Chapter 6 Feedback Loop （Kieran）
FEEDBACK LOOP (KIERAN)
The lab hums quiet, just fan noise and relay clicks. I’m halfway through rigging cheap sensors to a broken hockey stick when Wren’s voice cuts through the space, level and precise.
“No—slow down. You skipped the free-body diagram. If you don’t draw it, you’re guessing.”
My hands still on the shaft. I tell myself I’m not eavesdropping. But I am.
The kid she’s tutoring nods too fast, pencil squeaking against paper. Wren waits him out, patient as a sniper. She’s relentless.
I nudge a small weight onto the stick shaft, watch the readout creep, and try to focus on my own work.
I clamped this broken stick in a vise last week, started testing how much it bends when pressure hits the carbon fiber.
I know how a shot feels when it loads right in my hands, but I want to see it in data, turn instinct into proof, motion into numbers.
If the setup works, maybe it becomes my senior project.
Or maybe I just stop thinking about it at three in the morning.
The freshman finally gets it. His shoulders drop, relief flooding his face. He thanks her twice, stuffs papers into his backpack, and bolts for whatever counts as dinner at this hour.
The lab goes quiet again. Not dead quiet. The breathing kind.
Wren caps her pen, neatly stacks her notebooks, and presses the spot between her eyebrows for exactly two seconds. Work-tired. The kind that comes from carrying too much and still showing up anyway.
Something in my chest pulls tight—an instinctive, useless urge to step in. Do what, I have no idea.
She doesn’t look at me. She never does first.
Which, of course, makes me talk.
“You scare the shit out of them,” I say, nudging a weight onto the stick shaft. “You know that, right?”
Her head lifts a fraction, eyes narrowing. “If they’re scared of diagrams, that’s a them problem.”
I grin. “Pretty sure they’re scared of you.”
“Good.” She slides her pens into a perfect row. “Fear improves retention.”
I laugh before I can stop myself. It echoes too loud in the half-empty room, so I try again, quieter. “So…tutoring freshmen?”
She gives me a single side-eye that could peel varnish. “Someone has to keep this campus from setting itself on fire.”
“Hey, I’m doing my part.” I gesture to my ridiculous setup. “Protecting a fragile brand. If people find out I read, it’s over for me.”
She snorts—barely, but it counts. “Yes. Tragedy. Wouldn’t want them to discover there’s more to you than a jersey and a grin.”
“Image maintenance is an art,” I say.
She nods toward my setup. “What are you actually doing?”
I set my palm on the clamped shaft and feel the flex under my fingers.
“Trying to see the thing I feel when I shoot.” I tap the small meter.
“A few cheap sensors taped to the shaft. I load it, the readout moves. I want to turn the way a shot feels into numbers—so the instinct becomes something you can train to, not just hope for. If it works, I can build a trial version for practice drills. If it fails, I wasted a few hours and a roll of tape.”
Her mouth does something I haven’t seen before—half reluctant, half surprised. It’s not a laugh. It’s a preview of one. “You’re measuring stick flex with breadboard sensors.”
“Hey, don’t knock my cutting-edge facility.” I motion to the vise, the cheap components, the disaster of duct tape. “The O’Connor Institute of Making It Up As We Go.”
That gets me the first real one—a quick, caught-off-guard smile that transforms her entire face. There’s a dimple. A fucking dimple I’ve never seen before because she’s never let her guard down long enough to show it.
My hand slips. The weight nearly drops. I catch it at the last second, pulse hammering.
Smooth, Kieran.
When I look back, the smile’s already gone, locked away like it never existed. But I saw it. Proof that underneath all that armor, there’s softness. Warmth. The kind of real that makes every hookup I’ve ever had feel like going through the motions.
And she gave it to me by accident.
My pulse won’t settle. I want that smile again, that unfiltered flash that felt like winning something I didn’t know I was competing for.
Her expression smooths back to neutral. “The lab doesn’t usually host hockey royalty this long.”
I roll the shaft again, feel the carbon load. “Heard you tutor that kid. Even though you scared him, I think he got it.”
“He just needed someone to slow him down.” She slides a paperclip over a neat stack of notes. “Most problems get easier if you can stand still long enough to see what’s actually there.”
Standing still isn’t my talent. On the ice, motion is how I think—reading plays in real time, adjusting angles on instinct. I don’t solve problems step by step. I map them, then move.
I don’t say that. I track her hands instead—firm, precise, smudged with graphite from somebody else’s homework. Before I know it, I’m handing her a clean rag from my toolbox.
“You tutor every night?”
“When people need it. It pays.”
“Why won’t you tutor me, then?” I keep my tone easy, like it’s a reasonable question. “You shut that down in under a second.”
Her head lifts, eyes catching mine. “Because I’m not sure that’s what you actually want.”
My mouth curves. “How so?”
“You walk into a room performing. It’s loud. It’s charming. It’s exhausting.” She hands me the rag back. “And underneath it, there’s something…calculated. I can’t tell if you’re being genuine or if you’re playing at something. I don’t like not knowing the rules. It throws me off.”
The words land clean and hard.
