Page 69 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 3

“You know what I was thinking about today?” he said, carving a lazy figure eight near the blue line. “That time when we were thirteen and I tried to impress Katie Morrison by skating backward while juggling pucks.”

I snorted, the memory surfacing with painful clarity. “You mean when you ate shit in front of the entire peewee league and their parents?”

“I prefer to think of it as an ambitious athletic experiment that didn’t quite achieve its intended results.”

“You knocked yourself unconscious, Shaw. Coach had to carry you off the ice.”

Griffin’s laughter echoed through the empty arena, rich and uninhibited. “Worth it, though. Katie was totally impressed.”

“She was horrified.”

“Same thing.”

He was beautiful when he laughed. That was the thought that hit me as I watched him skate backward, arms gesturing as he defended his thirteen-year-old self’s questionable decision-making. The emergency lighting turned his skin warm gold, highlighted the sharp line of his jaw and the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he was amused.

I’d always known Griffin was attractive. You couldn’t spend a decade in his orbit without noticing that people gravitated toward him, that servers lingered at our table and classmates found reasons to walk past wherever he was sitting. But this was different. This was the moment when attraction became something deeper, more dangerous.

Griffin Shaw laughing in an empty hockey rink, completely free and radiating the kind of joy that made everything else fade into background noise. This was when I’d fallen in love with him, though I hadn’t understood it then. Thirteen years old, watching my best friend make an ass of himself for a girl’s attention, and all I could think was that I wanted to be the reason he looked that happy.

“Your turn,” Griffin said, pulling me back to the present. “What’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever witnessed you do?”

I tried to think of something appropriately humiliating, but Griffin was already grinning with the satisfaction of someone who’d remembered the perfect story.

“Oh, wait. I’ve got it. Junior-year tryouts, when you were so nervous about making varsity that you threw up right before your skating test.”

“I had food poisoning.”

“You had anxiety, and we both know it. You spent three hours in the bathroom that morning giving yourself a pep talk in the mirror.”

The memory should have been embarrassing, but Griffin told it with such affection that it felt like a gift. He remembered the details that mattered to me, not just the funny bits: how scared I’d been, how badly I’d wanted to prove myself, how he’d sat outside the bathroom door offering commentary and encouragement until I’d finally emerged ready to skate. Especially the “I’m a strong, independent woman” part he’d made me say, which was the first time I laughed that day, breaking through the thick ice of anxiety.

“You stayed with me,” I said, the words coming out softer than I’d intended.

“Of course I did. You were a mess.”

But he’d stayed. While other kids were warming up or psyching themselves out, Griffin had planted himself outside a bathroom door and talked me through the worst of my nerves. He’d made jokes about the coach’s mustache and speculated about what the older players ate for breakfast and told me stories about his summer job at the hardware store until I’d stopped shaking.

That was Griffin. That had always been Griffin. The person who stayed when you needed him.

We’d ended up near center ice, close enough that I could see the way his breath clouded in the cold air, close enough to count the freckles that summer had left scattered across his nose. The rink felt enormous around us, but the space between us had shrunk to something intimate and charged.

“I’ve been thinking,” Griffin said, his voice quieter now, more serious. “About all this camera stuff, and the social media, and people analyzing everything we do.”

My pulse quickened. “What about it?”

“It’s weird, right? Having strangers dissect your friendships like they’re experts on your life?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice to stay steady.

“Because the thing is,” he continued, leaning against his stick, “they can film us and edit us and make us into whatever characters they want, but they can’t capture this.” He gestured between us, encompassing the empty rink and the comfortable silence and the shared history that stretched back to childhood. “They can’t capture what it’s like to have someone who knows you well enough to talk you through a panic attack or remember every stupid thing you’ve ever done and still want to spend time with you.”

Griffin, unknowingly eloquent about the exact reasons I couldn’t risk losing him, described our friendship with the kind of reverence that made my throat close up.

“They’ll try to make it into something it’s not,” he went on. “Turn it into drama or competition or whatever sells episodes. But this is ours, you know? This friendship, these memories, the fact that you’re the first person I want to tell when something good happens and the only person I want around when everything goes to hell.”

I stared at him, at the earnest expression on his face and the way the emergency lighting turned his eyes gold-flecked hazel, and felt something crack open in my chest. He was talking about friendship with the passion most people reserved for love declarations, and he had no idea what he was doing to me.

“Griffin,” I started, his name coming out rough and unsteady.