All Chapters of Collision on Ice: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Roselle's POV He asked me to come with him somewhere without explaining where, which under normal circumstances I would have refused purely out of principle, except these weren’t normal circumstances anymore, whatever we were now clearly operating under different rules than the ones we’d started with. We ended up at an overlook a twenty minute drive outside town, a spot he apparently came to sometimes when practice ran long and he needed somewhere quiet that wasn’t his apartment, and we sat on the hood of his car with the whole valley spread out below us, lights just starting to come on as the sky shifted toward dusk. “This is different,” I said, meaning the two of us, sitting somewhere with no clipboard, no schedule, no excuse of duty holding either of us there. “Different bad?” “Different good. Just different.” I pulled my knees up, wrapping my arms around them against the cold. “You don’t bring p

Roselle's POV I sat in the library that Thursday night with a textbook open in front of me, three chapters behind on reading I actually needed to finish, and instead spent the better part of an hour staring at the same page while my mind kept circling back to the overlook, to the way his voice had gone rough saying he didn’t know if he trusted me, and then the way it had gone even rougher admitting that he was scared I’d leave.I hadn’t planned on any of this. That was the part I kept turning over, again and again, unable to fully settle into it. I had built my entire life around one clear, unbending rule, no distractions, no relationships, nothing that could threaten the plan I’d made for my family before I even set foot on this campus. I had watched my mother laugh through her own humiliation because the alternative was worse, had made myself a promise standing in a hallway at twelve years old that I would never let anyone have that kind of power over me, the power to decide I

Roselle's POV “I don’t want to hear it,” I said, before he could say anything more.“Roselle—”“Don’t.” My voice came out harder than I intended, the fury I’d been sitting with for the last three hours finally finding a target directly in front of me. “I saw the photos. Everyone saw the photos. You’re standing outside my dorm at eleven at night trying to explain yourself, and I genuinely do not have the capacity right now to hear whatever version of the truth you’re planning to sell me.”“It’s not a version. It’s the actual truth.”“That’s what everyone says.”“I know how it looks.”“Do you? Because from where I’m standing, it looks exactly like what it looks like, which is that two days after telling me things you claim you’ve never told anyone, you went back to someone you’ve been sleeping with for over a year, and I was stupid enough to actually believe that overlook meant something.”“It did mean something. It still does.”“Then exp

Roselle's POV "I don't know what to do with that," I admitted, still standing outside the library with him, the cold air doing nothing to cool the specific heat of embarrassment sitting in my chest. "The fact that I believed it so fast. What does that say about me?""It says you like having the situation already solved," he said, watching me carefully. "You'd rather have a hard answer than sit in an uncertain one, even if the hard answer turns out to be wrong. I get it. Doesn't mean I loved being the wrong answer.""That's fair.""I'm not angry that you jumped to it, Roselle. I get why not knowing feels worse to you than just deciding, even badly." “I should have given you the chance to explain first.”“Maybe. But I also gave you plenty of reasons over the last two months to assume I’d eventually do something exactly like what those photos suggested. I can’t be upset that my own reputation caught up with me.”We stood there for a moment, the ten

Roselle's POV “You didn’t answer your phone,” he said, standing in the doorway, something cautious in his voice like he was still bracing for whatever I’d come here to say. “I didn’t want to answer over text. This felt like something that needed to actually happen in person.” “What needed to happen?” I didn’t answer with words. I stepped forward instead, closing the last of the distance that had sat between us since he’d asked his question hours earlier, and kissed him properly, deliberately, none of the accidental collision of our first kiss weeks ago, just a clear, certain answer to a question I’d spent the last several hours turning over from every possible angle before finally arriving at the only conclusion that actually made sense. “That answer your question?” I asked, pulling back slightly. “Pretty thoroughly, yeah.” We stood in his doorway for a long moment, both of us grinning in a way that felt al