My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter One

The plane touches down forty minutes late, and Mara Bennett is grateful for every one of those minutes, because it means forty fewer minutes she has to spend in this city before she has to be a professional about it.

Prague in early September is overcast in a way that doesn't commit to rain, the sky pressing low over the tarmac like it's deciding something. Mara pulls her carry-on down from the overhead bin, slings her laptop bag across her body, and follows the slow shuffle of passengers off the jet bridge, already composing the first line of tomorrow's piece in her head out of pure defensive habit — anything to keep her mind from doing what it wants to do, which is count backward. Five years. Five years, one month, and, if she's being exact about it, eleven days.

She isn't being exact about it. She stopped letting herself do that math around year three.

Customs takes longer than it should. The agent flips through her passport with the unhurried thoroughness of someone who has never once in his career felt time pressure, and Mara stands very still and thinks about nothing, which is a skill she has spent five years perfecting to a professional standard. By the time she clears the gate and finds the arrivals hall, half the tournament press corps is already there ahead of her — she recognizes two broadcast anchors from the last World Cup cycle, a print reporter from a Toronto paper she's traded emails with but never met, a knot of cameramen arguing cheerfully in what she thinks is Finnish over whose equipment case is whose.

The credentialing table is a folding card table with a laminated sign taped to the front that says MEDIA in four languages, staffed by two volunteers in matching red polos who look thrilled to be within shouting distance of anyone who might, at some point this week, touch an actual athlete. Mara gives her outlet name and waits while the taller of the two volunteers sorts through a shoebox of envelopes with the focused seriousness of a surgeon.

"Bennett," the volunteer says, finding it. "Here you are."

The envelope has her name misspelled — Mara Bennet, one T short — which feels almost funny, a small clerical mercy, like the universe trying to hand her a version of this trip that isn't quite hers. She corrects it, gets a new lanyard printed while she waits, and does not look at the credential packet's roster insert — a courtesy sheet with headshots and jersey numbers for every team in the tournament, stapled together by federation — until she's alone in the elevator up to her hotel floor with nothing left to distract her.

Even then, she only lets herself look for three seconds.

Adrian Cole. Forward. Captain. United States. The photo is a press headshot, professionally lit, absolutely nothing like the Adrian she used to know, except for the eyes. Whoever printed this roster sheet had no idea they were reproducing, in miniature, on cheap glossy paper, the exact look he used to give her across a crowded dining hall when he wanted her to know he'd rather be anywhere she was. It's a strange thing, seeing five years of a person's life compressed into one four-by-six photograph — the jaw a little sharper, something more settled and more guarded in the set of his mouth, a captaincy patch stitched onto a collar she's never seen on him before. He looks like a man built for exactly the kind of tournament he's about to play in. He looks nothing like the boy who once fell asleep in a library carrel with her notes for a Renaissance lit final spread across his chest, and he looks, infuriatingly, exactly like him too.

The elevator dings. Mara turns the roster sheet face-down in her folder like she's tucking in a child who won't stop looking at her, and steps out into a hallway that smells like carpet cleaner and someone else's room service.

Her room is standard tournament-hotel neutral — a narrow bed, a desk barely wide enough for her laptop, a window that looks out over red-tiled rooftops toward a river she can't quite place from this angle. It is, she thinks, setting her bag down, a perfectly nice room in a perfectly nice city that she is going to spend the next several weeks experiencing almost entirely through the inside of arenas and hotel lobbies, the way journalists on assignment experience most of the world — glancingly, professionally, always half a step removed from the thing itself.

She sits on the edge of the bed and takes out her phone. Three missed messages from her editor, Callum, all variations on the same theme — landed yet? get me something on Cole for the preview piece, editors upstairs are asking — and one from Selene, sent four hours ago, before Mara's flight had even left the ground: Thinking of you today. Not because you need me to. Just because I am. Call when you land, no matter the hour.

Mara reads it twice before she can make herself put the phone down.

She unpacks with the particular efficiency of someone who has done this so many times the motions no longer require thought — laptop on the desk, charger threaded behind it, blazer hung so it won't wrinkle before tomorrow, the small tin of mints she keeps for exactly this kind of trip placed by the door so she never leaves a hotel room without checking her breath and her face in the mirror by the coat hooks, a habit some producer drilled into her during her first year on television segments and which has never quite left her.

The last thing she unpacks is the folder Callum's research assistant put together — three days of prep condensed into forty pages: rosters, stats, injury histories, quotes from teammates about Adrian being "quiet, focused, all business," which is either the least interesting description of a person Mara has ever read or the most accurate one anyone besides her has ever managed, depending on how you look at it.

She flips past all of it to the one page she printed at home and told herself she wasn't going to bring.

It's not a photo. It's a printout of an old Ashford Courier-Journal archive article — the college paper, not even the professional one — dated six years ago. BENNETT'S COLUMN: HOME ICE. A photo of her at twenty-one, hair shorter, standing rinkside with a notepad, looking at something off camera with an expression she doesn't fully recognize anymore. She'd covered the men's hockey beat for the student paper her junior and senior years. It's how she met him. It's the last piece of paper evidence she has that there was ever a time when watching Adrian Cole play hockey made her feel anything other than professionally obligated to.

She doesn't know why she brought it. She tells herself, standing in a hotel room in Prague with the shades still up and the gray light doing nothing for the room's color palette, that it's for the piece — that somewhere in that old byline is the kind of origin-story angle Callum keeps circling, a full-circle narrative, the sort of thing editors love. That's the lie she's decided to live inside for the next however-many weeks this assignment takes.

She puts the article back in the folder and closes it.

Her phone buzzes again. Callum, a fourth time: Preview piece due Thursday. Need the Cole angle. You're the only one on staff who can get him to actually say something.

She types back, deletes it, types again. Working on it. Will have something by Wednesday. She doesn't say what "something" means. She's not entirely sure herself.

She stands at the window for a while, watching the light change over the rooftops, watching a tram cross a bridge somewhere in the middle distance, and lets herself think, for exactly as long as she's going to allow it tonight, about the fact that somewhere in this same city — possibly this same hotel, if the federation booked press and Team USA under the same roof, which she strongly suspects they did — Adrian Cole is doing whatever a national team captain does the night before training camp officially opens. Reviewing systems. Icing something. Sleeping, probably, if he has any sense, which he always did, even at twenty, even when she used to tease him about being the only college kid she knew with a consistent bedtime.

She wonders, briefly and against her own better judgment, whether he saw the credential list too. Whether her name jumped out at him from a roster of press the way his jumped out at her from a roster of athletes. Whether it cost him anything at all, or whether five years and an ocean's worth of practice at being unreadable have made that kind of question obsolete before she even finishes asking it.

She doesn't call Selene right away, even though she promised she would. She sits with the not-knowing a little longer first, the way you press on a bruise just to confirm it's still there, and then, finally, she picks up the phone.