Her Rustanov Bully: the (possibly romantic?) tale of how I pucked around and found out
Her Rustanov Bully: Chapter 15

Yom did not delete the spyware app.

And, despite his stated antipathy toward both Lydia the Liar and Hanson the Gandon, he couldn’t stop himself from obsessively poring over every text they exchanged in the following days.

In fact, instead of deleting the spyware app he’d planted on Hanson’s phone, Yom toggled its notification button to the on setting.

Consequently, he received a buzzing notification on Thursday, in the middle of his strategic management class, when Hanson received an outrageous request from the girl he’d relabeled “Lydia DTF” in his phone.

Yom breathed through the dark, clenching sensation twisting through his chest.

There was no calculated waiting period before Hanson deigned to respond this time. Instead, Yom found himself sickly riveted as he watched Hanson immediately text back in real-time.

Her sweet answers to Hanson sliced across Yom’s chest.

“Mr. Rustanov, you are aware of our no phones policy in the classroom, no?”

Yom looked up to see the strategic management professor, who’d been droning on a minute ago, now peering over his reading glasses with a disapproving look.

What was he doing?

Yom angrily stowed the phone and resumed paying the utmost attention to the lecture.

But his stomach turned every time his watch notified him of a new message.

By the end of the class, Lydia and Hanson had set their plan in stone.

That afternoon, at the last practice before Friday’s final game, Yom had to listen to Hanson brag to the other players about how he was having the perfect double week.

That meant he’d slept with two girls every day since Sunday.

“Tonight I got a double date with two bi-girls I met at Rustanov’s place, and I just got Friday all lined up with one honey right after the game at my house and another one at the party Lars’s girlfriend is throwing for us at Tri Kappa,” Hanson announced loud enough for even the assistant coaches to hear in the back offices. “But I’m still looking for Saturday’s hoes. Too bad Rustanov’s not throwing another after party on Friday. That got me pussy appointments all week. Know what I’m saying?”

Apparently, most of the other players did. They snickered and gave him daps like Hanson was on his way to winning the Stanley Cup.

Did Lydia know she was just a number to Hanson? That he’d sleep with her and then hie away to stick his khuy in the next girl like she was an appetizer he’d decided to order before moving on to the main course?

A sickly green acid threatened to corrode him from the inside. Was she truly planning to give her virginity to this gandon?

Perhaps he should…

Do not act the Rustanov, his Uncle Alexei warned inside his head before he could finish that thought.

And Yom knew Uncle Alexei was right.

That virginity stuff had been a lie anyway, Yom reminded himself as Hanson and his friends tossed around some possible names for Saturday. Everything that came out of Lydia Carrington’s mouth was a lie.

She didn’t deserve his protection.

Much less his obsession.

Yom jammed his earphones in, vowing not to give Lydia Carrington another minute of his thoughts.

But he still didn’t delete the spyware app.

Don’t think about it… Don’t think about it… Don’t think about it… Yom chanted to himself the next day as he watched Hanson text with the former girl of his dreams right before the game.

Forcing his mind to shift gears, Yom locked his focus on winning this match and maintaining their perfect streak.

What felt like only seconds later, the ref blew the whistle for the start of play. Yom busted across the ice, channeling the rage tearing up his chest to put three points on the board by the time the Yolks returned to the locker room for the first intermission.

However, that rage also earned him three penalties for cross-checking, boarding, and unnecessary roughness in the first period alone, and their head coach wasn’t too happy about that.

“What’s going on with you out there?” Coach laid into him as Yom bent down to retighten his skates. “You’ve got to stop raising H-E double hockey sticks in the second period, or you’re going to be ejected from the game before the third… Wait, what are you doing, Rustanov?”

Yom didn’t even realize that instead of tightening his skates, he’d begun taking them off, until the Yolks’ head coach demanded to know why.

She was at Hanson’s house. Waiting for him, naked on the bed….

Do not act the Rustanov, Uncle Alexei warned again.

Meanwhile, the head coach asked, “Are you hurt?” He immediately switched from angry to alarmed for the team’s best player. “Do you need a medic, son?”

Son. Strange how the coach only called him that when winning was on the line.

Yom thought darkly of his real father. Of the Rustanov genes that had made him this way.

