My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Eight

Mara makes it exactly as far as the end of the media wing corridor before her hands start shaking.

She notices it first in her grip on the recorder, still clutched loose in one fist, a small tremor she can't quite steady no matter how deliberately she tries. She tells herself it's nothing — low blood sugar, maybe, the muesli she skipped this morning finally catching up with her, adrenaline from a difficult professional interview working its way out of her system the way it always does after something demanding. She has interviewed grieving Olympians. She has interviewed men mid-collapse of entire careers. She does not fall apart in hallways.

She finds the stairwell at the end of the corridor almost by instinct, ducks through the door before she can think too hard about why, and stands on the small concrete landing between floors with her back against cool cinderblock, and lets herself, finally, feel exactly what she's been holding since he said her name and then took it back.

It isn't dramatic. She doesn't cry, exactly — she's had five years of practice not doing that in professional settings, and the habit holds even here, even alone. What happens instead is smaller and somehow worse: her breath goes shallow and quick, her chest tight in the specific way it used to get in the first year after everything, before therapy, before Selene taught her the grounding exercises that still, six years later, are the only thing that reliably brings her back to herself. She presses both palms flat against the cold wall behind her and breathes in for four counts, holds for four, out for four, the way she's done a thousand times since a hospital room she doesn't let herself think about very often.

It's fine, she tells herself, matching the words to her breathing. You did the interview. You got what you needed. It's fine.

It isn't the interview that undid her, and she knows it, standing alone on a stairwell landing with her heart still going too fast. It's the fact that for one unscripted half-second, in a room with a recorder running and two hundred professional reasons not to, he said her actual name instead of her byline, and something in her chest that she has spent five years keeping very carefully sealed answered before she could stop it.

She stays on the landing for four full minutes, breathing, steadying, rebuilding the version of herself she's going to need for the rest of the day — the competent one, the professional one, the one Callum is expecting a scene-setter from by tonight. By the time she pushes back through the door into the corridor, she looks, to anyone passing, exactly like a journalist walking briskly toward her next assignment. It's a good performance. She's had a great deal of practice.

She doesn't call Selene from the stairwell. She waits until she's back in her hotel room, door locked, blazer off, sitting on the edge of the bed with her knees pulled up in a way she'd never allow herself in public, and only then does she pick up the phone.

Three floors above the media wing, in a locker room mostly emptied out for the afternoon, Adrian Cole sits on a bench in front of his stall with his elbows on his knees and his head down, and does not move for a long time after the last of his teammates have filtered out toward the bus.

He should be reviewing tape. There's a systems meeting in forty minutes, line combinations to memorize, a scouting report on tomorrow's opponent he hasn't finished reading. He is aware of all of it, the way you're aware of traffic noise outside a window — present, ongoing, entirely unable to compete with what's actually occupying his attention.

Mara. Her name, unscripted, unplanned, had come out of him in the middle of a sentence about a linemate's chemistry with a completeness that frightened him, the syllables arriving in his mouth before any part of his conscious mind had signed off on them, and he'd had to watch her hear it — had to watch the exact moment it landed on her face, something raw and unguarded flickering there before she'd covered it, professional as ever, faster than he could apologize.

He's had five years of practice not saying that name out loud. Five years of catching himself right at the edge of it in a hundred different contexts — a reporter asking about his college years, a teammate joking about his relationship history, his own mother, twice, testing the water to see if the subject was safe to raise yet, and finding, both times, that it very much was not. He has become, by necessity, extremely good at redirecting a conversation before it gets anywhere near her, at answering questions about "what happened after college" with vague, professionally acceptable non-answers about focusing on his career, at being, in every documented, on-record way, a man with no complicated unfinished business in his past at all.

And then she'd walked into a press conference room this morning, name badge catching the light, and every piece of that careful architecture had needed exactly one look to start coming apart.

He thinks about the moment in the corridor before the presser ended — you talked to Selene — and the way her voice had sharpened instantly, protective and wounded at once, and he understands, sitting alone in an emptying locker room on the other side of an ocean from home, that there is an entire five-year history he knows almost nothing about, that whatever happened to her after he left is a country he has never been allowed to visit, and that some instinct buried under all his careful composure has apparently decided, without consulting the rest of him, that he wants back in.

He doesn't examine that instinct too closely. He has learned, over five years, that examining it too closely is exactly how you end up doing something you can't take back — a phone call you shouldn't make, a question you have no right to ask, a reopening of a door he closed for reasons that had nothing to do with what he wanted and everything to do with what he was afraid would happen if he didn't.

His phone buzzes in his bag. A text from his mother, checking in the way she does before every tournament, a habit that has never fully recovered its warmth since the year everything happened, though she'd never say that out loud and neither would he. He doesn't answer it yet. He sits a moment longer, elbows on his knees, replaying, against his own better judgment, the exact sound of Mara's voice saying it matters to me in a corridor twenty minutes before an interview neither of them had been ready for.

It matters to me. Five words, delivered sharp and fast and entirely unguarded, the most honest thing either of them had said all day, and he'd had nothing to offer back except an excuse about a team meeting.

He gets up eventually, because the meeting is real and thirty-five minutes away now and he is, whatever else is happening underneath the surface, still a captain with responsibilities to a room full of teammates who are counting on him to show up steady. He splashes water on his face at the sink near the equipment room, checks himself in the mirror the way he's done before every difficult moment of the last five years — shoulders back, jaw set, whatever's underneath pushed down far enough that it won't show on camera, in a room, in front of anyone who might ask a follow-up question he isn't prepared to answer.

It's a good performance. He's had a great deal of practice.

He doesn't think, walking toward the meeting room, about the ring he still has, three time zones and half a decade away, sitting in a drawer in an apartment he's never let anyone else see the inside of. He doesn't let himself think about it, the same way he doesn't let himself think about a stairwell, or a text message he typed with hands that were shaking so badly he could barely hit send, or the six years of silence that followed a decision he still isn't sure, standing here now, he'd make the same way twice.

He thinks about hockey instead, because hockey is safe, because hockey is the one place his whole life has never once asked him a question he couldn't answer, and he walks into the meeting room three minutes early, steady, composed, exactly the captain his team needs him to be.

Underneath it, quiet and constant as a heartbeat, one thought keeps surfacing anyway, no matter how many times he pushes it back down.

She's here. She's actually here. And I don't know how much longer I can keep pretending that doesn't change everything.