Chapter 2
CHAPTER
TWO
Ambrosia
Elli Adler: I am stunning.
Shea Adler: Utter perfection in my eyes.
Ambrosia Mercer: UGH! Swoon! Y’all, come on, he is Shea Adler. Cue the applause.
Shea Adler: Wow, what an opening.
Elli Adler: My favorite is the applause.
Ambrosia Mercer: I made it myself, but I’m not done.
Elli Adler: Ooh, what’s next?
Ambrosia Mercer: You may know Shea Adler, and his name demands respect, but y’all, let me tell you about Elli Adler.
Shea Adler chuckles, as Elli Adler squeals.
Ambrosia Mercer: Mrs. Elli Adler took over ownership of her beloved Nashville Assassins at the young age of twenty-eight.
The Assassins have soared under her leadership, winning eight Cups, and the Luther Arena has been voted best arena in the US fourteen times now.
She is known for her gracious heart and motherly love for her players.
She started the Elli and Shea Fund, which not only gives hockey equipment to low-income kids, but is now responsible for starting hockey programs in state-run schools.
With her help and her guidance, out of the nineteen hundred middle and high schools throughout Tennessee, 1,002 now have thriving hockey programs. While she is done raising her children, who are all huge names in the hockey world, she is still a billet mom for kids wanting to play in the USA.
Her heels are as high as her ambitions, she owns the heart of Shea Adler, she is Elli Adler.
Shea Adler: Wow, I think your introduction was way better than mine.
Elli Adler: The heels part really drove it home.
Ambrosia Mercer: I’m glad you liked that. I had that thought up before your other accomplishments.
Laughter.
Shea Ader: Thank you for having us. I have to say, when I did this with your dad, the room was dank, smelled like beer, and he wasn’t nearly as welcoming.
Elli Adler: I was thinking the same thing.
Ambrosia Mercer: Thank you. I wanted a livelier space but still hockey.
Elli Adler: You achieved it.
Shea Adler: I love the goal and the snacks.
Ambrosia Mercer: That means a lot! Thank you. Now, when my dad ran this podcast, he only brought on the player, but I am moving in a new direction. As everyone knows, we lost Rowe Mercer, my amazing dad, great husband, and fantastic hockey player turned podcaster, six years ago.
Shea Adler: Wow, six years. It seems like yesterday. I can still feel him crushing me into the boards.
Ambrosia Mercer: He was a bruiser, for sure.
Elli Adler: But a kind man off the ice.
Ambrosia Mercer: The best.
Shea Adler: He’d be proud of you, Ro.
Elli Adler: So proud.
Ambrosia Mercer: Stop, you’re making me emotional.
Laughter.
Ambrosia Mercer: I have kept The Rowe Report true to the script my dad had. For one thousand episodes, I carried on his name. But now that I’m in my final year to get my master’s in sports communication, I want to try my own ideas. My own script, but still keep my dad’s memory alive.
Elli Adler: I love that, and congratulations!
Ambrosia Mercer: Thank you. Now, I know my listeners are worried that I could mess up this podcast, but I won’t.
You’ll still get the full story of greatness from my guests, and I’ll always be on top of all the hockey news, but I’ve decided that I want to do a segment where we focus on the player outside of his sport.
Shea Adler: I’m sure I speak for your listeners when I say I’m intrigued.
Ambrosia Mercer: As you should be. With the rise of Sports Romance novels, I feel we can bring more women to the sport of hockey.
The best way is with little looks at real love.
You see, my dad said that he felt like his game totally changed when he met my mom.
It gave him a reason to show out and impress her, but mostly, it made him push to be better so that she could proudly say she was married to the best hockey player ever.
When he retired, she was the first person he thanked.
I love the love my parents had, and I want to know if it’s true.
So, tell me, Shea, did finding your person change your game?
Shea Adler looks at his wife, brings up her hand that he has been holding the whole time before kissing her knuckles.
Shea Adler: Without a doubt.
“Mija! Mija!”
How I can hear my tía over my headphones as I edit my session from this morning is beyond me. Or is it? She’s loud as hell even when she whispers. I push my headphones off, grimacing when they get caught in my curls, before I gather my hair and tie it up.
“Yes, Tía?”
My tía, Naylia, pops her head out of my room, and I make a face.
Her hair, like mine, is a combination of dark and light brown wild curls.
It’s up in the same bun I have but held back by a purple bandanna.
