The wrong door

Ava’s pov

I had written three rules on the inside of my wrist in blue ballpoint before the bus pulled out of my hometown, and I had been reading them like a prayer for six hours.

Keep your head down. Don't ask questions that sound like questions. Stay away from the hockey team.

By 8:52 on my first morning at Westbridge University, I had already broken the third one, and I hadn't even found my first class.

The campus map on my phone was a liar. It swore Hargrove Hall sat two minutes north of the library. It did not. I had walked in a circle twice, coffee going lukewarm in one hand, folder crushed under my arm, phone pinned between my shoulder and my ear while a recorded voice from the financial aid office told me my call was very important to them.

"Of course it is," I muttered, and hung up.

That was when I saw the door.

Gray metal, propped open with a rubber wedge, a sign above it that read ARENA STAFF ONLY. Beyond it, a long corridor glowed with cold white light. A shortcut, I told myself. Any sane person would have taken it.

Any sane person would also have read the sign.

The cold hit me first. It curled around my ankles and slid up my sleeves, carrying the clean, metallic smell of fresh ice. Then came the sound: blades carving, pucks cracking against boards, a coach's whistle shrieking like a bird of prey. I slowed without meaning to. The walls were lined with framed photographs, decades of Westbridge Wolves in black and silver, grinning, arms thrown over each other's shoulders, holding trophies like they had never once been told no.

I should have turned around.

Instead, I walked the wall the way people walk through a graveyard, reading the years. My eyes snagged on the team photo from two seasons ago and went straight to the third row, to the space between a redhead and a defenseman with a crooked nose.

There was a gap there. A rectangle of slightly brighter paint where something had hung and then been taken down.

My throat tightened.

Ethan.

I blinked hard, spun on my heel, and walked straight into a wall.

The wall was warm, and breathing, and very, very solid. My coffee exploded between us. For one suspended second I watched the lid pop off and the entire cup, dark roast, no sugar, four dollars I did not have to spare, empty itself down the front of a black practice jersey.

"Oh my God," I said. "I'm so…….”

"Seriously?" The voice was low and rough and amused in the worst possible way. I looked up, and it’s….

Damien Cole.

I knew his face the way I knew my own phone number, memorized and unwelcome. I had studied it in grainy game photos, in newspaper archives, in a screen capture paused at 1:14 on a video I had watched far too many times. But the photographs had missed one thing. They hadn't caught his eyes: gray-green, sharp, ringed with dark lashes, and fixed on me with the lazy interest of a cat that had found something small to play with.

His hair was damp and pushed back by a careless hand. Coffee dripped from the hem of his jersey and hit the floor with a soft plip. The captain's C stitched over his heart was soaked brown.

"That was my favorite jersey," he said.

"It's a practice jersey."I answered.

"Favorite practice jersey." He said calmly.

"Then you shouldn't stand in the middle of a hallway like a vending machine." He added.

One of his eyebrows lifted. Behind him, two players in half-unlaced gear drifted out of the locker room and stopped to watch. One of them whistled low.

"Did she just call you a vending machine?"

"I think she did." Damien didn't look away from me. "I've been called worse. Never by a trespasser in a coffee-stained cardigan, though."

I glanced down. A brown splash had, in fact, reached my sleeve. Wonderful.

"I'm not trespassing. I'm lost." I answered.

"Same thing, with better excuses." He stepped closer. Not threatening, just certain, the way people are when the world has always rearranged itself for them. I caught the scent of soap and cold air and something like cedar, and hated that I noticed. "Staff only. Do you work here?"

"No." I answered.

"On the team?" He asked.

"Obviously not." I answered.

"Then you're either lost or a fan, and fans are usually a lot more impressed." He replied.

"Wow," I said. "Does that line work often?"

A slow grin curved his mouth, and I hated that, too. "You tell me, sweetheart."

"Don't call me that." I snapped at him.

"Then give me something else to call you."He said with a smile across his lips.

"How about nothing?" I hugged my ruined folder to my chest and stepped around him. "I'll pay for the dry cleaning. Send me the bill."

"Send it where?" He asked.

"To someone who cares." I answered.

The players behind him burst out laughing. Someone said, "Oh, she's good," and someone else wheezed, "Cole just got cooked," and for the first time the grin on Damien's face flickered. Barely. Like a guy who wasn't used to hearing people laugh at him instead of with him.

Good. I kept walking.

I made it four steps.

"Hey. Hey, wait." Fast footsteps, then a hand closing around my elbow. Not hard. Just enough to turn me around. "You dropped this."

He was holding my student ID, the plastic slick with coffee. It must have popped off its lanyard in the collision.

"Thank you," I said stiffly, and reached for it.

He didn't let go.

He was reading it. I watched his eyes move across the card, watched them stop on a single line, and watched every ounce of lazy charm drain out of his face like water from a cracked glass.

"Bennett," Damien said quietly. The word came out strange. "Ava Bennett."

"Give it back." I cried.

The hallway had gone silent. Even his teammates had stopped laughing.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

"Ohio. Why? Give it back." I said again.

"Ohio." A muscle ticked in his jaw. The gray-green eyes lifted from the card and found mine, and there was nothing amused in them now. There was something darker. Something almost like fear. "Any relation to Ethan Bennett?"

My heart stopped.

Three rules. I'd had three simple rules, and I had broken one in under nine minutes.

The lie left my mouth before I could stop it. "Who?"

Damien Cole stared at me for a long, terrible moment. Then he looked down at the ID again, and I watched his thumb press, slowly, against the corner of the card, hard enough to bend it.

"Funny," he said softly. "Because you have his eyes."