11. Nova
Chapter eleven
Nova
He walks in and doesn’t react.
That’s the thing that gets me every time.
I’ve been sitting in Riley’s office for four minutes preparing for something — anything — and he walks through the door, sees me, and gives me absolutely nothing.
Right side of the table. Hands flat. Eyes on Riley.
Like I’m not even here.
Which is worse.
Riley has a plan. She always has a plan.
She lays it out the way she lays everything out — efficient, weather-report flat, no editorializing.
No comment from either party. No confirmation, no denial.
I keep my access. He keeps his privacy. We handle questions the same way: no comment, team policy, focus on the game.
“This works if you both commit to it,” she says. “It doesn’t work if either of you makes it complicated.”
Neither of us says anything.
“Good,” Riley says, like that was an answer.
She closes her laptop.
Twenty minutes. That’s all it takes to contain something that felt enormous at midnight in a parking lot.
We stand up at the same time. File out. The door shuts behind us.
The hallway is long and empty and neither of us planned to be alone in it.
We just turned the same direction.
My jaw is set. I know it’s set because I can feel it and I can’t seem to fix it and my pen is still in my hand because some habits don’t switch off. I look at him the way I look at a problem I’m working out — direct, no performance, not giving anything for free.
“We need to be careful,” I say.
“I know.”
“I mean it, Jax.”
“I know.”
He looks at me. Steady. Letting me check. I check.
“The photo,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“It looks—”
“I know what it looks like.”
He holds my gaze. Doesn’t look away. Neither do I.
The hallway tightens around it.
He’s close enough that I could reach for him. Close enough that I know exactly where my hand would land. Close enough that not touching him feels louder than touching him would.
I make the call. The slight shift in my weight, the pen tightening in my hand, the choice made and held.
We’re both making the same call.
Neither of us is happy about it.
Riley didn’t say don’t. She said be careful. I’m starting to understand those aren’t the same thing.
A door bangs open somewhere down the hall. Brody’s voice carrying — loud, cheerful, constitutionally incapable of reading a room he isn’t in. I glance that direction. Back to him.
“We need to be careful,” I say again.
Like I’m trying to convince myself this time.
“You said that already.”
“You needed to hear it twice.”
He looks at me. “Did it work?”
Something moves across my face. Quick. I pull it back before it becomes anything.
He sees it anyway.
I leave first.
The parking lot is full sun. Florida morning, already hot. My phone has been going since six AM. I was awake at five.
The photo is everywhere.
There’s no way to read it wrong. It looks exactly like it felt. That’s the problem.
I’ve seen it enough times now that I should be used to it. I’m not.
The second kiss — the slow, deliberate one that was a choice and now looks like one. I sit in my car and open it again. I told myself I wasn’t going to do that. I did it anyway.
The second I didn’t pull back. The part where neither of us did.
The angle of it makes my stomach turn over. Not because it’s blurry. Not because it can be misread. Because it can’t. It catches exactly what happened. Like it meant something. Like he knew it meant something.
No ambiguity. No space to pretend it was anything else.
Just me in an empty parking lot gripping his jacket like I forgot who I was for a second and didn’t particularly care.
My stomach does something sharp and immediate.
I ignore it. Keep looking.
A stranger took this. Someone far enough away to watch without being seen, close enough to catch the exact second where neither of us was pretending anymore. There’s something specifically awful about that — not just that it exists, but that it exists outside of me now. Outside of him.
I lock my phone. Unlock it again. Look at the photo one more time.
Then I put it face down in the passenger seat and stare through the windshield like that is a normal thing people do when they are absolutely fine.
Sixty seconds.
I need sixty seconds of not being somewhere that requires me to be a professional.
I let the minute run.
Then I go in.
My editor texted at seven. Call me when you can. I know what that means.
I set up. Recorder. Notebook. Backup pen. All the rituals. All the small pieces of competence I can stack between me and the fact that I am about to spend the day in the same building as the man whose mouth was on mine twelve hours ago.
