Page 92 of Fractured Ice

He stares at me.

"I'm serious," I say.

"You're serious?"

"I'm completely serious."

"So you're—" He blinks. "Does that mean you'll be my girlfriend?"

I think about two days of thinking, the kissing booth, Emma in the kitchen, and a pen with blue crystals in my jacket pocket.

"Yes," I say.

What happens next I do not have time to document because Ethan makes a sound that no grown man should be comfortable making and launches himself onto the bed. I grab the pile of crumpled papers before they can scatter, laughing, and he's kissing my face and my hair and wherever he can reach while I try to protect the notes, because I want to keep them forever. I'm laughing hard enough that I can't catch my breath, and he's grinning against my cheek, as the party below us continues without knowing that anything significant has happened.

But something has.

Something that's been many years and a science project at the bottom of a lake and a box of unlabeled files in a box in my mind in the making.

He presses his face into my neck and I hold on. The notes are safe around us, outside the March night is cold and ordinary, and in here everything is different than it was an hour ago.

I think I'm okay with that.

I think I'm more than okay with that.

22

Ethan

Knox is winning again, which under normal circumstances would bother me.

Currently I don't care. After weeks with my very own awesome girlfriend, nothing much bothers me any longer. I'm sitting on the couch with my controller mostly forgotten in my hand, thinking about Sienna asleep upstairs in my bed this morning, and her laugh last night, and the way she'd said she liked me, and I keep smiling at nothing.

"Geez," he says.

"What?"

"You can't stop!"

"Stop what?" I ask, confused.

"Smiling at the wall."

"I'm looking at the screen."

"You're looking at the air in front of the screen and smiling at it." He sinks a goal. "You've been like this for two days. Ever since you came down declaring Sienna as your girlfriend."

"I'm fine."

"You're disgustingly happy. It's uncomfortable to be near. It's like you're in pain, just waiting for her to get ready."

Across the room, Jace has Rory tucked into the big chair with him, her legs thrown over his, and he's saying something into her hair that makes her tip her head back and laugh. I would feel something about that if I hadn't spent the last two days acquiring the same thing, which means instead I just feel like we're all exactly where we're supposed to be.

I hear footsteps on the stairs.

I look up, because I’ll always look up when there are footsteps on the stairs now, and Sienna comes down in jeans and the green jacket she had on the first day I saw her this semester, her hair down. Whatever I was thinking about completely leaves my head.

She's beautiful. Every single time. It doesn't matter how many times I've seen her face, it resets every time and does the same thing to me. I'm aware that I've stopped pressing buttons on the controller and I'm just looking at her, and she has absolutely noticed.