My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Two

Selene picks up on the second ring, the way she always does, no matter what time zone or what hour, which is a fact about their friendship Mara has stopped being surprised by and never stopped being grateful for.

"Tell me you landed," Selene says, by way of hello, her voice coming through with the particular clarity of someone walking somewhere — Mara can hear the click of heels on pavement, a car horn somewhere distant, the ordinary noise of a city that isn't this one.

"Landed. Room secured. Credential acquired, misspelled, corrected." Mara sits on the edge of the hotel bed and finally, finally lets her shoulders drop out of the posture she's been holding since the jet bridge. "How's Chicago?"

"Chicago's Chicago. I have a board meeting in the morning that I would trade for literally anything, including your assignment, and you know how I feel about hockey." A pause, the click of heels stopping. "How are you? Actually. Not press-release you."

Mara looks at the closed folder on the desk, the roster sheet tucked face-down inside it like something she's trying not to wake up. "I'm fine."

"Mara."

"I'm fine, Selene. I've done my job for five years. I've interviewed guys who lost their whole season on camera and didn't fall apart. I can do a press conference."

"I didn't ask if you could do a press conference," Selene says, gently, in the voice she's had since the very first year Mara knew her — a voice built, Mara has always suspected, out of years of learning exactly how much pressure a person can take before they c***k, and calibrating everything she says accordingly. It is the single kindest quality Mara has ever encountered in another human being, and she has been on the receiving end of it since she was nineteen years old and had absolutely nothing left. "I asked how you are."

Mara closes her eyes. Somewhere below her window, a tram bell rings twice, unhurried, foreign, grounding.

"I saw his photo on the roster sheet," she says finally. "Before I'd even gotten to my room. Just — there. In an envelope. Like it was nothing."

"Okay."

"I haven't seen him in five years, Selene. Five years, and the last thing he ever said to me in person was in a stairwell, and the last thing he ever said to me at all was a text message I still — " She stops herself. She's not going to finish that sentence. She never finishes that sentence, not even with Selene, not even now, six years and a hospital bed and an entire rebuilt life later.

"You don't have to do this," Selene says, quiet and certain, the same thing she has said in some form every year since the assignment first got floated to Mara's desk. "Callum can put someone else on it. You can tell him you have a conflict of interest and no one would blink."

"I've built five years of my career on being the reporter who doesn't blink," Mara says. "I'm not starting now."

There's a silence on the line that Mara knows is Selene deciding whether to push, and deciding not to. It's one of the things she loves most about her — Selene has never once, in six years, told her what to do about Adrian Cole. She has told her what to do about everything else. Selene picked her therapist, back when Mara didn't trust herself to pick anything at all. Selene picked her first apartment, cosigned it, actually, when Mara had no credit history and no family to list as a reference, because when your family is a grandmother who died when you were eighteen and two parents you can barely remember, there is no one to cosign anything, and Selene simply became the person who did.

But about Adrian — about the whole shape of what happened — Selene has only ever asked questions and then gone quiet and let Mara arrive at her own answers, slowly, over years, the way you'd wait out a long winter without trying to speed up the thaw.

"Do you remember," Mara says, surprising herself, "the first thing you ever said to me? In the hospital?"

"I remember everything about that week," Selene says, and there's something careful in her voice now, like she's not sure which direction Mara wants to take this. "Why?"

"I don't know. I think about it sometimes, right before assignments like this. You told me I didn't owe anyone an explanation for surviving." Mara looks at her own reflection, faint, in the dark window glass. "It's a strange thing to hold onto for six years, but I do."

"You didn't. You don't." A beat, and Selene's voice softens further, drops the last of its brisk, get-through-the-logistics edge. "You don't owe him an explanation either, for the record. You don't owe him anything at all. If this assignment turns into you sitting across from him trying to make him understand what he cost you, that's not journalism, Mara, that's just reopening a wound with a recorder running."

"I know."

"Do you?"

Mara doesn't answer right away, and that, she suspects, is answer enough for both of them.

"Call me after the first interview," Selene says instead, letting it go, the way she always eventually does. "Whatever time it is. I don't care."

"I will."

"I mean it, Mara."

"I know you do." Mara looks at her own reflection again, a pale shape superimposed over rooftops she still hasn't learned the names of. "Thank you. For — all of it. Not just tonight."

"You don't have to thank me for that. You never have to thank me for that." A beat, and then, lighter, deliberately shifting the weight of the conversation the way Selene always does right when Mara's about to slide somewhere she can't easily climb back out of: "Now go eat something that isn't a hotel vending machine. I know you. You'll interview an entire national team on an empty stomach and pass out at a press conference, and then it'll be a headline, and I will have to fly to Prague to yell at you in person, and my passport's expired, so please don't make me deal with that."

Mara laughs — actually laughs, surprising herself with it, the sound loud in the small quiet room. "Noted."

"Go. Eat. Sleep. Be terrifyingly competent tomorrow, like you always are."

"Goodnight, Selene."

"Goodnight. I love you. Call me."

The line goes dead, and Mara sits on the edge of the bed for a long moment in the settling quiet, phone still loose in her hand, feeling the particular ache that comes after being loved well by someone right when you most need it and least feel like you deserve it.

She does not, in fact, eat something that isn't from a vending machine, mostly out of spite for her own exhaustion, but she does force down a bag of pretzels and a bottle of water while she opens her laptop and pulls up the file she's been building all week: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS — A. COLE.

The list is long, and every question on it is safe.

What made you decide to accept the call-up this year, after turning it down twice before?

How does it feel returning to international competition after the injury two seasons ago?

What's it like leading a locker room full of guys who've never played together before?

Professional. Careful. The kind of question that gets a safe, professional answer, delivered in the clipped, controlled cadence she already knows he'll use, because she's watched enough of his clips over the past three days to know exactly what kind of interview subject Adrian Cole has become. Guarded. Economical with syllables. A man who has clearly spent five years learning to give reporters nothing, which would almost be funny, if Mara didn't understand, better than anyone currently accredited to cover this tournament, exactly what he's protecting and exactly how much practice it takes to get that good at protecting it.

She types a new line into the document, then stares at it.

Why didn't you—

She deletes it before she can finish typing the sentence, the way she has deleted some version of that same sentence probably two hundred times in five years, across a dozen half-drunk voice memos she never sent and one long, unhinged email she wrote at twenty-two and never opened again, let alone sent. She isn't sure the English language has assembled the right words for it yet — something in the shape of why did you leave without telling me anything at all, except that phrase has had five years to grow roots and thorns and an entire private mythology, until it isn't really a question anymore so much as a wound with syntax. It has no business appearing in a professional interview document. It has no business appearing anywhere at all, except that it does, over and over, in the one part of her mind she has never quite managed to soundproof.

She closes the laptop before that thought can go any further than it already has, and sits for a moment in the room's sudden quiet, listening to a tram bell ring somewhere below, unhurried, foreign, and entirely indifferent to the fact that on the other side of this city, in a hotel she hasn't confirmed but privately suspects, a man she has spent five years trying not to think about is very likely lying awake too.

Tomorrow, she reminds herself. Tomorrow she will be a journalist, and none of this — not the ring in a drawer six hundred miles away, not the questions she'll never get to ask — will show on her face at all.

She believes it, mostly, right up until she turns off the lamp.