Page 73 of Fractured Ice

“No.” We can’t. I’m not ready for it.

I pick up my bag. I walk toward the exit and I don't look back, and it takes considerably more effort than it should.

17

Sienna

I don't have a destination. I hadn’t been able to find Emma, and she wasn’t answering my calls, so now I’m just walking. In a random direction. I just need to move.

The fair continues in every direction around me, families and students and the particular chaos of too many people in too much sunshine. I'm walking through all of it trying to get enough distance between myself and the kissing booth to think clearly, which is proving difficult because every time I try to think clearly I think about the back of the tent instead, and then I need more distance.

Ethan's hands. Ethan's mouth. The way I'd been about to suggest somewhere quieter to go like a person completely driven by hormones.

"Sienna!"

I walk faster.

"Sienna—"

I consider pretending I can't hear him over the fair noise. I'm actively constructing this fiction when someone steps directly into my path and I nearly walk into them.

Dylan.

He catches my arm to steady me, smiling like running into me in a crowd of several hundred people is a pleasant coincidence and not the universe making a very pointed comment.

"Hey," he says. "I heard you were manning a booth here."

"Hi." I arrange my face into something normal, even though I’m surprised he was looking for me. "How long have you been here?"

"About an hour. The team's got a table near the food vendors." He falls into step beside me naturally, the way he does everything, smooth and easy. "How's the volunteering going?"

"Done, actually. I was just heading⁠—"

"Sienna."

Ethan catches up.

I watch the exact moment Dylan clocks him, a small recalibration, pleasant expression staying where it is while something behind it adjusts.

"Walker," Dylan says.

"Reed." Ethan looks at me. "You left."

"My shift ended."

"You left fast."

"I walk quickly."

"You walked quickly in the opposite direction from the exit."

"I was taking in the fair." I gesture vaguely at the surrounding fair. "It's a nice fair."

Ethan looks at me with the expression he gets when he knows exactly what I'm doing and is going to let me do it anyway. Dylan suggests we walk together. I open my mouth to find a reason this won't work and come up empty, and then we're three people instead of two walking through the fair, and I'm in the middle, and I have genuinely nobody to blame for this but myself.

So, I just keep walking. The cotton candy stand appears before I've fully accepted my situation.

"Blue raspberry?" Dylan's already at the counter, already flagging down the vendor, with the confidence of a man who orders for people without asking and has never once been wrong.