Hockey Smut

The Fan

The first thing I thought when the puck landed at my feet was that he had missed.

Which was ridiculous, because professional hockey players did not accidentally flip pucks over the glass directly into the tiny space between a woman’s boots.

Especially not after making eye contact with her first.

I had been standing against the glass since the doors opened, pressed between my best friend, a father with two young boys, and a group of college students holding signs that had become progressively less appropriate with every beer they drank.

I didn’t have a sign.

But I had his jersey.

And that felt like enough.

It was the expensive kind, stitched instead of heat-pressed, with his name stretched across my shoulders and his number covering most of my back.

I had owned it for three seasons. I wore it to nearly every home game and had brought it on two road trips, though I tried not to think about how much money I had spent following a man who had no idea I existed.

Until warmups.

He noticed me less than five minutes after stepping onto the ice.

At first, I assumed he was looking at someone behind me. Players always scanned the glass during warmups. Kids held up signs asking for sticks and pucks. People pounded on the glass like they had never seen another human being before.

But his eyes kept returning to the same spot.

To me.

The first time, I looked away.

The second, I smiled.

The third, he smiled back. Was that a wink?

My heart nearly stopped.

He circled through a passing drill, hair curling beneath the edge of his helmet, then took a shot that rang off the crossbar hard enough to make everyone around me jump.

He glanced toward me immediately afterward.

Like he wanted to know whether I had seen it.

I had.

Of course I had.

I had seen nearly every goal he had scored over the past four years.

I knew how he leaned on his stick before faceoffs and how he always tapped the left post with his blade before the opening draw.

I knew he chewed the inside of his cheek when he was frustrated and pushed his hair back with both hands during postgame interviews.

I knew things about him that he would probably find unsettling if I ever said them aloud.

I also knew he was not usually the kind of player who interacted much during warmups.

He rarely tossed pucks to fans. He never hammed it up for the cameras. He skated, shot and left.

Which was why I knew something strange was happening when he peeled away from the final drill and went to the bench.

An equipment manager leaned over the boards to hear him.

The player said something, then pointed.

At me.

I froze.

The equipment manager looked in my direction, looked back at him and laughed.

My face went hot.

The player handed him a puck.

The equipment manager dug through his pocket, pulled out a silver marker and wrote something across the black rubber.

The college students beside me noticed.

“Oh my God,” one of them said. “He’s giving you a puck.”

“No, he isn’t.”

He was.

The player took it back, skated toward the corner and stopped directly on the other side of the glass.

Up close, he was bigger than he looked from my seat.

That should not have been possible.

He tapped the glass once with the puck, right in front of my face.

I stared at him.

He grinned.

Then he flipped it over.

The puck landed between my boots.

Everyone around me reacted at once. The college students screamed. The boys beside me pointed excitedly. Their father bent down like he was going to pick it up.

I moved faster.

The puck was cold in my hand.

His number was written across the top in silver.

Beneath it was a phone number.

I looked up.

He was still standing there.

His eyes dropped to the puck, then returned to mine.

I mouthed, “Seriously?”

He shrugged.

Then he skated away.

For the rest of warmups, I could barely feel my legs.

I did not text him during the game.

That would have been insane.

I considered it during the first intermission, then decided it made me look desperate. I considered it again during the second intermission, then decided there was a chance the number belonged to an equipment manager or a team intern and the entire thing was an elaborate joke.

By the third period, I had convinced myself I had misread the situation completely.

The puck sat in the bottom of my purse while he scored the game-winning goal with six minutes remaining.

The building erupted.

I screamed with everyone else, jumping to my feet as the goal horn sounded and his teammates surrounded him along the boards.

When he skated past the section afterward, he looked up.

Not vaguely toward the crowd.

At me.

He tapped the glass with his stick.

Then he kept going.

My friend grabbed my arm.

“Girl. You have to text him!”

“I know.”

“Now.”

“The game isn’t over.”

“He gave you his phone number on a puck.”

“I’m aware.”

“How are you so calm about this?!”

“I think I’m having a medical event.”

The final horn sounded minutes later.

The team gathered at center ice to salute the crowd. He was named the game’s first star and came back out alone, circling the ice with his stick raised.

I waited until we reached the concourse before pulling out my phone.

