Her Rustanov Bully: the (possibly romantic?) tale of how I pucked around and found out
Her Rustanov Bully: Chapter 11

“So, what d’ya think about this, girl?” Tommy asked me, lowering his voice. “You. Me. Going back to my house.”

“What do I think?” A wide smile split my face, and I could only hope I didn’t look like too much of a goofball, grinning from ear to ear as my heart soared. “Are you serious? I’d love that.”

“What are you doing here?”

My heart froze mid-soar at the sound of the heavily accented voice.

“Should we go?” I asked Tommy, doing my best to hold on to my wide smile. “Like, right now?”

“Yeah, sure, but hold up. First, let me introduce you to somebody. He’s going to be hella jealous!”

Before I could protest, Tommy pulled me into his side to talk to the person who’d interrupted our important conversation about me maybe coming back to his house. “Hey-hey, Rustanov, wassup?! You probably don’t know each other, but this is⁠—”

“I know who she is,” Artyom said to Tommy.

While staring at me.

As if on cue, a couple of other Yolks skated up, falling in on either side of Artyom like hyenas attending to a cartoon villain.

“Oh, you two…” Tommy glanced between the two of us, his happy expression lacing with confusion. “…know each other?”

Did I say my heart was soaring earlier? Now, it nose-dived into my stomach. Like some kind of plane crash.

Fuck.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“No, not really….” I threw Artyom a pleading look, silently begging him not to ruin everything I’d been hoping for with Tommy ever since I spotted him at the back-to-school fair.

“Da, we met in Berlin,” Artyom answered Tommy without looking away from me.

“Right, right, we did!” I backpedaled furiously, trying not to look like a complete liar. “Artyom was playing for Team Germany, and my brother, Paul, and I were there cheering for Team USA. But Germany won the match, thanks to Artyom. So, yay for them.”

I held my breath, hoping that maybe a compliment would get Artyom to play along with me instead of ruining my chance to go home with Tommy.

“This is correct,” Artyom said in response to my revisionist history. “My team won against Team USA.”

I let out a breath of relief.

Until Artyom added, “And then, she offered to fuck me later that night. I believe she is what you Americans are calling slut bunny. No, that is not the correct word….” Artyom pinched his chin in his hand and raised his eyes with a considering look. “Puck bunny—da? This is what we are calling these girls who fuck us only because we are hockey players? This is correct?”

The words hit me like a slap to the face. My skin prickled, hot and mortified, and in an instant, it felt like every single person in the arena had turned to stare. At me.

“Excuse me?” I managed to choke out, my voice trembling with a mix of indignation and panic.

Meanwhile, both the hockey hyenas let out obnoxious snickers, and one of them assured him, “Yeah, that’s definitely what we call them!”

“Well, um… like I said, great game.” I turned back to Tommy, my voice straining under the weight of pretending that Artyom Rustanov hadn’t turned our enthusiastic, one-on-one conversation into a toxic cesspool of male double standards. “Maybe I’ll see you later? Like we were⁠—”

“Da, later we are having after-game party at my place. You should stop by,” Artyom said with an elegant nod of his dark head. “You can offer your pussy to Hanson again. And any other hockey players who want it.”

I sucked in a breath. God, it was like getting punched in the gut by a blizzard.

I didn’t know whether to be alarmed or impressed by how polite he sounded while eviscerating me in front of Tommy.

Artyom actually had the nerve to look down at me with an expectant look, as if he was patiently awaiting my answer to his politely toned but super-gross invitation.

I tried to open my mouth to answer. Tried and failed.

The truth was, my reserve of courage had already been hovering around empty when I made myself come out on the ice to congratulate Tommy. I found out, in the unable to come up with a clapback way, that I had nothing left in the tank.

In the end, I clamped my lips and ducked my head to run away like somebody with her hair on fire.

“Perhaps we can call her Black Bunny from now on,” I heard Artyom suggest behind me. “This way, we know which Puck Bunny we are talking about as she works her way through the team….”

The laughter of the hockey hyenas drowned out the rest of whatever else he said as I ran blindly toward the rink’s entrance—only to crash into Trish, who was making her way through the crowd to save me, even though I’d forgotten to give her the signal we’d agreed to when I came out on the ice to congratulate Tommy against Claudia’s many dire warnings.

“What happened?” Trish asked, grabbing onto my arms to steady me. “Did that Rustanov guy say something to you?”

I didn’t have to answer. She could tell from the look on my face just how badly my attempt to seal the deal with Tommy had gone.

“Oh, fuck that!” Trish glared over my shoulder toward Artyom and his crew, who were probably still laughing. “Watch me go tell that Russkie ball sack where he can⁠—”

“No, Trish, don’t!” I grabbed her by the hand before she could push past me and began tugging her toward the rink’s entrance, where Claudia was waiting with the furtive air of an herbivore who didn’t want to be seen by voracious predators.

“Claudia was right….” I admitted to Trish. “I should never have come here, no matter how much I wanted to make this thing happen with Tommy. Let’s just go, okay?”

Trish reluctantly let me drag her out of there.

And I spent the rest of the week actively avoiding Artyom Rustanov, as advised.

Unfortunately, hiding from a hockey god dead set on making your life miserable wasn’t that easy when he knew where you lived most nights.

