~~~~~ Emery’s Pov ~~~~~
The side entrance to the rink was a door I had never actually used before.
It was tucked behind a row of dumpsters and half-hidden by a chain-link fence that separated the athletic complex from the parking lot beyond it.
Calloway was waiting there when I arrived, her arms crossed against the cold, still in her practice gear.
Her hair pulled back tight enough that I could see the tension in her jaw from ten feet away.
“You came,” she said, like she’d genuinely doubted I would.
“You asked me to.”
“I know.
I just—” She stopped, shook her head and pushed the door open instead of finishing the sentence.
“Come in.
It’s freezing out here and I don’t want to have this conversation where anyone can hear it.”
Inside, the rink was empty and dim, only the emergency lighting on, casting everything in a flat gray-blue that made the whole space feel smaller than it did during practice.
It was more private somehow, despite being technically the same size.
Our footsteps echoed against the concrete walkway ringing the ice, and somewhere overhead a vent hummed steadily, the only sound besides our own breathing in the cold, still air.
She led me to the bleachers, dropped down onto the lowest row, and I sat beside her, close enough that our shoulders almost touched, waiting for her to say whatever it was she had pulled me out of class for.
“My dad called,” she said finally, staring straight ahead at the empty ice instead of at me.
“Twelve minutes after the picture went up.
Twelve minutes, Emery.
He must have some kind of alert set up, because there’s no way he just happened to be scrolling a college gossip account at two in the afternoon.”
“What did he say?” I asked anxiously.
“He wanted to know who you were.
Not — not in a nice way.
He wanted to know if I was ‘distracted.’ If this—” she gestured vaguely, encompassing, I assumed, the entire concept of me.
“—was why my grades had been an issue in the first place, before he even knew they were improving.
He’s convinced I’m losing focus over a girl instead of actually fixing the problem myself.”
“That’s not fair.
You’ve worked incredibly hard the last three weeks,” I said.
“I know that.
You know that.
It doesn’t matter what either of us knows.” Her voice had an edge to it I hadn’t heard before, brittle in a way that made me want to reach for her hand.
I stopped myself at the last second, unsure if that was allowed anymore, unsure if it ever had been.
“He’s already decided the narrative,” Calloway said, looking back at me.
Her dad had already decided that Calloway was struggling because of a distraction, not because organic chemistry was genuinely difficult and she needed help like literally everyone else in that class.
It didn’t matter that the distraction happened to be the reason she was passing now instead of failing.
I sat with that for a moment.
The feeling of something protective and furious rose up in my chest on her behalf.
A feeling I didn’t entirely know what to do with.
“So tell him that.
Tell him the truth,” I said finally.
“He doesn’t listen to explanations, Emery.
He listens to results.
And right now the only result he’s looking at is a photo of his daughter looking cozy with someone at a restaurant, which apparently outweighs weeks of actual improvement.”
“So what happens now?”
She was quiet for a long moment, long enough that I started to worry the silence itself was an answer I wasn’t going to like.
When she finally spoke, she still wasn’t looking at me, her hands twisted together in her lap in a way that looked nothing like the confident, untouchable captain from the recruiting posters.
“He’s coming to the game Saturday.
Flying in specifically because of this.
And he’s going to want to meet you, or at least see for himself what he’s dealing with, and if he decides you’re a distraction.
If you are a real one, not just a headline — he’s not going to stop at disapproving from a distance.
He’ll pull his support for my housing stipend.
He has done it before, over smaller things than this.”
I felt something cold settle in my stomach that had nothing to do with the rink’s temperature.
“He can do that?”
“He funds part of my off-campus housing separate from the athletic scholarship.
Technically, yes.
He has threatened it before, for less.” She finally turned to look at me, and there was something raw in her expression that she usually kept locked down tight, something that made her look younger than the assured, untouchable person I had first met in Coach Marsh’s office.
“I don’t know what to do about this, and I don’t like not knowing what to do.
