All Chapters of Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

137 Chapters

What I Used to Be

POV: Silver PrestonThe Olympic Trials medal catches the morning light in Americus's hands and throws it back across the room in sharp little flashes.I want to snatch it away from her.Shove everything back into the box, push it under the bed, and pretend none of this is happening. Pretend I am just a regular college freshman with a knee injury and a Yale hoodie and no history worth excavating.Instead my throat closes completely and I sit there on my narrow bed and do not move.Riley appears in the doorway.She has a composition notebook tucked under one arm, pages covered in neat handwriting, and the look of someone who actually completed her assigned reading this morning. She takes one step into the room and stops.Her eyes move from Americus to the medal to the open box on the rug to me."Wait." Her voice is careful. "What is that?"Americus does not miss a beat."Not what. Who." She holds the medal up slightly, letting it catch another angle of light. "Meet Silver Preston. Olymp

The Dining Hall

POV: Silver PrestonSleep is impossible again.Every time I close my eyes my brain pulls me back to Ingalls. The sound of Eli's edges on the ice. The way the arena felt when his gaze lifted from the ice and found me in the stands without any effort at all.I tell myself it means nothing.I tell myself Americus is being dramatic, that there is absolutely no reason to think Eli Hayes has any idea who I am beyond the girl who nearly fell on him in the Branford courtyard and was rude to him on a plane.The doubt does not care what I tell myself.It just sits there.By lunch the next day, Americus has made an executive decision about my trajectory."We are going to the dining hall," she announces, already applying what appears to be her third coat of glitter lip gloss in the narrow mirror. "Hiding in here with protein bars is not a long term strategy, Silver. It is not even a short term one.""I am not hiding.""You are absolutely hiding."Riley looks up from her composition notebook with

Modern American Literature

POV: Silver PrestonI swore I would not unravel again.Not in public. Not where other students could watch it happen. Definitely not where Eli Hayes could observe it from across a dining hall with that unreadable expression he seems to have permanently installed.I bolted anyway.Left my untouched tray of curly fries on the table and pushed through the heavy Gothic doors and did not stop until I was back in the Branford corridor with stone walls on either side and no one watching.The humiliation follows me all the way back to the room.I close the door harder than I mean to. The diamond-paned windows rattle in their frames.Americus looks up from her desk.Riley looks up from her notebook.I get into bed, pull my covers up, and open my assigned reading.Neither of them says anything, which means they are being kind, which somehow makes it worse.I spend the rest of the evening buried in course syllabi and reading lists, scribbling notes in margins with the focused desperation of some

Blue State

POV: Eli Hayes She is going to be late.I knew it the moment I sat down and checked the time and did the math on how far Branford is from Blue State on a bad knee.I ordered my coffee anyway and picked the corner table by the window because it gives a clear sightline to the door, which is habit more than anything else. Eleven years of hockey teaches you to know where the exits are.I have been at Yale for less than two weeks and I already have a system.Early practice. Classes. Film review. Conditioning. Sleep. Repeat.There is no room in that system for complications.Silver Preston is a complication.I knew who she was the moment I saw her on the plane out of San Jose, sitting in 14A with her knee brace and her Yale hoodie and her very deliberate effort to look at nothing except the window. Silver Preston. Junior national medalist. The girl who fell at Nationals in January and took half the figure skating internet down with her on the way.I follow skating the way most hockey playe

Guess We'll See

POV: Silver PrestonThe challenge sits between us like a dropped puck at center ice.Neither of us moves to pick it up immediately.I look down at my notebook and let the ambient noise of Blue State fill the silence. The espresso machine grinding. Students calling out orders. Someone near the back laughing too loudly at something on their laptop.Normal sounds. Safe sounds.I write the words identity crisis at the top of a fresh page and underline them twice.Professional. Neutral. Focused on the assignment.That is the plan."Fitzgerald first or Hemingway?"Eli wraps both hands around his coffee cup."Hemingway. Start with the war injury angle. Physical limitation and creative identity."I write it down.He is not wrong. Hemingway's relationship with the wounds he carried from World War One, both physical and psychological, runs through almost everything he wrote. The way he used writing to process what his body could no longer do. The way his public identity became both armor and ca

