Page 82 of Nowhere to Hide
Then she catches herself and puts the phone away. The grin softens into a smaller one, the snort folds itself away, and she clears her throat and looks at the screen. Just like that, her face is composed again.
I miss that laugh. I want those moments back — the ones where I pulled reactions like that out of her a few times a day. I want to be the guy who makes her feel safe and comfortable and warm.
But I can’t right now, not without askingthatquestion.
“Ivy,” she says.
I nod. “Text me when you’re home,” I say.
“I will.”
She leans across the bed and kisses me on the cheek, and then she’s gone.
I stay in bed a long time. Then I hear a noise from the kitchen, and I get up and find Luca at the counter. I stop mid-stride because, although the guys have keys to my place, I didn’t expect him here right now.
He’s wrapping a plate in foil with a second plate already finished beside him. He’s humming something under his breath, and when he sees me he freezes with the look of a man who has been caught doing something he absolutely intended to get away with.
“Okay,” he says. “So this isn’t what it looks like.”
“It is exactly what it looks like,” I say. “You’re stealing my food.”
“In my defense, Seb made pasta last night and I’m pretty sure he used ketchup for the sauce,” he says, already gesturing with the plate. “And Theo microwaved a steak…”
“So?”
“A steak. In the microwave. I just can’t live like this, okay?” He scoffs. “I’m not apologizing. Sloane’s cooking should be a shared resource.”
I just raise an eyebrow.
He picks up the plates. “I’m taking it.”
But the humor dies when I don’t respond, and he seems to sense something is wrong, because he gets two forks out of a drawer, peels the foil back off one of the plates, and slides it across the counter to me. It’s leftover meatballs Sloane made the other night.
“Eat,” he says. “You look like you’ve skipped the last three meals, so I’m not leaving until you do.”
So I eat, and as I do, he leans on the counter and tells me the full Theo steak story. It’s long-winded and almost certainly embellished, but he doesn’t ask me what’s wrong, and for ninety seconds I enjoy the distraction from the questions and the lists in my head.
“You look like shit, by the way. But, like—” He waves his fork at my face. “Well-structured shit.” A pause. “I’m leaving before this gets worse.”
Then he’s gone, and I sit on the stool, open my laptop, and go back to the emails.
twenty-two
ROWAN
I getto the rink forty minutes before practice and start taping my stick, because it feels like the one thing I can control right now. The locker room is empty, and I take my time, taping so perfect that even my old man couldn’t find fault with it.
We’ve got St. Adrian’s on Thursday and the whole campus is buzzing. Posters are everywhere, the student section is organizing its chants, and somebody already spray-painted RAVENS EAT on the bridge by Fox Row.
I should be locked in, because this is my week.
Last year, I had two assists in the third period, and the student section chanted my name after the final horn, and I stood on that ice with confetti in my hair, thinking I’d earned every second of it.
But the week feels wrong, and I know why.
The room fills up in waves. Seb comes in first, drops his bag, and nods at me. He’s looked tired all week — at Ironwood, he was on the back porch, phone to his ear, talking someone back home through what sounded like a hard time.
But he’s Seb, so since then, he’s handled it the way he handles everything: silently, aggressively, and with the posture of a manwho would rather eat glass than discuss his feelings or his life with anyone.