My hands shook while I typed.

Hi. I’m assuming this number is real.

I stared at the message for ten seconds.

Then I added:

Or your equipment manager is about to be very confused.

I sent it.

The reply came before I reached the escalator.

It’s real.

Then another.

You kept the puck. Good start.

I stopped walking.

People flowed around me toward the exits.

My friend leaned over my shoulder.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve stopped breathing.”

My phone buzzed again.

Where are you?

I typed:

Leaving.

Three dots appeared immediately.

Don’t.

My stomach flipped.

Come down to the event level. Security knows you’re coming.

I stared at the screen.

My friend read it over my shoulder and made a sound that attracted attention from several strangers.

“You’re going.”

“I cannot go into an NHL locker room after a game.”

“You literally have his name on your back.”

“That makes it worse.”

“It makes it destiny.”

“It makes me look unwell.”

My phone buzzed.

Unless you don’t want the tour.

I knew exactly what he was doing.

It worked anyway.

I want the tour.

His answer came almost instantly.

Good.

A staff member met me near an elevator, checked my identification and escorted me through a concrete hallway beneath the stands. The arena looked entirely different from that level. No music. No flashing lights. Just gray walls, stacked equipment cases and the distant hum of machinery.

My friend waited upstairs.

She had hugged me before I left and whispered, “Do something I would regret.”

I was trying not to.

The staff member stopped outside a hallway lined with framed photographs.

“He said he’d meet you here.”

“Thank you.”

She smiled like she knew something I didn’t.

Then she disappeared around the corner.

I stood alone beneath a photograph of the team celebrating a championship from more than a decade earlier.

The building felt strangely empty.

I could still hear faint activity from deeper in the arena, but the crowd was gone. The players had completed their interviews. Most of the staff had started packing up.

Doubt pushed through the excitement. This was ridiculous.

I didn’t know him.

He didn’t know me.

He knew I looked good in his jersey and had stood close enough to the glass for him to get a proper look. That was not the basis for a sensible decision.

Then the locker-room door opened.

He stepped into the hall wearing a dark suit with his tie hanging loose around his neck.

Every sensible thought left my body.

“You came.”

His voice was lower than it sounded in interviews.

He walked toward me.

Without skates, he was still tall enough that I had to tilt my head back when he stopped in front of me.

His gaze traveled down the jersey.

“That looks better from this side of the glass.”

I folded my arms.

“You’ve seen people wear your jersey before.”

“Not like that.”

I should have said something clever.

I had imagined speaking to him hundreds of times. In those imaginary conversations, I was funny and relaxed. I treated him like a normal person and impressed him with how little I cared that he was famous.

In reality, I stared at him.

“You threw your phone number at me.”

“I handed it to you very smoothly.”

“You made another man write it down.”

“I was wearing gloves.”

“You could have taken them off.”

“Warmups were only fifteen minutes.”

I laughed before I could stop myself.

He smiled.

The tension eased slightly.

“Come on,” he said. “I promised you a tour.”

He pushed open the locker-room door.

I had seen the room on television and in photographs, but stepping inside felt different.

The stalls formed a wide oval around the team logo in the carpet. Jerseys were gone. Most of the equipment had been cleared away, though a few pairs of skates remained on shelves and damp towels were piled near the training-room door.

It smelled like soap, deodorizer and something unmistakably athletic beneath both.

“No media?” I asked.

“Long gone.”

“Other players?”

“Most of them.”

“Most?”

He glanced toward me.

“You worried someone will see you?”

The question sent a warm pulse through me.

“Should I be?”

“Probably.”

He showed me the training room first, then the stick rack and the hallway leading toward the bench. He explained which players were superstitious about where they kept their gloves and which teammate had once thrown a broken stick hard enough to put a hole in the wall.

I began to relax.

He was still him, but he was also funny in a dry, unexpectedly self-deprecating way. He answered questions without making me feel ridiculous for asking them.

Then he brought me back into the main room.

His stall was near the far end.

I recognized it immediately from every postgame interview I had ever watched. His nameplate sat above the empty space. A pair of gloves rested on the shelf.

He leaned against the wooden divider beside it.

“This is me.”

“I gathered that.”

“You know the number?”

I gave him a flat look.

He laughed.