One More Night

“Come on Staal, move your feet!” Torts hollered at him, and while Marc dug in, the real desire to work wasn’t there. He knew it, he’d known it since setting foot in New York when he got off the plane. His heart wasn’t all in it, and as much as he’d hate to admit it, most if it was back in Thunder Bay with a particular brunette that wasn’t his wife.

Those thoughts haunted him through the remainder of practice, where more than once the coach barked at him to get himself together. He just couldn’t focus, he couldn’t make himself want to win and want to perform and play the way that he normally did. It was strange and foreign to him to not want hockey with every fiber of his being, and as they filed off of the ice his teammates all sensed it.

“Staalsy, what’s wrong with you lately?” Marc stiffened as Dan came up and made himself comfortable in the stall next to him. The two were good friends, but just as Marc had reacted to anybody else trying to get to the root of his problem, he was freezing him out.

“I’m just off, that’s all. Need to get my head in the game,” he mumbled as he un-taped his socks and began to take off his gear. Dan stayed seated silently beside him, and Marc was beginning to get unnerved by his friend’s gaze.

“I don’t think it’s your head that isn’t in the game, Marc,”

The statement made his blood turn cold. He couldn’t honestly be that easy to read, could he? That somebody who hadn’t seen him for three and a half months could walk in and immediately diagnose his problem. Instead he sighed, and shrugged his shoulders in an attempt to not give himself away.

“I don’t know, maybe. It just doesn’t feel the same this time,”

Dan nodded, and then seemed to be trying to find the words he wanted to use. His gaze moved around the locker room, while Marc watched him quietly.

“You, uh, get things patched up with Robyn?”

The question of the decade, it seemed. All of the guys on the team knew about the problems they’d been having at the end of the season last year; Marc had ranted or spilled his guts about it on more than one occasion. Most of the guys were sympathetic; those who were married couldn’t believe how painful it was for Marc. He and Robyn were married about a year and suddenly everything was going harshly downhill on him, without him having done anything. The single guys on the team, however, didn’t have much to say, other than insisting between themselves that this was the reason why they weren’t getting married any time soon.

“Working on it… she just shuts me out whenever I try to talk to her or do anything about it. Sometimes…” he stopped himself short, realizing what he was about to say. Dan’s eyes had widened too, and the two of them were silent for a while as they processed it.

“Sometimes?”

“Sometimes I wonder if it’s going to get any better… if we shouldn’t just end it,” Marc whispered, horrified with himself for having even suggested it. The thought hadn’t ever been at the forefront of his mind before, but now – mixed with the idea that he could try things with Bree, for real this time – the idea was looking oddly tempting. He had no words for how awful that realization made him feel; he’d grown up firmly believing that when you were married it was because you loved that person with everything you had, and consequently you gave everything you had to make it work. And so far Marc hadn’t done that, but he was still thinking about the possibility of divorce.

“That’s pretty serious,” Dan allowed, and Marc nodded, swallowing hard as he finished getting dressed. That statement was going to need some serious thought, and all he wanted to do when he got home was crawl into his bed and stay there.

“I… I can’t believe I just said that,” Marc admitted, and Dan sighed.

“That might say a lot more than you think. I mean, I know what you think about marriage, but maybe you really do need to think this through Marc. Keeping the ‘sanctity’ or whatever it is of marriage isn’t worth you being miserable for the rest of your life just because you don’t want to get a divorce,”

Dan’s quiet words struck a chord with Marc, who couldn’t make himself do anything more than nod. He was scaring himself, and the worst of all of it was that he had no one to turn to. As badly as he wanted to tell somebody, he couldn’t drop that news on any of his friends; he couldn’t expect them to keep this a secret. That was putting far too much on them, and he wouldn’t do that to anybody, let alone a friend. Let alone friends who knew his wife, and whose wives or girlfriends were close with her.

“There’s something more to all of this, isn’t there?” he asked, and Marc froze.

“I… I don’t know yet,” was all he could choke out, before he exited the locker room as quickly as possible. On the drive back to his apartment he tried to drown himself in the music playing through the car’s stereo, but nothing could quiet his thoughts. They were screaming at him, pounding away at the inside of his head and threatening to tear him apart.

He let himself in, not surprised that his wife wasn’t home. Where she went, he had no idea. She never told him anything anymore, just went about her own life and all that Marc had to do with her was when she’d come home late at night and crawl into their king sized bed without a word to him. That was when she came home – some nights she didn’t bother, and he learned from his teammates, or their wives or girlfriends that Robyn had been with friends.

Instead of what he should be doing – inhaling a protein shake, possibly laying down for a nap – Marc dug through the bottom cupboard next to the fridge, pulling out an unopened bottle of tequila. At that point he didn’t care what it was; he just needed something to quiet down his conscious. If only drinking the straight liquor out of the bottle didn’t make him think of doing the same thing with Bree that first night they met, he might feel a little better. Even though the tequila burned like hell, he shook it off and took another drink, repeating the process until his thoughts began to blur together and the tension in his stomach eased up as his guilt was slowly slipping to the back of his mind.

With that he replaced the bottle – now missing a considerable amount of liquid – and stumbled his way to his bedroom. After crawling beneath the covers and making himself comfortable Marc’s thoughts started to reclaim their place at the front of his mind. Bree was at the center of all of it; her bright eyes, friendly smile… the way her brown eyes lit up when she first saw him, and how smoky and dark the color turned when he kissed her. The way her laugh started light and delicate and soon turned full-hearted and loud as she forgot her inhibitions and got caught up in the humor. The way her fingertips trailed lightly over his cheek as she spoke to him when they lay curled up together, whether it be on her couch or in her bed. The way her expression softened and the gentle light in her eye told Marc he was all she needed.

She was everything he craved and wanted. And he’d not only lied to her, betrayed her, but left her without coming clean about it all. Even if he wanted to, he knew he couldn’t expect her to want anything with him again, even if he did get a divorce. The thought weighed him down, made him feel as if something was pulling him down into the mattress, pressing on his chest and slowly suffocating him. It was going to kill him, he decided, this dishonesty and the secrecy of it all. He couldn’t do it, he’d break and his life would fall down around him, and still it wouldn’t be enough. Bree wouldn’t be there.

He found it ridiculous. He’d spent almost a year with Robyn before telling her that he loved her. They’d been together for three years before he could see himself spending the rest of his life with her and asking her to marry him. That was logical, time-appropriate, and yet with Bree none of it made sense. He’d met her at random, in a bar no less, and without having an open, free relationship in two and a half months she consumed his thoughts. Even now, having been in New York for three weeks, she was everywhere he turned. She was in every brunette he saw walking down the street, in the jokes the guys made in the locker room that he knew she would have killed herself laughing at. In his mind when he couldn’t help but compare Robyn’s indifference to Bree’s thoughtfulness.

He was a terrible person, Marc decided as he buried his face into his pillow. And even though he was sure his brothers and family would never forgive him, he would have to come clean.