Chapter 20: The Morning After the Gold
Sleep didn’t come. It hovered somewhere near the ceiling of her sterile athlete village room, just out of reach. Every time Amber closed her eyes, she saw two things on a loop: the clean, cold arc of her final spin on the ice, and the chaotic, mud-splattered blur of Y/n fighting for balance in the boardercross trench. The gold medal lay on the nightstand, catching the sliver of streetlight through the blinds. It felt like it belonged to a different person.
By 4:30 AM, she gave up. She pulled on thermal leggings, a thick hoodie, and laced her boots quietly, not wanting to wake Alysa in the next bed. The village was a ghost town, the pathways empty under the eerie blue glow of security lamps. Her feet carried her without conscious decision. Away from the skating precinct. Toward the rumbling, unseen machinery of the mountainside events.
She found herself at the halfpipe.
It was colossal in the predawn dark. A giant steel mouth waiting to be fed. Lights were on, bright and clinical, bleaching the sculpted snow into a stark, luminous blue. The only sound was the whine of a snowcat idling in the distance, its orange blade slowly grooming the deck.
Then, a sharp, cutting sound. The scrape of a board on frost.
Y/n was already there, a lone figure dropping into the massive pipe. No crowd, no cameras. Just the athlete and the architecture. She carved high up the near-vertical wall, shot into the air, her body a tight rotation against the grey sky before landing with a thump that echoed across the basin. She wasn’t doing a routine. She was testing the transitions, feeling the snow, popping smaller spins and grabs.
Amber stood frozen at the spectator railing, her breath pluming in the air. She felt like an intruder.
Y/n took another drop, gathering speed. This time she went bigger, soaring twice her height above the lip. A 1440. Four full rotations. It was reckless and beautiful, done for no one’s benefit but her own. She landed it clean, the board slapping down on the snow with a confidence that bordered on arrogance, skating out the transition with arms wide.
Then she slid to a stop at the bottom, unstrapping her back foot. She pushed toward the exit, pulled off her helmet, and shook out her hair. Her eyes, sharp and alert even now, scanned the empty stands. They landed on Amber.
A slow smile spread across Y/n’s face, no surprise in it. As if she’d expected her.
“Can’t sleep either, gold medalist?” Y/n called, her voice carrying easily in the cold, quiet air. She skated over to the railing, looking up.
“I slept,” Amber lied.
“Uh huh.” Y/n rested her arms on the barrier. “You look like you got five minutes of terrific sleep. What brings you to the pipe? Slumming it with the dirtbags?”
“I was walking.”
“Right.” Y/n pushed back from the railing. “Come down here.”
“What? No.”
“Come on. The ice princess should see the view from the gutter. It’s educational.”
Amber hesitated, but the pull was stronger than her reservation. She made her way down the slick metal stairs to the deck level. The snow here was churned and hard. Y/n had already strapped into a different board, a shorter, softer-looking one.
“This is a beginner board,” Y/n said, patting it. “You’re gonna take a run.”
Amber barked a laugh. “Absolutely not.”
“Why? Scared?”
“I have a competition leg. I can’t risk a twisted ankle on… on this.” She gestured at the board with disdain, but it was fragile.
“We’re not going in the pipe, Glenn. Look over there.” Y/n pointed to a gentle, wide slope adjacent to the venue, a beginner hill lit by the same harsh lights. “It’s a bunny slope. A baby could navigate it on a cookie sheet. It’s just snow.”
“I skate. On a flat, predictable surface. With a toe pick for control.”
“And that’s all calculated. This,” Y/n said, stomping her boot on the snowboard, “is about letting go. About being okay with falling. Something tells me you’re bad at that.”
The challenge was too direct. Amber glared. “Fine.”
The process of strapping in was humiliating. Y/n knelt in the snow, tightening the bindings around Amber’s boots. “Front foot at, like, a fifteen-degree angle. You’ll hate it. It feels wrong.” Her hands were efficient, not lingering.
