Chapter 17
STELLA
I’m waiting for Jayden to show up and I’m weirdly excited. Did I miss him the last week?
I guess I did. Sort of.
That’s… I don’t know. Is it bad? I can’t fall for this guy.
I am not going to be my mother.
I think back to when I met Cole. After my parents’ divorce, I didn’t start dating again until university. Cole was interested in me right away, flirting, paying attention to me. He pursued me. And I loved it.
It was heady, being the focus of someone’s attention like that. After being abandoned by both my parents, basically, this was a high for me. It felt exciting and fun and affirming. It felt good to be loved. I wanted to be with him all the time. I craved his attention.
It took a while for me to see the problems with that. The day I realized I was turning into my mother scared the hell out of me.
I’m happy with my life now. A fling is fine.
I can have a fling with Jayden. No strings, no commitments.
He’s young! Twenty-five. He’s not ready to settle down!
I was reminded of that when I told him about Cole and he said, “Whoa. That’s a relationship.
” It’s a good thing he’s young because he’s not going to get serious either.
When he asked me out Friday, it was so tempting to ditch my other plans. But the truth was, I’d had a stressful week and I’d been truly looking forward to a ten-step skin care routine, a full-body exfoliation, and watching TV in bed.
My doorbell rings. Betty loses her mind barking—she always does that—and scrabbles across the hardwood floor to the door.
I open the door to him and smile.
Damn, he looks good.
And that smile—boyish, warm, the dimples—I might melt a little inside.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi. Come in.”
Frank is with him and has already entered, heading straight for Betty. I glance at them greeting each other, then back at Jayden. He steps into the foyer and hands me… flowers.
My heart softens even more as I gaze at the arrangement of white cymbidium orchids in an elegant black box. “Oh…” I breathe out. “Thank you. They’re beautiful.” I take them. “You can hang your jacket in the closet.”
I take the flowers to the kitchen. When I look over at him, he’s crouched down to greet Betty, rubbing her head and ears. “Hey, pretty girl. I haven’t seen you for a while.”
She gazes at him adoringly.
Me too, Betty. Me too.
Jayden joins me at the island.
“Would you like a drink?” I ask. “I have wine and beer. Or some soft drinks.”
“Coke Zero?”
“I have Diet Coke.”
He sighs. “Okay.”
“There’s no difference!”
He gasps. “Yes, there is. But it’s fine. I’ll get it.”
He makes himself at home pouring himself a drink. I already have a glass of red wine.
“Dinner’s mostly ready, but we don’t have to eat right away.” I move to stand by the table. “I love these cymbidiums.” They’re pure white with a bit of pink and bright yellow. “Do you want to know the parts of an orchid?”
He looks at me like I just asked if he wants to shave his armpits.
I laugh. “You’re going to love this.” I gently touch one flower with my index finger. “This is a petal.”
His eyebrows lift.
“And these are sepals.”
“Okay.”
“Now look closely here… this is the column.”
His eyes narrow as he studies it.
“With the stigma and the pollinia.” I point to the stem. “And here’s the ovary and ovules.”
His gaze snaps up to mine.
I grin.
“And this…” I brush the petal that’s speckled with pink. “Is the lip, or labellum.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I am not. These are the callus ridges. And look at this.” I indicate the bright-yellow part in the interior of the flower. “It’s the anther cap. It’s tiny, but what does it remind you of?”
He studies it then looks up at me again, lips twitching. “Is this why you’re so interested in orchids?”
“No.” I smile serenely. “I just think they’re pretty. I learned this stuff when I took the course. Also, sometimes, orchids produce a sticky sap called “happy sap”.”
A crack of laughter burst out of him. “Jesus.” He gestures at the flower. “Who knew orchids were so erotic.”
“Right? I told you you’d enjoy it.”
He shakes his head, lips curved in amusement.
We move over to the couch. Betty joins us immediately, begging for attention from Jayden, and once again, he pets her fondly.
He likes my dog.
Then Frank noses his way in, jealous, and Betty jumps over Jayden to sit on the other side of me.
We make some small talk, catching up about my work and his road trip and the two home games they just played back-to-back Saturday and Sunday.
“That must be tiring,” I say. “You guys play so hard, you need a day off after.”
“Yeah. It only happens a few times a year there’s a back-to-back. At least they were here at home.”
“You looked good Saturday night,” I say.
“You watched?”
“I was there.”
“What?” He stares at me. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“Did you need to know?” I tease.
“Well… we could have gone out after. Oh… maybe you were there…” His voice trails off.
“It was a business thing,” I tell him. “One of our business partners has a suite and invited Troy and me to join them.”
“Oh. If you want to come to other games, I can get you tickets.”
“That would be nice. Anyway, it was a good game. Congrats on the win.”
