Page 18 of On Thin Ice

But this was different.

He was my roommate now. And roommates did not rub one out while picturing the other’s slick body covered in soap suds.

Letting out a groan of frustration as I willed my dick to behave itself, I pulled out my phone to find something to distract myself with. Plopping back down on my bed, I opened TikTok, liking a video of a husky going absolutely wild in the snow, double-tapped a thirst trap from a gym bro in California who always left flirty comments on my posts, then paused on a clip of a girl I’d casually dated last year, lip-syncing to Beyoncé like she was having a spiritual awakening.

I continued scrolling. Then scrolled some more.

The longer I sat there, the more fidgety I got.

I tapped my fingers against the phone case. I rested my elbows on my knees and then sat up straight. My knee bounced. I checked the time.

Only six minutes had passed since he’d gone into the bathroom, but it felt like thirty.

I stood up, then sat back down, rubbing my palms along the tops of my thighs. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth.

My chest felt tight. Not in an I’m-having-a-heart-attack way, just … compressed.

What the fuck was wrong with me?

As if I didn’t already know.

It washim.

More precisely, it wasroomingwith him. Sleeping ten feet away from the man I had a massive, unshakable crush on.

At home, we could retreat to our individual rooms and pretend the other didn’t exist—or rather, he could pretendIdidn’t exist.

But here in this hotel room? There was no space. No buffer.

I was going to hear him breathing tonight. Every rustle of his sheets would remind me he wasright there, close enough to reach for.

Not that I ever would.

Fucking hell.

I swiped out of TikTok. Opened Instagram. Closed it. Checked my texts—nothing new. I debated posting something dumb to my stories, but even thinking about trying to be funny or cute for the internet felt exhausting.

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, blowing out a long breath.

Get it together, Bell.

The bathroom door opened with a quiet click, steam curling around Ethan like he was stepping out of a fog. He looked freshly scrubbed, his dark hair damp and pushed back off his forehead, his T-shirt clinging to his chest, and those damn gray sweatpants slung low on his hips.

I blinked. My mouth parted slightly, my brain going haywire for a moment. I tried not to stare and failed—epically.

Something embarrassingly close to a whimper caught in my throat, and suddenly, he turned to face me.

“You okay over there?”

“Yeah,” I said quickly. Too quickly. I cleared my throat. “Just, you know … scrolling.” I held up my phone and rocked it back and forth like a weirdo. “Just rotting my brain.”

He shook his head and muttered something under his breath before crossing to the armoire and picking up the remote. He flicked the TV on, and a blast of blue light filled the room asSportsCenterlit up the screen.

Yeah, no way was I watching that.

The Aces might have won tonight, but I’d played like shit. I knew it, the coaches knew it, and our fans knew it. I didn’t need some talking heads detailing all the specific ways I’d sucked.

I grabbed my Kindle from the front pocket of my bag and settled back against the headboard, angling the pillows behind me. I was halfway through a slow-burn romance about a grumpy carpenter who had reluctantly rented his spare room to a younger, chaotic mystery writer. The carpenter was trying valiantly to keep his walls up, refusing to let the writer in, but their forced proximity was killing them both in the best, most deliciously agonizing way possible.

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