(rivals to lovers, small town, sports) [WATTYS 2024 SHORTLIST] (Season 3 coming soon) After a devastating Olympic loss puts her career in a downward spiral, an aging skier returns to her laid-back mountain hometown to rediscover her love of her spor...
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"Okay," Juniper said to herself, pulling her shoulders back against the pain that had been low-key bothering her for days. "This's just a conversation. You got this."
Summer's comment about her negative self-talk had gotten under her skin. Maybe because Juniper knew that she didn't used to be like this. It wasn't fun to see herself as a failure. She figured it was worth trying to cultivate a more positive approach.
Specifically, right now she was trying to pump herself up to talk Mike's daughter out of quitting skiing. Even though she still wasn't entirely certain that she didn't want to quit.
She was pretty sure positivity didn't used to be this hard, either.
The bitter wind followed her through the door into the toasty warmth inside Bootlegger's Brew. The teen girl waiting by the bar only looked up from her phone long enough to pull a face that made it clear how much she did not want to be here.
Juniper felt the exact same way, but she smiled anyway. "Lizzy?"
"It's Elizabeth."
"Cool. Nice to see you again, Elizabeth."
The girl threw herself into a chair, dumped her backpack on the floor, and glued her eyes to her phone. Juniper hovered.
"Can I get you anything?"
The answer was a very complicated drink order. Juniper splurged and got herself a cookie, too. She needed it.
While she waited for the espresso machine to do its magic, she studied Elizabeth across the room. The gangly red-headed kid she remembered had grown up into a less gangly teenager who wore very complicated eyeliner. Her clothes were far more stylish than anything Juniper remembered owning at that age. Or the clothes she owned now.
Positivity. It was a good thing they were here to talk about skiing, not fashion.
Elizabeth didn't say thank you when Juniper set her drink down, just picked it up with one hand and kept thumbing at her phone with the other. Juniper settled in the other seat, breaking off bite-sized chunks of cookie and trying to find a position that didn't make her shoulders complain.
Sometimes her back liked to remind her that she had spent most of her teen summers showing off and taking nasty falls on her water skis. She had booked a physio appointment to deal with it, but while she waited for Elizabeth to look up all she could do was shift in the chair until her spine stopped yelling and settled to a grumble instead.
"Oh, you can talk," Elizabeth said eventually, her eyes still fixed on her phone screen. "I'm listening."
"Okay. How was your race last weekend?" she asked, speaking to that wall of sleek red hair.
"It was a race."
Juniper crossed her forearms on the little table and decided to take the Summer Li approach: extreme directness. "Look, you clearly don't want to be here. I don't really want to be here, either. But your dad said that you turned down an invitation to join the development team this year. He thought you might want to talk to someone about why you want to quit ski racing."
