Chapter 1 #3
Alex tilted his head sideways and tried to read the questions in Mitch’s notebook. There had to be at least two dozen, and he got the feeling Mitch was the kind of person who would have follow-up questions to his follow-up questions.
“Let me talk to Chris,” Alex offered. “See if I can’t set something up between you.” It wasn’t an offer Alex would usually make, but he felt bad that Mitch hadn’t gotten to hear Chris speak when it was clearly something the kid had prepared for.
Mitch’s whole face—which was expressive to begin with—lit up. “Yeah? Let me give you my info.” He jotted his name, email, and phone number on a blank page of his notebook, ripped the page out, and slid it across the table to Alex.
“And, you know,” Mitch said, tapping the paper right above his phone number. “If you want to use this for something else too, I’d be okay with that.” Then he winked.
Wait. Was Alex being hit on?
He was mentally backtracking through their conversation when something must’ve caught Halley’s attention. He made his way over to them with clipped strides, his mouth in a tight line.
“Mr. Greyson,” he said. “You are not the only one wishing to speak with Mr. Dean.”
Mitch glanced around and his eyes went big at the line of students behind him waiting to talk to Alex.
Alex bit back a sigh. His line was longer than the other panelists’.
He sent a mental apology to his friends waiting for him at the pizza place in town, even as the phone in his pocket buzzed again.
“Should you wish for an autograph from Mr. Dean,” Halley continued, “the request needs to be made on your own time.”
“Autograph?” Mitch repeated. “Why would I want his autograph?”
Alex choked back a laugh. It was refreshing to talk to someone who didn’t give a shit about his pseudo-celebrity status.
“We were discussing career paths, actually,” Alex said, coming to Mitch’s defense. It was becoming clear that Halley had it in for Mitch for some reason.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mitch stood silently, his arms crossed, an annoyed gaze on Halley.
“Don’t take up too much of Mr. Dean’s time please, Mr. Greyson.” Halley gestured at the cluster of students behind Mitch. “There are others waiting to speak with him.”
As Halley walked away, Mitch eyed the line over his shoulder before turning back to Alex.
“Bet they’re all wanting an autograph,” he muttered.
In line were three women—one of whom was holding a tiny mirror up to her face and applying lip gloss—a man wearing a blue and white Tampa Bay jersey, and another who was unashamedly filming Alex’s conversation with Mitch.
“You never answered my question,” Mitch said to him.
“Which one?”
“Why the NHL is and isn’t what you expected.” Mitch tucked his pen into the notebook and slid both into his backpack.
“You follow hockey?” Alex leaned a hip against the table.
“Of course.”
Alex tried to think of a response that wouldn’t sound wishy-washy, but also wouldn’t give anything too personal away. He didn’t know this guy from Adam. What if he was with the school newspaper and was angling for a sound-bite?
Except as he was wracking his brain for an appropriate answer, it hit Alex all at once that Mitch Greyson was blatantly checking him out.
Okay, not so blatantly that someone not looking directly at his face and body language could tell, but blatantly enough that Alex—who never got hit on by men—finally clued in. He was, in fact, being hit on.
It completely threw him and whatever Mitch’s question had been? Yeah, it was gone. Not that Mitch seemed to care anymore whether or not Alex answered.
Was Alex giving off some kind of gay vibe or something?
He’d promised himself a long time ago that if he ever made it to the NHL, he wouldn’t divulge his sexual preferences for anyone.
He didn’t want to make a Thing out of it, wasn’t going to give the media something other than his skills to talk about.
Not that he was worried—at twenty-four years old, he could count on one finger the number of times he’d been sexually attracted to someone.
At this point, he was pretty sure the whole dating-romance-marriage-babies thing wasn’t in the cards for him.
Not only did it take him forever to figure out if he was attracted to someone, but the way dating was going nowadays, nobody wanted to be friends first and wait for romantic feelings to develop, if they developed at all.
