Page 24 of Fractured Ice

Blake looks at the sidewalk. "Doesn't."

"See?" Knox gestures at Blake. "Even Blake thinks so."

Blake says nothing. This is high participation for Blake at midnight. Of the triplet, of my best friends, he’s always the quietest. The one who feels things too deeply, when everyone thinks he doesn’t feel anything at all. It separates him from Knox, the constant jokester, and Noah, the genius. Marking the identical men as anything but the same.

The lacrosse house is lit up from the inside, music bleeding out through the walls, and there are people on the porch despite the cold, which is the kind of commitment to a party I've never fully understood. We get maybe three steps inside before girls are appearing from various directions, and Knox shifts into the specific gear he has for this, easy and warm and finding the humor in everything. Blake immediately looks like he'd rather be literally anywhere else.

I don't have bandwidth for any of it. I'm already scanning the room.

I find her in the kitchen doorway.

Sienna's in a black top. It does things I'm going to be thinking about for a genuinely unreasonable amount of time. Her jeans fit like they were made specifically to make my life difficult. Her pale blond hair is down and she's got a drink in one hand as she’s talking to Emma. She's so goddamn beautiful that I feel it in my cock before I feel it anywhere else. A hard, immediate pull that I have exactly zero control over.

Knox appears at my elbow. "See someone you like?"

"What?"

"Go talk to Sienna," Knox says, giving me a knowing look.

“But I–”

“Seriously, before someone else does.”

Fuck. He’s right. I head to talk to Sienna as Laura, Knox’s very annoying friend comes running up, pushing herself all over him. Not that he notices. She’s like paint peeling to him, he doesn’t even register her, and like a high-pitched squeal that never goes away when she’s around to the rest of us.

Sienna sees me coming. She doesn't run, which I count as progress. Her expression does something that's not exactly welcoming but not the door being slammed either, which gives me enough to work with.

"Hey," I say.

"Ethan." She glances at Emma, who immediately develops a pressing need to be somewhere else.

"I wanted to apologize," I say. "Again. For earlier."

"You apologized already."

"I said two things that warranted apologies and I've only addressed one of them."

She looks at me for a second. "I'm listening."

"About the locker room." I know before I even finish the sentence that I'm not going to land this how I want. "I apologize for putting you in an uncomfortable position." Then, I attempt a joke. “Not that you seemed to mind your skirt up and me behind you. We might have to⁠—”

I watch it happen almost like it’s in slow motion. I watch her face go from something almost open to something completely closed, and I get one full second to understand exactly how badly I've just stepped in it before her hand connects with the side of my face.

It's not hard enough to actually hurt. It's hard enough to make a point.

"You're an idiot," she says, and turns and walks back into the party.

I stand there.

Yeah. I am.

I get a drink I don't particularly want, find a wall to stand near, and spend the next hour doing exactly what I told myself I wasn't going to do, which is keep my eyes on Sienna across the room. She's fine. She's with Emma, she's talking to people, she's doing what people do at parties, and the drink in her hand gets refilled once, then again, and by the third hour of the night something in her posture has shifted, the composed precision she carries everywhere softening into something looser.

Is she drunk? Off three drinks?

That would be fine. People get drunk at parties. What is not fine is the guy who's been circling her for the last forty minutes like a goddamn shark, a big guy with the particular energy of someone who has decided something and is waiting for the right moment to act on it. I've been telling myself I'm being paranoid. Sienna's not paying attention to him, and that's not unusual for Sienna, but he keeps closing the distance and she's not fully tracking it.

Emma's not with her anymore. I scan the room and find Emma on the other side of the party, deep in conversation, no line of sight to Sienna.