33. Nova
Chapter thirty-three
Nova
He puts the Post-it on the crate between us.
I look at it. Brick, drawn in three lines, looking exactly like Brick looks when he’s decided someone isn’t meeting expectations. The considering tilt. The half-closed eyes. Acceptable underneath in my handwriting.
He carried this in his gear bag for three weeks without noticing. Through the whole postseason and every practice in between. Just — there. In his bag. My handwriting. My cat drawing. My word.
I pick it up.
“I keep building the wall up and then wondering why I can’t see anything,” I say.
He doesn’t soften it. Says I shut him out, and that it was real, and I don’t argue, because it was. But then he tells me he watched me choose him every time that mattered — that maybe he’d been measuring the wrong thing the whole time.
It lands somewhere I don’t have armor for.
“I’m not the same person who ran that piece,” I say.
“I know. You proved it. Every day since you got here.”
The tunnel goes quiet. The good kind — the kind that settles when two people stop arguing with something that’s already true.
“I don’t know how to stay,” I say. My voice goes thin the way it does when I’m trying not to turn it into a joke. “I’m scared it’ll get hard and I’ll handle it alone and shut you out, and you’ll be standing in a tunnel watching me disappear.”
“Nova.”
Just my name. Not sharp. Not soft. Steady.
I swallow.
“You don’t want to leave us,” he says.
I look at him. Like he just took the whole spiral out of my hands and set it down on the floor.
“You don’t get to decide that for me,” I whisper.
“I’m not deciding,” he says. “I’m hearing you.”
The tunnel goes quiet.
“I don’t want to leave us,” I say.
The words feel like stepping onto ice and not knowing if it’s going to hold.
He holds his hand out. Not a test. Not a demand. Just there.
I put mine in it.
The scarred one. The certain one — the one that’s been catching pucks for four seasons in this building, that retaped the blocker at every stoppage for two years managing something nobody named until I did. That hand is holding mine and it isn’t performing certainty. It just is.
That’s the difference. That has always been the difference.
I hold on.
There’s a Cup Final banner at the far end of the hall.
I don’t know when they put it up — sometime in the last week, the city decorating itself with belief before it had proof. Blue and white. The Cyclones logo. CUP FINAL in letters big enough to read from here.
I was here before this banner existed. Before anyone outside Canyon Bay believed it could. Back when this building was still just a place I knew how to leave.
Neither of us says anything about it.
We don’t have to.
It’s right there.
Game 5 morning.
His kitchen. My coffee. Brick doing the weaving thing between my feet like he’s been doing it for months, which he has.
Jax is at the counter reading something on his phone that makes him set it face down after three seconds.
“Hendricks again?” I say.
“Hendricks again.”
“What’d he say this time.”
“That our goalie is playing above his level and will regress to the mean in a decisive game.” He picks up his coffee. “Saved it.”
“For the folder.”
“Folder’s full. New document.”
I look at him over my coffee. There’s this specific feeling — watching a man be exactly who he is, all this time, and still gets you. The certainty of him. The way he files things without drama. The way he just — keeps going.
“You’re going to win tonight,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Not a question,” I say.
The corner of his mouth. “Keep it.”
I keep it.
I bring both notebooks to the game.
The professional one and the personal one. I set them side by side in the press box and look at them for a second — the whole season sitting in two small notebooks. Both of them mine. I stopped pretending one of them doesn’t count somewhere around month three.
I pick up my camera and go to work.
I do my job. Liam’s face between periods. Aurora in the family section, one hand on her belly, the other over her mouth. Brody doing something inadvisable in the defensive zone.
And Jax.
Thirty-one in his crease. Stopping everything. The ghost quiet — I can tell by the ease of him, the absence of that micro-hesitation I’ve been watching for months.
The building isn’t holding its breath anymore. It’s exhaling.
The Cyclones win Game 5 3-1.
Series is 3–2 now. One more game.
After the buzzer the celebration erupts and I photograph it — the bench, the ice, the families section — and I’m doing my job and then I stop doing my job because he’s looking for me.
Not the way he used to look for me. Not the scan, the checking, the early-months habit of having to confirm I was still there. Just — his eyes coming up and finding mine the way they always do now, like it’s not a search anymore, like it’s just where he looks.
My camera drops to my side.
My hands aren’t steady.
He’s already walking.
Through the whole room. The team behind him — Brody yelling, Aiden sliding on his knees, Liam with both fists up. He walks through all of it. Gets to me.
Cups my face in his hands, and looks at me.
Then he kisses me.
Right there. In front of everyone. His team, the cameras, Riley in the corner, Brody watching from three feet away like he’s been waiting for this since the grocery store.
I hold onto his jersey. He holds on.
The room keeps going around us, all that noise and celebration, and we are in the middle of it and neither of us is anywhere else.
When he pulls back, he’s looking at me. Just him. Certain. Here.
“One more,” he says.
“One more,” I say.
Brody, completely losing it: “FINALLY — wait we already did this — IT KEEPS HAPPENING AND I LOVE IT—”
Aiden, somewhere: “Brody.”
Brody: “I WILL NOT BE CALM ABOUT THIS.”
I start laughing. I can’t help it. Jax looks at me laughing and the corner of his mouth does the thing and I think — I am so in love with you — and I don’t say it out loud.
His house. Late.
Brick’s between us on the couch in the exact center, tail wrapped around his feet, positioned with the authority of a cat who has decided he is the furniture now. The city still going outside.
One game away from everything.
I open the personal notebook. Find the page. The word in the middle — my handwriting, fast and slightly slanted, the kind I use when I’m done being careful.
Stay.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I write it again. Same page. Underneath.
Bigger.
I put the notebook on the coffee table. Open.
He doesn’t look at it. Doesn’t comment. Doesn’t make it a thing.
He just sits there — his arm along the back of the couch behind me, not touching me, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him anyway.
The specific way he takes up space near me that I stopped noticing three months ago because it just became the way rooms feel.
I look at the word on the page.
Then I lean back into him.
His arm comes around like it was already on its way.
We sit there while the city celebrates outside and Brick arranges himself across both our laps and the notebook sits open on the table with the word written twice.
One more game.
Game 6. Cup Final. The Reapers on our ice. Sixty minutes. Whatever comes after.
His arm is around me. The word is on the page in front of us, written twice, in my handwriting, and he still hasn’t looked at it and he doesn’t need to.
I close my eyes, tomorrow night Jax Mercer is going to fight for the Stanley Cup. And I am going to be there. Not as a journalist. Not watching it.
Just there.
Holding on.