The Hockey Playing Alpha and His Human Ice Princess

Georgia

I run into him outside the library on a gray Tuesday afternoon, my bag heavy with books I probably won’t open before the assignment’s due, the sky doing that flat, colorless thing it does right before it decides whether to rain.

"You’re Georgia," he says, before I’ve even fully registered that he’s talking to me and not someone behind me. "The skater. Everyone’s been talking about your medals."

"Apparently everyone talks about a lot of things around here."

"Small school. Big gossip economy." He falls into step beside me like we’re already friends, like this is a conversation that’s been happening for a while and I’ve just now caught up to it. "I’m Liam, by the way. I don’t think we’ve officially met, which is honestly a crime, given how much time I’ve spent hearing about you secondhand."

"Secondhand from who?"

"Oh, you know. The general campus rumor mill. Very efficient. Borderline supernatural, some might say." He grins when he says it, easy and quick, and moves on before I can decide whether that was a joke or something else entirely dressed up as one. "So. How’s Rosethorne treating you? Besides the aggressive interest in your competitive skating history."

"Honestly? Strange." I say it before I’ve fully decided to, surprised at how easily it comes out around him, like his whole presence makes it easier to just say things plainly instead of managing them first.

"Strange how?"

"I don’t know. Little things." I shift my bag on my shoulder, trying to figure out how much of this I actually want to say out loud to someone I’ve known for four minutes. "Everyone here moves weird. Half the people I’ve met seem to already know things about me they shouldn’t. There’s a lot of talk about traditions nobody actually explains. And I keep hearing coyotes that don’t sound anything like coyotes."

"Rosethorne’s just old," Liam says, waving a hand the same way Mandi does when she’s brushing something off - quick, dismissive, like the question itself is the problem. I file the similarity away without fully meaning to. "Old schools get weird. All that history sitting around, it does something to a place. Makes people superstitious. Makes rumors stick harder than they should. You’ll get used to it. Everyone does eventually."

"That’s the second time someone’s told me that exact thing."

"Must mean it’s true, then." He grins wider, unbothered, and it’s not really an answer, but it’s delivered with such easy confidence that it almost feels like one anyway, at least for a second, before I catch myself and remember I still don’t actually know anything.

We keep walking, no particular destination, just drifting along the edge of the quad while the light shifts from gray to that gold, late afternoon color that makes even the strangest parts of this campus look almost gentle. He’s funny the whole time, genuinely funny, quick with a joke that lands exactly when a silence starts stretching too long, like he’s got some internal radar for the precise moment a conversation is about to tip into something uncomfortable.

"So what’s the theory so far," he asks, "on the coyotes that don’t sound like coyotes?"

"I don’t have one yet. I was hoping you might."

"Me? I’m the wrong person to ask. I sleep like the dead. Could be a marching band out there and I wouldn’t know." He says it lightly, already half-smiling, already looking for the next beat to land on. "You know what actually happened during a hockey game two years ago, though? Bench-clearing brawl that turned into a snowball fight. Real thing. Coach nearly quit."

"That’s a very smooth redirect."

"I contain multitudes." He doesn’t even pretend otherwise, just grins wider, pleased that I’ve noticed, like being caught is half the fun of it.

I laugh despite myself, and he takes the opening to tell me about a professor who apparently offers extra credit for catching typos in his own syllabus, then a rumor about a ghost supposedly living in the east dormitory that he clearly doesn’t believe but tells with enough drama to make it entertaining anyway. Every story is good. Every joke lands. I find myself laughing more in twenty minutes with him than I have in most of my conversations here combined.

I like him instantly, the way you like people who make everything feel a little lighter just by standing near them, who seem incapable of letting a room stay tense for longer than a few seconds before they’ve found some way to defuse it.

But somewhere underneath the liking, there’s something else too, a small, persistent awareness building the longer we talk. Every time I steer the conversation toward the twins, toward anything that touches on the stranger corners of this school, Liam is there waiting with a joke or a story or a perfectly timed distraction, ready before I’ve even finished asking the question properly. Mention the twins and he’ll roll his eyes and make a crack about their matching outfits. Mention the strange energy of the school and he’ll deflect into old-school-superstition territory.

It’s too practiced to be accidental. Too smooth to be luck.

"Speaking of intense," he says, as we near the dining hall steps, "you should see Puck during finals week. Man turns into a ghost. Nobody’s seen him eat food in front of another human being in over a year."

"Is that a joke or an actual fact?"

"With Puck, it’s usually both." He says it easily, but something underneath the words holds a little tighter than the rest of the sentence, and I catch it before he can fold it away.

The late afternoon light turns long and gold across the cobblestones, throwing our shadows out ahead of us, and I decide to just ask.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You can ask. Can’t promise you a straight answer." He says it like a running joke between us already, even though we’ve known each other less than half an hour.

"At least you’re honest about that part." I hesitate, weighing whether I actually want to spend the goodwill I’ve built up in this conversation on a question I already suspect won’t get answered. I decide to ask anyway. "Is Puck always this intense?"

Something flickers across Liam’s face, fast, there and gone in less time than it takes to blink, a shift in his easy grin that I almost miss entirely. If I hadn’t been watching him closely this whole conversation, cataloging the exact rhythm of his deflections one by one, I might not have caught it at all. But I did catch it. Something underneath the charm, something that looks almost like worry, or grief, or both at once, gone before I can name it properly.

Then the grin resets, smooth as ever, like nothing happened, like I imagined the whole thing.

"You have no idea," he says, and there’s something real underneath the lightness of it this time, something that doesn’t quite match the joke he clearly wants it to be. It’s gone almost as fast as it arrived. Before I can ask what he means, before I can push at the crack I just watched appear and disappear on his face, he’s already moving again, already talking, already three sentences into a completely different story about that same professor and a truly unfortunate typo involving the word "public."

I let him change the subject. I don’t have much choice, honestly, the way he does it, smooth and fast and disarming, folding the moment shut before I can get my fingers properly into the gap.

But I notice. I file it away, the flicker, the real thing underneath the joke, and I walk away from that conversation liking him more than I probably should for someone I’ve just met, and trusting him a little less than the liking would suggest I ought to.

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