7. Holly
SEVEN
HOLLY
“Hockey,” Tracey stated. “We should have known he was an athlete.”
Before I left for campus, I’d received a text from Graham.
Bring a blanket.
Choosing to trust him, said blanket was now draped over my arm as Tracey and I walked into the campus’s ice arena. And I figured that out because my second text came from Graham two hours later. I was sitting in my finance class next to Dallas when a picture popped up.
It was a picture of clear glass walls with metal bleachers behind it. The half wall beneath the glass had NCWU’s painted Wolf mascot on it.
For assuming I was such a smart girl, I had to show the picture to Dallas.
“What is this?”
His eyes narrowed on the picture. “Ice arena. You’ve never been? They do open skate every week. It’s a blast.”
No, I’d never been to the arena for a fun night of ice skating. I didn’t tell Dallas that. I thanked him, took my phone back, and then it clicked.
A quick search of NCWU’s hockey roster proved me right. Graham Marchese, forward, whatever that meant. His face was a bit blurry due to the thumbnail picture provided, but as I scrolled through the rest of the roster, other names jumped out at me. Eli. Tanner.
Well, surprise, surprise.
Another search of their schedule had most of my other doubts about Graham clicking into place. Every night he was out of town? He was at an away game. On nights when he was “busy?” He had a home game. Nights when he went to bed early? He’d had to leave the next morning for a trip.
I should have been able to figure it out sooner given his propensity for wearing sweatshirts and hats with our school’s logo all over it. I’d assumed he was big into school spirit.
“You owe me for this,” Tracey muttered, and her body shivered as we set our phones beneath the school’s ticket scanner. “It’s freezing in here.”
It was cold, and the air was different from outside. Staler and not as crisp as the freezing temps outside.
“It’s not like they can heat the place,” I muttered.
We headed to the concession stand and bought hot chocolates and then scanned the arena. A small cheering section was decked out in green and gold hats and scarves on the opposite side of the rink beneath the massive HOME SEATING green banner.
And on the ice?
The team was warming up. Charleston University was their opponent, and they were closest to us in their red and white jerseys.
“Looks like we go this way.”
I followed her around the edge of the arena, keeping one eye on the hockey teams, and trying to figure out which one was Graham. They all had on helmets and pads, and there weren’t names on the back of the jerseys to help me out.
We reached the bleacher section, and as Tracey started walking toward the small crowd that looked to be students, most of them blonds, I grabbed the back of her coat.
“Don’t.”
“What?”
“That girl.” I gestured to the blond closest to the glass wall. She was decked out in green and gold. It also looked like she’d added strands of green tinsel to her hair.
The rest of the girls around her looked similar. Apparently the Lambda Nu Chi girls were fans…maybe not of hockey, but definitely of the players.
Tracey made a face as she looked at me over her shoulder. “We should probably figure out who she is.”
“Explains why she approached me about Graham.”
We avoided the students and climbed the steps to the back row, passing a dozen or more adults gathered close together in the bleachers at the center of the rink. We grabbed our seats, separated from both adults and students, and off to the side, giving me a clear view of the ice rink.
“Graham’s number eight,” she said, and then flashed me a picture on her phone.
I leaned in closer. “What about Eli and Tanner?”
She scrolled through the roster pics, moving slow enough I could pick out their faces. “Tanner is twenty-two, and Eli…six,” she said once she found them.
“Wonderful.” I focused on the team.
They were set up in three lines, and the guys skated so fast, slapped the puck back and forth so quickly, I kept losing sight of it. It looked like a drills practice, and after every shot at the small goal, they skated leisurely back to the lines. It was impressive any of the pucks went in considering the goalie was about twice the size of the small goal he skated in front of.
Everything moved so fast, and the constant swish of skates on ice and the smack of the puck soon became nothing but background noise.
Tracey sat and bumped my shoulder as we huddled close to each other and wrapped my blanket around us. “I can’t believe you’re dating a hockey player.”
“I’m not dating anyone.”
She chortled. “Right. Sure you’re not.”
“We went on one date. That’s not dating.”
“I think the fact he said he likes you and thinks about you and invited you to his place says you are.”
“Whatever.” I shivered and grabbed my hat from my pocket and tugged it onto my head.
“Do we know anything about hockey?”
“I used to watch with my dad. Pretty sure he put it on when it was my nap time, so unless I learned through sleep, probably not.”
“My brother played. I just read books and colored and ignored everything about the game.”
“So we’re mostly screwed,” I said.
She held up her phone and wiggled it. “They hit the puck into the goal and try to win. How much more do we need to know?”
I wanted to know why Graham kept this from me. That wasn’t normal, was it? Didn’t athletes like to tell everyone how awesome they were?
A horn blared, and Tracy and I both jumped.
“Wowzers,” she whispered, pressing her heart to her chest. “That was loud.”
That horn meant something because the teams skated to the benches and cleared the ice.
A loud voice squawked through the speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen. Please rise for the singing of our national anthem, performed today by North Carolina Western University’s very own Megan Schleppe.”
As the announcer spoke, guys from both benches came back out onto the ice, this time without their sticks, and lined up, each team on a blue line, and faced the flag hanging next to a scoreboard.
