36. Nova
Chapter thirty-six
Nova
I’m in the press box, crying in a completely unprofessional way.
I don’t even care.
My camera’s still up. My recorder’s still running. Somewhere under my palm, my notebook is open to a page I will probably never be able to read later because my hand is shaking too hard and there are tears running down my face and the Cyclones just won the Stanley Cup.
I was here for every second of it.
Some things are bigger than professionalism.
I photographed the whole game.
Every period. Every save — and there were thirty-eight of them, I counted, because I count things now the way I learned to count things watching him, the way you learn to pay attention to the things that matter when someone shows you how.
The glove save in overtime I got from three angles because my hands knew before my brain did that it was coming.
The ghost rose.
I saw it — the half-inch in the blocker hand, the hesitation that’s been there since before I arrived, the thing I named for him in a tunnel on a night when I put my camera in my bag and sat down next to him anyway.
He didn’t flinch.
He read it all the way in. Glove up. The puck stayed there and the arena exhaled all at once and I lowered my camera and pressed both hands flat on the press box railing and just stood there breathing.
I did that.
Not the save. Not the win. But the naming of it. I sat in a tunnel and I said the true thing and something settled in him that had been unsettled for two seasons.
I did that.
And then I watched him use it.
Aiden scores forty-one seconds later.
Top shelf. Two-on-one.
The horn goes and the building comes apart and somehow my camera keeps working even when the rest of me doesn’t.
I get Aiden with both arms up. The bench clearing. Brody launching himself into the pile like gravity is optional.
Liam with both fists raised — which might be the loudest thing I have ever seen him do.
Coach Barnes bent forward with his hands on his knees, head down for one private second before the room takes him too.
Aurora in the family section, both hands over her mouth, Aiden’s name stretched across her back, their baby not born yet but somehow already part of this.
I photograph until I can’t tell what’s tears and what’s camera blur.
I photograph all of it.
He surfaces from the pile.
I see it happen — the team peeling away one by one, the chaos redistributing, and then he’s there. Standing in his crease. Still in full gear. And he looks up.
The whole arena between us. Every camera in the building pointed somewhere else.
He finds the press box. He finds me. Like it’s not a search — like it’s just where he looks.
Something moves through me that I don’t have a word for yet — or I do, but feeling it and naming it are two different things and right now I’m just standing in a press box with the whole building roaring around me and the man I love is looking at me from across the ice and I lower my camera and I just look back.
I sit in the press box for a minute after.
I don’t move. I don’t reach for my recorder or my notebook or the professional version of myself that knows what to do next.
I just sit there with the celebration coming through the walls — this muffled enormous sound of something going exactly right — and I let it be real.
I named that ghost.
I sat in a tunnel without a recorder and said the true thing.
He carried it all the way to overtime.
He used it.
And now the building is losing its mind. Brody is crying. Liam has both fists up. Aiden is already looking for Aurora. The trophy is on the ice.
And I am sitting in a press box at the Cup Final, and for the first time in my life, I do not feel like a visitor.
It doesn’t feel like staying anymore.
It just feels like home.
I stand up. I go find him. The press scrum is chaos.
I move through it the way I’ve learned — credential up, camera ready, the practiced efficiency of someone who knows the geometry of a crowd. I’m looking for him and then I stop looking because he’s already coming.
Full gear. Skates on. The room parting around him the way rooms always part around him — not because he pushes, just because he takes up space with that specific certainty and people move.
He is not walking toward the cameras.
The whole room can see it. Every journalist, every photographer, Riley somewhere behind me already making notes. He is walking through the noise and the bodies and the celebration, and he knows exactly where he’s going.
I stop moving. He gets to me.
Cups my face in his hands, and looks at me.
The whole arena. The cameras. Brody watching from approximately three feet away like he just experienced complete personal vindication.
Then he kisses me.
