Bail | LRH

Chapter 12: cracking

Luke Hemmings

I could see her thinking about it. Whether or not she wanted to answer this truthfully, or keep me in the dark. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again, biting her bottom lip in contemplation.

"Okay, okay" she sighed before continuing. "I don't mean to be 'mysterious' or whatever, you call it, I just don't like having many people in my inner circle. I mean surely you've noticed my lack of entourage wherever I go, my best friend is literally my dad, and I don't like people getting close to me because they tend to just use me to get through to my dad and his connections. Nothing's ever really seemed genuine when it comes to people our age trying to connect with me– and that was a lot more than you asked for, sorry."

She turned away and scolded herself for dumping all of this information on me, most likely thinking that I didn't give a shit about any of it. But she didn't even realize that this was all I needed to hear. She gave me exactly what I wanted. This was useful.

"I see, I see. So you think that whenever people want to be your friend they just want to get to your dad, or use your fame or whatever." I elaborated on what she told me.

"Yeah exactly, that's why my inner circle consists of basically just my family. Considering the fact that there are like no girls my age for some unknown reason that snowboard, all of you boys at competitions ruled me out when we were kids so I figured I might as well just keep to myself. Sometimes some of the guys would try to get closer to me, again, because of my dad and because of I guess the social status or whatever I don't know and I had to cut them out after the fact."

I felt a tinge of guilt hit me in the chest. But I wasn't using her in the way that everyone else did. I didn't want the connections or the coaching, or anything that these other people wanted. I was simply testing her, seeing how much one could pile up on her plate until it was too much, seeing if her will to push forward would live up to the major talk she did. We didn't even know if this plan would work, so I shouldn't feel guilty. We haven't done anything yet, we aren't even friends yet.

"Don't tell me– was it Connor? And I'm guessing Jackson was one of them too huh?" I said knowing that those two were always trying to find some way to slither their way into better deals, bigger competitions, and other things along those lines.

"Spot on." She said while giving me finger guns. "That's why I'd rather keep my distance with everyone on the mountain, friends are just– it just doesn't work for me."

"But Calum's your friend" I said remembering that he's probably the closest to her on the mountain, for the sole reason that they were in this exact situation about a year or so ago.

"I mean if you would even call it that, it's not like we've ever hung out or anything, but if I see him out over here like I'll stop and say hi, or ask how he's doing but that's it. We don't talk outside of all this." She gestured to our surroundings.

"He considers you a friend, so there you go, you have a friend" I said, sending her a smile before adding, "and maybe if you don't decide to push me off of this thing before it starts moving again, we can be too."

"I guess I can try to be nicer to you, but I'm not making any promises. If I don't decide to kill you first, then maybe... We'll see, I haven't made up my mind yet."

"Alright, I can deal with that" I said, sticking my hand out for her to shake. She hesitated, looking down at my hand then back up to meet eyes before grabbing my hand with hers and shaking it.

"So what are we playing? Don't say eye-spy or rock paper scissors or I will actually push you" she warned.

We spent the rest of our time on the lift actually playing games, we ended up playing rock paper scissors about thirty times though. She won the majority of them. We played slide with our hands, before both of ours got too red from slapping them repeatedly. We played concentration. We played any game we could think of except eye-spy.