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I don’t take it. When it opens, I let her walk in first, and I look at the buttons. I’ve got two floors. The doors close, and I have her back against the wall with my hand on her jaw before it starts moving. She makes a sound into my mouth and grabs a fistful of my hoodie, and by the time we stop on one, her hair is out of its clip, and the clip is in my hand.

The doors open on two people from the first floor. Kylie says, “Morning,” and walks out with her chin up, and I follow her with her hair clip in my pocket.

It’s cold out, so I put my arm around her shoulders on the path, and she doesn’t say anything about it. She walks closer. Halfway across the quad, she puts her hand in my hoodie pocket, where the clip is, and leaves it there.

The dining hall is half empty. We take a table by the window.

“Where is everybody?” she says.

“Don’t know.”

“Paige didn’t text me. Did Koda text you?”

“Don’t care.”

She rolls her eyes. “Okay.”

I put my leg between hers under the table, and she stares at me while I do it and takes a drink of coffee. “I know what you’re doing,” she says. “You’re trapping me.”

“You can move.”

“I can’t move.” She kicks my shin, which does nothing. “Your legs are enormous.”

I lean forward on my elbows. “What are you doing later?”

“Going to Theo’s to get my jacket,” she says, taking a bite of eggs. “Because it’s still there. I left it there when I got abducted.”

“Tell Kenzie to grab it.”

“I also want to find out if he asked her out.”

“Kenzie can tell you.”

She narrows her eyes. “That’s not how friendship works, Nash.”

I eat. She’s watching me; I can feel it, and I keep eating, and after about ten seconds, she puts her fork down, props her chin on her hand, and grins.

“Aw. Don’t be jealous that I have friends.” She leans forward. “I thought you didn’t get jealous.”

“It’s different now,” I say.

The grin drops off her face. She sits back, picks up her fork, puts it down again. Her ears have gone red, and she looks out the window at the quad for a second.

“I have class,” she says.

She reaches across the table into the pocket of my hoodie, takes her hair clip back, and walks out with her tray.

I have class too and then practice at three-thirty. That’s every day now except Mondays: Berwyn runs it, the whole staff is on the ice, and it goes ninety minutes to two hours depending on how much he hates what he’s seeing.

Greeley doesn’t look at me. It’s been days of this. He’s on the third line, and I’m on the second. He says good morning to everybody in the room except me, and in drills, he does his reps, and I do mine, and we don’t exist to each other. It should feel like winning. It doesn’t feel like anything.

Forty minutes in, we’re doing a two-on-two in the corner, and Koda comes off the boards next to me with his stick across his thighs. “So I heard you carried a girl out of a Scrabble game. Over your shoulder. Paige got a forty-second voice memo about it from Kenzie. I’ve listened to it four times. Blondie screams something about you being insane, and then there’s this, like, thud—”

I check him. It’s not hard, just a shoulder along the boards the way you’d do it in a game, and his feet come out, and he goes down on his side and slides about four feet. He gets up laughing so hard he can barely breathe, and then he comes at me, gets an arm around my neck, and we go into the boards together. Berwyn blows the whistle three times before we stop, and we’re both laughing as we come out of it.

Rafe skates past without slowing down. “Children.”

Berwyn makes us do lines for it. When we’re done, we’re both bent over at the boards with our hands on our knees.