(fic) The Girl That Bond Married
Title: The Girl That Bond Married.
Pairing: Julie Bertuzzi-centric. Julie Bertuzzi / Ashlee Belfour. Julie / Todd Bertuzzi
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This is fiction, I made it up.
for the hockey_fc challenge New Kid in Town
The Girl That Bond Married.
Julie Bertuzzi-centric. Julie Bertuzzi / Ashlee Belfour. Julie / Todd Bertuzzi
Notes: Marinette Sedin is Daniel Sedin's wife
Lotta Naslund Markus Naslund’s wife
why yes, new kid in town can be about those affected by moving as well as players.
///
It’s nearly winter, but it’s Florida, so Julie unties the strings on her top and lets it drop on the ground as she walks to Todd. He grins and almost blushes and yeah, after kids and years and fights and seeing each other puking from being sick she still has it.
‘Tan lines have no class' she says. And it’s a great line and she instantly regrets it. Because she doesn’t need lines to fuck her husband. She needs five minutes without the kids around and a home game.
Ashlee would grin like a porn queen and lick her lips and pout, but Julie just climbs on Todd’s lap on the recliner and kisses him, tongue and teeth and her wedding ring glittering in the noon sun.
Todd’s hand slides up her back and Julie leans back as he kisses her neck confident he can hold her up.
///
It felt like she was the Cheshire cat, nothing left of her but her smile hanging in the air, a foolish false grin. Like she had fully disappeared. Her friends were probably saying right now: ‘oh do you remember Julie? Yeah, I hear she lives in the States now, has a couple of kids and probably a gun.’
But it would not be a bad thing to be remembered for a smile, to always leave the impression of joy behind you. Or to leave on the best line.
///
Lotta had had the softest touch. When Julie was frazzled over newborns or, the-thing-that-bad-year, Lotta could calm her down easily. But, Lotta was so sweet and friendly and special to everyone. Which was the problem.
Sometimes Julie used to tell herself off for the crush.
Except they. Julie stops thinking. Just stops and tries to decide which of the roughly five thousand houses she’s seen today she could actually imagine herself living in.
She finally picks the place with the biggest kitchen and the biggest bay window to the back yard. It’s going to cost a fortune in insurance for all the glass but Julie doesn’t care. The compensation for all the time Todd spends on the road is that they have money.
Sometimes it almost feels like enough.
///
The first home game and stuck in the wives room where all the oxygen has been sucked out and Ashlee corners Julie. She’s all big blonde hair and bigger pink lips and even bigger tanned boobs.
‘We have to go out for lunch some time. Girl talk.’
Julie reminds herself that she and Todd were pre hockey sweethearts when Ashlee smiles at her with her perfect white teeth, and her impeccable spray on tan, and her nails that have glitter on the tips and not one chip.
Ashlee’s breathy little-girl voice that has to be a put on and her fluttering fake eyelashes and her pouting insistence that she and Julie can be ‘best friends’ turn Julie’s stomach.
It occurred to Julie that she had a best friend already, ‘oh yes, my friend, Lotta, I don’t think you ever met her.’
But, it’s not the same talking on the phone even though they speak every other day. Julie craves the calls and wants more at the same time. She wants someone who knows everything and doesn’t know everything. Knows the big stuff but not the superficial shit.
Doesn’t know that Julie gets a sore stomach after three coffees so always tells her sweetly to stop. Doesn’t know that Julie hates driving in the rain so will wait around for hours in bookstores until it clears.
Ashlee has a determined flutter as she sweeps around the room. But for a second - over Olie’s wife’s shoulder and shit Julie can’t remember her name - for a second, her blue eyes bright like a dolls, sweeping over Julie, cataloguing devouring and Julie promises herself they will never be alone in a room together.
///
She decides to dislike Jay’s girl because she wears a thin gold chain around her waist, and really who does that except Pamela Anderson?
More than that though she promises to keep two rooms between her and Ashlee cause there is no benefit to be dragged into shopping and whatever bored games hockey wives with no hobbies and no life play.
She keeps her promise for three weeks and one discovery of a hickey on Todd’s chest. Julie doesn’t say anything for four hours until the kids are in school and then they go at it.
It is a fight they have had before. Julie has the weird sensation of floating above the two of them watching what is happening, while a memory Julie brings this fight home from Vancouver to Florida.
Todd ‘has to go, has to go’ and Julie calls Lotta.
Lotta is sweet and sympathetic and recommends they go to counseling or Julie goes and stays with her or her mother until things calm down.
Julie is pissed off because Lotta added that ‘when things blow over you can go home’ like, like there was a chance Julie wouldn’t go home. Of course she would. She’s married, she promised, and this. And she can’t go home if she never leaves home. She can’t just pull the kids out of school and uproot her life on a fucking whim and a trade. This is an aberration that is caused by hockey. Julie wonders why it feels like her life both began and hit pause the day Todd became a professional player. Like it was the fulfillment of so many dreams, and at the same time it’s like they won’t get to have a real marriage until he retires. He’s still traveling like a kid in junior, still partying on the road like he’s sneaking away from his parents.
Still the great guy she married, still loves her. She’s not leaving.
///
But things never stop. Hockey players never really grow up and hockey players’ wives still dress like it is half price drinks night at the single saloon. Todd just remembers all the tricks he learned in Vancouver to get good at hiding it. Julie just bites her tongue and talks about her kid’s schools with a type of grim determination that borders on psychotic. Ashlee just waits and talks to Jay’s badly dressed girlfriend about engagement rings.
