Page 64 of Fractured Ice

"Walker."

"I'm playing."

"You haven't pressed a button in forever." He pauses the game himself. "Are you even here right now?"

I drop the controller on my lap and look at the ceiling. "I'm here."

"You're somewhere." He picks up his beer. "How bad is it?"

"What."

"The Sienna thing. How bad?"

I groan. It comes out from somewhere deep and involuntary, and covers most of the available ground on the subject. "I ruined her date, Knox. She was on a date and I walked into the same restaurant. Then I stood outside and watched Dylan Reed kiss her before I started a fight with him on the sidewalk." I drag a hand over my face. "And then I walked her home and listed everything I know about her like a lunatic and she told me to stop talking to her."

"The listing thing⁠—"

"I know."

"That was a lot."

"I know."

"Like, individually those are all decent moves. But stacked together on one night⁠—"

"Knox. I know." I grab my beer and take a long drink. "And the thing is, I can't even be mad at myself for the restaurant because I'd do it again. I see her somewhere and I go toward her. I can't not go. And then I open my mouth and everything comes out wrong, and I've been doing this for years, and I still can't figure out how to just—" I stop. "Say the right thing. In the right order. Like a functioning person."

Knox is quiet for a second. He's looking at his beer and I can tell he's actually thinking, which is a different face than his normal face, more still.

"You know what's genuinely the worst feeling?" he says.

"I have a pretty good idea right now."

"When you find the one girl—" He stops. Starts over. "When you find this girl. And everything you normally do just stops working. Like you've got a whole system, right, and the system works, and then you're around her and the system just—" He shakes his head. "Doesn't."

I look at him sideways. "Yeah."

"And every conversation somehow goes sideways. You say a thing and you can hear it landing wrong and you can't stop it. You know what you want to say and what comes out is completely different." He peels the label on his bottle. "And every other girl in the entire world is easy, and this one is just—not. And it makes no sense because you're the same person. You're the same guy who does fine everywhere else."

"Knox?"

"What."

"Who is she?"

He looks up. The label tears in his hand.

"What do you mean who⁠—"

"You're not talking about me anymore." I sit up. "You haven't been talking about me for the last minute. Who is she?"

"I don't know what you’re saying.”

"You just described my exact situation with Sienna. Except you weren't describing my situation. You were describing yours." I watch and know he's been caught somewhere he wasn't planning on being caught. "You can get literally any woman on this campus. You know that, right? I have watched you talk to women. You're genuinely good at it."

"Not this one," he says simply, with a finality that closes the door on the subject. Something about the way he says it, with just those three words, stripped of the usual Knox performance, makes me feel, probably for the first time in our friendship, like we're the exact same person having the exact same terrible experience on parallel tracks.

"Who is⁠—"