The Hockey Captain's Forbidden Girl

Chapter 1: Rule Number One

The first rule of surviving senior year was simple. Never fall in love with your brother's best friend.

The second rule was never let him find out you still weren't over it.

I broke both before nine o'clock on a Monday morning, and I hadn't even left the newsroom yet.

"Big announcement." Julian stood at the front of the room, coffee in one hand, a printed schedule in the other, the whole staff crowded around the assignment board like he was about to read off something better than a beat assignment. "Hartwell Hockey opens their season in three weeks. I want a full-time reporter on it. Season preview, game recaps, player features, the works."

A ripple went through the room, half excitement, half relief that it wasn't them. Somebody near the back muttered something about press passes and courtside seats, like this was the beat everyone had been quietly hoping for since September.

"That's a real beat," someone said. "Like, actual readership."

"Exactly. Which is why I'm giving it to my best sports writer." Julian's eyes found mine across the room, and something in my stomach dropped before he even said my name. "Harper."

"No."

The room went quiet enough that I heard the coffee maker gurgling in the back corner.

"I'm sorry?"

"I said no. Give it to someone else." I kept my eyes on my notebook, on anything that wasn't the six other people now staring at me like I'd turned down a scholarship. "I don't cover athletics."

"You're the best sports writer on staff."

"Then I'll cover something else. Track. Rowing. I hear the club fencing team needs press."

A couple of people laughed, assuming I was joking. I wasn't, and Julian's expression told me he knew it too.

Julian didn't argue in front of everyone. He just said, "My office, five minutes," and walked off before I could refuse that too.

I gave him ten, mostly out of spite, and found him leaning against his desk when I finally showed up, arms crossed, patient in the particular way that meant he already knew he'd win.

"Why are you so against hockey?"

"I'm not against hockey. I'm busy."

"You turned in your last three assignments early. You're not busy." He studied me a beat too long, the way editors learn to study people who are lying badly. "Is this about your brother?"

"Mason has nothing to do with it."

"Then what?"

I didn't answer, because the honest answer had a name attached to it that I hadn't said out loud in three years, and I wasn't about to start in Julian's office at nine in the morning.

"Lily." He set his coffee down, which meant he was done being patient with the deflecting. "You've been at this paper two years. I've never once seen you turn down an assignment. Not the piece on the dining hall lawsuit, not the one on the frat suspended for hazing, not the three-thousand-word investigative thing on parking permits that nobody asked for and you wrote anyway. And now the easiest beat on the board, and you're refusing before I've even finished the sentence."

"Maybe I don't want to spend my semester writing about one particular hockey player."

Julian's head tipped, just slightly, something new working behind his eyes. He didn't ask which one. He just filed it away, the way good editors file away anything that sounds like the start of a better story than the one they'd planned to assign.

"You grew up at that rink. Your dad still has the season tickets." He said it gently, but it landed exactly the way he meant it to. "You're the only reporter I trust with this, Lily. I need someone who already knows the players — who won't need six weeks to learn who's who on the roster." He softened, just slightly, enough that I knew he meant it. "I wouldn't ask if I had another option."

"You always have another option."

"Not a good one." He held out the folder he'd been carrying since the meeting, patient, waiting. "Two weeks. Season preview's due before the opener. If you hate it after that, I'll reassign it, no questions asked."

I took the folder because there wasn't a version of this conversation where I won, and because Julian had never once been wrong about which of us would cave first.

The walk back across campus took me past the practice rink, which I could have avoided, which I'd been avoiding successfully for three years by routing every trip to the library through the science quad instead. Today I didn't have the energy to care.

Two girls in Hartwell hoodies passed me going the other direction, deep in a conversation I wasn't trying to overhear.

"—and he smiled at me yesterday, like actually smiled, not the polite thing he does for everyone—"

"He's getting drafted first overall, you know that, right? Scouts were at practice last week. My cousin works in the athletics office, she says his name's already on some agency's shortlist."

"I heard he and Ava are back together."

"No way. Since when?"

"Since like, last week? Someone saw them at Malone's."

The second girl kept talking, something about a party this weekend, but I'd already stopped absorbing words, the folder suddenly heavier under my arm than it had any right to be. Ava. I told myself it didn't matter, that a name overheard between two strangers on a sidewalk had no business landing in my chest like a small, private injury three years past its expiration date.

I kept walking. I did not slow down. I definitely did not glance toward the arena doors when they swung open thirty feet ahead of me, the team spilling out in loose clusters after morning skate, gear bags over shoulders, laughter carrying across the quad.

Mason's laugh found me first, easy and loud, and I almost lifted a hand to wave before I saw who he was walking beside.

Ethan Carter hadn't changed the way I'd spent three years half hoping he had. Same easy stride, same effortless way of taking up space without trying, hair still damp from the ice, gear bag slung over one shoulder like it weighed nothing. He was saying something to Mason, laughing at his own joke, and for one second I thought I might actually make it past unnoticed.

Then he looked up.

Three years.

Three years of crossing streets and skipping games and rerouting my entire life around this exact possibility, and it took him exactly one second to find me across thirty feet of open quad like no time had passed at all.

Everything else went quiet. Mason's laugh, the girls behind me, the ordinary Monday morning noise of a campus waking up, all of it fell away until there was nothing left but his eyes on mine and the specific, familiar way my whole body forgot how to do anything but stand still. I'd forgotten what that felt like, or maybe I'd just gotten good at pretending I had.

He said something to Mason, something I couldn't hear, and started walking toward me.

Mason looked up half a second too late, already confused, already calling after him. "Ethan? Where are you—" He caught sight of me then, notebook clutched to my chest, and his confusion only deepened. "Lil?"

I turned around and left.

I didn't run. I want that on the record, wherever this ends up being recorded. I walked, fast, purposeful, the kind of walk that could pass for somewhere else to be, and I did not look back to see if he was still watching, because some part of me already knew the answer, and I wasn't ready to carry it the whole way home.