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Brad doesn’t get out of bed on his day off for anything less than fresh powder, bright sun, and low wind. He spends enough of his working days slogging through crud, clouds, and gusts of ice, but when these conditions hit, it’s undeniable like a siren song.
He gets up early and pulls on his layers and boots. Hoists his skis over his shoulder and gets into the powder before it’s defiled by jerries from New Jersey.
“Hey Colbert,” Q-Tip calls over, scraping at a sheet of ice with a pick as Brad loads onto the lift. “Hope you got your handwarmers.”
Brad scoffs as he reaches up to lower the bar. Safety first.
“Handwarmers are for small children and lawyers,” and Brad only wears trusty GoreTex from the eighties.
It’s beautiful out here today, like a picture or a painting, the snow soft and supple beneath his skis. He heads down from the lift and over to where the runs are steep and majestic, where he can plough through the powder in god-given solitude.
Except for the flash of yellow over in the glade to his left.
Someone’s tearing through the woods, fast and reckless, like they’ve already gone and decided that the here and now is the best way to die.
It’s his day off, but fuck it. Brad hates idiots and particularly those in bright yellow ski jackets. It’s always the yellow jackets.
He veers off the trail and into the trees, snow shredding into thin white clouds behind him. The terrain is rough and densely woody here, a solid Bad Idea given the dubious snow coverage from the dry weeks before, but the moron that Brad’s chasing is zipping ahead through the birches, easy and at home like there's nothing to it, and there's only one way down so Bad Idea it is.
By the time Yellow Jacket glides to a stop, they’re out of the trees in a clearing far below and Brad’s knees are complaining loudly.
“Sir,” Brad calls out, adopting a somewhat well-used tone that says you might have paid a hundred and fifty bucks for your lift ticket but I'm still your daddy. “That is dangerous skiing. Be advised - ”
And then Nate pulls off his goggles and helmet and grins at Brad, and Brad's gotta say, he's almost impressed.
“Be advised what, Brad?”
“Isn’t there a conga line of second wives you should be leading down the bunny hill?”
Nate laughs. “Day off. Like you,” he says, nodding at Brad’s own plain clothes get-up. “Although unlike you, I draw lines between work and pleasure.”
“You’ll have to forgive me for trying to keep your ass out of trouble.”
“Did my ass look like it was in trouble?”
Nate says this without a hint of smugness, like it's just a question that he and Brad both happen to know the answer to. The answer being that Nate is really, really good. If Brad believed in fucking useless inventions like GoPros, Nate would probably be one of maybe three people he would allow to have one.
“Only idiots go tree-skiing with this level of snow coverage,” Brad counters.
“Interesting,” Nate says thoughtfully, clicking his helmet back into place. “Look who followed.”
Unbelievable.
“Want to hit some chutes?” Nate asks, pulling down his goggles.
“More people should know what a pain in the ass you are.”
Nate grins at this and Brad follows him anyway.