The Rival Between Us

Chapter Five

The next morning Elena felt marginally human again, well enough to attend morning skate and conduct the two interviews she'd scheduled with rookie defensemen for her feature piece, though she made a point of not looking toward the far end of the ice where Roman ran drills with the kind of ferocious focus that made even his teammates give him a wide berth.

She said nothing about the pharmacy bag. She had turned the mystery over in her mind so many times overnight that she'd nearly convinced herself she'd hallucinated it entirely, some fever dream constructed by a lonely heart that wanted, more than anything, for it to have been him.

But it had been real. The bag sat on the desk in her hotel room, evidence she couldn't quite bring herself to throw away.

She got her answer, unintentionally, at practice that afternoon. She was standing at the edge of the boards with her recorder out, waiting to catch a few players for post-practice quotes, when she overheard Noah Bennett needling Roman about something near the bench, their voices carrying in the mostly empty arena.

"You went to a pharmacy at eleven at night," Noah was saying, not bothering to lower his voice, clearly enjoying himself immensely. "For flu medicine. For a woman who, and I quote, 'chose to go' and doesn't matter to you anymore."

"Shut up, Noah."

"I'm just saying, that's a very committed level of not caring."

"She was sick. It's called basic human decency."

"Sure. And the granola bar? The specific brand? Basic human decency also involves detailed grocery-related memory recall from six years ago?"

Elena's face went hot, and she turned quickly toward the far end of the rink, pretending to be absorbed in her notes, her heart hammering loud enough that she was half convinced the entire arena could hear it. She did not turn around to see whether Roman had noticed her standing close enough to overhear. She did not need to; she could feel the exact moment his attention landed on her, a physical weight settling across the ice between them.

He didn't say anything to her that day. He answered his scheduled press availability with the same clipped professionalism he'd shown at the first press conference, careful to look everywhere in the room except directly at her, though she noticed - she couldn't help but notice - that his eyes moved to her twice, quick and involuntary, like a man checking to make sure something he cared about was still safe.

That evening, on the bus back to the hotel after a light workout session, Elena fell asleep somewhere over the outskirts of the city, exhaustion and the tail end of her fever finally catching up with her. She woke slowly, disoriented, aware first of the low hum of the bus engine and the murmur of teammates talking quietly a few rows back, and second of an unfamiliar weight across her shoulders.

She looked down. A jacket - the team's travel jacket, black with the Titans crest stitched over the heart - had been draped over her while she slept. It still held warmth, which meant it had been placed there recently, which meant someone had noticed her shivering in the overly air-conditioned bus and quietly, without a word, without waking her, done something about it.

She turned, slowly, and found Roman three rows up exactly where he'd been the entire trip, headphones on, eyes fixed on his phone, giving absolutely no indication that he had moved an inch in the last hour.

But his own seat, she noticed, no longer had a jacket draped over the back of it the way it had at the start of the ride.

Elena sat very still, the borrowed jacket warm against her arms, and said nothing. He said nothing. Neither of them acknowledged what had happened, not on the bus, not at the hotel, not the next morning when they passed each other in the lobby and he gave her the same clipped, distant nod he'd been giving her since the press conference, as if the last two days hadn't happened at all.

But Elena kept the jacket. She told herself she meant to return it the next morning, and then the morning after that, and somehow, without ever quite deciding to, she found it hanging in her hotel closet three days later when the team packed up to fly home, folded carefully instead of returned, a small and stubborn piece of evidence that whatever Roman Volkov said out loud, his actions were telling a very different story.

She thought about Maya's words from the couch a few nights earlier. Stop looking at his mouth.

She was starting to suspect the mouth wasn't the problem. The problem was that she had never actually stopped looking at all of him, not for one single day of the last five years, and being back in his orbit was reminding her, with brutal and unwelcome clarity, exactly how much that truth was going to cost her before this season was over.

Later that night, back in her own hotel room, Elena sat cross-legged on the bed and stared at the jacket for a long time before finally hanging it properly in the closet rather than leaving it crumpled on the desk chair. She told herself the care was purely practical - no sense ruining good fabric. She did not examine, too closely, why she'd pressed her face briefly into the collar before doing so, or why the faint, familiar scent of him lingering there had made her chest ache in a way she hadn't expected.

She thought about calling Maya to report the whole strange, wordless exchange, and then decided against it. Some things felt too fragile yet to survive being spoken aloud, even to her closest friend. Better to let it exist quietly for a little longer, unexamined, before the world - or her own relentless journalist's brain - demanded she assign it a meaning.