Page 60 of Fractured Ice

"Actually, come over tonight. We don't have to—" He tilts his head. "I just don't want the night to end."

I open my mouth.

There’s movement in my peripheral vision.

Ethan is standing in the restaurant doorway.

He's not moving. He's not pretending to check his phone or have a conversation. He's just standing there watching us, jacket on, hands in pockets, and his expression is hard to decode from fifteen feet away, but it isn't pleasant and it isn't casual.

Dylan follows my eyeline.

The temperature drops about four degrees.

"Walker," Dylan says.

Ethan comes off the doorframe. "Reed." He nods at Dylan and then at me, and his voice has the particular easiness of someone managing himself carefully. "It was a good game tonight."

"Didn't watch it," Dylan says pleasantly.

"Our record would suggest you might want to start."

"Our record would suggest you've been having a decent season," Dylan says. "For a regional sport."

Ethan smiles, and it doesn't reach anything. "Football players say regional like it's an insult."

"Football players say it like it's a fact."

"Hockey's in twenty-three countries, man. Football's got, what, the UK trying it out because they had a slow week?"

"Football players are actual athletes."

"Hockey players skate at forty miles an hour while getting checked into boards by two-hundred-pound men." Ethan tilts his head. "But sure."

"Hockey players are also missing teeth."

"Yet we're still impossibly good-looking."

"Hockey players," Dylan says, still smiling, "are focused on a sport that makes the national news maybe three times a year."

"Football players," Ethan says, "are focused on a sport where the clock stops every forty-five seconds and there's still enough time left over to film a hundred commercials."

Dylan's smile stays where it is but the wattage shifts. "At least football players have their priorities straight."

"At least hockey players know what their priorities are."

I look at Dylan. I look at Ethan. Neither of them is looking at me. Dylan's jaw is set like someone winning an argument he's decided matters, and Ethan's got his hands still in his pockets and his eyes fixed on Dylan with an expression that would be perfectly friendly to anyone who hadn't been watching him for the last three months.

"I'm going home," I say.

They both look at me.

"Thanks for dinner," I tell Dylan. I turn and start walking.

I make it about a block before I hear footsteps behind me.

"Sienna."

"No."