Then he ignored both the voice of Uncle Alexei’s reason in his head and the very real coach outside of it as he began removing his pads.

His teammates noticed that Yom’s removal of his uniform went beyond what was needed to use the toilet before the second period.

They started asking him questions, too, and by the time he’d stripped out of his team uniform and redressed in the training sweats he’d worn to practice, their head coach had gone from angry to concerned to completely livid.

No more nice Christian coach—he turned red in the face, screaming invectives after Yom as he left without a word of explanation.

The last thing Yom heard before the locker room door closed behind him was Hanson saying, “C’mon, Coach, forget him. I can win this thing all by myself. We don’t even need his prima-donna bullshit—oops, my bad for cussin’.”

Hanson was right.

They most likely would win purely because of the three-point advantage Yom had already given them. But fan memories were fickle. If Hanson managed to make even one successful shot in the power position he rarely got to play unless Yom was in the penalty box, then the much weaker player would receive all the glory when that final buzzer sounded.

But he wouldn’t get Lydia.

Yom gritted his jaw as he jumped into the black Ram 2500 truck he’d bought as his first “American car.”

Do not act the Rustanov.

Too late, Uncle Alexei, Yom thought as he screeched out of the parking lot. This is no longer option.

Yom’s mind had gone that particular shade of Rustanov red that wouldn’t let him see anything but the woman who’d drawn his ire and his desire.

Scenarios of what he would say when he confronted Lydia battled inside his mind as he headed toward the address Hanson had given Lydia right before the game.

He’d threaten to hack into her school records and make sure she couldn’t graduate.

He’d tell her about his particularly diabolical plan to blackmail all of her references so she wouldn’t be able to get a job after she graduated.

He’d point out that she’d been adopted by a millionaire, but his birth family was worth trillions.

You didn’t get to trillions by being anything but ruthless.

I won’t just destroy your senior year, I’ll destroy your life if you go through with this.

That cruel promise crackled between his ears as he parked, got out of the truck, and walked toward a small house with gray siding and dull red trim.

Then another, much more menacing one dropped into his head as he lifted the mat to retrieve the key Hanson had promised to leave there: I could make her choose me.

Since she’d displayed so little sense when it came to selecting who she slept with, he’d arrange things so that she’d “choose” to take another offer.

The one where she became a Rustanov pet. Like his mother.

He’d promised himself he would never do this—that he would never act the Rustanov in that particular way. But this jealousy… this obsession. It was no longer just a sickness. It had become a cancer that had spread through his body and metastasized in his brain, destroying his control and whatever fetters he’d put on his behavior before deciding to finish his schooling in the States.

The Rustanov pet idea rooted itself inside Yom’s chest and grew like a weed. With tendrils.

By shattering his vision of her, Lydia had left him no choice, he reasoned with the dopey boy who’d dreamed of asking his Library Girl out after winning the USCA championship—the one who still refused to accept that she wasn’t who he’d thought she was.

This was the only way—the only way to tire of Lydia, as his father had tired of Yom’s beautiful mother.

What would it take to make you leave me alone?

He finally had a reply for the question Lydia had practically spat at him.

And he no longer cared whether she liked the answer.

There was no key under the mat, but as it turned out, he didn’t need one.

When Yom opened the screen door to test the lock, he found the door inside partially cracked.

As if Lydia had been so eager for this hook-up, she’d forgotten to close it.

That detail iced over any reservations he had about continuing the Rustanovs’ terrible legacy of taking pets as he walked through the door—only to stop and squint.

The house was freezing-cold inside, and Yom immediately spotted the reason why: a wide-open back door.

Confusion began to dissipate the ugly black rage inside Yom’s chest, and instead of heading straight to the bedroom, as he’d planned during his angry ride over, Yom frowned and walked toward the back door leading to the yard behind the house.

What in the hell?

Yom once again stopped short on the outside porch when he saw the scene laid out in front of him.

Lydia, on her knees in blood-speckled snow. Wheezes of labored breathing cut through the night.

“Oh my God, thank goodness you’re here!”

Lydia’s voice tore with relief when she looked up to see him standing underneath the back porch light.

“Can you help me? Please, you have to help me!”