Page 62 of Fractured Ice

"Ethan—"

"He's not your type."

"You don't know anything about my type."

"I know more than you think."

"You've had maybe fifteen conversations with me in the last five years."

"Twenty-three," he says, "if you count the ones at your family's Christmas parties. Twenty-five if you count the two arguments we had at Rory's at her summer barbeques."

I stop again.

He stops too.

"Your favorite ice cream is strawberry," he says. "The good kind, with the real pieces, not the artificial pink stuff. You hate the artificial pink stuff."

I stare at him.

"You're a terrible bike rider. Like, genuinely terrible. Knox had to catch you at the Fourth of July thing three summers ago when you went down the hill and couldn't figure out the brakes."

"That hill was⁠—"

"You're one of the best artists I've ever seen in my life. You don't talk about it. I don't know why you don't talk about it, but you stopped and I noticed." He keeps going, even though I haven't said anything, like he's been holding this for a while. "You had a thing for Max Evans from sophomore through junior year of high school. You thought it was subtle. It wasn't."

My face is doing something that makes me grateful it's dark enough to partially hide.

"You bleached your hair the summer before senior year and you were convinced it looked terrible for the entire three weeks it took to fix, and it didn't look terrible, but you wouldn't hear that from anyone." He pauses. "And you hide behind your writing when the world gets to be too much. You always have."

The street is very quiet.

I don't have anything to say, and that's a situation I'm rarely in.

"How?" I say. It comes out smaller than I intended.

"I've been paying attention." He looks at me steadily. "I've been paying attention to you for a long time."

Something moves through my chest that I can't afford right now. I close it off the way I close things off. I pull everything back together and make myself think about what's actually happening, which is that I just came from a date I went on, because I wanted space from Ethan Walker, and Ethan Walker followed me to it and then listed everything he knows about me on a sidewalk, and neither of those things are acceptable.

"This is an assignment," I say. "That's all this is. You're my subject. I'm your assigned journalist. That's the arrangement."

"Sienna—"

"And you have been with, by conservative estimate, half the women at this school.”

“I haven’t been with anyone since we started this project.”

Is he serious? Did he finally break his dick? Or is this something else?

"Ethan." I look at him. "You haven't been with anyone since the project started. That's what I'm supposed to believe? You? For a whole month?"

He looks back at me. Something in his expression goes very still. "Yeah," he says. "That's what I'm telling you."

"I don't believe you."

"I know."

Damn him.