Chapter 12
MATEO
The bus leaves at seven Friday morning, and I’m there at six forty-five because I’m always there first. And also because I didn’t sleep.
I find a seat near the back, put my headphones in and watch the team load on. Mercer loud from the moment he steps through the door, Barrett still half asleep, Chen with his coffee and his book and his complete calm that I find both admirable and slightly irritating that early in the morning.
And then Elida.
She comes on with Calloway - dark jacket, hair up. She scans the bus and her eyes find mine briefly before her gaze drops and she takes a seat three rows ahead.
I stare out the window.
Outside the campus is dark and the path lights are still on. I watch it slide past as the bus pulls out.
The thing about being on a bus with someone you can’t stop thinking about is that you’re on a bus. There’s nowhere to go. It’s hours of highway and the awareness of her that I’ve stopped being able to turn off.
She doesn’t look back.
Chen drops into the seat beside me after an hour and opens his book. We sit in comfortable silence for a while.
Then he says, “you good for today?”
“Yeah.”
“Scouts will be there.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been skating well.”
“I know.”
Outside, the highway opens up grey and endless. I think about scouts and the window that doesn’t stay open forever. Underneath all of that, I think about the week of careful professional distance that has somehow been harder to take than the weeks of open hostility.
At least when she was pushing back I knew where I stood.
All I know is I need to play the best hockey of my season and I need to do it while she’s sitting somewhere in those stands watching.
Which is either going to help or destroy me and I genuinely don’t know which.
I close my eyes.
Two hours to Ridgewood.
ELIDA
I can feel him back there.
That’s the absurd part. The bus is full and Calloway is beside me talking through the game plan yet I’m aware of exactly where Mateo Russo is sitting.
“You seem tired,” he says.
“Long week.”
He nods and goes back to his notes.
The hotel is a Marriott on the edge of Ridgewood.
It’s the kind of place that exists purely to be functional.
We check in and Calloway runs a brief team meeting in the conference room.
There’s nothing I need to contribute to, and then there are a few hours before the evening game. The team disperses.
I take my key card and find my room.
Room 214.
I wonder which room he’s in and then I’m annoyed that I’m wondering that.
My phone buzzes.
Jake.
Good luck tonight. Let me know how they get on.
Thanks, I type back. Will do.
MATEO
Forty minutes to game time.
I find the stairwell at the end of the corridor, sit on the third step, and put my head in my hands.
There are scouts in the building.
I know they’re here because Calloway mentioned it so casually in the team meeting - I know he didn’t want me to freak out about it. But it was like he was saying it directly to me - “Scouts, Russo. If you want to get signed, DO something about it!”
Good version: I play well. They notice. Someone makes a call.
Bad version: I play the way I’ve been playing so far - a good captain, good enough play but not good enough or close enough for people making those decisions.
They’ll scratch me off and go back to whoever else is on their list and I’ll finish this season and graduate and that’s it.
That’s the whole thing. I become someone who almost made it, who was close, who had a shot and didn’t convert, and I spend the next forty years at some desk somewhere being the guy who used to play hockey.
Maybe I can brag about it at the water cooler.
Or have a son I can push too hard and live vicariously through.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.
I’m the captain.
I don’t spiral. That’s not what I do. I get on the ice and I lead and I don’t let the weight of things show because the team is watching. The team needs to believe, and if I don’t believe, then no one does.
Except I’m in a stairwell and I can’t breathe properly.
The door opens.
Elida stands in the doorway - she takes in the sight of me. She doesn’t say anything for a moment.
Then she comes in and lets the door close behind her and sits down on the step beside me. She’s close enough that her shoulder is against mine. She doesn’t speak, just sits there, and I stare at the floor and try to find the breathing thing again.
“Sorry,” I say eventually.
“Don’t be.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to be fine.”
She’s looking straight ahead, elbows on her knees. She seems calm and unhurried.
“This might be… If this doesn’t go well tonight, I think that’s probably it for me. In terms of being seen. In terms of any of it.” I laugh, short and humorless. “It’s only college hockey, right?”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Minimize it. It’s not only college hockey. It’s your life. Your career. This is what you’ve been building since you were - what, six years old?”
“About that.”
“So don’t minimize it to make it hurt less. Own it. Own how much it matters.”
