Bury the Hatchet

Chapter Five - Bury the Hatchet

HUNTER

This was definitely hell, this place in life where I existed now. To be clear, I no longer thought that simply because of how hot it was all the time. Had to be hell. I must have fucked up even more royally than I'd realized, and someone had decided to put me in a permanent state of misery, and I'd ended up in purgatory. There was no other reasonable explanation. I'd survived telling both Mom and Carrie about the upcoming nuptials, but I wasn't sure the hearing in my left ear would ever be the same after Mom told me exactly what she thought of it all. Carrie had been far more understanding. Maybe too understanding. Shouldn't she have been bothered by it, at least to an extent? But all she'd said was that she understood, and she'd see if she could come. Those two calls had hardly touched the surface of the hell my life had become, though.

For one thing, I was being bombarded at every turn by jackasses shoving cameras and microphones in my face. That wasn't supposed to be part of the deal, playing hockey in the South. I mean, if I were in Montreal or Toronto, maybe New York or Chicago, then sure. That was just how it tended to go in the big-time hockey hotbeds. But in Oklahoma? I was supposed to be able to live like the masses, to go places and not be recognized as someone important enough to care about. Or at least not important enough for them to shove a mic in my face. I was supposed to be able to blend in even better down here than I had in Portland. Instead, the complete opposite was happening, and I hated every second of it.

In general, I was a private person. I preferred to keep my personal life personal, but right now I was having to broadcast it to anyone who cared to see it...and there were a surprisingly large number of people who cared. They were doing the same thing to Tallie, but she seemed resigned to it, so much so that I was beginning to understand her better. All indications pointed to the fact that this had been her life for quite some time, and she expected it to be part and parcel of her life going forward. It wasn't her choice, but for some reason she allowed it to happen.

The one good thing to come of it was that our efforts seemed to be having the desired effect, at least as far as we could tell from such a small sample size. Already, I'd seen pictures of the two of us popping up in the local newspaper's gossip and celebrity section, and there'd even been a brief article on the sports page. Tallie said that she'd seen positive talk along with some video on one of the websites she visits regularly, and there was quite a bit of buzz going on social media sites. We were making an impact. So far, no one was exactly sure what to make of us, but the fact was they were talking. So there was a start.

If the fact that the media was following us around constantly wasn't bad enough, now we could add to it that every time some obnoxious camera guy focused in on the pair of us, I had to be all over Tallie. Getting cozy with her, in and of itself, wasn't a horrible thing, beyond the fact that I liked to keep things like that behind closed doors. Tallie was sexy as sin, and I was about a hundred times more physically attracted to her than I wanted to be. The problem came from the knowledge that no matter how turned on I got while we played our parts, there wasn't ever going to be anything permanent between us.

Don't get me wrong. I was down with the idea of a one-night stand under the right circumstances. But nothing between us would allow for it to be just one night. It would be awkward when I would be taking her home with me every night for a year but then we'd be parting ways once we shut the cameras out. Was there such a thing as a one-year stand?

She'd said up front that maybe I wouldn't have to be celibate the whole time we were together, but I wasn't sure she meant it or had thought through the implications of what she'd hinted at, and I was less sure it was a good idea. For either of us. The further we took things once we were alone, the greater the likelihood that one of the two of us—if not both—would end up getting our feelings hurt in the end. It would be a hell of a lot safer to just keep our hands to ourselves, like Mrs. Roth insisted upon, other than in those moments when we were playing things up for the media.