It wasn’t long before she had five—five!— NHL hockey players around the table in her little apartment. Katie filled the short but wide, clear, circular vases for the centerpieces with water, plant food, and cranberries. Then she set it on the table where she showed one player how to cut and place floral tape ina grid pattern over the opening to support the flowers they’d be putting in.
Three players, Connor included, were taking a stem at a time, removing extra and damaged leaves from the stems and any damaged petals from the buds, cutting the stem diagonally at the base, then placing them in a big bucket of water with flower food in the middle of the table.
The fifth player was preparing the spruce and eucalyptus stems for the base.
As they worked, Katie grabbed her phone and took a picture of the five of them hard at work and texted it to Emmalee along with the wordsMore help showed up. Emmalee texted back a gif of someone screaming with unrestrained enthusiasm.
Emmalee: I’m closing the shop at four. Sooner, if I can get the last person to pick up their arrangement earlier. Please, I beg of you, DO NOT LET THEM LEAVE BEFORE I GET THERE.
When they finished the prep work, Katie gave them each a vase and moved the extras to the counter. Then she taught them how to make a centerpiece based on the picture that the florist sent. She started with the base of greenery— the spruce and eucalyptus— then added five focal flowers, which for this, were red and white amaryllis that were striped like a candy cane. Then she added the red roses and dahlias, giving tips on how to arrange them and when to cut the stems. She finished it off with some fern pieces and a few pine cones.
They watched with amazing focus. Was that an athlete thing? And then they all got to work. She took the moment to grab her video camera and started filming. They worked so intently that she wasn’t sure they’d even noticed that she’d pulled out the camera.
A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth as she captured these five big, strong, athletic men who were known for their brute strength and relentless aggression on the ice as they hunched their broad shoulders over her kitchen table. They all had their brows furrowed in focus as they tended to delicate petals and stems with their big, calloused hands, choosing with great care where to place each one. These titans of the rink were doing such a gentle task. The sight of it was disarmingly charming. It was a dance of contrasts, and it was absolutely beautiful.
One of the players, a guy they called Calloway, placed his final amaryllis and said, “My mom would be so proud of me right now!”
Then one she was sure was named Bradshaw said, “Mine, too.” Then he brought two fingers to his lips, kissed them, and held them high in the air. “Love you, Mama!”
Connor was the closest to him, and he glanced over and said, “Oh, did you lose your mom?”
Bradshaw shook his head. “No. She just told me when I was a kid that not only did she have eyes in the back of her head, but she had eyes in the back ofmyhead, so I better make her proud whenever she wasn’t around.”
Henderson, the player that Connor had texted to come help, reached over and ruffled the back of the guy’s hair. “Is that why you have this shaggy mullet? To cover the eyes?”
Bradshaw smoothed it back down. “You know it.”
Katie was chuckling right along with them and trying very hard not to shake the camera as she did.
Davis studied his centerpiece, which was looking pretty good, and said, “I think I’ll take my little girl with me to get some flowers so we can make a centerpiece for Christmas dinner. My wife will be blown away.”
It hit Katie that all these men were used to having cameras on them, so even once they did notice that she was filming, nothing changed. They continued to make jokes and rib each other over floral choices. The tough veneer of the hockey players seemed to melt away.
The more she filmed, the more she could tell that beneath everything, these were people with depth that went well beyond anything in the rink. They were brothers. They were friends. Even though Connor was new to the team, they had a shared experience as elite players who were at the top of their sport that bonded them even before they became teammates.
Since Connor was the player she was assigned to film, she spent a good amount of time zooming in on him, focusing on the way he bit his bottom lip when he concentrated. The way his left brow raised. The look on his face of… what was it? Focused contentment? The way he would put a flower stem in the vase and then look at it from the right and the left, adjusting it in small amounts before deciding that it was right.
After a good long moment of filming him, he looked straight at the camera— at her— and smiled. One side was raised just slightly more than the other, and he had a little sparkle of amusement in his eyes. His expression was mesmerizing. He picked up a flower by the stem and held it out toward the camera. She had been zoomed in enough that the auto-focus switched to the flower, bringing it momentarily into crisp clarity and blurring him, before she put the focus back on his face, blurring the flower.
That, combined with the expression on his face was perfection. She couldn’t wait to pull this footage up on her laptop later.
She didn’t know if the Glaciers could use footage like this, especially since it wasn’t one of the scheduled events she was supposed to film and it included more teammates than justthe player she was assigned to film. But this moment with five professional hockey players making floral arrangements felt like something that needed to be documented, regardless.
About the time they all finished their second centerpiece, which meant that all twelve were finished, Emmalee came bursting through the door, like too many things had been keeping her back and she was finally free. As soon as she flicked the door shut with her foot, her hands flew to her face. “Oh, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sight. Thank you so much for coming to help!”
She went around the table, looking at each arrangement, complimenting them on what a great job they did. Calloway pulled out his phone. “I’m putting this on social media!” He switched the camera into selfie mode and twisted it so he could get both his face and the floral arrangement in the shot. The other four did the same.
“The bride and the groom are huge hockey fans,” Emmalee said. “They are absolutely going to go nuts for this! Can I tell them that you guys made them?” They all said yes, so she had them write their names and jersey numbers on a piece of floral tape that they stuck to the side of the vase so she could make a card to go with it on the tables tomorrow.
By the time Emmalee finished complimenting them, they all seemed more than ready to take on making a bridesmaid bouquet each. She suspected that it would give them additional bragging rights that they were all strangely excited to have.
At some point, she ordered pizza, and it showed up as they finished their bouquets. They all ate as they admired their work, bragged about their new skills, and smack-talked about whose was the best. Even though the temperatures in the room made the pizza go from perfectly warm to “fresh from the fridge” cold much too fast, the mood in the room was light. Fun. And something she wished could happen every day.
Especially the Connor part of it. As they all talked and laughed, his eyes kept finding hers, and he kept giving her that same smile. The one that told her that her heart was definitely in trouble.
After Emmalee thanked everyone profusely, Connor’s teammates said goodbye, and Connor asked Katie if she wanted to ride over to her parents’ for the hay ride in his car. Even though her head was telling her to pull back, her heart was saying “Grab every extra moment you can with this man!” So she told him yes.
As they walked out to his car, he said, “I’m really glad you let me come help today, even though you probably would’ve chosen to do it by yourself.”