‘Whatever’ Julie thinks and rolls her eyes.
It might be worse she thinks as she looks around the room. Could be another woman, could be a string woman in the same town they live in and Todd’s never done anything like that to her. At least there won’t be a pregnancy or something and there’s no way Julie could handle that particular humiliation.
But this is bad enough. The two of them on the ice, on the road, on the bed, something she can never fight. Something she can’t compete with the way she can when the puck sluts come snaking around.
It’s like smokers Julie decides watching the game with eyes narrowed into slits. You always mean to quit, but the cigarettes are all around you, behind every counter. And it’s easy to promise yourself that you will stop again again. She doesn’t make Todd promise to end it, because she hates being lied to.
Sometimes she really hates Todd.
Before the game he stopped in the car on the way to the arena and promised it was over. A one-time thing, an aberration.
It wouldn’t piss her off so much if the thing with Markus had really ended. Julie hates lots of things, pollution, people who don’t separate recycling properly, people who let their kids run riot, but the one thing she can’t take at all is being lied to.
Fucking Todd, the piece of shit, this was supposed to be something that was left behind in Vancouver, just Markus, just them, and the liar the liar, Julie remembers one afternoon drinking to much wine and kissing Lotta out of revenge and the soft feel of her breasts pushing against Julie's, her fingers that weren't long enough to circle Julie's wrists and she calls Ashlee before her rage has entirely burned out.
Todd was calling Vancouver as much as she was. Two lies was really one to many.
She regrets it the instant she wakes up the next morning, but Ashlee won't let her cancel their lunch. 'But sweetie’ she says her voice trilling like a mechanical bird, and the nick name has Julie’s teeth on edge, 'I'm already on my way to your place! Now hush my cell is cutting out.'
Ashlee has a tattoo of a butterfly on a buttercup on the small of her back. Julie sees it when Ashlee stretches up to pet one of the puppies at the pet store. She doesn’t get it though. The puppy. Ashlee pets its nose one last time and says she’ll think about it.
She walks backwards talking about her brother’s German Sheppard managing to avoid walking into any of the crowds of teenage girls and buys Julie a donut and a latte. She pretends to give a damn about Julie’s kids and Julie pretends to give a damn about her clothes.
Lotta did not kiss her back.
///
Todd comes home from the road trip all apologetic and sad and Julie knows that it didn’t end at one.
God-fucking-damn. Julie feels sad that he’s so unhappy. Then miserable that Todd is sad, then angry as hell at the both of them.
Todd could have the balls and the good fucking manners to not throw his affairs in her face. Did he learn nothing from Markus? That man had been the soul of discretion; no one knew what he was up to. Except that everyone really knew but it was done in such a way that everyone felt bad gossiping about it.
Julie invites Ashlee over to help her hang curtains and kisses her when she walks in the door.
Ashlee kisses her back with no pretense and no tease. It’s really longer but it feels like seconds and Julie’s wet and her heart is going thud-thud thud-thud and she wants it like this, like she wanted Todd when they first met.
Julie rocks her hips into Ashlee and kisses and kisses until she can’t breath.
Julie hasn’t had an orgasm against a wall since the first year of her marriage.
///
The kids like their new school ok, and Todd gets better at hiding things, again. It’s always this way, a flowering of passion and then Todd cools off. Except her, he’s never stopped loving her, or needing her, or wanting to be married to her.
‘Cause he’s around you.’ Julie thinks to herself. Julie imagines the conversations they must have, the lovers and her Todd. Todd insisting he loves her.
Julie pauses half way through cutting peppers for the pasta sauce. She can hear in her head Todd saying ‘I love Julie, but she doesn’t understand.’ She knows that if Todd were in the house she would stick this knife in his neck, the son of a bitch.
She invites Ashlee over for a drink and makes sure she has a bottle of wine in one hand and a glass in the other so they can’t do anything stupid.
Ashlee takes the drink and the two of them talk about Toronto and Vancouver, ‘it’s nice to be ignored’ Ashlee says. ‘Toronto was a fucking three ring circus, and the pay off wasn’t nearly enough.’
‘Liar.’ Julie thinks, but says; ‘oh I’m easy to ignore’ and it doesn’t come out petulant, or flippant it comes out fucking sad. Ashlee strokes her face and they kiss so soft that Julie can feel Ashlee’s hair touching her face like a bleached slap and then Ashlee says ‘it’ll be ok’ and Julie snaps.
‘Jesus’ Julie says, ‘I’m not a fucking child.’ She pushes Ashlee back and is faintly surprised to realize how few clothes she’s wearing. How much wine she had to drink while they were talking about the neighbourhood.
‘You’re not acting like much of a grown up.’ Ashlee hisses back and stuffs buttons into buttonholes and walks out.
‘I deserved that’. Julie tells herself. She thinks about calling Lotta or Todd or her cousin that she used to be so close to, or Ashlee to apologize, but instead walks outside with the rest of her glass of wine and drinks it staring at the pool.
She doesn’t cry or throw things, and if her throat gets tight it’s just a reaction from the booze. Fuck this anyway. She pitches the rest of the wine into the lavender bush because she hates lavender. Julie makes plans in the moonlight, because she’s a fucking adult.
She’s going to fix this garden and get in perfect shape and learn to do something useless and feminine. Lotta used to make quilts, so fuck it, Julie will learn to knit.
