My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Seventeen

The delay isn't anyone's fault, exactly, which somehow makes it worse — a mechanical issue with the team's chartered bus, discovered twenty minutes before the scheduled departure to the next host city, that leaves an entire traveling party of players, staff, and the small contingent of press credentialed to travel with them stranded in a parking garage for what the federation's increasingly apologetic transportation coordinator estimates, with visibly diminishing confidence, will be "forty-five minutes, maybe an hour."

It becomes closer to two.

Mara finds a spot on a low concrete barrier near the edge of the garage, laptop bag at her feet, and settles in for what she assumes will be an uneventful wait among a scattered crowd of people checking phones and murmuring about lost time. She's three emails into catching up on Callum's latest round of feature-piece notes when someone lowers themselves onto the barrier beside her, close enough that she knows who it is before she looks up.

"They're saying an hour," Adrian says, by way of greeting, settling in with the loose, unhurried patience of a professional athlete who has clearly weathered a hundred travel delays before this one and long ago stopped finding them worth getting worked up about. "I'd bet on two."

"You'd win that bet." Mara closes her laptop, giving up on the emails for now, and glances sideways at him — suit jacket off, sleeves rolled, tie loosened in a way that makes him look, for a moment, less like a national team captain and more like the boy she used to know cramming for finals at the back of a library. "You seem unbothered."

"Not much point being bothered by something you can't control." He shrugs, easy. "Learned that early. Bad weather, bad ice, bad refs — you can spend the energy being angry about it, or you can spend the energy on the parts you actually have power over. Hockey teaches you that pretty fast if you're paying attention."

"That's disturbingly reasonable of you."

"I have my moments." Something in his voice carries a small, private warmth, and for a moment they sit in comfortable silence, the parking garage's fluorescent lights humming overhead, the general low murmur of a stranded traveling party continuing around them.

"How's the feature coming?" he asks, eventually. "The one you've been so cagey about all week."

"Slowly."

"That bad?"

"That complicated." Mara considers how much to actually say, weighing professional discretion against the strange, easy pull of a conversation that feels less like an interview than anything they've had all week. "My editor wants something real. Something with 'teeth,' his word. I keep starting sentences I can't finish."

"What kind of sentences?"

She shouldn't answer that. She knows she shouldn't, is aware, even as she opens her mouth, that this is exactly the kind of unguarded territory she's spent the entire assignment trying to avoid. She answers anyway.

"The kind that are true," she says. "Which is the problem. Every honest sentence I write about you turns into something I can't actually put my name on."

Something shifts in his expression, careful and searching. "Try me. What would an honest sentence say?"

Mara looks at him for a long moment, weighing the risk of it, and then, because the garage is loud enough that no one nearby is paying either of them any attention, because two hours of forced proximity has apparently worn down whatever professional caution she had left, she says it anyway.

"That there's a version of you the world gets, and a version that only shows up when you think no one important is watching. That the guarded one is armor, not the whole truth. That I've spent all week trying to figure out which version I'm actually supposed to be writing about, and I don't think I know the answer."

He doesn't say anything for a moment, and Mara watches something move across his face — not quite surprise, closer to recognition, the specific expression of a man hearing something true said out loud for what feels like the first time in a very long while.

"That's a good sentence," he says finally, quiet.

"I can't print it."

"Why not?"

"Because it's not about a hockey captain. It's about—" She stops herself, aware of exactly how close to the edge she's standing.

"About what?"

"About someone I used to know," she says, careful, choosing the word deliberately, testing whether he'll let it stand at that distance or push closer.

He doesn't push. He looks at her for a long moment instead, something unguarded and a little sad in his eyes, and says, quietly, "I think about him too, sometimes. Who he used to be. It's strange, talking about yourself like a different person. But some days it genuinely feels true."

"What changed him?"

The question is out before she can stop it, more direct than anything she's asked all week, five years of careful professional distance collapsing into six words she has no right to expect an answer to.

Adrian is quiet for a long moment, long enough that Mara thinks he's going to deflect the way he always does, close the door the way he closed it in the tunnel with Cross, the way he's closed it in every interview all week.

"Fear, mostly," he says instead, so quietly she almost misses it under the ambient noise of the garage. "He was afraid of a lot of things he didn't know how to say out loud. So he stopped saying much of anything at all, about anything that actually mattered. Turns out that's a hard habit to break, once you've had five years of practice."

Mara's chest goes tight. It's more honesty than she's gotten from him all week, more than she expected to get at all, delivered in a parking garage under humming fluorescent lights with an entire traveling party scattered around them, and she understands, sitting beside him, that whatever door has been slowly cracking open since the moment she walked into that press conference has just opened another few inches, wider than either of them planned.

"What was he afraid of?" she asks, gentler now, careful not to push too hard against something clearly still tender.

Adrian looks at her, something enormous and complicated moving behind his eyes, and for a moment Mara thinks he's actually going to answer — actually going to give her the thing she's wanted for five years, sitting right here in a parking garage with nothing but bad lighting and mechanical delays standing between her and the truth.

"Everything," he says instead, quiet, incomplete, the door closing again just short of all the way. "Losing everything. He was afraid of losing everything, and so he made sure it happened anyway, just — differently than he expected."

A staffer's voice cuts through the garage, announcing that the replacement bus has arrived, that boarding will begin in five minutes, and the moment collapses under the sudden bustle of a traveling party gathering its bags and its patience for the next leg of the trip.

Adrian stands, offering Mara a hand up she doesn't quite need but takes anyway, his grip warm and familiar in a way that undoes something in her chest she thought she'd secured years ago.

"We should get on the bus," he says.

"We should."

Neither of them moves for a second longer than the moment requires, and then, together, they do.

On the bus, by accident or by some quiet, unacknowledged design neither of them examines too closely, they end up seated near each other — not beside each other, exactly, federation seating protocols keeping players and press in loosely separate sections, but close enough, across the narrow aisle and one row back, that conversation continues in low, easy fragments for most of the two-hour drive to the next host city.

They talk about nothing important. College memories, carefully edited for safety. A shared, ridiculous professor neither of them can believe they both remember with equal fondness. The specific, absurd stress of a mutual friend's wedding from years ago that neither of them attended together, but both, it turns out, still think about.

It's easy. Dangerously, unmistakably easy, the particular effortless rhythm of two people who once knew each other completely finding, against every careful precaution either of them has built, that some things simply don't erase, no matter how many years or how much silence you put between them.

Mara watches the city lights give way to darker highway outside the window, Adrian's low voice a steady, familiar presence across the aisle, and thinks, with a mixture of hope and dread she doesn't fully know how to separate, that this — whatever this easy, dangerous thing between them is becoming — might be far harder to survive than the silence ever was.