The Virgin’s Secret Marriage: Post 10

Chapter 6: Two Minutes for Terrible Use of Hockey Terminology

(Posts for the foreseeable future may be a bit brief and slapdash. Sincere apologies—it’s been a heck of a few months and the Commissioner is digging her way out of them.)

Chapter six covers about 24 hours, so let’s find out if I can do it justice in just one post… Given my tendency toward verbosity, I’m not holding my breath.

When we left off (in chapter 5), Joe had picked Emma up and carried her into her bedroom for their wedding night. Chapter six begins when he discards her at the foot of the bed, then strips to his boxers and climbs in.

Emma is disappointed, “as she realized this was as far as the romantic gesture was going to go” (71). Geez, Emma. Make up your damn mind. Two minutes ago you were telling him to get out of your house because sleeping beside each other would be too intimate. Now you want… what, precisely?

She snarks at him some more, telling him to sleep on the couch He says refuses.

“I earn my living with my physical agility, Emma. No way am I going to mess up perfectly conditioned muscles trying to curve my body like a slithering snake to fit on that trendy red sofa you’ve got out there, just so you’re feminine sensibilities are appeased” (71).

Great. Joe has begun monologuing. What is he, a Grade B villain? Wouldn’t a simple “No, it’ll hurt my back” have sufficed?

Eventually Emma gives up, changes into pajamas, and climbs into bed. They lie there for a bit, uncomfortable, before Joe asks what Emma had told her father the day that they married (and didn’t get it annulled) since clearly she hadn’t told him about the (original) marriage. I dunno, Joe. If you two wanted to get some sleep (both having cited early mornings), I’m not sure that’s the small talk route you wanted to go.

The answer is really just a rehash of what we already know. Emma didn’t tell her father because it was clear it didn’t matter. Said father was pissed off enough at Joe because he’d dare come near Emma at all, and he assumes all hockey players are “about the groupies and the easy sex and the egos and the tunnel vision on the game” (73).

This offends Joe who declares that he’s not promiscuous, and to prove it (??) snuggles up to Emma and informs her that she’s never gotten over him, just as he’s never gotten over her. They both deny this announcement out loud but both begin to realize it might be true. They eventually fall asleep, then it’s morning and Emma gets ready to leave to placate the Demanding Wedding Mama. Joe announces that he’ll take care of breaking her lease and getting everything moved out of her apartment and she again complains about this but caves.

Joe shows up while she’s with her clients later in the day, to give her the key to his house. Emma is annoyed by how much everyone seems to like Joe, which doesn’t make me think very highly of her. While Joe is at the wedding venue, his mom pulls him aside to lecture him

She informs him that if he “married Emma without loving her with all [his] heart,” he’d committed a crime (79). I’d say that I don’t know what she wants from him at this point, since that’s a pretty useless comment post-wedding, but she announces that love is something you decide to do every day. I don’t think she means you can just decide to love someone, randomly, but that is totally how it reads. She also says that she and Emma’s mom let the two of them get married the day before because she can see their chemistry. Yeahhh, okay. They’re over 18, as we’ve covered before (because they were over 18 seven years ago already) so there’s not much they could have done besides made a spectacle in front of the media. Also, chemistry does not equal love. She goes on to demand that Joe be a good husband to Emma, which includes not just providing for her (which Joe points out that he’ll absolutely do but that Emma doesn’t exactly need him to) but also being her “partner” (80)

She spoke as if underlining every word. “Her soul mate. For real” (80).

Is everyone in this novel absolutely insane? Or perhaps they’re actually aware that they’re living in a romance novel? Who declares that? Of anyone? Let alone of their son? Knowing that said son married for convenience (of a sort)? I… just… I got nothing here.

Eventually, the day ends for both members of the couple and Emma goes to her new home, which is lovely and well maintained on the outside and an absolute disaster of boxes on the inside. She asks him to turn on the air conditioner, he refuses and then goes to watch recordings of his games from the previous season (specifically against Vancouver, in case you’re curious.) Emma decides to join him and watches as the on-tape Joe gets into a fight. When she asks what the two players were chirping at each other, he refuses to tell her.

“Nothing your ladylike ears should hear” (83).

I … guess this is supposed to be either gentlemanly or cute? I can’t really tell. She asks again. He refuses again. She gets irritated that she’s still being “sheltered unnecessarily” by men (83) so she grabs the VCR remote (which tells us, I guess, when this book was written. Or perhaps not. I mean, it was published in 2010… But I know I’ve seen shots of hockey players watching games and plays and stuff on laptops, meaning it’s gotta be all digitized by now. So why would Joe be watching on actual tape? Harrumph.

