On the Record

SLOANE

Room B was hotter than the press box and somehow smaller.

The walls were plain cinderblock painted an apologetic shade of beige. Folding chairs were arranged in three neat rows facing a cheap black table draped with a Dalton University athletics banner. A microphone sat in the middle like a dare. Someone had plugged in a standing fan in the corner, but all it did was stir warm air and make the banner twitch.

By the time I got there, half the seats were already taken.

Local media. Student reporters. Two guys from what looked like a regional sports blog. Ethan hovered along the side wall with his camera hanging at his chest, not intruding, just present. Ready.

Professional.

I could do professional.

I took a chair in the second row and set my recorder on my knee instead of the table in front of me because my hand needed the grounding weight of it. I flipped open my notebook to the cleanest page I had left and wrote:

**Postgame**

**Do not ask soft questions**

**Do not look like you know him**

The door at the side opened and Coach Reynolds came in first, still in his suit, tie loosened, expression exactly as severe as always. He sat, adjusted the mic once, and folded his hands.

The questions started immediately.

Thoughts on the win.

What changed in the third.

How did the power play open up.

The usual.

Coach handled them with the dry economy of a man who considered adjectives ornamental. He credited structure, pace, net-front presence, commitment to detail. He called the Eagles “well coached,” which in Reynolds language was practically a sonnet.

I took notes quickly, cleanly, my pulse settling into something manageable through the ritual of reporting.

Then one of the local reporters asked, “What did you think of Hartley’s response after the game got tied?”

Coach’s expression didn’t change, but there was the faintest pause before he said, “That’s what top-line guys are supposed to do.”

A reporter behind me chuckled softly. “That sounded almost complimentary.”

Reynolds looked straight at him. “Don’t get used to it.”

The room laughed.

I didn’t.

Because I was too busy writing down the exact cadence of the line, the almost grudging respect in it, the way the answer gave away more than he probably intended.

Coach left after ten minutes.

Marcus came in next.

Of course he did it smiling.

Still in partial game gear—compression shirt under a Dalton hoodie, damp hair, cheeks flushed from the win—Marcus took the chair like he’d been born for microphones and public affection. He fielded questions about the power-play finish, the chemistry on the top line, the crowd energy. He was charming without sounding rehearsed, funny without being evasive. Easy.

I could see why people loved interviewing him.

He spotted me in the second row almost immediately and his grin widened a fraction. Not inappropriate. Not lingering. Just enough to make my stomach knot because if Marcus could pick me out of the room in one glance, then Chase would too.

One of the student reporters asked Marcus whether playing with Hartley made the game feel easier.

Marcus laughed. “Depends what night you catch him. When he’s in a mood? Yeah. It gets real easy.”

“What kind of mood?”

“The kind where he thinks the whole rink belongs to him.”

More laughter.

I wrote that down too.

Because it was true.

And because it sounded like something people would say about kings and disasters and boys who made it impossible to remember where professional distance was supposed to begin.

Marcus wrapped up with a joke about the student section nearly giving him hearing damage, then slid out through the side door.

The room shifted.

I felt it physically. A tightening. A reorientation.

No one said it out loud, but this was the one they were waiting for.

The side door opened again.

Chase walked in.

Every nerve in my body went on high alert.

He’d changed since the final horn. Showered, mostly. Still damp around the hairline, dark hair pushed back carelessly. Black dress shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled to the forearms. No tie. No jacket. The look of someone too young to wear exhaustion that well and too practiced at it for that to matter.

He sat at the table, adjusted the mic once with those long, steady fingers, and scanned the room.

His eyes found mine immediately.

It wasn’t dramatic. No visible reaction. No hitch in breath or change in posture. Just a direct, unmistakable lock of gaze that lasted exactly one beat too long before he looked away.

I stared down at my notebook like it had personally offended me.

The first question came from the regional sports blog guy. Two goals involved, game winner, what was working out there tonight?

Chase answered easily. Space management. Puck support. Getting to the inside. He gave the kind of polished answer he’d learned to give whenever cameras or recorders were present—clean, efficient, impossible to quote badly.

Another question. How much do you enjoy nights like this when the crowd is that engaged?

