could be a doctor.”

“A doctor, huh. Thanks for thinking that, but I’m not exactly a top achiever, you know.” I know I’m rambling, but I’m too high and too confused to stop. “I suck at math. And I’m pretty bad at stuff like relative business valuation models too. I’m not really good at anything other than sports.”

His expression has turned serious.

“That’s not true, and you know it. What about that portrait you drew of me?”

He gestures at my phone. Shit, he saw his portrait.

“Oh God. You must think I’m this terrible stalker. I’m so sorry. You must have hated me for following you around like I did.”

“I didn’t. You know I didn’t. It wasn’t like that.”

He stops, and I ask, “What was it like, then? Andi? Please tell me.”

There’s a lengthy pause. He chews on his lower lip.

“When you kept trying to talk to me,” he says eventually, looking past me like he used to, “when you tried to flirt with me, and in the end even told me directly you wanted to sleep with me…. I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea how to deal with being just one step away from this.” We are lying flush against each other, and he wiggles a finger between our stomachs, then utters a small laugh. “Shit, I even pretended I was sick!”

“You really did that because of me? God.”

“I know it’s pathetic, but I was scared.”

“But that’s horrible! I never wanted you to be scared of me!”

He gives a scoff.

“I wasn’t scared of you. I was scared of myself.”

He’s fidgeting in the confines of the sleeping bag, making it rustle.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says, finally looking at me again. “You’ve got these amazing eyes….”

“… eyes,” I echo, a little incredulous.

“Yeah, that was what hit me about you first. Your eyes are so warm, and… I don’t know. Like you couldn’t even spell the word ‘malice.’”

I’m not quite sure I’m fine with this, but he’s already going on, stroking my temple, the gesture full of emotion.

“I knew from the start you were something else. God, I knew I was lost from the moment you walked up to my desk that first day. And then, when I saw you in the vapor bath, sprawled out at my feet, all glistening and gorgeous…. Do you have any idea what that did to me? I couldn’t think straight for the rest of the night. And then you started coming after me, and you wouldn’t stop. I didn’t want to fall for you; I never wanted to fall for a guest. I tried everything to keep you out of my system. I wanted to hold on to my life as it was, but I just didn’t know how.”

And now? I can’t help but wondering. What’s going to happen once the helicopter takes us away from here, back to Fitsch?

But Andi isn’t thinking of the future right now, he’s still caught up in the past.

A smile is playing across his lips as he goes on caressing my hair.

“When you kept staring at me while I played with the band—it was just so hard not to lose track of what I was doing on the keyboard. You remember that one time when I went to the bathroom? I meant to run some cold water over my head, then ended up beating off in a stall instead. And then I found you waiting for me in the hallway. I thought you’d see everything in my face.”

“I thought you hated me!”

God, I felt so wretched that night. Just thinking about it still causes my voice to catch in my throat.

He quickly kisses me, palming my cheek.

“I never hated you, Justin. How could I?”

“You certainly did when I was being a pain in the neck and fell down that crevasse.”

“When you fell down that crevasse, that was the worst moment of my life! God, Justin, I thought you were gone!”

“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry for making you hurt your foot like you did and everything. I think I haven’t even thanked you. So, thank you for saving my life instead of just telling me I got what I deserved and leaving me with the glacier spirit.”

“I guess it was worth the trouble in the end, you know,” he says, pulling softly at my hair. He’s teasing me. This is so new and so enchanting and it just might be that I’ll need to hear him make fun of me for the rest of my life. And to have him play with my hair. He does like it after all it would seem, even with the worst-case styling crisis I’ve got going on. I didn’t get to brush my hair, let alone wash it after I took the helmet off, and just now he’s winding one of my straggly strands around his finger and puts it to his nose like he’s trying to breathe me in.

“So… you don’t mind I made that picture of you?”

“I love that picture,” he murmurs into my hair. “What you do is a bit like impressionistic painting, isn’t it? You kind of made me look, like, lit up from within.”

