Everybody in the locker room is looking at me like I’m about to break, and it’s really starting to piss me off.
I’ve been keeping my head down and trying to avoid confrontation all week. Luckily, Collin, Miller, and Lowell have all stepped in to help keep everything a little less crazy.
But it’s hard when your teammates are looking at you like they can’t trust you. It’s hard for me because, on one hand, I meant to lie, but on the other, I didn’t.
It’s all so confusing.
Coach has been livid with me all week, and my ice time reflects that. I’ve barely been getting five minutes since everything went to shit.
My mom is pissed at me. My teammates are pissed at me. The organization is pissed at me. And worst of all, Ryan is pissed at me.
I miss her. I miss her so fucking much it hurts. I didn’t know I could hurt like this. I thought I knew pain when my life changed forever when the skate blade connected with my face, but I was wrong.
It’s nothing compared to this.
I want to talk to her more than anything, but I also want to give her space.
I fully understand why she’s upset with me. I wasn’t upfront about knowing the marriage certificate never got submitted. I slept on the knowledge of that for days, knowing it changed everything.
And I did it because I was scared. Absolutely fucked out of my head. Worried I was going to lose her.
In the end, I might have lost her anyway.
“All right, everybody. Suit up. Hit the ice for warmups. I want you to go out there and play hard. Hit hard. Win battles in the corners. And make sure Florida knows this is our house. We got it?” The room cheers. “Good. Now get out there and win a fucking hockey game.”
Everyone is buzzing, that pregame high coursing through our veins.
They’re ready for this.
I’m ready for this.
I’m especially ready for this because Colter plays for Florida now, and I fully plan to land every hit on him possible tonight.
Denver did some digging for me and found out that the informant for the article who blew this whole mess up was none other than Brittney. I guess she’s been digging into our marriage from the beginning. When she came up blank on finding evidence, she concluded it was fake and tipped off the press, who then did the work they’re so good at.
It’s funny. I don’t think she even knew I was aware of the certificate mishap. I think she was trying to get one over on me and shock me.
I don’t care about her trying to hurt me. I just care about Ryan hurting.
So tonight, we’re playing by hockey rules, and Colter is going to pay.
Warmups are uneventful. Colter stays to his side and I stay over to mine, but I make sure to stare him down the entire time, letting him know his time is coming.
By the time he’s skating off the ice, he looks like he’s about to piss his pants.
Collin comes up and claps me on the back as we head down the tunnel for puck drop. “Good, man?”
“Yep. Fucking dandy.”
A grin pulls up one side of his lips. “You’re totally going to fuck him up, aren’t you?”
“Yep.”
He laughs, and I have a feeling he might get his licks in too.
The game kicks off, and within five minutes, the teams are already coming to fisticuffs courtesy of our captain running Colter into the boards.
It was a clean hit, a solid hit. But Florida didn’t like it.
After that, we score, making it 1–0. Luckily for Colter, we’ve yet to share a shift out on the ice. No doubt something carefully orchestrated by Coach. During the second period, he gets lucky again, and so do we. We’re up 3–0.
And then, finally, in the third period, when we are stomping their asses 5–0, his time comes.
We step out on the ice together, and I immediately drop the gloves. No preamble, just straight for the guy. He knew it was coming, so he was prepared.
“I’m not looking for a fight tonight, Rhodes,” he tries to reason.
“That’s too fucking bad. You gotta answer for what you did.”
“What I did? I didn’t do shit! That was all Brittney!”
I grab his sweater, finally getting the fucker to hold still, and we trade blows.
Over and over and over again.
“Stop, stop!” he screams. “Fuck, man! I didn’t do anything!”
“No, but your fucking fiancée did.”
“We’re not even engaged, asshole.”
“What?” I loosen my grip on him and he goes tumbling to the ice on his ass. The refs hold me back as if I’m about to hop on top of him. “What did you say?”
“We’re not even engaged. It was all for show.”
For show? She was never even engaged.
What the fuck?
“She was mad at you because you wouldn’t propose to her. So, she made up this big elaborate thing, hoping you’d get jealous and break up the engagement. But no, you had to go get fucking married to some other little slut.”
And that’s when I truly see red.
This has to be the worst week of my life, and that includes the week I got my scar.
Ryan and I aren’t married.
I’m in love with her and she won’t talk to me.
And now I’m fucking suspended for fighting.
Okay, so maybe not for fighting. It was more like slaughtering.
I lost it after he called Ryan a slut. Completely lost all sense of being and just wailed on him. I don’t remember anything that happened after that. All I could focus on was beating him to a bloody pulp. And watching the videos back, that’s exactly what I did.
I don’t feel bad about it either. If that makes me wrong, then I don’t care.
“Totally fucked this one up,” my agent says as he slides onto the stool next to me.
