The word followed her everywhere like a shadow with teeth.
Washed-up.
It trailed her across Yale's Gothic courtyards, through the towering stacks of Sterling Memorial Library, even into her fitful dreams where she found herself falling endlessly through ice that never solidified beneath her blades. No matter how many times she told herself she didn't care what Bianca and Bella whispered in athletic complex locker rooms, the echo had lodged itself deep under her ribs, a constant ache that competed with her reconstructed knee for attention.
Which was exactly why meeting Eli for their American Literature project felt like walking straight into another kind of carefully orchestrated ambush.
She'd almost canceled three separate times, fingers hovering over her phone with increasingly elaborate drafted excuses about being "overwhelmed with other coursework" or "dealing with a family emergency." But each time, she'd deleted the message before sending it. She couldn't give him that satisfaction, couldn't let him think she was the kind of person who bailed when things got uncomfortable. Her competitive instincts, apparently, extended beyond figure skating into academic partnerships with annoyingly perceptive hockey players.
So she walked into Sterling Memorial Library Tuesday afternoon with her knee brace grinding against her jeans and her annotated copy of The Great Gatsby clutched against her chest like literary armor.
Eli was already there, which shouldn't have surprised her but somehow did.
Instead of claiming some remote corner table where they could work in relative privacy, he'd positioned himself right in the center of the main study area, surrounded by the quiet buzz of serious academic work. His book lay open beside a legal pad covered in what appeared to be actual notes, and he held a pencil with the kind of unconscious competence that suggested extensive practice. His hoodie sleeves had been shoved up to his elbows, revealing forearms that spoke of serious weight training, and his dark hair fell forward as he bent over the pages, completely absorbed in whatever passage had captured his attention.
Silver stopped walking and blinked.
This wasn't the Eli she'd encountered leaning against dining hall walls with calculated casual arrogance, or the version she'd glimpsed at the hockey house party commanding social space through sheer presence. This was someone different—focused, intense in a way that had nothing to do with intimidation and everything to do with genuine intellectual engagement.
She approached the table cautiously and slid into the chair across from him, setting her book down with deliberate precision. "Didn't expect you to show up early."
His eyes flicked up from the page, meeting hers with that same steady directness that always made her feel like he was reading more than just her facial expression. "Didn't expect you to show up at all."
Her jaw tightened automatically. "I said I would be here."
He didn't respond immediately, just returned his attention to his notes with the kind of dismissive efficiency that suggested her presence was noted but not particularly significant. His handwriting, she noticed despite herself, was sharp and cramped, like every word required careful consideration before being committed to paper.
Silver opened her copy of Gatsby, determined to project the same level of unaffected competence. "So. Major themes. Jazz Age excess, class mobility, the corruption of the American Dream. Standard literary analysis territory."
"Reinvention," Eli said immediately, not looking up from his book.
She glanced across the table. Now he was watching her again, pencil balanced between his fingers with casual precision. "That's what the novel's really exploring. You can dress yourself up in money, throw parties, surround yourself with all the right people and all the right things. But none of it changes what you're actually running from."
Silver's chest constricted with uncomfortable recognition. She hated how much sense his interpretation made, how easily his words seemed to slice through Fitzgerald's elaborate prose straight to something that felt uncomfortably personal.
"Didn't think hockey players spent time analyzing the psychological motivations of literary characters," she muttered, flipping through her book to find the passage they'd been assigned.
He smirked faintly, the expression transforming his features from merely attractive to genuinely dangerous. "Didn't think figure skaters cared about the performative aspects of identity construction."
Her stomach performed what felt like a badly executed jump combination. "I never said I was—"
"You didn't have to."
The simple statement hung in the air between them like a challenge she wasn't equipped to meet. Silver gripped her pen hard enough to leave indentations in her palm, pulse racing with the kind of fight-or-flight response that belonged in competition warm-up areas, not academic study sessions.
The silence stretched until Eli leaned back in his chair, pencil spinning between his fingers with the unconscious skill of someone who'd probably been fidgeting with hockey sticks since childhood. "So what do you want to argue? That Gatsby's tragic because he couldn't escape who he really was underneath all the performance, or because he wouldn't stop chasing something that was already gone?"
Silver stared at him across their shared table, surrounded by the quiet intensity of serious students wrestling with serious ideas. She'd spent the previous night forcing herself through the assigned chapters, barely managing to extract surface-level observations about symbolism and historical context. Her notes consisted mainly of highlighted passages and question marks in margins where Fitzgerald's meaning eluded her.
And here was Eli Hayes, supposedly just another recruited athlete coasting through his academic requirements, casually dissecting the novel's central psychological tension like he'd been preparing for graduate seminars.
Her throat felt suddenly dry. "You're actually good at this."
His mouth twitched with what might have been genuine amusement. "Surprised?"
"Yes," she admitted, because dishonesty seemed pointless when he'd already demonstrated his ability to see through whatever facades she tried to construct.
The corner of his mouth lifted into something that wasn't quite a smile but suggested the possibility of one. Not the calculated smirk she'd grown accustomed to, but something warmer, more real.
Silver looked down quickly, scribbling meaningless observations into her notebook just to break the tension that had suddenly become charged with something she didn't want to examine too closely. Her pulse hammered against her throat, and she could feel heat creeping up her neck despite the library's aggressive air conditioning.
She told herself she wasn't going to look at him again, wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of catching her staring.
But when she inevitably raised her eyes, she found Eli's head bent over his book again, dark lashes casting shadows across his cheekbones as he read with the kind of focused intensity that suggested the rest of the world had temporarily ceased to exist. His concentration was complete, unself-conscious, almost beautiful in its absolute commitment to the task at hand.
Silver caught herself staring and discovered she couldn't look away.
For the first time since their partnership had been announced, she wondered if there might be more to Eli Hayes than the carefully controlled surface he showed the world. And for the first time in months, she found herself genuinely curious about someone other than herself.