The point is not to make scarves, she lives in fucking Florida, the point is to do something just for her.
///
Todd scores a goal and the new one gets an assist - which hardly ever happens. They celebrate on the ice and Julie narrows her eyes from the glare of the white. Julie would buy waterproof mascara, but that would involve admitting that she was crying. She considers blaming swimming every day and getting her lashes dyed. But they are tears from squinting in the sun. At night in Florida. Or the wind blowing in her eyes from the open window.
Julie takes the kids to school, early and books them into after school judo. For flexibility. She walks home, all out of balance from not having one kid or one school backpack to anchor her and sits by the pool.
Fuck tan lines, fuck Florida. Where’s a hurricane when you need it anyway?
She thinks about maybe calling her mum, but who knows how to deal with this? Even Lotta would look oddly superior behind the sympathy sometimes. Whatever, like Markus wasn’t a known player behind her back.
Julie calls Ashlee cause it’s not like she’ll be busy working or reading or having an internal life or anything.
In fact she’s sleeping.
‘It’s ten o’clock! Are you pregnant?’ Julie says.
‘God I hope not.’ Ashlee sounds husky and not altogether there, and more human than normal so Julie invites her to go shopping for garden supplies.
‘You can pick the sculpture.’ Julie says by way of apology for the other day. She looks over the backyard; yeah anything can be hidden behind the trellis with bougainvillea on it in the far corner.
When Julie gets back, smelling like Ashlee’s perfume and like room 612 of the Pink Shell Motel she doesn’t have a shower because why should she? And she goes for a swim while she waits for the delivery guys to bring her stone thing over, and her face is wet from the water, and she smells like chlorine and not salt.
///
Julie gets a sweet Christmas card from Lotta that shows Vancouver in the winter and after the first period of a game against Ottawa Julie leaves the kids with Joe’s wife and their brats and sits in her car in the underground parking lot.
Ashlee taps on the window. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ She says and Julie looks through the windscreen and says ‘I couldn’t give a shit.’ Ashlee huffs and searches through the pockets of her ridiculous unseasonable fake white fur jacket and pulls out a battered Marlboro packet.
Her Zippo has an engraving of a Cadillac on it.
‘Ed’s.’ Ashlee says and rolls her eyes and throws it on the dash. She hands Julie tissues that smell slightly of cigarette smoke and then some liquid eyeliner.
‘You would probably be a good mum.’ Julie finally says and Ashlee laughs and then coughs a little bit from the smoke going down the wrong way.
‘I doubt that. Ed’s kids like me though. I thought one day, well I guess I’m the cool step mom. They don’t need me for anything really.’ Ashlee smiles. ‘That’s not so bad, they could really hate me, but they hardly ever see their dad and he told them once if they were jerks to me they couldn’t come over.’
‘I like my kids.’ Julie says. I know that isn’t earth shattering, but I do. I like their company. I’m lucky that way. Todd’s a good dad.’
‘So is Ed.’ Ashlee says, and blows a stream of smoke to the roof of the car.
“I know our lives are easy.’ Julie finally replies. ‘Compared to most people. It’s just the bits that are hard are hard for the same reason as everyone else.’
‘Todd doesn’t.’ Ashlee smokes carefully and makes a fuss of unwinding the window the throw the butt away.
‘Cheats.’ Julie says. ‘Don’t tell anyone, they would make fun of you for being the last to know.’
‘I thought the wife was always the last?’
Julie laughs, bitter but real anyway. ‘Blah blah, cry the world a river Julie Bertuzzi.’
‘Todd never …’Ashlee’s voice trails off. ‘Yeah well, you have my shoulder girl. That sucks.’
Ashlee lights another cigarette and Julie drags herself out of her funk long enough to ask about Christmas.
Ashlee gets a real honest laugh out of her with her outraged ‘yes I can cook!’ and Julie even has half a cigarette for the hell of it.
‘Third periods starting.’ They walk back in next to each other. Eddie gets a shut out. Ashlee grins, honest and huge so that her eyes wrinkle at the sides.
///
Gary knocks up his girlfriend again and Ashlee is in charge of the baby shower. Julie goes because it turns out she hates knitting and sewing and the garden is threatening revolution if she spends any more time in it. No rooms need painting yet, but Julie has her eye on the laundry.
They get streamers and cards and clothes and stuff everything in the back of Ed’s car.
‘Yeah its ridiculous, and stupid expensive to run’ Ashlee says, preening a little bit at the surfer dudes checking out her authentic Thunderbird something something that Julie can’t catch or doesn’t care enough to translate into real human speech, ‘but you can get a lot in the backseat.’
She bursts out laughing and Julie looks at her in horror but she can’t stop laughing when she says ‘you two didn’t…’ Ashlee’s eyes get twinkly and she says, ‘yeah we did.’
Julie snorts, trying not to laugh and says ‘but that blanket is for the baby! It could touch the,’ she thinks for a minute ‘unclean.’ She finally says and Ashlee snickers.
‘Do you want salad with almonds and mineral water or should we hit McDonalds?’
‘Fries.’ Julie says and smiles at her reflection in the window of the back of the car.
Their fingers touch when they go for the sauce at the same time and Ashlee drinks diet coke but that’s ok.
///
Julie rests her hip against the stone obelisk that Ashlee picked. She touches the pile of shells that the kids brought home from the beach to decorate it with. Its pretty, wearing away in the sun and wind with a little bit of moss at the base.
