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“So, when you told me, ‘Don’t worry, Nile, Joe is a beginner too,’” Nile said, pulling her sunglasses down her nose just so she could look directly into Nicky’s lying, lying face. “What you actually meant was, Joe is a beginner next to Andy, who has been alive for over six thousand years.”
Nicky didn’t have the decency to look even a little bit apologetic. “He has only been skiing since the ‘80s,” he said. “You cannot truly call that experience.”
Nile glared. “I was lured here under false pretenses.”
The corner of Nicky’s mouth curved up. “And is here so very awful?"
They were sitting on the ground, for various definitions of sitting. Nile was half sprawled on a pile of snow, one ski still attached to her boot; Nicky had rescued the second ski when it detached during her tumble, and was now crouched next to her, helping position it back into place. Pine trees lined the slope, sunlight glittering off the white coat dusting their branches, like something out of a postcard. And stretching below them, like a miniature painting printed on a chocolate bar wrapper, were the snow topped mountaintops of the Dolomites, towering around a valley that seemed to go on forever.
“I mean,” she said, after a moment. “I guess it’s not the worst.” Nicky extended a hand, and Nile pulled herself up, leaning against him and pushing down against the ski until she heard it click back into place. “You still suck, though,” she added.
“I’ll take it under consideration,” Nicky said, serene as a snowfall, and led her back down.
*
It was, she admitted later on, definitely not the worst, even though it was yet another activity in which Nile had decades of years of catching up to do, and she hated losing (though it was not, she knew, a competition. Officially.)
The resort they were staying at was a five star hotel, courtesy of the client who’d hired them to do The Italian Job – Nicky hated when she called it that, so Nile made sure to call it The Italian Job as often as possible – and a welcome luxury, after spending the majority of the past month in an old safehouse in Munich.
In the evening, after dinner comprised of steak and potatoes and grilled vegetables – all of them fancy Italian ones – and a bottle of wine, they sat in the hotel common room playing scrabble and Rummy, Joe and Nicky’s thighs pressed against each other, Andy warming her back against the fireplace in the lobby.
“She’s gotta be cheating, right?” Nile asked.
Joe snorted.
“She’s sitting right here,” Andy said mildly.
“I’m not asking you,” Nile said. “I’m asking Joe. The only trustworthy person in the room.”
Joe tapped his cards on the table thoughtfully. “It’s a philosophical question. If you cheat but don’t get caught, is it still considered cheating?”
“Yes.”
Joe grinned, and ducked as Andy flicked a crumpled napkin at him. “Just for that,” she said, “I’m going to clean you out next round.”
“Wait, clean him out?” Nile asked. “Are we even playing for something?”
“Hot chocolate,” Andy said, taking another card from the pile.
“Six months on this team, and I can’t even tell if you’re joking,” Nile sighed.
“She’s not,” Nicky assured her. “The boss hasn’t joked about hot chocolate since 1963.”
“A weirdly specific reference,” Nile said. “Now I can’t tell if you’re joking.”
“He’s not,” Joe said fondly. “You know Nicky’s a terrible joker.”
“Speaking of jokers,” Andy said, putting her card down on the table, and Nile groaned. Really. Some jokes should be illegal. Also, cheating.
“Well, I’m gonna pack it in,” Andy said, after a few more rounds, and two mugs of what was technically hot chocolate but really, Nile could tell, a tower of whipped cream in a mug over the minimal liquid requirement to be considered a drink. “See you at 8AM?” she asked, because she was a sadist, and Joe and Nicky nodded, because they were whipped, and Nile found herself nodding along, because, she guessed, maybe she was too.
*
The best thing about skiing with Joe and Nicky was seeing Joe’s delight when Nicky fell down.
“He’s just so smug about it,” Joe explained fondly, pocketing his phone after taking a video of Nicky spitting out snow after rolling down just a little bit of… mountain. “He and Booker started going maybe sixty, seventy years ago. It was their thing. By the time I joined in, they were whizzing down off-pistes when I was still struggling with getting on a chair lift.”
