My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Six

The mixed zone thins out slowly, the way these things always do — a knot of broadcasters getting their thirty-second soundbites from whichever players the federation staff steer their way first, print reporters hanging back for the players more likely to actually say something worth quoting, the whole room gradually loosening from tight professional formation into the looser, more scattered energy of an assignment winding down for the morning.

Mara isn't part of the scrum. Her interview with Adrian is scheduled separately, arranged through official channels weeks ago, which means she has no professional reason to be standing in this corridor at all, notebook still clutched loosely in one hand, watching the room empty around her with the studied casualness of someone who has absolutely convinced herself she's just finishing up her own notes and not, in fact, waiting for something she hasn't let herself name.

She's turning to leave — actually turning, actually one step into the corridor toward the exit — when she hears her name.

Not Bennett, the way Callum says it, or Ms. Bennett, the way federation staff have said it twice today reading off a credential list. Just Mara, low, in a voice she would recognize in a crowded stadium, in a foreign country, after five years of not hearing it at all.

She turns around.

Adrian is standing a few feet away, near the mouth of the mixed zone, half-turned as though he'd been walking toward the players' exit and stopped mid-stride, and for one long, suspended moment neither of them says anything else at all. Up close, under the corridor's flatter, less forgiving light, the five years show more plainly than they did across a crowded press room — a small scar through one eyebrow that wasn't there before, faint lines starting at the corners of his eyes that have nothing to do with age and everything to do with the specific, sustained strain of professional hockey, the captaincy patch on his collar close enough now that she can see the stitching.

He looks, up close, exactly as unreadable as he did on the stage, and exactly as unlike a stranger as he ever has.

"Hi," Mara says, because someone has to say something, and because five years of professional training have apparently left her with nothing more sophisticated than the single word a person says to literally anyone.

"Hi." Something moves through his expression — not quite a smile, not quite anything she can name — and then he seems to catch himself, straighten, recalibrate to whatever version of this conversation he decided, at some point over the last twenty minutes, he was prepared to have. "I didn't know you were on the tournament credential list until I saw your name on the roster this morning."

"I could say the same."

"Could you." It isn't quite a question. There's something underneath it — not accusation, exactly, but close enough to it that Mara feels her spine straighten on instinct, five years of professional armor sliding into place without her having to think about it at all.

"I'm covering the whole tournament," she says. "Not just you."

"I didn't say you were."

"You implied it."

"I asked a question."

"You made a statement disguised as one." The words come out sharper than she intends, sharper than the professional version of herself standing in a credentialed press corridor is supposed to allow, and she watches something flicker across his face at the edge of it — surprise, maybe, or something closer to recognition, the specific expression of a person hearing an old, familiar rhythm land in an unfamiliar context.

"You still do that," he says, quieter now.

"Do what."

"Catch people in exactly what they said instead of what they meant to say." A pause. "I forgot how much I—" He stops himself, visibly, the sentence closing off mid-thought the way a door closes when someone remembers, halfway through opening it, that they weren't supposed to.

Mara doesn't finish the sentence for him. She wants to, badly enough that the wanting surprises her, but she has spent five years learning that finishing other people's sentences for them is how you end up believing things they never actually said, and she isn't about to start doing that again, not here, not in a corridor, not with a recorder still technically running in her bag.

"Congratulations on the captaincy," she says instead, professional, deliberate, choosing the safest possible ground to stand on. "It suits you."

"Thanks." He glances down, briefly, at the patch on his collar, as though he'd genuinely forgotten it was there, and when he looks back up at her, something in his face has shifted again, gone more careful, more guarded, like a man remembering, all at once, exactly how much is at stake in a conversation he'd let get too loose too fast. "How's — " He hesitates. "How's your career. Selene mentioned once that you'd gone into journalism, but I didn't know it was — this. National coverage. It's impressive."

Mara goes very still.

"You talked to Selene?"

It comes out sharper than she means it to, sharper than anything else she's said in the last three minutes, and she watches him register the shift instantly, watches something close down behind his eyes like a shutter dropping.

"Once. Years ago. It was — brief." He shifts his weight, and for the first time since she turned around, he looks less like a national team captain and more like the twenty-one-year-old she used to know, caught in something he wasn't supposed to say out loud. "It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me," Mara says, before she can stop herself, and the honesty of it surprises them both — she can see it land on his face, can see him recalibrate again, faster this time, like he's decided the safest move is retreat.

"I have a team meeting," he says. "In ten minutes."

"Right." Mara nods, professional again, or as close to professional as she can manage with her pulse still audible in her own ears. "Of course."

He hesitates — actually hesitates, one beat too long for a man with somewhere he needs to be — and for a moment Mara thinks he's going to say something else, something real, something that might actually answer any of the two hundred questions she has never let herself ask out loud in five years. His mouth opens slightly. Whatever it was going to be, he closes it again before it gets out.

"It's good to see you, Mara," he says instead, quiet, careful, the words landing with a weight that feels entirely disproportionate to how ordinary they should be. "I mean that."

"You have a strange way of showing it," she says, and means for it to come out light, almost teasing, the kind of thing you say to soften an edge, but it doesn't come out light at all. It comes out exactly as heavy as it actually is, five years of silence compressed into six words, and she watches it hit him the way she meant it to and immediately wishes she hadn't.

Something crosses his face — not anger, she thinks, something closer to grief, quick and total and gone almost as fast as it arrived, replaced by the same careful composure he wore through the entire press conference.

"Yeah," he says, quietly. "I probably do."

He doesn't explain it. He doesn't elaborate, doesn't offer the one thing Mara has spent five years wanting more than almost anything else in her life, which is a reason, an actual reason, something she could have argued with, pushed back on, made sense of. He just holds her gaze for one more second, something unreadable and enormous moving behind his eyes, and then he turns and walks back down the corridor toward the players' exit, toward a team meeting he probably does have in ten minutes, leaving her standing exactly where she was, notebook still clutched in one hand, recorder still technically running in her bag, having captured absolutely nothing she'll be able to use in tomorrow's paper and everything she is going to spend the rest of the night trying not to think about.

She doesn't move for almost a full minute after he's gone. Somewhere down the corridor, a federation staffer laughs at something, ordinary and distant. Mara stands very still in the space he left behind and finally, finally, lets herself feel exactly one thing she promised herself this morning she'd save for later.

It arrives anyway. It always does, eventually. She has learned, over five long years, that later always comes.