The singer’s voice filled the arena, and I scanned the rink and then found her at the edge of the ice on the far end, standing right at the edge in front of a door to the rink that had opened. Her voice was rich and pure, and she sang it a cappella, which was probably more impressive than anything I’d ever seen.
When she was done, the small crowd cheered, the Lambda Nu Chi’s loudest of all. Both teams skated back to their benches, grabbed their sticks, and then stood in the doorway.
And then the announcer came back on. “Charleston University’s starting lineup…” he droned on, rattling off a bunch of names as the visiting team skated out, one by one, to the ice.
The lights turned dark, and eerie, low music came on building and growing louder. My heart rate matched the beat, thumping harder and faster as it crescendoed. Spotlights appeared and flashes of green and gold filled the area.
“Whoa,” I muttered. They were putting on a show, and it was pretty cool to see.
“And now…for your North Western Carolina University starting lineup!”
The small crowd cheered and got to their feet. Every time a name was called, a player skated onto the ice and did a lap around the rink until they landed at a specific spot on the ice.
I wished I would have gotten earlier clues so I had time to do basic research on the game. I was totally lost.
Finally, Graham’s name was called. A woman six rows away from us jumped to her feet, grabbing my attention. She was older, dressed in a thick sweater, a winter coat, and had a striped scarf wrapped at least three times around her neck. “Go Graham!”
“That must be his aunt,” I muttered to Tracey.
“And he has his own fan club.” She elbowed me in my side, but I didn’t need her nudge to know who she was talking about. The blond who had stopped me in my tracks was jumping up and down, cheering for him, louder than anyone else.
To Graham’s credit, if he heard the noise, he ignored it and skated to his spot in the center of the ice, inside a blue circle, and across from the team’s other player.
He tapped his stick to the ice, stood, and turned his head, stopping when he found me like he knew exactly where I’d be sitting. He reached up and tugged at his helmet before dipping his chin and then turned back to the opponent across from him.
But I swore, in that brief moment when our eyes met, there was a smile curling the edges of his lips.
“Yeah. If you’re not dating, fine, I’ll give you that. But after that, I’m pretty sure you’re about to be. And someone isn’t happy about it.”
I didn’t need to look toward the other students to know who she was talking about.
I could feel her heated glare from across the space between us.
* * *
Hockey was wildly crazy. There were fights and shouts. The puck flew across the ice so quickly I kept losing it and then finding it when the players were suddenly fighting behind the net at the opposite end of the ice. Every time our team scored, a horn blared, and lights went off through the arena. The music was loud, the announcer explained everything that was happening, and while Tracey and I tried to watch every minute, I had absolutely no clue what was going on.
The most terrifying moment came when Eli got in a fight across the ice from us. Helmets and gloves went flying. Fists started slamming into each other’s faces. More players from both teams joined in, and soon, Graham’s fists were flying as fast as everyone else’s.
No one was bothered by this. In fact, the arena turned electric. Parents and students and even the away team across the rink jumped to their feet, clapped, and cheered.
By the time uninvolved teammates and the referees separated the players, blood was dripping from more than one player’s nose or from a cut by their eye, and players from both sides were shoved into a small, enclosed bench area off to the sides of their teams.
“Sin bin,” Tracey had muttered, clearly trying to learn about the game by Googling it on her phone. “It’s actually called a penalty box, but it’s most commonly referred to as the sin bin.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Google.”
“Shut up.” She chuckled and bounced her shoulder against mine. “I’m learning. Consider me your new hockey tutor.”
“Thanks.”
Whatever had happened, and whatever the reason for the fight, everyone quickly settled down, and the game resumed like it hadn’t happened at all.
The entire experience was confusing, but there was no hiding the fact that Graham Marchese was by far, the leader of the team. He moved faster, and out of all the shots on goal, he had landed two, putting the Wolves ahead by four to zero.
The buzzer went off, signaling the end of the second period.
“I’m freezing,” Tracey muttered. “I need more hot chocolate. Want some?”
“No thanks.” She tossed her half of the blanket onto my lap and headed down the stairs. Thanks to my hockey tutor, I now knew there was a fifteen-minute break and then one final twenty-minute period.
While Tracey was gone, I did my own research about hockey and pulled up the site Tracey had been using. Apparently hockey teams fought for all sorts of reasons. They weren’t only an expected part of the game, but one of the most exciting.
“Who knew?” I mumbled and kept reading.
Tracey came back before long, hot chocolates in both hands and handed one to me. “I know you said you didn’t want it, but I bought you one anyway.”
“Thanks.” As soon as the warm cup was in my hand, I definitely wanted it. The heat alone helped.
“Anything exciting happen while I was gone?”
“It’s intermission. What could happen?”
“With you around? Who knows.” She shrugged like I was the wild and crazy one out of the two of us.
I laughed her off, sipped on my hot chocolate, and then pulled up NCWU’s hockey Instagram page. “Apparently they’re pretty good,” I told Tracey as I saw a graphic with their conference standing. “Number two in the conference right now.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“You know?” I closed my phone and slipped it into my coat pocket. “I don’t really either.”