Because you are. Because you are blue and gold and light.

God, will he forever make me feel like this, confused and euphoric and struggling for something normal to say?

“That’s because I don’t work with lines,” I say, trying to pull myself together. “The trick is to think about light sources and hues and to find the exact shade that will bring out what you really see. And then I’ve used a special filter on this picture….”

I break off. It would be just too bad if he found out I’m this boring nerd that can go on and on about shit like hues and shades and filters.

“Yeah?”

“You don’t want to hear about this.”

“I do! I love digital art. It’s what I like best by way of, you know, adult stuff online? Drawings and animations.”

Huh.

“I sometimes make GIFs like that,” I say.

“Really? You do animations too? Wow, that’s impressive! Oh man, I’d love to be an artist like you. You’ve got to show me everything you’ve done!”

Okay, is this really happening? Is he telling me he’s interested in my drawing? I don’t usually show my stuff to my friends or tell real-life people about my art blog, because I don’t want to scare anyone away with the NSFW content. And I’ve never talked about my drawing with hookups either, because I didn’t want to scare them away with the nerdiness.

What it boils down to is I’ve never been anything like proud of my work. And now Andi of all people tells me he likes what I do? Using words like “impressive”?

“It’s just this bit of doodling I do—”

“It’s not doodling,” he says forcefully, furrowing his brow and tightening his grip on my shoulder as if he means to discipline me. “You shouldn’t call it that.”

“My mother does.”

“Then you shouldn’t listen to what she says. No disrespect.”

I chuckle, feeling guilty.

“You know, this last week, sometimes I kind of liked the idea that there are all these mountains between my mom and me at the moment, and the ocean too. I mean, she’s my mom and everything, but…. Well, you know how mothers are.”

“Not really, no. I’ve just got a grandmother. My mother died when I was six.”

“Oh, I’m sorry!”

Oh no. Of course, Rosi from the Gletschergeist told me his father was a single dad. And here I’ve been saying all these things about mountains and the ocean. I try to tell Andi how dumb I am, spluttering.

He gives me a firm, quick kiss on the lips.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Really, it is. I want to talk to you about your art some more. Because I think it’s spectacular. No, just listen to me for a moment, Bennet.”

He has put his index finger to my lips to keep me silent.

“What you did with my picture? That’s a whole new, I don’t know, language of colors you’ve created there. And the eagle picture too. I’ve seen you work on it in the lounge.”

“You have, haven’t you,” I say against his finger, satisfied at the thought that he did some stalking of his own there. Fuck, he totally sneaked up on me to get a look at my tablet, and he listened in on my conversations with Jay and Carl at dinner too!

“The eagle is you too,” I say, squinting at him through my lashes.

“Wow,” he says after a small beat, but not at all like he’s laughing at me. He’s still looking at me all seriously.

“You don’t seem to realize it, but you are extremely talented, Justin. You could be a professional graphic artist. Or a board designer. You could be all kinds of things.”

“My statistics professor thinks I’m a little dumb,” I say, because he does, and because it’s disconcerting to listen to Andi say these things.

“You aren’t dumb. You are intelligent and passionate and seven kinds of wonderful.”

“Don’t forget stellar at snowboarding,” I joke, trying to hide my blush and the debilitating happiness that keeps bubbling up inside me because of his crazy talking.

“That too,” he says.

“I never realized you didn’t just hurt your foot yesterday but took a blow to the head too.”

He stays all earnest.

“You think this is just because you are my first. Don’t you?”

I don’t dare ask what he means by “this.”

Suddenly I’m hyperaware again of his skin against mine. A shiver runs through me.

“You are certainly good for a beginner,” I say, my voice failing me. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of talents yourself, Herr Fankhauser, looks like you aren’t just a top boarder but a natural in bed too—”

He shuts me up with a kiss. A real one this time.

