Quiet please

Ava’s pov

I made it to Hargrove Hall eleven minutes late, locked myself in the third stall of the second-floor bathroom, and stayed there until my hands stopped shaking.

They took longer than I wanted.

You have his eyes.

I pressed my back against the cold metal door and breathed in through my nose, out through my mouth, the way the school counselor had taught me the winter Ethan came home. I had practiced this moment on the bus. I had practiced a hundred different versions of who? and no, never heard of him, delivered with just the right amount of bored confusion. In none of the rehearsals had Damien Cole looked at me like I was a ghost.

In none of them had I felt like one.

Ethan used to say I had the worst poker face in Ohio. You lie like a toddler, Ava. Chin up, eyes sideways, voice about two notes too high. He had been right. He was always right, back when he still talked. Back when he was the loud one, the golden one, the boy who burst through the kitchen door every Saturday with a duffel bag and a scholarship letter and a grin that could power the house.

Now he sat in the dark of his bedroom and watched the ceiling. And nobody in my family would say why.

So I was going to find out myself.

I washed my face, retied my ponytail, and walked into Media Law twenty-two minutes late. I took notes about nothing. I stared at a professor's mouth while the words slid right off me. All I could think about was a pair of gray-green eyes, and a thumb pressing down on the corner of my ID like a man leaning on a bruise.

At 3:50 in the afternoon, I clocked in at the Hollis Library circulation desk.

It was the cheapest job on campus and the most useful. Work-study paid for my textbooks, and the desk gave me a monitor, a login, and a quiet corner where nobody asked what I was researching. It smelled like old paper and radiator dust. For twenty-five minutes, it was almost peaceful.

Then the front doors opened and the room went silent in a way I recognized.

Damien Cole walked into the library like a man walking into a courtroom. Clean jeans, black hoodie, the Wolves logo on the chest. His hair was dry now, and he looked like he'd slept as well as I had, which was not at all. Heads turned. A girl at the study tables dropped her pen.

He ignored every one of them and came straight to my desk.

"Library cards are for students," I said before he could speak. "Hockey players get a separate form. It's called a diploma."

"Cute."

"Thank you. I practiced."

"You work fast." He leaned on the counter, close enough to read the name tag pinned to my blouse. A. Bennett. "Yesterday I didn't know your first name. Today you've got a job, a name tag, and a mouth."

"I've always had the mouth. The job's new." I looked pointedly at his hands. "Is there something I can help you find, Mr. Cole? Manners, maybe? Aisle seven."

Someone at the reading tables shushed us. Damien lowered his voice.

"Why did you lie to me?"

The scanner in my hand beeped and went silent.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Ethan Bennett. You said who like you were slamming a door." He tilted his head. "So I'll ask again. How do you know that name?"

"I don't." I replied him.

"Ava." He called my name.

"Don't say my name like that." My voice came out quiet and steady and furious. "Like you have the right."

Something flickered across his face. Not anger, which I'd have known what to do with. Something almost like hurt, and gone before I could name it. He pulled back, reset, and put the smirk on like armor.

"Fine. Play it your way. But hear me, Bennett. Stay out of the arena. Stay away from my team. Whatever you came here for, it isn't going to be found on my ice."

I smiled.

I felt it spread across my face, slow and sweet, and I watched him realize he'd made a mistake.

"Is that a threat?" I asked.

"It's advice." He answered.

"Then here's mine." I tapped three keys and turned my monitor toward him. A red banner glowed across the screen. ACCOUNT FLAGGED: COLE, DAMIEN R. OVERDUE ITEM. FINE: $47.50.dollars.

He stared. "I've never checked out a book in my life."

"Funny. The system says you've had Introduction to Contract Law since 2022."

"That's not mine!"

"It's got your name on it." I folded my hands on the desk. "Unpaid fines block athletic eligibility until they're cleared. School policy. Page forty-one of the handbook."

He actually laughed, one short, disbelieving breath. "You didn't."

"I didn't do anything. The system did." I let the smile sit there. "Cash or card?"

"You're unbelievable." He said.

"And you're being loud in a library." I nodded toward the sign over his shoulder. "Quiet, please."

The whole reading room was watching. Damien dropped three twenties on the counter, took the receipt I held out between two fingers, and leaned in until his mouth was a breath from my ear.

"This is war, Bennett." He said.

"Good," I whispered back. "I was hoping you'd say that."

He left with his pride in pieces. I stood very still until the doors swung shut behind him, and then I sat down, hard, and pressed both palms against my chest.

My heart was slamming. Not from fear, which was the problem. I knew what fear felt like. This was something hotter and a lot more dangerous, and I had no business feeling it for the boy whose name I had written on the first page of every notebook I owned.

My phone buzzed against the desk.

I almost didn't look. When I did, it was an email from the editor of the Westbridge Courier, the one I had been waiting on for three weeks.

Ava, congratulations. Your application for the hockey beat has been approved. Athletics wants a reporter embedded with the team all season: practices, travel, locker-room access. Report to Coach Brandt's office tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. Your designated team contact will be Captain Damien Cole.

I read it twice.

I had spent a month planning how to get close to the Wolves. I had written the application at two in the morning, begged for the assignment, and chosen the beat for exactly one reason: it was the only way into the arena, the locker rooms, and the people who had been there that night.

It had worked. Of course it had worked.

And it had just chained me to the one person at Westbridge who had looked at my ID and seen my brother.