All Chapters of Collision on Ice: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Jace's POV I told myself the whole walk back to my car that it didn’t mean anything.She’d looked exhausted. That was all. Any halfway decent person would have done the same thing, seeing someone that clearly running on fumes at one in the morning, and it had nothing to do with the window at the library, nothing to do with whatever I’d sat there feeling watching her work a counter she had no business still standing behind after the day she'd already had. It was food. It was only a sandwich and juice. It didn't mean I was beginning to care about her more than I wanted to. I almost believed myself by the time I got home.The problem, and I recognized it even as I sat there on my couch rethinking it, was that one act like that wasn’t going to satisfy whatever had actually shifted in me watching her through that window. I knew myself well enough to know this wasn't just a one-time act of kindness I'd forget about. I was going to want to do it again. And I could not, unde

Roselle's POV The athletics office was quiet on Wednesday afternoons, most of the team either in class or at conditioning, and I usually used the window between my last class and my shift to catch up on grading practice quizzes in relative peace. Jace was usually gone by then too, off to whatever late class or meeting occupied his Wednesdays, which was why I did a double take finding him still there, seated at the desk in the corner, a book open in front of him that had absolutely nothing to do with hockey.I almost didn’t say anything. I almost just sat down at my usual spot and let the moment pass unremarked. But curiosity got the better of me before I could stop myself.“What are you reading?”He looked up, and his face changed, briefly, almost caught out, before he answered. “Nothing.”“It’s clearly something. You’ve had your nose in it for ten minutes.”He hesitated, and for a second I thought he might just close it and change the subject the way

Roselle's POV I hadn’t meant to overhear anything.I was still sitting exactly where he’d left me, his book gone from the desk but the strange, unfinished shape of our conversation still hanging in the room, when his voice carried back through the door he hadn’t bothered to close behind him, low at first, then clearer as whatever call he’d answered picked up.“There’s no situation,” he was saying, and something about his tone made me go very still, curiosity winning out over the part of me that knew I probably shouldn’t be listening at all.Whatever the person on the other end said next made him laugh.It stopped me completely. I’d heard Jace Whitfield smirk, sneer, deliver cutting remarks with surgical precision, and exactly once, briefly, do something that might charitably be called almost smiling, in that strange conversation about the book ten minutes ago. I had never once heard him actually laugh, full and vulnerable, the kind of laugh that came from s

Roselle's POV It started as a normal conversation, or as normal as anything between us ever got, both of us stuck waiting on the same delayed shuttle back from an away game where I’d been sent to log academic hours for the athletes traveling with the team, the parking lot half empty, the bus supposedly ten minutes out for the last twenty five.“You didn’t have to come to this one,” Jace said, breaking a silence that had stretched longer than either of us seemed inclined to fill.“It’s my job.”“It’s a mandatory home game monitoring position. Away games weren’t part of the original assignment.”“Coach asked if I’d cover it since the usual person had a conflict. I said yes.” I shrugged, leaning against the cold metal railing outside the visitor’s entrance. “Why, does my being here bother you?”“I didn’t say that.”“You implied it.”“I was making an observation.” He said it without any real heat behind it, which was new enough that I noticed i

Roselle POV Dez had turned twenty one that week, and apparently in hockey culture that meant the whole team owed him a proper celebration whether he wanted one or not, which was how a senior player’s rental three streets off campus ended up hosting half the roster on a Friday night. Dez, delighted and slightly overwhelmed by his own birthday, had personally invited me the day before, insisting I’d earned an actual night off after two months of memorizing rosters and reading workout boards under pressure, and had gone as far as telling Chloe directly that she was invited too, on the grounds that anyone who could beat him at cards deserved a seat at the table.The house belonged to one of the senior players, a sprawling rental three streets off campus that had clearly hosted enough parties over the years to have developed its own permanent smell of spilled beer and old carpet, and by the time Chloe and I arrived the living room was already loud enough that conversation requ