My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Twenty-Three

Five Years, Six Months Earlier

The stairwell in Mara's dorm building is nothing special — cinderblock walls painted a flat institutional beige, a single flickering fluorescent light on the third-floor landing that maintenance has been promising to fix since September, a faint echo that turns every footstep into something louder than it actually is. It is not, by any reasonable measure, a romantic location. Mara will think about that often, in the years to come — how the setting of the most important moment of her entire life was, in every practical sense, completely unremarkable.

It's early December, three days before finals, and they're taking the stairs two at a time because the elevator's been broken for a week and neither of them can be bothered to wait for it, both of them laughing about something that will, within a year, stop mattering enough for either of them to remember what it was.

Adrian catches her hand on the third-floor landing, pulling her to a stop mid-laugh, and something in his expression shifts, suddenly serious in a way that makes Mara's stomach do a small, anticipatory flip.

"What," she says, still catching her breath from the stairs.

"Nothing. I just—" He looks at her for a long moment, something enormous and a little nervous moving behind his eyes. "I need to say something, and I've been trying to find the right moment for about two weeks, and I don't think there's ever going to be a right moment, so I'm just going to say it here."

"Adrian, you're scaring me a little."

"Don't be scared. It's not bad." He laughs, a little breathless, a little disbelieving of his own nerves. "God, I had a whole plan. I was going to take you somewhere nice. Somewhere that wasn't a stairwell that smells like industrial cleaner. But we're here, and I don't think I can wait for the right moment anymore, so."

He reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a small velvet box, and Mara feels her whole chest go tight and warm and terrified all at once.

"It's not — I know we're twenty-one," he says quickly, watching her face. "I know this isn't an engagement ring, not really, not the official kind. I'm not asking you to marry me tomorrow. I'm asking you to know, for certain, the way I know it, that this is real. That whatever happens after graduation — hockey, my parents' plans, wherever the world tries to pull either of us — I want you in it. I want forever. I know that's a big word for two people who still eat cereal for dinner most nights. But I mean it completely."

He opens the box. The ring inside is simple, small, exactly the kind of thing a college senior on a hockey scholarship could afford without his parents noticing the withdrawal, and it is, in that moment, standing on a cinderblock landing under a flickering fluorescent light, the single most beautiful thing Mara has ever seen.

"I promise you forever, Mara," he says, his voice steady despite the nerves still evident in his hands. "Whatever happens — hockey, my parents, the whole world — forever."

Mara doesn't answer right away, too full of feeling to trust her own voice, and Adrian's face flickers with a moment of uncertainty before she finally, finally finds the words.

"Yes," she says, and it comes out half-laugh, half-sob, entirely overwhelmed. "Yes, obviously yes, ask me a real question next time and see how fast I say yes."

He laughs too, relief and joy breaking across his face all at once, and slides the ring onto her finger with hands that are shaking slightly, and then he's kissing her, and she's laughing against his mouth, and somewhere below them a door slams and someone's music is playing too loud through a dorm room wall, and none of it matters at all. It is, Mara will think later, in the years when she lets herself think about it, the single happiest moment of her entire life — total, complete, and entirely unaware of everything still waiting on the other side of it.

"I love you," she says, when they finally break apart, forehead against his, both of them a little breathless. "I love you so much it terrifies me sometimes."

"Good," he says. "It should. Love that doesn't terrify you a little isn't trying hard enough."

"That's very profound for a guy who just proposed on a stairwell that smells like bleach."

"I contain multitudes." He kisses her again, softer this time, lingering. "I mean it, Mara. Whatever comes. Hockey. My parents. Any of it. I promise you this is real."

She believes him completely. She has no reason not to — no evidence yet of exactly how much pressure two people can withstand before something breaks, no understanding yet of what it actually costs a person to keep a promise made at twenty-one when the entire architecture of their family, their career, their whole constructed life, is quietly, relentlessly working against it.

She just knows, standing on a stairwell landing with a ring on her finger and the whole rest of their lives apparently ahead of them, that she has never been happier, and never will be again — not because happiness like this doesn't return, though it will take her years to fully believe that, but because this particular happiness, this specific, total certainty, belongs entirely to a version of herself who doesn't yet know what's coming.

They don't tell anyone right away — Adrian's idea, careful and deliberate in a way Mara doesn't think much about at the time. "Let's just have this be ours for a little while," he says, the next morning, turning the ring gently on her finger where it sits, small and simple and entirely hers. "Before the whole world gets opinions about it."

She agrees, not understanding yet exactly what he means by the whole world, not understanding yet the specific weight of opinions his family in particular is capable of generating. She just knows she likes the idea of a secret, of something entirely theirs, unwitnessed and unjudged, existing in the private world of two people who love each other completely.

They have six weeks like that. Six weeks of a secret ring and stolen moments and a happiness so complete it feels, in retrospect, almost dangerous — the kind of joy that seems, looking back, like it was always living on borrowed time, though neither of them could have known that then, walking hand in hand across a snow-covered campus with an entire unwritten future stretched out ahead of them.

Six weeks, and then a text message arrives on Mara's phone, nine words long, and the whole architecture of that future collapses at once, leaving nothing behind but a ring at the bottom of a drawer and a promise that took five years, and a great deal of pain, to even begin understanding the real shape of.

But that's still six weeks away, that morning on the stairwell landing, ring catching the flickering fluorescent light, both of them laughing, neither of them yet aware of anything except exactly how happy they are.

Some mornings you don't know, until years later, that you were living inside the last good chapter of something. Mara wouldn't understand that about this one for a very long time.