Anyway, Emma rewinds the tape in an attempt to lip read, but Joe has the TV remote and turns off the screen. Emma goes to get the second remote from him and the weirdness starts.

…he put two fingers in his mouth and let out a startlingly loud whistle. Fists closed, he crossed his arms in front of his chest and held them there. “Two minutes for interference!” he declared, grabbing her wrist and pulling her over onto his lap (84).

This continues. Emma tries to escape. He pulls her back into his lap and declares “Into the penalty box you go” (84). There’s more wriggling and trying to escape.

“Ah-ah-ah!” Still holding on to her with one arm, he made yet another “call”—via punching motion to the side, his arm extending downward from the shoulder. “Another two for roughing!” (85).

I … this … This is not what I meant when I started tagging this book’s posts with “where’s the hockey.” This is not the hockey I seek! What the hell?!

I might even prefer the traditional sex in the locker room to this weirdness.

“You don’t want to add unsportsmanlike conduct to the mix,” he told her gravely, bending his head to kiss the nape of her neck, as one hand slid beneath the hem of her cotton blouse to caress the skin just above her waist. “That might get you sent to the locker room for the rest of the game.”

If the penalty box was his lap, Emma didn’t want to even think where the locker room might be (85).

Emma really, really wants to kiss Joe at this point, so instead she stomps on his instep and elbows him.

“Fisticuffs are not tolerated in this game”

“It wasn’t fisticuffs,” Emma argued, even as she tried unsuccessfully to bring her knee up. Rookie or not, she was not going down without a fight (86).

This isn’t how we hockey! This isn’t how anyone should hockey! Stop this madness!

Joe pins her to the couch at this point, and the chapter ends with the following…

“Joe, you are not going to kiss me,” she stated plainly. Not this way. Not without love.

But his sexy grin only widened.  “Want to bet?” (86-87).

Fine, you two, go have the sex. Have ALL the sex if you want, just stop trying to base it on hockey metaphors and penalties.

(A friend of mine, the one who I was visiting in Vancouver, actually, one wrote a hockey penalties explained piece specifically for dirty minds. That was brilliant and I shall ask her if I can get it posted here on the FHL. This scene, however, is just awkward, like the author suddenly remembered she should put in more hockey and this is where she shoehorned it in.)

An Interruption

Real Life, unfortunately, has gotten in my way and there are currently no more blog posts for the FHL-- yes, right in the middle of the current novel. Sadcakes and woe!!!!

Hopefully, this is a travesty that I can fix as soon as possible-- maybe even in time for Wednesday's usual post, although I cannot promise that. HOWEVER, I do have something to hold you over for today's post at least...

Nancy Warren wrote a Harlequin Blaze named Face-Off in which three siblings each get a short-ish story. I read this book several years ago and was so irritated at one of the stories that I wrote a review of it for friends (and as a potential piece for a blog that never came to be called "Two Minutes for Bitching", but which eventually, in a small way, became this blog.)

Remember that I wrote this before any of the other reviews on this site, which is why there are places I could have referenced things on this blog but I didn't know them yet....

Enjoy this standalone and wish me luck to find the time to write some more posts!


-----"Ice Time" from Face-Off by Nancy Warren-------

The basic premise is that Jarrad MacBride has just seen his NHL career cut short, at 35, due to a head injury that left him without peripheral vision. (If you’re suddenly having Cutting Edge flashbacks, you’re not the only one, but while there is one figure skating reference in the story, that’s not the path that Jarrad takes.) He’s feeling useless now that his career is over, and to top it off, his swimsuit model ex-wife has made the news as she’s become engaged to an NBA superstar. To avoid the paparazzi camping out at his LA home, he heads back to where he played hockey, Vancouver.  (The story never explicitly states that Jarrad played for the Canucks, probably due to copyright, but that’s the implication.) Jarrad’s friend, an amateur hockey player who we never actually see, has asked him to coach his team for an upcoming Firefighters vs Police hockey game. Meanwhile, school-teacher Sierra has been coaxed into playing hockey, with a friend we never see again, but she hasn’t skated in years and doesn’t know how to play. After leaving the firefighters to their practice, Jarrad wanders from one sheet of ice to another and spies Sierra, clinging to the boards in fear as all the other women leave her there, and he helps her off the ice, pleased that she doesn’t recognize him. From here, the two form a relationship that overcomes Jarrad’s uncertain future and Sierra’s lack of self-esteem.

As short romantic stories go, that’s a pretty good set up. And since the story is only 50 pages, the author does a very nice job of getting these two characters together (emotionally) in a way that works within the genre. The writing is generally strong, too, which frankly is never a sure thing with Harlequins.

