Thin Ice and Thinner Excuses

I stared at Finn's text until the screen went dark, then lit it up again, then let it go dark a second time like toggling a light switch was going to help me think straight. It didn't.

Knox or Finn.

The words sat in my chest like a puck lodged against the boards—stuck, vibrating, refusing to move cleanly in either direction.

I typed back the safest, most cowardly response in the history of romantic entanglements: Probably just Knox and me tomorrow. But thanks for the marshmallows. Seriously.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Understood. Have fun, California. Layers, remember.

No wink emoji. No teasing. Just that quiet, even warmth that made Finn Henderson somehow more dangerous than the guy who'd kissed me breathless against a pickup truck in a snowstorm. At least with Knox I knew where I stood—unsteady, sparking, tilted slightly off-axis. With Finn I felt steady, and steady was its own kind of terrifying when you'd spent four days in a place that already felt like it was rearranging your entire life.

I buried my phone under my pillow and told myself I was going to sleep.

I stared at the ceiling for two hours instead.

Sunday morning arrived gray and insistent, the kind of pale Minnesota sky that looked like it was thinking very hard about snowing but hadn't committed yet. Dad was already gone by eight—early morning tape review with the assistant coaches, because apparently rest days weren't a real thing in hockey—which left me alone in the blue two-story with nothing but a pot of lukewarm coffee and my own overthinking for company.

I opened my laptop. My dragon-riding librarian manuscript blinked back at me, cursor blinking on chapter twelve where I'd abandoned my protagonist mid-sentence three weeks ago, somewhere between San Diego and the end of my old life. She was standing in a doorway. Couldn't decide whether to go in.

Same, Elowen, I thought. Same.

I typed exactly one sentence before my phone buzzed.

Knox: Still on for tonight. Seven sharp. Dress warm or I'll literally wrap you in a blanket myself.

Me: Threatening me with comfort items is not the intimidation tactic you think it is.

Knox: Who said anything about intimidation?

I put the phone face-down. My protagonist stared up at me from the doorway, waiting. I closed the laptop.

He picked me up at 6:58, which felt deliberate. He was leaning against the truck when I stepped outside, hands shoved in the pocket of a dark green jacket that matched the Eagles colors like he'd planned it—which, knowing Knox Callahan, he absolutely had not. He just always looked like that. Effortlessly, annoyingly like that.

"You're early," I said, pulling the door shut behind me.

"I'm exactly on time." He pushed off the truck and reached for the passenger door before I got there. "You're just surprised I showed up."

"I'm surprised you're not still half in shoulder pads."

He grinned—that warm, crooked grin that was slowly dismantling my better judgment piece by piece. "Give me a little credit, Kane."

The drive out of town took fifteen minutes, past the gas station with the broken M on its sign, past the high school with its angry-bird-on-skates marquee (GO EAGLES – REGIONALS OR BUST), past the last streetlight and into the kind of dark that doesn't exist in cities. Minnesota dark. The kind where the stars don't compete with anything.

Knox drove with one hand on the wheel and the radio low—something old and acoustic that I didn't recognize but didn't want to interrupt with a question. The heater hummed. Outside, pine trees scrolled past, thick and black against the indigo sky.

"How's your dad?" I asked, because it had been sitting on my tongue since practice.

His jaw moved. Not quite a wince. "Stable. Same as yesterday. They're running a stress test Tuesday." He exhaled slow through his nose. "He keeps telling me not to worry about it. Which is exactly what someone says when you should absolutely be worrying about it."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." He glanced over, and in the low light his face was softer than usual—less captain, more just *person.* "It's not your thing to be sorry about. I just… I needed tonight. Something that wasn't practice or hospital waiting rooms or Sophia's mom calling to offer casseroles."

The name landed between us like a puck to the boards. Neither of us flinched, exactly, but we both felt it.

"For what it's worth," I said carefully, "the casserole thing sounds genuinely awful."

He laughed—unexpected, real. "Margaret Reyes makes this tuna noodle thing. It's—" He shook his head. "It's a punishment dish, Avery. It is seasoned with obligation."

I burst out laughing and couldn't stop, and the tension that had been sitting in my sternum since the bonfire cracked loose. Knox was still grinning when he pulled the truck onto a gravel track I would have missed entirely, cutting between two pines so close they scraped the mirrors.

The lake opened up in front of us like someone had laid down a mirror.

I'd seen frozen lakes in movies—always dramatic, always foreboding, all creak and fracture. This was different. It was still. Perfectly, impossibly still, a flat pale expanse that reflected the sky back at itself in shades of dark blue and silver. The pines ringed it in a dense black border. Overhead, the stars were outrageous. The kind that make you feel small in the specific way that also feels like relief.

"Okay," I said quietly. "I take back approximately forty percent of my complaints about Minnesota."

"High praise." Knox cut the engine. "Come on."

