My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Five

The rivalry question comes from a broadcaster in the third row, a compact man with a Canadian network's logo pinned to his lanyard, who leans into his microphone with the easy confidence of someone who already knows the answer will make good television.

"Adrian, Team Canada opens their tournament tomorrow with Dominic Voss as captain — the two of you have some history, going back to juniors, then college. Given the way the group stage is structured, there's a real chance you two meet again before this is over. What's your read on that?"

Mara watches something move under Adrian's composure for the first time since he sat down — not a c***k, exactly, nothing so dramatic as that, but a tightening at the hinge of his jaw, small and quick and gone almost before she's registered it. She would have missed it a year ago. She would have missed it, she suspects, at any point in the five years before this one, before she'd spent an entire career learning to read the half-second before someone's public face catches up to what they actually feel.

"We've played each other a lot of times," Adrian says, and his voice, when it comes, is exactly as even and unremarkable as every other answer he's given so far, which is precisely how Mara knows the question landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to. "Good player. Good captain. If we end up across the ice from each other again, it'll be a good game."

It is, Mara thinks, writing the quote down verbatim, an answer engineered with surgical precision to contain absolutely nothing — no history, no heat, no acknowledgment that "some history" might be doing a great deal of quiet, complicated work in that single tossed-off phrase. She's spent enough of the last three days reading old tournament coverage to know the outline of it even without Adrian filling in any color: two junior national teams meeting in a gold medal game that went to Canada in overtime; a college exhibition series that got chippy enough to make the highlight reels for reasons that had nothing to do with clean hockey; a running, half-decade rivalry that sports networks on both sides of the border have clearly been happy to keep monetizing every time the two men's paths cross.

The broadcaster tries once more, angling for something with actual texture to it — "Some would call it more personal than that" — and Adrian's mouth does the almost-smile again, the one Mara recognizes and wishes she didn't, thin and controlled and entirely unamused.

"You can call it whatever sells," he says. "I call it hockey."

A ripple of laughter moves through the room, appreciative, and the liaison moves the floor along to the next raised hand before the broadcaster can press further. Mara writes down good copy in the margin of her notebook, professional instinct operating on autopilot even while the rest of her sits with the small, useless observation that whatever exists between Adrian and Dominic Voss, it's real enough that a room full of strangers can watch it land on his face in real time, and specific enough that he's built an entire deflection script around not discussing it. She wonders, briefly, what it costs him to have that much practice keeping something contained. She wonders, less briefly and far less comfortably, whether she recognizes the shape of that particular skill because she's spent the last five years building the exact same one herself, just aimed at a different subject.

The liaison calls on three more reporters — questions about line combinations, about the tournament's expanded format, about a teammate's return from injury — and Adrian answers each with the same even, economical competence, giving away nothing beyond what's strictly necessary, and Mara sits through all of it with her pen moving and her recorder running and a growing, uncomfortable awareness that she is going to have to raise her hand eventually. She can't file a scene-setter piece about the opening presser without at least one direct exchange in it. Callum will notice. The whole room will notice, actually, if the one reporter with the most obvious personal stake in this particular athlete sits through his entire opening press conference without asking a single question.

She raises her hand on the fifth round, along with six or seven others, and the liaison, scanning the tiered seats, calls on her before she's fully prepared for the fact that he might.

"Mara Bennett," she says, into the microphone a staffer hands her, her voice coming out steadier than she has any right to expect. "For Adrian — you've turned down the national team call-up twice before. What made this year different?"

It's a fair question. It's on her prepared list, verbatim, chosen precisely because it's safe enough to survive being asked out loud in front of two hundred people, general enough that it doesn't require either of them to acknowledge, even obliquely, that they have ever met before this morning.

Adrian's eyes find hers across the room, the second time today, and this time neither of them looks away first quite as fast.

"Timing," he says, after a beat just long enough that Mara feels it in her chest before she hears the actual word. "I wasn't in the right place before. I am now."

It's nothing. It's a perfectly ordinary, perfectly deflectable answer, the kind any athlete gives to any version of that question in any press conference anywhere in the world, and Mara knows, writing it down with a hand that is not quite as steady as she'd like, that she is almost certainly reading something into it that isn't there, the way grief and longing have a way of finding meaning in the most ordinary available material, the way you can convince yourself a stranger's coat is the exact shade of a coat someone you lost used to wear.

But his eyes hold hers half a second longer than the answer requires. Half a second longer than professional courtesy calls for, longer than a stranger fielding a stranger's question, and in that half second Mara understands, with a certainty she has no evidence for and cannot defend to anyone, least of all herself, that he knows exactly what she heard in that answer, because he put it there on purpose.

Then he looks away, back to the next raised hand, and the moment closes over like water.

Mara sits very still in her seat, pen resting against the page, recorder's light blinking steadily beside her, and does not write anything else down for almost a full minute.

The presser wraps twenty minutes later, the liaison calling time over a chorus of "one more question" from reporters who didn't get their turn, and the players file back out through the staff door in the same loose, practiced order they arrived in. Adrian doesn't look at her again on his way out — doesn't so much as glance in her direction, in fact, with a deliberateness that feels, to Mara, like its own kind of answer.

She packs up her notebook and recorder with hands that have mostly steadied themselves back into professional competence, and falls in with the general drift of press toward the mixed zone, where a smaller subset of reporters will get a chance at brief one-on-one soundbites before the team disperses for the day. She isn't credentialed for that scrum — her actual sit-down interview with Adrian is scheduled separately, tomorrow, arranged weeks ago through official channels by an editor who has no idea what he arranged — but she lingers near the corridor anyway, notebook still in hand, watching the room empty out around her.

Somewhere behind her, she hears two broadcasters already workshopping tomorrow's angle on the Voss rivalry, tossing around phrases like bad blood and unfinished business with the easy enthusiasm of people building a storyline they'll get to enjoy for weeks. Mara doesn't join the conversation. She has her own version of unfinished business to think about, and it has nothing to do with hockey at all, and everything to do with a half-second of eye contact that she is almost certainly going to spend the rest of the day trying, and failing, not to think about.

She checks her phone in the corridor outside. A text from Callum: Got anything?

She looks at the blank reply field for a long moment before she types: Got plenty. Writing it now.

She doesn't tell him what, exactly, "plenty" means. She isn't entirely sure she could explain it to him even if she tried.