28. Russ
CHAPTER 28
RUSS
The last thing I expected to be doing two days before the start of training camp is signing energy drinks at a small independent sporting goods store in Ancaster, but the store owner contacted the team and Mabel in PR asked me to swing by and do a bit of fan service before we get into the pre-season.
Four cases of BioPunk later, my hand needs some physical therapy, but the fans who showed up seemed delighted—and the store owner is happy, which is great. It’s not often that I get tagged for this kind of community outreach.
I’m thinking about grabbing a coffee and heading to the gym when I step outside and almost collide with Shannon, coming out of the door right beside the store entrance.
She gasps my name as I catch her by the upper arms, safely keeping her upright. I glance up at the sign above her head.
Buckley Family Law.
My attention jerks back to her face. I take in her red-rimmed eyes and nervous pinched mouth.
“Are you okay?” My grip tightens on her arms.
She exhales. “I’m fine. It’s….” She screws up her face, her lovely eyes swimming in fresh, unshed tears. “Complicated.”
“All right.” I rub my hands lightly up to her shoulders, then release her.
“What are you doing here?” She gestures at the store behind me.
“Signing bottles of BioPunk.”
She laughs in surprise. “Really?”
“Really.”
“That’s…unexpected. And funny.”
“Yeah.” I grin, and her mouth turns up at the corners just a little bit. Shaky, but that’s a smile. That’s better. “Viral TikTok, apparently.”
“Good for drink sales, good for the game.”
“That’s what Mabel said.”
Now her eyes spark with something that looks more like joy. “I love Mabel.”
“Hey, I was going to get a coffee across the street. Do you want to join me? I’ll even show you the TikTok that went viral.”
“Oh, I’ve already seen it. Emery sent it to me yesterday.”
I chuckle under my breath. “Of course she did.”
Shannon exhales and wipes the corner of her eye. “She’s very much a friend collector, isn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
She looks at me carefully. “Is she going to be visiting this fall?”
“Probably not.” I don’t really want to talk about Emery when Shannon still looks on the verge of crying. “Listen, I don’t like the idea of you driving upset. If you don’t want coffee, can I drop you at home? Or maybe call someone else to pick you up?”
“Oh God, please don’t tell anyone.” Alarm flashes across her face. “I can’t?—”
“Hey. All right.” Without thinking, I draw her into my arms and give her a hug—and she tenses up.
I let her go immediately.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
“No, it’s…” She takes a deep breath and gestures across the street without looking that way. “Coffee would be good.”
I manage to steer her across the street without touching her again, and inside the bakery, I order an iced black coffee.
“Same for me,” she says.
The place is empty, which is good—nobody is going to hear our conversation—but also a bit awkward, because there’s no white noise to provide cover.
“Do you want to sit outside?” the barista asks helpfully. “We have picnic tables in the garden.”
The bakery is in a converted century-old house, and the garden out back is a little slice of overgrown heaven. And we have it to ourselves, but there’s a breeze and some birds—it’s not the awkward stillness of inside. Perfect.
“Have a seat,” I say quietly but firmly.
She slides onto one side of a picnic table, and while I want to take up the rest of the same bench and wrap my arm around her, I resist that inappropriate urge and drop onto the other side instead.
She sips her coffee, and for a while, that’s all that I need—just to see her and know that she’s calming down, that she’s not crying in her car. But as the colour in her face returns to normal, it’s hard to keep silent.
“It’s good to see you,” I finally say.
She lets out a little frustrated laugh, but keeps her head ducked.
“Shannon.”
She shakes her head.
“Look at me.”
It takes her a second, but she slowly lifts her head.
“It is good to see you,” I repeat firmly as I hold her cautious gaze. “And we don’t have to talk about anything beyond that.”
“This isn’t too awkward for you?”
I blink in surprise. “No.” I frown. “Not for me. And if it is for you, I?—”
“It isn’t.” Her shoulders relax in visible relief.
“Has it been awkward…” I almost crush my coffee and carefully flatten my hand against the table. “At home?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s fucked, Shan. He—” I cut myself off when her expression pinches. I need to tread carefully. “We’re grown ups.”
“It’s just sex, right? I’ve had a lot of sex.” She doesn’t look away as she says it, and it’s not meant to be seductive at all—her face is all blotchy and red, after all. She’s trying to be fearless, and it’s working. Fearlessly bold, despite everything that’s gone on. That’s her natural instinct, and fuck me but I love it.
More than anything, I want to lean in and ask her to tell me all about that sex. Even if it’s been with her douchebag husband.
And while I don’t agree that what happened between us is just sex, I’m glad that’s all it felt like for her. She deserves any pleasure she can grab ahold of.
“I’m pretty sure I confessed to some wild days, too,” I say gruffly.
She sighs. “Ugh, that’s enough of that. Distract me, please. Show me those TikToks of your countrymen ripping on your ads.”
“I’ve got something even better.” I swipe through my album of photos from my last trip home. “Did you know there’s a statue built in my honour in my hometown?”
She gasps in delight. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Like…a permanent one?”
“Bronze, in fact. The real deal. I am the pride of [Scottish town name]. And every time I join another NHL team, they add a new badge around the base.”
“Oh my God.” She claps her hands together in glee as I hand over my phone to show her photos of me standing in front of the bronze, idealized version of myself. The hockey journeyman and the hockey hero, side by side. “They’re so proud of you.”