It’s like someone closed an electric circuit. A jolt of heat zings through me, and he starts pushing against me, delving his tongue deep into my mouth. He moves his hands down my sides and rests them on the small of my back. My cock springs free from between my thighs. It has grown to maximum size in about a second.

The feel of his hot length against mine. His hands on my ass now, strong and demanding. Yet again, I imagine him inside me, and the mere idea makes me spill over and smear a glob of precome onto his stomach.

“Hey,” he says. And this time there’s nothing cautious to that word. This time it’s pure sex. Pure dominance.

He grabs for my cock and starts working on it as if he had an owner’s right to it. He makes me come as if he had never done anything else in his life. Like a man with a purpose.

And it turns out that’s exactly what he is. He lets me spurt into his fist, squeezing my orgasm out of me, urging me on with whispered words I don’t understand, stripping me of the last bits of sanity. Then he lets me recover for a bit, kissing me wherever he can reach in the confines of the bag and grinding his erection against my hip.

I don’t suspect anything, nothing more than that he wants to come like this, so I reach between us to stroke him. That’s when he shoves my hand away to slip his own between my stomach and my softened cock, scooping up my come. When he reaches across my hip to part my cheeks and puts a slippery finger to my hole, it sends such a jolt of excitement through me that I let out a sob.

I’ve had my hole touched before, but I’ve never been, like, especially keen on it. Like, it was okay, but what I really wanted was to put my dick in the other guy and get off.

Andi’s free hand is on my cock, making it stir yet again, and he’s circling his finger around my hole.

“Come on,” I gasp incoherently. I can’t bear the teasing. I want it in.

“You sure? I don’t really know how….”

“Come on,” I repeat. Last night it was me who needed to be told how to do something simple like lighting a match. Now it’s his turn. “Just do it, Fankhauser, put your finger in me. Quick, with feeling.”

He gives a chortle.

He’s laughing at my joke, and it’s the best sound ever. I want to make him laugh again, but the next moment I feel him level a finger at my entrance, then slip it up my hole. I can’t think anymore. I’ve got his long, strong finger in my ass, prodding me, searching for my prostate.

Shivering all over, feeling my spent cock pulse painfully as it fills with blood again, I burrow my forehead into his shoulder and let the sounds just spill from my throat.

Stopping grinding against me, he slides his hand out of my crack and up my back.

“That too much? Justin? You need to tell me,” he says. “I’ve got no idea what I’m doing here.”

“Fuck, you so do,” I mumble against his shoulder.

“No, seriously. I wouldn’t want to do anything that isn’t okay for you. I don’t want to misread you. Or hurt you. You’ve got to tell me what you want.”

“This is fine,” I croak against his chest. “I am fine.”

“But… people have preferences. They do, don’t they? What’s yours? Do you switch, or do you only bottom, or….”

He has been reading up on the terminology. It’s obvious he has never uttered these words before. It so should be me who’s taking the lead here.

“I’m usually a top,” I say sheepishly, peering up at his face.

“Oh. Right. Yeah,” he says, nodding and biting his lip. “Yeah, I want to try that with you.”

“But I think I want you to do me.”

Clumsily I grab for his hand and move it back to my butt, then slip one leg over his hip to give him access to my hole. Our erections slip over each other, squeezed together between our sweaty bodies.

“Oh God, I want you inside me, Andi,” I gasp. “I want you to fuck me. Please.”

“I want that too, baby, but we’d need lube for that, wouldn’t we.”

Baby. Oh my God, he called me “baby.”

“Justin?”

“Oh. Yeah. Lube, yeah, that’s true,” I stutter. I want him to say baby again while he’s fucking me senseless.

“And we haven’t got any condoms.”

That’s true too. The glacier got them, swallowed them along with the sandwiches and my backpack.

“Right, no condoms,” I say.

I’m parroting him as if I were Jay.

Fuck.

