All Chapters of Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

POV: Silver PrestonAmericus could turn anything into a production.Her suite looks like a garment district has been invited inside and allowed to fully express itself. Sequins cascade from open garment bags across every surface. Silk ties in jewel tones are draped over her desk chair in a waterfall of color. A precise lineup of heels stands along the baseboard with the discipline of something that has been arranged, considered, and rearranged at least twice.The glittery pink clipboard is somewhere under a drift of fabric.I have barely stepped through the heavy wooden door before she descends on me, pressing a silk-wrapped hanger toward my chest with the authority of someone who has never once doubted their aesthetic judgment."Floor length, midnight blue, very Grace Kelly meets the present century. Try it on immediately.""I didn't exactly agree to—""Best friends don't require explicit permission for interventions." She has already moved to Riley, adjusting the champagne-colored d

POV: Eli HayesShe keeps pace with me.That is the first thing I notice, coming down the last turn of the spiral staircase and out into the Gothic corridor below. She does not fall behind or pull ahead. She walks beside me with the careful deliberateness of someone who has made a decision and is sticking with it.The February evening outside is the kind that settles into your coat immediately.Clear sky. The temperature has dropped since afternoon. Our breath makes steady white clouds as we cross the first quad, the snow underfoot compacted by a week of foot traffic into something dense and slightly treacherous along the edges of the path.I watch her knee.I cannot help it. I have been watching how she navigates uneven ground since the cobblestones in September, when I caught her mid-fall and she looked at me like I was a specific inconvenience she had not budgeted for.She is managing it.Not easily. But she is managing it.We walk without speaking for a while.It is not uncomfortab

POV: Americus BentleyI have been doing Silver's hair for forty minutes.This is not unusual. Hair requires time, intention, and a willingness to hold the curling iron at the correct angle without rushing the section. What is unusual is the quality of silence coming from the person sitting in front of my vanity mirror.Silver Preston is not a loud person.She does not fill rooms the way I do, which is fine, different people fill rooms differently, and the world would be genuinely overwhelming if everyone operated at my frequency. But she has a specific presence even in silence. A watchfulness. An awareness that communicates even when she is not speaking.The silence she has been sitting in tonight is different.It is not the exhausted silence of the past several weeks, which felt like someone trying very hard to hold something together while also holding something else down at the same time.It is quieter than that.More settled.Something happened.I do not know exactly what. She cam

POV: Eli HayesI watch it happen from across the room.Carroway crossing the floor toward Silver with the specific quality of movement that I have spent a semester identifying as calculated. The way he times his arrival. The way he positions himself in relation to her.I have been at this gala for forty minutes.I arrived early, which is not my usual approach to events like this, and I have been near the far column for most of that time, watching the room do what rooms do at formal events.Watching Silver specifically.Not the way I have been watching her all semester, with the careful management of someone keeping their own surveillance at a distance they can maintain control of.Just watching.Because she walked in tonight and something was different.The dress is different. The hair is different. But those things are surface and I have never been particularly interested in surfaces.What is different is the quality of how she is standing.No calculation in it.No managed distance b

POV: Silver PrestonThe heavy doors open into cold air.The corridor outside Woolsey Hall is the particular quiet that exists just outside loud rooms, where the sound becomes muffled and distant and your own heartbeat becomes audible again.I push through and let the door close behind me.The jazz trio's warmth disappears.Stone corridor. Security lighting. The February draft moving through the old passage with the persistence of something that has been doing this since before anyone currently at Yale was born.I look both directions.Empty left.To the right, near the far window that overlooks the courtyard, a familiar silhouette.He is leaning against the stone wall.Jacket on. Arms crossed. Looking at the dark window with the focused quality of someone who is not actually looking at anything.He hears my footsteps.He does not turn immediately.Which means he knew someone was coming but was not sure it was me, which means he is as uncertain about this as I am, which is the most hum