Do-Over (4 page)

And I look incredible. In ski pants! The ones he chose are even better than the ones Christie suggested. When I sent her a pic of me in the new pants, she got all excited about them.

Good thing, because I need something to distract me (and Christie) from the David Anderson issue, which has been plaguing me for two solid days and is now threatening to ruin my Saturday, too.

Somehow I’ve gotta get over it. Just forget Christie ever brought it up.

“You ready?” Georg asks. He looks completely comfortable with his ski gear, like he could go down any slope without worrying that he’ll crash and burn the way I worry. He has his boots on, and he’s carrying his skis over his shoulder, pointing toward the nearest chairlift with one pole. “We can put our skis on once we’re closer to the lift line.”

He’s so gung ho, I just know he’s going to be disappointed by my skiing skills. I hope he doesn’t get too torqued waiting for me
when I panic at the top of every section that looks the least bit icy or steep.

“Sure,” I say. “Let’s wait for Dad and what’s-her-name, though. They’ll want to know where we’re going.”

Georg grins, letting his skis slide down in front of him so the tails rest in the snow. “Her name is Fraulein Putzkammer. But she said you can call her Miss Putzkammer if you want.”

I roll my eyes. I cannot, cannot say “Putzkammer.” Please. It’s hard enough just to think of her as The Fraulein—which is now my mental nickname for her—because
fraulein
is a strange enough word itself. The French
mademoiselle
is so much cooler. “I still don’t get why the press office felt like they had to send someone along.”

I’m sure The Fraulein is nice enough. She’s probably in her late thirties or early forties. She’s also way prettier than her name makes her sound, with blond hair and a fairly athletic bod—nothing sagging too far south—which I assume also means she can keep up while we ski. And she seemed okay on the way here last night. She let me and Georg choose which CDs to listen to in the
car, and she didn’t seem to mind when I took longer than everyone else at the gas station, trying to count out the euros correctly to pay for a candy bar so I could get my chocolate fix. She even translated some of the wall signs for me when we checked into our cutesy little guesthouse last night here in Scheffau.

But something about her isn’t sitting right with me. It’s more than the fact that she’s obsessive about telling Georg to keep his ski cap on whenever he’s not wearing his helmet, just to improve the odds that no one will recognize him this weekend and we can have a more relaxing, private vacation. More than the fact that she flirts with my dad, because pretty much all women over voting age flirt with my dad.

Scary, I know, but the guy
is
decent-looking in a parental sort of way. He goes to the gym every morning to keep his buffed-up muscles, plus he has the whole etiquette thing going for him. Women get all into that.

I glance over as the unnaturally blond Fraulein brushes a piece of lint off the side of her ski jacket, resolve to be my nicey-nice
self and not make a crack about how lint won’t matter once she’s skiing, then turn toward Georg, who’s messing around with the bindings on his skis. Without even looking up, he whispers, “Don’t worry about her, Val.”

“Easy for you to say.”

My bullshit detector is pretty finely tuned, so it doesn’t usually go off without reason. The fact that I can’t pinpoint why is driving me bonkers. But I don’t want to get all bitchy about her and then find out I’m way off base, either.

“She’s been working for my parents and traveling with them for almost five years now. She even came on my Zermatt trip over winter break to keep an eye on me. She’s cool.” Georg’s voice is low enough that she can’t hear him from where she’s sitting on the bench, pulling on her ski gloves. “And she’s really helpful, Val. If any media types show up, she’ll work with them to arrange a time where they can ask me questions or take photos somewhere here at the base lodge. Otherwise, they’ll all buy ski passes and try to snap pictures on the slopes, which is dangerous for
everyone. Or worse, they’ll try to follow us in the evenings to see if something is up with you and me so they can write about it.” He raises his head and his eyes meet mine for a brief moment. “I don’t know if my parents would have let me come without her.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.” Dad explained it all last night, once we’d checked in and Georg was in his room next door to ours and The Fraulein was in her room across the hall. “But it still sucks. I was hoping it’d just be you, me, and Dad. Mostly just you and me.”

“It will be,” he assures me. “We’ll split off from them when we get to the summit. As long as we check in on the cell phone every so often, we should have plenty of time to ourselves.”