I have a couple of hundred tricks on my track record, and I need a total rookie to remind me of the basics of anal sex?

“Yeah, alright, looks like we can’t do it,” I say. I sound so downcast I should be embarrassed by it.

Andi is stroking my hair back from my brow again.

I’m rapidly becoming addicted to the feeling.

“I’ll jerk you off while I fuck you with a finger, okay?” he murmurs. There’s something in his tone, something that says “Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of you,” and it makes me light up like fireworks inside.

Fuck, he really seems to be the born top, more so than I ever was.

Before I can say “yeah, go ahead” or anything, to maintain at least a semblance of control, his finger is back inside me. I hiss with the delicious stretch, and he kisses me like he wants to drink my moans.

When he reaches between us, palming my cock and balls, I decide to just let go and let him take me along for the ride again.

 

 

WHEN I come again, he says, “I love you.”

I say it back.

It’s what people say when they’ve just shot their load into a guy’s fist with his finger up their ass.

But also, it’s the outlandish truth.

 

 

HE SLIPS his finger out of me. Scooping up my come like before, he turns me onto my stomach. He’s on top of me, his weight pressing me into the thin mattress so I can feel the bed slats underneath. When he parts my cheeks and smears my come into my crack, I think he’s going to fuck me after all.

But what he does is slip his length between my cheeks and move it back and forth in my crack, rubbing against my hole. The silver bag starts to rustle in an obscene rhythm.

At first he goes slow, trying to keep his weight on his elbows and knees. But quickly, he starts to build up speed and pushes down on me hard, and the friction becomes almost too intense.

I’ve been worrying about his sprained ankle, afraid he might harm it or make the splint come loose, but very soon I can’t hold on to a single thought anymore.

Each time the curve of his cock pushes against my hole, the sensation spears through me like an electric charge. Again and again, I’m getting opened up for a tiny, excruciating bit, and my brain is swamped by the maddening desire to finally be filled and fucked for real.

My hole is itching and aching, my bruises hurt, my sore muscles scream under the strain of his thrusting, and I don’t want it to end.

When he comes, flooding my crack, I lift my hips to meet him in a pointless attempt to somehow absorb his load. There’s his chuckle again, mixing into his gasps, so dirty and so tender. It’s a sound of complete satisfaction and happiness. He hasn’t made that sound before me, I know, and I feel a stab of bliss unlike anything I have ever known.

His head comes down to rest next to mine. Keeping me in his arms, he strokes my hair, saying my name. Calling me baby again. And telling me yet again that he loves me.

And I say it back.

I have good reasons to panic.

The worst part being I wouldn’t have stopped him just now if he had fucked me bareback.

And I told a guy I love him. Twice over. In broad daylight.

Oh yes, these are pretty solid reasons to panic.

But all I feel is the deepest peace.

 

 

THE CLATTER of a helicopter.

It’s eight thirty.

I’m almost mad at the rescue guys for being early. Andi and I have just been about to start a new round. My cock is throbbing from overuse, and my hole has been fingered raw. But I didn’t tell Andi that when he asked me if I was ready to go again. I guess I wanted to squeeze as much sex as possible into these hours that some conniving glacier sprite has granted me with him.

We’ve pulled apart, both still short of breath.

“Let’s wait for them outside,” Andi says.

We scramble out of the silver bag, chuckling at the clumsiness of too many limbs and too-erect cocks getting in the way.

I’m sharing sexy fun with Andi fucking Fankhauser.

And he keeps looking at me like he needs to make up for the whole of the last week. Like I’m something really, really special.

I’m freezing cold in the soaked underwear, jacket, and pants I’ve had to put back on, I’m starved, and hurting all over from the tumble I took down that crevasse yesterday.

It’s the best morning of my life.

 

 

IN THE helicopter we get clothes from the rescue service, plus coffee and sandwiches. The coffee and the sandwiches are heaven; the pants and shirts are dry. They are also an extremely unbecoming blotchy brown. Andi looks like a movie star who’s been dressed up to impersonate an especially dingy beggar.