Right there. In front of everyone. I hold onto his jersey and he holds on and the room keeps going around us — all that noise and celebration and the city losing its mind above us — and we are in the middle of it and neither of us is anywhere else.
His hands in my hair. My hands fisted in thirty-one.
The noise going to a frequency I stop hearing because all I can feel is him.
When he pulls back he’s looking in my eyes.
“Everyone saw that,” I say. My voice isn’t entirely steady.
“Yeah.”
“You walked through an entire arena.”
“I know where you are.” He looks at me like it’s simple. Like it has always been simple. “I know where you are.”
My face goes completely red.
I cannot help it.
I do not care.
Riley finds me after.
She’s been crying too, but she won’t say so. She hands me a coffee and stands next to me watching the celebration.
“Good season,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Good story.”
I look at her. “Which one.”
She looks at me over her coffee. Something in her face she’s never let out before. “Both,” she says.
She walks away.
I stand there with my coffee.
Both.
My professional notebook has the season. The games, the quotes, the documentary. My personal notebook has everything else — the tunnel, the ghost, the parts I wrote down because keeping them only in my chest felt impossible.
Both of them mine. Both of them true.
We walk out together.
The city is still going when we step outside.
Windows lit. Streets full. People spilling onto sidewalks and balconies and car hoods because they waited too long for this to go quietly now.
I have my cameras.
He has the team replica Cup tucked against his side like this is a perfectly normal thing to carry through Canyon Bay after two in the morning.
We walk.
“Tell me about Brick,” I say. “The first time.”
He looks at me. “At the shelter.”
“Yeah.”
He walks for a second. “He just walked over and sat next to my leg. Didn’t do anything. Didn’t perform. Just — sat there. Like he’d decided and that was it.”
I look at him.
“Did you know right away?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“When did you know about me?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. The city going around us and him walking next to me in the middle of all of it, thinking about it honestly.
“Grocery store,” he says.
I stare at him. “The grocery store.”
“Yeah.”
“We argued about possession law in a grocery store for twenty minutes.”
“I know.”
“And that was — “
“I knew something,” he says. “Didn’t know what yet.”
“What did you know?”
He thinks about it. “You argued about possession law with a stranger like the answer actually mattered.” He looks at me. “I knew you meant everything you said.”
I need a minute.
He just described Brick sitting next to his leg and deciding. No performance. Just — sat there.
I look at him walking next to me and I get it.
“You knew in the grocery store,” I say.
“I knew something.”
“From a possession law argument.”
“You said a true thing to a stranger who wasn’t going to remember it.” The corner of his mouth. “I remembered it.”
My face goes red. I look at the city. He watches me look at the city and doesn’t say anything about my face and that’s him too — knowing when to let something just sit there.
“Damn,” he says.
I look at him. “What.”
“You look good.”
“We just won the Stanley Cup.”
“I know.”
“You’re still—”
“Yeah,” he says. “Still.”
I shake my head. He takes my hand. The city is loud and bright and completely alive around us and we are walking through Canyon Bay celebrating something we were part of and I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Not watching it.
In it.
What happens after I’ll keep mostly to myself. I will say this. At some point his shirt was gone, and my hand found the griffin on his right arm.
Guardian. Power. Courage. Protection.
The first time he told me what it meant, the word hit wrong for half a second. Griffin. One name my body still knew how to brace against.
But this was not that.
This griffin lived on Jax Mercer’s skin. Wings and claws and quiet violence, yes, but not the kind that corners. Not the kind that takes. Not the kind that feeds you a lie and lets you carry the damage. This one guarded. This one stayed.
And when my fingers found the compass on his shoulder, I remembered what he’d said.
Keeps me pointed.
I used to think direction meant leaving before anyone could make it hurt. Then Jax Mercer looked at me like coming home was the only place either of us had been heading all along. His house. His kitchen.
