Page 63 of Fractured Ice

“And then you show up at my one and only date of the last month and decide to—what? Compete with him? Prove something?"

"I'm not competing⁠—"

"You spent ten minutes arguing about sports with him on a sidewalk."

"He started it."

I want to scream.

"Stop." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Stop following me. Stop showing up. Stop listing things you know about me on sidewalks at nine-thirty at night."

"Sienna—"

"I mean it. Good night."

I turn and walk the last half block to my house, sensing him trailing me the whole way. Emma is on the porch in her coat with a book and a mug, and she looks up when she sees me. Her expression shifts instantly through several things, landing on curious and carefully blank at the same time, which is Emma's version of giving me space while absolutely dying to know what happened.

Behind me, I hear Ethan stop on the sidewalk.

I don't look back. I go up the porch steps and Emma moves to let me past, and I'm almost at the door when I hear nothing, the absence of footsteps, the particular silence of someone still standing somewhere, and can’t decide if I hate or like that he’s still there, waiting for me, watching me.

I go inside before I can make the mistake of turning around to see what his face is doing.

Emma is behind me in about four seconds.

"That was Ethan Walker," she says.

"I know who it was."

"Why was he walking you home from your date with Dylan?"

"It's a long story."

"I have literally nowhere to be." She sits on the couch, pulling her feet up, book abandoned. "Start from the very beginning."

I look at her. “How do you know there’s any story to tell?”

"I saw his face when you went inside," she says. "I was on the porch. He stood there for a second like he wanted to say something. He didn't and then he left." She tilts her head. "What did he almost say?"

That's the question, isn't it?

"I don't know," I say.

It's true, and it's the thing that follows me upstairs and sits at the edge of everything while I get ready for bed, the image of him standing on the sidewalk with Emma on the porch and something stopped behind his eyes that never made it out.

I don't know what it was.

I'm not sure I want to.

15

Ethan

Seven days.

Seven days of walking across a campus that has roughly four thousand students and somehow not running into the one person I've been looking for every single time I leave the house. Seven days of checking my phone and finding nothing. Seven days of practice and games and team dinners and lying on my bed at night staring at the ceiling thinking about a sidewalk conversation I'd give anything to take back and redo.

Knox is beating me by three goals, which has never happened in the history of us playing this game, and I just let him score a fourth because I wasn't watching the screen.