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Chapter 17
Date de publication:
2026-08-17 19:03:44Jace's POV
Brooke’s apartment always smelled like the same candle, something like vanilla, and I’d learned a long time ago not to think too much about fact that I could recognize it blind.The room settled into silence, broken only by the sound of our breathing as the last traces of heat slowly faded. Neither of us said anything when it was over. We never did. Words had never been part of whatever this was.Afterward, she stayed curled against my side for exactly as long as
Dernier chapitre
Collision on Ice Chapter 21
Jace's POV I told myself the whole walk back to my car that it didn’t mean anything.She’d looked exhausted. That was all. Any halfway decent person would have done the same thing, seeing someone that clearly running on fumes at one in the morning, and it had nothing to do with the window at the library, nothing to do with whatever I’d sat there feeling watching her work a counter she had no business still standing behind after the day she'd already had. It was food. It was only a sandwich and juice. It didn't mean I was beginning to care about her more than I wanted to. I almost believed myself by the time I got home.The problem, and I recognized it even as I sat there on my couch rethinking it, was that one act like that wasn’t going to satisfy whatever had actually shifted in me watching her through that window. I knew myself well enough to know this wasn't just a one-time act of kindness I'd forget about. I was going to want to do it again. And I could not, unde
Collision on Ice Chapter 20
Roselle's POV By the time my shift ended at half past midnight, my legs had stopped feeling like they belonged to me in any useful sense, and I locked the front door of the coffee shop behind the last customer and stood there for a second just breathing, the way you do when your body finally gets permission to stop pretending it isn’t running on empty.I still had a paper due Monday I hadn’t started. I still had tutoring at 8:47, unmovable, because showing up late even once felt like handing Jace exactly the kind of ammunition he’d been hunting for since day one. I did the math in my head without meaning to, the way I always did lately, four hours of sleep if I skipped the reading, five if I skipped eating breakfast instead, and none of the options felt like it should be a real choice a person should have to make on a Thursday night in September.I made it about two blocks from the coffee shop before my body simply stopped negotiating with me.It wasn't dramati
Collision on Ice Chapter 19
Jace's POV The video was already circulating by the time I got to the locker room, half the team watching some slowed down replay of the fall on a phone somebody was holding up like it was a highlight reel worth studying, and I sat down at my stall and started unlacing my skates without saying a word, because I can’t even talk my way out of this one.“Man, you went down like a folding chair,” Eli said, sitting down next to me, not even bothering to hide the grin. “Full send. Arms out and everything.”“I’m aware.”“I’m just saying, if you’re gonna eat it, at least commit to the bit like that. Very dramatic.”“Are you done?”“Not even close, but I’ll spare you for now.” He nudged my shoulder, easier than the room deserved, and lowered his voice enough that it stayed between us. “You good, though? Actually good, not just embarrassed good.”I thought about it longer than the question probably warranted. My back ached in a low, dull way that had nothin
Collision on Ice Chapter 18
Roselle's POV The first shot came in the form of my coffee order, somehow, impossibly, arriving from the campus café with a note taped to the cup that read tutoring session cancelled, when I had never once cancelled anything and definitely hadn’t asked anyone to relay that information anywhere.I found out it wasn’t true only because Dez texted me confused about where I was, and by the time I got to the study hall fifteen minutes late, three of Jace’s teammates were already lounging around with their feet up, having apparently been told the same thing.“Cute,” I said, dropping my bag onto the desk hard enough to make a point. “Very cute.”Jace was leaning against the doorway, arms crossed, doing an extremely poor job of looking innocent. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”“Someone called the front desk and cancelled my sessions in my name.”“Strange. Maybe you should be more careful with your own scheduling.”“Careful. Right.” I sat down at
Collision on Ice Chapter 17
Jace's POV Brooke’s apartment always smelled like the same candle, something like vanilla, and I’d learned a long time ago not to think too much about fact that I could recognize it blind.The room settled into silence, broken only by the sound of our breathing as the last traces of heat slowly faded. Neither of us said anything when it was over. We never did. Words had never been part of whatever this was.Afterward, she stayed curled against my side for exactly as long as either of us ever stayed like that, which was never very long, both of us having long since settled into an arrangement that didn’t require lingering to feel complete. She reached for her phone on the nightstand, scrolling through something with one hand while her other stayed loosely draped over my chest, and I lay there staring at the ceiling fan doing its slow, useless circles, the specific quiet after that never quite felt like peace, just absence of noise.“You’re doing the thing,” she
Collision on Ice Chapter 16
Roselle's POV The team event was being held in the athletics building’s function room, the kind of space that clearly existed for exactly this purpose and no other, fold out tables lined with cheap catering trays and a banner overhead welcoming families for parent weekend, and I was there strictly in a work capacity, checking off names against a roster while players’ families filtered in looking for their sons among a sea of matching team polos.“You must be the new tutor everyone’s talking about.”I turned, and the girl who’d said it was warm in a way that felt immediate, easy, the kind of warmth that didn’t feel fake even on first meeting. She was maybe my age, holding a plate she hadn’t touched yet, watching me with open curiosity rather than the wary appraisal I’d half braced myself for after two and a half weeks of being campus gossip.“Depends on the version of talked about you mean,” I said. “The flattering one or the other one.”She laughed genuinel
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