My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Nineteen

The injury scare happens fast, the way these things always do — one moment Adrian is driving the net in a routine scrimmage drill, the next he's crashing hard into the boards after a clean but forceful check from a teammate, and the whole rink seems to hold its breath for the two or three seconds it takes him to get back to his feet.

Mara is standing at the boards, thirty feet away, credentialed for another routine practice observation, and she is on her feet before she's consciously decided to move, both hands pressed flat against the glass, heart slamming against her ribs with a force entirely disproportionate to what she's actually watching. He's down for only a moment. It's nothing, probably — the kind of collision that happens a dozen times in every practice, the kind of thing a professional athlete shakes off with barely a grimace — but for those two or three seconds, watching him not immediately get up, Mara feels something in her chest go cold and total and entirely unprofessional.

He gets up. He waves off the trainer who skates over to check on him, says something to his teammate that gets an apologetic nod in return, and skates a slow, testing circle to prove to the coaching staff he's fine before rejoining the drill. It's over in under a minute. It's nothing.

Mara realizes, standing at the boards with her hands still pressed flat against the glass, that she's shaking.

She becomes aware, a beat later, that Adrian is looking at her.

Not at the ice, not at his teammates, not at the coaching staff waving the drill back into motion — at her, across thirty feet of rink, having clearly clocked, in the middle of a routine collision, exactly how visible her reaction was. His expression is unreadable from this distance, but something in the way he's watching her tells Mara everything she needs to know about how much he saw, and how little either of them is prepared to discuss it out loud in the middle of a national team practice.

She forces her hands down from the glass. She picks her notebook back up from where she'd apparently dropped it, unnoticed, at some point in the last thirty seconds. She writes nothing, because her hand isn't steady enough yet to produce anything legible, and stands very still at the boards for the rest of the practice, professional composure reassembling itself slowly, imperfectly, around the edges of something she can't quite put back together the way it was before.

He finds her afterward, in the corridor outside the locker room, still in his practice gear, hair damp, expression careful in a way that tells Mara he's spent the last twenty minutes deciding whether to say anything at all.

"You okay?" he asks, quiet, no preamble.

"I'm fine. It was nothing. You're fine." Mara hears herself say it too fast, too many short sentences stacked on top of each other, the specific verbal tell of someone working very hard to convince herself of something she doesn't fully believe.

"I saw your face," Adrian says, gentle, not pushing exactly, just stating a fact he clearly isn't willing to pretend he didn't notice. "At the boards. That wasn't a journalist's reaction."

"I don't know what you want me to say to that."

"I don't want you to say anything to it. I just—" He stops, runs a hand through his damp hair, visibly working through whatever he's trying to articulate. "I didn't expect it to still matter to you. Whether I got hurt. After everything."

The observation lands harder than Mara expects, and she feels something old and raw c***k open in her chest, five years of careful professional distance suddenly, inconveniently insufficient to the moment.

"Of course it still matters," she says, quieter than she means to, more honest than she's been with him all week. "I don't know how to make it not matter. I've tried. I built an entire life trying."

Something shifts in his face — not surprise, exactly, more like a confirmation of something he's suspected but hadn't let himself fully believe. "I've tried too," he says, quiet. "Five years of trying. It doesn't really work, does it."

"No," Mara admits. "It doesn't."

They stand there for a long moment, the corridor emptying out around them as teammates and staff filter past toward the exits, neither of them quite finding the next thing to say, both of them clearly aware that they're standing at the edge of something neither has been ready to name out loud all week.

"Can I ask you something," Adrian says, finally, careful, testing.

"Okay."

"That day. In the corridor. When I mentioned Selene, and you got — protective, almost. There was something in your voice I didn't understand. Like there was history there I don't know about." He watches her carefully, something searching in his expression. "Is there something you're not telling me? About the last five years?"

Mara's chest goes tight, the question landing exactly at the edge of everything she's spent five years not saying out loud to anyone but Selene, exactly at the door she keeps open only a c***k before slamming it shut every single time.

"There's a lot I haven't told you," she says, careful, choosing her words with total precision. "It's not a simple story. I don't know if I'm ready to tell it here. In a corridor. Before you have to go do whatever's next on today's schedule."

"Okay." He nods, slow, respecting the boundary even though she can see, plainly, that it costs him something to do it. "When you're ready. If you're ever ready. I'll listen. Whatever it is."

"You say that like it's simple."

"It's not simple. I know it's not simple." Something pained crosses his face, quick and total. "But I want to know. Whatever happened to you after I left — I want to know, even if it's hard to hear. Even if it makes me hate myself more than I already do some days."

The admission hangs between them, heavier than anything either of them has said all week, and Mara feels, standing in a corridor with the last of the team filtering past toward the exits, the sudden, overwhelming urge to tell him everything right there — the pregnancy, the miscarriage, the hospital bed, Selene finding her in the woods — five years of silence pressing up against the back of her teeth, ready to come out all at once.

A staffer rounds the corner before she can decide whether to let it.

"Cole, you're needed for the equipment fitting, they're waiting." The staffer's tone is brisk, apologetic, entirely oblivious to what he's just interrupted.

Adrian holds Mara's gaze for one more beat, something unfinished and enormous still hanging in the air between them, and then, reluctantly, turns to follow the staffer down the corridor.

"Mara," he says, glancing back once. "Whenever you're ready. I mean it."

He's gone before she can answer, and Mara stands alone in the emptying corridor, chest tight, the words she almost said still sitting heavy and unspoken in her throat, wondering how many more near-misses like this one they're going to survive before one of them finally, actually, says the whole truth out loud.