“It’s terrifying when something matters that much,” she says. “I know that. I know exactly what that feels like.”
“The competitions?”
“I used to get physically sick before major events. Not nerves exactly - more like my body trying to eject the pressure before I had to carry it onto the ice. My coach at the time told me to breathe through it. Told me the fear meant I cared and caring was the whole point.”
A shadow crosses her face when she says my coach - there and gone.
“Did it work?”
“Sometimes.” A small smile. “And sometimes I was sick and scared and I went out there anyway.”
“And?”
“And I skated,” she says simply. “Because that’s what you do. You leave it at the side and you play.”
“What if it’s not enough? What if I go out there tonight and give everything and it’s still just - not enough?” It’s the first time I’ve said that out loud to anyone, including myself.
“It will be. Go show them.” Simply. Like it’s a fact she’s stating.
Somewhere above us the rink is filling up. In thirty-five minutes I have to be a captain again. None of that feels quite as mammoth and impossible as it did ten minutes ago.
“Thank you. Really.”
She looks at me, and the distance between us is nothing, it’s been nothing for weeks. I lean in slowly, and she doesn’t move away. I press my lips to hers gently, and she kisses me back the same way.
No urgency. No interruption waiting to happen.
I pull back - she’s looking at me with an expression I don’t have a word for.
“Go play,” she says softly.
I stand up.
I offer her my hand and she takes it. I pull her to her feet and we stand close for one more second in the stairwell light.
“Elida…”
“Go,” she says. But she’s smiling.
I go.
ELIDA
I stand in the stairwell after he’s gone and press my back against the wall.
Own it. Own how much it matters.
I said it to him but I felt it land somewhere in my own chest too.
I straighten my jacket and go find my seat.
MATEO
I leave everything in the stairwell and I play.
My play is different tonight.
I feel it in the first shift - the edges clean and precise under me, the reads coming before the plays develop, my body doing what I ask it without argument or lag or that fraction of resistance I’ve been fighting all season.
I’m not thinking about technique. I’m not thinking about scouts - only the puck and the next play.
It’s just hockey.
But it’s the best hockey I’ve played in a long time.
We score in the first - Grant, off a setup I made without thinking. I can hear the stands but I skate back into position without looking up.
We score again in the second.
This one is mine - a transition that opens up because I find the angle and the shot goes where I put it. The red light comes on and the noise hits me like a wall.
Then Chen crashes into me from behind and Barrett from the side and someone is shouting in my ear. I’m laughing - it feels so bright and real.
We hold it through the third.
Final buzzer. 3-1.
The bench clears onto the ice and it’s the beautiful chaos of a team that really, really needed this. I take it in for a moment, standing there while it happens around me.
Then I find her.
She’s come down to the glass, standing at the boards with Calloway.
I skate over - she’s grinning at me. I don’t think about it, I open the gate and pull her in for a hug.
It’s less exuberant but more certain. She knows it too - I can feel it in the way she holds on for a second longer than last time. Around us the team is celebrating.
“Good win,” she says, into my shoulder.
We pull back and look at each other for a second that contains way more than we can say, and then Barrett appears and throws his arm around my neck and drags me back into the chaos.
I go with him, smiling. The scouts are somewhere in this building, and I don’t care, I genuinely don’t care right now.
I’ll care tomorrow.
Tonight I just want this.
ELIDA
The team finds a bar two blocks from the hotel.
The celebrating starts before we’ve even got our coats off. Tara appears beside me within minutes with two drinks and an expression of complete delight.
“That was incredible!”
We find a spot near the wall. I watch Mateo across the room.
He’s with Chen and a couple of others, relaxed in a way I’ve only seen a handful of times, the captain-mode dialed down for one night. He laughs at something Chen says.
Calloway appears beside me briefly.
“Brilliant result.”
“Absolutely.”
He nods once and looks across the room and then back at me with an expression that is kind and professional.
“Get some rest. Long bus home tomorrow.”
I watch him go, and when I look back across the room, Mateo is looking at me.
I hold his gaze for a moment.
Then Tara says something, and I turn toward her, and when I glance back he’s talking to someone else.
My heart is doing the thing it’s been doing for weeks. The rest of me isn’t far behind. Tonight I think I’m going to stop arguing with both of them.