Her dark brown eyes are framed in dark lashes and have wrinkles from her laughing like a hyena her whole thirty-nine years.
Her lips are plump, her cheekbones high, and yeah, my aunt is a baddie.
She has a huge ass, thick thighs, and the tiniest little waist. She can pull a dad, a brother, and a son with no issue at all.
My aunt is a tiny bit of a cougar. A proud one, at that.
She adjusts her apron that I know my mom has on too, but she’s in the kitchen cleaning.
Why they insist on coming over and cleaning after a recording session will never make sense.
I am twenty-four years old; I can clean my own place.
I understand that this is Naylia’s condo, and when I’m ready to move out, she’ll sell, but I’m not a slob.
I clean up after myself just fine, but it’s as if they can’t accept that.
Or believe that I’m old enough to take care of myself.
Sometimes I feel like since they don’t have my dad to fuss over, they’ve moved all their energy over to me.
It’s annoying as hell.
“Tía, why are you in my room? No one went in there,” I ask, confused, but she waves me off.
She blows out an exaggerated sigh. Her voice is full of mirth and a spicy Spanish lilt as she insists, “Still needs to be cleaned. But why are all the toys I got you still in the packaging?”
My jaw goes slack. “Why are you in my drawer?”
She doesn’t seem the least bit guilty. She only shrugs. “I had to make sure you took them out of the packing, which you did not. They need to be cleaned, mija. You can’t go from packaging to your panocha.”
God above.
My face burns with embarrassment. “I know that. I don’t need them.”
She arches a brow. “Don’t lie to me. Your panocha gets no action. It probably has bats flying out of it at this point.”
She’s not wrong.
“And yours gets more action than a T.J.Maxx on a Wednesday when new products are put out,” I snap back, and she grins, her eyes lighting up with humor.
“Yes. Come join me on aisle sixty-nine.”
When she snorts at her own awful joke, I roll my eyes.
“I’m good where I am,” I mutter. It’s a lie, but we won’t be getting into my nonexistent love life. “You can take the toys, by the way.”
She doesn’t like that at all. “I got them for you. Maybe if you give yourself an orgasm, you’ll want a man to do it.”
“It isn’t that I don’t want a man to do it, I just don’t have time,” I complain, giving her a look.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had this argument.
My life revolves around school, work, and the podcast. When am I supposed to find someone to give me orgasms?
After watching my parents love each other so hard, there is no way I don’t want that.
I crave it. The constant support, the intimacy, the all-consuming love.
I want someone to be obsessed with me, and to get that, I have to put time into finding someone.
Not get on Tinder, swipe right, and hook up.
Which is how my peers are doing it. Yeah, not a fan.
She shakes her head. “That’s sad. It’s called self-care. Tickle the bean, Ro. Maybe you wouldn’t be wound so tight.”
I need to change the locks.
“Nay, leave her be. Not everyone wants their panocha compared to a hallway that someone’s tossing a hot dog down.”
Tía throws my mom a wicked look, but no one is really mad here.
Well, I’m annoyed. Neither of them spoke of sex toys, guys, or even orgasms when my dad was around, and he always shielded me from their crazy.
Now that he’s gone, Nay has moved in with my mom—which worked for me since I got her condo—but I feel like they have nightly meetings over a glass of wine to discuss how to drive me nuts.
They smother me with their crazy and love.
They want me to put myself out there, but again, I don’t have the time.
I run my dad’s podcast, which takes up forty hours of work a week.
During the season, I’ve been announcing the girls’ hockey games, but after the last boys’ announcer retired, I’ll now be doing the boys’ games since I have the highest GPA in my program.
I can’t wait since this is what I want. Women’s hockey is still up-and-coming.
I feel in my soul it’ll get there, but I want to be where the action is, and that’s men’s hockey.
Since I’m not there yet, I’m getting my master’s, and I’m constantly applying for the next best internship.
Though, after today, I may have an in with FanDuel Sports Network South from the great Elli Adler.
I usually don’t like to take handouts, but I’m tired of fetching coffee.
I want to announce, and if Elli Adler can pull some strings for me to show off who I am, I’m here for it.
So, yeah, no time. I have goals, and while my dad may have believed that finding his person made his game better, that can’t be true now. Not with the guys my age. They are all so self-absorbed, no one is loyal, and most of all, they want me to chase them.
I don’t chase anyone; I attract.