All Chapters of Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

POV: Americus BentleyI have seen my father deliver bad news before.Not often. He protects me from the professional parts of his life the way parents do when they think their kid is still young enough to be protected from things.But I have seen it.There is a specific quality to his voice when the news is not good. Not cold. Never cold. Just very, very precise. Like he is choosing every word for its accuracy rather than its comfort, because he has learned that comfort that is not built on truth does not actually help anyone.He is using that voice now.I sit in the chair across from his desk and watch Silver sit on the examination table and answer his questions.She answers every single one of them with the composure of someone who has been preparing for this conversation without knowing she was preparing for it. Range of motion. Pain levels. Stability. Grinding or catching in the joint.Her voice does not waver once.Her hands are flat on her thighs.Her face is doing that thing it

POV: Eli HayesI should have gone straight back to the house.Practice ran long. Coach Tillman kept the defensemen on the ice an extra forty minutes working transition drills, the kind of repetitive, grinding session that leaves your legs feeling like wet concrete. My shoulder aches the way it always does after heavy contact work, the deep specific ache that lives in the joint where the labrum repair sits.The injury that almost ended everything before Yale.The injury nobody here knows about because I came to Yale to play hockey, not to be someone's cautionary tale.I have my bag over one shoulder and my helmet in my hand and I am heading back toward the athletic complex exit when I see her through the window.Silver Preston, leaving Sterling Memorial Library into the middle of what has gone from a light snowfall to something significantly more serious in the last hour.She has her head down against the wind, hands shoved into her coat pockets, moving across the courtyard with the par

POV: Silver Preston The game's pace is immediate and relentless.Bodies into the boards. The puck moving faster than my eyes want to track, that black disk ricocheting between sticks and off the glass with sounds that carry all the way to the upper sections.Yale dominates possession in the opening minutes but the other team, Cornell, pushes back hard along the boards and through the neutral zone with the defensive discipline of a program that has been doing this for a long time.I watch Eli.I tell myself I am just tracking the game, getting familiar with hockey as a sport I have never paid serious attention to before.This is not entirely true.In figure skating, edge work is everything. The angle of the blade against the ice, the precision of the turn, the distribution of weight through a curve. I have spent my entire life developing the ability to read ice and read bodies on ice, to see what the edge is doing and understand what the skater is asking of it.Watching Eli Hayes play

POV: Silver PrestonThe morning after the game feels like waking up inside someone else's fever dream, where everything carries the surreal afterglow of victory and celebration that hasn't quite worn off yet.I emerge from restless sleep to find Americus sprawled across her own bed like a sequined starfish, still wearing the glittery top from last night's afterparty and scrolling through her phone with the dedicated focus of someone curating the perfect social media narrative.She hums fragments of what sound like victory songs, occasionally punctuating the melody with small squeals of delight as she discovers new photos from the evening's festivities.Riley has claimed her usual position at the desk, wrapped in a soft cardigan and nursing a steaming mug of chamomile tea while pretending to focus on her philosophy reading.But I can tell from the way her eyes keep flicking toward Americus that she's definitely absorbing every word of the ongoing commentary.The morning light streaming

POV: Silver PrestonI spend the week after the hockey game perfecting the art of strategic evasion.It requires more energy than I anticipated.I leave American Literature the precise second Professor Chen dismisses class, moving through the side door before anyone can fall into step beside me. I take longer routes across campus that add ten minutes to every trip but reliably avoid the athletic complex and the coffee shops near Ingalls where hockey players tend to cluster after practice.I have memorized the team's practice schedule.I am aware of how that sounds.I do it anyway.The Gothic courtyards and stone pathways that felt like possibility on my first day have become an obstacle course I navigate with the focused attention of someone who has a very specific person they are trying not to encounter while also pretending they are not trying to avoid anyone.It is exhausting.It is also necessary, because the snowstorm was three days ago and I can still feel exactly where his hand