Todos los capítulos de Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Capítulo 111 - Capítulo 120

POV: Silver PrestonI did not need a knight.I got one anyway.Eli pushes off from the wall and crosses the corridor floor with the measured stride I have cataloged from months of watching him move through spaces he does not perform in.His equipment bag shifts on his shoulder.He does not look uncertain for a single step."That's enough."His voice is low and entirely clear.Leona turns toward him with the cool assessment she reserves for people who challenge her athletes and live to regret it."And you are exactly who, young man?""Someone who's tired of watching her get torn apart in a public hallway."Leona's gaze moves back to me.The calculation of someone rearranging their tactics in real time."You allow boys to speak for you now, Silver? How wonderfully collegiate."Heat floods my face."He's not speaking for me--""She doesn't allow me to do anything," Eli says. Flat. Certain. "I'm choosing to say something because what I'm watching is not acceptable."Leona's expression doe

POV: Silver PrestonDistraction is the only cure for anger.That is what I tell myself when Americus shoves a tube of deep red lipstick into my hand and announces, with the finality of someone who has already decided, that I am coming to the party tonight."I'm really not in the--"She has already moved to my closet.She pulls clothes without asking while I stand in the middle of our room still holding the lipstick like evidence of something I did not agree to."You've been pacing this room like a Gothic heroine for two days," she says, not looking up. "You need noise and people and the kind of night that makes your own problems feel small by comparison."I want to tell her I need the opposite of that.What I actually need is quiet enough to process everything that happened in that corridor. Leona's words finding every existing crack. Eli's yes that landed like something solid. My own response, which I still cannot fully look at directly without feeling something collapse in my chest.

POV: Eli HayesEvery head in the room turns toward Silver.Not toward me.Not toward Carroway.Toward Silver.That single collective motion tells me everything about what this room has assembled as common knowledge over the course of one semester - more than I would have thought possible from the outside, and completely obvious from the inside. People notice things. People talk. Apparently people have been talking about us for weeks without either of us realizing how thin the walls had become.I look at her.She is not looking at her can. She is not looking at the floor, at Americus, or at the exit - all the places a person looks when they want to disappear.She is looking at me.Her eyes are doing the thing they do when something real is happening and she is deciding whether to manage it. I have seen that particular calculation before, the flicker of calm laid over something faster underneath, and I know better than to mistake it for indifference.We are in a circle of approximately

POV: Silver PrestonThe party begins to break apart after that peak.Someone turns the music louder. Conversations drift into smaller clusters. The intensity of the circle disperses into the ambient noise of people wanting to pretend the last five minutes were just a game.I leave as soon as I can do it without looking like I am running.The Gothic corridor is cooler than the common room and quieter, the noise dropping behind me as the heavy wooden door swings shut.I press my back against the stone wall.Close my eyes for two seconds.Open them.Eli is already there.He is leaning against the medieval stonework a few feet away, arms crossed, watching me with the expression he uses when he has something to say and has not yet decided whether to spend it."You think that was amusing?" he asks. Low. Measured. Sharp underneath."It was a dare. A stupid party game.""That wasn't a game." He pushes off the wall and takes one step toward me. "That was you handing him exactly what he came he

POV: Silver PrestonLoneliness makes you reckless.I know this by the next afternoon, sitting in the residential college common room with my Victorian literature assignment open on my laptop, reading the same paragraph for the fourth time without retaining any of it.The common room hums with familiar sounds.Hockey players at the long table debating line changes for Friday's game. Figure skaters two couches over analyzing the technical elements of last weekend's exhibition, the kind of conversation I once participated in as a full member and now only exist adjacent to. Theater students running lines near the windows.My phone lights up.Weston.Coffee? Just us. No pressure.No pressure.That phrase is doing a great deal of work.I watch the cursor blink in the text field for longer than I should.The campus outside the casement windows is all grey and brown, February doing its particular best to make New Haven look like a place where things go to wait out the winter. The last patches