My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Thirty-One

Five Years, Two Months Earlier

The first sign that things have shifted beyond ordinary college fame comes in early spring, when a photo of Mara and Adrian outside a campus coffee shop ends up posted, without her knowledge or consent, to a hockey fan forum with several thousand active members — nothing malicious in the original post, just an excited fan sharing a candid sighting of the team captain, but the comment thread beneath it curdles fast, the way these things sometimes do.

who's the girlfriend, hope she knows what she's signing up for

captain's too good for randoms tbh, hope she's not just here for the clout

someone find out who she is, this team deserves better PR than some rando

Mara sees the thread only because a well-meaning classmate forwards it to her, thinking she'd want to know, and reads it alone in her dorm room with a growing, uncomfortable knot in her stomach, understanding for the first time that being Adrian's girlfriend now means being, to a meaningful number of strangers, a public curiosity rather than a private person.

She doesn't tell him at first. It feels small, manageable, the kind of internet noise that surely dies down on its own. She's wrong about that, though she doesn't know it yet.

It escalates slowly, over the following weeks — a stranger recognizing her outside her dorm and asking, with unsettling specificity, whether "things are still good with Adrian," as though her relationship were a matter of public record rather than her own private life; a girl in one of her classes who mentions, with barely concealed resentment, that "some of us have been fans of Adrian since freshman year, must be nice to just show up and get the guy"; an anonymous account that starts leaving comments on her rarely-used social media, nothing overtly threatening, but persistent enough, personal enough, that Mara starts checking her notifications with a low, constant dread she didn't have a year ago.

She finally tells Adrian in April, sitting on the edge of his bed in his off-campus apartment, showing him the worst of it on her phone with hands that aren't quite steady.

His reaction is immediate and severe — a fury Mara hasn't seen from him before, quiet and controlled but unmistakably real, reading through message after message with a jaw growing tighter by the minute.

"This is unacceptable," he says, finally, handing her phone back. "I'm going to say something. Publicly. Ask people to knock it off."

"I don't think that'll help. It might make it worse, actually — draw more attention to it."

"So I'm just supposed to do nothing while people harass you?"

"I don't know what the answer is. I just know making a public statement about it might not be the answer either." Mara feels tired, suddenly, in a way that has nothing to do with the late hour. "I didn't sign up to be a public person, Adrian. I signed up to date you. I didn't realize those were going to become the same thing."

Something in his face falls, guilt and frustration mixing together. "I'm sorry. I should have prepared you for this better. I've grown up with some version of public attention my whole life, because of hockey, because of my family's name — I forget sometimes that it's not normal, that most people don't have to navigate this."

"It's not your fault."

"It feels like my fault. You're dealing with all of this because you love someone whose life comes with an audience attached." He runs a hand through his hair, visibly working through something difficult. "I don't know how to protect you from it. I've been trying to figure that out since the first message you showed me, and I still don't have a real answer."

They sit together in uneasy silence for a while, Mara leaning into his shoulder, both of them turning the problem over without finding anything close to a solution, and it's in that silence, Mara will understand much later, looking back, that something in Adrian genuinely begins to shift — not toward her, exactly, but toward a fear that will, months later, prove far more consequential than either of them could imagine that night.

The fear crystallizes fully three weeks later, at an away game two states over, when a small group of fans waiting outside the visiting team's bus recognizes Mara from the earlier forum photos and surrounds her, not violently, not even particularly aggressively by any legal definition, but closely enough, insistently enough, asking enough pointed, uncomfortable questions about "what she's really after" and whether she "knows how many girls would kill to be in her position" that Mara ends up genuinely frightened, unable to get clear of the small crowd until a security staffer finally notices and intervenes.

She doesn't tell Adrian right away. She's shaken, more than she wants to admit even to herself, and she spends the bus ride home mostly silent, staring out the window, trying to process something that felt, in the moment, less like enthusiastic fandom and more like something with real edges to it, something that could, under slightly different circumstances, have gone somewhere much worse.

He notices her silence immediately, the way he always does, and it takes barely any pressing at all before the whole story comes out, and Mara watches his face go through several distinct stages — concern, then anger, then something colder and more frightened than she's ever seen from him.

"They surrounded you," he says, voice tight, controlled in a way that Mara recognizes now as effort rather than calm. "Actually surrounded you. Where was security?"

"It happened fast. Security got there eventually."

"Eventually isn't good enough." He's pacing now, agitated in a way she's never witnessed from him off the ice. "This is exactly what I was afraid of. This is exactly the thing I didn't know how to protect you from, and now it's actually happened, and I don't—" He stops, visibly working to steady himself. "I don't know how to keep this from happening again. I don't know how to guarantee it doesn't get worse."

"Adrian, it's okay. I'm okay."

"You're not okay, you're shaking right now." His voice carries real fear underneath the anger, and Mara understands, watching him, that something fundamental has shifted in how he's thinking about all of this — no longer an abstract concern about internet comments, but a concrete, physical fear for her actual safety, sharpened by an incident that could have gone, with only slightly worse luck, somewhere genuinely dangerous.

He holds her for a long time that night, quiet and shaken, and Mara feels, held against his chest, both comforted and, underneath the comfort, a small, growing unease she can't quite name yet — some early, unconscious recognition that this fear, once fully crystallized in him, is capable of driving decisions she hasn't yet seen the shape of.

She doesn't know, that night, exactly how much weight this particular fear is eventually going to carry, or how directly it will factor into a decision he'll make just a few months later — a decision that will feel, to her, like abandonment, but which is already, tonight, quietly taking root in him as something closer to protection, however catastrophically he'll end up executing it.

She just knows, held against him in the dark, that something has changed between them tonight, something neither of them fully understands yet, and that the easy, uncomplicated happiness of the stairwell promise feels, for the first time, very slightly further away than it did before.