The kids are running around the pool with Joe’s brats - and Julie had to offer to take them for the day after all the baby sitting that has been done for her during games - and Dwayne, Eddie’s son, is chasing them and doing such a good job of minding them that Julie makes a mental note to pay him. Todd is looking surprised to see Ed Belfour in his back yard, maybe cause Eddie and Alex don’t get along that well.
Well that’s ok; Alex and Julie Bertuzzi don’t get on that well either.
Julie watches Ashlee wander up with a drink and a beer for Edide. She responds to something Todd says and hollers at her bull terrier and kisses Eddie distractedly on the cheek then agrees to help one of the girls fix her hair.
Julie hadn’t realized after all this time that Ashlee actually did love him.
The first time Julie saw Todd she thought he was the hottest thing on two legs. Time hasn’t done much to change her mind about that. Just she sometimes wants to fuck him up as much as she wants to fuck him.
‘Ok I need a drink.’ She tells the obelisk and sits on the edge of Todd’s chair and admires the way his shoulders look under his t-shirt.
The next day Ashlee comes over to help her tidy up and they end up having sex in the kitchen on the couch in there that Todd sits on to tie the kids shoelaces and that they brought from Vancouver. Julie isn’t sure why. She isn’t sure why she’s never thought of it as being sex before.
Before Ashlee leaves to go the gym ‘no I do not want to do Pilates’ Julie sniffs, ‘I swim.’ Julie told Ashlee that Todd was fucking Alex.
‘That sucks.’ Ashlee says and gives her a hug that has more affection behind it than most of the times they have had screwed and Julie holds on for thirty seconds conscious of the ticking clock and the line on Ashlee’s skin where she stops applying make-up.
Then she pushes herself back and tells Ashlee that spinning class waits for no one.
‘Pilates.’ Ashlee says. ‘Remind me to buy some smokes on the way.’
It isn’t so bad, Julie thinks, to leave an impression of laughter behind yourself when you go.
///
She isn’t sure what it is before that, just something to see if it registered she was usually so numb from being pissed off or lonely.
That night she and Todd have a marathon session in bed that leaves Julie sore enough that she makes him take the kids to school while he smirks and says ‘he’s still got it’ as he kisses her goodbye. He reminds her that he’s leaving right after practice for the LA trip and Julie frowns until she hears Ashlee’s voice telling her it will give her wrinkles and augh. So she gets up and plans a new garden path.
Then because it’s not to hot and its her fucking house she starts to dig it.
///
Julie clambers into bed, every muscle from her feet to her neck slowly murdering her from spite and thinks about a massage.
Todd’s good at them, his huge hands warm and soothing and sensual all at the same time. Somewhere in the middle of the thought the hands are Lotta’s gentle friendly touches then Ashlee’s caresses. Julie touches herself and she can’t remember ever getting this wet from jerking herself off before. And her wrist hurts from the angle, and her thighs hurt from her legs being open and her cunt hurts from Todd and her screwing all night and it’s the best feeling ever.
///
Ashlee has a tiny bruise under her eye, just down from the corner on the top of her cheekbone.
She’s wearing a shit-load of make up though, so it could be bigger.
Julie takes the kids to swimming practice and books them for an hour in the supervised fun park. She buys a packet of Marlboros on the way to Ed and Ashlee’s and when she gets there Olie’s wife is holding Ashlee’s hand and looking earnest.
‘Ash you ready to go to the manicurists?” Julie says a little bit to loudly.
Ashlee is out of the chair and by Julie’s side like a cat moving when someone steps on its tail.
‘Gotta go.’ She tells the wife in a soft breathy voice. ‘Girl talk.’
Julie puts her hand on the small of Ashlee’s back when they walk to Ed’s Thunderbird. Ashlee learns toward her for a second and smiles and takes the cigarette packet offered to her.
“Lets go someplace and down a pitcher of margaritas’ she says. ‘And put it on Ed’s credit card.’
‘He can buy us dinner then.’ Julie says. ‘I have to call Todd and tell him to pick up the kids.’
Julie feels a slight mean sense of pleasure that Todd’s afternoon plans will be spoiled, but then he shouldn’t have plans beyond a nap anyway.
They’re his kids too. Julie kicks herself for even thinking that. The worst thing is knowing she’s the only one who misses Vancouver, the kids love Florida. Todd can make them barbeque for dinner.
The Panthers win and Eddie saves the game after Auld gets pulled in the middle of the second. Todd doesn’t score and Julie kisses Ashlee under a streetlight leaning against the Thunderbird until a bunch of hooting teenage boys startle them.
Then she kisses her again and hails them both a taxi to take her home to her kids and her half finished path and her husband. She doesn’t wipe Ashlee’s lipstick off her face.
///
Marinette Sedin calls her and Julie makes plans to catch up in the off-season, they have places that are near each other in the islands.
She mentions at the end of the call that they are redecorating the spare room and she admits the call is a pretext to get Julie’s help. And without meaning to Julie says ‘my friend Ashlee is a champion shopper, anyway, she can help us find the perfect curtains.’
They make actual concrete plans that can’t be backed out of and just before Marinette goes because ‘the baby is so going to wake up but you have no idea how much I have needed to talk to another adult female’ she says ‘so you happy there? In Florida?’
Julie thinks about swimming and Todd playing with the kids by the pool.
‘Yeah I’m happy enough.’ She finally says. ‘I guess I don’t miss everything about Vancouver anymore.’