That said, given that the point of this review is hockey, how was the hockey?! You might be asking. Despite the genre, I actually had pretty high hopes because the book opens with a letter to the reader wherein the author informs that she used to be a freelance journalist and she interviewed “every one of the of the Vancouver Canucks for a feature in their magazine” (4). I took this to mean she knows hockey and has been around it a lot. (I’m also guessing, between that aforementioned information and a few turns of phrase that she’s Canadian, which would mean being surrounded with more hockey than the average American, too.) But upon rereading the opening letter, I’m now thinking that maybe she only interviewed the Canucks team members the one time for that one gig and that her only real interest in hockey players are that they are “fit, tall and hot!” as she put it in the letter. And fair enough, but it makes me feel a bit better about my issues with the story.

These are not issues who will bother anyone who doesn’t obsess over hockey, I expect.

The first I can handwave away as something a Canadian, particularly one once in the media, might understandably make. Our hero, Jarrad MacBride, is hounded in Los Angeles because his ex-wife is dating an NBA player. Now, if she’d left him for the NBA player, which is not the implication, and if the NBA player is a top star and maybe currently playing in the … whatever the NBA championship is called and for an LA team, this might all make some sense. But after watching the 2012 Stanley Cup Finals and seeing the LA media consistently get the names of the players on their own hockey team wrong, not to mention the name of their own team (the Kings inexplicably became a basketball team at one point in the Finals, according to the LA media—the Sacramento Kings, to be precise, magically playing … on ice and in LA?) I have a really hard time thinking that there would be news vans camped outside the house of a former player from Vancouver. Oddly, the character actually thinks that the media will be less troublesome when he’s home in Vancouver, to which I say, Bwuh? Vancouver is obsessed with their players and I’d actually believe those reporters hounding him, but there he only gets a blogger. So that all struck me as odd.

The second part I found troublesome was the meet-cute. Okay, so meet-cute is inherently troublesome, but again, in the genre I can forgive the hero, disgruntled with his own life, disgusted by the lack of teamwork amongst the firemen he’s supposed to coach, suddenly swept into fascination by a woman in hockey gear clinging to the boards. Sure, fine, whatever. Suspension of disbelief and all that—it is, after all, a 50 page romance delivering what it’s supposed to. But somewhere in all of that, I get the suspicion that Nancy Warren doesn’t actually understand hockey and may not have ever seen a hockey rink.

It starts with Sierra skating on a “breakaway” – and I’m honestly not sure that Ms. Warren knows what a breakaway is because Sierra “skated straight over to the boards and started up the rink” (20). And “She had to guess the direction of the puck, since she never took her eyes off her skates” (21). That’s… not a breakaway. Somehow, the puck gets to the goalie who stops it and then the practice is over, everyone leaves the ice, “except the woman with the breakaway” (21).  You keep using that word! I do not think it means what you think it means! But fine, sure, whatever. And this is all from Jarrad’s—the former professional hockey player—perspective, so it’s not like Sierra is just thinking that a breakaway is something that it isn’t.

Anyway, Jarrad helps her off the ice, and they flirt, and then he goes and buys her a cup of coffee. Which leads me to my next point, which I will fully admit is a nit-pick. I admit it! But Sierra has magic hockey gear.  I’m serious. It apparently dissolves AND wicks away sweat. I need to get me some of this gear.

I once read a novel (a tv show tie-in, to be precise) in which the main characters spent time nearly every chapter parking their car. And I don’t mean that in some sort of interesting euphemistic sense, I mean, they literally, every chapter, spent time looking for a place to stash their 1967 Impala before they could go and do, y’know, stuff to forward the book’s plot. Apparently, this obsession over parking the car came from the author’s annoyance that on the tv show, the characters always had no trouble finding parking. It did not, however, make for particularly interesting reading. So I’m not suggesting that Ms. Warren needed to spend every other page describing hockey gear, or the basics of how a non-professional ice rink works, but as someone who actually plays (very) amateur hockey, I was thrown when every time the Sierra gets off the ice her gear apparently melted away.

