18. Nova
Chapter eighteen
Nova
Blank document.
I’ve been staring at it for twenty minutes and I have written exactly nothing. I have been a journalist for four years and this has never happened to me before.
That’s not true. It happened once. Griffin fed me an angle and I couldn’t make it sit right on the page and I ran it anyway because the byline mattered more than the feeling in my gut that something was wrong.
I know what that feeling means now.
I close the laptop. Open it immediately like that helped. I’ve been a journalist for four years and this is apparently where we are.
The press box hums around me. Game prep happening below. The ice getting its final treatment before warmups. I have my recorder and my notebook and my backup pen and my whole professional system fully operational and I cannot write a single word of this piece.
That’s information.
I just don’t know what to do with it yet.
The network wants the personal angle piece.
My editor has been wanting it for weeks — since the first photo of us started making the rounds — and her phone hasn’t stopped since.
Biggest byline of my career sitting right there — journalist embedded with Cup contenders, the relationship that developed, exclusive access, the whole story — and all I have to do is write it.
I open the document.
Type his name.
Stop.
I’ve done this four times this morning. Four times I get as far as Jax and then I just — stop. Sit there with his name on the screen and think about the coffee cup on his counter and the shirt I’m still wearing sometimes and the thing I still haven’t told him sitting under all of it.
What exactly am I supposed to write here.
Journalist with complicated history embeds with team, falls for goalie, neglects to mention the piece she wrote two seasons ago that almost got him traded.
That’s a story.
Just not the one my editor is asking for.
I close it. The document autosaves. Great. Now it exists.
Warmups.
I pick up the Nikon because that’s what I do — camera up, lens between me and the thing I’m trying not to feel.
I frame Jax in the crease. The pre-shot stillness.
The blocker tape. The specific switch that flips before the first shot of the day — I’ve watched it happen enough times now that I can see it coming before it does.
I hold the frame.
Put the camera down without shooting.
Aurora appears beside me with two coffees like she materialized out of the Florida air.
She’s been doing this — showing up when I need her without me saying I need her.
I don’t know if Jax told her something or if she just pays attention or if this is what it looks like when someone actually gives a damn about you on a consistent basis.
I’m still learning to recognize that.
She holds one out.
“You didn’t shoot,” she says.
“I know.”
“That’s new.”
“Is it.”
“You always shoot warmups. First thing. Camera up before you even have coffee.”
I take the coffee. Look at the ice. At him in the crease running rotations. “Maybe I just wanted to watch.”
Aurora is quiet for a second.
“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe.”
We stand there drinking our coffee and neither of us says anything else and that’s the thing about Aurora — she knows when to push and when to just stand next to you with coffee and let you figure it out yourself.
I figure nothing out.
But I feel slightly less like I’m doing it alone.
They win it in regulation.
Conference Final bound.
The locker room is insane — I can hear it from the hall, that specific quality of loud that means something has shifted, something has become real in a way it wasn’t before.
I stand outside the door and hear Liam’s voice through it.
Five sentences.
I don’t write them down. Once, I would have. I would have reached for my notebook, captured the shape of it, turned it into something useful.
Now I just stand there and listen.
Some things aren’t for the page. I know that now. Maybe I had to come here with my backup pen and my backup backup pen and my system for every room to learn the difference.
The system still works.
It just doesn’t get everything anymore.
The door swings open and it’s chaos and I’m back to being a journalist.
Brody finds me first. Of course he does.
He’s still going — voice hoarse, eyes bright, completely unable to contain any of it — and I get my recorder up and let him talk because Brody talking is always good material and also because it gives me something to do with my hands that isn’t thinking about the blank document.
Sebastian and Caleb are doing something inadvisable in the corner that I photograph from three angles because I am thorough and also because I need to look like I know what I’m doing in this room right now.
Liam gives me one sentence.
It’s better than everything else combined.
In the chaos he turns.
I don’t know why I notice it — there are forty people in this room, players and staff and the specific electric energy of a team that just punched their ticket to the Conference Final — but I notice it. He turns and his eyes find me across the room and they stay there for exactly one second.
One second.
Then Brody’s on him and Aiden has him in a headlock and the moment’s gone.
The photo posts at eleven PM.
I’m in bed when it hits my phone. Aurora’s Instagram. The locker room celebration. The arena still losing its mind, and somehow she caught this one frame — Jax turning, me across the room, chaos behind us, both of us just — looking.
I stare at it for a long time.
I am professionally horrified.
I keep looking at it.
The thing about this photo is it doesn’t lie. That’s the thing about Aurora’s photography — she doesn’t dress things up. She just catches what’s there. And what’s there is a man who turned in the middle of everything and found me first and a woman who was already looking back.
Forty thousand people liked it.
I save it to my personal camera roll.
I immediately judge myself for doing that.
I do not delete it.
Then I see Griffin’s comment:
I see you’re covering more than just the game. ?? Good work NV.
NV.
His nickname for me. The one he used when we were together, six weeks of it, his voice saying it like he owned the abbreviation and everything attached to it.
Nobody else calls me that.
Nobody else would know to call me that unless they knew me as V. North first.
He’s letting me know he knows.
I go very still.
He’s seen the photo. He’s read the byline — Nova Shaw, not V. North — but he knows they’re the same person because he was there when I made the switch.
He watched me bury the pen name when I left Tampa.
And now he’s digging it back up.
For leverage.
For exactly this moment.
My hands are not steady on the phone.
I screenshot the comment.
Delete it from the photo.
Sit in the dark thinking about what it means that he’s watching this closely. That he commented publicly. That he used that name where anyone could see it even if only I would understand what it meant.
He wants me to know he’s watching.
He wants me to feel it.
I set the phone face-down on the counter.
Turn it over again ten seconds later.
Almost open a text to Jax.
Put it down.
Not yet. Not tonight. Not with the Conference Final starting and his head needing to be exactly where it needs to be and not on Griffin Novak and whatever game he’s playing from Tampa.
I’ll deal with it.
My editor texts at midnight.
Have you seen the Instagram photo? Network is calling. Please advise.
I stare at the ceiling.
Please advise.
I look at the photo one more time — the whole arena, the chaos, his eyes finding mine across all of it. One second. Aurora caught it and the whole hockey internet saw it and Griffin left a comment with a name only he knows and my editor wants me to advise her and I have nothing.
I put the phone face down. I open the blank document. Stare at it.
Type:
The first time I saw Jax Mercer he was in a dress shirt at nine PM in a grocery store and he let me win rock paper scissors.
I stare at that for a long time. Delete it. Close the laptop. Open my personal notebook. Write it there instead. Then I write three more lines that aren’t for anyone else and close the notebook.
Lie in the dark.
Think about Griffin’s comment. Think about forty thousand likes. Think about one second across a room full of chaos. Think about the name I buried sitting underneath all of it like a lit fuse I keep choosing not to touch.
I close my eyes.
I don’t sleep for what feels like forever.