All Chapters of Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

POV: Silver PrestonI thought committee meetings were going to be the hard part.I was wrong about that.The real challenge materializes during prep week, when Americus somehow acquires six enormous crates of decorations through channels she refuses to explain, three extension ladders from Yale's maintenance department, and official permission to transform Woolsey Hall into what she describes as a winter wonderland that would make Disney jealous.Which is how I end up in Woolsey Hall on a Saturday morning that started before any reasonable hour.The hall itself is one of Yale's landmark spaces, completed in 1901, with ceilings that reach high enough to make you feel appropriately small and stone walls that have absorbed a century of university ceremonies. The kind of room that makes you understand why Yale bothers with formal events at all, because some spaces are simply built to hold them.Right now it looks like a decorating supply warehouse exploded inside it.Paper snowflakes in v

POV: Silver PrestonThe fairy lights will not leave me alone.I am back in the dorm, lying on my narrow bed staring at the ceiling, and I can still see them. The way the gold spread across Woolsey Hall's stonework. The way the room changed in the space of a second from impressive to something that felt like it meant something.The way Eli was already watching when I looked up.Americus is out celebrating our decorating progress with the kind of social energy that genuinely never seems to require recharging. Riley fell asleep an hour ago with a philosophy textbook open across her chest, which is the most Riley thing I have ever witnessed.The room is quiet.Above me, the glow-in-the-dark stars Americus applied to our stone ceiling during the first week of school cast faint green light across the medieval walls. She put them up with the same focused dedication she brings to everything, consulting an actual star map to get the constellations approximately right.I stare at them and think

POV: Silver PrestonI hate assigned seating.The entire concept is social manipulation dressed up as hospitality. Forcing conversations nobody asked for, manufacturing proximity between people who have been doing perfectly reasonable work to maintain distance from each other.Americus, naturally, considers this a feature.She approaches place cards the way she approaches everything else, with the focused enthusiasm of someone who has already decided how this is going to go and is simply arranging the physical world to match her vision.I should have seen this coming.Mory's sits on York Street, a private dining club that has been part of Yale's social architecture since 1849. Wood-paneled walls. Oil portraits of distinguished alumni watching from gilded frames with the patient authority of people who have been right about most things for a long time.The private dining room we have been given for the committee dinner has a long mahogany table set with the kind of precision that commun

POV: Silver PrestonThe rumor does not die.I spent forty minutes in the Ingalls locker room telling Bianca and Bella Mitchelle directly that I am not coming back, and by the next morning the campus has collectively decided that this is exactly what someone who is secretly coming back would say.I heard she's been training after hours.Someone saw her at the rink.My friend in athletics said there's already talk about her joining the team.I navigate Old Campus with my hood up and my eyes forward and my jaw set in the specific way that Americus has started calling my competition face, which she means as a compliment and which I experience as a diagnosis.Nothing I say makes any difference.The denial just feeds the story.By Wednesday I have stopped trying to correct people directly and started using the strategy that has served me best since September.Move through. Say nothing. Wait for something else to happen that is more interesting.Yale is a large enough place that something mo

POV: Silver PrestonI catch up to him on the steps outside Sterling.I don't plan to.My feet make the decision before I've finished arguing myself out of it, which is becoming a pattern I don't entirely like. There's a recklessness to it that doesn't suit me, this acting before thinking, this letting impulse override careful deliberation. I've built my entire academic career on measured responses, on thinking three steps ahead. Yet here I am, chasing after someone I barely know, propelled by something I can't quite name.The November air hits immediately, cold and direct, the kind of temperature that clarifies things. It sharpens the edges of thought, strips away pretense. My breath comes out in visible clouds, dissipating into the late afternoon gray.Eli stands at the bottom of the stone steps, bag slung over one shoulder, moving toward the athletic complex with the unhurried pace of someone who has practice in an hour and knows exactly how long the walk takes. There's a precision