My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Twenty-Six

Adrian reads the morning coverage of last night's loss with the specific, low-grade dread of a man watching people misunderstand something about him and having no way to correct it without making everything worse.

Cole, typically among the tournament's most consistent performers, struggled to find his usual rhythm tonight. He reads Mara's line three times, appreciating, even through the discomfort, exactly how careful she'd been with it — fair, professional, giving nothing away. Other outlets haven't been quite so restrained. A Canadian broadcast segment he catches on the team bus's overhead screen speculates openly about "mounting tournament fatigue," a phrase two different panelists repeat with the confident authority of people who have never once had to actually explain what's really happening inside someone else's head.

He lets them believe it. It's easier than the alternative, and he's had five years of practice letting people believe convenient, incomplete versions of his own story rather than correcting them with anything closer to true.

The guilt of it sits heavy in his chest anyway, all through morning practice, all through a systems meeting where the coaching staff runs through last night's tactical breakdowns with careful, diplomatic language that avoids assigning individual blame even though everyone in the room knows exactly whose uncharacteristic mistakes cost them the game. His teammates are kind about it, the way good teammates are — Cross claps him on the shoulder pad on the way out of the meeting, says something easy about bouncing back, no real weight behind it — and Adrian accepts the kindness with a professional gratitude that feels, underneath, like one more layer of dishonesty stacked on top of everything else he's been carrying.

He thinks about what actually happened last night, replaying it in the privacy of his own head the way he can't replay it anywhere else. Not fatigue. Not the grind of the tournament schedule, whatever the panelists want to believe. He'd been standing at the blue line in the second period, mid-shift, and had caught sight of Mara in the press box out of the corner of his eye — an accident, nothing deliberate, just a reflexive glance toward where he'd apparently, without fully realizing it, been keeping track of her location all game — and something about the sight of her, notebook in hand, watching him with an expression he couldn't quite read from that distance, had knocked something loose in his concentration that took the rest of the period to fully recover from.

He can't tell anyone that. He can't even fully admit it to himself without the admission carrying implications he isn't sure he's ready to face — that whatever has been building over the last two weeks has apparently gotten large enough to affect his actual performance on the ice, the one place in his entire life that's always, reliably, remained untouched by everything else falling apart around it.

He doesn't like what that implies. He doesn't like it at all, walking off the practice ice that afternoon, and he still doesn't like it eight hours later, unable to sleep, when he finds himself, for reasons he doesn't examine too closely, taking the elevator down to the hotel bar at nearly midnight.

Mara is already there when he arrives, alone at a corner table with a glass of wine she's barely touched, laptop closed in front of her, staring at nothing in particular with an expression that suggests she's been sitting with her own thoughts for a while.

She looks up when he approaches, surprise crossing her face, quickly followed by something more complicated.

"Can't sleep either?" he says, gesturing to the empty chair across from her.

"Something like that." She nods toward the seat, an invitation, and he takes it, feeling something in his chest ease slightly at the simple fact of her not turning him away.

A server appears; he orders a beer he doesn't particularly want, mostly for something to do with his hands, and for a moment they sit in a silence that isn't quite comfortable but isn't quite strained either, something in between, two people who have spent two weeks circling closer and closer to a conversation neither of them has fully had yet.

"I'm sorry about last night," he says, finally. "The game. I know you had to write about it."

"You don't owe me an apology for a bad game."

"I owe you an apology for the reason it was bad." He says it before he's fully decided to, the words arriving faster than his usual careful filtering allows, and watches her go very still across the table. "It wasn't fatigue. Whatever the panelists are saying. I saw you in the press box, second period, and I lost my whole rhythm for about ten minutes trying not to think about everything I haven't said to you yet."

Mara's breath catches, audible even over the bar's low ambient noise. "You can't tell me things like that."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know what to do with them." Her voice is unsteady, more honest than her usual professional composure allows. "Because every time you say something like that, I go back to my room and lie awake trying to figure out if it means what I want it to mean, or if I'm just hearing what I've spent five years wanting to hear."

"What do you want it to mean?"

The question hangs between them, heavier than the bar's dim lighting and quiet late-night atmosphere should be able to support, and Mara looks at him for a long moment, something raw and unguarded moving behind her eyes that Adrian hasn't seen from her since the very first day, before either of them had fully rebuilt their careful public composure.

"I want it to mean you're finally going to tell me the truth," she says, quiet. "All of it. Not fragments in corridors. Not almost-conversations that get interrupted. The actual truth, Adrian. About why you left. About what you were so afraid of that you decided silence was better than an explanation."

He's quiet for a long moment, turning his beer glass slowly on the table, and Mara watches something war behind his expression — the careful, practiced deflection he's used for five years pulling against something else, something that looks, for the first time, like it might actually be losing.

"I will," he says, finally, quiet and certain in a way that's different from every previous version of this same promise. "I don't know exactly when. But I will. I'm tired of the fragments too, Mara. I'm tired of watching myself hurt you in smaller ways because I'm too much of a coward to just say the whole thing at once."

"You're not a coward."

"I left you a nine-word text message and five years of silence. I think the evidence suggests otherwise." He says it without self-pity, just plain, hard fact, and Mara feels something in her chest c***k at the honesty of it, more honesty than she's gotten from him in the entire two weeks combined.

They talk for another hour after that, careful and unguarded in equal measure, drifting through easier territory again — his rookie season struggles, her early years breaking into journalism, small true things that neither of them examines too closely for deeper meaning, both of them apparently, tacitly, agreeing to let the conversation breathe rather than pushing it toward the enormous unresolved thing sitting underneath all of it.

It's easy, dangerously so, the same effortless rhythm from the bus ride, deepened now by something rawer and more honest underneath it, and by the time they finally notice how late it's gotten, both of them are aware, without saying so, of exactly how close they've come to something neither is fully prepared for yet.

"I should go," Mara says, first, standing, gathering her things with hands that aren't entirely steady.

"Yeah." Adrian stands too, close enough that for a moment neither of them moves, something charged and unresolved hanging in the narrow space between them. "Mara—"

"Don't," she says, quiet, not unkind, just honest. "Not tonight. I don't think either of us is ready for whatever comes after tonight."

He nods, understanding, though something in his face suggests the restraint costs him more than he lets on. "Goodnight, Mara."

"Goodnight."

They part in the elevator lobby, taking separate elevators to separate floors, both of them retreating hard and fast from something that had, for one unguarded hour, felt dangerously, wonderfully close to being real.