Page 34 of Much Ado About Hockey

“Karen…”

“You know when you are mad or frustrated, you call me Karen, but when you are all lovey-dovey or want to get kissy-faced with me, you call me Nutella?” – and now his wife was getting that weird little warble in her voice.

“Can we hug?”

“Is that you starting something? Should I be on my guard?”

“No, I’m nervous too, and I just want to feel like I’m not alone.”

“Hugging – and that’s it? Don’t think that I didn’t see that bed, mister...”

“I’ll sleep on the couch – and you can lock the bedroom door,” he promised, taking a step slowly toward her, his handsstill out in an unthreatening manner. Karen actually took a step back, shaking her head nervously, her expression erratic, and it was doing something to his insides. “Nutella, please, honey. This is just two friends hugging after a long day, and a long week, and I missed you. I swear, it’s nothing but a hug, or you can push me off the balcony.”

She let out a panicked-weird-warbling laugh before looking at him. Her beautiful eyes were huge and terrified – and that was breaking his heart. She needed to be wanted, to be won, to be wooed – and he was realizing just how backward they had gone about everything from the very beginning.

He’d asked her to marry him, and for some reason, she said ‘yes’ – but from there, both of their worlds had turned upside down, inside out, putting them both on edge. It was time for the two fighters to retreat to their corners, get their bearings, and see where everything else fell into place. He touched her hand, felt her shaking, and made several more soft crooning noises to which she broke and began crying big ‘crocodile tears’ as his mother would say – and it broke his heart.

“This isn’t me,” Karen wept, looking at him and shaking her head. “I’m not like this, none of this is me, Jett… this isn’t me…”

“We’ve both been under a lot of pressure,” he agreed gently, pulling her trembling frame into his arms and managing to hug her against him as he breathed in her scent. “We need time to breathe, regroup, and…”

“This isn’t me. I’m not this angry or hard to deal with…”

“I never said you were hard to deal with,” he interrupted, chuckling softly against her hair as he held her close, his mind screaming silently, ‘Uh, yeah you are!’ and ‘Is this worth it?’. He cooed several more times, gently rocking back and forth with her until she stopped sobbing and hiccupped against his throat. “Fair warning, if you snort against my skin – I’m gonna laugh and tell the guys during practice.”

“Of course you would,” she muttered, trying to pull away from him, and he managed to hold her still. “I don’t like being teased.”

“Who’s teasing, Nutella?” and he felt her seize up, bracing himself. “Hold on, don’t go getting all weird on me. We’re only hugging.”

“There you go with the Nutella-comment, which means you are getting all kissy…”

“Only if you ask…”

“I’m never asking you to kiss me.”

“Then maybe you were wrong about ‘Nutella’ – weren’t you? But that would take the ‘Great-and-Mighty Karen Acton’to admit that she was wrong,” he taunted, putting the emphasis on wrong because it felt really good to say her name – and felt her jolt slightly in his arms. “Doesn’t ‘Karen Acton’sound so good? I swear it rolls right off my tongue, almost better than my name.”

“I swear you are weird.”

“Guilty as charged,” he chuckled and kissed the top of her head, testing her and feeling her tense. “Go get some sleep, Nutella, and we can figure it all out later. When’s your stuff coming?”

“In a week.”

“Then help yourself to whatever you find. I asked the realtor to leave toiletries for us in the master bathroom because we were coming in so late,” he offered and was so grateful for the foresight of doing that one thing. It actually was a last-minute email to the man begging him to leave toothbrushes, toothpaste, and toilet paper in case the stores were closed. The dealership was delivering his car tomorrow at nine, then he was taking Karen to go pick out a car, pick up some supplies and groceries… and then he was pretty sure they would have snapped at each other, argued, or something – and he would end up at the gym downstairs or the ice rink.

They were like oil and water. It was never going to work out – or last.

… And he was obviously a dreamer.

7

KAREN

A month had passedsince Karen moved in with Jett, and everything that had once felt like a dream now hovered precariously on the edge of unraveling. It was as though life had handed her a blank check—an open invitation to begin again, to write a new chapter in a new place with a man who had once made her heart race—but somehow, it all felt hollow.

The reality of their life together was nothing like she had imagined. If their relationship had been a ship, it had already struck the iceberg and was slowly taking on water. She could feel the weight of failure pressing on her chest, subtle at first, like the ache of unshed tears or words left unspoken. The small cracks in their foundation had turned into jagged fractures.

She had always prided herself on being independent and capable. So when Jett had asked her to come with him to pick out a car, her immediate reaction wasn’t excitement or partnership—it was resistance. She wasn’t going to be some ‘helpless little wife’ who couldn’t make her own choices. So she told him no.

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