My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Thirteen

Mara doesn't sleep that night, not really, and by eleven o'clock she's given up pretending she's going to.

She sits at the small hotel desk with her laptop open, the COLE — FEATURE DRAFT document still mostly blank, and works instead through the evening's practical tasks — filing tomorrow's short update on the group-stage standings, answering a handful of emails from Callum's research assistant about photo permissions, transcribing the last of Cross's usable quotes into her running notes file. It's the kind of busywork that has saved her more nights than she'd like to admit over the last five years, the professional equivalent of counting sheep, methodical and undemanding enough to keep her hands occupied without asking anything of the parts of her mind currently occupied elsewhere.

It doesn't entirely work tonight. It never entirely works, if she's honest, but tonight especially not — every few minutes her attention drifts, unbidden, toward a conversation overheard in a tunnel, toward Cross's careful, half-finished sentence about a version of Adrian that existed before any of them knew him, toward a hotel two blocks from her own where, for all she knows, he's sitting in some equivalent room doing some equivalent thing, systems review or scouting tape or whatever a captain does the night before a group-stage game that actually matters.

She catches herself wondering which room. Which floor. Whether the federation booked press and players in genuinely separate hotels or whether some cruel administrative accident has them closer than either of them realizes, and she makes herself stop wondering, hard, the way you'd pull your hand back from something hot.

She types one more sentence into the feature document — There is a version of Adrian Cole most of the hockey world has never met — and then closes the laptop before she can decide whether to delete it, because for the first time in three days, she isn't entirely sure she wants to.

Three floors up, or possibly three floors down, or possibly across a stretch of city Mara has no actual way of measuring from where she's sitting, Adrian Cole is also not sleeping.

He's gone through the scouting report on tomorrow's opponent twice already, has the systems breakdown essentially memorized, and still finds himself sitting on the edge of a hotel bed at close to midnight with the television off and the room lit only by the gray wash of city light through curtains he never bothered to fully close.

He thinks about Cross's face in the tunnel yesterday, the easy, unbothered curiosity of a teammate who has no idea what he actually stumbled into, and about the sharpness in his own voice cutting the conversation off before it could go anywhere — a reaction disproportionate to the question, and he knows it, has known it since the words left his mouth, has spent most of the day since turning the moment over trying to understand exactly what in him reacted with that much force to something so ordinary.

Old stuff. Not talking about it.

It's the sentence he's used, in some form, for five years, whenever anyone gets close enough to the subject to require a response at all. It has always worked before. Teammates learn quickly not to push. Reporters, mostly, respect the boundary once it's clearly drawn. His own parents, on the rare occasions the subject surfaces at all, have learned to read the particular set of his jaw that means the conversation is closing whether they like it or not.

It didn't feel like it worked yesterday. It felt, standing in that tunnel with Cross's easy grin faltering in front of him, like something had cracked slightly in the delivery — like five years of practiced deflection had, for the first time, sounded exactly as thin as it actually is.

He gets up, restless, and crosses to the window, looking out over a city he genuinely likes, would probably enjoy under any other circumstances, all spires and red rooftops and a river cutting through the middle of it like something out of the paintings his mother used to collect before everything with his parents got complicated. He thinks about his mother, briefly, the way he tries not to most nights, and about the specific quality of her silence whenever Mara's name has come up in the rare conversations they've had about it — not disapproval anymore, exactly, not after everything, but something closer to a wound she doesn't know how to acknowledge without admitting what her own hand had in causing it.

He doesn't want to think about his parents tonight. He redirects, deliberately, the way he's practiced doing for five years, and thinks about hockey instead — tomorrow's opponent, the systems he's already reviewed twice, the specific defensive weakness their video staff flagged that his line should be able to exploit in the second period if the matchups break the way he expects.

It doesn't hold. It never fully holds anymore, not since a press conference two days ago, and he finds himself, standing at a hotel window at midnight in a city six hundred miles from anywhere he calls home, thinking instead about the exact sound of Mara's voice saying it matters to me, sharp and unguarded and entirely, devastatingly honest, in a corridor where he'd had absolutely nothing honest to offer back.

He thinks about the ring, the way he does most nights he can't sleep, sitting in a drawer in an apartment in Ashford that he has never once let anyone else see the inside of. He'd told himself, buying it back into the drawer after the breakup instead of getting rid of it — a decision that made no sense to him even at the time — that he was keeping it for practical reasons, that jewelry has resale value, that he'd deal with it eventually.

He has never once believed his own explanation. He suspects, standing at this window, that he's spent five years not believing quite a lot of the explanations he's given himself.

His phone sits on the nightstand, screen dark, and he thinks, not for the first time this week, about picking it up and typing something — anything — a message with no plan behind it beyond the simple, uncomplicated fact that he wants, more than he's wanted almost anything in five years, to hear her voice again outside the careful architecture of a scheduled interview.

He doesn't pick it up. He has learned, over five years, that wanting something badly enough to reach for it doesn't automatically mean he has the right to, especially not when the last time he reached for something this important, he'd broken it so completely he still doesn't fully understand how to begin explaining why.

He goes back to bed eventually, not because he expects to sleep, but because there's a game tomorrow, and a team counting on him, and whatever else is unraveling quietly underneath his careful captain's composure, that much, at least, he still knows exactly how to show up for.

He lies awake a long time anyway, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling, listening to a city settle into its own late-night quiet outside his window, and thinks, with the specific, unbearable clarity that only ever seems to arrive at hours like this one, about a girl in a stairwell who once believed him when he said forever, and about all the ways he's spent five years proving her wrong without ever once explaining why.

Somewhere across the same dark city, close enough that if either of them had known exactly where to look, they might have found the right window, Mara Bennett is finally, fitfully, falling asleep with her laptop closed and one unfinished sentence sitting alone on an otherwise blank page.

There is a version of Adrian Cole most of the hockey world has never met.

Neither of them knows, yet, how much closer they both are to finding out exactly who that version has become.