There just wasn’t an app for that. Instead, people were too busy jumping into bed with random strangers and having casual friends-with-benefits hookups.
No, thank you.
Hell, he didn’t even like kissing. He’d kissed all of two people in his life and it hadn’t done anything for him either time.
It was wet and gross and unpleasant. The way things were going in his nonexistent love life, he’d be a virgin for the rest of his life.
Others might bemoan their virgin status at twenty-four years old, but frankly, Alex didn’t care. What was the big deal about sex anyway?
In today’s sexually-charged culture, Alex often felt like an alien.
That didn’t, however, prevent him from acknowledging the attractiveness of another person. Like Mitch, for example. Alex’s extremely limited sexual experience was the reason the butterflies had come out when faced with such an outwardly beautiful person.
Mitch’s gaze swept him up and down, a half smirk on his face, his thumbs tucked into the waistband of his jeans and drawing attention to his crotch.
The man really was attractive in an I-know-I’m-the-shit kind of way.
It was the kind of personality type Alex usually avoided.
It was disingenuous and he didn’t have time for fake people in his life.
Alex’s bullshit meter clanged and any butterflies that’d appeared at Mitch’s good looks disappeared in the face of Mitch’s in-your-face personality.
Mitch’s gaze landed on Alex’s mouth for one, two, three seconds. Then he took his time cataloguing Alex’s face. When Mitch’s eyes met his again, the man’s smile turned lewd.
It was possible Mitch was the type of person who hit on anything that moved.
Eyes hooded, he leaned in across the table and whispered, “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime.”
Well, it was blatantly obvious what that meant.
With one last parting glance at Alex’s mouth, Mitch turned and left.
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, Alex finally walked into the pizza joint in tiny downtown Glen Hill, Vermont.
He was still faintly horrified that Mitch had hit on him while in full view of the other speakers and lingering students, but as he started to realize that no one had been paying them any attention, except for the guy who’d been filming them from far enough away not get any sound, horror gave way to mild amusement.
It was also a nice ego boost, even though he wasn’t interested.
Mama Jean’s was two-thirds packed at almost ten o’clock. College kids having a bite before they hit the bar down the street, most likely. Alex took a moment to fondly remember his own college days.
His friends were sitting in a booth against the front window.
JP and Jay were both Jonathans with unpronounceable last names, so on their first day of practice with the GH Mountaineers in their freshman year, Coach Bedley had given them nicknames.
Yet people still got them confused even though they looked nothing alike.
Six-foot tall JP had light brown skin, dark eyes, and dark hair cut short that matched the perpetual scruff on his face.
He had the whitest teeth Alex had ever seen and the friendliest smile.
Jay, on the other hand, often joked that he was the palest guy in America.
He was only about five-foot-six and he’d let any muscle from their college hockey days run to fat now that he wasn’t playing anymore.
Alex slipped into the booth next to Jay and grinned at his friends. He might’ve spent the past two-plus years since graduation playing for Tampa, and he’d made great friends on the team, but JP and Jay were family.
“We ordered for you,” JP said by way of greeting, taking a pull from his beer bottle. “Your usual. Told Mama Jean to hold the order until you arrived, since we didn’t know how long you’d be.”
“God, I miss Mama Jean’s pizza.” Alex missed Vermont food in general. He snagged a half-eaten slice from the mostly empty tray in the middle of the table.
“Is it weird being here while your team is still going on as if nothing happened?” Jay asked.
“Yes. Thanks for pointing it out, jackass.”
“It’s what I’m here for, man.”
“How’d your lecture talk thing go?” JP asked, taking a bite of pizza crust.
Alex shrugged. “It was a lecture talk thing.”
It was too bad that Chris had missed his flight. The kinesiology students would’ve gotten more out of his talk than Alex’s boring last-minute speech. It was just Alex’s bad luck that he’d been visiting his grandpa in Montpelier when Chris had called. Alex hadn’t had the heart to say no to the man.
“How’s your grandpa doing?” JP asked, as if he’d known where Alex’s thoughts had gone.