The doctor who is part of the rescue service team examines his ankle and declares it sprained. He still recommends an X-ray at the hospital. There will be an ambulance waiting for us at the helipad, he says.

But Andi says he wants to go home.

“You should see a doctor, Andi,” I tell him.

“No need.”

“But—”

“It’s you who should go see a doctor, Justin. It was you who fell down a crevasse, not me! You might have a concussion.”

“Don’t try to change the subject!”

“Then don’t try to make me go to the hospital!”

We are quarreling. And he is winning.

It’s annoying, and it feels like we are a couple.

Something squeezes at my heart.

Just a few more minutes and it’ll all be over.

 

 

WHEN THE ambulance drops us off at the gate of the Fankhauser’s parking lot, Jay and Carl are waiting by the front doors. I gave them a call when we got on the helicopter to tell them we were on our way back to the hotel.

Andi just texted his dad. Apparently he didn’t give him a heads-up that we’d be back early.

Andi got crutches from the ambulance guys and insists he can walk by himself. I still keep close to his side, not ready to leave him be just yet.

When we cross the parking lot, someone zooms past us on a moped. It’s Andi’s friend Jo.

Same as probably everyone else in Fitsch, he must have heard what happened and no doubt came here to learn the latest news.

On seeing Andi, Jo hits the brakes, skidding across the snow-covered asphalt. Scrambling off the moped, he lets it crash to the ground and runs to greet him. Grinning broadly and talking a mile a minute, he whacks Andi on the shoulder so hard I want to shout at him to be careful, for fuck’s sake.

But I can’t. I don’t know how Andi would feel about me telling off his friend like an overanxious husband, and also Jay and Carl have reached me. They take me in the middle, separating me from Andi, and fuss over me like two old aunts. For a while they just won’t stop commenting, mostly in two-word sentences like “man, shit!” or “shit, man!”

Eventually Carl pulls a Krapfen from his sweater pocket, takes a hearty bite, and says, “We’ve been up all night!”

“All night,” Jay says. “And we couldn’t focus on gaming like at all! And we were so worried we skipped dinner, even Carl!”

I know what this means and tell them I’m sorry.

Meanwhile Jo has made Andi put an arm around his shoulder. He has taken the crutches from him and helps him hop down the gravel path leading to the hotel’s back door in the basement.

It seems Andi doesn’t want to enter the house through the front doors. He wants to avoid the commotion. I get that.

I also get that he doesn’t need his friend to know he made the American tourist come four times in total up on the glacier. That we had our own private Fitscher Saturday Night up there, fireworks included.

I get it.

But hell, there’s nothing I want more than to close the distance between us and push Jo into the slush ice on the gravel and sweep Andi up into my arms.

Oh fuck.

He hasn’t as much as looked my way since this Jo person appeared and stole him away.

Now, it might be because of the horrible clothes from the rescue service. I sure don’t look like a movie star in mine. In combination with my wildly tousled hair, they make me look more like a fashion-averse yeti.

But yeah, I know that’s probably not the real reason why Andi is suddenly ignoring me again.

The real reason is much simpler.

It’s the fact that we are back to Earth. Back to real life.

“If only you’d listened to us!” Carl is saying, spraying a shower of Krapfen crumbs complete with jam over my shirt front. “Seriously, it must have been so bad, not just no food and the cold, but spending the night with this Andi guy! I mean, we all know he thinks you’re this pain in the neck—”

That moment, Andi stops and turns around.

“Justin? You coming?”

Carl drops his Krapfen. Jay looks like he would do the same if he could.

It’s a great moment.

They so didn’t believe I had a chance to score with Andi. But I did, and now he’s asking me to walk with him and calls me Justin.

This isn’t about being the winner in a bet, of course it isn’t.

I still am.

And Andi hasn’t discarded me just yet after all.