“Aye, they are. It was a bit rude to leave that enthusiasm behind when I was twelve and move to a land where everyone and their brother is better at me than hockey.”
Her gaze lifts from my phone to my face, immediately sobering up. “Twelve?”
I shrug. “It made sense at the time. I was being scouted a bit, but mostly by video. There are more amateur scouts in any city in Ontario than there are in all of the UK. My parents weren’t together anymore, and they agreed my Mum should bring me to Canada. She was the one with the dual citizenship, after all.”
Shannon’s brows pull tight. “Is she still here?”
I shake my head. “No. She moved back to Scotland as soon as I was eligible for the draft.”
She reaches out and covers my hand with hers. “It sounds like there’s some complicated history there.”
I squeeze her fingers. “Yeah. Maybe for another time, though. That’s not the kind of distraction I wanted to offer.”
“Any time. We can compare dysfunctional family tales.”
“We have more in common than you might think,” I say. “Your story about getting on the bus and heading for New York when you were eighteen. That was me and the draft. I went with another OHL teammate. He went in the first round. The next day, his whole family sat with me until the very end.”
Her eyes are huge and filled with concern about an event that happened eighteen years ago and clearly worked out in my favour. “Were you drafted?”
“Halfway through the seventh round, yeah.”
She smiles, relieved for past me, and eases her hand out of my grip. I hadn’t noticed I was still holding it. “I’m going to look for that video.”
I laugh. “If you do, I’m going to have to look for your stints as a weather girl.”
“You underestimate my ego, sir, if you don’t think I’d like that. Once an aspiring actress, always an aspiring actress. I love an audience. Well…” She gestures at her face. “Usually.”
“I’m not an audience, Shannon. I’m a friend.”
“Those aren’t the same thing?” She says it lightly, but her voice cracks.
Silence stretches between us. She drinks a good amount of her coffee.
I wait her out until she sighs. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you pity me.”
“I swear to God, that’s not what I’m thinking.”
“What are you thinking then, with that unbearably soft look of understanding on your face?”
“That you’re beautiful and brave.”
She shakes her head a little, but that gets me another smile, so I’ll take it.
But then she takes a deep breath, and my chest pulls tight even before she speaks. “I need to— I may have given you the wrong impression. With the tears and the fact that you saw me coming out of a law firm. And my…”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not, actually. Nothing is okay. I— I’m not leaving Max. I can’t, apparently. Not yet.”
Oh, fuck me. That’s why she was crying? “Not…yet?”
She tells me, haltingly, about walking in without an appointment, just to find out what the process would be if she wanted to initiate a divorce—only to find out she can’t, because she hasn’t been a resident of Canada long enough. And either way, unless she wants to prove in a court of law that Max has been unfaithful, she needs to wait through a year of separation, which means living apart from him in a country where she isn’t legally eligible to work.
“Aspiring actresses don’t qualify for exceptional visas, it turns out,” she jokes.
It makes me want to burn down the entire world. “What are your other options?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Of course you do.” I reach for her, but she slides her hands away.
Right.
Fuck.
When I saw Shannon coming out of that family law office, I thought she was leaving him, and in that split second, the fantasy that I had tried so desperately hard to put on ice, so hard to get over, to rebound from—that fantasy roared back to life.
And now as she sits across from me, small and broken and trapped, I realize that what I had envisioned was coming from my point of view as a single, unencumbered man.
This life as the wife of a hockey player has trapped her, not only in misery, but literally trapped her in a foreign country with very few options. My simplistic fantasy will never be what Shannon wants.
We aren’t in this together. I am, at best, a casual friend who she had a misguided threesome with.
I suck in a slow, careful breath. “Is moving back to the States not an option? You could work there? I—” I could help, I want to say. I settle on, “Your friends could help.”
She blanches. "It's not that simple."
"Why not?”
She fiddles with her cup, nearly empty now. “You don't think that the press would immediately be on that? Here, a year-long quiet separation followed by a divorce once he's moved on—that’s…that's civilized and?—"
Civilized . The way she says the word sounds like a loaded bomb.
"You don't want to embarrass him," I say.
"No, of course not." She's earnest. He doesn’t fucking deserve how kind she is being to him.
"Why not? He's clearly hurt you."
"It's—I told you, it is complicated. I am not—Russ, I don't know who you think I am, but I am not that girl. If I were to have a splashy divorce at the earliest opportunity in New York City, for example, sure that might embarrass Max, and he would hate that. But do you know what would happen next?”
Solemnly, I give her the respect she deserves and don’t pretend that I’ve thought this through as much as she has. “What?”
“He would use everything that he knows about my past to destroy me. and any chance I would have of moving on from that, finding any kind of job that follows anywhere in my limited skill set, would be destroyed. I have already accepted that, on the other side of this divorce, when it happens, I will be a nobody, and I'm fine with that." Tears slip from her eyes.
And I can’t let her cry alone. I just can’t.
I reach across the table and gently swipe them off her face.
"I am fine with that," she repeats. “It’s that whole audience thing, you know? Double-sided. Two weeks ago, I had plans to start a podcast, and now—" She stops and stares at me, her eyes painfully bright. "And now the thought of everyone in the world having access to this wound that is my marriage makes me want to shrivel up into a tiny ball and never be perceived ever again by anyone.”