Heaving out a long sigh, Alex rubbed a hand over his face.
“That good, huh?”
“Sorry, man.” Jay patted his arm.
“He’s not getting any better,” Alex said. Suddenly not so hungry, he set the rest of his slice back onto the tray. JP nabbed it.
“People don’t usually get better from Alzheimer’s, do they?” Jay asked.
From what Alex could tell, based on an extremely thorough and in-depth internet search combined with interviews with as many neurologists as he could find who would give him the time of day, sometimes Alzheimer’s patients did get better, or at least stabilize, for periods of time.
But not Grandpa Forest.
It killed Alex to see the man he remembered as being upbeat, fun, outgoing, and wicked smart reduced to a shell of who he used to be. And it was compounded by the fact that Grandpa Forest kept mistaking Alex for his own son—better known as Alex’s good-for-nothing dad.
All Alex wanted was five damn minutes where his grandpa would look at him with familiarity, smile his bright, toothy grin, and say, “Alex, my boy!” the way he used to, then envelope him in his trademark bear hug.
Five minutes for Grandpa Forest—Alex’s biggest supporter—to see him play in the NHL.
“Let us know next time you head to Montpelier for a visit,” JP said. “We’ll come with you.”
“That’s… No—”
“Yes,” JP interrupted him. “You’ve always been there for us. When my mom died, when Jay’s grandma had a heart attack. You’re going to let us be there for you, whether you like it or not.”
Jay pointed at JP with his beer. “What he said.”
“Fine,” Alex grumbled, though he had no intention of taking them up on their offer. Still, his heart warmed at the support from his friends, even as he found himself annoyed that they wouldn’t let him sulk in peace.
“How long have we got you for?” JP asked as a server deposited Alex’s pizza onto the table. “A few more days?”
Alex took a bite, grunted around the food in his mouth, and swallowed before answering. “I’ll be here until end of November probably. Just need to get back to Tampa for a charity gig at the end of this month, and I might spend a couple weekends with my mom in Toronto. Other than that, I’m here.”
“You don’t need to be near your doctors for…” JP waved at Alex’s arm.
“There’s nothing they can do until the cast comes off. There might be some rehab after that, but we won’t know until my arm’s healed.”
“What will you do with yourself while you’re here?”
“Oh, shit!” Alex slammed a hand onto the table, startling his two friends. “I didn’t tell you guys. Do you remember Kate Harvey?”
“Nope,” Jay muttered.
JP straightened and his eyes went big. “From our creative writing classes?”
“Wait, the one who wouldn’t give you the time of day?” Jay asked JP.
“That’s her,” Alex confirmed. “She works for a publisher in New York and approached me about writing a book about hockey.”
“Shut the fuck up. Dude!” Jay raised his glass in a toast. “That’s awesome.”
“What’s the book about?” JP asked.
“That’s the thing.” Alex wiped his hand on a napkin. “I don’t think the idea she pitched is going to work. She wants it to be autobiographical, chronicling my career. But truthfully, my story’s not that interesting. I’ve been trying to find another angle.”
“What about a highlights book?” Jay suggested.
“It’s been done to death. I was hoping to dive into the sport, get into the nitty gritty. I just have to figure out what direction to take it. Anyway.” He finished off his slice. “Tell me what’s going on here.”
They spent two hours talking about nothing and everything. Eventually, the crowd at Mama Jean’s thinned, then it got busy again as semi-drunk college kids came over from the bar for food before heading back to the dorms for the night.
It wasn’t until they were getting ready to leave that Alex discovered a giant purple drawing on his cast.
He glared at Jay. “Dude, seriously? Did you not hear me say that I still have a charity event to attend?”
“You can educate them while you’re at it,” Jay said, smirking.
“Pretty sure the only thing he’d be educating them on,” JP said, peering closely at Alex’s cast, “is that you’re anatomically deluded.”
There, drawn with a purple Sharpie on Alex’s cast, was a giant cock and balls.