The Cup on the counter. His hands on me like the whole night has narrowed to this room, this breath, this thing between us that has been building one look, one almost, one impossible choice at a time, and finally has nowhere left to hide.
I’ll say this, the man plays hockey the way he does everything else — like he’s already read the play, like he knows exactly where it’s going, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it.
It was the best night of my life.
By morning, that photograph will be on every sports outlet in the country.
I will never say I’m sorry.
Neither will he.
My phone buzzes at 3:14.
We’re at his place, half-asleep, my hand on his chest. It’s on his side of the bed, so he reaches for it before I do.
Reads it.
“Nova.”
“Yeah.”
“Your neighbor. Mrs. Patterson. She says there’s a cat yowling at your back step and it won’t stop. Been over an hour.”
I’m already sitting up.
Dina has never done that. Dina eats and disappears. Dina does not yowl. Dina does not stay.
I pull his hoodie on over bare skin.
“Get Brick,” I say.
He gets Brick.
We’re in the truck in five minutes.
Brick complains from the carrier like he has been personally wronged.
I’m in Jax’s hoodie with my hair still tangled from his hands, and the team replica Cup is tucked beside him because there is nowhere else to put it at 3:14 in the morning and he is absolutely not leaving it on his kitchen counter while we drive across town.
Florida is dark around us. Empty streets. Eight minutes to my place.
He keeps one hand on the wheel and the other on my thigh. I put my hand over his and look out the window.
“I know, Brick,” he says.
Brick does not accept it.
I huff a small laugh.
Dina is on the back step when we pull in.
Yowling. Not eating. Not running. Just sitting there moaning like she’s been doing it for an hour because she has been.
I get out of the truck slow.
Don’t approach.
Walk past Dina to the back door of my apartment. Unlock it. Push it open.
Stand aside.
Don’t say anything. Don’t crouch down. Don’t reach.
Just open the door.
He’s out of the truck now, carrier in one hand, the team replica Cup tucked under his other arm, watching from twelve feet away because he already knows — this is between me and my cat and he is barely peripheral to it.
Dina stops yowling.
Looks at the open door.
Looks at me.
Looks back at the open door.
Stands up.
Walks past me into the kitchen.
Just walks in. Like she’s been waiting for someone to open the damn door for months and now somebody finally did and she has somewhere to be.
I don’t move. Don’t breathe.
Inside, Dina settles on the kitchen mat in front of the sink. Lays down. Tucks her paws under. Closes her eyes.
Like she lives here.
Like she has always lived here.
I look at Jax.
I can’t speak. My hands are over my mouth and my eyes are burning and there is a feeling in my chest I don’t know how to name — not yet, maybe not ever — something that feels like months of almost and finally and safe.
She didn’t need coaxing. She didn’t need a bowl moved closer or a voice she recognized or a slow careful approach. She just needed the door open.
She just needed someone to open the door and stand aside.
He walks over. Sets everything down. Pulls me into his chest without saying a word.
I don’t make a sound.
Neither does he.
We stand there for a long time.
Brick goes on the counter beside the Cup when Jax brings him in.
He looks at Dina on the mat. She looks at him. Neither of them says anything to each other.
Then he settles next to the Cup like he’s always belonged there. Tail wrapped around his feet. Fur catching the kitchen light. Looking like a cat who’s assessed the situation and accepted it.
I look around the room.
Dina is on the mat in front of the sink like she has always lived here.
The plant on the windowsill is still alive despite me overwatering it for two months.
My camera bag is by the door where it always lands.
Jax’s arm is around me, warm and certain.
And both cats are in my kitchen at 3:30 AM like the universe finally stopped arguing with itself and put everything where it belongs.
I don’t try to make sense of it.
I just stand there in my kitchen at 3:30 in the morning with both cats, the Cup, and the man who took six flights of stairs in his socks to say five words, and I let it all be exactly what it is.
She waited eight months to come inside.
Hell. So did I.
“Bed,” he says eventually.
I go.