Brody is the first person I see.
He has seen the photo.
I know immediately — he’s doing the thing. Too warm, too fast, talking about the upcoming road trip schedule like the information is urgent, like he’s been saving it for this exact moment.
Brody is many things. Subtle isn’t one of them.
“How’s the ankle?” I ask.
Twenty minutes of ankle. I write all of it down. My hands need something to do.
Liam gives me four words for the piece I’m building on team momentum. Then he gives me a look. The look is harder to decode than the four words. I write both down. The look goes in the personal notebook.
Then I do actual work for a while.
Transcribe Brody’s ankle update. Clean up Liam’s quote.
Tag two photos from warmups that my editor will want by lunch.
I build out three paragraphs on team momentum and delete two of them because they sound like they were written by a woman who got photographed kissing her source in a parking lot and is attempting journalism through blunt-force denial.
I start again. This version is better. Cleaner. Way less insane.
Forty seconds later my brain throws Jax Mercer into the middle of a sentence about defensive recovery and I have to backspace half a paragraph.
I take a sip. It’s terrible. I keep drinking.
Caleb says something to Sebastian at the far end of the rink and both of them laugh. I write down the drill note I actually need. I answer one email. I rename three audio files.
That’s the shape of the morning: work for two minutes, think about him for ten seconds, get annoyed with myself, go back to work, repeat.
Functional enough that nobody looking at me would know anything was wrong.
Chaotic enough on the inside that I start writing the word crease in my notes and nearly put kiss instead.
I do not love that for me.
By the time my phone lights up again, I’ve gotten a decent paragraph out of myself, captioned six photos, and spent an unreasonable amount of energy not looking across the rink unless I have a work-related excuse.
Aurora texts at ten. Coffee this week?
That’s it.
I stare at my phone. She’s seen the photo.
She has one hundred percent seen the photo.
She’s the sister of the man in the photo and she’s texting me about coffee like it’s a normal Tuesday in a normal week where I didn’t kiss her brother in a parking lot and end up in approximately forty-seven sports media outlets before breakfast.
She’s texting about coffee anyway.
I open my journal. Write one line. Close it. Keep moving.
I photograph warmups. He’s in the crease running rotations and I keep the camera on him and tell myself it’s for the piece on goalie preparation that I have been building for three weeks and this is partially true.
I can’t keep my eyes on the drill.
He catches me looking from across the ice. Doesn’t react. Goes back to his drill.
I capture shots of the boards for a while.
The day goes like that. Work. Him. Work. Him.
I get everything I need — Brody’s ankle update, Sebastian and Caleb doing something inadvisable that I photograph from three angles because I am thorough. I write my notes. I do my job.
My camera keeps ending up on him. I stop fighting it after a while.
Water break.
He skates to the boards. Stops in front of me. My recorder is in my hand. Notebook open. Professional distance fully operational. He looks at me for a moment. Not the reading-a-shooter look. Something quieter.
“You good?”
Two words. That’s it. Not about the photo. Not about Riley’s plan or the rival outlet or the comment nobody is making. Not about the parking lot or the kiss or any of it.
Just — you good.
Like I’m the thing he’s checking first.
“Yeah,” I say.
He nods once. Skates away. I stand at the boards. He asked if I was okay before anything else. Before the photo. Before the fallout. Before himself.
That’s what he does. And I don’t know what to do with that. I stand there for way too long with my recorder in my hand and nothing useful in my head.
The series clincher happens at nine forty-seven PM.
I’m looking at my watch when the horn sounds, so I know the exact time the arena comes apart.
The noise doesn’t just hit my ears. It enters my chest. Physically.
The building itself exhales, like everyone inside it has been holding the same breath for sixty minutes and finally lets it go all at once.
Round 1. Done. Cyclones advance.
