Adult Alex pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Get a few with mine too.”
I do, my chest feeling warm as I focus on the four hockey lovers in the frame. The boys are radiant. Alex looks proud and actually excited.
I haven’t seen that expression on him yet.
Alex needed this. He’s not getting this in Rebel right now, and I’m frustrated with my hometown. Alex is used to being a star. He’s used to being recognized like this when he’s out and about in Portland. He’s used to people wanting to talk to him and get photos with him. He has a signature thatpeople treasure. Hell, his signature has probably sold for a few thousand dollars. Maybe more.
Then he moves to a small town in Louisiana to help save our hockey team, and they all treat him like he’s Public Enemy number one.
But even though Alex claims that all he knows how to do is play hockey, I can see that’s not entirely true. Sure, he likes the attention from these three boys, but he’s making them feel pretty great too.
“Now one with the two of us.” Alex is holding his arm toward me.
“What do you mean?”
He grabs my wrist and pulls me up against his body, wrapping his arm around me again.
“Take a photo of me and Nora and include it when you post the other photos tonight,” he tells the boys.
The boys lift their phones and snap photos of Alex grinning at them and me looking up at him with a few obvious stars in my eyes too, I’m sure.
“How should we caption this one?” Austin asks.
“Alex and his girlfriend, Nora,” Alex says.
Their eyes widen, but they quickly type it in.
Finally, with all of that finished, Alex says, “Okay, guys, it was really nice to meet you.”
“Oh my God, it was great to meet you,” Matt says.
“Thanks. Be sure you keep an eye out for the Revelers.”
The boys promise to, and go running across the square to rejoin their parents.
“That was really great,” I say, watching them disappear in the crowd.
“It was.” He retrieves our bag of dessert, then links his fingers with mine as we start walking back across the square.
“I meanyouwere great with them.” He’d made those boys’ nights. Maybe their trip to New Orleans. There’s plenty about this city that excites visitors, but those boys are of an age that meeting a professional athlete they admire probably outweighs any museum, jazz band, or even spooky ghost tour.
He looks in the direction they disappeared. “Thanks. They were…” He shrugs. “That was just really nice to run into some fans.”
“That must happen a lot in Portland.” That won’t happen much here, I realize. Even without Rebel being particularly unwelcoming, most of the New Orleans hockey fans will be fans of the local team, I’m sure.
So, we’ve not only taken him away from his really nice penthouse—yes, Ruth showed me the photos inHockey Hunks—and his really nice cars—yes, those were in that article too and are a far cry from the truck that Astrid procured for him. We’ve also taken him away from his fan base. A guy who thinks all he’s good at is hockey at a time when his pro hockey career has been derailed because of an injury and a long, ultimately not fully productive rehab. I found that part out with some online searching of my own. I couldn’t help it. It’s not every day a girl has a date with a guy she can get an entire background on via her phone. Oh, sure, you can get arrest reports, but while those are definitely important to find ahead of time, even those don’t tell thewholestory. Not like the plethora of information, photos, quotes, and stats I found on Alexander D. Olsen, number fourteen, the six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-and-ten pound center for the Portland Grays.
“I do,” Alex says of being spotted out and about by fans in Portland.
“Do you like that or not?”
He hesitates as if he’s not sure how he should answer. He looks at me. “I like it. Kind of a lot.”
I smile. “That’s a good thing then.”
He goes on. “I know that sounds like I just like having my ego stroked, and that’s not bad, but it’s really just that I like knowing people like what I do. Since that’s my whole life, what I give all my time and attention to, it would suck if I’d put all these years and all this work in and no one gave a shit, you know?”
“It’s yourwholelife?” I repeat.
