All Chapters of Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

POV: Silver PrestonNothing spreads faster than gossip at Yale.I already know the damage is waiting by the time pale February light comes through the diamond-paned windows.I barely slept.The photograph exists perfectly in my memory even before I see it circulating. The streetlight catching the snow outside Harkness Tower. Weston's head angled toward mine, the geometry of it reading as something it was not quite. My face caught soft and unguarded, mid-breath. The specific expression of someone who was about to say something that mattered.By breakfast it is everywhere.Not literally everywhere. But in every phone, every group chat, every conversation that drops to a murmur and picks back up at a slightly different frequency when I enter the dining hall.The great hall does its usual morning business under the soaring Gothic arches and long wooden tables. The sounds are familiar. Cutlery, chairs, the low roar of several hundred conversations at once.But the texture of it is differen

POV: Silver PrestonHis silence is heavier than anything he could have said.I slip through the heavy oak door of the lecture hall and find my seat near the tall leaded windows before the room fills. The worn wooden desk surface is cool under my palms. The carved scratches of generations of students underneath my fingers.Eli is already there.Three rows ahead and one section over.The arrangement we have held all semester without ever discussing it. Close enough to share academic territory. Far enough to maintain the fiction of chosen distance.He does not look when I sit down.Not the reflex glance that most people cannot suppress when movement enters their peripheral vision. Not the fractional acknowledgment I have grown accustomed to, the almost-imperceptible shift when he registers my presence in a room.Nothing.His notebook is already open.Pen positioned with the precision of someone who arrived early and has been composing themselves ever since.I arrange my own materials.Ha

POV: Silver PrestonOld instincts do not ask permission.Riley's words have been circling in my head since she said them, each rotation bringing hope and doubt in equal measure.You know he cares, right?The possibility sits in my chest like something I cannot set down and cannot figure out what to do with.By midnight, the tower room is too small for it.I pull on thermal leggings, practice pants, the Yale hockey sweatshirt I borrowed from Americus months ago and kept without discussion. Thick socks. My skate bag from under the bed.Americus is asleep across the room, her breathing even and unbothered.I ease the door shut behind me.The campus at two in the morning has its own quality.The Gothic buildings settled into darkness with only the security lights still running. My breath shows white in the cold air. My footsteps across the quad are the only sound moving.Ingalls sits low against the February sky, the building's profile familiar in every light condition I have encountered

POV: Silver PrestonHis anger is colder than the ice.I push upright from where I am still braced against the boards and make myself meet his eyes."Go ahead," I say. "Say whatever lecture you came here to deliver and get it over with."The defiance in my voice sounds thinner than I want it to.He steps over the boards.He came directly from late practice. His dark hair is still damp, pressed flat at the edges from wearing a helmet for the past several hours. His Yale jersey is half-untucked, the fabric creased in the pattern that comes from wearing full gear. He did not stop to change.He stops close enough that I have to tilt my head back slightly to hold his gaze."You don't belong out here like this," he says. "Not at two in the morning. Not with your knee in the condition it's in."The clinical accuracy of it stings more than any insult."It's none of your business.""Like hell it isn't."The words ring through the empty rink with a force that surprises me, bouncing off the glass

POV: Silver PrestonHis words smell like Georgia pines.The walk back from Ingalls crosses the whole of Yale's sleeping campus. The Gothic buildings dark against the February sky. The flagstones quiet under my feet. My knee makes each step an event.I let it.Eli's words move with me through every passage.I know him better than you think.The certainty in how he said it. Not the sharp edge of someone trying to land a point in an argument. The particular flatness of something that was simply true and had been true for longer than tonight.And then: I wasn't the one who ended that player's career. But I was there when it happened.I am still turning those two sentences over by the time I reach our building.I let myself into the tower room quietly.Americus's breathing is steady and deep from across the room. She came in late while I was still out, her coat still over her desk chair, one boot off and one on, which is a level of exhaustion that belongs to someone who ran out of the ener