“Don’t know what that’s like at all,” Nile said drily.
Joe glanced at her, grinning. “Yes, well.”
They were a little lower on the slope than Nicky was, standing off to the side and waiting for him to finish gathering himself. Nicky’s jacket was a bright orange, entirely clashing with turquoise pants but conveniently easy to spot.
“Did you always come here?” Nile asked. There was something comforting about hearing Joe talk about Booker, no longer suppressed with quiet rage, but just… neutral. Reminiscing.
“Ha, no,” he said. “As if either of them could ever agree on where the better resorts were. Modern Italy is not a country or nation Nicky particularly relates to, he is too old for that – but try telling that to him when Booker starts going on about the superiority of the French Alps, and suddenly Nicky turns into a pizza, parmigiano, ragù, Juventus monster. It’s odd but kind of cute.”
The sun was shining, the snow getting a little slushy but not too hard to handle – Nicky joined them, giving Joe a dirty look for the video – “You were far away!” Joe protested, “no one can identify you with the hat and goggles anyway” – and continued down. Whenever they reached a fork in the road, Joe and Nicky let Nile choose the way, letting her lead them down whatever paths she felt comfortable in, some more challenging, some not. Nile could handle herself down the pistes, but she wasn’t nearly as graceful as Joe and Nicky, who carved the snow with such elegance it seemed effortless. Nile, on the other hand, felt her thighs burning by early afternoon.
“Time out,” she said on one of their next stops, holding a hand up and panting. Joe immediately understood, and said, “Come on. There’s a good spot nearby for a break.”
They’d skied through two towns that day; now, Joe led them into a gondola that would take them back up the mountain. The ride up left her a little queasy, the small compartment hot and stuffy and dangling over a giant rocky chasm below, but when they exited at the top, the view took her breath away.
It felt like a restaurant at the end of the world. Joe ordered them waffles and mulled wine, and they sat on the wooden deck of the patio, stripping off gloves and hats and coats – in Joe’s case, stripping all the way down to a t-shirt, which Nicky was definitely enjoying – and leaned back, basking in the warm sunlight.
“I hope you put sunscreen on,” Nicky said, and Nile hummed her assent. Andy wouldn’t let her leave the room without sunscreen in the morning. It was very sweet.
Joe chuckled. “Remember—"
“Oh yes,” Nicky said, and turned to Nile. “Booker tended to forget about sunscreen.”
“Well,” Joe corrected, “either forget, or just have faith in his body’s ability to protect itself from UV rays.”
“Misplaced faith.”
“Extremely. But,” Joe pointed out, “he never forgot his chap stick.”
“True,” Nicky said. “A very generous application of white chap stick, and goggles, and the rest of his face would burn red like a lobster.”
Nile took a sip of her hot wine, spiced with cider, and her breath fogged in the air. “You seem to be enjoying the memory a lot,” she pointed out.
“Well.” Nicky smiled happily. “If I recall, the last time it happened was just after Booker had spent the afternoon pontificating about much better the après-ski was in France than here, and next thing we knew he looked like a clown mask was tattooed onto his face.”
Nile frowned. “Do you even have a word for après-ski in Italian?”
“We don’t talk about that,” Nicky said immediately.
Joe was shaking his head, clearly trying not to laugh. “We don’t talk about that.”
*
By the time they tried heading back to the hotel, some of the lifts back had already closed, and they had to ski down to the nearest village and take a bus, carrying their equipment over their shoulders through the last stretch. When Nile finally arrived in her and Andy’s room, she collapsed on her bed, too tired to even think of taking a shower.
“Everything hurts,” she groaned.
Andy was sitting on a couch by the window, reading a newspaper. She had spent the day skijoring, which was apparently skiing while being dragged forward by a horse because Andy was just that extra, and mortal, and probably not in any pain at all.
“You should go to the spa,” Andy suggested.
Nile lifted her head from the bed. “There’s a spa here?”
Andy raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t give me that look, there were no spas in safehouses in the last six months!”