He relaxes and smiles. “It felt like we were playing better. But then last night wasn’t so great.”
“If you hadn’t been playing against that goalie, I think you would have had about six goals.” I shake my head. “Shots on goal were crazy lopsided.”
“And yet we lost.” His smile is thin.
“Yeah. That’s frustrating.” I sip my wine. “You were playing some long shifts.”
He shoves a hand into his hair. “Yeah.”
“That means your coach relies on you.”
“Yeah.” He makes a face.
There’s a pause in the conversation, so I say, “Soooo… I was bored yesterday and I put together a bunch of your stats.”
He blinks. “Uh… okay.”
I bite my lip. “They might be helpful to you. If you’re interested.”
His face is inscrutable. A slight twitch of his eyebrow is all I get. I don’t know what he’s thinking. He lifts his drink and takes a few swallows. “Sure.”
After a pause, I say, “That didn’t sound enthusiastic. I’m not trying to push this stuff on you.”
“I know.” His smile is cool. “It’s fine.”
He thinks I’m insulting him.
“I’m not… it’s not…” I stop. Then I sigh. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to insult you. I’m not saying you’re a bad player. You’re not.”
He inclines his head.
“It’s what I do.” I make a face. “I love stats. You don’t have to listen to me, though.” I stand. “How about dinner?” I ask brightly.
I barrel to the kitchen. The chicken is in the oven. The salad is in the fridge. The table is set.
“What can I do?” His deep voice comes from behind me.
“Nothing. I mean, here.” I hand him the salad. “You can put this on the table.”
In a minute, we’re sitting down at the table.
“It’s coconut chicken,” I tell him. “Marinated in lime, fish sauce, and coconut milk, then breaded with panko and coconut.”
“Sounds amazing.”
“Here’s the sauce for it. Spicy mayo. And the salad is… I made it up. Thai inspired, I guess.”
When he takes his first bite of chicken, he closes his eyes. “Wow. Delicious.”
Pleasure flows through me. “Thank you.” I cast about for a new topic of discussion. “Do you know why people say bless you when you sneeze?”
His fork pauses in mid-air. “Uh. No.”
“It’s because in medieval times, they believed that sneezing expelled demons.”
“Ah. That makes sense.”
“Also, you don’t sneeze in your sleep, because the nerves that trigger sneezing are also asleep.”
“Interesting.”
I’m babbling about nonsense. “Sometimes, when I pluck my eyebrows, it makes me sneeze.”
“Huh. I knew someone who sneezed after sex. Every time.”
“Wow. Was it a woman?”
He pauses. “Maybe.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Did they sneeze because of the orgasm?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll have to research that.”
“Do you sneeze after sex?”
“You should know the answer to that.”
He wrestles back a smile. “Right. You did not sneeze.”
“I hate it when people scream when they sneeze. We have someone in the office who does that.”
“I hate it when someone sneezes more than a few times. Come on, man, get a grip.”
I nod. “I get it.” I cut a piece of chicken and fork it into my mouth.
After a moment of silence while we both eat, he says, “You can show me my stats after we eat.”
My head snaps up. Our eyes meet.
“I really don’t want to push you to do something you aren’t interested in. If I crossed a boundary, I’m sorry.”
“I am interested. I really want to do better this year. I want our whole team to do better.”
I nod slowly. “Okay. If you’re sure.”
“Yeah. I want to see the data.”
“It’s not bad, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I have some sense of my own abilities. It may not be bad, but I’m not a top-tier D-man.”
“You could be.”
“You’re gonna show me how?”
I smile. “Yes.”
After we eat and clean up and feed our dogs, we go up to my office where my computer is.
I pull another chair up to the desk and bring up some of the charts I put together.
“A major downside of the traditional plus-minus statistic is that it depends on both teammates and opponents, so it’s not always a good measure of a player’s individual contributions.
For example, a player on a below-average team could have a plus-minus that is lower than average simply because of his linemates. ”
“Sure.”
“So we developed a new stat. We call it our Boosted Player Metrics, or BPM. And it doesn’t depend on the rest of the team.”
“Okaaaay.”
“Stop me if I get too involved. I love talking about this stuff.”
“Stop.”
I level a look at him.
“Kidding!”
“Okay. You know Corsi and Fenwick.”
He nods.
“There are a bunch of other metrics—expected goals percentage, takeaway-giveaway different, high danger scoring chances—and this is what puts it all together.” I open a scatter plot. “It shows two measurements—games played and your defensive metric.”
“That graph makes my eyes glaze over.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I know. I’ll explain it. First, I need to go over all the components of the defensive metric. This is the linear model we use…” I point at the screen.
“Jesus.” He falls back in his chair. “My head is exploding.”