Page 8 of Cross Ice

He walked toward me, all confidence and effortless grace, and I recognized the type immediately: exactly what I’d sworn off after Ryan. My brain registered the warning. The rest of me ignored it. I cataloged the way he moved through the crowd—the slight smirk playing at the corner of his mouth, the way his brown eyes stayed locked on mine, like I was the only person in the room.

Ryan had moved like that too. Like he already knew you’d say yes.

“Hey,” he said when he reached me. “I’m Nico.”

Up close, he was even more attractive. Square jaw, straight nose, full lips. A face that stopped traffic. And those eyes… dark and intense and fixed entirely on me. But underneath the confidence, I caught something else: the slight tension in his jaw, the way he held his beer a little too carefully. He was nervous. Presenting ease he didn’t quite feel.

That detail softened something in me against my better judgment.

“Evan,” I said, because apparently my mouth was working even if my brain wasn’t.

We moved away from the bar to a quieter corner. He was vague about his work—"I’m in sports,” he said, with a smirk that suggested I was way off base when I guessed personal trainer. I filed the evasiveness away. The question formed, and I let it go before it reached my mouth. Old habit. Easier than what came after asking. Ryan had deflected questions too, though his deflections had been smoother, more practiced. Nico’s felt less like concealment and more like someone who hadn’t figured out what he was allowed to say yet.

That was a distinction I couldn’t entirely explain, but I felt it.

When he admitted it was his first time—at a club like this, doing any of this—something in his expression shifted. The confidence didn’t disappear exactly, but something underneath it showed through. Uncertainty. Genuine, unguarded, unmanaged. Ryan, for all his charm, had rarely let me see anything he hadn’t already decided I should see.

He reminded me of Ryan. The easy smile, the way he could make me feel like the center of the universe.

But he also didn’t. And I couldn’t decide which fact scared me more.

The heat in the club was stifling. He shrugged off his jacket and draped it over his arm, and I watched the movement without meaning to: the flex of his biceps, the expanse of his chest visible through the thin white cotton. When his gaze returned to my face, he caught me looking.

I took a sip of my drink and didn’t apologize for it.

The attraction between us was obvious, crackling in the air like static electricity. I wanted him. That part was simple. Whether wanting him was wise was a different question entirely, and I was rapidly losing the ability to care about the answer.

When he asked if I wanted to get out of there, I hesitated.

I didn’t know his last name, where he really worked, or anything beyond Nico and a charming smile.

“We can go to a hotel,” he said. Not his place. Not mine. Neutral ground, no strings, no way for this to follow me home.

Safe enough.

“Yeah,” I said finally. “Let’s go.”

We walked to an expensive hotel a few blocks away that raised my eyebrows. I hung back in the lobby seating area and tried to talk myself out of the spiral forming in my head while he checked in. Personal trainers didn’t drop this kind of money on a random Friday night hookup. Which meant he’d either lied about what he did, or he hadn’t told me enough of the truth for personal trainer to mean anything.

Ryan had been rich and famous. It had made everything complicated in ways I hadn’t been prepared for.

But there was something more genuine about Nico, something that felt less like acting and more like the truth, even buried under all the things he wasn’t saying.

So, when he came back with key cards and that nervous energy humming beneath his easy grin, I followed him to the elevator anyway.

The doors closed.

For about three seconds, we stood there, carefully not touching. My heart hammered against my ribs. I stared at the digital floor numbers like they were the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen.

He turned to face me.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

My breath caught. No one had asked me that in longer than I could remember. Ryan had never asked. Ryan had just moved, confident in the answer, and I’d let him because I’d mistaken assumption for certainty, possession for wanting.

“Yeah,” I managed.

He closed the distance between us, cupping my face in his hands. The kiss started soft and questioning, giving me room I hadn’t expected him to give me. I gripped his jacket and kissed him back harder than I meant to, answering the question he’d had the decency to ask.