The glass in front of me erupts. Players piling onto the ice, the bench clearing, Brody somewhere in the middle of it with both arms up screaming something nobody can hear over the crowd. Caleb is crying. Sebastian is pretending he isn’t crying and doing a terrible job of it.
I have my camera up. I am shooting everything.
I am also — and I notice this with the specific detachment of a person watching themselves from a short distance — genuinely moved.
Not as a journalist. Not because it’s a good story, though it is.
Because this building, this team, this ridiculous city that believed before anyone else did — they’ve gotten under my skin in a way I don’t know how to undo.
I look for him in the pile automatically. I don’t decide to. I just do.
He surfaces near the boards — teammates finding him, hands on his helmet, someone pulling him into a hug he accepts for exactly two seconds before he’s moving again. His eyes go to the family section first.
Aurora.
He finds her immediately. She’s on her feet, one hand pressed to her mouth, and he looks at her across the ice the way you look at the people who were there before any of it — before the number on the back, before the building, before the city that’s currently losing its mind around them.
She laughs. He doesn’t smile so much as something releases in his face. The careful goes somewhere and what’s underneath it is just — relief. Real and unmanaged and entirely his.
I shoot it without thinking. Then I pick up my personal notebook. Instead of opening it, I put it back in my bag.
Some things aren’t mine to keep.
I’m packing up alone in the press area. Recorder in the bag. Notebook closed. Almost done.
Katarina sits down next to me. Doesn’t ask. Just sits.
I keep packing.
“He doesn’t do things he doesn’t mean,” she says.
I look at her.
“Jax.” Like it’s obvious. “His whole career he’s done things he didn’t mean for other people. The team. The city. Anyone who needed something from him.”
She stands.
“He doesn’t do that for himself.”
She goes.
I sit there. My hands are still on the notebook. Not opening it.
He doesn’t do things he doesn’t mean.
The sentence lands again. Lower this time.
That’s the part I don’t want. Not the kiss. Not the photo. Not even the fallout. The possibility that he meant it and I believe he did.
I put one hand flat against the notebook. Then the other.
Grounding, apparently. Didn’t know I needed grounding. Good to know.
I don’t open it. I don’t write anything down. I sit with it exactly as it is. Because I know exactly what she’s saying. I just don’t want to follow it all the way through.
Eventually I stand. My legs feel normal. Annoyingly.
I leave.
Dina is on the steps when I get home. Nine PM, unbothered as ever.
I don’t bother with the bowl ritual tonight. I just sit, and she lets me, and that’s its own kind of strange.
It all comes out anyway. The photo. The parking lot. Riley’s three words landing like a door closing.
Aurora texting about coffee like we’re just normal people having a normal week. The series win and the noise in my chest that I wasn’t ready for. Him finding Aurora first across the ice — the specific look on his face when he did, the thing that went somewhere and left something realer behind it.
Dina finishes eating. Sits. Takes one step toward me. Stops. Disappears into the dark.
I sit there for a while.
I go inside. Open my personal notebook. Read the line I wrote this morning. Close it.
I pick up my phone. Look at the photo one more time. The way I didn’t pull back. The way he didn’t either.
I put it down. I don’t delete it.
My phone lights up.
Unknown contact — except it isn’t unknown. I put his number in three weeks ago and told myself it was professional, for the access, for the story, for any reason except the real one.
Brick sat in your spot on the couch tonight.
I read it twice.
I have never been to his place. I don’t have a spot.
I type three different replies. Delete all of them. I’m sitting on my kitchen floor and I don’t remember deciding to do that.
I stare at that for a long time.
Then I type:
Tell Brick I said that spot is disputed territory.
I hit send before I can talk myself out of it.
The reply comes less than a minute later.
Jax:
He says bring legal representation.
I laugh.
Out loud.
Alone on my kitchen floor with my phone in both hands and my heart doing something deeply inconvenient.
I should put the damn phone down.
I don’t.
For once, I let myself sit there and want the next message.