Traffic Cone

CHASE

Dalton University was everything the brochure promised and nothing I wanted.

The campus looked like it had been designed by someone who’d never actually been to college—old stone buildings draped in ivy, quad stretching green under late-summer sun, the hockey facility gleaming like a cathedral to the sport I’d built my entire identity around. My dorm was in the athletic housing block: newer, nicer than standard, with a view of the practice rink from my third-floor window.

Marcus listened exclusively to Luke Bryan and snored like a chainsaw being fed through a wood chipper—okay, only on the first night he snored. After that he mostly just breathed like he was auditioning for Darth Vader.

**Sloane:** *First day was fine. Castillo praised my article. The one about you. Ironic.*

I read it three times. Her voice—sharp, clipped, hiding something underneath—played in my head like an audio file I couldn’t delete.

**Me:** *Famous by association. You’re welcome.*

**Sloane:** *You’re insufferable even through text.*

**Me:** *And you miss it.*

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then:

**Sloane:** *Go to sleep, Hartley.*

She didn’t deny it.

I lay in the dark, phone warm against my chest, and tried to remember what it felt like to exist before this summer. Before her.

I couldn’t.

---

First week of college was a carousel of orientation events, campus tours, and the kind of forced socialization that made my skin crawl. Everyone was performing. Freshmen performing excitement. Upperclassmen performing indifference. Coaches performing belief in our potential.

And I was performing normal.

Practice at 6 a.m. was the only thing that felt real—grateful for the ice, the cold, the structured brutality of skating drills that left no room for thought. For ninety minutes every morning, I was just a body in motion: edges, crossovers, stops, starts, one-timers from the circles until my wrists ached and my lungs burned.

But the second I stepped off the ice, she was there.

Not physically. Worse than physically.

She was in the space between thoughts. In the pause after a whistle. In the steam rising off the shower tiles that reminded me of every time I’d pressed her against slick ceramic and felt her arch into me. She was in the weight room when I closed my eyes between sets and saw her face—not her body, not the sex, just her *face*—the way she looked at me when she thought I wasn’t watching.

Like I was something she’d been looking for without knowing she’d lost it.

“Yo, Hartley.” Jax, toweling off at the next locker. “You coming to Sig Ep tonight? Welcome party. Kegs. Girls. The whole deal.”

“Maybe.”

“‘Maybe’ is a no in disguise. Come on, man. You’ve been a ghost all week. It’s college. Live a little.”

I went.

I shouldn’t have.

The frat house was a sweat-stained monument to bad decisions. Sticky floors, bass so loud it turned your heartbeat into a remix, bodies packed wall-to-wall. Jax disappeared into the crowd within thirty seconds, drawn toward a group of volleyball players like a moth to a six-foot flame.

I stood by the keg with a red cup I hadn’t touched and watched the room like a spectator.

A girl approached. Dark hair—wrong shade. Green eyes—wrong green. Smile bright and uncomplicated, the kind of smile that belonged to someone who hadn’t spent the summer being taken apart piece by piece by a hockey player she was supposed to hate.

“You’re Chase Hartley,” she said, leaning in to be heard over the music. “I’m Amber. I’m in your econ class.”

“Hey.”

“You don’t remember me.”

“I don’t remember anyone from econ. I barely remember econ.”

She laughed. It was a nice laugh. Open and easy. Nothing like Sloane’s—Sloane’s laugh was rare and reluctant, a sound she rationed like currency, and when you earned one it felt like cracking a vault.

Amber put her hand on my arm. “You want to get out of here? It’s loud. We could go somewhere quieter.”

Six months ago I would’ve said yes without thinking. Amber was pretty. Amber was willing. Amber was exactly the kind of uncomplicated hookup that had defined my pre-Sloane existence.

“I’m good,” I said. “Thanks, though.”

She blinked—surprised—then recovered with grace. “Okay. Well, if you change your mind, I’m in Whitfield Hall. Room 217.”

She walked away. I watched her go and felt nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

I pulled out my phone.

**Me:** *At a frat party. Girl just hit on me. Dark hair. Green eyes. She was pretty.*

Three dots. Long pause.

**Sloane:** *Cool. Hope you have fun.*

Right. I didn’t respond.

She called at 11:47.

I was lying on my bed in the dark, her number lit up the screen and I answered before the first ring finished.

“Hi.” Her voice. Soft. This was the midnight version of Sloane.

“Hi.”

Silence. The good kind. The kind that exists between two people who don’t need words to occupy the space.

“How was the first day?” I asked.

“Terrible.”

“Scale of one to ten.”

“Eleven. Hargrove’s teaching *Gatsby*. Obsession as a narrative engine. I wanted to laugh.”

“Did you?”

Silence. And then she cut the call.

Week two. The fractures started showing.

Morning practice, Thursday. Standard neutral-zone transition drill—D-to-D pass, stretch pass to the winger, enter with speed. I’d done it ten thousand times. Could do it in my sleep.

Except today.

The puck came to me on the left wall. I looked up to find my outlet. And for one half-second—maybe less—I wasn’t in the rink. I was in the kitchen, and she was pressing a coffee mug to her lips, and the morning light was catching her collarbones, and—

“HARTLEY!”

The hit came from the blind side. Six-foot-two sophomore named Greggs, built like a brick shithouse, catching me flat-footed with a clean shoulder-to-chest check that sent me crashing into the boards so hard my helmet bounced off the glass.

I went down. Puck gone. Play moved on.

Coach Reynolds’ whistle screamed. “What the hell was that, Hartley? You had two full seconds to move the puck and you stood there like a traffic cone! Are you injured or just asleep?”

“Neither, Coach.” I picked myself up, shaking out the stars. “Won’t happen again.”

“It better not. NHL scouts don’t draft traffic cones.”

The guys on the bench said nothing. But I caught the looks. The sideways glances that said *what’s wrong with the top prospect?*

Nothing was wrong with me.

Everything was wrong with me.