Page 23 of Fractured Ice

Not the locker room.

Not the way I felt when Ethan Walker had his hard cock against my ass.

None of it. My assignment will be facts. Facts about Ethan Walker the athlete, not the man.

I have a job to do. I'm going to do it. Ethan Walker is an assignment and I'm going to cover him the same way I'd cover any other athlete, with professionalism, appropriate distance, and absolutely zero incidents involving hockey equipment on locker room floors or dresses bunched up around my waist.

Starting now.

I walk faster.

6

Ethan

It's past midnight and I'm lying in bed doing the single least productive thing I can think of, which is scrolling through Sienna's Instagram and cataloguing everything I've done wrong in the last week that’s made her hate me just a little more.

The interview where I couldn't stop asking her questions back. The locker room, the stupid joke, the ice pack, the whole disaster. The thing I said at the party about the locker room, which I knew was wrong before it finished leaving my mouth, but I said it anyway because apparently I have no functional connection between my brain and my decisions when she's within ten feet of me.

Every photo she posts is her being exactly who she is, sharp and composed and doing her actual life, not the life she wants people to think she has, and each photo is also a reminder that I have had approximately a thousand opportunities to stop acting like an idiot around her and have failed to take a single one.

I close the app. Open it again.

There's a new story. Her face, someone's living room in the background, Emma beside her with a drink in her hand, and Sienna's laughing at something off-camera in a way she almost never does around me.

I sit up.

I know that house. It's three streets over, the one with the wraparound porch that the lacrosse guys rent. There's a party there almost every other Thursday and it takes me about four minutes to walk from here.

I'm off the bed and pulling on jeans and a t-shirt before I've made any kind of conscious decision about this.

In the hallway I nearly collide with Rory, who looks like Jace has been fucking her for hours. Jace is in the doorway behind her looking equally pleased, and they both take one look at me pulling a hoodie over my head at midnight and Rory raises her eyebrows.

"Why do you look like you're going for more than beer and wings?"

"Party," I say. "Few streets over."

I keep moving down the hall. But there's a second, just a second, where I feel the weight of what I'm looking at behind me. The knowledge that there are two people who figured love, romance, the whole shitshow out, who got there, who have something real, and it sits somewhere in my chest in a way I don't want to examine.

Jace got the girl he wanted. Has her. I've been trying to get Sienna to look at me like a real person for years. But I keep showing up and saying the wrong thing and walking away having made everything worse.

I go downstairs.

Knox and Blake are on the couch in front of the TV, with a game paused and an argument in progress about something that looks like it's been going on long enough to lose the original point. Blake looks up when I hit the bottom of the stairs.

"Party," I say. "Down the street."

Knox is on his feet before I finish the sentence. Blake takes an extra three seconds, which for Blake is basically enthusiasm.

The February air hits us on the front porch and Knox immediately starts talking about Friday's game, the way he always does when something's on his mind, burning through the whole thing out loud like if he says it enough times it'll resolve itself. Penalty kill efficiency, the other team's top line, a specific play he wants to run that Sullivan hasn't greenlit yet.

"Sullivan's going to greenlight it," I tell him.

"He's not. He thinks it leaves us exposed on the left."

"It doesn't."

"I know it doesn't. You know it doesn't. Blake, tell him it doesn't leave us exposed."