He smiled a little. Said it was fun to feed off the energy but the job stayed the same either way.

Then another. How does he evaluate his own game tonight?

“Good in parts,” he said. “Cleaner in the third than the second. There are still details I want back.”

That one was honest enough to make me look up.

He wasn’t performing now, not exactly. Or maybe this was another layer of the performance—one I was too compromised to identify cleanly.

A girl from the student paper asked whether he felt the growing draft chatter around him this season.

“There’s always chatter,” he said. “The game doesn’t care.”

That got a couple appreciative nods.

I should have let someone else carry the hard question.

I knew that.

I also knew I wasn’t going to.

I raised my hand.

The moderator pointed to me. “Sloane.”

Not Winters. Not from the Ledger. Just Sloane. Informal enough to make me want to murder somebody.

I straightened in my seat anyway.

“Sloane Winters, Eastlake Ledger.” My voice came out steady. Thank God. “You’ve talked before about pressure as background noise. Tonight, after the Eagles tied it, your game actually got sharper. So what changed? Was it tactical, or do you genuinely play better when the weight gets heavier?”

The room went still.

Not silent, exactly. The fan still hummed. Someone shifted in a folding chair. Ethan’s camera strap creaked softly as he moved his weight.

But the air changed.

Because that wasn’t a soft question. It wasn’t about the goal. It wasn’t about the crowd. It wasn’t about whatever bland safe thing everyone else had been asking.

It was about him.

Chase looked at me.

Really looked.

And for a second I thought maybe I’d gone too far. Maybe I’d stripped the skin off something better left covered. Maybe I’d let too much of what I knew leak into the room.

Then he leaned a little closer to the mic.

“Tactical, some,” he said. “We made an adjustment in how we were entering after the tie. Simpler routes. Quicker support off the wall.” A pause. “But mostly…” He exhaled once through his nose. “Mostly pressure clarifies things.”

No one in the room moved.

He went on.

“When the game gets heavy, you find out what you trust. Your reads, your habits, your line, yourself. Or you don’t.” His voice stayed even, but some layer beneath it had gone quieter. More dangerous. “The weight doesn’t disappear. You just stop wasting energy pretending it isn’t there.”

I forgot to write.

He kept looking at me.

“I think people talk about pressure like it ruins you,” he said. “Sometimes it does. Sometimes it just strips everything extra away. And then it’s you and the game. No excuses. No noise. Just whether you’re enough for the moment in front of you.”

The room was completely silent now.

Not because the answer was loud. Because it wasn’t.

Because it was too honest.

I wrote the quote down in a rush, hand shaking hard enough to slant the letters.

One of the local reporters jumped in after a beat, trying to pull the room back toward standard press availability. Asked about chemistry with Marcus. Another asked whether the Eagles’ neutral-zone pressure had surprised them early. The normal rhythm resumed, but only on the surface.

The answer was still sitting there.

So was the way he’d delivered it.

Like he knew exactly who had asked. And exactly what she was really asking about.

The session ended eight minutes later.

Chase stood. Someone from the student paper called one last question after him about the next road trip, but the moderator cut it off with an apologetic hand wave. Players were done.

Chase disappeared through the side door.

The room burst back into ordinary motion.

Chairs scraping. Reporters checking quotes. Phones lighting up. Ethan slid closer while I was still staring at the page.

“That,” he said quietly, “was not a normal postgame answer.”

I looked up too quickly. “What do you mean?”

Ethan’s eyes were on my notebook, not my face. “I mean no one asks a hockey player whether pressure clarifies him unless they already know the answer matters.”

My grip tightened on the pen.

“And no one answers like that,” he added, “unless the person asking matters too.”

I stared at him.

He gave me exactly half a second of eye contact, then looked away first.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m not going to write a romance column.”

I should have laughed.

I didn’t.

“Go get your hallway shots,” I said.

He studied me one more moment, then nodded and moved off.

I stayed seated until the room emptied enough to breathe.

Then I packed slowly.

Recorder into bag. Notebook closed. Pens gathered. Phone, credential, folded stat sheet. My hands had remembered how to function, but only barely.

The hall outside Room B was cooler. Quieter too. Most of the media had already moved on—filing stories, chasing coaches, grabbing late coffee before the drive home.

