All Chapters of Collision on Ice: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Jace's POV I sat in the equipment room for a long time after she walked away, staring at nothing, running through every possible explanation for messages I had absolutely no part in sending, and coming up with nothing that made any real sense.Someone had access to her schedule specific enough to know where she’d been that night. Someone had studied her writing style closely enough to fake it convincingly. Someone wanted her discredited specifically with the athletes she tutored, which meant someone understood exactly what would hurt her most and had aimed for it directly.I ran through a mental list of everyone who might have a reason to want her gone from this position. A few of the guys on the team had grumbled about the tutoring requirements before she started, but none of them struck me as capable of this level of deliberate cruelty, and most of them had come around on her considerably once they saw how good she actually was at the job.Brooke’s face flashe

Jace's POV I felt it happening before I fully understood what it was, the air between us shifting into something I hadn’t planned for and definitely hadn’t come here looking for, her face tilted up slightly toward mine, close enough that I could smell whatever she used in her hair, something like vanilla that had no business being as distracting as it was.I wanted to close the distance. That was the plain, uncomfortable truth of it, standing there in her doorway at nearly nine at night, having come here purely to clear my name and somehow ending up in a silence charged with something I had absolutely no business feeling toward someone whose entire existence, two months ago, I’d have described as a problem to be managed.I stepped back instead.It wasn’t graceful. I felt the abruptness of it even as I did it, the sudden physical distance landing somewhere between awkward and cruel, and I watched something flicker across her face, confusion first, then something

Jace's POV I found her in the athletics office the next afternoon, alone, headphones in, working through what looked like a stack of practice quizzes she was reviewing one of the freshmen on my roster, and I stood in the doorway for a minute before I said anything at all, working out exactly how I wanted to open a conversation I had no legitimate reason to be starting. “Do you like him?” She pulled one earbud out, glancing up. “Do I like who?” “Julian.” She frowned slightly and it was gone in a second and she set her pen down slower than it required, buying herself time she clearly needed. “He’s my friend.” “That’s not what I asked.” “It’s the answer you’re getting.” “That’s not an answer, that’s a dodge.” I stepped further into the room, arms crossed, aware even as I did it that I had absolutely no right to be asking this question at all, no claim on her attention that would justify the tightnes

Jace's POV I watched her from across the athletics building for four days straight, careful never to let it look like watching, though I doubt I fooled anyone who happened to notice how often my attention drifted toward wherever she happened to be in a room.She was careful to avoid me. Every interaction was professional and precise, routed through email or the shared scheduling system instead of the easy conversations we'd fallen into over the past two months. The silence followed me everywhere. It settled in my chest like a weight that made every breath feel a little tighter, and every time my phone buzzed, a small, foolish part of me hoped it was a message from her. It never was. I hated how much I missed something as simple as hearing her laugh across the office, and I hated even more that I couldn't admit it to anyone, least of all myself.“You look terrible,” Eli told me on Thursday, dropping into the seat next to me at lunch. “Genuinely terrible. What happened

Jace's POV Neither of us moved for a long moment after, close enough that I could feel her breath against my jaw, both of us apparently frozen by the sheer scale of what had just happened between two people who’d started this exact conversation arguing.She pulled back first, just slightly, enough to look at me, and whatever was on her face, I couldn’t fully read it, something between shock and a question neither of us seemed ready to ask out loud.“That happened,” she said, quietly, like she was testing the words out to see if they’d hold.“That happened.”Neither of us said anything else for a beat too long, the silence stretching thin and strange, and I felt the specific panic rising in my chest that always showed up whenever something started to matter more than I knew how to handle, the old instinct clawing for something, anything, to make the moment smaller than it actually was.“Well,” I said, “that’s one way to end an argument.”It was the