Nile rolled herself out of bed and into slippers. “Wait,” she said. “This isn’t going to be like one of those,” she wiggled her eyebrows, “mixed nude spas just because we’re in Europe, right?”
Andy smiled. “Wrong part of Europe, wrong time of Europe,” she said.
“Right.” Nile breathed a sigh of relief. “Last thing I need is to go down there and see a bunch of naked sixty year old dudes. I mean – not that sixty is, uh, old or anything!” Andy didn’t say anything. “I’m just saying, like, there’s a difference between seeing a sixty year old naked and like, going down there and encountering Joe and Nicky naked, you know?” Andy gave her an interested look. Nile had no idea what her mouth was saying. “…I’m just going to go dunk myself in some hot water now, bye,” she said, and fled the room.
*
Nile spent far too long in the steam room and far too long in the jacuzzi but fuck it, she was immortal, she could do what she wanted, and took a long, steaming hot shower afterwards, the kind that felt like it was soaking her muscles to the core.
She met the others for dinner. This time, they decided to stroll around the town looking for a place to eat, instead of staying at the hotel. They crossed the stone bridge over the bubbling stream that flowed through the town, found a small, family-owned place to eat, where Nile ordered the best soup she’d possibly ever tasted. On the way back to the hotel, they walked by a small plaza behind the town church, which was displaying an array of lit up, bigger than life snow sculptures. A castle; a pair of elves; a giant bear; Snoopy; and—
“Nicky?” Nile blurted. “What the?”
It wasn’t a giant statue like the others, but it was definitely a bust of Nicky, beautifully carved into ice and snow, basked in soft light reflected from the other sculptures. It was obvious who the culprit was.
Nicky was looking at Joe with warmth in his eyes. “Is this where you snuck off to last night?”
Joe smiled, with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders.
“It’s beautiful,” Nile said with wonder. “I didn’t know you sculpted too.”
“Don’t ask him who he learned from,” Andy said, her boots crunching on the snow. She nudged closer to Joe, leaning against him, so much affection in her eyes. “It is beautiful.”
Joe ducked his head, one arm going briefly around her, just a touch.
“Your name should be plastered in all the papers,” Nicky sighed. “Around the world. You should be a renowned artist.”
“Nile,” Andy prompted, the way she did every time Nicky started talking about how Joe deserved to be out in the world making a name for himself, ever since she’d heard Nile singing it to herself one day:
“Have you heard the news that you’re dead,” Nile sighed, hopefully not too off-key, she should really just keep a snippet of that on her phone just for cases Andy wanted to troll the others or remind them of the harsh realities of life (or death).
“Okay, okay, I know, the world doesn’t get to have Joe,” Nicky said, taking Joe’s gloved hand, and starting to walk back to the hotel, as the first flakes of snow were beginning to fall. “Just us.”
*
Nile woke up late the next morning. Her muscles were still sore from yesterday, the way they got after a day of good, hard training; she could count the aches in her shoulders, arms and thighs.
The blanket was soft and warm, and she pulled it up, snuggling deeper. If she didn’t open her eyes, it would be like she hadn’t woken up at all.
But Andy was an early riser. She’d want them up soon.
Nile gave a good, deep groan.
She felt the mattress dip. “Shhh,” she heard softly. “It’s okay. You can go back to sleep.”
Nile blinked her eyes open blearily.
The room was lit in a washed out light from the window. The curtains were open, and it looked like there was a blizzard outside. Andy sat on her bed.
“We’re not going out in that,” Andy said. She placed a hand on Nile’s back, stroking soothingly through the blanket. “You can sleep in. I’ll bring you up some breakfast. The boys will come in later too, we can watch a movie or something.”
Nile was so tired, and so warm. She hoped they had enough blankets in the room for Joe and Nicky too, because anyone who entered the room this morning should feel as cozy as she did.
She thought about breakfast in bed, about snuggling under the covers as the snow continued to fall outside, with Joe and Nicky safe and nearby, and Andy’s hands, soothing and steady against her, and let herself fell back asleep.