My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Ninety-Four

They had met, if you traced it back far enough, over a spilled cup of coffee in the Ashford University athletic building, eighteen months before development camp, before scouting letters, before any of it had a name yet.

Richard liked to tell the story short — I bumped into her in the hallway and she yelled at me — but Talia always corrected him, patient and amused, the way she corrected most of his stories about the two of them. "You didn't bump into me. You were walking backward, looking at your phone, and you walked directly into a table I was standing at, and the coffee I had just poured went all over my shoes, and I did not yell. I said a bad word, quietly, like a civilized person."

"You yelled."

"I said a bad word forcefully."

It had become one of those stories couples keep polishing over time, smoothing its edges until it fits neatly into the shape of how we started, and Richard had told it so many times by now that he sometimes forgot the parts that weren't funny — how she'd been standing at that table because she'd just come from a meeting with her coach about a nagging shoulder injury, how she'd looked, underneath the irritation, genuinely tired in a way that had made him want to apologize twice as hard as the spilled coffee required.

He thought about that now, home for a weekend after development camp, lying on the porch swing at his parents' house with Talia's head on his chest and her development-camp acceptance letter — her own, for the girls' side, arrived the same week as his evaluation results — folded in her jacket pocket where she kept touching it every so often like she wanted to be sure it was real.

"Tell me the version where I yelled," Talia said, apropos of nothing, her voice half-muffled against his shirt.

"You want the exaggerated version?"

"I want the version where I get to be dramatic. I've had a stressful two weeks. Let me have this."

Richard laughed, low, and pulled her a little closer. "Fine. You yelled so loud three people came out of the equipment room to see what happened. You threw the cup at my head — missed, thank god, or I'd have a scar — and you told me, and I quote, that I was going to owe you a coffee for the rest of my natural life."

"Much better story."

"You're still collecting on that debt, for the record. I've bought you probably four hundred coffees since."

"And you'll buy four hundred more," Talia said, tilting her head back to look at him, "because that's the deal. That's what you signed up for when you ran into my table like an idiot."

The acceptance letter mattered more than either of them had let on out loud, not just because it was an honor — though it was, an underage invite to an elite camp was rare for any player, let alone a right winger who'd spent two years being told, gently but consistently, that she was talented but maybe not quite big enough, quite fast enough, quite enough enough for the highest levels — but because it meant, for the first time since they'd started dating, that they weren't going to be living two entirely separate versions of the same dream.

"I used to think I'd have to just — watch," Talia admitted later that evening, sitting across from Richard at the kitchen table where so much of his family's important conversations seemed to happen, a cup of tea going cold between her hands the way Mara's always did when a conversation got serious. "Watch you go do the big things, and cheer from the stands, and be happy for you, and that would be its own kind of good life. I'd made peace with that. I really had."

"You never told me that."

"Because I didn't want you to feel guilty about something that wasn't your fault. You didn't ask to be better positioned than me. You just were, for a long time — bigger program, more scouts through Ashford, a grandfather in the Hall of Fame practically guaranteeing somebody would look twice." She turned the mug slowly on the table. "I'm not saying that to be bitter. I'm saying it because I want you to understand why this letter means as much to me as it does. It's not just an invitation to a camp. It's proof I get to be in this with you, not next to it."

Richard reached across and took her free hand, the gesture as automatic by now as breathing. "You were always in it with me. Even before the letter. You think I don't know that? Every scouted game, you were the reason I could walk back out for the next shift after a bad one. That's not next to it, Talia. That's the whole center of it."

Mara found them still at the table an hour later, when she came down for a glass of water and discovered her grandson and his girlfriend deep in the specific unhurried conversation of two people who had stopped noticing the passage of time.

"Don't mind me," Mara said, filling her glass at the sink, watching them with the quiet, assessing warmth she'd apparently been giving every young couple in this family for going on forty years now. "I just like knowing this kitchen still gets used for the important conversations. It has a good track record for that."

"Is that a hint you want details?" Talia asked, smiling.

"It's an observation that I've had a lot of long talks at this exact table over the years, most of them about things that felt too big to hold at the time and turned out, eventually, to be exactly the right size." Mara leaned against the counter, glass in hand, studying the two of them. "You two have the look of people figuring something out. Good figuring, from what I can see on your faces. Not the other kind."

"We're figuring out how to do the hockey thing together," Richard said. "Not just — alongside each other. Actually together."

"Ah." Mara's expression softened into something private and a little distant, the particular look she got when a young person's words landed somewhere old in her. "Your grandfather and I spent about five years apart doing exactly the opposite of that, doing it separately when we should have been doing it together, and let me tell you — I would trade almost anything to have gotten what you two just found this early. You have no idea what a gift that is. Truly."

"You always say things like that," Richard said, "and it always makes me want to ask more, and you never quite tell the whole story in one sitting."

"That's because the whole story is a whole book, love, and you've already read it." Mara smiled, setting her glass in the sink. "I'll leave you two to your figuring. Don't stay up too late — your father wants to hear about camp again in the morning, and he'll ask better questions if you're not exhausted."

Later, walking Talia out to her car under a sky just beginning to clear after a brief evening rain, Richard stopped her before she opened the door, some instinct telling him the moment deserved a beat of stillness before it passed.

"I don't say this enough," he said. "I get caught up in the scouting stuff, and the camp stuff, and my own head, and I don't say it enough. But none of this means anything if you're not the one standing next to me for it. Not behind me. Not somewhere separate, cheering politely from a distance. Next to me. That's the only version of any of this I actually want."

Talia looked up at him for a long moment, her expression open in a way she didn't often let it be, even with him.

"I want that too," she said. "I've wanted that since the coffee cup, honestly, even before I knew what to call it." She reached up and touched his jaw, brief and warm. "Text me when you get the full camp report from the coaches. Not the summary your dad already told everyone. The real one."

"You'll be the first person I show."

"Good," Talia said, and kissed him quickly before sliding into her car, "because I intend to hold you to that for the rest of your natural life. Consider it interest on the coffee debt."