With a quick nod to my friends, I sprint up to his free side and offer him my arm to lean on.

 

 

JAY AND Carl are staring at us from behind. And Andi leans on me, his hand on my arm, like he has to.

But I’ll have to part with him in just a few minutes, and I’m dreading, dreading the moment.

Once we’re on the second floor, Andi will tell me goodbye and disappear behind the door that says Privat. Into his old life.

And I’m going to go upstairs and pack my things.

I might have been to another universe with him, but down here, time has moved forward like nothing happened. It’s Sunday, 9:00 a.m., which means I have less than an hour to get ready to leave for the airport.

I’m going to leave.

I’m just a hotel guest. Who’s leaving.

All of a sudden, I am flooded by a lack of energy that feels like a sickness.

We’ve entered the hotel and made it into the stairwell unnoticed. Apparently Andi is so not keen on meeting anyone that he prefers the stairs to the much more frequented elevators.

He laboriously limps up the stairs next to me, listening to Jo tell him God knows what.

The guy won’t stop talking to Andi, in German, of course, while guiding him past flowerpots and shoe polishing machines in the most circumspect of ways, and it makes me feel angry in a way that’s plain absurd.

Fuck, I just hate having to share Andi like this.

It’s true, just a few hours back, I felt it was the worst thing ever to be responsible for his survival without anyone else around to help. I was the only person on the planet who could save his life, and it freaked me out.

But now I find I want that back.

Fuck, Andi is mine to take care of!

He’s mine.

Only he isn’t.

Oh fuck.

 

 

WE HAVE reached the ground floor and are just passing the door that leads from the staircase into the lounge when someone opens the door.

A wave of warmth and the hubbub of voices washes into the cool and quiet of the stairwell.

About four dozen people are gathered in the lounge, moving about, talking over each other.

Andi’s folks.

They turn toward us like a multiheaded monster.

“Andi.”

“Andi!”

“It’s Andi!”

They move forward in a chaos of cheering and beaming faces.

I recognize the old lady who turned seventy-five the other day, probably Andi’s grandmother. She’s carving her way through her family with her walking stick with a take-no-prisoners determination. Andi’s brother, who is the fastest to get to Andi and three times her size, gets shoved to the side.

Another man pushes to the front now, stumbling over his own feet. It’s Andi’s father. People stay back to give him space, even the old lady.

Andi hobbles forward into the room to greet him.

Fankhauser Senior pulls Andi into a crushing hug. He’s crying.

I can only guess at what he’s saying and what’s Andi’s response. It seems Andi’s father is trying to convince his son to let him take him to the hospital. And it seems Andi refuses.

I know the meaning of “na” by now, and hell, I definitely know his expression when he tells you “no, not happening.”

His father nods, obviously too wrecked by a sleepless night to fight his son. He looks way older than he did two days ago.

He keeps nodding and repeats something that sounds like he’s vowing to never again allow his son to risk his life as a glacier guide for a tourist.

Feeling like a fiend in human shape, I focus on the Krapfen crumbs sticking to the front of my rescue service shirt.

Someone moves into my line of vision.

Andi, it’s Andi, motioning to me to step forward. I raise my eyes to his face.

His magical smile hits me in the chest so hard my knees go weak.

He takes my hand and pulls me to his side.

I don’t understand what he’s saying because the rushing of blood in my head blocks out all sound and because he’s still speaking German. He’s talking to his folks. But he keeps casting his bright gaze over me while he speaks, and it’s like standing in a shower of light.

When he’s done, his father nods at me.

“Thank you, Mr. Bennet,” he says. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for my son. You saved his life.”

He’s thanking me for saving Andi’s life.

Right. I guess I did. It was also me who put him in mortal danger in the first place, but I feel it doesn’t make much sense to point that out.

Andi still hasn’t let go of my hand.

The old lady with the walking stick who stands next to Mr. Fankhauser has noticed.

