Page 2 of Fractured Ice

The impact removes me from my feet with an efficiency I'd almost admire if I weren't the one being removed. His shoulder hits mine, momentum handles the rest, and I go down onto the sidewalk with two hundred pounds of soaking wet person, smelling like a delicious type of cologne that I can’t quite place, landing across me in a way that drives the air out of my lungs and soaks every layer I'm wearing with cold water from the wet kickball game.

For a second there's just the cold and the concrete, and the urgent awareness that my recorder had better still be intact or this person and I are going to have a very different kind of conversation than the one I was just imagining.

Then he starts laughing.

Pushed up on one arm, already laughing before he even figures out what happened. I stare up at the January sky and take stock. My bag is somewhere to my left. My jacket is destroyed. My ribs are intact, and the man currently occupying my personal space is⁠—

I look at his face.

I close my eyes.

Ethan Walker. Of course it's Ethan Walker. The extremely attractive back I spent the last thirty seconds conducting an academic assessment of belongs to Ethan Walker, who has been a feature of my life that I did not ask for since we were four years old, and who has apparently decided that ruining my life when we were younger wasn't enough, he needed to ruin my day today too.

The universe and I are going to need to have a serious talk.

The laughing stops.

"Oh," he says when he glances down at me.

"Yes," I say. "Oh."

I watch his face cycle through about four different expressions in three seconds, which is very on-brand for Ethan. There's the tail end of the laughter. Then the recognition. Then something that might be concern and maybe sheepishness, though sheepishness has never historically been Ethan's strong suit. Then something else I don't bother cataloguing because I don’t care that much about how he’s feeling.

His eyes drop to my shirt revealed beneath my open jacket.

My white shirt, which is now completely, aggressively transparent. I have been a journalist-in-training for almost two years and I can tell when a situation has become a headline, and right now the headline is not great.

"You look good wet," Ethan Walker says.

I genuinely need a moment.

Not because I'm flustered. I want to be clear about that. I need a moment because I'm running a quick internal calculation about whether any jury in the country would convict me for what I want to do to Ethan right now, and the answer is no, they would not, they would ask me if I needed a cup of coffee on my way out of the courthouse.

"Get off me."

He scrambles back immediately and reaches a hand down to help me. I ignore it and get up on my own, because accepting assistance from Ethan Walker after he just knocked me onto a sidewalk and then had the audacity to comment on what the resulting situation has done to my shirt is a level of charitable behavior I’m not currently capable of. My dignity has left the building and I wish it had taken me with it.

I pick up my bag, confirm through the front pocket that my recorder is in one piece, which it is, thank God, because I don't have the budget to replace it, and turn to keep walking. The fraternity and sorority members are yelling for the ball. I glance back just long enough to see Ethan throw it to them before he focuses back on me, and I focus back on what’s in front of me.

"Sienna—"

"I'm going to class."

"Hey, wait, I'm sorry⁠—"

"Noted." I don't slow down.

He falls into step beside me. Of course he does. I don't know why I expected anything different. Ethan Walker has been following me around since we were children, and the only thing that changes is the context. At ten, it was whatever game he'd invented that he needed a second player for, which just so happened to mean I had to be the second player. At seventeen, it was showing up at things I was already at and acting surprised to see me. The boy becomes a man and the game he played became a kickball with a very wet man, and I still end up soaked and inexplicably walking next to him.

Some people don't evolve. They just get taller.

"I genuinely didn't see you," he says. He's keeping pace with approximately no effort, because he's six three and I am significantly not that, which has been an ongoing structural complaint I've had with our dynamic since roughly age twelve. "I was going for the ball and you came out of nowhere."

"I was on the sidewalk."

"The ball went wide."

"The ball went wide," I agree. "And your solution to that was to run into a pedestrian on a public path."