Chapter Twenty-One
1170 Words
Six Years Earlier
The rink at Ashford University smells the way it always does in early October — cold concrete and machine-chilled air, the faint metallic tang of new ice, the particular echoing quiet of an arena forty minutes before puck drop, when the only sounds are skates cutting practice laps and a Zamboni idling somewhere behind the boards.
Mara Bennett is twenty years old, three weeks into her junior year, and deeply, thoroughly unqualified for the assignment she's just been handed.
"You've never covered hockey," the Courier-Journal's outgoing sports editor says, not quite a question, sliding a media credential across a cluttered newsroom desk toward her anyway.
"I've watched maybe four games in my life."
"Congratulations, you're now our most experienced hockey writer, because everyone else on staff has watched zero." He shrugs, entirely unbothered by the gap in her qualifications. "You're a good writer, Bennett. You'll figure out the rules. Team's decent this year, actually — real shot at conference. Go introduce yourself to the captain before practice, he's usually good about giving quotes, unlike half these guys."
That's how she ends up standing at the boards on a Tuesday afternoon in October, notebook in hand, feeling entirely out of her depth, watching a hockey practice she barely understands the rules of, waiting for a captain she's never met to notice she's there.
She doesn't have to wait long.
He skates over during a water break, unprompted, pulling off a helmet to reveal dark hair damp with sweat and an expression of open, easy curiosity that Mara isn't remotely prepared for.
"You're new," he says, leaning against the boards, entirely unbothered by the fact that he's addressing a total stranger. "I know everyone who normally covers us. You're not one of them."
"I'm Mara. I'm covering the team for the Courier-Journal this year. Sports desk's short-staffed."
"Adrian." He offers a hand over the boards, and Mara shakes it, aware, distantly, of exactly how cold his glove is even through the mesh. "You any good?"
"At hockey? No idea, I've never played."
"At writing."
"That, I'm actually good at."
Something shifts in his expression — genuine interest, sharpening into something almost like delight. "Good. I hate when the paper sends someone who just prints stats and calls it coverage. You want a real quote or the boilerplate one?"
"Real, obviously."
"Then ask me something real."
Mara looks down at her notebook, at the three safe, generic questions she'd prepared on the walk over from the newsroom, and abandons all of them at once, some instinct telling her the safe questions are exactly the wrong ones for this particular conversation.
"Why hockey?" she asks instead. "Not what got you into it. Why do you still do it. What's actually in it for you, three practices a week, at a school where the football team gets ten times the funding and none of you are ever going pro."
Something in his face changes — not offense, she realizes with some relief, but genuine surprise, the specific look of someone being asked a question they haven't actually had to answer honestly in a long time.
"Because it's the only place I don't have to be anyone but exactly who I am on the ice," he says, after a moment, quieter than his earlier easy confidence. "Everywhere else, there's a version of me people expect. My parents, mostly. Some very specific idea of who their son's supposed to be. Out here, none of that matters. It's just — is the shot good or not. Did you make the pass or didn't you. It's the most honest thing in my entire life, most days."
It's not the answer of a college hockey captain giving a student reporter a quick, safe quote for a season preview piece. It's the answer of someone who's been waiting, without quite realizing it, for someone to actually ask him a real question, and Mara writes it down carefully, aware even in the moment of exactly how much more this conversation has become than the assignment she walked in expecting.
"That's a good answer," she says.
"You asked a good question." He grins, easy again, the vulnerable moment folding back into something lighter. "Most reporters just want to know if we're going to beat State this year."
"Are you?"
"Absolutely not. But print that we said we were confident. Good for morale."
She laughs, surprised by it, and he laughs too, and somewhere behind them a coach's whistle calls the team back to the ice, and Adrian pulls his helmet back on, already skating backward toward center ice, still watching her.
"You coming to the game Friday?" he calls back.
"I'm covering it. So, yes."
"Good. Ask me more questions like that one. I'll actually answer them."
She does come to the game Friday, and the one after that, and by the time October gives way to November, Mara Bennett — sports reporter through professional necessity rather than any actual passion for the game itself — finds herself genuinely looking forward to Tuesday and Thursday practices in a way that has increasingly little to do with journalism.
It happens slowly, the way these things do. A postgame interview that runs fifteen minutes over because the conversation keeps drifting away from hockey and into everything else — his parents' expectations, her own family, the strange, disorienting freedom of college after a childhood that neither of them, it turns out, found particularly easy. A study session in the library that starts as a favor — Mara helping him prep for a lit exam in exchange for better postgame access — and ends four hours later with both of them still talking, notes forgotten, some other conversation entirely unfolding instead.
By December, she's stopped pretending, even to herself, that she's covering the team purely for the byline.
"You like him," her roommate says one night, watching Mara reread a text from Adrian for the third time with an expression she isn't managing to keep off her face.
"He's a good source."
"Mara."
"Fine. Yes. I like him." Mara sets the phone down, feeling something warm and unfamiliar settle in her chest. "It's stupid. I've known him two months."
"Sometimes two months is enough," her roommate says, and Mara, staring at her phone, at a text that says nothing more remarkable than good game tonight, thanks for coming, finds herself, for the first time in longer than she can remember, genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy.
She has no way of knowing, that December night, exactly how much that happiness is eventually going to cost her, or how many years it will take her to build anything like it again. She just knows, lying in a dorm room with her phone glowing warm in her hand, that something has started that she isn't going to be able to stop, and doesn't particularly want to.
Some beginnings feel like that. Total, and warm, and entirely unaware of everything still waiting on the other side of them.
- Writer
