Page 50 of Like a Power Play (Greenrock University: Icebound #1)

Obviously, she figures it out—because she’s the main character and anyone named Gertie can most definitely solve a puzzle. Mid-heist, she pushes him off a moving train while get him back! by Olivia Rodrigo blasts in the background.

He dies. (Rip. Ish.)

She rides off into the sunset with the hot blonde female Russian train conductor who was secretly helping her all along. They end up co-running a glamorous and mafia-like crime ring across the Western rail lines ( Femininomenon , Chappell Roan).

“So what happens to her dad?” Peyton asks, wrapping the wired earbuds around her phone as we step off the bus. “Does he ever sell his inventions? Does he ever get to see his daughter again?”

I glance down at her screen; Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day lights it up.

“No,” I say, shaking my head.

Peyton frowns.

“But,” I add, “he does end up healing from his wife’s tragic death by running off with some exchange student who’s just old enough to make the audience go along with it. He realizes that his true calling wasn’t invention. It was finding love again.”

She smiles at that.

“Come on.” I wave her forward. “This way.”

We walk along the sidewalk, disappearing into the early-morning fog.

I think of Gertie for a while, and how this would be where the story starts—her lugging her suitcase stuffed with linens and books down the muggy street.

I wonder if she ever goes to visit her mom’s grave and decide that she does each year on the anniversary of her kidnapping.

Streetlights cast halos on the dark, glistening concrete, and I try to tug my jacket zipper the rest of the way up to my chin to fight off the breeze.

Only, my fingers cramp.

I slip the tiny piece of metal between my thumb and forefinger again, squeezing them together, but a sharp pain slices through.

I wince, pulling back. Peyton notices, but she doesn’t say anything.

She just leans over and zips it up for me without a word.

Then she scoots closer, her arm brushing mine, probably trying to share body heat.

I can’t help but remember the last time Peyton and I shared body heat.

“I’m starting to think this has nothing to do with hockey,” she says, eyes flitting as we pass into a slightly hazy park.

A grin tugs at my lips. “Oh, but my young, overly ambitious Icarus—” I say, flicking her hair in mock affection that feels a lot less mocking than I had intended. “It has everything to do with hockey.”

Through the fog, a massive white dome takes shape—the Oregon State Capitol, according to the map on my phone.

We veer off the main sidewalk, onto a little paved path, which leads us to a tall, bronze statue.

The metallic man stares out, gripping a cane in one hand, and a hat in the other.

Behind him, his cloak flows in the imaginary wind that’s blowing the opposite direction of the real wind.

We just stand there and stare.

After a moment, Peyton turns to me.

“I don’t get it,” she says.

I grin, a cocky, Peyton kind of grin, and point at the base of the statue with my toe. “Still need me to teach you how to read?”

She rolls her eyes. “Funny,” she says, but leans down anyway, squinting at the engraving. Then she straightens up, still confused. “...Okay?”

I keep staring. Waiting.

She sighs, and asks in the most uninterested tone possible: “Who’s Dr. John McLouglin?”

A giant grin breaks across my face. “I’m so glad you asked!” I say, high-pitched and condescending like a kindergarten teacher.

She groans, which is my cue to continue.

“Johnny here was a physician turned fur trader slash colonizer who basically ran the Hudson’s Bay Company.”

Peyton blinks, unamused. “And you’re telling me this because…?”

“Because ol’ Johnny had a son. Johnny Jr. And one day, after screwing up basically everything in his life, JJ decides he wants to follow in daddy’s footsteps and be a fur trader too.”

I stop there, just to see what she’ll do with it.

She raises an eyebrow. “Well? Did he?”

I nod. “Yeah.” A beat. “Until he got blackout drunk, beat the shit out of some coworkers, and got himself shot to death.”

Peyton recoils. “Jesus, Darcy! Why would you tell me that?”

I shrug. “Because sometimes trying to be like your dad gets you somewhere you don’t want to be.”

“You brought me all the way here to tell me that? To make me stare at the statue of a dead guy who has an even deader son?”

I tilt my head. “Can a dead person really be more dead than another dead person?”

She gestures to Johnny Sr. “Well, his son doesn’t have a statue to commemorate him, so.”

Another breeze cuts through, shaking the leafless trees, biting at my skin. I pull my hair back over my ears, makeshift insulation against the cold.

“I brought you here to tell you that,” I say, voice firm, “and to stop you from getting on the ice. Practicing every morning isn’t helping you get better. It’s setting your body up to fail.”

