2. Nova
Chapter two
Nova
My system works.
New room. New exits. New faces.
I clock them before I clock anything else, because wanting to belong has never helped me survive one. Under ten minutes. I’m oriented, and ready.
Always.
Military-kid with muscle memory. The kind you build when you spend half your life being the new person and learn very quickly that nobody’s coming to make it easier.
Keep your head straight, Nova. The Cyclones arena is just another room.
I tell myself that on the drive over. In the parking lot. While I’m setting up in the press area with my recorder, my work notebook, my backup pen, my backup backup pen, and the camera, because I shoot my own stills when I can.
Riley calls it initiative. I just prefer not depending on somebody else to catch the part that matters.
Usually that kind of focus is enough. his morning, apparently, not so much.
What I’m definitely not doing is thinking about the grocery store—or the fact that I beat a man built like a loading dock in open fluorescent combat over cat food and enjoyed every minute of it.
I am especially not thinking about his shoulders straining that dress shirt.
None of that’s relevant.
The team comes out for warmups and I get to work.
Except.
No, actually, give me a second.
I’ve been covering sports for more than four years. I know exactly how good professional athletes look, especially when they’re stretching. I have been in press boxes and locker rooms and on sidelines with men who treat their bodies like custom-built weapons. I am not new here.
But somehow this is an active problem.
Brody comes out first and immediately drops into a hip flexor stretch that should probably require a waiver. He folds himself in half like his hamstrings were handcrafted by angels, holds it, comes back up, does the other side.
Zero strain. Zero acknowledgment that a normal person would need medical imaging after that.
I take a picture.
Professionally.
Sebastian and Caleb follow, doing something with resistance bands that I am going to classify as hockey and leave it right there because I’m a journalist and, in theory, an adult.
Liam Steele steps onto the ice and I watch him for a full ten seconds before I remember I’m holding a camera. He moves like gravity is for people with less confidence.
I take several very serious photographs of the ice.
I am checking light.
Then—
Holy shit.
How the hell is he here?
The grocery store guy comes out of the tunnel and my brain leaves the chat.
Him.
The man from the cat food aisle.
Who is he and why don’t I know about him?
He looks different in all that padding. But he has the same dirty brown hair a little longer on top. Sharp through the jaw in a way that should be illegal this early in the day. Full gear. Pads. Gloves. All that size somehow even worse on ice.
For one ridiculous second I just stare.
My camera follows him before I fully decide to let it.
He moves to the crease and drops into a butterfly stretch with the kind of unhurried ease that feels frankly disrespectful to the rest of us trapped in ordinary bodies.
His jersey lifts slightly at the back.
Just enough to be a problem.
I take a shot.
For compositional purposes.
He comes back up, rolls his right shoulder—then drops back down. Goes onto his back. Starts hip rotations with a fluidity that should not exist in a man that size.
I take another shot.
And another.
This is already embarrassing.
Then he goes into a full split.
I lower the camera.
I raise it again because I am here to work and not to stand in media row having a full internal collapse over a man I assaulted with a grocery basket less than twenty-four hours ago.
He leans forward into the stretch and his whole back shifts under the jersey.
Those arms.
Of course.
That tracks.
I put the camera down and look at the rafters for a second like there might be adult supervision up there.
Okay.
Fine.
I’m a professional.
He’s standing now, back in the crease, tracking a puck through the drill. Completely still before it comes and then suddenly not still at all, the save and the recovery and the reset happening so fast my brain misses half of it the first time.
I forget to shoot.
Just stand there watching like an idiot with my mouth slightly open and no excuse ready if anyone asks.
When I do finally hit the shutter, I’m photographing the wrong player.
Amazing, Nova.
Then, because my brain is committed to making this a terrible morning, Griffin Novak voice clouds my thoughts entirely.
The Cyclones are a joke.
Expansion team playing dress-up.
Kat threw her whole career away going there.
He said it over dinner six weeks in. Casual. Like cruelty only counts if you raise your voice first.
Using his own sister as a punchline about a team he’s already decided didn’t deserve respect.
That was the night I started paying attention.
Griffin.
Who I was seeing at the time.
Who I believed was a source and a person worth trusting in the same breath.
Same mistake.
Twice.
I heard what he said and took it as direction.
After a year of cleaning up the wreckage of my own judgment—the kind that starts with leaving and gets worse before it gets better—I looked into the job.
Researched. Applied. Put the portfolio together. Sat across from Riley Stevens while she looked through my work for four minutes and then asked when I could start.
And that was that.
I did that myself.
Nobody handed me anything. Nobody pulled strings. Griffin Novak’s narcissistic need to be right about everyone accidentally pointed me toward a door, and I was smart enough to walk through it.
I am very good at finding doors.
What I am less good at, apparently, is forgetting that I already have history here.
With the team.
With the story.
