Chapter 12
Mara's office carried coffee, pine, and the faint ozone of a laptop running too long. Lex sat in the chair across from the desk with Goldie draped across her feet and watched Mara click through game footage on the screen, and she thought about how different this was from a month ago.
A month ago, these sessions had been war.
Mara pointing out every mistake with surgical detachment.
Lex arguing every correction with the stubborn fury of someone who'd been told her entire career that she was doing it wrong.
They'd circled each other like boxers in the early rounds, testing, jabbing, looking for weaknesses.
The tension had been unbearable, the kind she knew from the shift before a body check — braced, committed, no turning back.
Now the tension was still there. It hadn't diminished.
If anything it had deepened, matured, evolved from volatile and adversarial into richer and more dangerous.
But the sessions themselves had changed.
Mara praised her more. Not lavishly, never that, but with a quiet specificity that meant more than any compliment Lex had received in her career.
Your transition read in the second period was clean.
Your positioning on the defensive cycle was exactly right.
The pass to Camille was world-class. Small sentences delivered in Mara's low, steady voice, and each one pressed into Lex's chest like a warm stone.
She liked winning Mara's approval. She liked it too much. Mara, with her blue eyes and her sharp cheekbones and her grey-blonde ponytail and her coaching jacket zipped to the throat like armor she never quite brought herself to remove.
"This sequence here." Mara paused the footage.
On the screen, Lex was driving through the neutral zone, reading the defensive pairing, identifying the passing lane to Camille.
The play that had won them the game three days ago.
"Watch your body positioning as you enter the zone.
Shoulders square, stick loaded, eyes up.
That's elite-level spatial awareness. Four months ago you were chasing pucks like a retriever.
Now you're reading the ice like you've been doing it your whole life. "
Lex glanced at Goldie, asleep on her feet. "Did you just compare me to a retriever?"
"I compared past-you to a retriever. Present-you is considerably more sophisticated.
" The corner of Mara's mouth moved. Not quite a smile.
The ghost of one, suppressed before it could fully form.
Lex filed it away with all the other almost-smiles she'd been collecting since week one.
She had a private catalogue of them. The twitch when Lex caught her off guard.
The press of lips when Lex made her laugh and she refused to let it show.
The brief, unguarded flash when Lex nailed a drill and Mara forgot, for half a second, that she was supposed to be distant.
"Watch this next clip. Your defensive coverage in the third period." Mara clicked to the next timestamp and adjusted the screen angle.
They watched the clip. Mara narrated the positioning, the coverage zones, the moment where Lex had to choose between chasing the puck carrier and trusting the system.
Mara's voice in coaching mode was one of Lex's favorite things about these sessions.
The precision of it. The authority. The way Mara's hands moved over the trackpad with the same economy she brought to everything, no wasted motion, every gesture purposeful.
In the footage, Lex held her position, let the system work, and the interception came from Lou on the weak side, exactly as the coverage scheme predicted.
"You trusted the system," Mara said.
"I trusted you."
The words came out before Lex had approved them.
Neither of them reached for a follow-up.
The silence stretched, weighted with everything those three words had dragged into the open.
Mara's fingers stilled on the trackpad. Her blue eyes lifted from the screen and met Lex's, and neither of them breathed.
The air in the office thickened. The overhead light cast a warm circle around the desk, leaving the corners of the room in shadow.
Goldie shifted on her feet, dream-twitching, her collar jingling softly.
The laptop screen glowed between them with the frozen image of players on ice, but neither of them was looking at it anymore.
Lex wondered how long they were going to keep pretending.
How many more sessions they could sit across from each other with this charge building between them, this accumulating pressure that had nowhere to go except into arguments and loaded silences and moments like this one, where the professional script dissolved and what was left was two women sitting too close together in a quiet room, wanting what they weren't supposed to want.
"The system works because it's trustworthy," Mara said. Her voice was quieter than before. The coaching cadence had slipped into a register that was softer, more careful, as if each word was being weighed before release.
"So are you."
Another silence. Mara looked away first, pulling at the zipper of her jacket in the nervous gesture Lex had catalogued weeks ago. She clicked the laptop closed.
"That's the review. Good work this week. Genuinely."
Lex should have stood up. Should have thanked her, walked out, gone home to Elise and a beer and the safe distance of separate lives. Instead she stayed in the chair with Goldie warm on her boots and the quiet thickening around them like snow.
Lex leaned forward slightly, resting her forearms on her knees.
The movement brought her closer to the desk, closer to Mara.
The fine grain of Mara's skin was visible in the lamplight, the thin scar on her left eyebrow she'd never asked about, how her eyelashes caught the light when she blinked.
Details she'd been collecting without permission, filed in a part of her brain that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with wanting.
"Can I ask a personal question?"
Mara's eyes narrowed slightly. Not suspicion. Wariness. The automatic caution of a woman who kept personal questions in a locked box and rarely gave anyone the key. "Depends on the question."
“Tell me about your relationships. The serious ones. The real ones.”
The wariness deepened. Mara's shoulders rose a fraction, her posture tightening. She picked up her coffee mug, found it empty, set it down again. "There's not much to tell."
"That's not a no." Lex held Mara's gaze across the cluttered desk.
"It's not a yes, either." Mara exhaled through her nose, slow and controlled.
"I was married. Years ago. Jason. That was real. Or, I thought it was.” She stopped, her jaw tightening.
"But that was a different life. Since then — since I understood what I actually wanted — I've been focused on my career.
There have been people. Briefly. Nothing that lasted because I never let anything last. The game always came first."
"That sounds lonely."
The word made Mara flinch. A small contraction of her shoulders, so brief that anyone who wasn't watching her with the obsessive attention Lex had been paying for six weeks would have missed it.
"It sounds disciplined." But the correction lacked conviction.
Mara's expression was unguarded in a way Lex rarely saw, the mask thinned by the late hour and the quiet intimacy of the small office.
The clock on the wall read past nine. The arena was empty around them, the building creaking and settling into its nighttime rhythms, and they were the only two people left in it.
“Tell me about the thing you had with a woman.”
Mara took a deep breath, as if deciding whether to tell her or not. “Sara,” she said.
“I wouldn't call it a real relationship. She was my assistant coach. We were both married. Myself to Jason and Sara to Clive. We had some thing driven by passion and lust. It cost us both our marriages. It caused a big scandal. It didn't last, she left me for another man. It was a long time ago.”
"You should try it sometime," Lex said. "A real relationship. Letting someone in. You might like it."
Color spread across Mara's cheekbones. A slow, gorgeous flush that started at her jawline and climbed to her temples, and she pressed her lips together as if trying to physically hold the words back. "I'm not sure the timing has ever been right."
"Timing is an excuse." Lex's voice was low, steady.
"Timing is a factor."
Lex shifted in the chair, stretching her legs out, and the movement brought her knee close enough to brush against the side of the desk.
Close to Mara's leg on the other side. Not touching.
The possibility of touching. "What about you?
" Mara asked, and the question had the quality of a deflection, a conversational pivot designed to move the spotlight off herself. "Your relationship history."
"Girls happen to me," Lex said. "They always have.
Since I was eighteen and figured out what I wanted, there's been no shortage of interest. Teammates, opponents, fans.
I'm not good at turning people down when they're standing in front of me and interested.
So things start and they burn hot and they fade fast because I'm never all the way in. I'm always holding back."
"What are you holding back?"