Lahat ng Kabanata ng Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Kabanata 151 - Kabanata 158

Silver PrestonThe box of medals comes out from under the bed last.I have saved it deliberately.Everything else has been packed in the careful systematic way I approach things now, without the frantic energy of someone trying to outrun their own feelings. Textbooks boxed with the syllabi tucked inside them. The Yale hoodie, worn through at the right cuff, folded on top because it will go in my bag rather than a box. Thomas's letter in the inside pocket of my jacket where it has been since March.Americus has been packing in the way Americus does everything, which is dramatically and with significant sound effects and occasional musical accompaniment from her rhinestone speaker.Across the room, Riley is already mostly finished because Riley has been organized since the day she arrived and has maintained it through every circumstance including a snowstorm, a gala, and a semester that tested everyone's organizational systems in ways that had nothing to do with academics.I pull the b

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. In my left hand, the manila packet is thick, stamped in purple administrative ink from the Dean's Affairs Office. The sealed corner is still cold from the walk across Old Campus. On the front, my legal name sits opposite Weston's, filed barely forty minutes after we deposited Marina Volkov's clinic logs into the secure athletic board lockbox. The phantom sensation of his lips against my knuckles sits on my skin with the particular persistence of something designed to linger. Not affection. A performance for whoever was watching from the quad windows. A deliberate marker.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

POV: Silver PrestonAcademic torture has a new name.Professor Dawes announces the mid-semester comparative analysis pairings, and I stare at my annotated stack of Victorian Gothic texts like it personally engineered this outcome.Eli Hayes.Partner.The seminar room is the kind of Yale space that has absorbed decades of student anxiety into its walls. Chalk dust, old wood, and the particular cold seeping through Gothic windows installed long before anyone thought about insulation. Around us, other students settle into their assigned pairs, voices dropping to the productive murmur of people who can actually focus. I envy them, briefly and bitterly, before the feeling curdles into something closer to dread.I can't focus.Weston's voice is still running underneath everything, a current I can't shut off no matter how hard I try to drown it out with syllabus logistics and the dry comfort of required reading. It surfaces at the worst moments, filling the pauses I should be using to think,

POV: Silver PrestonThe night air cuts sharper than any argument.I shove my chair back hard enough that the metal legs screech against the restaurant tile, the sound slicing through the ambient noise. Heads turn at nearby tables. Someone's fork pauses halfway to their mouth. A waiter glances over, unsure whether to intervene. Americus half-rises too, her napkin sliding off her lap, concern flickering across her face before I am moving too fast for her to catch.I do not care.My stomach is in knots from pasta I did not taste, my pulse still hammering with the aftershock of that table, of Eli's flat declaration landing in the silence and Weston's smile sharpening in response and Americus's grin faltering for the first time all evening. I do not know which of those three things unsettles me most. Maybe it is that they happened all at once, stacked on top of each other until I could not tell where one ended and the next began. Maybe it is that some small, traitorous part of me felt reli