He has a joke for everything. She’s the only one who ever saw what the laughing was hiding.
Carter Vance is the easiest guy on the Lakeview State roster to love and the hardest to actually know. Loudest laugh in the room, joke for every bad call, a grin that never lets anyone close enough to see the cracks. It’s worked for years. It worked right up until the one person who saw through all of it walked back into the arena.
Maren Ellis left three years ago — after Carter made a joke that broke something neither of them knew how to fix. Now she’s back at Lakeview on a media fellowship, camera in hand, assigned to cover the team’s championship run. Including its captain-in-waiting. Including him.
Carter has one season left to prove he’s more than the funny one. Maren has one semester to keep her distance, do her job, and not fall for the boy who already broke her heart with a punchline. But the ice is small, the cameras are always rolling, and the thing between them never actually ended — it just went quiet.
This time, the joke isn’t going to save him. And the last rule is the one neither of them can keep.