The smile he gives me as we follow Dad and The Fraulein to the lift line makes me want to crumple right there in the snow. Especially when he adds, “Hey, cool ski pants. Those new?”

Gotta love a guy who notices.

Dad and The Fraulein are ready to go, so we head to the lift line. As we snap on our
skis, Georg asks me how Christie, Jules, and Natalie are doing, just because that’s the kind of guy he is. And he’s never even met them.

He’s just so amazingly perfect.

And I’m so
not
. Just thinking about Christie ties my stomach up in knots again.

How could I possibly have cheated on Georg?

Okay, it’s not like I was
cheating
cheating on him in Virginia. He did tell me he wanted us to cool it (his exact words) right before I went home on break, so what did he expect? And my friends set me up with David, totally without my knowledge, so it wasn’t as if I initiated the date at all. And they did it in a way that would have made it rude for me to back out.

We only went out one time after the initial setup date, and that was it. Over and out. I figured out pretty fast that, for one, I was still crushing pretty bad on Georg even if he did want to cool it (and even if it turned out I misinterpreted what he meant), and for two, once I actually went out with David, he just didn’t do it for me. Even when he kissed me, it wasn’t anything as
good as Georg’s kisses. No zing. No flair. No ooh-baby-do-I-want-you-now.

I think David and I would still be really good friends if I lived in Virginia. However, even if he kissed better than Georg, we’re just too different on the inside to be an actual couple. I firmly believe this, despite the fact that I had a massive crush on him for so long, it could probably be recorded in the
Guinness Book of World Records
, assuming they covered such things. David simply looks at the world in a different way than I do.

Specifically, in a way that wouldn’t include my mom.

I can’t blame David for his views, especially since he idolizes his father, who’s this hotshot Republican lobbyist I’m constantly seeing on CNN talking about the importance of strong Christian families in holding together the fabric of society. (Really, he said that to Paula Zahn last year. In prime time.)

Frankly, I don’t expect anyone to be all happy-happy-happy that my mom’s a lesbian or anything like that. I’m still having trouble dealing with the fact that my parents aren’t together anymore, let alone the
whole Mom-is-living-with-another-woman thing.

But the entire David incident drove home to me that I really need to be with someone who can understand my family and its quirks and still be okay with it all. Someone who can be okay with
me
, exactly the way I am. Even on the days when I’m not okay with who I am.

And that someone is Georg. My heart has been with him the whole time. If he really meant to break up with me during our whole “cool it” thing, I know deep down inside that I’d still be devastated.

Mom assured me that it was fine that I went out with David while I was home and told me not to feel the least bit guilty. She said I wasn’t cheating on Georg. That I was learning what I don’t want in life, which is as important as learning what I do want—or something Oprah-ish along those lines.

At the time, it made perfect sense. After all, it’s not like I’m thirty and married to Georg and still trying to figure out what I want by messing around with another guy. I’m fifteen, I just started going out with my
first-ever boyfriend, and we haven’t been together very long at all.

But now, waiting in the lift line with Georg next to me and Dad and The Fraulein behind me, I have to wonder if I handled things the right way. If I really should have been listening to Mom, the Self-Help Book Queen of the World, instead of my own gut. And if I should have fessed up to Georg the minute I got home and realized that he didn’t want us to be broken up, but just wanted us to keep things low-key.

Georg and I get up to the front of the line. Thankfully, I don’t take a header as I scoot to the red STOP marker and wait for the chair to come around behind me so I can sit. Once we’re airborne and Georg has pulled the safety bar down in front of us, I close my eyes, enjoying the morning sunshine and the soft breeze blowing on my face. I can hear the swoosh of skis against snow as we sail over the heads of the skiers who got here before us and have managed to squeeze in a run or two already.

This is so much better than just hanging out in the palace scribbling essays for school or killing time vacuuming the apartment
for Dad while I wait for Georg to get home from a soccer game.

That thought instantly makes me picture Georg in his soccer shorts. Yummy, yummy, yum, yum, yum. His legs are all muscular without being bulky. The kind you can just run your hands over and—

Georg’s arm bumps against mine. “Perfect day, huh? The snow’s just glittering. And it’s not too cold, either.”

