‘This Is Their Happily Ever After’: Rachel Reid on Her Next ‘Heated Rivalry’ Book

By CT Jones

CT Jones

Contact CT Jones on X Contact CT Jones by Email View all posts by CT Jones May 14, 2026

The sky is threatening rain on an early Wednesday evening, but that hasn’t stopped a line of people from wrapping around a tall brick building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Inside, beside Spotify-branded bookshelves, a recreated locker room, and replica jerseys with Hollander and Rozanov on the back, is a horde of people clutching books. More than 200 people — not including the 155 on the waitlist — reserved tickets to this Spotify audiobook party to catch a glimpse of author Rachel Reid, the brain behind Heated Rivalry, a new-adult LGBTQ hockey romance whose HBO Max adaptation became a runaway hit. As for the author, she’s still trying to figure out how this all happened in the first place. 
“It’s still hard to believe,” Reid, 45, tells Rolling Stone. “I knew the show was good and fans of the books would like it. But I wasn’t expecting it to have this much global reach.”

By now, most people know the story of Heated Rivalry, the second book in Reid’s hockey series, Game Changers. Prior to the HBO Max show’s Nov. 28, 2025, premiere, the TV adaptation of Reid’s book was an upstart romance from Canadian streaming service Crave. It starred virtual unknowns Hudson Williams as Shane Hollander and Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov, two rival hockey players who have a years-long secret romantic relationship. A last-minute acquisition by HBO gave the series a dual premiere in Canada and the U.S., and audiences across the continent were hooked. Heated Rivalry has averaged 10 million viewers per episode, according to Variety, a figure that continues to increase well after the season finale aired in December. 

Following the show’s release, demand for copies of Heated Rivalry, the 2019 book and source material, was so high that there was a two-week waitlist in bookstores while Reid’s publisher, Harlequin, caught up. According to Spotify, the audiobook of Heated Rivalry experienced a 1,500-plus percent increase in listening the week of that shortage. And the public’s fixation on the story has seeped into the real world: There have been themed club nights, look-alike contests, and an unofficial off-Broadway musical parody. Both Storrie and Williams attended the 2026 Met Gala and Storrie hosted a February 2026 episode of Saturday Night Live. But none of this was expected. 

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Reid tells Rolling Stone that during filming, she, Williams, and Storrie started a group chat to share their hopes for the series. Looking back, Reid calls that text chain a perfect snapshot of how unprepared any of them were for the show’s response. “[Those texts] seem so innocent,” she says, laughing. “‘What if you were on a billboard? What if there was an ad on TV?’ As we got closer, I was like, ‘What if one of you was on a talk show?’”

Following the success of the show, Reid’s calendar has gone from long days locked away writing to suddenly being one of the most sought-after guests at book events. (She thinks of the Lady Gaga meme taken from the artist’s description of the schedule following her debut album, Fame: “No sleep, bus, club, another club, another club, plane, next place.”) It’s a schedule that would be tough on anyone, but gets harder when you factor in Reid’s role as a mother — she has two children, aged 12 and 16 — and a person who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. 

In August 2023, Reid was diagnosed with the nervous system disorder, which affects motor control and can cause tremors, stiffness, and weakness. “It’s an unpredictable disease in a lot of ways, especially young-onset Parkinson’s,” she says. “I wasn’t sure, realistically, if I’d still be able to write.” 

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She’s still working through the learning curve of her symptoms, which often include brain fog and have made typing much more difficult. But while she’s optimistic that she’ll adjust to a new normal that allows her to keep working, handling the pressure of becoming an overnight sensation is something she’s still trying to figure out. 

“I went from having this list of goals as an author, some of which seemed very unlikely, to having them all checked off,” Reid says. “It feels like too much for any one person. I try to just pretend none of it exists, because if I do think about it too much, it’s going to be very difficult to write, because I’m going to be thinking about all the expectations.” 

Leaving expectations behind has also meant acknowledging when her schedule is too much for her. Reid announced the seventh book in her Game Changers series in January, titled Unrivaled. It’s the final book featuring Shane and Ilya and delves into the aftermath of revealing their relationship to the world. “At the end of [the second book in the series, The Long Game], they’re married, and they’re teammates, and everybody knows about their relationship. I could have left it there, but over the years, I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she says. “They’ve never really had a normal relationship where they haven’t been hiding, or where they’ve been together this much. So there’s a lot to explore.” 

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