My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The photo is taken without either of them noticing, which is, Mara will think later, somehow the most unsettling part of the whole thing — that an entire private, unguarded moment could exist in public space for anyone with a long lens and enough patience to capture, without either of them ever registering they were being watched at all.

It happens two days after the bar, outside the arena's back entrance, where players and credentialed press occasionally cross paths in the narrow service alley used for equipment deliveries. Mara is there catching a few final quotes from a Finnish coach when Adrian emerges from a side door, spots her, and crosses over — an entirely ordinary, professional exchange, at least at first, the two of them discussing nothing more remarkable than tomorrow's quarterfinal matchup.

But somewhere in the middle of the conversation, something shifts — Adrian says something that makes her laugh, genuine and unguarded, and reaches out, briefly, to tuck a strand of hair back from her face where the wind has caught it, an old, familiar gesture that neither of them seems to fully register as anything other than automatic, muscle memory from a relationship that ended five years ago but apparently never entirely left either of their bodies.

It's a small moment. Two seconds, maybe three. But it's the kind of moment a photographer with a long lens and a tabloid contract has been waiting for, and by the time Mara gets back to her hotel room that evening, the photo is already circulating.

Callum calls before she's even seen it herself.

"Bennett, what the hell is this," he says, no greeting, and Mara's stomach drops the instant she hears his tone.

"What's what?"

"Check your email. I just forwarded you a link from a tabloid aggregator. You and Cole, outside the arena, looking real cozy for a professional interview subject." A pause, weighted, waiting. "You want to explain that to me before I have to explain it to my editors?"

Mara opens the email with hands that aren't quite steady, and there it is — a grainy but unmistakable photo, timestamped, her laughing, his hand near her face, the whole image cropped and captioned by whoever's running the tabloid site with a headline that makes her stomach turn: HOCKEY CAPTAIN'S MYSTERY WOMAN — OLD FLAME REKINDLED?

"It's not what it looks like," she says, hearing the inadequacy of the sentence even as she says it.

"It looks like a photo of you two being extremely comfortable with each other. What am I supposed to think it actually is?"

Mara closes her eyes, weighing exactly how much of the truth she's willing to give her editor over the phone at nine o'clock at night. "We knew each other. In college. Before either of our careers. It's — complicated. But it has nothing to do with my coverage. I've been fair, Callum. You've read everything I've filed."

"I have read everything you've filed, and it's been good, careful work." His voice softens slightly, though the underlying concern doesn't fully lift. "But Bennett, this is exactly the kind of thing that gets a reporter pulled from a story, whether it's fair or not. Perception matters as much as reality in this business, you know that. If this blows up, if other outlets start digging into whatever 'complicated' means, I'm going to have a real problem defending your continued coverage of this team."

"Nothing's going to blow up. It's one photo. It'll be forgotten in a day."

"I hope you're right." He doesn't sound convinced. "Do me a favor. Keep your distance from Cole for a few days. Professional distance, I mean. Just until this cools down. I don't want to be having a bigger version of this conversation next week."

Mara agrees, though the promise sits heavy and uncomfortable the moment she makes it, and hangs up feeling the specific, cold dread of a private world suddenly, uncontrollably becoming public property.

Adrian calls twenty minutes later, and Mara can hear, in the careful tightness of his voice, that he's already seen the photo too.

"I'm sorry," he says, before she can say anything at all. "I know this is going to complicate your job. I should have been more careful. In public, I mean. It was a stupid, small gesture and I didn't even think about it."

"It's not your fault."

"It's partly my fault. I forget, sometimes, that a lot of people are watching all the time now, in a way that wasn't true in college. I got careless." He sounds genuinely rattled, more than Mara's heard from him about anything media-related all tournament. "My team's PR staff already called. They want to know if there's a statement they should be preparing."

"What did you tell them?"

"That there's nothing to prepare a statement about. That we're old friends, and the photo caught an innocent moment out of context." A pause, heavy with everything underneath it. "It felt like a lie, saying it. It felt like a small, cowardly lie, and I hated saying it, but I didn't know what else to say."

Mara understands the impulse completely — has spent the last twenty minutes constructing nearly identical, technically-true-but-fundamentally-incomplete explanations for her own editor — and the shared discomfort of it, oddly, makes her feel closer to him rather than further away.

"My editor wants me to keep professional distance from you for a few days," she says, quiet. "Until this cools down."

"That's probably smart."

"It doesn't feel smart. It feels like being asked to go back to pretending none of the last two weeks happened."

"I know." His voice carries real regret. "I don't want that either. But maybe — maybe a few days of distance isn't the worst thing. Gives this story somewhere to go quiet. Gives us both a minute to think, without a camera somewhere trying to catch the next thing to speculate about."

Mara doesn't love the suggestion, but she can't fully argue with the logic of it either, and after a long moment, she agrees, reluctantly, the promise settling heavy in her chest alongside the one she made to Callum twenty minutes earlier.

"For what it's worth," Adrian says, before they hang up, "I'm not sorry about the moment itself. Just sorry it got photographed. I liked making you laugh. I've missed being the reason you laugh like that."

Mara doesn't have an answer for that steady enough to trust her own voice with, and after a moment, they say goodnight, and she sits alone in her hotel room afterward, staring at a tabloid headline that has turned two seconds of genuine, unguarded happiness into public speculation, feeling the particular grief of watching something private become something else entirely — something owned, now, by strangers with cameras and captions, rather than just by the two people who actually lived it.

She doesn't sleep well that night. Somewhere across the city, she suspects, neither does he.