I turn and look at him. He’s so gorgeous I can’t stand it. His helmet is covering most of his dark hair and he’s pulled his goggles down over his eyes, but I can still make out a devilish gleam through the lenses that makes me go all loopy. Mostly ’cause I know that gleam is one hundred percent for me.

“You know I love you madly, right?”

It just blurts right out of my big mouth, right there with my dad all of twenty feet behind me on the next chair.

We’ve never done the “I love you” bit. I made a pact with Christie, Jules, and Natalie years ago that if any of us ever felt that way about a guy, we’d wait for him to say it first. But I couldn’t help it.

And now that I’ve had two shocked seconds to think about what I just said, I don’t want to take it back.

Even though we’re totally in public here on the lift and Dad and what’s-her-name are on the chair right behind ours, Georg eases his hand across the seat and slips his gloved fingers over mine.

“You have no idea how much I want to kiss you right now,” he whispers.

Oh, I can guess.

I scoot just a little closer to him on the chair, lace my fingers up through his, then squeeze. We let go quickly, since neither one of us wants a lecture from Dad or The Fraulein about how inappropriate it is for a prince to engage in PDA.

“We’ll find an empty section of the trail after we ditch them.” There’s enough urgency underlying Georg’s scrumptious accent to have me scanning the slope immediately, trying to see what areas are in view of people riding the chairlift so we don’t do anything stupid in any of those places.

We get off the lift and decide to take one of the easy runs, just to warm up.

On the good side: Even after nine months
off, I pick up right where I left off from skiing. I glide right along. I don’t fall or even wobble on the way down. I manage to do this even though I know Georg’s watching me and even though I can practically feel him kissing me, I want him so bad.

On the not-so-good side: Dad and The Fraulein stick to us like glue the whole way down. Even when I pause at the side of the trail and fake like I need to adjust my goggles, they stop and wait.

Can they tell Georg and I are dying to jump each other or what?

When we get to the lift, I tell Dad that I think Georg and I are going to head to another part of the slope now that we’ve done a practice run, but we’ll make sure we don’t draw any attention to ourselves. Georg adds that we can meet them for lunch and that if they need us before that, we’ll both have our cell phones.

Dad agrees (hooray!), but then he maneuvers in the lift line so I end up riding with him this time while Georg’s stuck with The Fraulein.

I feel bad for Georg, but better him than me.

“You looked pretty good there,” Dad says
as we take off. “Must be the new ski pants.”

“Very funny.”

“Look, Val, I wanted to ride with you for a reason.” His voice is quiet, like he’s afraid what he’s saying might carry to Georg and The Fraulein on the chair behind us.

Damn. Time to do a preemptive strike against his fatherly instinct to lecture me. “I promise, Dad, Georg will keep his helmet on. I don’t think anyone will realize who he is. And we’ll definitely behave if we go—”

“It’s not that,” Dad assures me. “I trust the two of you.”

He’s quiet for a minute, using his pole to pick some loose snow off the side of his boot as the chair ascends. Once he’s settled again, he says, “It’s just . . . do you remember when I e-mailed you in Virginia to let you know I’d be meeting you at the airport when you returned home from break?”

“Sure.”

“I said I wanted to hear all about your trip, but that I also had news to share with you.”

“Oh. Sorry . . . guess I forgot.” Duh. I totally spaced that he said he wanted to talk about what happened with him while I was
gone. Or maybe I just assumed he was saying he wanted to talk because he
always
wants to talk, and it’s usually just to nag me about proper behavior. Or to tell me all about what dignitaries he had the chance to meet while he was at work that day. Then it occurs to me. “Are you going to have to travel for work?”

I knew that travel was a possibility when I moved here with Dad. Part of why we’re living in the palace instead of some apartment in downtown Freital (the capital city and, frankly, the only real town in Schwerinborg) is so that if Dad needs to go along on any official trips with Prince Manfred, I’ll be where other adults can check up on me. Make sure I eat decent food and don’t skip school and all the usual stuff Mom did whenever Dad traveled during his last job, working for the president. And being at the palace—as Dad has pointed out on numerous occasions—means no one can get to our apartment (or to me) without going through metal detectors and showing ID first. It’s like being a well-guarded dignitary myself. Or a prisoner in lockdown, depending on how I feel on any given day.