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Tamara sucked in a breath; the familiar sting of the frigid mountain air caught in the back of her throat. Her eyes fluttered somewhere behind the tinted goggles as she savoured it, like she always did. It didn’t matter where she was, that fresh air tasted the same nearly every mountainside. It made her head spin. She was terrified, but at the same time exhilarated. It was a high unlike anything.

Purer than the first time she’d tried to smoke behind the bike sheds. Far more exciting than the time her friend had snuck a bottle of vodka into their slumber party.

That had been kids stuff.

The breath of air left her mouth in a frozen vapour and she looked down the steep slope, covered in stark white snow as clean and as groomed as the fur on her body. The height was dizzying, only amplified by the sheer grade of the slope.

This was grown up stuff.

The green lights flashed in her eyes, and the arctic fox cursed her daydreams. She’d almost missed her cue! The cheers of the crowds were distant, muted, fading away in the rush of wind whistling through her ears as she pitched forward and jumped. A single leap took her off the ledge, her arms yanking at the gate for extra momentum. It hardly seemed logical for anyone to want to ‘throw’ themselves down a hill.

Tamara had left logic at home. All that mattered now was the feeling. The skip of her heartbeat, the rush of adrenaline, and despite the whirling chaos of snow and multicoloured parkas of the spectators blurring by in her peripheral vision, the vixen was in a total state of zen.

The polymer board strapped to her feet scraped and hissed as she cut through the snow. The edge of the snowboard carved into the ice as she adjusted her angle of approach slightly. Just ahead was her launchpad. She’d only get one more run at this. It had to be perfect.

Her knees were bent, her centre of gravity low and her arms tucked in tight to minimize drag. Only at the last minute did she straighten slightly and lean into a sharp turn.

At the exact same time the world dropped away. Gravity seemed to shift, turning her stomach upside down and she keeled forward. Her heart stopped. Her breath caught in the back of her throat.

A wide smile tore her muzzle. She lived for this shit!

Nose first, Tamara jetted into the colossal half-pipe. It was almost as big as that she’d trained in. nearly twice as big, though not as long as that carved into her usual haunt at home. But the artificial snow could hardly beat the fresh, natural powder of South Korea’s dizzying heights.

She plunged past the lip, leaving it all by her tail. Gone were the spectators now. Gone was the wind. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. She was suddenly aware of her helmet strap cutting into her chin. She flexed ever so slightly and found comfort.

Or perhaps the rush just numbed her.

The world canted again and soon she was rushing up the opposite side of the pipe. Again she was tucked low, knees bent and poised to jump like a predator on prey. In addition she coiled to one side, winding up the jump as the lip raced closer.

She timed her jump well and threw herself into a spin.

Soaring high, it was like the arctic vixen had grown wings and took flight. She cleared the half-pipe entirely and pirouetted like a ballerina unconcerned with trivial things such as ‘gravity.’ And as if to further flip Newton the bird, she twisted and grabbed the tail end of the board with her off hand.

Seconds, and 1080-degrees later she let go of the board and nosed back down to Planet Earth, and with barely an inch to spare. She hit the snow hard and raced down into the valley again, lining neatly into her next jump.

She had doubled back, practically going back the way she had come down. Further down from her entry point would come her next launchpad. two of three.

But it took its sweet time, and soon Tamara was screaming in her head – willing herself to magically regain the momentum she’d lost in her last jump.

A voice drowned out her dismay, the calm tone of Ethan focusing her zen again.

“You’re short!” she remembered him saying.

“Screw you!” her laughing retort had come. But Ethan hadn’t been finished yet.

“Yeah, you’re short. But that makes you small. Light. You might not be able to get optimal momentum on the descent, but you can jump higher on your own. You have less drag… because you’re a skinny-ass string bean.”

Tamara smirked behind her scarf as the next jump finally came. Ethan had been with her from the beginning. They’d grown up together, learned to ride together in their hometown’s raggedy artificial slopes. And if their parents were to be believed, they’d been tight friends since before either of them could walk.

She leapt into her next trick, compensating for her lack of momentum. She put more power into it, and feeling the burn in her calves she unwound her next spin with a splay of her arms. She took to the air with another 1080, and a partial backflip she’d never admit was totally accidental. But she made it work.

Keeping her hands free in case she had to rebalance on a botched landing, she slammed the curved nose of her board into the snow. She had over-spun, but she made it work. Ethan’s voice was in her head again. Always complimenting everything she did right, always ready with advice to help her improve, or at the very least a joke to motivate her.

He was telling her it was okay to make mistakes, then he’d add some quip about her being crap at this. But in a way it made her feel better about when she took a spill or didn’t land a trick quite right. His words always encouraged her to push forward, shrug off failure and keep going.

And even though Tamara was imagining his voice now, it was still a comfort. All her memories of Ethan were. Even that fateful day he’d taken a bad spill, the one that had wrenched his knee and ended his competitive snowboarding career.

Tamara had been in a panic the entire trip to the hospital. But not Ethan. He’d been cool as a frozen cucumber, assuring her he could still outride her one-legged.

A subtle windmill helped her keep balance and she kept the tail of her board from slipping out of control. She righted into a straight rush for the bottom of the half-pipe, lining up her third and final jump of the run.

“Doing good, Tam,” Ethan’s imaginary voice told her. “Remember, you’re better built for this than most grown-ass adults, and you got more skills to boot.”

