The Rival Between Us

The press room at Titans Arena smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet, and Elena Hart had been sitting in the third row for exactly eleven minutes, memorizing the exits, before she let herself admit the truth: she did not want to be here. She wanted, more than anything, to be back at her cramped desk at Sportsline Weekly, buried under injury reports and salary cap analysis, anonymous and safe. Instead she was here, notebook open on her knee, a lanyard with her name printed in block letters hanging against her chest like a target. ELENA HART. CREDENTIALED PRESS. As if the credential was the only thing that mattered about her walking back into this building. Around her, the room filled with the low murmur of reporters checking recorders, adjusting cameras, trading gossip about last night's game. Someone laughed too loudly near the back. Elena kept her eyes on her notebook, on the neat blue ink of questions she'd prepared the night before, questions that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with the fact that her hands wouldn't stop being cold. She had told herself, driving to the arena that morning, that five years was a long time. That people changed. That the boy who used to trace lazy circles on her shoulder while they watched old movies on his beat-up couch was not the same man who was about to walk through that door as the captain of a championship contender. She had told herself a lot of things. She believed almost none of them. The side door opened, and the room's energy shifted the way a room does when the person everyone came for finally arrives. Elena didn't look up right away. She counted her own heartbeat instead — one, two, three — and then, because she was a professional, because she had a job to do, she lifted her head. Roman Volkov had always been big. That hadn't changed. But the boy she remembered had carried his size like something he was still growing into, all elbows and unfinished angles. This man wore it like armor. He'd cut his hair shorter. There was a thin white scar above his left eyebrow that hadn't been there before, and his jaw had hardened into something that made the team photographers' jobs very easy and made Elena's chest ache in a way she resented completely. He sat down at the table at the front of the room, adjusted the microphone with two fingers, and let his gaze move over the assembled press with the practiced indifference of a man who had done this a hundred times. Then his eyes found hers. The room didn't stop. The world didn't stop. But something in Elena's ribcage did, some small mechanism that had apparently been waiting five years for this exact moment to seize. Roman's expression didn't change. Not a flicker. Not a twitch of the jaw. He looked at her the way he might look at an empty seat, and then his gaze moved on, sweeping across the rest of the room as if she were no different from anyone else with a notebook and a lanyard. It should not have hurt. She had expected worse — anger, maybe, or the particular cruelty of a man who felt betrayed. She had not expected nothing. Nothing was so much worse than anger. Anger meant he still felt something. Nothing meant he had successfully erased her, and some i***t part of Elena, the part that had never quite grown out of loving him, felt that erasure like a physical wound. The team's PR director began the press conference with the usual pleasantries — injury updates, a nod to last night's overtime win, a joke about the weather that got the obligatory laugh. Elena barely heard any of it. She was watching Roman's hands where they rested on the table, the same hands that used to hold hers walking down Queen Street at two in the morning, now folded and still and belonging to a stranger. "Questions," the PR director said, and the room came alive with raised hands. Elena raised hers. She told herself it didn't matter that her fingers trembled slightly as she did. The PR director scanned the room and, whether by cruel coincidence or some administrative oversight that hadn't flagged her name, called on her. "Elena Hart, Sportsline Weekly." She stood, because that was the protocol, because she had done this a thousand times with a thousand other athletes who had never once made her hands shake. "Roman, last season you talked about wanting to prove the team could win without relying so heavily on your line in the third period. How has that philosophy evolved heading into this postseason?" It was a good question. A fair question. A question that had nothing to do with anything except hockey, exactly the kind of professional distance she had promised her editor she could maintain. Roman looked at her for a long moment. Long enough that a ripple of curiosity moved through the room, other reporters glancing between them, sensing something without being able to name it. "Next question," he said. He didn't answer. He didn't even pretend to consider it. He simply moved his gaze past her to a reporter three rows back, as if she had not spoken at all, as if the words had dissolved in the air before they reached him. Elena sat down. Her face was burning, and she was aware — acutely, humiliatingly aware — of every eye that had turned toward her, trying to piece together the story beneath the moment. She kept her chin level and her pen moving across her notebook, writing nothing, writing he dismissed me on purpose, writing this is going to be a very long season. Beside her, a reporter from a rival outlet leaned over and murmured, "What was that about?" "Nothing," Elena said. "Old news, apparently." But it wasn't nothing, and she suspected, watching Roman answer the next three questions with the easy, practiced charm he'd apparently learned to switch on and off like a stage light, that both of them knew exactly how much of a lie that was. When the press conference ended, she gathered her things quickly, hoping to slip out before the crowd bottlenecked at the door. She didn't make it. Roman rose from the table at the same moment, and for one unbearable second their eyes met again across the room, over the heads of reporters packing up equipment and photographers reviewing shots on tiny screens. This time something did flicker across his face. It was there and gone so fast she might have imagined it — not warmth, not softness, but something sharper. Recognition, maybe. Or the particular fury of a man forced to remember something he'd worked very hard to forget. Then he turned and walked out through the side door without a word, and Elena stood there in the emptying press room, notebook clutched to her chest, wondering how she was possibly going to survive an entire championship run standing this close to a man who had once been the center of her whole world and now couldn't be bothered to answer her question. She thought about calling her editor and begging for a different assignment. She had, in fact, already tried that twice. You're the best sports journalist on staff who has genuine insider access to that locker room, her editor had said, not unkindly, but with the immovable logic of someone who had a budget to protect and a rival publication breathing down his neck. I'm not pulling you off the biggest story of the year because of some ancient history. Ancient history. That was one way to describe it. Elena walked out of the arena into the gray Toronto afternoon and did not let herself cry until she was three blocks away, safely alone, the wind off the lake cold enough to explain the redness in her eyes to anyone who might ask.