Her Man Advantage: Post 6

Chapter 3: Groupies
 

Jennifer shows up to the next morning’s practice only to find that it’s open to the public. A young woman introduces herself.

“I’m Chelsea, groupie extraordinaire” (32).

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been to a fair number of Coyotes practices and I’ve seen the other regulars. I even saw some who I thought were, frankly, a little obsessed (yes, more than me). And I don’t think any of them would introduce themselves that way. Chelsea is one of a group of four who not only come to every practice (every public one and even some that aren’t, apparently) but also follow the team. After this day’s practice, they’re driving to Montreal to see that night’s game.

Jennifer wonders how these women have jobs that allow them to tailor their schedules around the team. Flurry and I wondered that about other people we saw at practices.  (We were graduate students.) And that wasn’t even for people who went to away games. She also notices that the women don’t dress like puck bunnies (dressed to get noticed) but were in appropriate hockey rink clothes. She speaks with Chelsea for a while, then asks if she can send her cameraman (Bryce) along with the women to Montreal for footage and they say yes.

I really hope Chelsea has a car that fits more than five. Because sure, there’d ‘only’ be five of them, plus luggage and camera equipment, but that’s a 7 and a ½ hour drive, without stops, from Philadelphia to Montreal. That sounds awfully squishy.

Jennifer loses some of her enthusiasm for Axel and the team when she learns they have groupies.

Did he have female fans who shadowed his movements? The idea rankled (32).

The idea should more than rankle because that’s called stalking, if all those movements are shadowed.

The fans “squeal” as some players skate their way and grin at them. I’ve also never seen that happen at practice. Then when the team leaves the ice, they “thronged the tunnels” for a chance at getting high fives.

This really reads like the team is practicing not at a practice facility but at their arena. Or, more to the point, like the author hasn’t seen the difference. Once again, you wouldn’t need a tunnel (which protects the players from the fans) if you’re at a practice facility. That said, the only practices I’ve been to have been the Coyotes’, so it’s possible that the setup is different elsewhere. I know that the Canucks, for example, don’t have open practices (except one that you have to pay for and which does happen at their actual arena.) Most teams do have open practices, at their practice facilities, though.

(It’s also weird to me that whole team is leaving the ice at once, the way they do after games. During Coyotes’ practices, they left in ones and twos over a period of time. Some would need more time with one of the specific coaches or just wanted more time to drill.)

The other oddity is that apparently the ticket sales aren’t great for the Philadelphia Phantoms (there’s talk with the groupies about boosting ticket sales from the documentary series.) There are NHL teams that need sales boosted—the Coyotes are one of them (but far from the only one!) But Philadelphia? Really? I just don’t understand it. This is another thing that reads more like an AHL or ECHL team rather than NHL.

The scene ends for Jennifer when she sees that Chelsea-the-super-fan has Axel’s player number tattooed on her wrist. It’s played like a “dunh-dunh-dunnnnhhhh” reveal but I don’t understand why. The more groupie-like someone is, the less likely they’d be to actually attract someone’s serious attention, in my opinion. And it’s not like Chelsea needed Axel’s permission to get the tattoo.

Her Man Advantage: Post 5

Chapter 3: Attraction

Axel tries to speed through the tour of the training facility, but our heroine, Jennifer, is actually quite smart and catches on and asks why he’s trying to get rid of her. She also spends a great deal of time admiring Axel as they race through the rink. She decides that the scar on Axel’s cheek (a U-shaped scar) must be from a puck, and she admires his butt, thinking “Constant skating, apparently, yielded a truly spectacular butt” (25). I appreciate the fact that this author knows something about hockey players—yes, they tend toward having very nice butts for precisely this reason.

(Someone I respect a helluva lot and who had a serious position above me, shocked me once by telling me a story about hockey butts. Once, while she was buying hockey skates for her son, she saw Shane Doan, captain of the Coyotes, in the same store denying his son an incredibly overpriced hockey stick. He was apparently right in front of her and facing away, so she ended up staring. Her husband caught her at it.  She said at least she hadn’t grabbed Doan’s butt. After this story I respected this person even more, heh.)

Anyway, Jennifer not only calls him on his trying to get rid of her but on his trying to intimidate her, too. Often romance novels gain their tension from the eventual couple not telling each other things or confronting each other. So I quite like that these two (at the moment) are up front. Are you trying to get rid of me? Yes. (On the other hand, Axel doesn’t tell her why and just says that he thinks the idea for the documentary is lousy and everyone should be focused on the game. Currently I’m okay with that since they met roughly and hour (or four, depending on the shower scene) ago.)

This confrontation, however, leads to the clinching. Axel claims, “I tried to outrun you” (27), but when Jennifer says that avoidance might have been the better plan, he’s all “You called. I came.” Jennifer says this might be a bad idea and Axel agrees that their attraction will lead to complications (28).

Axel has Jennifer pinned to the wall and she has her hands clutching his shirt, and yet she says she wasn’t coming on to him. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. But they do, despite their attraction, manage to pry themselves apart for the sake of their working relationship.

Jennifer then asks who would be better to talk to, since Axel is no longer willing. But as soon as she starts naming his teammates, Axel gets jealous and decides he does, in fact, have time to talk to Jennifer, the next day. Besides, he’s telling himself that it’s better if he keeps her nearby so as to have an eye on her.

