บททั้งหมดของ Ice Between Rivals : บทที่ 81 - บทที่ 90

I walked out of the dorm still trying to understand what had just happened.Kai had asked me to be his friend.Kai. The same person who had made the first weeks of my time at this academy feel like a sustained exercise in surviving someone who had decided, on principle, to make everything harder. Who had pushed me, provoked me, switched off the lights to watch me fall apart, and said things I’d spent real energy recovering from.That Kai had sat in front of me with tears drying on his face and asked — quietly, genuinely, with all the armour temporarily gone — if we could be friends.My heart, completely against my permission, was very happy about it.I needed air. I walked until the cafeteria appeared and went in, and that was where Miller found me — arriving at my shoulder with the easy certainty of someone who has been looking.“Where have you been?” He nudged me as we sat down.“Around,” I said.He looked at my face with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who notices thing

I was the first one to class.I sat down in the quiet of the empty room and looked at the desk in front of me and thought about grapes and blue eyes and a corridor I had walked down very fast this morning, and then I thought about exams and graduation requirements and the semi-finals and all the various things that were now apparently happening at the same time, and by the time the room began filling around me I had successfully redirected myself into something resembling focus.And then Ken sat down beside me.Casually. Naturally. With the easy, unbothered energy of someone arriving at a seat they’ve always occupied, wearing a smile that had absolutely no business being that uncomplicated given the circumstances.I looked at him.He looked back. “What’s with the face, Noah? You look angry.”I stared at him for a moment. “You looked for me,” I said flatly. “To do what, exactly? Tell more people things I trusted you with?”The smile faltered. Something moved underneath it — not quite g

I didn't try to pull him off. I didn't make a joke. I just brought my arms around him, one hand resting on the small of his back and the other cradling the back of his neck, pulling him closer until his forehead was tucked into the crook of my shoulder."I've got you," I murmured. My voice sounded deeper in the dark, vibrating through my own ribs. "I'm right here. It's just the cafeteria, Noah. The same tables, the same chairs. Nothing changed but the light.""It's... it's not just the light," he whispered, his voice breaking. "It's the space. It gets... it gets so big when I can't see the edges."I tightened my grip. I thought about the girl he’d told me about—the one hiding in the dark while her mother died. I didn't see the hockey captain anymore. I saw the person who had survived a nightmare and was still waiting for the sun to come up.“Don’t cry,” I said. “I’ve got you.”I said it quietly, into the dark, and meant it in the simple, practical way — you are not alone in this, I am

Ava’s pov I sat in class and waited for him to appear.He didn’t.I looked at the empty seat across the room and thought about the night — the cafeteria, the dark, his hands holding mine while I talked about my mother. I had talked about her. Actually talked, with words and details and the parts I usually kept sealed behind something that didn’t have a name. I had never done that — not with Noah, not with anyone who had known me long enough to ask. And somehow it had been Kai, the person I had spent weeks cataloguing as the worst possible version of a human being, who had sat across from me in a locked cafeteria at two in the morning and held my cold hands and said it wasn’t your fault.I turned the pen over in my fingers.He’s not as bad as I thought.The teacher arrived. Still no Kai. I pulled out my phone under the desk — against the rules, entirely — and typed a quick message.Hi.It didn’t deliver.I tried calling. Let it ring once and hung up, just enough to nudge his phone int

Kai’s POVI had only replied to his text because it was him.Anyone else and the phone would have stayed face down on the pillow until the battery died. But it was Noah, and so I had typed something — something deliberately irritating about stalking, because old habits — and then put the phone down and gone back to sleep.My body was wrong in a way I couldn’t fully account for. I had always been healthy — genuinely, consistently healthy, the kind of person who didn’t get sick, who pushed through things and came out the other side without incident. And yet for the past week everything had become a trigger. The rain. The cold floor of the cafeteria. The jacket I’d given away. I was paying for all of it now in increments.I slept.When I woke up, I was warm.Not the feverish, uncomfortable warmth of a body fighting something — actual warmth, the steady, even kind that comes from outside. I shifted and felt them — two bottles, hot water inside, positioned carefully against my sides. Close