I’ve had my ass planted on this stool at Slapshots for two hours now. My sentence was handed down earlier this afternoon, and I can’t seem to make myself go home because it makes me too damn sad. All I do is think about Ryan and hockey and everything I’m missing out on.
“Think it’s safe to say I am totally boned.”
“Six games, Rhodes. And for that. It looks like petty retaliation.” He holds out two fingers to the bartender, then nods toward my beer. “Doesn’t look good.”
“I know.”
The bartender slides two beers in front of us. One for me and one for him.
“Other than this little blemish on your hockey career, how are you feeling?”
“Like shit. Utter shit.”
Shep laughs at me. “Yep, been there.”
I’ve never meant those words more in my life mostly because I can’t remember a time when I’ve felt like this. After my accident, I felt awful. But this? This is a whole new level of awful.
It’s excruciating. Body-aching painful.
And I have nobody to blame but myself.
I know I shouldn’t have kept the truth about our marriage from Ryan. It was stupid. Easily the dumbest thing I could have done after we worked so hard to build a genuine relationship and respect for one another.
But…I was scared.
God. That sounds so fucking ridiculous, but it’s true.
I was scared that if she didn’t have a reason to be married to me, she wouldn’t stay.
And why should she? I’m grumpy as shit half the time and I’m not the best at expressing my emotions. Nobody wants to deal with that shit, especially not someone like Ryan.
Someone so smart and funny and gorgeous and way fucking out of my league.
She doesn’t have a reason to stay—I know it and she does too.
I just…I hope that she does.
I miss her. I miss her laugh, her smile. I miss the way she looks first thing in the morning and the way she smells. I miss her so damn much that I hid her pillow from my housekeeper, so she didn’t wash away Ryan’s scent.
I’m a sick, sick man.
Sick and sad and so stupid.
“Why does love hurt like this?”
“No fucking clue, man, but it blows.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry Denver couldn’t get out in front of this one. Totally blindsided us all.”
I laugh, but there’s no humor to it. “You can say that again.”
I pick up my fourth beer of the hour and knock the rest of it back in one drink. I reach for the one Shep just bought me and sip at that too.
“Do you really think drinking away your troubles is the best thing to do given your history?”
I glare over at him. “Mind your business, Shep.”
He lifts his hands up. “Just saying, last time that did not turn out so well for you.”
He’s got that right.
“Have you talked to her?”
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
“Do you know what you’re going to say to her when you do?”
“Not a fucking clue.”
“Well, in my experience, it helps if you tell her you’re in love with her. Girls are really into the whole ‘being emotionally available’ thing.”
I laugh at that. “Is that what’s wrong with me? Am I just not emotionally available enough?”
“Honestly? I think you’re a little too emotionally available.”
Well, that’s a first.
“Listen, I’m going to say this in the nicest way possible, but…that scar really fucked you up in more ways than one. Yeah, it made that ugly mug of yours even uglier. But it messed you up where it really counts.” He taps the side of his head with his forefinger. “You’re stuck up here, man. Like totally stuck up here. You are just a giant closed-off mess because you’re so damn worried about what everybody sees when they look at you that you forget about all the other important parts. Not to be a walking fucking cliché or anything, but it’s what’s on the inside that counts the most. And your insides are a little screwy.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. I am messed up in the head from my scar. Messed up in the head because it’s what everyone sees first. And sometimes, it’s all people see. After a while, it gets really hard to crack the code of who is who.
“Can I ask you a question?” Shep says.
“Not like I have anything better to do right now. Go for it.”
“How come you married her?”
“I don’t know, I was drunk.”
He gives me a look that says I’m full of shit. “Try again.”
“Man, I don’t fucking know. I was drunk. I was like out-of-my-mind drunk.”
“There’s nothing in your mind that sticks out as to why? A reason for it being her? Out of all the people you could have done this with, you did it with her?”
I lift my shoulders. “I…well, I guess she felt safe.”
“Safe?”
“Yeah. Safe. I felt like I could be myself around her and I never had to put on any sort of front or put up any walls.”
“And why is that? Why did you feel like that with her?”
“My eyes.”
“Your eyes?”
“Yeah. She always looked me in my eyes. A lot of people don’t look me in the eye. They just look at my scar, and then they’re afraid to meet my eyes because they don’t like what they see or they don’t want me to see how they really feel, but Ryan? She always looked me in my eyes, even when I didn’t want her to, and I thought that was brave. I thought she was brave, and that made me want to be brave. Kind of stupid because, I mean, look at me. I’m a giant, scary, beastly dude getting showed up by this little beauty who is bolder than I could ever dream to be.”
“So be it.”
“Huh?”
“Be it. Be brave. Be brave for her. Be brave for yourself. Tell her how you feel. Tell her what you want. And tell her so damn loudly she has no choice but to listen to you. Just be brave.”