Pairing: Julie Bertuzzi-centric. Julie Bertuzzi / Ashlee Belfour. Julie / Todd Bertuzzi
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This is fiction, I made it up.
for the hockey_fc challenge New Kid in Town
The Girl That Bond Married.
Julie Bertuzzi-centric. Julie Bertuzzi / Ashlee Belfour. Julie / Todd Bertuzzi
Notes: Marinette Sedin is Daniel Sedin's wife
Lotta Naslund Markus Naslund’s wife
why yes, new kid in town can be about those affected by moving as well as players.
///
It’s nearly winter, but it’s Florida, so Julie unties the strings on her top and lets it drop on the ground as she walks to Todd. He grins and almost blushes and yeah, after kids and years and fights and seeing each other puking from being sick she still has it.
‘Tan lines have no class' she says. And it’s a great line and she instantly regrets it. Because she doesn’t need lines to fuck her husband. She needs five minutes without the kids around and a home game.
Ashlee would grin like a porn queen and lick her lips and pout, but Julie just climbs on Todd’s lap on the recliner and kisses him, tongue and teeth and her wedding ring glittering in the noon sun.
Todd’s hand slides up her back and Julie leans back as he kisses her neck confident he can hold her up.
///
It felt like she was the Cheshire cat, nothing left of her but her smile hanging in the air, a foolish false grin. Like she had fully disappeared. Her friends were probably saying right now: ‘oh do you remember Julie? Yeah, I hear she lives in the States now, has a couple of kids and probably a gun.’
But it would not be a bad thing to be remembered for a smile, to always leave the impression of joy behind you. Or to leave on the best line.
///
Lotta had had the softest touch. When Julie was frazzled over newborns or, the-thing-that-bad-year, Lotta could calm her down easily. But, Lotta was so sweet and friendly and special to everyone. Which was the problem.
Sometimes Julie used to tell herself off for the crush.
Except they. Julie stops thinking. Just stops and tries to decide which of the roughly five thousand houses she’s seen today she could actually imagine herself living in.
She finally picks the place with the biggest kitchen and the biggest bay window to the back yard. It’s going to cost a fortune in insurance for all the glass but Julie doesn’t care. The compensation for all the time Todd spends on the road is that they have money.
Sometimes it almost feels like enough.
///
The first home game and stuck in the wives room where all the oxygen has been sucked out and Ashlee corners Julie. She’s all big blonde hair and bigger pink lips and even bigger tanned boobs.
‘We have to go out for lunch some time. Girl talk.’
Julie reminds herself that she and Todd were pre hockey sweethearts when Ashlee smiles at her with her perfect white teeth, and her impeccable spray on tan, and her nails that have glitter on the tips and not one chip.
Ashlee’s breathy little-girl voice that has to be a put on and her fluttering fake eyelashes and her pouting insistence that she and Julie can be ‘best friends’ turn Julie’s stomach.
It occurred to Julie that she had a best friend already, ‘oh yes, my friend, Lotta, I don’t think you ever met her.’
But, it’s not the same talking on the phone even though they speak every other day. Julie craves the calls and wants more at the same time. She wants someone who knows everything and doesn’t know everything. Knows the big stuff but not the superficial shit.
Doesn’t know that Julie gets a sore stomach after three coffees so always tells her sweetly to stop. Doesn’t know that Julie hates driving in the rain so will wait around for hours in bookstores until it clears.
Ashlee has a determined flutter as she sweeps around the room. But for a second - over Olie’s wife’s shoulder and shit Julie can’t remember her name - for a second, her blue eyes bright like a dolls, sweeping over Julie, cataloguing devouring and Julie promises herself they will never be alone in a room together.
///
She decides to dislike Jay’s girl because she wears a thin gold chain around her waist, and really who does that except Pamela Anderson?
More than that though she promises to keep two rooms between her and Ashlee cause there is no benefit to be dragged into shopping and whatever bored games hockey wives with no hobbies and no life play.
She keeps her promise for three weeks and one discovery of a hickey on Todd’s chest. Julie doesn’t say anything for four hours until the kids are in school and then they go at it.
It is a fight they have had before. Julie has the weird sensation of floating above the two of them watching what is happening, while a memory Julie brings this fight home from Vancouver to Florida.
Todd ‘has to go, has to go’ and Julie calls Lotta.
Lotta is sweet and sympathetic and recommends they go to counseling or Julie goes and stays with her or her mother until things calm down.
Julie is pissed off because Lotta added that ‘when things blow over you can go home’ like, like there was a chance Julie wouldn’t go home. Of course she would. She’s married, she promised, and this. And she can’t go home if she never leaves home. She can’t just pull the kids out of school and uproot her life on a fucking whim and a trade. This is an aberration that is caused by hockey. Julie wonders why it feels like her life both began and hit pause the day Todd became a professional player. Like it was the fulfillment of so many dreams, and at the same time it’s like they won’t get to have a real marriage until he retires. He’s still traveling like a kid in junior, still partying on the road like he’s sneaking away from his parents.
Still the great guy she married, still loves her. She’s not leaving.
///
But things never stop. Hockey players never really grow up and hockey players’ wives still dress like it is half price drinks night at the single saloon. Todd just remembers all the tricks he learned in Vancouver to get good at hiding it. Julie just bites her tongue and talks about her kid’s schools with a type of grim determination that borders on psychotic. Ashlee just waits and talks to Jay’s badly dressed girlfriend about engagement rings.
