Page 42 of Shattered Ice
“I missed the part where you try to coast on charm and then sulk when it doesn’t work? Sure. Desperately.”
I lean in again, crowding her, close enough to smell the faint citrus on her skin. Her breath quickens. “Eyes on me, Harrington.”
She doesn’t blink. “You like calling me out.”
I lean closer, matching her stillness. “You like needing it.”
Her breath is tight. Her jaw tense. But her pulse is visible at the base of her neck now, ticking a little faster than it should be. And her knee hasn’t moved. Still touching mine. She reaches across the notebook to flip a page, her hand brushing my knuckles. Neither of us pretends it didn’t happen.
“Back an inch,” she says, quiet steel under the words.
I shift—barely—but I obey. She continues without missing a beat, unshaken. And I realize: it’s not a complaint. It’s a defense mechanism. She’s telling me I’m getting too close to something she can’t control. I lean back just enough to give her a breath of space but not enough to let her forget I’m there. Her own breath eases, but her hands stay tight around her pen.
“Try again,” she says, tapping the formula.
My pencil moves. The right answer this time. She checks it, then looks at me. “You miss when you sprint,” she murmurs. “I set the pace.”
I shrug. “Maybe I just like hearing your voice.”
She doesn’t rise to the bait. Instead, she flips to a clean page and draws a timeline, talking me through it, her tone clinical. But her hair slips again, and she catches her bottom lip between her teeth when she’s in focus, and I’m not hearing every word the way I should. She smells like sharp citrus and ink. She looks ruinable, and I want the slow dismantle.
This is different from how the guys talk about girls. This isn’t sport. I want to peel her apart, slow and thorough. I want to take that fortress of control she’s built and dismantle it brick by brick until I’m the only thing she has left to hold on to. I want to find out what happened in the dark that makes her gasp like that. I want to find out what else makes her lose control.
The pencil clicks in my hand. The plastic snap echoes like a trigger pull.
She glances up, her eyes narrowing. Not hostile. Just aware. She’s aware of me now. And I’ve been aware of her for too long.
When the clock hits the hour, she gathers her things with precision. Her fingers graze mine once more, intentional or not, and I watch her pulse stutter under her skin like a secret betrayed.
“I’ll see you Wednesday,” she says.
I nod once.
She walks out like the storm doesn’t touch her, but I feel her in the room long after she’s gone. And I make a vow to the empty air.
When she breaks, the ruins will belong to me.
Chapter 25
Clara
Iwokethismorningto sunshine, but my first conscious thought was to brace for a crack of thunder. My ribs are tight, a cage of anxiety around my lungs. It’s not the storm that has me shaken. It’s Adrian.
It’s how he saw me—really saw me—when the lights cut out and the suffocating dark crawled in. He saw my terror. And I let him. For just a second, I leaned into the wrong person, seeking shelter in the heart of the storm itself. That small, instinctive betrayal of every single boundary I have built to keep myself safe?
That’s what haunts me.
Which is why I’m here, in the library, back at my usual table with my back to a solid, reassuring wall. I’m supposed to bestudying, but my textbooks are unopened. Instead, I’m falling down a rabbit hole. On my laptop screen, a dozen tabs are open, a constellation of academic journals and anonymous support group forums.
I type in a new search:Reading avoidance in gifted student-athletes.My finger stutters on the trackpad, my palm suddenly slick with a nervous sweat.
I read a post from a mother whose son, a D1 basketball player, could read a court but not a textbook.“They called him lazy for years,”she wrote.“But he wasn’t lazy. He was terrified. The words were a puzzle he couldn’t solve, and he would rather be seen as a defiant asshole than a stupid one.”
The words are a key turning in a lock I didn’t know I was holding.Adrian.My lungs seize like I’ve swallowed ice.
I click another link, a testimonial from a CEO diagnosed at forty.“I built an entire empire on my ability to listen and delegate. I never read a report if I could have someone summarize it for me. I didn’t know why. I just knew that looking at a dense page of text felt like drowning.”
My heart aches with a sickening sense of recognition. I close my eyes and see Adrian, his jaw tight with frustration as he stared at the stats packet. “Give me the lecture. I’ll memorize it.” It wasn’t a shortcut. It was a survival strategy.