Standing up was the first disaster. Amber felt immediately, utterly disconnected from the earth. The board was a plank, an alien appendage. She wobbled, arms windmilling. Y/n caught her elbow, steadying her.
“Okay. Lesson one: you’re not skating. You’re not standing pretty. You’re surfing. Bend your knees. More. Yeah, like you’re about to sit in a gross porta-potty.” Y/n’s instructions were crass and effective. “Now, to go, just lean forward a tiny bit. Seriously, a millimeter.”
Amber leaned. The board slipped forward. A jolt of pure panic shot through her. She leaned back instinctively, catching her heel edge, and slammed backwards onto the snow. The impact knocked the air from her lungs.
Y/n was there, not laughing, just offering a hand. “Edge control. It’s everything. Heelside, toeside. That’s your world now. Again.”
They spent an hour on that gentle incline. Amber fell. A lot. Forward, backward, sideways in spectacular, ungainly collapses. Each time, Y/n pulled her up. “You’re thinking too much. Stop planning your next three moves. Just react.”
On maybe the tenth try, something clicked. Amber made a cautious heelside turn, then linked it shakily to a toeside turn. She traveled maybe fifty feet without falling, descending at a snail’s pace, before gently sinking onto her knees to stop.
She was panting, her hair escaping its braid, sweat cooling on her back. She looked up at Y/n, who had been snowboarding switch beside her, mirroring her.
“See?” Y/n said, her grin visible in the dawn light now bleeding over the mountains. “You’re a natural disaster. But you’re moving.”
Amber started to laugh. It was a breathless, surprised sound she hadn’t heard from herself in years. It wasn’t a performance laugh for a sponsor or a camera. It was just a release. She sat fully in the snow, feeling the cold seep through her pants.
Y/n unstrapped and sat down beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. They looked out at the waking Olympic valley, the first rosy light hitting the peaks.
“My finals are tonight,” Y/n said after a quiet moment, her tone shifting. The easy bravado was still there, but underneath it ran a current of something taut.
“You looked unstoppable yesterday.”
“Yesterday was a heat. Tonight’s the final. Single elimination. One bad turn, one guy cutting too hard…” She trailed off, picking up a handful of snow and letting it sift through her fingers. “I’m the only one left for the US. In my event. The only one.”
Amber absorbed this. She knew the weight of representing a country, but she’d always shared it with a team, with other skaters. This was a solitary burden of a different kind.
“They don’t talk about it like that for you, do they?” Amber asked softly.
Y/n shook her head. “Nah. The story is always the snowboard, the tricks, the ‘alternative sport’ vibe. Which is fine. I prefer it. But the guys in the booth, the federation… they have a tally. They know I’m the only shot at a medal in that event. It’s not a team sport, but it feels like one when you’re the last one standing.”
“What do you do with that?” Amber asked, genuinely wanting to know. “The pressure.”
Y/n looked at her, green eyes clear. “You strap in. You drop in. You focus on the turn in front of you, not the finish line. You remember why you started—because it’s stupid and fun and it makes you feel alive.” She paused. “And sometimes, you find a gold medalist to give a terrible snowboard lesson to at dawn. Puts things in perspective.”
The sun broke fully over the ridge, flooding the halfpipe with gold light, transforming it from a cold steel gash into a radiant channel of possibility. Down in the village, a day of other competitions was beginning.
Y/n stood up, brushing snow off her pants. She offered Amber her hand again. “Come on. I gotta get to physio. And you’ve got a reputation for grace to repair.”
Amber took the hand, letting Y/n pull her to her feet. Her legs ached in new, strange places. Her body felt thoroughly used. For the first time in a long time, it didn’t feel like a precision instrument. It just felt like a body.
As they walked back toward the village, the sounds of generators and distant cheers growing louder, Amber didn’t look back at the pipe. She looked at the woman walking beside her, who carried a different kind of weight with a shrug and a smile. The quiet between them wasn’t empty anymore. It was just quiet.