Page 14 of Meet Your Match (Kings of the Ice)

FREE OF EXPECTATIONS

Maven

T he amount of times I yawned throughout the day was impressive, but even as tired as I was, it was fascinating following Vince around on a day off.

It surprised me that we went straight from the park to the stadium, where he changed and headed to the team’s private gym on the top floor.

There were only a few other players in there, and they goofed off a bit before each settling in to their various workouts.

They weren’t lifting weights, though. It seemed to be all cardio, a couple of them jogging on the treadmills while Vince spent almost an hour on the bike.

When he was done, he spent a lot of time in what he told me was recovery.

One of the trainers did an intense cupping session with him before a long massage, and he finished it all off with a twenty-minute sauna session.

I had followed him in long enough to take a photo before quickly exiting, because being in a literal hot box with shirtless Vince was a sure-fire way to test my professionalism .

Afterward, he ate another meal prepared by the team’s chef before we headed back to his condo. His housekeeper had come while we were gone, and the place was now spotless.

He spent a long time meditating, which surprised me, and then he journaled, which about put me on the floor with shock.

When I thought about having one day off, I imagined him bingeing Netflix, or going out with the guys.

And he admitted that sometimes, he did just that.

But most of the time, he had a routine he stuck to, especially during the season.

While he was journaling, I stepped onto his beautiful balcony to call Reya and Camilla. They were losing their minds over the content. Between the game and all the footage from his day off, our followers were feral. And so were my bosses.

“All of this is gold,” Reya told me. “And don’t worry about your garden, your plants, or your house. We’ve hired someone to take care of all of it for the month.”

That brought me as much relief as it did anxiety, because caring for my home and my garden was something I wanted to do — not have someone else doing.

Still, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t having fun, that this assignment wasn’t exciting. I decided to take my dad’s advice and live in the present . What were the odds I’d ever do anything like this again?

Answer: slim to none.

With the end of that phone call, I committed to throwing myself completely into the experience and getting the most out of it. And when I quietly stepped back inside, Vince glanced up at me from where he was journaling with a crooked grin.

I ignored the way my heart skipped a beat when he did .

Throughout most of the day, he was silent, and I just took photos and videos and observed from the outside.

I’d told him to pretend like I wasn’t there, and after the park, he’d been incredibly proficient in adhering to my request. I almost missed it — his playboy attitude, cocky lines, and quick banter.

But there was something magical about watching him from the outside, being a little fly on the wall during a professional hockey player’s day off.

I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, exactly, but it likely involved women and drugs and spending money like it would never run out.

I definitely hadn’t expected him to be so focused on the season, to work on his body and his mind, to stick to a routine that would help him recover from the games this past week while also gearing up for the ones to come.

There was a reason he was one of the best rookies in the league. Maybe luck and talent had something to do with it, but this? His dedication to what he did? That played a part, too.

I thought I’d be ignored until I excused myself from his apartment, but when the afternoon bled into evening, and the sun began to sink over the city skyline, Vince grabbed two local IPAs out of his fridge.

He cracked the top on one of them before arching a brow at me to ask if I wanted the second one.

And usually , I was not a beer girl.

But I thought what the hell — part of the experience, right? and nodded.

“Is it Netflix time?” I asked him as I took the first sip.

He smiled the way the Cheshire cat would, rounding the kitchen island and walking past me and across the room.

“Not quite,” he said .

And he placed his beer on the end table by his pottery wheel.

“Wait,” I said excitedly, hopping off my barstool and all but skipping over to him. “Am I going to get backstage access to the making of a Vince Tanev ceramic masterpiece?”

“I can’t tell if you’re being sincere or sarcastic.”

“A bit of both.” I grabbed one of the spare rolling stools in the area and took a seat, wheeling up to where he was. “So what are you doing? What are you making? Tell me everything.”

I couldn’t explain it, but Vince was the most relaxed I’d seen him all day when he stepped into that little corner of his home. It was like watching someone kick their shoes off after a long, hard day.