‘Whatever’ Julie thinks and rolls her eyes.
It might be worse she thinks as she looks around the room. Could be another woman, could be a string woman in the same town they live in and Todd’s never done anything like that to her. At least there won’t be a pregnancy or something and there’s no way Julie could handle that particular humiliation.
But this is bad enough. The two of them on the ice, on the road, on the bed, something she can never fight. Something she can’t compete with the way she can when the puck sluts come snaking around.
It’s like smokers Julie decides watching the game with eyes narrowed into slits. You always mean to quit, but the cigarettes are all around you, behind every counter. And it’s easy to promise yourself that you will stop again again. She doesn’t make Todd promise to end it, because she hates being lied to.
Sometimes she really hates Todd.
Before the game he stopped in the car on the way to the arena and promised it was over. A one-time thing, an aberration.
It wouldn’t piss her off so much if the thing with Markus had really ended. Julie hates lots of things, pollution, people who don’t separate recycling properly, people who let their kids run riot, but the one thing she can’t take at all is being lied to.
Fucking Todd, the piece of shit, this was supposed to be something that was left behind in Vancouver, just Markus, just them, and the liar the liar, Julie remembers one afternoon drinking to much wine and kissing Lotta out of revenge and the soft feel of her breasts pushing against Julie's, her fingers that weren't long enough to circle Julie's wrists and she calls Ashlee before her rage has entirely burned out.
Todd was calling Vancouver as much as she was. Two lies was really one to many.
She regrets it the instant she wakes up the next morning, but Ashlee won't let her cancel their lunch. 'But sweetie’ she says her voice trilling like a mechanical bird, and the nick name has Julie’s teeth on edge, 'I'm already on my way to your place! Now hush my cell is cutting out.'
Ashlee has a tattoo of a butterfly on a buttercup on the small of her back. Julie sees it when Ashlee stretches up to pet one of the puppies at the pet store. She doesn’t get it though. The puppy. Ashlee pets its nose one last time and says she’ll think about it.
She walks backwards talking about her brother’s German Sheppard managing to avoid walking into any of the crowds of teenage girls and buys Julie a donut and a latte. She pretends to give a damn about Julie’s kids and Julie pretends to give a damn about her clothes.
Lotta did not kiss her back.
///
Todd comes home from the road trip all apologetic and sad and Julie knows that it didn’t end at one.
God-fucking-damn. Julie feels sad that he’s so unhappy. Then miserable that Todd is sad, then angry as hell at the both of them.
Todd could have the balls and the good fucking manners to not throw his affairs in her face. Did he learn nothing from Markus? That man had been the soul of discretion; no one knew what he was up to. Except that everyone really knew but it was done in such a way that everyone felt bad gossiping about it.
Julie invites Ashlee over to help her hang curtains and kisses her when she walks in the door.
Ashlee kisses her back with no pretense and no tease. It’s really longer but it feels like seconds and Julie’s wet and her heart is going thud-thud thud-thud and she wants it like this, like she wanted Todd when they first met.
Julie rocks her hips into Ashlee and kisses and kisses until she can’t breath.
Julie hasn’t had an orgasm against a wall since the first year of her marriage.
///
The kids like their new school ok, and Todd gets better at hiding things, again. It’s always this way, a flowering of passion and then Todd cools off. Except her, he’s never stopped loving her, or needing her, or wanting to be married to her.
‘Cause he’s around you.’ Julie thinks to herself. Julie imagines the conversations they must have, the lovers and her Todd. Todd insisting he loves her.
Julie pauses half way through cutting peppers for the pasta sauce. She can hear in her head Todd saying ‘I love Julie, but she doesn’t understand.’ She knows that if Todd were in the house she would stick this knife in his neck, the son of a bitch.
She invites Ashlee over for a drink and makes sure she has a bottle of wine in one hand and a glass in the other so they can’t do anything stupid.
Ashlee takes the drink and the two of them talk about Toronto and Vancouver, ‘it’s nice to be ignored’ Ashlee says. ‘Toronto was a fucking three ring circus, and the pay off wasn’t nearly enough.’
‘Liar.’ Julie thinks, but says; ‘oh I’m easy to ignore’ and it doesn’t come out petulant, or flippant it comes out fucking sad. Ashlee strokes her face and they kiss so soft that Julie can feel Ashlee’s hair touching her face like a bleached slap and then Ashlee says ‘it’ll be ok’ and Julie snaps.
‘Jesus’ Julie says, ‘I’m not a fucking child.’ She pushes Ashlee back and is faintly surprised to realize how few clothes she’s wearing. How much wine she had to drink while they were talking about the neighbourhood.
‘You’re not acting like much of a grown up.’ Ashlee hisses back and stuffs buttons into buttonholes and walks out.
‘I deserved that’. Julie tells herself. She thinks about calling Lotta or Todd or her cousin that she used to be so close to, or Ashlee to apologize, but instead walks outside with the rest of her glass of wine and drinks it staring at the pool.
She doesn’t cry or throw things, and if her throat gets tight it’s just a reaction from the booze. Fuck this anyway. She pitches the rest of the wine into the lavender bush because she hates lavender. Julie makes plans in the moonlight, because she’s a fucking adult.
She’s going to fix this garden and get in perfect shape and learn to do something useless and feminine. Lotta used to make quilts, so fuck it, Julie will learn to knit.