He grabbed a blanket from the back seat and a thermos that did not, he confirmed with pointed significance, come from Finn. We picked our way down to the bank, boots crunching on the snow-crusted shore, and he spread the blanket over a flat rock that looked like it had been used for exactly this purpose many times before.

I sat. He sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and poured two cups from the thermos. Hot chocolate—real, thick, not from a packet—with the faintest edge of something warm that turned out to be a drop of peppermint extract.

"Did you make this?" I asked.

"Don't sound so shocked."

"Knox. You made hot chocolate from scratch."

"My mom's recipe." He said it simply, no performance. "She used to make it after every home game, win or lose. Said it was the only way to guarantee the night ended on a good note." He turned the cup in his hands. "She passed when I was twelve, so now I just… make it sometimes. When I want the night to end right."

The stars blurred for a second before I blinked them back. I wanted to say something worthy of that. Instead I just leaned my shoulder into his and let the silence hold it.

He let it.

After a long moment he said, "You're not going to ask me anything about her?"

"Not unless you want me to."

He looked at me sideways. "Most people ask. Or they do the I'm so sorry face for the next twenty minutes."

"I'm sorry you lost her," I said. "But I don't want to make tonight about sympathy. You said you needed something that wasn't hospital waiting rooms." I gestured at the lake with my cup. "So."

Knox studied me for a moment with an expression I couldn't fully decode—something between surprised and careful, like he was recalculating. Then the corner of his mouth lifted. "How are you real?"

"California mutation. Something in the salt air."

He laughed, and this time he didn't pull the laugh back in. It went all the way up to his eyes, and he tilted his head toward the sky, and I watched his face open up in the starlight and thought, completely involuntarily: Oh no. Oh no, this is the worst possible development.

Because this wasn't the Knox from the rink—all sharp edges and team-captain charisma. This was the version underneath. The one with his mom's hot chocolate recipe and the shadow behind his eyes when his phone rang. The one who drove out here when things got heavy because the lake didn't ask anything of him.

I was in serious, irreversible trouble.

We stayed for two hours.

I told him about Elowen and the dragon manuscript and how I'd abandoned her in the doorway because I didn't know yet what she was brave enough to choose. He told me about his first game after his dad's diagnosis—how he'd scored a hat trick and stood on the ice afterward feeling nothing, just hollow, because his dad was watching from the upper section instead of behind the glass where he always stood. We talked about college—him torn between a hockey scholarship two states away and wanting to stay close to home, me not knowing yet if I even wanted a home here or if Evergreen still felt like a place I was visiting.

At one point I asked about the Eagles' playoff chances, and Knox looked so genuinely pleased that I'd asked that I had to look back at the lake before my face betrayed me entirely.

The cold crept in around eleven. I was on my second cup of hot chocolate and my third attempt at identifying a constellation when Knox reached over and pulled the edge of the blanket tighter around my shoulders, his arm settling along my back like it lived there.

"Warmer?" he asked.

"Marginally," I said, which was a complete lie because I was suddenly approximately one thousand degrees.

He ducked his head, and I turned mine, and we were close—the way we'd been in the parking lot, forehead to forehead, breath mingling in small white clouds.

"Avery." His voice was quieter now. Careful.

"Don't say anything complicated," I said, before I could stop myself. "Just—give me one more minute where this is still simple."

He stilled. Then, slowly, he pressed his lips to my temple instead. Warm. Soft. Nothing like the parking-lot kiss—not desperate, not proving anything. Just present.

"Okay," he murmured against my hair. "One more minute."

I closed my eyes and listened to the ice settle with its low, resonant groan across the lake, the sound of something solid holding its own weight, and tried very hard not to fall any further.

Spoiler: completely unsuccessful.

He walked me to the door at midnight, thermos under one arm, and we stood on the porch in the kind of comfortable quiet that should have taken months to earn.

"The bonfire stuff," he said finally. "Sophia. My dad. All of it—I know it's a lot to walk into."

"It is," I agreed. "But I'm still here."

Something in his expression shifted, settled. He reached out and tucked a strand of hair back under my beanie with one finger, careful and deliberate.

"Text me when you're inside," he said.

"It's my house, Callahan. I'm not going to get lost."

"Humor me."

I rolled my eyes and went in. Leaned against the door in the dark. Pulled out my phone.

Me: Inside. Still thawed. Zero percent eaten by wolves.

Knox: Excellent outcome. Sleep well, California.

I was halfway up the stairs when the second message came through.

Knox: For what it's worth—Elowen should go through the door.

I stopped on the third step.

Me: You remembered her name.

Knox: I remember everything you tell me.

I sat down on the stair and stared at that sentence for a full minute.

Somewhere in the kitchen, the fridge hummed. Outside, Minnesota was dark and cold and enormous.

And I thought: maybe forty percent was too conservative.

I was revising my complaint retraction all the way up to seventy-five.