With the piece I wrote two seasons ago—because I needed it, and trusted that asshole for too long.
My name is on it. And now I’m here. Credential around my neck. Notebook open. Acting like I belong in this building without that following me in.
That shame sits differently than panic.
Lower. Hotter. Harder to explain.
My press credential sits next to my recorder.
Nova Shaw.
V. North stayed in Tampa. That’s the whole point. Reclaim myself. Put that version of me to sleep—the one that mistook motion for safety and distance for control—my clean start.
Nova Shaw is here to do better.
Back to work.
Brody first. He gives me three times what I asked for and several bits I absolutely did not ask for. I already know I’m going to have to fact-check half of it, but at least one quote is usable and somehow I also now know his grandmother’s views on pasta water.
Sebastian and Caleb together because they move like a shared bad decision and I’m not untangling that before noon. I get enough on record from both of them that they’re definitely going to regret by dinner.
Liam Steele gives me four words in response to one question, and those four words are worth more than everything Brody said combined.
I’m good at this.
I know how to walk into a room and make people let me in.
What I cannot seem to do is keep my camera off grocery store guy for longer than about forty-five seconds.
He’s running drills now—reading shooters, tracking the puck, the particular full-body attention of a man whose job is to know where disaster is headed before it gets there.
He goes completely still before every shot.
Like the whole rink pauses around him.
Then he moves.
And it’s a lot.
I pick up my work notebook and force myself to write something useful.
Read it back.
Technically accurate. Completely dead.
Because what I want to write is that there is something unnerving about a man who wastes that little. That every movement of his looks chosen. That it is extremely inconvenient to be this aware of someone before I even know his name.
Instead I close the notebook.
Wrong thought process. Wrong century. Wrong profession.
I finish the morning. Pack up my recorder, my work notebook, the backup pen that rolled under the table, camera back in the bag.
Thorough.
Professional.
Almost at the door, I stop.
Open the personal notebook.
Write three lines.
The man in the dress shirt.
The way he fought for nothing and still somehow made losing look deliberate.
Rock-paper-scissors. I won.
I stare at the page.
Wrong notebook.
I cross the lines out hard enough to score the paper.
I’m almost at the door for the second time when I remember the roster. Standard prep. I’ve got some of them down, but all the faces need names before tomorrow.I sit back down. Open my laptop. Pull up the team page.
Forwards. Defense. Name, position, number, face.
I move through it quickly.
Then the goalie.
Standard team photo. Jersey. Neutral expression.
I stare at the screen.
No.
No way.
The grocery store. The basket. The can.
Oh my God.
I made Jax Mercer play rock-paper-scissors for cat food.
I close the laptop.
Open it.
Close it again.
And there it is.
The full collision.
Grocery store guy has a name.
Jax Mercer.
And my name on that hit piece that smeared him.
“Good one, Nova.”
Out loud. To nobody.
I sit in my car in the arena parking lot with the engine off and the Florida heat pressing against the windshield and my credential still hanging around my neck like evidence.
I knew I was coming here. I knew I’d be around the team. I knew I’d have to live with the old piece sitting in the background like a stain.
What I did not know was that grocery store guy was Jax Mercer.
That part feels like karma coming for me.
I changed my name to get out from under one version of myself. Put V. North to bed. Start over clean.
And now here I am, sitting in a parking lot with my recorder and my notebook and my full embedded access and absolutely no way to un-steal a man’s cat food or unpublish my own terrible decisions.
I drive home with my brain chewing on the same five humiliating details.
She’s on the steps when I pull up.
Small. Gray. Scruffy in the way that suggests life has been both rude and consistent about it. One ear nicked. Ribby under the fur. Sitting there like she owns exactly nothing and answers to even less.
She’s been showing up around dinnertime for a week and a half now, which does not make us bonded, attached, or in any way a heartwarming story. It makes me a woman who puts food out for a feral alley cat and gets tolerated in return.
I named her Dina three days ago, which she has done absolutely nothing to earn except continue existing with the kind of grim little refusal I recognize on sight. I put the bowl down three feet away and sit on the step above it. She waits until I stop moving.
That part feels personal every time.
Then she comes forward and eats without looking at me once, like eye contact would be an unnecessary intimacy and we are nowhere near that kind of relationship.
Fair enough.
I blurt out everything anyway.
Griffin. The piece. The roster photo. The exact moment my stomach dropped out in the parking lot.
She keeps eating like none of this is her problem, which, to be fair, it isn’t.
I save Jax Mercer for last because I would still like to preserve at least one molecule of self-respect if possible. That effort fails almost immediately. I tell her about the way he moved on the ice this morning and hate myself for how specific I get.
Dina finishes eating, offers no emotional support whatsoever, and disappears into the dark like a tiny, underfed therapist with terrible boundaries.
I sit on the step for a while.
I’m used to that.