This chapter’s hockey metaphor: Desire slammed him like a body check to the boards (31).

Her Man Advantage: Post 4

Chapter 2: Copping Only a Minimal Feel

Our hero, our fearless heroic hero, nearly instantly regrets his agreement to show Jennifer, the “mouthy filmmaker” around the practice facility (19). Mouthy is such a gendered adjective; I disapprove. Apparently, in trying to stall for time he has remained in the shower “willing away his reaction” so long that he has worn the bar of soap “down to nothing.” I don’t know about you, but my bars of soap last a lot longer than one shower. Even if Axel weren’t starting with a fresh bar of soap, he’d have had to have been in the shower for a really long time. (Out of curiosity, I did a Google search and while respondents disagree, I saw most people’s bars of soap lasted a minimum of 2 weeks’ worth of showers, with the average seeming to be closer to 3 weeks. Apparently, the average American’s shower lasts 8.2 minutes. Assume 1 shower per day for 2 or 3 weeks (14-21 showers) and that would be 114.8 minutes (almost 2 hours) or 172.2minutes (almost 3 hours) To be fair, one generally doesn’t use the soap the entire time one’s in the shower, so it might be less than that to wear away a bar. But we could still assume more than an hour. Damn, Axel is wasting a lot of water.

Furthermore, while the above quote doesn’t explicitly say his “reaction” is an erection (which is odd, given that this is a Blaze and just as in Body Check we’ll learn much about our hero’s penis’s general reactions to the world later), that’s what it reads like. If my (admittedly hasty) calculations are right, then he’s probably fine. But if he’s using soap that lasts even longer, it’s not inconceivable that he’d go past the 4 hour mark, in which case, according to commercials, he’d want to see a doctor for that erection.

At any rate, presumably shriveled like a raisin, Axel finally leaves the shower and gets dressed. As he finishes, Kyle Murphy walks in. Kyle, as I mentioned before, is Axel’s friend, team superstar, and son of the family who “facilitated Axel’s move to the U.S.” (20). His appearance here, though, is basically to chat about Axel’s new task of showing Jennifer around, and to provide a place for Axel to think about how “seriously hot” she is. (Apparently she has “sexy, shoulder-length red curls. Vivid green eyes.  Cute-as-hell freckles and a build so willowy he could probably wrap his arms around her a few times” (20-21). (Not that it matters, but I personally prefer the more average heroines. Also, we learn elsewhere that Jennifer is short, which to my mind doesn’t quite go with willowy.)

But lest you think Axel is only interested in Jennifer’s body, the narrative quickly corrects us. “But that stuff was window dressing for the spark inside her, a spark that flared from the moment she stepped out from behind the post to greet him”  (21). That’s right, everyone. Watch out. Jennifer is fraught with spark…ness. What does that even mean?

Digression time! (Since this post has been *so* on topic thus far…) Hearing about Jennifer step out from behind the post makes me think of one of the coyotes practices I’ve been to, and I’m going to share it because why not? (This was with Flurry, who can back me up on this.) I think it must have been a weekday practice because I don’t remember very many people there. And Raffi Torres was still on the team, so this must have been two seasons ago. Raffi got off the ice and someone called to him (someone who’d been watching, but who he seemed to know). He turned to say something to that woman, but kept walking. He finished what he was saying, turned around, and walked directly into an enormous post. I managed to keep from laughing until he got through the doors leading off to the other rink/the Yotes’ dressing room, then turned to Flurry wand was all “Did I just see what I think I saw?” and she was looking at me the same way. It was awesome.

ANYWAY. Back to the Philadelphia Phantoms…. When Axel asks Kyle if the latter had met Jennifer, he learns that she is currently up in the rafters in order to discern what kind of wide-angle shots she can get. Axel flips out about this, slightly, worrying for her safety, and dashes off to save her.

Here’s where I have to admit ignorance. (I hate admitting ignorance.) I have only been in one NHL team’s practice facility (the Coyotes’ obviously.) So the description of the Phantoms’ practice “arena” seems odd to me, but I cannot actually safely say that it’s impossible. But it does really seem like the author had a regular arena in mind, not a rink.

Axle plowed through the double doors, past the tunnel leading to the ice, toward the viewing area for visitors. 

“Up here!” she called, lying prone on a steel girder that was part of the open web truss system holding up the clear glass arena ceiling (21).

That all seems rather exorbitant for a practice facility. All I can say is that the Coyotes’ practice rink doesn’t have any of that- no tunnel (you don’t need a tunnel if no one is above you in the stands to throw things at you), no viewing area, and certainly no clear glass arena ceiling. That last, however, might be because, well, Phoenician desert sun is maybe something you don’t want to invite in when you’ve got to cool the place enough to keep ice from melting.

They share some witty banter, during which Axel accuses Jennifer of being an insurance liability, since she’s fifteen feet up, then she swings herself down most of the way. Axel, hero that he is, positions himself underneath to catch her if she falls, and also sneaks a look up her blouse. Then he wraps his arms around her and they do that whole ‘sliding down his body’ thing, and he eventually puts her down “copping only a minimal feel” (23).

And here we’re back to that thing where they’re both attracted to each other and we know that they’re going to end up together, so that’s all right then, thing, but I’m still not really okay with this. She didn’t even want his help getting down. (Also, what is a “minimal feel”?)

They both catch their respective breaths and he starts the tour of the facility.