The point is not to make scarves, she lives in fucking Florida, the point is to do something just for her.
///
Todd scores a goal and the new one gets an assist - which hardly ever happens. They celebrate on the ice and Julie narrows her eyes from the glare of the white. Julie would buy waterproof mascara, but that would involve admitting that she was crying. She considers blaming swimming every day and getting her lashes dyed. But they are tears from squinting in the sun. At night in Florida. Or the wind blowing in her eyes from the open window.
Julie takes the kids to school, early and books them into after school judo. For flexibility. She walks home, all out of balance from not having one kid or one school backpack to anchor her and sits by the pool.
Fuck tan lines, fuck Florida. Where’s a hurricane when you need it anyway?
She thinks about maybe calling her mum, but who knows how to deal with this? Even Lotta would look oddly superior behind the sympathy sometimes. Whatever, like Markus wasn’t a known player behind her back.
Julie calls Ashlee cause it’s not like she’ll be busy working or reading or having an internal life or anything.
In fact she’s sleeping.
‘It’s ten o’clock! Are you pregnant?’ Julie says.
‘God I hope not.’ Ashlee sounds husky and not altogether there, and more human than normal so Julie invites her to go shopping for garden supplies.
‘You can pick the sculpture.’ Julie says by way of apology for the other day. She looks over the backyard; yeah anything can be hidden behind the trellis with bougainvillea on it in the far corner.
When Julie gets back, smelling like Ashlee’s perfume and like room 612 of the Pink Shell Motel she doesn’t have a shower because why should she? And she goes for a swim while she waits for the delivery guys to bring her stone thing over, and her face is wet from the water, and she smells like chlorine and not salt.
///
Julie gets a sweet Christmas card from Lotta that shows Vancouver in the winter and after the first period of a game against Ottawa Julie leaves the kids with Joe’s wife and their brats and sits in her car in the underground parking lot.
Ashlee taps on the window. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ She says and Julie looks through the windscreen and says ‘I couldn’t give a shit.’ Ashlee huffs and searches through the pockets of her ridiculous unseasonable fake white fur jacket and pulls out a battered Marlboro packet.
Her Zippo has an engraving of a Cadillac on it.
‘Ed’s.’ Ashlee says and rolls her eyes and throws it on the dash. She hands Julie tissues that smell slightly of cigarette smoke and then some liquid eyeliner.
‘You would probably be a good mum.’ Julie finally says and Ashlee laughs and then coughs a little bit from the smoke going down the wrong way.
‘I doubt that. Ed’s kids like me though. I thought one day, well I guess I’m the cool step mom. They don’t need me for anything really.’ Ashlee smiles. ‘That’s not so bad, they could really hate me, but they hardly ever see their dad and he told them once if they were jerks to me they couldn’t come over.’
‘I like my kids.’ Julie says. I know that isn’t earth shattering, but I do. I like their company. I’m lucky that way. Todd’s a good dad.’
‘So is Ed.’ Ashlee says, and blows a stream of smoke to the roof of the car.
“I know our lives are easy.’ Julie finally replies. ‘Compared to most people. It’s just the bits that are hard are hard for the same reason as everyone else.’
‘Todd doesn’t.’ Ashlee smokes carefully and makes a fuss of unwinding the window the throw the butt away.
‘Cheats.’ Julie says. ‘Don’t tell anyone, they would make fun of you for being the last to know.’
‘I thought the wife was always the last?’
Julie laughs, bitter but real anyway. ‘Blah blah, cry the world a river Julie Bertuzzi.’
‘Todd never …’Ashlee’s voice trails off. ‘Yeah well, you have my shoulder girl. That sucks.’
Ashlee lights another cigarette and Julie drags herself out of her funk long enough to ask about Christmas.
Ashlee gets a real honest laugh out of her with her outraged ‘yes I can cook!’ and Julie even has half a cigarette for the hell of it.
‘Third periods starting.’ They walk back in next to each other. Eddie gets a shut out. Ashlee grins, honest and huge so that her eyes wrinkle at the sides.
///
Gary knocks up his girlfriend again and Ashlee is in charge of the baby shower. Julie goes because it turns out she hates knitting and sewing and the garden is threatening revolution if she spends any more time in it. No rooms need painting yet, but Julie has her eye on the laundry.
They get streamers and cards and clothes and stuff everything in the back of Ed’s car.
‘Yeah its ridiculous, and stupid expensive to run’ Ashlee says, preening a little bit at the surfer dudes checking out her authentic Thunderbird something something that Julie can’t catch or doesn’t care enough to translate into real human speech, ‘but you can get a lot in the backseat.’
She bursts out laughing and Julie looks at her in horror but she can’t stop laughing when she says ‘you two didn’t…’ Ashlee’s eyes get twinkly and she says, ‘yeah we did.’
Julie snorts, trying not to laugh and says ‘but that blanket is for the baby! It could touch the,’ she thinks for a minute ‘unclean.’ She finally says and Ashlee snickers.
‘Do you want salad with almonds and mineral water or should we hit McDonalds?’
‘Fries.’ Julie says and smiles at her reflection in the window of the back of the car.
Their fingers touch when they go for the sauce at the same time and Ashlee drinks diet coke but that’s ok.
///
Julie rests her hip against the stone obelisk that Ashlee picked. She touches the pile of shells that the kids brought home from the beach to decorate it with. Its pretty, wearing away in the sun and wind with a little bit of moss at the base.