“This guy is going into the kiln because it’s finally dry enough,” he said, picking up a wide, shallow bowl. It was sage green and looked like one you might use for pasta or a salad. “And I’m going to fuck around with some designs on these guys,” he said, motioning to a set of tiny glasses.

“What are those, anyway?”

“I had Japanese teacups in mind when I made them,” he said. “Mainly for sencha. But we’ll see how they turn out.”

“They look okay to me.”

“Now,” he said. “But I could screw them up in the design process or in the kiln. Especially since we live in Florida.” He shook his head. “The moisture here fucks everything up.”

I felt like a little kid in Santa’s workshop, an excited smile spreading on my lips as I leaned forward and took it all in.

“And then,” he said, reaching for a plastic container on one of the shelves behind his wheel. He set it on the table and popped the lid, revealing multiple sealed bags of clay of all different colors. “I’ll start something new.”

“What do you do with all of them?” I asked. “When you finish?”

He shrugged. “Depends. I keep some, give some away as gifts, throw some right into the garbage where they belong.”

“Use some to make ten grand for charity.”

“Someone’s gotta make the rich assholes of the world feel good about themselves,” he said pointedly, and we shared a knowing smile.

I continued peppering Vince with questions as he got started, and he had the patience of a saint as he walked me through everything he was doing, step by step.

I had just as many questions about this as I did about hockey, except this was more exciting to me because it was something I had personal interest in.

I loved tending to my garden with my hands, loved cleaning up the earth with my hands, too. The thought of creating something with them, of taking something from the earth to make something beautiful and useful… it was enticing.

“How did you get into this, anyway?” I asked after he had placed a few pieces into the kiln. He grabbed a bag of clay next, adding pieces of it to a scale until he had the right weight of what he wanted to work with.

“I don’t really know, actually,” he confessed, covering his workspace with a large piece of plywood.

He plopped the clay onto it before taking a seat, readjusting the stool and table until they were at the perfect height.

Then, he dug his hands into the clay and began to knead it. “I kind of stumbled upon it.”

“How does one stumble upon pottery? ”

“I was a freshman at Michigan, my first year playing hockey at that level. And I knew it would be tougher than when I was in high school, but I didn’t realize how much of a toll just being a college athlete would have on me.

It’s not just hockey,” he said, molding the clay with long, smooth presses of his fingertips.

“And it’s not high-school-level classes.

It’s grueling practices, high-pressure games, and getting a degree, a career.

I mean, of course we all want to go pro, and most of us know we’ll play in the circuit in some way , at least for a while.

” He shrugged. “But what if you get a career-ending injury? What if you only play a few years and then get let go altogether? We can’t all play pro forever.

There are too many players with the same dreams.”

“I never thought of that,” I admitted softly, mulling on all he’d said. I’d always assumed college athletes had a free pass, that they were the lucky ones who didn’t have to try as hard as the rest of us.

I felt a little guilt at that assumption now.

“Anyway, I was stressed, to put it lightly,” he continued, and I marveled at how his hands spread and shaped the clay, how gracefully his fingertips and palms worked in sync to wedge it.

I’d never stared so much at someone’s hands, and I found myself appreciating the makeup of his, the large knuckles and smooth, bronze skin that stretched over them.

“When I wasn’t in class or studying, I was at the rink, either practicing or playing in games. We partied, of course, but that was stressful sometimes, too, because one night of partying too hard could mean a shit game performance the next day.

I needed something for me,” he said after a pause.

“Something that wasn’t goal-oriented, that didn’t have any pressure tied to it.

One night when I couldn’t sleep, I was scrolling on my phone, and this time-lapse video of a vase being made came up.

I must have watched it a dozen times.” He smiled as if he were back in the memory. “And then, I signed up for a class.”

“And you loved it so much, you made yourself a home studio?”

“Not until I got my signing bonus,” he said. “This shit’s expensive. But, yeah. I knew I’d need it now, in the NHL, even more than I did in college.”

He seemed to be satisfied with whatever he’d done to the clay to prep it, and he balled it up in his hands before rolling over to his wheel.