All Chapters of Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

The world looks scrubbed raw after the snow.I barely sleep after the library. I lie in my narrow bed staring at Americus's glow-in-the-dark constellations while she breathes evenly across the room, and my mind cycles through every word Eli said, every moment we came close to something neither of us named, every expression on Riley's face in that lamplight alcove with Liam beside her. Sleep, when it finally comes, is thin and unsatisfying, the kind that leaves you more tired than if you had stayed awake entirely.By morning the nor'easter has blown itself out completely. Yale's campus has been remade overnight. Every surface lies blanketed in snow so clean and bright I need to shade my eyes before I even reach the bottom of the residential college steps. Sterling Memorial's Gothic spires cut against a cobalt sky that looks freshly painted, every ledge and roofline capped with ice that catches the early sun in cold flashes. The maintenance crews have been working since before dawn. Nea

POV: Eli HayesI hear the impact before I reach the gate.I am coming off a separate practice session, stick loose in one hand, my shoulder aching in the specific way it does after heavy repetition work. Sweat has already gone cold beneath my jersey. I was heading for the equipment room, thinking about nothing more complicated than a hot shower and a protein shake.Then I hear it.The sound of a body hitting ice is distinct, different from a puck against the boards or a stick on the ice surface. It is hollow and immediate and impossible to mistake once you have heard it enough times, the kind of sound that lives in your spine before your brain catches up to it.I push through the gate without deciding to.The main rink surface opens up in front of me.Silver is at the boards, both hands gripping the perimeter barrier, her weight distributed unevenly in the specific way of someone who just fell and is doing a damage assessment. Her practice gear is wrong for the temperature, too thin f

POV: Eli HayesShe asks it again.Why do you care.A whisper this time, not a challenge. The empty rink catches it and holds it, the echo softening the edges until what remains is something closer to genuine than anything she has directed at me since the Sterling steps.Her voice cracked in the middle of the sentence before this one. I heard it happen. The crack in someone's voice when they are fighting to stay controlled and the fight is almost lost is a sound I know well, from inside and from outside. I have been on both sides of it, and I have never found a way to make it easier to hear.I look at her.She is against the boards, hands gripping the barrier behind her, her weight still distributed slightly off the left leg despite every effort she is making not to show it. Her hair has come loose from whatever careful arrangement it started the evening in. There is ice on her sleeve from the fall. Her eyes are bright in the specific way that is not going to be tears and is not fully

POV: Silver PrestonI have already half-regretted taking his arm before we reach the first streetlamp.The cold outside is the sharp, clarifying kind that follows a storm once it has spent itself. The sky has gone clear and dark, stars scattered across it with the precise indifference of something that has been there longer than any of us. The Gothic towers of the residential colleges rise against it like cut paper, every ledge and carved detail still softened by accumulated snow. It is the kind of night that makes a person feel small in a way that is not entirely unwelcome.Weston walks beside me with the easy, unhurried quality he applies to everything, as though the temperature, the hour, and the fact that I am clearly favoring my left leg are all minor details that have nothing to do with him. He does not adjust his pace to mine. He does not need to; I suspect he has already calculated exactly how slow I can go without admitting it costs me anything.My knee makes each step its ow

POV: Silver PrestonThe latch clicks behind me.I lean against the door, letting my full weight settle into the wood for a moment, as if it might hold up more than just my body.My eyes close.The phantom sensation of Weston's lips against my knuckles sits on my skin with the particular persistence of something designed to linger. Not pleasant, not unpleasant. Just present. A small, deliberate mark, the kind that asks to be noticed and remembered, whether I want it to or not.I open my eyes.Americus is watching me from her bed.She sits cross-legged, her dark hair caught in a pencil-secured bun that looks one sharp movement from total collapse. Her arms are folded across her chest. Her expression is the organized one, the version she wears when she has been thinking for a while and has arranged everything she wants to say into a specific order, like index cards laid out and numbered.She does not speak yet.The desk lamp throws light across the room, and in it I can see every detail