Chapter 6: What We Don't Say

He texted me at midnight. Not Mason's phone. His own number, unknown to me until that exact second, six words sitting alone on my screen like he'd typed and deleted everything longer a dozen times before settling on the smallest possible version.

Can you meet me. Please.

I told my roommate I was getting food. I wasn't. I walked to the same bench outside the library where he'd caught me a week ago, and found him already there, elbows on his knees, staring at nothing.

"You're not going to tell me about the accident, are you."

"Not tonight." He looked up, and whatever composure he'd rebuilt at dinner had worn all the way through, leaving something rawer underneath it, tired in a way that had nothing to do with practice. "Tonight I just needed to see you somewhere Mason isn't and nobody's filming an interview and we're not sitting across a table pretending everything's fine."

"That's not really an option for us, though, is it."

"No." He said it simply, no self pity in it, just fact. "It's really not."

I sat down next to him anyway, close enough that our shoulders almost touched, not quite, both of us apparently still governed by three years of careful distance even now.

"Whoever's texting me knows things," I said. "Real things. Things that aren't campus gossip."

"I know."

"Do you know who it is?"

"No." He said it fast, the same speed I'd learned to distrust in the film room, and then, slower, like he was correcting himself in real time, "I have guesses. I don't have proof. And until I do, I'm not going to say a name and be wrong, because if I'm wrong about this, the consequences aren't just embarrassing."

"What does that mean?"

"It means some things are dangerous to get wrong." He rubbed a hand over his face, and for a second he looked less like the boy who ran the whole rink like it belonged to him and more like someone carrying something heavier than a hockey season. "I want to tell you everything, Lily. I do. I just need you to trust that there's a difference between not telling you and not being ready to tell you the wrong thing."

"That's a very convenient distinction."

"I know how it sounds."

We sat there a while, the night going quiet around us the way it had on that first roadside months of history ago, and I found myself studying his profile in the dark, cataloguing it the way I'd apparently never actually stopped doing, three years or not.

"Can I ask you something else?" I said finally. "Not about the texts. About us."

"Anything."

"At dinner. Your knee."

The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, something more careful than that. "I've been trying not to do things like that."

"You're doing a bad job."

"I know that too." He turned his head, and in the dark his eyes found mine easily, like three years of avoiding exactly this hadn't taught either of us anything useful at all. "I meant what I said in the kitchen. I keep learning things about the last three years that don't match what I thought I knew. I don't know how to sit across from you at your family's table and not want to reach for you."

"Ethan."

"I'm not asking you for anything. I know we can't. I know why we can't, Mason, the team, all of it, none of that's changed." His voice had gone low, steady, the kind of steady that cost effort to hold. "I'm just telling you the truth, because apparently that's the one thing neither of us managed to do three years ago, and I'd rather not repeat that particular mistake."

I didn't have an answer for that, not one that wouldn't have undone something I still needed intact to survive whatever came next, so I did the only thing that felt honest in that exact moment. I reached over and laced my fingers through his, just for a second, just long enough to feel his hand go still with surprise before it closed around mine, careful, like he thought I might change my mind if he moved too fast.

"This doesn't fix anything," I said.

"I know."

"It doesn't mean anything's different."

"I know that too." He didn't let go. "Doesn't mean I'm giving it back, though."

We sat there another minute, hands laced together on a bench outside a library at midnight, three years of unfinished sentences finally quiet for once, and I let myself have exactly sixty seconds of pretending none of the rest of it existed, not Savannah, not the texts, not whatever accident he wasn't ready to explain, before I made myself pull my hand back and stand up.

"I have to go."

"I know." He stood too, careful not to close the distance I'd just put back between us. "Lily. Whatever else happens. I'm glad you sat down."

"Me too," I admitted, and walked home alone in the dark, replaying the exact weight of his hand around mine the whole way, wondering how something that changed nothing could still feel like it had changed absolutely everything.