She’s not misreading me. She’s clocking me. The dare made it feel simple: show up, charm her, collect the yes. I never stopped to wonder what that yes would mean to her. I didn’t even question why I thought I deserved it.
For the first time tonight, I don’t have a smart reply ready.
I swallow. “I didn’t mean to make you feel unsafe.”
“You didn’t.” She closes her notebook, neat and final. “I just work better when I understand the variables.”
For a second, the air balances between us, humming with unspoken things. The smell of solder and old coffee. The distant buzz of fluorescents. The space where I should say something smart and don’t.
Then I do the thing I’m best and worst at—I push.
“You want to grab a bite?” The words scrape out of me. “There’s a Thai place on Comm Ave still open. I’m starving.” I clear my throat. “You look hungry too.”
Her fingers rest on the notebook’s edge. She closes it with quiet precision, and I track the movement like an idiot—efficient, careful, graphite still smudged across her knuckles. I want to wipe the marks from her skin, tuck her hair behind her ear, do a thousand things I haven’t earned.
What the hell is wrong with me?
Her gaze lifts to mine, steady as a scalpel. I catch the smallest hitch in her breath. Hope flares—stupid, reckless—right before she cuts it clean.
“No.”
Her favorite word. The one she drops without blinking while my pulse stumbles. It should piss me off. Instead, it lands like a bruise I keep pressing.
“General policy?” I try to joke. My voice tips sideways. “Or hockey-player specific?”
“Neither.” She slides the notebook into her bag. “I don’t want to be seen with you.”
The hit is surgical. No hesitation. No softening.
“Because people will talk?” I manage. My throat tightens.
“Because they will assume.” She pauses, jaw setting. “And because I’m into someone else.”
Everything in my chest checks hard left. My hands flatten on the workstation, knuckles whitening. Something hot and ugly coils in my gut. Not anger. Worse.
Jealousy.
I replay the frames I didn’t want to see: the party—her eyes sliding past my shoulder to find him in the crowd; lecture—the way her shoulders eased when he spoke; group work—the unconscious pencil tap, keeping time with his words.
How did I miss it?
“Theo,” I rasp before I can stop myself.
The name drops between us like a puck on fresh ice. She doesn’t blink.
“None of your business.”
I laugh, hollow even to my own ears. “Right. Totally.” The weight in my palm suddenly feels wrong. “Still, the guy with the glasses. Does he know?”
Her jaw tightens. “You’re making assumptions.”
“I’m good at reading plays,” I say, and I am. Just not this one. “He should know.”
“That’s not how this works.” She drops the freshman’s notes into the lost-and-found bin. “Not that I’d know much about it,” she adds, quick and embarrassed. “But I’ve read about it.”
The admission lands devastating.
I’ve been with girls who knew exactly what they were doing. Girls who looked at me like I was the prize. Easy. Clean. Uncomplicated.
None of them ever made me lose words.
None of them ever smiled like they forgot I was watching.
None of them ever said no this way—like I’m just noise she refuses to tune into.
“Then make him decide,” I say.
Maybe I mean Theo.
Maybe I just mean—consider me.
Her eyes flash. “You do this a lot, don’t you?”
“Do what?”
“Walk in and rearrange everything.”
I brace both hands on the workstation, steel cold under my palms. “Only when it needs rearranging.”
“Or when you need entertainment.” She slings her bag onto her shoulder, movements precise. “It’s late.”
“I’ll walk you to your dorm.”
“No.”
Fuck.
The meter blinks a calm number, indifferent to the wreckage three feet away. I open my mouth. Close it. Whatever I want to say—sorry, try again, don’t look at me like that—doesn’t deserve oxygen.
She pulls on her jacket and turns toward the door.
The smile slips out again.
Quick. Unthinking. That dimple flashing like she forgot—just for a second—that she’s supposed to be careful around me.
It hits harder than the no.
Like something real I didn’t earn.
“Tell him, Wren,” I say, and my voice gives me away.
She stops. “Stop telling me what to do.”
“Right,” I say, hands up. “Right.”
She studies me for a long second, then nods, like she’s solved an equation I’ll never see.
“Goodnight, O’Connor.”
“Kieran,” I say. I don’t know why it matters. I just know I need it. “Use my name when you’re telling me no.”
That same smile ghosts back—smaller now. Contained. Still enough.
“Goodnight, Kieran.”
My name in her mouth hits like a clean shot to open ice—quiet, brutal, perfect.
I don’t move. I just take it.
She slips out. The latch clicks shut.
Final.
I stand there too long, staring at my reflection in the dark glass—a guy in a gray hoodie, used to being the center of the frame, suddenly aware of how wide the edges are.
Theo.
The name circles once.
It shouldn’t matter.
It does.
Not because I’m losing—I’ve done that before.
But because I didn’t think it would cost me.
Isabelle’s dare surfaces like a body in dark water: Make her fall.
It should feel like momentum.
Instead, it tastes cheap.
I sling on my backpack and kill the lights.
Outside, the cold bites hard.
The dare flickers again.
Make her fall.
Yeah.
Still planning on it.
Only now, I’m not sure if I’m doing it to win Isabelle’s game—
—or because the thought of Wren Marin choosing someone else makes me want to put my fist through a wall.