Page 82 of Thin Ice

"Yeah," I said. "We are."

Chapter 22: Alex

The fire turned everything orange.

Faces, snow, the steam rising off six mugs of hot chocolate that Noah had made on the cabin stove with actual milk because Priya told him the water version was unacceptable. The stone pit threw heat in a circle and we sat inside it, six chairs pulled close, and beyond the circle the snow was blue in the dark and the lake was a flat black line and the cold pressed in from every direction but couldn't quite reach us.

Liam's hand was on my leg. His thumb resting on the inside of my knee, warm through my jeans. I kept looking at it. His knuckles. The calluses across his palm from the oar and the marina and twenty years of working with his hands. I wanted to pick it up and hold it against my face.

Remy was talking to Noah about transit systems. I didn't know how they'd gotten there — something about Noah's commute to campus, and Remy had opinions, and now he was drawing an imaginary map on his knee with his finger explaining why the bus route through Noah's neighborhood was designed wrong.

"The transfer point is a fifteen-minute walk from the station," Remy said. "That's not a connection. That's a punishment."

"I just drive," Noah said.

"That's because the system failed you. You shouldn't have to drive."

"I like driving."

"Nobody likes driving. People like not waiting for a bus in the rain."

Ethan was showing Priya something on his phone — footage from the fall, the joint program stuff, camera low along the water. She was leaning in, asking questions about shot composition the way she asked questions about everything, precisely, with follow-ups that made Ethan pause and think before answering. They looked like two people who'd known each other for years instead of hours.

Snow started. Not heavy — small flakes, dry, catching the firelight like sparks going the wrong direction. They landed on Liam's hair and on the shoulders of Remy's denim jacket and on the blanket Priya had pulled across her lap. The world got quieter the way it does when it snows. Smaller. Like the lake and the trees and the dark had pulled in close to listen.

I almost said it.

On the ice. His face right there, his eyes on mine, and the word had been in my mouth and I'd swallowed it. Replaced it with something safe. Something true, but smaller.

His hand was on my leg and the fire was warm, and these people had driven hours to sit in the cold with us, and I should have been able to say it. The simplest sentence in the language.

But what if I say it and he leaves?

I just watched everything I thought was permanent disappear in one night. The trust, the house, the name, the family — all of it conditional, all of it revocable, all of it gone. And now I was sitting here with no tuition and no registration and no idea what January looked like.

What if I put the last thing I have into his hands and he gives it back?

Then I have nothing. Not the family I was born into, and not the person I chose.

So I didn't say it. Not because I didn't mean it. Because I meant it so much that losing it would be the one thing I couldn't come back from.

"Alex." Remy's voice. I looked up. He was watching me from his chair, feet tucked up, mug in both hands. "Did you ever think about rowing for Riverside?"

The question landed strangely. "What?"

"Riverside. If the Kingswell thing doesn't work out. Transfer. We'd just need someone to replace Braden, and we've already got the quad."

I stared at him. I hadn't thought about it. Not once. The whole time I'd been doing math on Kingswell's tuition, it hadn't occurred to me that there was another school on the same river.

"I didn't think of that," I said.

Liam looked at me, his eyes lit up.

"I don't even know how I'd pay for tuition."

Noah leaned back in his chair. "Well, Liam doesn't pay tuition."

Everyone looked at him.