I should have done the same.

Instead I stood there near the cinderblock wall pretending to check a quote while my pulse climbed back into my throat for no defensible reason.

Footsteps sounded down the hallway.

I knew them before I looked up.

Chase.

He’d lost the mic and table and institutional neutrality of the press room, and with them some of the distance. He looked bigger here. Closer. More dangerous in the quiet.

He stopped a few feet in front of me.

For one suspended second, neither of us said anything.

Then he glanced at the notebook in my hand and asked, “You got what you needed?”

Professional tone.

Almost.

I nodded. “I think so.”

“You think so.”

“I’m a journalist. We hedge.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Barely.

“Right.”

I should have left then.

Should have smiled politely, thanked him for his time, and walked down the hall with all the clean, safe distance the situation required.

Instead I stayed where I was.

And so did he.

There were still people in the building, somewhere. Trainers. Staff. Students. Maybe Ethan around the corner pretending not to pay attention. But in this patch of hallway it felt like the air had changed pressure around just the two of us.

“Good game,” I said finally.

His eyes stayed on mine. “That sound objective enough for your notes?”

“No.”

His mouth curved a little more. “Thought so.”

Heat crawled up my neck.

I tightened my grip on the satchel strap. “Your answer in there was good.”

“Your question wasn’t soft.”

“I wasn’t aiming for soft.”

“I know.”

Silence again.

Longer this time. Heavier.

He looked tired up close. Not physically. Something deeper. The kind of tired that sits behind the eyes. But there was adrenaline in him too, still crackling under the skin, and I knew exactly what it felt like when Chase was carrying that much unspent energy in his body.

Dangerous knowledge.

I took one tiny step back, not because I wanted distance, but because wanting the opposite felt too visible.

His gaze dropped to the movement, then lifted again.

“You came,” he said quietly.

The words landed harder than they should have.

“I’m covering the series.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I swallowed.

No answer came fast enough.

He stepped closer.

Not enough to touch. Just enough that I could smell clean soap and rink air and something warm underneath that my body remembered instantly. The hallway light caught faint dampness at his collar where his hair hadn’t fully dried.

My pulse was humiliating.

“You stood up,” he said.

My face went hot. “I did not.”

A beat.

Then, very softly, “You did.”

I looked away first. Down at the notebook. At the edge of his sleeve. Anywhere but his face.

“That was a lapse in professionalism.”

“That one looked personal.”

The words weren’t teasing. That was the problem.

They were too direct.

My throat tightened around the answer I couldn’t give him in a hallway outside a press room where his name was still echoing off recorder files.

So I said the only thing I could. “You played well.”

He exhaled. Slow. Almost amused. Almost wrecked.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

More silence.

This one wasn’t empty. It was crowded with everything we weren’t saying. The summer. The pool house. The phone calls. The fact that he’d just answered my question like there was no one else in the room. The fact that I’d asked it because I knew exactly where the blade should go.

He shifted one fraction closer.

I felt it like a hand.

Then, low enough that it stayed between us:

“I missed you.”

The hallway disappeared.

Just gone.

No cinderblock. No fluorescent lights. No staff voices somewhere around the corner. No Ethan, no series, no ethics, no reason.

Only that.

Only him saying it without irony or smirk or anywhere to hide.

Every organ in my body seemed to stop functioning at once.

I stared at him.

He didn’t look away.

No joke after it. No attempt to soften the blow. He just stood there and let the truth sit between us in clean, unbearable air.

And because I was apparently incapable of protecting myself when it mattered most, my first instinct wasn’t to run.

It was relief.

Hot, awful relief that made my eyes sting.

I laughed once, softly, because I didn’t know what else to do with a feeling that big in a hallway that small.

He frowned slightly. “What?”

I shook my head.

Then I heard my own voice say, smaller than I intended, “I missed you too.”

His whole face changed.

Not dramatically. Not enough that anyone passing would clock it. But I saw it. The release. The crack in the careful, exhausted control he’d been wearing since he walked into Room B.

For one impossible second, I thought he might touch me.

He didn’t.

Instead he looked over my shoulder toward the hallway exit, then back at me, and said quietly:

“Wait.”