Pregnant for My Brother's Hockey Rival

The banners went up overnight. Emma noticed them the moment she stepped off the campus shuttle — long stretches of navy and silver fabric strung between the lampposts along Blackwood's main walkway, each one printed with the same aggressive declaration: *WOLVES DON'T LOSE AT HOME.* Someone had also chalked the sidewalk in front of the student union. Block letters, six feet tall, already being stepped on and smeared by the morning crowd. *TONIGHT WE TAKE BACK THE CUP.* She stepped around a group of students filming a pregame hype video, sidestepped a guy in a foam wolf head who was doing something she chose not to identify, and pulled her jacket tighter against the November cold. Game day at Blackwood University was its own particular kind of chaos. "Emma!" Her friend Priya fell into step beside her, breath fogging in the air, a Wolves jersey thrown over her coat. "Tell me you're watching tonight." "I have a seven AM shift at the clinic and a pharmacology exam Monday." "That's not a no." "That's absolutely a no." Priya made a sound of genuine distress. "It's the Ridgecrest Ravens. Do you know how many years it's been since we beat them?" "I don't follow hockey." "Everyone follows hockey on game day. It's basically a civic obligation." Emma gave her a flat look. Priya had been her roommate for two years and knew exactly why Emma didn't follow hockey, which made the comment either oblivious or deliberate. Based on the slightly guilty way Priya then looked at her phone, Emma guessed deliberate. "Sorry," Priya said quietly. "That was dumb." "It's fine." Emma shifted her bag on her shoulder. "I'll see you tonight." She peeled off toward the health sciences building before the conversation could go anywhere else. --- The Blackwood sports clinic occupied the ground floor of the athletic complex — a clean, well-lit space that smelled like antiseptic and rubber flooring, staffed by two registered nurses and a rotating schedule of nursing students who handled intake, vitals, and basic assessments under supervision. Emma had worked there since sophomore year. She liked the structure of it. Patients came in, you helped them, they left. The problems were defined. Solvable. She was logging into the intake system when Dr. Reyes, her supervisor, appeared from the back office holding a printed schedule. "Good, you're early." Dr. Reyes set the paper on the desk. "We've got a full morning. Hockey team's coming in for pre-game medical clearances. All forty-two players, plus coaching staff." Emma looked up from the screen. "The whole team?" "League requirement before a rivalry game. They'll rotate through in groups starting at nine." Dr. Reyes was already moving. "I need you on vitals and intake forms. Marcus will handle the orthopedic assessments in the back." Emma looked at the schedule. Then at the names listed at the top of the team roster, which Dr. Reyes had helpfully attached. *Hayes, Noah — Captain.* "Dr. Reyes." She kept her voice even. "Is there any chance I could swap to the afternoon shift? I can come back at two and cover whatever's needed after—" "Emma." Dr. Reyes paused. "I know." "I'm not asking to be unprofessional. I just think someone else might be better positioned to—" "You're my most experienced student on shift today, and I need you here." She said it without cruelty, just fact. "Whatever is happening outside this building stays outside. In here, he's a patient. Same as everyone else." Emma said nothing. Dr. Reyes gave her a measured look before disappearing into the supply room. Emma turned back to the intake screen. She typed in her password. Deleted it. Typed it again. *Same as everyone else.* She thought about Ethan on the phone last week, voice stripped of whatever he used to sound like before the injury. He'd been calling to say he wouldn't make it home for Thanksgiving — work schedule, he said, though they both knew he didn't want to be in a town still covered in hockey posters. He was twenty-five years old and already talked like someone who had closed a door and bricked it over. She was not going to think about that right now. --- The first group arrived at nine-ten, a loose cluster of players in training gear, carrying the particular energy of people who had somewhere important to be and knew it. They were louder than regular patients. Bigger. One of them — blond, probably a defenseman based on the sheer width of his shoulders — tried to flirt with her during intake. "You going to the game tonight?" "Arm out, please." She wrapped the blood pressure cuff without looking up. "I can get you tickets. Good seats." "Breathe normally." "Does that mean you're considering it?" "It means breathe normally so I can get an accurate reading." He grinned and did what she asked. His blood pressure was fine. They were all fine — healthy twenty-year-olds at the peak of their physical conditioning, and the whole exercise was bureaucratic box-checking more than actual medicine. Emma processed them efficiently, made small talk when required, and didn't think about anything beyond the next form. By ten-thirty, she had cleared thirty-one players. She was updating the log when the door opened again, and she registered the shift before she registered the reason for it — the way the remaining guys in the waiting area straightened slightly, a subtle collective adjustment, like something had changed in the room's gravity. She didn't look up immediately. She finished typing the entry, set down her pen, and then looked up. Noah Hayes was taller than she'd expected, though she wasn't sure why she'd expected anything. She'd spent two years carefully not forming a detailed picture of him. He wore the same training gear as everyone else, but there was something in the way he stood that was different from his teammates — unhurried, contained, like he had never in his life needed a room's attention and had therefore never learned to perform for it. He handed his intake form to the check-in table without being prompted. Then he glanced toward the vitals station. Their eyes met. Emma had imagined this moment, in the peripheral way you imagine things you're trying not to think about. She'd assumed she'd feel anger, the clean sharp kind that had kept her warm through two years of watching her brother rebuild himself from the inside out. What she actually felt was stranger than that. More complicated. Noah Hayes didn't look guilty. He didn't look apologetic. He looked at her the way she was looking at him — like someone who had also known this moment was coming and had also made a decision about what his face would do when it arrived. Neither of them smiled. The intake assistant gestured him toward Emma's station. He picked up his form and walked over.