November 21, late night, Daegu time. After the couple finish their second tele-therapy session, they reflected on their romantic life. But it's still not wholly harmonious since they still have some argument in Korean, now centered on other aspects of their lives covered by their session:

"Thus far, the first step has been a little... rocky. Caro, Legnica and those other streamers I watched were all informative to some extent, and, of the gang, you only seemed to trust Caro, at least for the time being" Sampoong retorts.

"What did you learn from Legnica and the others?" Duri retorts. "It seemed... useless! Maybe you trust them too much!"

"Opening up to other cultures, useless? When you work remotely, with coworkers from around the world, sometimes a little cultural awareness can go a long way! Also, what could be useless to you may not be useless to me!"

"Now I have a better idea of why you kept watching these people on Twitch! You must have realized by now that I have very limited, if any, control over my work schedule!"

"Oh, for sure I do! The best we can hope for is that, at some point, the project will proceed to a new phase where you don't need to work overtime as much! Or a new project!"

"Except that, for my line of work, employers tended to value the ability to work long hours, perhaps a bit too much... We're not that rich, if we want even one child, we'd better save for it now!" Duri warns him.

Oh my god, hagwons. This is one of the most expensive aspects of child-rearing, the others being food, clothes and furniture, in no particular order. That's what I'm saving for! Duri starts thinking of what they are saving for, should they want children, and what they are expected to do.

"I never spent anything on games, nor did I give anything to anyone I watch! I stay home, I work from home to help you save, and I never leave home unless absolutely necessary! Looks like our hands are tied financially! If this therapist doesn't work out, I hope you're willing to gamble on an intern or a resident!"

"We might not have a choice if that happens! I don't want a bad therapist to ruin our finances! You know how tight our finances are!"

Joy... we need to reevaluate our finances and not just our schedule! She still feels like there are things I can't be trusted with, such as finances, Sampoong ruminates, while the only thing they seem to trust each other over is their schedules.

"It seems like there's so little you can trust me for!"

It's then that Duri learns of Sampoong's history of DMing Glitter. So Glitter is his go-to person to recommend books to him? And Glitter recced him books that, yes, correspond to the requests I made last week, but he probably blew the spare money on paying for therapy up front! It's still early to tell whether getting therapy was a good idea. Now I have a better idea of what to look for in a book! She then notes the recs Sampoong obtained from Glitter, and makes her due diligence for these, in hopes that Glitter didn't mislead him.

Speaking of Glitter, she starts reading the passages after the trade deadline. It has been a few busy days, for sure, but seeing Gus cry like this, while most other people write hockey players as these jealous, ripped alpha males who tend to be overprotective of their WAGs, and might mellow only for their WAGs and no one else, makes me wonder about Gus' personality away from Emma, as I know people often act differently with their love interests vs away from them. Might want to re-read the non-hockey scenes.

And it's then that she could be led to realize that his core flaw is him being a workaholic, but otherwise not be the kind of guy to mellow only for one person. However, she knows that the day a player gets traded is often high-strung emotionally for players.

When the stream begins, and Caroline starts to stream at around 8PM, Charlesbourg time, they see the criticisms that start flying in all directions. For the first time, Marie-France enters the voice chat, along with the usual suspects.

"Welcome to tonight's stream and stay tuned for the daily word count update. I'm closing in on the fifty thousand words"

"The way it appears headed right now, you decided to just stuff all the major things that can happen to a pending restricted free agent in a contract year! It might become one of the best books about RFA in the NHL, though" Marie-France tells the gang with a Québécois accent.

"Marie-France! While you know RFAs are relatively young players, as do Capitolium..."

"Sorry if I sound like a broken record, but hockey romance readers, by and large, wouldn't know the difference between restricted and unrestricted free agency!" Glitter complains.

"I might have slipped a mention of offer sheet at some point, but the time has not yet arrived to explain what can happen to a RFA in a contract year, though, and certainly not an offer sheet! Speaking of which, I forgot to add the qualifying offer extended by the Gunners to Gus at the end of the draft day chapter! When people read about free agency, in the media, or in romance books, they usually refer to unrestricted FA"

"How does that relate to RFA?" Sampoong asks her.

"Qualifying offers must be extended to pending RFAs by a certain date, and, in practice, not everyone accepts it, since they are for a set percentage of the previous salary and last for one season"

"If his previous team doesn't extend one, then the player becomes an unrestricted free agent" Capitolium adds, while Caro adds a few paragraphs about Gus' QO.

"Also, if a player rejects a QO, that doesn't mean he's going to hit UFA; rather, they can negotiate multi-year deals for higher salaries. I think I said enough about RFA for now, time to resume writing the season closer"

So I wonder if the one chapter we get post-trade but still in the regular season is any good, since it's supposed to be about how they keep longing for each other after Gus was traded away, Glitter seems to have gotten more patience for the hockey talk and simply listened to it, as opposed to just quit the stream.

"I hope you're aware of the failure points of long-distance relationships, and what happens when they have limited windows to see each other when hockey is in season!" Glitter warns Caro. "You even wrote in a line in their last date chapter about what these windows were!"

"Cheating is always a risk when you talk about NHLers, and certainly a few players must have accumulated a load of one-night flings!" the streamer keeps writing the Gunners' season closer, where, despite Gus having given his all for the 23-odd minutes he was on the ice, the Gunners lose in a shootout.

