Page 49 of Fractured Ice

The door opens.

Rory comes in first, and I'm already mid-smile before I clock who's directly behind her, and then I see Sienna and my brain mostly stops working. She's in a gray pullover that's slightly too big, her hair is down, and she's carrying a few small bags of chips like she stopped somewhere on the way over and decided to contribute. I'm staring, I know I'm staring, and I genuinely cannot help it.

She's so fucking beautiful it's hard to look at anything else.

She scans the room once, finds me, and I don't know what my face is doing but whatever it is doing makes Knox start to say something that I shut down immediately with a look.

"You actually came," I say when she gets close enough.

"Rory dragged me." She holds up the chips. "I brought an offering."

"She bought them herself," Rory says. "She was at the vending machine for four minutes."

"I took my time." Sienna looks around the room. "This is a lot of hockey players for one hotel room."

"You've seen most of them. You know Blake, Knox, and Noah—" I gesture. "That’s Declan, Luca, Mason, Tyler⁠—"

"I know who they are." Her eyes land on the card game. "What are we playing?"

"Poker," Knox says. "Come sit down. We're down a man."

Sienna’s the right person to ask. I’ve played with her a few times over the years, and she’s always been good, but I’m pretty sure she’s played a lot more than that.

She sits down with the other five guys. I sit next to her to watch. This is fine. This is completely normal and fine. I'm not thinking about the way her sweater is slipping slightly off one shoulder or the fact that she smells like something floral and clean that I've been aware of for weeks and have not been able to get out of my head. Not thinking about any of that.

They hand out the cards, give her a pile of Skittles to use as chips, and everyone throws a skittle into the middle pile. When that’s done, she picks up her cards and studies them. Then she looks at Knox's face and then at his cards, which she obviously shouldn't be able to see, then at the pile of Skittles in front of her, and she says, "I'll raise."

Knox looks at her. "You just sat down."

"Yeah, I did."

The entire table's attention shifts. Knox, to his credit, looks genuinely uncertain, and Knox is almost never genuinely uncertain about poker because Knox is almost never genuinely uncertain about anything. He studies her for a long second and then throws in his cards.

"Fold," he says.

Mason makes a sound of pure disbelief.

Sienna pulls the pot toward her.

"Knox folded like a fucking card table," Luca says, to nobody in particular.

"She's bluffing," Knox says, immediately. "I folded out of respect."

"Out of fear," Sienna says. She arranges the Skittles without looking at him, and I watch the corner of her mouth doing something that she's trying not to let become a full smile. I feel something in my chest that I've given up trying to name because it's been there since I met her and it hasn't simplified itself since.

She's going to be fine. More than fine. She's going to fit in here like she's been doing this for years, and I knew that, I knew that before I invited her. The idea of her here in this room with people I care about was exactly what I was afraid of wanting.

Because wanting it and not having it is manageable.

Having it and then watching it go away is something else entirely.

We play three more hands and she wins two of them. Rory, sitting beside her, is clearly delighted, nudging Sienna every time Knox's expression does something unhappy. Declan gets pulled into explaining why he's been to fourteen national parks, which Sienna apparently asked about, and the story involves a series of increasingly unbelievable road trip decisions that have the entire room listening by the end. Blake, who hasn't said more than twelve words, watches the whole thing with the particular expression he gets when he thinks something is funny and refuses to show it.

Sienna leans toward me at one point and says quietly, "Blake's been staring at Knox for the last ten minutes. Is he about to do something?"

"He's fine. That's just his face."

"I know his face. That's not his regular face. That's his preemptive face."