The previous jump had been steep and she’d ramped slightly above her mark. So, for the last one she could increase her angle of attack. Tucking her arms behind her back she threw her weight forward slightly and dove up that final incline. The edge of the half-pipe raced into position and she leapt into it, transferring her momentum into the air and immediately rocking backwards.

Her knees bent, she grabbed the side and tail of her board while rotating backwards.

She looked up, straight down at the lip of the pipe, and for a dread moment it seemed she wasn’t rotating fast enough. Her initial calculations said that she would slam face down into the ice. Her eyes were wide behind her goggles with the realisation and panic set in.

Her synapsis fired in overtime and time seemed to freeze. A long trail of loose powder curling from the edge of the half-pipe and tracing the path her board had taken through the air hung in zero-gravity, twinkling in the dim sunlight like a sheet of crystals. The faces of spectators were contorted with cheers and cries of excitement.

But she wasn’t thinking of the world around her. She was in her own place. A safe area, away from the pressures of training and competition. Away from the snow she loved so much, separated from the high-performance board she’d saved up practically her whole life to buy.

She was thinking of Ethan.

She was thinking of their time together. All these years of high school. The breezes, the struggles, the parties and the fights. They had their good times; like cross country snowboarding in the Alps, or staying home to play video games all night.

And the bad; Tamara crying in her room alone when another girl asked Ethan to prom.

But no matter what stepped between them, in the end Tamara and Ethan always came together again. Like Ethan’s knee. It should have been the end of his enthusiasm for Winter Sports. But it only tightened their bond. Where he could just ride casually and not compete, he was there to help Tamara train and push her to soar higher than either of them had imagined they could do individually.

No matter what, their fates were intertwined. Where Tamara went, Ethan followed. And she refused to have it any other way.

In that split second of synaptic overdrive, she came to a blatant realisation for why that was.

“I love him,” Tamara quietly realised.

Time screeched into its normal progression again.

The world realigned, and as if the realisation drew fate’s blessings to her, the planet righted itself. Her board hit the snow and she nailed the landing, gently soaring out the bottom of the half-pipe and onto the shallow run-off at the bottom of the slope.

She’d seen the other athletes on runs ahead of her take this final run with their arms held high, riding with triumph into the arms of friends and loved ones at the bottom. But as she approached the small conference forming just ahead, Tamara’s arms hung limply by her side. She barely could find the feeling in her fingers to pull down her scarf as she rode a curved groove of compacted snow to a figure breaking from the crowd.

He was her age, slightly taller and his lean frame was bulked by a parka quite like Tamara’s. Ethan was human, a woollen cap keeping his head and ears warm. He was punching the sky as he ran forward, laughing and shouting. And still Tamara said nothing, as if she was stunned.

Then she suddenly rushed forward with new speed and collided with the human.

They went down hard, with the violence of a rugby tackle. It happened so quickly that Ethan couldn’t fight it. He was just floored into the snow, flat on his back with the arctic fox pinning him down, and her mouth crashing into his.

The world had faded away, the same way when Tamara dropped into the half-pipe. But before everything muted she heard a sharp gasp of surprise from Ethan. There was a thunderous roar of applause from the spectators. One lady standing nearby let out a long “Aaaaaaw!”

Tamara broke the kiss, slowly and reluctantly. But she had to see Ethan. She wanted to see his eyes, to see what he made of this. And naturally he was stunned.

But then he smiled. Relief washed over Tamara like a wave of familiar adrenaline, and she pressed into his hand as he tenderly touched her face. She closed in again and their lips met for a second time, passionately. Ethan’s jaw loosened and he received her more openly now, letting her tilt her face slightly and push into the kiss.

Neither registered the eyes of the world upon them.

Tamara didn’t care about training, or competitions or judges anymore. It didn’t matter what was being displayed on the scoreboard. To her, this had been a perfect run.

##SEY MAH NEHM!##

Author’s Note :

Took maybe an hour to slam this out? Dunno. I wasn't timing.

Originally this was going to be this big long story that starts out the same as above, but Ethan is like this big shot celebrity snowboarder with a couple of gold medals under his belt, and Tamara has idolised him throughout her entire competitive career. However, it turns out Tamara is like forty-eight hours shy of her eighteenth birthday, so in the aftermath of their spontaneous public kiss they both fall into controversy as people start asking questions about what happened between them while they were training for the Olympics. Is Ethan guilty of grooming, etc? The whole thing tears them apart.

On one side you have Ethan who is the adult and ashamed of himself for what he may have done to lead her on, but on the other side you have Tamara who is mentally more mature than any of their critics, and she couldn’t give two shits. She just wants to hang out with her hero, especially on her birthday.

In the end Ethan realises Tamara is his friend first, and for the first time stops giving a damn about what other people think of him. He abandons his plans of putting as much distance as he can between him and Tamara and catches up with her on the slopes.

Having reconvened their friendship, Tamara kisses Ethan one more time and states she’s happy they’re still friends… for a year, anyway; just to be safe. After that there would be no more excuses.

The story was awesome in the planning stage, but once it all got typed up in rough form I realised the subject matter was really heavy stuff. And the “underage issue” always gets people riled up, so I guess I’m also a little too chicken-shit to even explore it properly.

But most of all it was the ending that really bothered me. It would have been a happy ending on paper, sure. But it’s the ambiguity of it that bothered me, because it was open ended enough for a reader to put a really depressing spin on it. It kind of made the whole journey not worth experiencing, and thus not worth writing about.

I’m happier with just leaving it at this short and sweet little tale. It’s got a happy ending, no matter how you try and twist it.

And happy endings are best endings… wait, that came out dirty.