And hence finish out of the top three in the Central division, so the Gunners' draft pick ends up being #20 unless they somehow make it to the Western Conference final, she keeps writing about the implications of this loss for Dallas. Maybe even make the Gunners lose in the first round if push comes to shove. Damn it! If it happened, then I will need to just have Gus reject the QO on draft day, rather than Dallas extending it then!

Which makes her displace part of the new lines being written in the draft day chapter about the QO into a new one before it.

"I guess, even if they have a good idea of each other's schedule, they'll probably have more room after the season ends" Sampoong starts feeling like this arc is hitting too close to his home.

"And lack of intimacy or trust, even if they communicate well otherwise, or jealousy can do a long-distance relationship in" Glitter adds a warning to Caro. "Even without cheating!"

"How do you come to know so much about relationship failure points?" Caro's expression on her face doesn't lie.

Maybe I seem to connect more with Emma because Emma isn't described as remarkably wealthy, and I'm dealing with a workaholic myself. However, why is it that Glitter allude to what I am going through? She's not our therapist! Sampoong starts feeling a little shaken, while having hitherto treated Player Masher as a book about the inner workings of life as a restricted free agent in the NHL.

"I apologize for not having told anyone here earlier, but I am a marriage and family therapist. Call me crazy, but reading romance is often the only way I could cope with hearing couples' problems day in, day out" Glitter answers Caro's question, causing most of Caroline's viewers to gasp.

"I guess, you read romance because you want the happy endings that you might be unable to obtain from your clients!" the streamer deadpans her MFT viewer.

"And, even though I cannot disclose client names here, nor get too specific about them, some romance books make me feel like there just couldn't be any kind of happy ending with them still together if the same case happened in the real world"

"It's ok for romance not to have healthy relationships, just not all the time. I hope you all understand that life once together is not all roses!" Sampoong adds.

Damn it, Glitter, we're back to this whole discussion of incompatible personalities, and wanting to use fiction to get what you cannot yourself! Like I knew that common goals and values are part of what makes personalities romantically compatible, and often the starting point, the streamer starts to feel her head increase in weight as it leads her to struggle finishing the chapter about the end of the Gunners' regular season.

"But there are those clients I have that had relationships with one side behaving mostly like a stereotypical bad boy or alpha male, and there was just no common ground!" Glitter vents in the stream's VC. "As a romance reader, I go through phases of just going with the BookTok flow, but there are times where I look for books that aren't abusive, or with specific issues that I didn't read in a while. I just stay out of mafia or billionaire romance then"

"And let's not forget about what is called queer romance, or simply non-heteronormative romance!" Lagado continues. "Caro, true, the book I recced to you a while ago is male-male, and I should have told you earlier about it, but often queer romance is better-written!"

"I apologize for what I asked you last week. Reading Player Masher took me out of my comfort zone, and also that I realized that I would rather have no sex than poorly written sex in a book!" Sampoong then looks back on what he recced her over a month ago.

At least the sex was well-written in the book I recced her. It really showed how awkward, and painful, it is for girls with no experience of sex to have sex, even with condoms, the Korean viewer starts thinking. At the same time, I feel like Caro captured the most intense moments in the life of a professional hockey player. Outside of the playoffs... for now. Capitolium wrote about how important draft day is for someone who isn't a pro player yet. So much that both billet and actual families attend in person.

But then there didn't seem to have any sprinting taking place since the whole stream is seemingly devoted to the reveal that Glitter is actually a marriage and family therapist.

Having overheard Caro, her mom enters the room. "Je l'admets, la misogynie internalisée est peut-être la raison pourquoi les auteurs de romance semblent ne pas donner aux héroïnes de vraies qualités rédemptrices qui pourraient en faire démarquer une, ou minimiser les défauts" (I get it, internalized misogyny might be the reason why romance writers seemed to shy away from giving female leads actual redeeming qualities that could make someone stand out, or minimize the flaws)

Like clumsiness, but actually shows it only to fall in the love interest's arms, or how someone is described as fat even though they only weigh slightly more than normal. For some romance writers, and certainly a Korean one or two, my daughter would be fat, even though she was described as having the build of a female hockey player. She's perhaps a little stocky, but I would never call her fat, Caro's mom then leaves the room, while the stream continues.

The end of the stream closes in on midnight because the discussion of cliches in romance books slows down the writers in the chat. With less than one minute to go, Caro writes as quickly as she possibly can, typos be damned, in a last-ditch attempt to get to the 1667 daily words. I can always have Gus go back to his room after the game, at his teammate's place. And try to tell Emma about how the season can possibly end. But, for the time being, he could offer a Gunners jersey to her, asking for which name and number to use, Caro furiously types the scene after the game while the clock is ticking on her, with an eye on the word counter.

Capitolium, on the other hand, is knee-deep into the writing of the Courteau Trophy playoffs. He fails to notice the typos that everyone else, like Jacques, have on Caro's manuscript.

Jacques: What a bunch of typos!

With only seconds to spare, she barely clears the daily par threshold, and she sighs in relief, upon seeing the pink-and-yellow hexagonal badge flash on her screen. Phew! The daily par cheevo is still alive...

"I made it, but I'm afraid I will need to stop the stream here: you don't want to see me fix these typos on air!" Caro then cuts the stream.