First published 2026
Hattie Cannon walks into summer hockey camp already certain about one thing: Colin Jettson cannot stand her. He has never gone out of his way to correct that impression. For the whole season, that distance worked fine. Now they are stuck in the same hotel, their college teams in the next rooms over, and polite silence is no longer an option. Keeping her players focused is Hattie's first job. Keeping things civil with Colin runs a close second. He is sharp, competitive, and harder to read than she expected. She starts to wonder whether the hostility she always sensed from him was something else entirely. Colin knows the truth. He let her believe the worst because the alternative, letting her see how he actually feels, felt riskier than any game. A week of shared hallways and late-night rink sessions makes that position harder to defend. Rebecca Jenshak's "Summer Thaw" is a short story in the "Summer Lovin'" collection, a group of brief summer romances written to be read in a single sitting. Hattie and Colin are the kind of rivals who argue in shorthand and skate like they have something to prove. What they need is to stop following everyone else's rules and figure out their own.
Genres: short-stories, romance, contemporary, contemporary-romance, sports-romance, college-romance
Vibes: competitive, intimate, romantic, tension-filled, witty
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, forced-proximity, misunderstanding, rivals, slow-burn
Setting: summer hockey camp, hotel, ice rink
Period: summer
49 pages · Kindle Edition · Amazon Original Stories