Page 36 of Fractured Ice

"Fuck, man, what are you doing to me?" I say.

"The twins at the Denver tournament," Tyler continues to Sienna, who is no longer looking at me, whose expression has done something I can't see from this angle and don't want to see. "Both of them. Same night. He’s a legend. Coach almost found out."

"That's not—" I start.

"It's fully documented," Mason says. "Multiple witnesses."

I look at Sienna.

The brief warmth that had been there five minutes ago is gone. Her face is back to the version I know least how to read, the closed-off one, the one she puts up when she's put up a wall around herself that no one can break. She looks at me for one second and then she turns and boards the bus.

"Great," I say, to nobody in particular. "Thanks. Really helpful. Both of you."

Mason looks after her in confusion. "Did we⁠—"

"Yes," I say. "You did."

I follow her onto the bus.

She's taken a window seat three rows from the back and she's already got her notebook open on her lap. I sit down beside her before she can establish the notebook as a barrier and she looks at me with barely concealed annoyance.

"I'm sorry," I say.

"For what specifically?"

"For that whole—" I gesture vaguely toward the front of the bus. "Whatever that was."

"You don't have to apologize for who you are."

"That's not who I am. That’s part of a certain version of myself, but I’m not that guy anymore⁠—"

"One girl a night, sometimes two." She says it back to me without inflection, like a quote. "Twins."

"That's—okay, some of that is accurate, but it's not⁠—"

"It's fine," she says. "Really. You don't owe me an explanation."

"I want to give you one."

"Ethan—"

"Those girls," I say, and I know immediately that this sentence is going somewhere bad but I can't find the exit. "They didn't—it wasn't like—they didn't matter. It was just sex. It didn't mean anything."

She looks at me.

I hear how it sounds.

"That's not what I meant," I say.

"What did you mean?"

"I meant that I didn't—that none of those situations were—" I stop. Start again. The thing I want to say is you're why none of them lasted, you're the reason none of it ever turned into anything real, but I can't get those words in the right order. They keep coming out wrong before they even leave my head. "It was different. Before."

"Before what?"

"Before I—" I drag a hand through my hair. "It's complicated."

"It doesn't sound complicated. It sounds like you slept with a lot of women and none of it meant anything to you, which honestly just makes it worse."