I’m not used to it.”
She was quiet for a moment, jaw working like she was turning something over in her head before she let herself say it out loud.
“There’s a way to make it stop, actually.
A way to control the story instead of letting a gossip account and my father’s imagination fill in the blanks,” she said.
“What is it?” I asked, wanting to hear whatever she wanted to say.
“What if there’s nothing for him to be suspicious of because there’s nothing to hide?
What if I tell him exactly what he already thinks he knows — that we’re together?” She said it fast, like she needed to get the whole sentence out before she lost her nerve.
“You’d be my girlfriend.
For the weekend, in front of him.
A tutor who happens to be dating me isn’t a distraction from my grades, she’s the reason they’re improving.
It reframes the entire narrative.
He can’t threaten to pull funding over something that’s demonstrably working.”
I stared at her, genuinely thrown, my mouth opening and closing once before I managed to find actual words.
Of everything I had braced myself for walking into that rink, this had not been on the list.
“You want me to pretend to be your girlfriend,” I asked, loudly.
“I know how it sounds,” she said, looking away.
“I wasn’t expecting that from you, is all.
You’ve spent three weeks acting like admitting you need help with anything is basically a personal failure, and now you’re asking me to lie to your father’s face for an entire weekend.”
“I told you.
I don’t like not knowing what to do.” Something almost sheepish crossed her expression, and was gone as fast as it appeared.
“This is me knowing what to do.
Or at least having an idea instead of nothing.”
“That’s insane.
That’s also, unfortunately, not a bad point.”
“I have my moments too,” she said, now looking back at me.
“You’d actually want me to do that?
Pretend to date you for one very uncomfortable weekend, in front of your father, who I should mention I’m now terrified of without even meeting him?”
I thought about eleven days, now closer to zero, about a stipend that had already covered part of last month’s rent, about a mother who worked too many hours and deserved not to worry about the electric bill.
I thought, underneath all of that, about the way Calloway’s voice had cracked slightly on
*he’s already decided the narrative*, and how much I wanted, suddenly and inconveniently, to be the reason that narrative changed.
“I’d do it,” I said.
“Rules, though.
We set boundaries before Saturday, not during it.”
Something in her expression eased, just slightly, relief and something else underneath it that I couldn’t quite name yet.
“Rules.
Right.
Yes.
That’s — smart.”
“That’s the whole brand,” I said, smiling awkwardly.
She almost smiled at that, the ghost of it flickering across her face before the seriousness of the situation pulled it back under.
“Thank you,” she said, quieter now, more sincere than anything she’d said to me since we had met.
“I mean it.
You didn’t have to say yes to this.”
“I know,” I blurted out almost immediately.
“Then why did you?”
I didn’t have a clean answer for that, not one I was ready to say out loud in an empty rink with emergency lighting turning everything gray-blue and her looking at me like the answer actually mattered.
There were a dozen half-formed reasons crowding behind my teeth — the stipend, sure, but also three weeks of grilled cheese and worksheets and a laugh I had started listening for without meaning to, a version of her nobody else seemed to get to see.
None of it felt safe to say out loud yet, not with Saturday still ahead of us and everything still theoretical.
So I gave her the version that was true without being the whole truth.
“Because you needed someone in your corner.
That’s it.
That’s the whole reason.”
She held my gaze a beat longer than the moment strictly required, like she wasn’t entirely convinced that was the whole reason either.
Not with Saturday looming over both of us like a deadline neither of us had actually agreed to.
“Saturday,” she said finally, standing, offering me a hand up off the bleachers that I probably didn’t need but took anyway.
“I’ll text you the details.
And Emery—”
“Yeah?”
“Try not to fall in love with the idea before we’ve even figured out the rules.”
I laughed, though something about the way she said it landed strangely close to a warning I should have taken more seriously than I did.
“Who’s falling in love with you, though?” I said, rubbing the back of my neck.