Peyton looks away instead of arguing. Which means she knows I’m right.

“If we’re doing this, if I’m going to keep helping you, then no more early practices.”

Now she argues.

“Four,” she says.

“One.”

“Three.”

“Two. Thirty minutes, max.”

Her amber eyes scan mine, searching for leniency. She finds none. A sigh escapes her lips, her shoulders sagging in surrender, but when our eyes meet again, there’s a gleam there. A spark of something I can’t quite decipher.

“Okay,” she says. “Two.”

I smile. “Two.”

After another long pause, I add: “In a completely coincidental and unplanned circumstance, there just so happens to be a five-star coffee shop just down the—”

Before I can finish, she steps closer. Close enough that our bodies are, once again, touching. Her hand curls behind my neck, pulling herself onto her toes until our mouths are perfectly aligned.

I like when her mouth is parallel with mine.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” she murmurs, her smile soft and lopsided.

I can’t stop staring at her lips as I reply, “Likewise, Icarus.”

For a second, we stand there, her fingers tangled in the back of my hair, my eyes tracing her chewed bottom lip. I want to kiss her. I shouldn’t want to kiss her.

“I can’t—” I start, pulling back. My stomach sinks. “Sorry, but, after—”

“Yeah, no,” she cuts in quickly, dropping back to her heels. I’m suddenly a whole lot colder without her pressed against me. “I know. Me too. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry.”

She shoves her hands into her pockets, awkwardly rocking on her feet. I shake my head.

“You don’t have anything to apologize for,” I say.

She flashes me a cocky grin. “But you do.”

I frown. “What? Why?”

She hitches a shoulder. “You can’t walk around with lips like that and expect me to not want to kiss them.”

Heat creeps across my cheeks, and I curse its existence because Peyton is doing what every arrogant hockey player does, and I should be immune by now. I am immune. She just has a way of slipping through the cracks sometimes.

“Has that ever worked for you before?” I ask, head tipping to the side.

Peyton hooks her arm in mine, just like she did that night downtown. “Yes,” she answers simply. “Yes it has.”

A loud melody springs from her back pocket, startling the both of us, and she fishes out her phone as I navigate our way to the coffee shop. I don’t make out the name on her screen before she swipes it away, declining the call.

“Everything okay?” I ask, brow creasing in concern.

She just nods, slipping it back into her pocket. “Fine. Spam call,” she says lightly. Then spins around to face me, walking backwards down the sidewalk. I follow. “Hey, so, how did Icarus get to the sun anyway? Spaceship? Blimp?”

I glance at my phone’s map and toss my head to the left to signal a turn. She pivots—still backward—without missing a step.

“You think a blimp could fly to the sun?”

She shrugs. “Maybe. Humor me.”

“Wings,” I answer, eyes flicking to hers.

She’s still walking backward, and some irrational part of me pretends it’s because she wants to keep looking at me and not because Peyton Clarke does things simply because no one told her not to.

Which is stupid, because I just turned her down.

Because she drives me completely insane.

Because I can’t date people. Because I shouldn’t want her to like me.

But for some reason, I do. I want her to like me.

Her brows lower over her hooded eyes. “Wings?”

“Wings,” I repeat. “He and his dad were imprisoned on Crete. His dad was this genius craftsman and built them both a pair of wings out of wax and feathers to escape. But he warned Icarus not to fly too high.”

Peyton exhales like she already knows what’s coming. “Let me guess,” she says, glancing behind her just in time to dodge a mailbox. “He wanted to be just like Daddy too?”

I shake my head. “No. That’s the thing. He wanted to be more than his father. He wanted to be a god. So he flew higher. Too high.”

She frowns. “And then he burned to death.”

“Actually…” I grin. “The wax on his wings melted, and he plummeted to the sea and drowned.”

Her feet come to a sudden halt, and her pretty porcelain jaw literally drops open. “What?” Her voice is an equal mix of horror and disbelief. “What the fuck kind of stories are these, Darcy?”

I laugh. “The good kind.”

She’s shaking her head, but she’s smiling. “No. Because apparently you either try to be like your dad and get shot, or try to not be like him and drown under the scorching sun.”

I give her a long deadpan look. “There is a third option.”

She quirks a brow. “Yeah? What’s that?”

“Stop trying to be like or unlike anyone,” I say. “Just be. ”