“Sure,” Connor said, unfazed. “Just saying, you don’t look at anyone else like that.”
The horn sounded. Connor hopped to his feet. “Hey,” he added lightly, tapping Luke’s shin pad. “Whatever it is, you play better when you’re distracted.”
Luke watched him walk down the tunnel, heart thudding harder than it should have. When he glanced back up at the press box, Cassie’s eyes found his without searching.
The corners of his mouth twitched before he could stop himself.
Over the next two periods, the Renegades dominated. Damien Morris scored twice on rebounds. Luke logged twenty-three minutes, blocking shots and springing forwards with crisp stretch passes. In the third period, he pinched down the wall, corralled a bouncing puck and snapped it past the goalie. The arena exploded. He pumped his fist, then gave a quick nod as he skated by the bench. Cassie’s fingers flew over the keyboard, capturing the details of his positioning and the coach’s comments about his poise. Her lead wrote itself.
That night, she filed her gamer by deadline, then drove home over the Smithfield Street Bridge. Her phone buzzed. Luke:“Your lead made me look better than I was. Meet me?”Cassie glanced at the clock—past midnight—and her stomach fluttered.
She parked her car outside his loft, heart thudding. He opened the door in sweatpants, hair damp from a quick shower, eyesdark with desire. They didn’t make it past the foyer. He lifted her onto the wall, her legs wrapping around his waist, his mouth claiming hers. Their lovemaking was frantic, a release of tension built over weeks. When they collapsed onto his couch afterward, sweaty and breathless, Cassie traced the compass tattoo on his ribs. “One game at a time,” she whispered.
“One game at a time,” he echoed, kissing her temple.
The hockey season is long not just because of the eighty-two games but because of the rituals around them. Cassie knew them all: the early-morning skate, the pre-game nap, the coffee at Novaria with the barista who memorized her order. She knew where to stand in each visiting arena to avoid being knocked over by players leaving the ice. She knew which press boxes served edible food and which ran out of coffee by the second period. She also knew the unspoken hierarchies among journalists—who would ask first, who would piggyback on quotes, who would try to trip her up.
At the start of the season, she committed to writing more features, deeper dives into players’ lives. She spent a day with Damien Morris at a boxing gym, sweating through a workout while he explained how punching heavy bags taught him balance and breathing. She interviewed Caleb Zheng’s parents, who owned a small restaurant in Scarborough and spoke of driving him to 6 a.m. practices before work. She wrote about assistant coach Marco Russo’s habit of watching Italian soccer matches to unwind.
Her coverage of Luke was clinical on the surface: zone exit percentages, controlled breakouts, time on ice. Privately, she obsessed over his well-being. She wrote notes in her journal about how his shoulders moved when he walked, about a new scar she hadn’t seen before, about the way his eyescrinkled when he was tired. She also wrestled with guilt. Every compliment could be misconstrued. Every criticism felt like betrayal. She overcompensated by nitpicking his turnovers and praising Nick Delgado’s stick work. After an October game in Nashville where Luke was caught pinching and gave up a two-on-one, she asked him at the scrum about his risk management. He responded professionally, but his eyes held hurt.
That night, she went to his hotel room. He opened the door wearing only sweatpants. His hair was pushed back, and he had an ice pack strapped to his knee. She hesitated.
“You were right,” he said before she could speak. “I should have stayed back. The coaches told me the same thing.”
“I didn’t ask to humiliate you,” she said, stepping inside. “I asked because I know you’re better than that.”
“I know,” he said quietly. He reached out and touched her arm. “It’s hard sometimes, not to take it personally. But I trust you.”
The trust in his voice only sharpened the ache. Cassie nodded, but the knot in her chest didn’t loosen. She had learned long ago how to take heat from players she barely knew—how to shrug off anger, defensiveness, silence. This was different. Criticizing Luke wasn’t professional distance; it was self-inflicted damage. Every tough question echoed later, replaying in her mind long after the quotes were transcribed and the story was live. She knew the fans would forget her words by morning. She knew the team would move on to the next game. But she carried the weight of it, the quiet knowledge that she had contributed, however fairly, to something that hurt someone she cared about.
What unsettled her most was that Luke didn’t seem as wounded by it as she was. He absorbed criticism the way players aretrained to—filtering, compartmentalizing, filing it away as fuel. She, meanwhile, felt each sentence like a small incision. Writing objectively meant stripping away tenderness, sanding down context, choosing precision over protection. It meant accepting that the version of him she put into the world could never fully reflect the man she knew in private. That loss of nuance, of softness was hers alone to bear.
As she stood there in his hotel room, the hum of the air conditioner filling the silence, Cassie realized that this was the bargain she’d made long before Luke Anders entered her life. Loving the game meant loving it honestly. And loving him meant being willing to hurt him in print, even when it hurt her more. She wondered, not for the first time, how long she could keep holding both truths without one of them breaking.
Thirty-Two
The off days were always quieter than Cassie expected them to be.
Luke lay stretched out on her couch, socked feet propped on the armrest, a muted afternoon game playing on the television more out of habit than interest. Cassie sat cross-legged at the other end with her laptop open, hair twisted up, phone within reach. The windows were cracked despite the cold, letting in the low hum of the street and the distant sound of traffic across the river.
Luke had one of her feet in his hands, thumbs pressing slowly into her arch, methodical and unhurried. He’d started doing it without asking months ago, and she’d never told him to stop.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” she said, eyes still on her screen.
“I am,” he replied. “This is rest.”
She huffed a quiet laugh and flexed her toes experimentally. “You’re doing that on purpose.”
“Doing what?”
“Finding the spot that makes me forget what I was about to write.”
“That’s just good defense,” he said. “Take away the passing lane.”
Cassie rolled her eyes and smiled before she typed a few more sentences, the feature she’d been circling for days finally starting to come together. The Renegades were at a crossroads, she’d written. Competitive, but not complete. A team deciding which version of itself it wanted to be.
Her phone buzzed.
