Page 54 of Puck Me Twice
My boss frowns. “Explain.”
“I think I broke my own heart.”
“I heard about you and Sven on the news,” Jacky says carefully. “It’s all over social media.”
“Yeah, well…” I shrug one shoulder. “Turns out we’re in very different places.”
Her eyebrows lift. “Oh?”
“I just need some space.” My eyes well with tears again. Angrily, I rub them away. “He wants marriage and babies and forever, and I—”
My voice catches.
“Do you not want those things? Or do you want them with someone else?” Jacky asks.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I admit: “I don’t know that I’m cut out for it.”
“What makes you say that?”
“My parents split up when I was three years old.”
“Okay… lots of people get divorced. It’s not the end of the world. I know you probably don’t want to think about you and Sven getting divorced, but—”
I shake my head. “I don’t know if I even believe in the happily ever after fallacy anymore. I don’t get to have that.”
“Vanessa…” Jacky reaches for my hand. “You can have that. You can have anything you want.”
“The new assistant equipment manager…”
“Did he do something? Do I need to get HR involved?” she demands.
“He… we dated. In college.” I rub at my eyes again. “We were together for two and a half years, and we were talking about getting married after I graduated so I could travel with him when he signed with the league.”
Jacky watches me, guarded. She lets me take my time to regroup.
“He dumped me. On my twenty-first birthday.”
“That cocksucker,” she hisses.
I shrug. “Well, yeah. I hadn’t talked to him until he started working here. And now every day I have this physical reminder of one of the worst times in my life, and—”
“But you have Sven,” Jacky interrupts.
“That doesn’t make the pain Robby caused go away. It only compounds it. Because Sven is talking about the same things, but who’s to say that whatever I did to make Robby run away won’t happen again?”
“Or maybe,” she says gently, “It had nothing to do with you.”
Wait, what?
“He would have been, what, twenty-one, twenty-two? And about to go into a professional hockey career?” Jacky shakes her head. “That’s a lot to deal with. Hell, half of our players can’t keep a relationship intact, and of the ones that do, they’ll split up two years after retirement.”
“See? It’s not meant to be.”
“I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”
“So?”
“I’ve never seen a man more in love,” Jacky says. “He practically worships the ground you walk on. And this was before anyone knew about you two.”
