Page 5 of Fractured Ice

Two girls from the game have already materialized at his side, one of them with her hand on his arm in the very particular way that means she's using the nearest available excuse to make contact. He's standing there with that easy posture he has, soaked hair, expression unreadable from here.

But he's looking at me.

Not at the girls. Not at the game. At me, in the doorway of the humanities building, wet jacket, transparent shirt, and bag strap digging into my left shoulder.

Watching me the way someone watches something they haven't finished thinking about yet.

I go inside.

I make it exactly four steps down the hallway before I stop and stand in front of the bulletin board, which is covered in flyers for study groups, lost cats, and an upcoming lecture on something I don't read because I'm staring at it without actually seeing it. I stand there for a moment that is slightly longer than it needs to be, before I remember that I have a class in fourteen minutes and a shirt situation to assess.

Ethan Walker has been making my life difficult since I was barely potty trained.

Some things, apparently, don't need to change when they're already so good at what they do.

2

Sienna

The white shirt wasn't fixable. I spent eleven minutes in a humanities building restroom with paper towels, a coat, and a truly bleak sequence of attempts before accepting that the best I could do was flip my bag strap to the front, button the coat to the top, and make peace with being damp and irritated for the foreseeable future. This is Ethan Walker's fault, and I want that on the record even if the only record is my own head.

By the time I get to the Sports Media Practicum room, I'm four minutes late and still damp in ways I won't fully appreciate until I sit down and feel the chair.

Emma Lawson has saved my seat. She takes one look at me when I drop into it and goes quiet before finally figuring out where she wants to start.

"What happened to you?" she says.

"Nothing."

"Sienna?"

"I'm fine."

"You're soaking wet, and your hair's a mess. No offense."

I pull out my notebook. "I was on the sidewalk and someone ran into me."

"Someone?"

"A person chasing a kickball."

Emma turns in her chair to face me fully, which is never a good sign. She's five foot two, and runs entirely on curiosity and the specific energy of someone who got into journalism because she genuinely cannot leave anything alone. I say that with love. It's also why I'm careful about what I tell her.

"Tell me everything," she says.

I give her the short version. The kickball game, the sidewalk, the impact, the soaking. She's already fighting a smile before I finish the sentence about going down on the pavement.

"Who was it?" she asks.

"It doesn't matter."

"It very much matters to me, because you’re specifically leaving out details."

"Emma."

"Was he at least attractive? Sort of like a consolation prize?"

I take a breath. "Ethan Walker."