And she isn’t the only one. The chitchat fizzles out. People are starting to stare.

Now Andi’s father looks down at our joined hands too.

Andi is the last one to notice we are still holding hands. I can feel the moment. It’s a second spanned out between eternities. Andi’s breathing stops. Then he tightens his grip on my hand.

And then he pulls me close.

He pulls me close and presses his lips onto mine in a hard, lightning-quick kiss.

I’ve never been present when someone came out to their family before. Never did it myself. Everyone in my life just always knew about me. There’s never been any need for me to stand up and inform my folks I won’t ever marry the neighbor’s daughter because I like guys.

Coming out. In an abstract way, I’ve been familiar with the concept, obviously. In an abstract way, I’ve known it’s this huge deal and all.

But nothing has prepared me for this moment.

The deafening silence. The feeling of something unnamed hovering at the edge of it, the very real possibility something is going to happen now that has the power to destroy the man in its center, maybe forever.

I stroke Andi’s hand as he holds on to mine. This is like waiting for another storm to break loose, and he needs to know I’ll be there for him no matter what.

Behind us, Jo makes a funny noise, as if he were fighting an asthma attack.

I feel like I might have one myself at any moment. The tension is so thick it all but squeezes my airways shut.

It’s the old lady who ends it. She says something in a cracked, authoritative voice, the meaning of which I have no chance to even guess at, then lifts her walking stick and prods Andi’s father with it from behind.

He frowns, rubbing his lower back. Then he steps forward.

Landing a huge paw on Andi’s shoulder, he gives a small nod.

Maybe there’s a touch of resignation to it, I can’t tell, because suddenly I’m being jostled about as if I were back in that blizzard.

The crowd of Fankhausers has started moving forward again like they’re one, and Andi holds on to me for sheer balance now as everyone struggles to get close enough to hug him and tell him they love him and welcome him home.

I get my share of hugs too. It’s mostly got to do with the lack of space, I guess. Things get so busy that I couldn’t step away from Andi even if I wanted to.

I have no chance to get who is who, even though some people say hello to me and tell me their names. I only know Max, who looks more like a bear than ever with the black stubble on his jaw. Apparently he wasn’t ready to bother with things like morning shaves as long as his brother wasn’t safely back home. He shakes my hand and smiles broadly at me, seeming ready to love and cherish me forever, no questions asked, because I am the man who saved Andi’s life.

And there’s Susi, of course. She beams up at me from behind her pink bangs, pokes me with her phone and cries, “I knew it, I knew it,” over the hubbub before she’s washed away by another wave of well-wishers.

It’s the old lady again who saves us. By now I’m positive she is Andi’s grandmother, Fankhauser Senior’s mom. Using her stick to get people to move out of the way, then to point at Andi’s bandaged foot, she yells something.

People step back from us, their exuberance effectively curbed.

She looks at me, piercing me with eyes as icy blue as Andi’s, and says in heavily accented English, “Andi needs to rest now. You go take him to bed, young man.”

On that, she pokes her stick into my calf.

The thing has got a metal tip, and the prodding really hurts.

But it feels like a blessing.

I dart a quick look at Andi’s father. He has stepped behind the bar counter and is busy filling glasses with Gletschergeist. He downs the first one in one gulp himself, then starts handing out glasses to people lining up in front of the counter. The talking has resumed. People clink their glasses together; some raise theirs in our direction, drinking to Andi’s health.

I have a sudden vision of everyone dressed in their dirndls and lederhosen, like back at the birthday party, only instead of a birthday cake with a silver seventy-five, there’s a white wedding cake on the table. And instead of Easter bunnies, there are rose garlands attached to the beams under the ceiling, and Andi and I aren’t dressed in matching potato bags but in matching tuxedos.

And instead of stopping right there, my brain just goes on making things up: Andi and me going to work in the morning in matching orange-and-yellow Happy Powder outfits; Andi and me sitting in the summer sun in matching lederhosen in front of the Mangeihütte.

