Page 80 of Fractured Ice

I stare at her.

"Emma—"

"Hear me out." She sets the cereal bowl aside. "You have two possible outcomes. One, you sleep with him, and it confirms that whatever you're feeling is real, and you have to actually deal with it and figure out what comes next. Two, you sleep with him, and it turns out it was desire without depth, and you get that out of your system and move on with the information." She opens one hand. "Either way you know something. Either way you've moved."

"That is the most reductive⁠—"

"It's not reductive. It's efficient." She points at me. "You overthink everything, Sienna. You analyze every possible outcome before you take a single step, and then you analyze the analysis, and by the time you've finished deciding what to do the moment has already passed. With your grades, with your career plan, that's a feature. With your heart it's a problem."

I open my mouth.

"When is the last time you took a risk with someone?" she says. "An actual risk, where you didn't know how it was going to go."

I think about it. The fact that I have to think about it for as long as I do is probably an answer in itself.

"That's what I thought," Emma says. "So. Ethan Walker. You have feelings for him. What are you going to do?"

"I don't know that sleeping with someone is automatically the answer to⁠—"

"I didn't say it was the answer. I said it was a step forward." She picks her cereal back up. "You've been standing still on this for months. Standing still isn't the same as being careful. It's just standing still."

The candle on the mantle is doing its warm-light thing in the next room. Outside, someone drives past slowly. The house settles the way old houses do.

"What if it does mean something?" I say. "What if both things are true? It's real, and I do something about it. And it doesn't mean the same thing to him?"

Emma is quiet, which is rare enough that I notice it.

"That's the real question," she says finally. Not dismissively. Just accurately. "That's the thing you're actually scared of."

"I'm not scared."

She gives me a look.

"I'm cautious," I say.

"Those are the same thing with better vocabulary."

I look at the counter again. The thing is, I already know the answer to most of what I've been circling. I know what it would mean if I let this happen. I know myself well enough to know that I don't do things halfway, that if I let Ethan Walker past the line I've been maintaining, it won't be something I can step back from cleanly.

What I don't know is him. What it would be for him. Whether I'm something he'd choose to keep or something he'd hold carefully for a while and then set down.

"I know where it would lead," I say. "With Ethan. If I—" I stop. "I know what it would mean for me."

Emma nods. She doesn't say anything else, which means she understands the rest of it.

"I just don't know if it'll mean as much to him," I say.

"You won't know until you find out," she says. "That's the risk part."

I sit with that. The cereal is gone now and Emma rinses the bowl in the sink and comes to lean against the counter beside me, and we stay like that for a while, which is something I didn't know I needed until I had it.

"For what it's worth," Emma says, "I don't think it's nothing for him. I've seen the way he looks at you when you're not paying attention."

"You've been paying attention to how Ethan looks at me?"

"I pay attention to everything. It's a gift and a curse." She pushes off the counter. "Go to bed. You'll think more clearly in the morning."

"Will I?"