All Chapters of Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

POV: Silver PrestonI should look away.The practical, self-preserving part of my brain has been issuing this instruction since my eyes found Eli across the ballroom, and I have been ignoring it with the specific stubbornness that has characterized most of my decisions tonight.The gala moves around us in the way formal events do when they succeed. The string quartet's sound fills Woolsey Hall the way good music fills a space built for it, finding the corners and the high ceiling and returning transformed. The fairy lights we hung do their work on the stone walls, casting patterns that shift with each movement in the crowd. Couples glide across the polished floor in patterns that the room seems to have been waiting for, as if the space itself has been holding its breath for this moment.I stand near the entrance with my sparkling water and my silver-gray dress and my awareness of exactly where Eli Hayes is at all times - a habit I have apparently developed without making a conscious d

POV: Silver PrestonI make it approximately forty feet from where I left Eli before Americus materializes beside me.She emerges from the crowd the way she always does, with the precise timing of someone who has been tracking my location and chose this exact moment to intercept. It's a talent she's perfected over years of student government and social orchestration."There you are."Her emerald satin gown catches every light source in the room simultaneously, which is very Americus. The fabric shimmers as she moves, demanding attention in a way she never has to ask for verbally.Her cheeks are flushed with the energy of someone who has been genuinely enjoying this event and wants everyone else to share the experience whether they want to or not. There's champagne on her breath - the expensive kind the alumni donors brought - and her eyes have that bright, determined gleam that means she's on a mission."You are lurking by the refreshment table," she observes."I am taking a break from

POV: Silver PrestonThe cold hits my face before the doors have finished closing behind me.November in New Haven is not polite about temperature. It doesn't ease you in with warnings or gradual shifts. It simply arrives, complete and immediate, and the contrast with the overheated ballroom makes it feel sharper than it probably is. My skin prickles with the sudden change, goosebumps rising beneath the thin silk of my gown.I welcome it anyway. The bite of winter air feels cleaner than the suffocating atmosphere I've just escaped.I push through the courtyard entrance and keep moving, my legs carrying me forward on instinct rather than conscious decision.The snow that fell earlier in the week has been maintained by whatever fell overnight, and the Branford courtyard is blanketed in the specific white silence of a Yale campus after dark in winter. The lamp posts throw amber light through the falling flakes, creating halos of warmth in the frigid air. The Gothic archways around the per

POV: Silver PrestonThe ballroom swallows me whole the moment I step back through the doors.Music rushes in like pressure equalizing after a vacuum. The string quartet weaves through Vivaldi, the crystal chandeliers throw fractured light across polished marble, and laughter ricochets off Woolsey Hall's stone walls in waves that feel almost physical.Too bright. Too loud. Too much.I let the noise push me forward.Moving feels better than standing still. Standing still means replaying the courtyard, which I refuse to do. Eli's face in the amber light, all sharp angles and something vulnerable I've never seen before. His hand suspended in the air between us, not quite reaching. The sentence he started but couldn't finish, hanging there like an unanswered question.*I just can't.*Cannot what.I am not thinking about it.My heels find the corridor along the east wall, blessedly dim and empty, and I press my back against the stone. My eyes close. The cold seeps through the silk of my dre

POV: Silver PrestonI know what I look like when I step back into the light.Eleven years of competition taught me this - how to arrange your face, how to set your shoulders, how to walk across ice or marble or any surface at all like the inside of you isn't currently on fire. The muscle memory runs deeper than conscious thought, a survival skill honed through countless performances when falling apart wasn't an option.I am doing that now.The ballroom receives me without ceremony, indifferent to whatever just shattered in that corridor. New couples have taken the floor since I left, their movements fluid and uncomplicated. The string quartet has shifted into something slower, a waltz that pulls at something tender in my chest. The chandeliers throw their light across everything with complete indifference to what happened in a courtyard or a corridor in the last twenty minutes.Nobody is watching me.Somehow that is worse. When you've spent your entire life performing under scrutiny,