Page 33 of Ruthless Edge

"It's one evening. Let it get in your way."

I look at the three of them. Paige still has my arm. Rory has her planning face on. Sienna looks, certain with herself, which is her version of enthusiasm.

Here's the thing. I've been dreading things for a while. The SAB, the gala, every meeting with Knox that I spend three hours psyching myself up for and another three hours recovering from. I've been feeling defensive.

And right now I'm sitting on a blanket under a tree and I'm being told what dress to wear on a date that I didn't see coming, and I don't feel like I need to defend anything.

"Okay," I say.

Paige squeezes my arm.

"But not the green dress," I say. "Let me look."

"You'll pick the green dress," she says with complete confidence.

I walk home an hour later with the cold coming in off the ocean not far from campus and my hands in my pockets, and I let myself think about Friday. Where Owen might take me. Whether we'll have the same easy conversation we have in the seminar. Whether it'll feel different outside of an academic context.

Owen is not the kind of person who makes my heart race. He's not the person I've spent three years quietly comparing everyone else to, always finding them short in some way I couldn't explain. He's stable and smart and kind and he looked at me like he actually really wanted to get to know me, and there's something about that that I keep coming back to.

Maybe I don't need my heart to race.

Maybe what I actually need is someone who chooses me out loud. Someone who doesn't make me do the math on what I mean to them, who doesn't leave me sitting at a table wondering whether the warmth I think I'm feeling is real or just something I'm building out of wishful thinking.

The more I think about it, the more Friday feels like exactly the right idea. Not because of fireworks. Because of the absence of all the things I've been carrying around since freshman year, all the weight of it, and the possibility, however small, of a night that is just a night, uncomplicated and new.

I get home and I text Owen my address.

He sends back a thumbs up and then: Don't ask what we’re doing.

I put my phone down and go to bed and I almost manage not to think about Knox Carter standing on a sidewalk looking like he'd lost something.

Almost.

Chapter Nine

Knox

Friday's game is going well.

I'm loose, I'm sharp, I'm connected to the ice in the way that happens on good nights where everything just clicks and you stop thinking about playing and start actually playing. We're up by one in the second period, the bench has good energy, and I've already had two clean takeaways and an assist on the first goal. This is the kind of game I like. The kind where I remember why I've been doing this since I was four years old.

"Carter," Ethan says, skating past me on the way to the faceoff circle. "Eyes on the ice."

I look at him. "My eyes are on the ice."

"Keep them there."

He doesn't say anything else, which is worse than if he'd explained himself, because now I want to know what's in the stands that I apparently shouldn't look at. Ethan knows I'm going to look. He grew up with me and my brothers. He’s my best friend, and he's been playing with me long enough to know that telling me not to do something is essentially instructions to do it.

I look.

Sienna first, then Rory, then…

Emma.

Emma is in the stands where all the hockey players' friends and relatives sit.

I lose about three seconds of game awareness that I'm going to have to account for later. She's in the section where the girls usually sit, just a few rows up, and she's wearing this dark top that's cut low enough that I can see it from the ice, which I don't usually notice in this arena because the lighting isn't great and I'm supposed to be playing hockey. I'm noticing it. I'm noticing a lot of things from here that I shouldn't be able to make out at this distance. I can't tell if that's the lighting or the fact that I've been thinking about Emma Lawson for years and my brain has developed an unreasonable level of dedicated processing power for her specifically.