5. Nova
Chapter five
Nova
Ididn’t plan to tell her anything.
I definitely didn’t plan to keep talking.
Aurora asked one question with her face and my mouth just kept going.
I have now told Jax Mercer’s sister that I think her brother is interesting, and I can’t take it back.
She has the kind of warmth that makes you hand her the truth without ever feeling cornered into it.
Which would be great if I wasn’t currently doing exactly that.
I’ve been talking for eleven minutes straight .
I know this because I checked the clock at two minutes when I realized I was still going on, and I have not been able to stop since.
She hasn’t interrupted me once. That’s the problem. Most people fill the space. Ask the next question. Push. She just leaves it there. Like whatever I say is enough. And somehow that makes me say more, not less. Aurora’s quiet, turning her coffee cup between her hands.
“He’s been holding everything together since we were kids,” she says. “He built this team from nothing. He even left a better contract to do it. Never once asked anyone to notice.”
“Wow.”
I choose not to ask how. That feels smarter. Safer. Which probably tells me everything I need to know about the kind of mood I’m in.
“He’s a good man,” Aurora says, like I should already know that.
I look up, then stare back into my coffee.
“That’s what I love most about my brother,” she says. “He’s not loud about caring. He just shows up until you realize he’s been there the whole time.”
There’s something uniquely unpleasant about hearing a simple truth when you are not remotely equipped to deal with it. Especially when it comes attached to the brother of the woman saying it. Especially when that brother has already ended up under my skin.
I’m a journalist with full access to this team. I am sitting across from the goalie’s sister—still going, somehow, saying more than I meant to.
“Another coffee?” Aurora says.
“Please,” I say.
Team dinner that night.
Long table. Full chaos. Brody at one end holding court, Sebastian and Caleb doing something inadvisable with the bread rolls, Liam at the other end, quiet as usual and still somehow pulling the table toward him.
Katarina sits next to him like she’s seen all of this before and stopped fighting it years ago.
I’m at the far end. Recorder, notebook, professional distance. I’m doing my job. I am completely on the correct side of the line.
The bread basket starts at Brody’s end and makes its way down the table, hand to hand. I’m watching Caleb say something to Sebastian that makes Sebastian inhale half his water when the basket lands in front of me.
I look up to say thank you.
He’s already looked away. Back to whatever Aiden was saying. Easy. Natural. Like passing bread to the journalist at the end of the table meant absolutely nothing. I hold the bread.
I have feelings about the bread. I am not getting into that right now. What I will say, purely as an observer of human behavior, is that he made a point of not making it a thing. Which somehow makes it more of a thing.
I eat the bread.
I’m fine.
That is, in fact, a lie, but it is a good one and I’m sticking with it.
The first road trip comes faster than I’m ready for.
Charter plane at six a.m., which should be illegal, and Brody, who is somehow already loud at six a.m., which should also be illegal.
The hotel is aggressively air-conditioned in the specific way of hotels that have given up on nuance and committed fully to cold.
I did not pack for this. I packed for Florida, because I live in Florida, and Florida does not do this.
Brody lends me his Cyclones hoodie without making it weird, because underneath all the noise he is, unfortunately, a very good person.
It hits mid-thigh. It is the warmest thing I have ever worn.
I am not thinking about the fact that it says CYCLONES across my chest.
I’m not.
That would imply I am having a reaction to wearing team gear in a team hotel while thinking entirely too much about the team’s goalie, and I reject that on principle.
Right now all I can think about is the fact that I need sugar. The vending machine is at the end of the hall. I’m going to get some, come back, and go to sleep like a professional.
I pull the hoodie on and head out.
The hallway’s narrow and quiet.
Most of the team’s asleep or close to it. Ice baths run late on travel days—Coach’s rule—and the guys who’ve done theirs are back in their rooms by now. The hallway has that late-night hotel silence where everything gets swallowed by carpet.
I’m almost at the vending machine when I hear the elevator.
I turn the corner.
He’s there.
Damp hair. Towel across his shoulders. Walking down the hall like he knows exactly where he’s going and has never once needed to second-guess his place in the world.
I almost plow right into him.
His hand comes up—automatic, fast—one palm on my upper arm, steadying me before I fully register what just happened.
We’re close. Closer than the boards. Closer than the grocery store.
The hall is narrow. There is nowhere to put a polite amount of distance.
His hand is on my arm.
Neither of us moves.
I look up.
He looks down.
One second.
The hand doesn’t move.
Two seconds.
I am very aware of exactly where his hand is.
Which is not helpful.
It is in fact, the least helpful thing my brain could be doing right now.
Something in the air between us shifts in a way I am going to need several hours and a different notebook to deal with.
I say something — sharp, probably funny, I couldn’t tell you what, because the part of my brain that does that runs completely independent of the part currently fixating on the exact placement of his hand.
It lands. He almost smiles.
And I file that away as a win I absolutely do not need it to be.
Then he says my name.
Just my name.
One syllable.
Not a question. Not a greeting. Just—Nova.
Like he’s confirming something to himself.
That is not a normal way to say someone’s name.
I would like to return to normal immediately.
His hand is still on my arm, and this is the real problem — not that he’s touching me, not even that I like it, but that nothing about it feels accidental or careless or casual in the way I’ve trained myself to dismiss the rest of it.
It feels deliberate. Steady. Like he’s been paying attention this whole time and only just let me catch him at it.
That’s so much worse.
I say something else. My mouth’s still running and I have no idea what it’s saying at this point.
Then he lets go. Steps back.
“Have a good night,” he says.
“Yeah, you too” I say.
He goes to his room.
I go to the vending machine.
I stand there for a while looking at the options without seeing any of them.
I get something. I couldn’t tell you what. Something with sugar. I walk back to my room.
I lie down on the bed in Brody’s hoodie and stare at the ceiling.
I think about one hand on one arm — approximately four seconds of contact — on a loop, for two hours.
Without making progress on any front.
Well that’s not entirely true.
What I make progress on, unfortunately, is admitting that the problem is not just that he touched me.
It’s that he touched me like it mattered where his hand landed. Like he knew exactly how much pressure to use. Like he was making sure I was steady before he worried about anything else.
That’s the sort of thing a woman can lose sleep over even when she has better reasons not to.
Then my phone lights up.
I turn my head.
Notification.
The piece I wrote on him two seasons ago—the one Griffin fed me, the one I knew felt wrong, the one I ran anyway—reposted by a rival outlet.
With my full name on it.
Sitting there in the dark like a verdict.
I look at it for a long time.
His hand on my arm.
My name sitting on the article like evidence.
Both true at the same time.
That should not feel like being split clean down the middle.
It does.
I turn the phone face down.
Stare at the ceiling.
Great job, Nova.
Really nailed that.
I should tell him.
Obviously.
That would be the clean thing. The adult thing. The thing a person with no career complications and a functioning conscience would do.
But I have full embedded access, a recorder in my bag, and a job I already know I am dangerously close to screwing up.
Also, we have known each other for exactly one stolen-cat-food argument.
There is no version of ‘by the way, I may have contributed to your professional trauma package’ that lands well at a hotel vending machine at midnight.
So I do what I always do when something is too big to touch.
I put it somewhere I can pretend is temporary.