The kids are running around the pool with Joe’s brats - and Julie had to offer to take them for the day after all the baby sitting that has been done for her during games - and Dwayne, Eddie’s son, is chasing them and doing such a good job of minding them that Julie makes a mental note to pay him. Todd is looking surprised to see Ed Belfour in his back yard, maybe cause Eddie and Alex don’t get along that well.
Well that’s ok; Alex and Julie Bertuzzi don’t get on that well either.
Julie watches Ashlee wander up with a drink and a beer for Edide. She responds to something Todd says and hollers at her bull terrier and kisses Eddie distractedly on the cheek then agrees to help one of the girls fix her hair.
Julie hadn’t realized after all this time that Ashlee actually did love him.
The first time Julie saw Todd she thought he was the hottest thing on two legs. Time hasn’t done much to change her mind about that. Just she sometimes wants to fuck him up as much as she wants to fuck him.
‘Ok I need a drink.’ She tells the obelisk and sits on the edge of Todd’s chair and admires the way his shoulders look under his t-shirt.
The next day Ashlee comes over to help her tidy up and they end up having sex in the kitchen on the couch in there that Todd sits on to tie the kids shoelaces and that they brought from Vancouver. Julie isn’t sure why. She isn’t sure why she’s never thought of it as being sex before.
Before Ashlee leaves to go the gym ‘no I do not want to do Pilates’ Julie sniffs, ‘I swim.’ Julie told Ashlee that Todd was fucking Alex.
‘That sucks.’ Ashlee says and gives her a hug that has more affection behind it than most of the times they have had screwed and Julie holds on for thirty seconds conscious of the ticking clock and the line on Ashlee’s skin where she stops applying make-up.
Then she pushes herself back and tells Ashlee that spinning class waits for no one.
‘Pilates.’ Ashlee says. ‘Remind me to buy some smokes on the way.’
It isn’t so bad, Julie thinks, to leave an impression of laughter behind yourself when you go.
///
She isn’t sure what it is before that, just something to see if it registered she was usually so numb from being pissed off or lonely.
That night she and Todd have a marathon session in bed that leaves Julie sore enough that she makes him take the kids to school while he smirks and says ‘he’s still got it’ as he kisses her goodbye. He reminds her that he’s leaving right after practice for the LA trip and Julie frowns until she hears Ashlee’s voice telling her it will give her wrinkles and augh. So she gets up and plans a new garden path.
Then because it’s not to hot and its her fucking house she starts to dig it.
///
Julie clambers into bed, every muscle from her feet to her neck slowly murdering her from spite and thinks about a massage.
Todd’s good at them, his huge hands warm and soothing and sensual all at the same time. Somewhere in the middle of the thought the hands are Lotta’s gentle friendly touches then Ashlee’s caresses. Julie touches herself and she can’t remember ever getting this wet from jerking herself off before. And her wrist hurts from the angle, and her thighs hurt from her legs being open and her cunt hurts from Todd and her screwing all night and it’s the best feeling ever.
///
Ashlee has a tiny bruise under her eye, just down from the corner on the top of her cheekbone.
She’s wearing a shit-load of make up though, so it could be bigger.
Julie takes the kids to swimming practice and books them for an hour in the supervised fun park. She buys a packet of Marlboros on the way to Ed and Ashlee’s and when she gets there Olie’s wife is holding Ashlee’s hand and looking earnest.
‘Ash you ready to go to the manicurists?” Julie says a little bit to loudly.
Ashlee is out of the chair and by Julie’s side like a cat moving when someone steps on its tail.
‘Gotta go.’ She tells the wife in a soft breathy voice. ‘Girl talk.’
Julie puts her hand on the small of Ashlee’s back when they walk to Ed’s Thunderbird. Ashlee learns toward her for a second and smiles and takes the cigarette packet offered to her.
“Lets go someplace and down a pitcher of margaritas’ she says. ‘And put it on Ed’s credit card.’
‘He can buy us dinner then.’ Julie says. ‘I have to call Todd and tell him to pick up the kids.’
Julie feels a slight mean sense of pleasure that Todd’s afternoon plans will be spoiled, but then he shouldn’t have plans beyond a nap anyway.
They’re his kids too. Julie kicks herself for even thinking that. The worst thing is knowing she’s the only one who misses Vancouver, the kids love Florida. Todd can make them barbeque for dinner.
The Panthers win and Eddie saves the game after Auld gets pulled in the middle of the second. Todd doesn’t score and Julie kisses Ashlee under a streetlight leaning against the Thunderbird until a bunch of hooting teenage boys startle them.
Then she kisses her again and hails them both a taxi to take her home to her kids and her half finished path and her husband. She doesn’t wipe Ashlee’s lipstick off her face.
///
Marinette Sedin calls her and Julie makes plans to catch up in the off-season, they have places that are near each other in the islands.
She mentions at the end of the call that they are redecorating the spare room and she admits the call is a pretext to get Julie’s help. And without meaning to Julie says ‘my friend Ashlee is a champion shopper, anyway, she can help us find the perfect curtains.’
They make actual concrete plans that can’t be backed out of and just before Marinette goes because ‘the baby is so going to wake up but you have no idea how much I have needed to talk to another adult female’ she says ‘so you happy there? In Florida?’
Julie thinks about swimming and Todd playing with the kids by the pool.
‘Yeah I’m happy enough.’ She finally says. ‘I guess I don’t miss everything about Vancouver anymore.’