Andi walking me down Venice beach looking gorgeous with his hair gone gray.

Maybe I really do need to have my head examined.

 

 

BACK IN the stairwell, Andi tells Jo he can go now. From what I understand, I gather he says he’ll be back with the band in a day or two and asks Jo to give the others his love.

Jo nods. He has stopped his endless talking. He looks like someone who took a good blow to the head. It’s nice, but it obviously won’t last.

I have a feeling he will tell a great many more people than just the guys from the band about what went down in the lounge of the Fankhauser this morning. He’s probably going to talk to every local in the valley.

The story is going to go viral within hours. And it might never really blow over. Rosi from the Gletschergeist is going to share it with every customer who wants to hear about the namesake of her sandwich bar for the next decade or so.

The next couple of weeks probably won’t be all peachy and a bed of roses for Andi. There will be those who’ll show their true colors. Some people will drop him.

But the important thing is, Andi came out of this whole coming-out business okay for now.

Better than okay, it would seem.

He won’t stop grinning at me. The energy of what he did, the simple relief, is radiating off him. I swear, if he weren’t limping, he’d be doing dance steps.

I wish I could share in his happiness.

Sure, I’m happy for him. Really, honestly happy.

But I’m hardly happy on my own account. How can I be? I’ll leave in half an hour’s time and won’t see him again and—yeah.

Andi is fine. That is what counts. He came out to his family, and even more importantly, he didn’t die last night.

That is what matters. Nothing else.

I’m going to cry later on the plane.

 

 

“RIGHT. BYE, then, I guess,” I say when we’ve reached his door. I can’t look at his face.

He leans against the wall, balancing on his good foot.

“You want to go change into something of your own?” he asks.

“Yeah, yeah, I guess. Can’t keep running around in this horrible shirt, can I.”

I tug at the sleeve of the rescue service shirt and attempt a laugh. It comes out rather hollow.

“You don’t have to go to your room to change, you know. You could just borrow something of mine,” Andi says. “You are a little shorter than me, but else we’ve got about the same size.”

For a moment I meet his gaze, feeling a twitch in my groin. That’s what just hearing him talk about me being shorter than him does to me. Bringing back the memory of our erect cocks rubbing against each other inside his fist….

“Justin?”

“Borrowing something from you wouldn’t make much sense, would it. I’d be leaving the country with your clothes on,” I stutter, struggling to get a grip.

There’s a small pause.

“Do you want to leave the country, then?”

It sounds like he’s talking about the big stuff.

Our lives.

At least that is how it sounds to me. Being in love so messes with your brain.

“My flight leaves in three hours. The semester starts the day after tomorrow….”

“You said you were thinking of quitting your course.”

He remembers I said that.

He’s telling me to stay.

Or is he?

As I watch him, trying to read his mind, I can see red blotches appear on his neck and cheeks. His eyelids flutter like they do, and he’s biting his lip.

Oh my God, I love him. I love him so much.

“You said you might start something new, take up a different course,” he suddenly gushes. “You could work as a snowboarding instructor until you know what you want to do. Here in Fitsch, at Happy Powder. Like you said, remember? You could do that. Make some good money while you make up your mind. Just an idea.”

I stare at him, realizing in a flash this is actually what I need to do.

He shuts his eyes, then looks me straight in the eye, and enveloping my soul in sky blue, he says on a single breath, “And also my grandma told you to take me to bed, remember? Well, I’m afraid that might take a while. I’d say you’ll have to reschedule anyway.”

Slowly my brain wraps itself around the double meaning.

Around the fact that Andi Fankhauser is propositioning me.

And actually, factually wants me to stay.

I feel something unfold in my chest, something warm and sweet and sparkling that is impossible to hide.

“Right, Bennet,” he says, his face breaking into his wonderful smile. He closes his fingers around mine. “Come on in.”