Friction
HIGH ALTITUDE – PART IV
In the last installment of High Altitude…
R. Adrian Thorne
The lift creaked and swayed beneath us, suspended by thick cables and blind faith.
Matt sat to my right, goggles down, mouth hidden behind the zip of his jacket. He hadn’t said much since we suited up — just the basics. Where’s your pass. You good. Let’s hit Cloudline first.
We hadn’t touched. Not once.
Not since the room.
Not since my hand was on him and his was on me and the only sound between us was breath and the kind of want you don’t come back from.
Now it was wind. And snow. And the occasional distant scrape of skis below.
My gloves were thick, but my hands still felt bare.
I tried to focus on the trees. The slope. The horizon line we were slowly rising toward. Anything but the silence beside me.
“You warm enough?” he asked suddenly, voice muffled behind his fleece-lined collar.
I glanced at him. His goggles reflected the sky. “Yeah.”
A beat.
“Sleep okay?”
He turned his head just slightly when he said it — not enough to make a thing out of it, but enough to make sure I felt the question.
I swallowed. “Yeah. You?”
A pause. Then: “Didn’t really sleep.”
My heart kicked.
He adjusted his gloves. “Couldn’t stop thinking.”
I didn’t ask about what. I didn’t need to.
The lift bumped as it passed a pole, jostling us an inch closer. Our thighs touched through our layers. Neither of us moved away.
The air was colder up here, sharper. But my skin burned under it.
“You okay?” he asked, quieter now.
I looked at him. At the space where his eyes were, somewhere behind the reflection of trees and sky in his lenses.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
He nodded.
Me neither.
He didn’t say it, but I heard it anyway.
The lift kept climbing.
The lift creaked again, swaying gently as we climbed. I could see our reflection in the glass of the ski patrol outpost we passed — two bodies side by side, still as statues.
He shifted next to me. Adjusted his goggles. Cleared his throat.
“I keep thinking about… the friendship.”
His voice wasn’t loud. Just clear.
I turned, but not fully. Just enough that I could hear the way his words sat in the space between us.
“It’s not just a friendship,” I said, before I could think better of it.
“I know.” He exhaled, clouding the air in front of us. “But it is too.”
And that landed hard. Because it was. The most important one I had. The longest. The closest. The one that had gotten me through breakups and finals and family shit I still didn’t know how to talk about. The one that knew the inside jokes. The dumb high school versions of us. The nights we almost froze in that busted Civic and laughed about it anyway.
I looked down at the slope as it drifted away beneath us.
“I don’t want to mess this up,” I said.
Matt nodded slowly. “Me either.”
We sat with that for a minute. Just let the wind say what we couldn’t.
Then — quieter — he added: “I didn’t expect it to feel like that.”
“You mean… good?”
He let out a breath. “Yeah.”
I laughed, soft and nervous. “Yeah. Me too.”
Another pause.
Then, almost too quietly: “I keep thinking about them.”
And I knew who he meant.
Emily. Lauren.
Our girlfriends.
The ones we’d left behind for a long weekend in the snow. The ones who knew about our friendship, but not the weight of it. Not the way it shifted last night. Not the fact that, for a few long, aching minutes, we stopped being just best friends and became something else entirely.
“They don’t deserve to be lied to,” I said, my voice low. Raw.
“No,” he agreed.
“But I don’t know what this is yet.”
“Same.”
The lift creaked again. We were almost at the summit.
“We can’t pretend it didn’t happen,” I said.
“I don’t want to.”
That hit me harder than I expected. I looked at him again, and this time he met my eyes — goggles off now, just him.
Matt. The one I’d known forever.
But also the one I was just starting to see.
“I don’t know what happens next,” I said.
He didn’t answer right away.
But his glove brushed mine on the safety bar. Not an accident.
Not this time.
“We figure it out,” he said.
The lift rolled forward. The bar lifted.
We reached the summit.
It was quiet up there — wind brushing past the ridgeline, snow crunching under boots as we slid off the chair and planted ourselves at the top of the run.
We didn’t say anything.
Just pulled our goggles down. Tugged gloves tighter. Clicked in.
Matt gave me a quick glance — not loaded, not heavy. Just a check-in. The kind he always gave me before we dropped into something steep.
I nodded.
And then we pushed off.
The slope opened wide beneath us — powdery and fast, the wind slicing past my face as I picked up speed. Trees blurred at the edge of my vision. My legs burned. My heart raced.
But for the first time since we left the room, I wasn’t thinking.
Not about the bed.
Not about the way he touched me.
Not about the way I didn’t want him to stop.
Just the mountain. The air. The way our lines carved side by side — not identical, but always finding their way back to each other.
Halfway down, he turned his head and shouted something I couldn’t hear — the wind swallowed it up — but he was laughing.
And so was I.
Because whatever came next…
This?
This was still ours.
TO BE CONTINUED…
