The Rival Between Us

Chapter Four

The team's first road trip of the playoffs took them to Montreal, and Elena spent the four-hour bus ride from the airport reminding herself, with the discipline of a woman gritting her teeth through a marathon, that she was a professional and this was a job and Roman Volkov's proximity three rows ahead of her on the team bus meant absolutely nothing.

It meant something.

She could see the back of his head from where she sat, the particular way he tilted it when Noah said something that made him almost-but-not-quite smile, the economy of his movements when he reached for his water bottle or adjusted his headphones. Five years apart and her body still recognized him instantly, some ancient animal part of her brain lighting up at his silhouette the way it might light up at fire, or thunder, or anything else worth paying careful attention to.

She buried herself in her laptop instead, drafting the opening of her first real feature - a piece about the team's chemistry heading into the postseason, careful and neutral and entirely professional, the kind of article that wouldn't raise a single eyebrow at the newsroom. She was three paragraphs in when Adrian Cross, the rival journalist from The Athletic North, dropped into the empty seat beside her with the easy confidence of a man who had never once doubted his own charm.

"Hart," he said. "How's the exclusive treatment going? I saw the press conference clip. Very dramatic. I give it a nine out of ten for tension, minus a point because nobody actually said anything interesting."

"Go away, Adrian."

"That's not very collegial of you. We're colleagues on this road trip, sharing a bus, sharing a press box, possibly sharing a hotel bar later if you're feeling generous."

Elena closed her laptop halfway, giving him a flat look. Adrian was, objectively, handsome - dark hair, easy smile, the kind of charm that had clearly worked on plenty of sources and probably plenty of women. He was also relentless, and under different circumstances she might have found his persistence more flattering than exhausting.

"I'm working," she said.

"On a story about team chemistry, judging by the three paragraphs I glimpsed over your shoulder, which, for the record, is a fairly dry angle when the actual story is sitting three rows up wearing very expensive headphones and radiating hostility toward you specifically." Adrian's eyes glinted with the particular delight of a journalist who smelled a better story. "Care to comment on that, off the record?"

"No."

"Come on, Hart. Everyone on this bus is dying to know the history there. I did a little digging. You two dated, what, five, six years ago? Before he was captain, before any of this. What happened?"

Elena felt her jaw tighten. "That's not a story you're writing, Adrian."

"I didn't say I was writing it. I said I was curious." He held up his hands in mock surrender, though the grin didn't fade. "Professional curiosity. Purely professional."

"Everything about you is purely professional, is it?"

"Mostly." His grin widened. "Not entirely."

She rolled her eyes and reopened her laptop, effectively ending the conversation, and Adrian, to his credit, took the hint and wandered back toward his own seat after one last comment about buying her a drink at the hotel bar later, which she ignored entirely. But she was aware - she couldn't help but be aware - that three rows up, Roman had gone very still during the entire exchange, his headphones still on, his eyes fixed determinedly on the window, his jaw set in a way that suggested he had heard every word despite the music presumably playing in his ears.

She told herself it didn't mean anything. She told herself a lot of things these days.

The hotel in Montreal was standard playoff accommodations - clean, corporate, forgettable - and Elena had barely gotten her key card to work before she felt the first wave of the flu that had apparently decided her body's stress levels made an excellent breeding ground for illness. By the time she'd unpacked her bag, her head was pounding and her throat felt like she'd swallowed sandpaper.

She skipped the team dinner. She skipped the hotel bar, much to Adrian's presumed disappointment. She lay in her hotel bed with a bad in-room movie playing quietly in the background and did not, under any circumstances, think about the fact that Roman was probably two floors up, laughing with his teammates, having successfully purged her from his life five years ago and never looking back.

She fell asleep around ten, woke up disoriented and feverish around midnight, and dragged herself to the door when she heard a soft knock, expecting hotel staff or possibly Adrian with an ill-timed nightcap offer.

The hallway was empty.

On the floor outside her door sat a small paper bag from a pharmacy - flu medicine, a bottle of water, a packet of electrolyte powder, and a granola bar, the exact brand she used to eat obsessively during finals week five years ago, the brand she hadn't thought about in years and would have sworn nobody currently in her life had any memory of.

There was no note. There didn't need to be.

Elena stood in the doorway for a long moment, the pharmacy bag clutched to her chest, her fever-addled brain trying and failing to process what this meant, what it could possibly mean, coming from a man who couldn't be bothered to answer her question in front of thirty reporters two days ago.

She didn't see him in the hallway. She didn't hear a door close nearby. But when she finally shuffled back to bed, medicine dissolving the sandpaper feeling in her throat, she found herself staring at the ceiling with a feeling she hadn't let herself feel in five years - the dangerous, destabilizing hope that maybe, underneath everything, some part of Roman Volkov still remembered how to take care of her.

She told herself it meant nothing.

She did not, for one single second, believe herself