All Chapters of Across The Ice: Falling for my ex’s biggest rival: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

By the time I wandered into Dean’s kitchen the next morning, Arthur Mercer had become the city’s favorite headline. Every channel had found a way to replay the same clip, looping his voice with the kind of urgency reserved for breaking news.“We stopped measuring ourselves against the Hart Group a long time ago.”Commentators filled the silence between repeats, each one more certain than the last about what it meant. Some framed it as a warning shot, others as the opening move in a corporate war, and at least one analyst spoke with the confidence of someone who had clearly never been in the same room as either man.Dean stood at the counter, pouring coffee with the calm of someone who had grown up inside this kind of noise and learned early not to react to it.“They’re acting like your dad just declared war,” I said, nodding toward the television as I took the mug he handed me.“They’re journalists,” he replied, leaning back against the counter. “Worst-case scenarios are their job.”“

The ride back to campus should have cleared my head, but instead it stretched everything out, giving my thoughts too much room to come back to themselves. Outside the bus windows, the city moved with its usual indifference—students weaving through traffic with coffee cups and deadlines, someone chasing a bus they’d already missed, couples arguing over directions like it mattered more than anything else they’d do that day. Life kept going. Mine felt suspended somewhere between a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic and a playground that still echoed with things left unsaid. Mason’s voice lingered in my head, not the whole conversation, just the part that mattered. One sentence. That was all he’d ever wanted. Twenty-two years of trying to earn something that should have been given freely, and it still came down to hearing I’m proud of you. It sounded simple when you stripped it down like that, almost childish, but there was nothing simple about it. I understood that kind of hung

The door had barely clicked shut before the apartment felt too quiet. I stood there longer than I should have, staring at the empty doorway as though Dean might suddenly come back and tell me we’d both overreacted. It was a pointless thought. Dean wasn’t impulsive. He didn’t walk away from conversations only to change his mind five minutes later. If he’d left, it was because he’d already made peace with the decision. Eventually I crossed the room and sat on the edge of my bed. My textbooks were still scattered across my desk, a hoodie still hung off the back of my chair like it had claimed permanent residence there, and my favorite mug sat beside the tin of hot chocolate I’d been promising to wash for days. The room hadn’t changed at all. I had. We hadn’t fought. Nobody had shouted. Dean hadn’t questioned my honesty, and I hadn’t lied to keep him from leaving. He’d asked me for certainty, and I’d discovered, at the worst possible moment, that I didn’t have it. Maybe this really wa

Melissa had kept her promise. The problem was she’d solved the wrong one. I stared at the updated campaign schedule while everyone else loaded equipment onto the buses. Instead of spending the next three days attached to Mercer Athletics and Easton’s media team, I’d been reassigned as Campaign Media Director. It sounded impressive, and judging by the amount of responsibility suddenly sitting on my shoulders, it probably was. I was no longer covering one university. I was overseeing media operations for the entire outreach campaign, coordinating student journalists, photographers and videographers from every participating school, making sure sponsors received the visibility they’d paid for and that nothing slipped through the cracks. Mercer Athletics would still represent Easton. Hart Athletics would represent Northbridge. Around them were half a dozen other universities with their own sponsors, athletes and media teams, all squeezed into the same three-day event. Since Northbridge

By the end of the second day, the campaign had settled into that stretched-out exhaustion where no one quite stopped moving, but everything slowed just enough to feel it. Volunteers folded banners with stiff hands, students rushed to upload interviews before the light disappeared, and athletes lingered to sign one more stick, pose for one more photo. Melissa caught me just as I was slipping away, already holding tomorrow's schedule like she knew I wouldn't argue. I answered on autopilot, my attention drifting elsewhere. When she let me go, I almost turned toward the hockey station out of habit. I stopped myself. If I meant anything I'd been telling myself all day, I couldn't keep waiting for Dean to close the distance. That had been easy before. It had also been part of the problem. I headed for the parking lot instead. His SUV sat where he'd left it that morning. I leaned against the passenger door, trying to look like I belonged there instead of someone who'd shown up without