“What are you doing?”

I nearly jumped out of my chair when Artyom noisily dropped into the Winona Ryder carrel right next to mine less than ten minutes after I sat down at my Anne Tyler one to deal with the schoolwork that was already piling up.

“Searching for more Yolks to fuck?” He leaned over the carrel’s divider to look at my laptop screen with no consideration for my personal space—or the “No Talking” sign hanging right above our heads.

I was filling out a report for a pretty sad child neglect case I’d shadowed a social worker on that morning. It had basically confirmed my decision to work on the four-legged animal side of things instead of the usual two. But I snapped my laptop closed on the highly confidential case before he could invade someone else’s privacy.

“That carrel is reserved.” By a history Ph.D. candidate who often reeked of future career despair and the family-sized bags of sour cream and chive potato chips, sure. But at least he was quiet—outside of all the crunching.

“Not anymore,” Artyom answered with a smirk. “It is mine for rest of semester.”

I wanted to ask how he’d managed to acquire this particular carrel when our reservations were supposed to be locked in stone until the end of the school year. But I refused to give him the satisfaction.

Instead, I packed up my things with shaky hands, swallowing the lump of anger rising in my throat. He wanted me to lose it. He wanted me to scream at him in the middle of the library so everyone could see me as the crazy puck bunny stalker he was painting me to be. Not happening, Rustanov.

So… my ultimate safe place. Another thing totally ruined by Artyom Rustanov.

Put that on the list, along with my potential relationship with Tommy.

And apparently, my previously upstanding reputation.

The next night, after telling me she was headed out to meet up with Claudia and a few of her hockey friends to smoke now that the women’s Yolks season was over, Trish came right back through the door less than an hour later. Crying.

“Oh my God, Trish.” I set aside my umpteenth attempt at reading Dawn to rush over to hug my sobbing friend. “What happened?”

Short Answer: Artyom Rustanov. That was what happened.

Claudia hadn’t been lying about how powerful he was. Not only had his acid-washed version of the Berlin story spread like wildfire through the campus, but now there was another rumor going around that I was stalking him by trying to hook up with all his friends on the men’s hockey team.

According to the captain of the women’s hockey team, that’s how we ended up in the same Clara Quinn seminar.

“Everybody’s calling her Restraining Order,” she’d told Trish right before passing her the pipe at the team’s informal chicken wings and smoke-out get-together they were having at Claudia’s off-campus apartment.

The words hit like a punch to the gut. Restraining Order. That’s what they were calling me now? My cheeks burned as Trish recounted what the captain had said. It wasn’t just humiliating—it felt like a death sentence for whatever shred of reputation I had left.

That’s the weird thing about being a chronic people-pleaser. You’re so busy pleasing, you have no idea how horrible it will feel when people stop liking you to the point that they’re straight-up talking about you behind your back. Nothing in my aggressively Black Mary Jane wiring had prepared me for this.

And worst of all, Trish was crying because of me. Because my nightmare was now hers. I wrapped my arms around her, hating myself for delivering this chaos to her doorstep all the way from Berlin.

“So, I was like, that makes zero sense, you dumb bitch.” Trish reenacted the story with a dramatic mix of wailing sorrow, feminist rage, and her original Milwaukee-hood accent. “Imagine my beautiful, smart, independent bestie out here thirsty for some hockey, bro! Get the fuck outta here—you know, I defended you like any best friend would. But then Claudia’s dragging me into the hallway, like I’m the one out here spreading fake-ass news!”

Trish paused just long enough to heave a deep enough intake of air to let her finish the story without having to worry about pausing to breathe again. “She was all, like, ‘You’re being out of pocket!’ And saying, ‘I warned you something like this would happen if you let her go to this game!’ And when I pointed out that she was part of the problem if she was going to keep smoking while this display of toxic masculinity went unchecked, she was like, ‘Well, I guess not everybody’s a saint like you.’ And I was like, ‘By saint, do you mean a decent person who refuses to sit by while the patriarchy runs over her best friend with a Humvee or whatever the fuck they drive in Russia?’ And then she just kept saying I was doing too much until suddenly she was like she didn’t think this was working out. She just dumped me!”

At that point, wailing sorrow took back over. “On Monday, she was begging me to take her to lunch with you because she couldn’t stand to be away from me after we spent every day together during winter break. And today, she just dumped me like I didn’t come back early from winter break to be with her while she finished out her season.”

Trish shook her head. “Like I didn’t spend all of Christmas biting my tongue at her conservative parents’ winter home in Florida. Florida, Lyds. Do you know how fucking nose wide open you have to be to spend Christmas in that armpit of a state? And she just dumped me! Turns out hockey players really are the worst—it doesn’t matter what gender they are!” Trish wailed before collapsing into tears.

I’d actually always wanted to go somewhere as fun and commercial as Florida after growing up in a fussy mansion overlooking Lake Minnetonka.

But I felt like crying myself as I guided a sobbing Trish over to the couch. My best friend had been so happy just a few days ago….

My heart twisted with anger and helplessness, thinking about the guy at the center of it all. How could one person wreak so much havoc on our lives?

I wish I could say that was the end of it. But over the next few days, I came to replace out that the tyranny of my new Rustanov bully had only just begun.