My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Twenty-Two

Six Years Earlier

Their first real date, if it can even be called that, happens by accident, on a Tuesday in January when a snowstorm shuts down half the campus and cancels practice for the first time all season.

Mara is holed up in the library, three chapters behind on a reading assignment she has no intention of finishing tonight, when Adrian texts her out of nowhere: practice got canceled. you eaten yet?

She hasn't. She tells him so, and forty minutes later they're sitting in a nearly empty diner two blocks from campus, snow piling up against the windows, sharing a plate of fries neither of them can really afford on a college budget and talking about nothing in particular for three hours straight.

"This isn't an interview," Adrian points out, somewhere around hour two, watching her notebook stay firmly closed on the table between them.

"I'm off the clock."

"Are you, though." Something teasing in his voice, but underneath it, genuine curiosity. "Is this a date, Bennett?"

Mara considers the question with more seriousness than it probably deserves, watching snow accumulate against the window, watching him watch her with an expression that makes her stomach do something complicated.

"I think it might be," she says, finally.

"Good." He grins, easy and unguarded, and reaches across the table to steal the last of the fries before she can. "I was hoping you'd say that. I've been trying to figure out how to ask you properly for about three weeks and every plan I came up with sounded stupid out loud."

"What was the worst one?"

"I'm not telling you that."

"Adrian."

"Absolutely not. Some secrets I'm taking to my grave." He's laughing now, and Mara is laughing too, and outside the diner window the whole city is going quiet and white and beautiful, and she thinks, watching him across a table covered in empty plates, that she has never once in her life felt this specific, uncomplicated kind of happy.

They walk back to campus together after, snow still falling, both of them underdressed for the weather and neither of them particularly minding, and at the door to her dorm building, he kisses her for the first time — careful, questioning, like he's giving her every opportunity to pull away if she wants to.

She doesn't want to.

"So that's a yes on the second date," he says, after, breathless, snow catching in his dark hair.

"That's a yes on a lot of things," Mara says, and means it more than she's ever meant anything.

Five Years, Ten Months Earlier

By spring, they are, by any reasonable measure, thoroughly, uncomplicatedly together — the kind of couple other students on campus have already started referring to as a single unit, Mara-and-Adrian, rather than two separate people who happen to spend most of their time in the same place.

It's easy in a way Mara has never experienced before, not with anyone. He remembers small things — her coffee order, the specific way she likes her toast, the exact anniversary of her grandmother's death, which he marks every year without being asked, showing up with nothing more than his presence and the quiet understanding that she doesn't want to talk about it, just doesn't want to be alone with it either. She learns his rhythms in turn — the particular quiet he needs after a loss, the way he processes disappointment by going for a long run rather than talking about it, the specific vulnerability underneath his easy confidence that almost no one else at Ashford ever gets to see.

It's on a warm evening in April, walking back from a game he'd played especially well, that he brings up his parents for the first time in any real detail.

"They're coming up next month," he says, careful, testing the ground. "Parents' weekend. I want you to meet them."

Mara feels something complicated move through her chest — hope, mostly, tangled up with a nervousness she doesn't fully understand yet. "Okay. I'd like that."

"They're—" He hesitates, choosing his words with visible care. "They have opinions. About a lot of things. About who I should be dating, eventually, long-term. It's not really about you specifically. It's more about — they have a plan. They've had a plan since I was a kid."

"What kind of plan?"

"The kind where I marry someone from a family they already know. Business connections, that kind of thing. There's actually a specific someone they've been not-so-subtly hinting about for years." He says it lightly, almost like a joke, but Mara catches something underneath it, something more serious than the tone suggests. "I've never taken it seriously. It's old-fashioned, even for them. But I want you to know it exists, before you meet them. So nothing catches you off guard."

"Should I be worried?"

"No." He says it firmly, taking her hand, something protective in the gesture. "You shouldn't be worried about anything. This is my life, not theirs. I get to choose who's in it."

Mara believes him completely, walking hand in hand back to her dorm in the fading April light, and she has no way of knowing, that warm spring evening, exactly how much that particular promise is eventually going to cost him to keep — or how completely, in the end, he isn't going to manage to keep it at all.

Five Years, Nine Months Earlier

Parents' weekend arrives on a bright Saturday in May, and Mara spends the morning more nervous than she's been for any exam in her college career, trying on three different outfits before settling on something simple and professional, the kind of thing that says I take this seriously without trying too hard to say anything else.

Richard and Eleanor Cole are, in person, exactly as composed and elegant as Mara had pictured from Adrian's careful descriptions — Eleanor in a pale blue dress that probably costs more than Mara's entire semester of textbooks, Richard with the same sharp jaw he's given his son, both of them shaking Mara's hand with a warmth that feels, even in the moment, faintly rehearsed.

"Adrian's told us so much about you," Eleanor says, over lunch, her tone perfectly pleasant, her eyes doing a quick, assessing sweep that Mara notices and pretends not to.

"All good things, I hope."

"Of course." Eleanor's smile doesn't quite reach her eyes. "You're a journalism student, Adrian mentioned. That's an interesting path. Not the most... stable industry, these days, is it."

"It's competitive," Mara agrees, keeping her tone light, though she catches the undertone clearly enough. "I like a challenge."

"Mom," Adrian says, a warning note in his voice, and Eleanor's expression shifts, smoothing back into pleasant neutrality.

"I only meant it's admirable," she says, "choosing a difficult field. Not everyone has the courage for uncertainty."

The lunch continues in that register for the better part of an hour — polite, surface-level pleasant, every compliment carrying a faint, deniable edge that Mara can't quite call out without seeming paranoid, every question about her future subtly probing for reassurance that she understands, on some level, exactly how uncertain a future she represents. Richard says little, mostly watching, occasionally interjecting a question about her family that makes Mara's chest tighten every time — and your parents, what do they do — a question she answers as briefly and evenly as she can manage, watching something flicker across Eleanor's face each time, some private calculation Mara can't quite read.

Adrian, for his part, spends the whole lunch visibly working to redirect every uncomfortable moment, steering conversation back toward safer ground, and by the time his parents finally leave that evening, he looks as exhausted as Mara feels.

"I'm sorry," he says, once they're alone again, walking slowly back toward campus. "That was — I should have prepared you better."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. My mother was—" He stops, frustration evident in his voice. "She does that. Tests people. She did it to every friend I brought home in high school too. It's not really about you."

"It felt like it was about me."

"I know." He pulls her close, something apologetic and fierce in the gesture. "I promise you, whatever they think, it doesn't change anything. I choose you. That's not up for negotiation, not with them, not with anyone."

Mara wants, badly, to believe him completely. She mostly does, walking back to her dorm under a warm May sky, his arm around her shoulders, the whole rest of their lives apparently ahead of them.

She doesn't yet know how much weight that particular promise is going to be asked to carry, or how, in the end, it's going to buckle under pressure neither of them fully understood yet, on that bright Saturday afternoon, they were even facing.