All Chapters of Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

POV: Silver PrestonNothing ruins pasta faster than silence.I twirl my fork through linguine that has gone cold while I try to disappear into my chair, watching noodles slide back into the bowl with the same stubborn persistence as everything I am trying not to think about. My stomach has been in knots since we sat down, and the cold sauce congealing on my plate feels like a fitting metaphor for whatever this evening has become.The restaurant Americus chose should have been perfect.Small and intimate. Exposed brick walls with warm fairy lights strung across them. Rustic wooden tables with flickering tea candles and small potted herbs that fill the air with basil and rosemary. The kind of cozy Chapel Street spot where conversations are supposed to flow and pasta fixes things. I remember her texting me the address last week with three exclamation points and a promise that this dinner would be exactly what our fractured little group needed. I should have known better than to believe h

POV: Eli HayesI watch her take his arm.The moment has a specific quality that I will not forget. Not because I did not see it coming - I saw it coming from the instant Carroway pushed through the restaurant door with the timing of someone who had been waiting for the exact right second to arrive. Which he had been. Which is the thing about Weston that I have been trying to tell her since September.He calculates everything.Every entrance. Every exit. Every word delivered in the precise order required to produce the precise outcome he is looking for. He plans the way other people breathe, without effort, without a single wasted motion, and I have watched him do it all semester and told myself it did not matter because she would see it eventually.I saw it coming.It still lands like something dropped from a height I did not measure correctly.She takes his arm. Her fingers close over his coat sleeve, and they turn toward campus, and I stand on Elm Street in January and watch them go

POV: Americus BentleyI push the door open without knocking because it is my room too.That is what I am thinking as I cross the threshold, the thought arriving with the automatic certainty of something I have never had to question before.I need my spare charger. Silver is back, and the light glows under the door, so she is probably studying or on the phone with Thomas. I will just grab it quickly and go. My mind is already three steps ahead, already halfway back out the door before I have even fully entered.Then I see them.I stop.My brain assembles the image in pieces because it does not want to assemble it all at once, does not want to hand me the whole picture in a single unbearable frame.Weston Carroway.Silver with her back against the desk.The specific quality of the space between them tells me exactly what I interrupted and for how long it has been happening. It is not a guess. It is a certainty that lands in my stomach before my mind has even finished forming the thought

POV: Silver PrestonTwo days have passed since I whispered those three words into the dark.*I'm worried too.*I have not let myself think about what they meant. The fragile peace between Americus and me has held since, quiet and careful, like something neither of us wants to test too hard, in case it shatters.Tonight the nor'easter settles the question of what I am doing with my evening by driving everyone indoors.Snow slaps against the tall Gothic windows of Sterling Memorial Library with the specific fury that belongs in a weather advisory, not a Tuesday night. The wind finds the ancient stone buttresses outside and turns them into something close to an instrument, a low moan that moves through the vaulted reading rooms and settles in the chest. Even the librarians at the front desk keep glancing toward the doors, as if expecting the storm itself to walk in and demand a card.I only came to return an overdue text.By the time I climb the granite steps and push through the carved

POV: Silver PrestonThe snow starts before I reach the corner of Elm and York.Not the polite kind that falls in straight lines. The horizontal kind, driving into my face with the specific efficiency of a New England storm that has decided it means business and would like everyone to know. It stings against my cheeks, finds the gap between my scarf and collar, and I welcome the discomfort more than I probably should.I left Weston at the entrance to Branford's residential college.He said something charming and calibrated as I went through the door. I do not remember what it was. My brain was already somewhere else, somewhere on Elm Street, somewhere in the shadows between two streetlamps, replaying a moment I cannot seem to put down.The look on his face when he said it was wrong.I had told myself it was not wrong.I had taken the arm anyway.I had said fine in a voice that did not sound like me, a voice borrowed from someone more certain than I felt.The dorm room was empty when I