We dissolved into laughter, drank our hot chocolate, and by the time the third period started, I was ready for my backside to stop feeling like a block of ice, but I was actually looking forward to the end of the game.
“Man,” Tracey muttered, as the team took their spots back on the ice. “Is it weird that I think all that gear makes the guys look kinda sexy?”
“Considering you can’t see their faces or what’s hiding under all of it? Yes.”
“Maybe I like the appeal of mystery.”
She was a nut. An absolute nut.
The third period started with Graham once again at the center. He got the puck and passed it to another player. The game flew by, neither team scoring, but it didn’t matter. Halfway through the period, I was sitting on the front edge of the bleacher, my hands fisted and pulled tight to my chest. The other team hadn’t scored, and our team hadn’t scored another.
They were fighting for the puck behind the net with our goalie in it, four players slamming each other into boards and kicking at the puck with their skates. Somehow, it got kicked or smacked to the side, and there was Graham, flying out of the tangle at the boards and racing down to get the puck.
“Oh my gosh!” Tracey’s hand landed on my thigh and squeezed.
He was skating, moving the puck back and forth with his stick.
Their announcer called out, “Marchese with a breakaway! He shoots…he….”
The horn blared, and the lights went out. “SCORES!”
Every single person on this side of the arena jumped to their feet and started screaming.
Tracey and I followed, slower. I glanced at her, and she shrugged. The claps in the building were louder than normal, and every student was jumping up and down on their feet.
“Hat trick! Marchese with the hat trick!”
A few seconds later, Tracey had her phone in her hand. “A hat trick is when a player scores three goals in a game. It’s a huge thing. In pro sports, people actually toss hats onto the ice.”
As she said it, two hats from the student section landed on the ice where Graham was getting bear-hugged by his teammates on the ice.
Whistles were being blown by the refs, but the chaos was too loud to get control. He skated over to his team, high-fived them all while they slammed their sticks against the boards and screamed and cheered along with everyone else.
“It’s a really hard thing to get,” Tracey continued.
I’d already figured that out.
“And rare.”
I covered her phone’s screen with my gloved hand and smiled at my friend. “I think I get it.”
* * *
My heart was racing. The game was over. We won five to nothing, but after the excitement of Graham’s last goal, I couldn’t calm down. Even as the final seconds ticked down, and it was obvious we would win, I was still leaning forward, moving left and right in the direction of the playing happening in front of me.
Even now, as the players had shaken hands and were starting to skate off the ice and disappear under a walkway I assumed led to the locker rooms, I couldn’t pull my focus off Graham. He skated like he was floating, and despite his size, he was graceful. Fast. So fast. He slapped the goalie’s helmet as the guy stepped off the ice and disappeared.
I expected Graham to follow him, but he stopped at an area that didn’t have glass and tugged off his helmet.
Immediately, his eyes met mine. “Get down here!”
“Go on,” Tracey said, shoving my back. “Go see your man.”
“Please.” I huffed and felt the force of a thousand glares on me as the girls heading in the same direction where he was standing shouted his name.
“Good game,” I told Graham, grinning down at him when I reached him.
“It was good. One of my best ever.” He was smiling wide, sweating even though the weather was freezing.
“Really?”
“I haven’t had a hat trick in two years. You must be my lucky charm.”
My chest swelled, and my smile brightened. What a nice thought for someone to have of me.
“You have plans later?” he asked.
“Warming up as quickly as possible is the only thing on my agenda.”
Graham laughed, bold and loudly, and it garnered attention because somebody stepped next to me, and the next thing I knew, I was shoved to the side and down a step.
“Hey!” Graham called and reached for me, but since I was above him, he couldn’t do much. I grabbed the railing and steadied myself.
“Awesome game, G,” the new person said.
I didn’t have to look to know it was the blond.
“Thanks, Piper,” he said, but he hadn’t looked at her. Instead, he scooted to his left so he was in front of me again.
“Doing anything later?” she asked. “We hear the team is having a party.”
Without taking his eyes off me, he replied, “Hoping to have a quiet night in. You in, Holly?”
Next to me, the girl—Piper—at least I now knew her name, scoffed. “Come on, Graham. You haven’t had a hat trick in years. Come out with us. We’ll make sure you have a good time.”
He glanced at her, a slight frown tugging down his lips. “Not interested, but thanks.”
He couldn’t have sounded any less thankful.
When he turned to me, he was no longer looking amused at all. “What do you say? Dinner and a movie in? I need to shower and clean up, but I can meet you at my place in an hour?”
“Um. Sure?”
“Great.” He grinned and skated off, leaving me alone with Piper and a gaggle of blonds behind her.
“He’ll get bored of you. I’ve known him practically my whole life, and you’re not what he’ll want for anything long-term.”
She wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know, but the words, said with such nastiness, hurt more than they should have. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
I turned and hurried to where Tracey was standing near the bottom of the bleachers.
“Sorry, so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think the girls would approach him with you there or I would have come with you.”
“No worries.”
“What’d she say to you?”
I rubbed my gloved hands together and then buried them into my coat pockets. “Nothing I didn’t already know.”