Delete

POV: Silver PrestonI leave Blue State with my jaw clenched and my notebook containing almost nothing useful.We agreed on a direction. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, the continuation after collapse. That part is fine. That part is actually good.Everything else about the last hour is significantly less fine.I cross back onto Old Campus through the wrought iron gates and let the familiar weight of the Gothic buildings settle around me. There is something about the scale of this campus that should feel overwhelming and instead just feels solid. Like the stone has absorbed enough anxiety from enough students over enough years that mine is not particularly remarkable.I find Americus and Riley in a sunny patch of grass near the base of Harkness Tower.Americus is sprawled across her jacket with a tube of holographic lip gloss in one hand, using it like a conductor's baton while she narrates something that involves considerable hand gestures. Riley sits cross-legged beside her with a philosophy

Party Night

POV: Silver PrestonDeleting Leona's message should have felt like freedom.Instead it leaves me feeling raw and exposed, like pulling off a bandage before anything underneath has properly closed. Every buzz of my phone for the rest of the afternoon makes me flinch. My body does not seem to understand that I am the one who ended the conversation.Which is exactly why, when Americus bursts through our dorm room door that Saturday night holding two sequined dresses like she is leading a cavalry charge, my first and only instinct is to pull my blanket over my head."Party night," she announces, with the energy of someone declaring a national holiday. "Hockey house. End of first week celebration. Everyone will be there.""Then I definitely should not go."Americus holds one of the dresses against me without asking permission, tilting her head with the critical assessment of someone who considers this a professional skill."You cannot hide in this room forever, Silver. This is Yale, not a

Washed Up

POV: Silver PrestonI do not remember deciding to leave.One moment I am standing against the wall of the hockey house with a cracking red cup in my fist, and the next I am outside on the sidewalk in the October cold, moving fast, or as fast as my knee allows, without any clear memory of the door.The night air hits my face and I keep walking.The music fades behind me by degrees. The bass line that felt like it was living inside my chest drops to a vibration, then a memory, then nothing.My palm stings where the cup's cracked edge has been pressing into my skin.I open my hand.The cup falls apart onto the sidewalk.Footsteps behind me, quick and deliberate."Roomie."Americus falls into step beside me, slightly out of breath, her sequined top throwing small fragments of streetlight in every direction. She looks at my face and then at the crushed cup remains on the pavement behind us and chooses her next words with more care than she usually applies to anything."Okay. That was a lot

The Great Gatsby

POV: Silver Preston The word follows me everywhere.Washed up.It trails me across the courtyards, through the stacks of Sterling Memorial Library on the days I go there to avoid thinking, into the fitful half-sleep I have been managing since the hallway outside the athletic complex.I hear it in the spaces between sentences during lecture. I hear it when I am brushing my teeth. I hear it when my knee aches at two in the morning and I am staring at the Gothic ceiling of our dorm room listening to Americus breathe and wondering what exactly I am doing here.I almost cancel on Eli three times before Tuesday.The first time I get as far as typing out a message about being overwhelmed with coursework before I delete it.The second time I tell myself I am genuinely not feeling well, which is technically true in ways that have nothing to do with illness.The third time I just put my phone face down and stare at the wall for five minutes until the impulse passes.I am not giving him the sat

Dr. Carter

POV: Americus Bentley I have exactly one rule about using my dad's professional connections.Do not abuse them.I have been bending this rule since approximately the moment I met Silver Preston.It is not my fault. Silver is the kind of person who makes bending rules feel like the responsible choice. She limps across campus every day pretending she does not limp. She winces on stairs and pretends she is not wincing. She carries this enormous, obvious pain around like it is invisible and seems genuinely confused when people notice it anyway.I notice everything.It is both my greatest strength and the reason my roommate is about to have a very important medical appointment she did not agree to.Dad texted three days ago that he would be in New Haven for a conference at Yale School of Medicine.I texted back immediately.I may have a situation.His response: Does this situation involve you or someone else?Me: Someone else. She needs a consultation. ACL reconstruction, figure skating l

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