We know she’s wearing gear; it was borrowed from her brother (whom we never see.) When Jarrad returns with the coffee, Sierra is unlacing her skates—there’s no mention of her gear being taken off before or after this moment. Now, it is theoretically possible to take off all of your gear before taking off your skates. It’s unlikely—you usually take off the helmet, gloves, shoulder pads, and elbow pads before the skates, but the shin guards, hockey socks, and breezers afterwards. You’d have to seriously stretch your hockey socks to get them on or off over your skates (ask me how I know!) and while it’s definitely possible to put the breezers on over your skates (my coach recommends it, actually), it’s difficult, and would be twice as difficult afterwards. Nit-picky, I know, particularly since the author does say “once she had her street shoes back on and the padding off” (23) but this isn’t the only scene in which the two practice hockey, and I want to know how this magic gear works.  Not to mention that apparently Sierra doesn’t sweat. Oh, sure, her hair gets messy from the helmet: it “picked up some static from the cold and was levitating in places” (21). This is with her helmet on.  How does her hair levitate with a helmet on top of it? Not to mention that maybe this is too much information about your humble reviewer, but when I play hockey, my hair doesn’t stick up. Why? Not only because there’s a helmet on top of it but because just the act of putting all the gear on is generally enough to get people to start sweating. I know that, despite her “breakaway”, Sierra wasn’t exactly tearing up the ice, but she’d still be getting a bit full of perspiration. So.

They get back on the ice, with no mention of putting on gear for either of them, until she falls and it doesn’t hurt because she’s wearing (magical!) padding. (Note, I’m suggesting it’s magical because it’s suddenly there, not because it works. The part where it doesn’t hurt when you fall—generally—is true, when you’re wearing gear.) Things work much better this time around because Jarrad coaxed the staff into giving her better skates. On one hand, I will admit that bad skates are going to make skating much, much harder. On the other, I have a hard time believing that there’s a super-secret stash of not-sucky skates behind the counter, just waiting for former NHLers to ask for them.  (Also, the skates she had on before were described as dirty white, which suggests that she was trying to play hockey in figure skates.)

Anyway, they go and have a date and then they have typically mind-blowing romance novel sex. Then they get breakfast at a diner where Jarrad eats multiple platefuls of unhealthy food. I mention this because later in the story Sierra makes him breakfast in bed and “it was healthier stuff than he usually ate and maybe the proportions were a little skimpy” (56). Now, I don’t know any professional hockey players. But they are athletes. Highly trained, highly paid athletes who put their bodies through hell each season. And from that alone I would think they would eat better than the “West Coast Trucker,” apparently a diner specialty that combines everything on the menu. In fact, because the summer hockey news is slow, I know that both the Vancouver Canucks prospects and the Phoenix Coyotes prospects were treated to seminars and lectures (and in the latter’s case, a trip to a grocery store) to learn about healthy eating. So while I get that athletes eat a lot, I would think that Sierra’s choice of “muesli and yogurt, or an organic fruit compote” wouldn’t be a foreign concept.

My last complaint is that after another round of mind-blowing sex, they go back to the rink at about midnight in order to have some private hockey time (no, that’s not a euphemism) and then afterwards they have sex in the locker room showers. Why is this an issue to me? First, no other time that Sierra has changed out of her hockey gear has she even been in a locker room, which is odd to me because every rink I’ve been to, be it for practice or just for stick time, has had players use locker rooms, if only to keep the giant bags of gear out of everyone else’s way, I should think. Maybe Vancouver rinks are different. Second, upon being told to shower, Sierra says “Okay, I’m not sure where the women’s change room is” (50) which makes sense, given my earlier point about her just (having magical gear and) lacing up her skates rinkside. But again, no rink I’ve been to (at this point, in my limited experience, that would be 7) has separate male and female locker rooms. And third, ewwwwwww, sex in a locker room shower? In an NHL rink, sure, I guess—they have people to clean those up, I should think. But an amateur rink (admittedly one where apparently they have magical hockey gear and super-secret skates and lots of free time on the ice, apparently, because whenever these two want to have stick time they never need to check a schedule) no thanks. Just the freakin’ locker rooms tend to smell horrifically (oh right, people don’t sweat in this book—when Sierra sees herself in a mirror after skating, before the shower sex, she sees her hair is rumpled and her face is red from cold), I can’t imagine that the showers would be clean. Ew ew ew.

Anyway, post-sex Sierra makes a comment about how Jarrad will only be in town for two weeks, so it’s okay that he’s hiding her away from everyone, and he says he can stay forever because he’s retired and he’s not hiding her away he was keeping the Prying Paparazzi from her. They then chat with a blogger and meet his family (the stars of the next two stories) and aww, it’s cute. Jarrad has his sense of purpose restored (in that he’ll coach amateur hockey? And be with Sierra?) and Sierra has her sense of self-esteem restored (because even though Jarrad should be out of her league, he has fallen for her) and they presumably live happily ever after.

I leave you with the quote of the novel: “She tried to hold on to sanity long enough to remind him of the importance of protection, but he was already reaching for the night table and she relaxed, knowing that he might take chances on the ice, but he wouldn’t take chances with her” (40).