So many thanks to foreverbaby and tiktaalik77 for betaing and to tracybacon for betaing and title.

“Come here,” said Rozanov, and Shane, whose jaw was a little numb, let his dick fall out of his mouth. It was mostly soft. Shane had been sucking Rozanov’s mostly soft dick for between six and eight minutes. Since all the most important moments of Shane’s life were timed, he had a good internal clock. He was pretty sure it had been eight minutes.

“Come here,” Rozanov said again. “I will finger you.”

It had been four months since Shane had last seen Rozanov, so it had been four months since he’d last given a blowjob. Four times in that time he’d put the dildo in his mouth when he was jerking off. The first time, he was sucking it when he came. Afterwards, the cum dripping into the webs between his fingers coupled with the dentist’s-office sensation of firm plastic in his mouth had made him feel pretty dumb. Though he’d still done it again. Maybe he’d gotten used to using too much teeth while there was no one there to say ouch, and now his technique sucked.

Shane said, “You don’t want me to…”

“It’s fine.” Rozanov tugged at his shoulder, then pointed vaguely at the space next to him on the bed. “I will fuck you with my hand.”

Shane was still hard. When they started, Rozanov had been talking about how Shane was humping the mattress like he was desperate and needed to get fucked and was going to take Rozanov’s whole cock and stuff. As things continued, the speech had trailed off. Shane had kept humping the mattress, because he still had his face pressed into the deep smell of Rozanov’s crotch and his hands pressed into Rozanov’s tensing obliques. But he’d felt something slipping out of his control.

As Shane was shuffling up the bed, he looked at Rozanov’s dick again. Even soft, it was huge. Shane’s stomach was reacting weirdly to the brand of collagen powder that wanted to sponsor him, so it had taken him fifty minutes to prepare. Maybe he hadn’t been thorough enough and Rozanov could smell it or something.

“It’s my fucking back,” Rozanov said. He was lying flat on the bed, looking at the ceiling with the muscle in his jaw clenched.

“It hurts?” Shane had watched videos of the check last week, when it happened. It had been a bad angle: Rozanov’s torso was twisted when he slammed into the boards. He hadn’t fallen down or anything, but through his visor his face was visible, and he was wincing as he skated stiffly away. He’d been out for the rest of the game, and the Raiders had lost to the Storm, which was pretty brutal. Rozanov had played today, and he’d seemed normal, mostly, except that he hadn’t tried to catch Shane’s eye at all.

Rozanov craned his head to look at Shane. He was not smiling. “Yes. It hurts.”

When Rozanov texted him about meeting up, Shane had typed out, “How’s your back?” But he didn’t send the message. Rozanov had his own friends. There were probably a ton of girls blowing up his phone with sad emojis and frowning selfies when it happened. He didn’t need Shane to add to that. He might think Shane was gloating, anyway.

Shane sat up. “Do you need to rest?”

Rozanov sat too. His expression was very still. Shane recognized it from playing together: it was what Rozanov did when he didn’t want to wince. “You are my coach?”

“No.”

“It’s not that bad.”

Shane’s options were to go along with it or say no. The pros and cons of each option were not materializing into their appropriate columns. He felt paralyzed. “Give me a second,” he said. He grabbed his underwear and phone on the way to the bathroom.

He checked that he wasn’t leaking or anything else obviously gross. He wasn’t. He made eye contact with himself in the mirror while he was still pulling his ass apart to get a look and was struck by how fucking stupid he looked. He googled “back pain no erection” and came up with a bunch of results, all of which seemed to be intended for old people and none of which he clicked on.

It made sense that Rozanov wouldn’t be into it if his back hurt. When Shane aggravated his hip bursitis, it never made him less horny. Sometimes it made him hornier, which sucked, because jerking off made it worse. But Rozanov had more opportunities for this kind of thing. He could pity-finger Shane without any real desire to and forget about it by the next time he hooked up with some girl in Boston.

Shane couldn’t do either thing: he couldn’t forget about it and hook up with some girl in Boston, and he couldn’t let Rozanov pity-finger him. But the only alternative was to leave. They wouldn’t play each other again until March, two months away. There was no guarantee that anything would happen then. Maybe Rozanov would meet someone. Maybe Shane would finally stop acting like an idiot. If he did, this would be his last chance at anything with Rozanov, even if it came to nothing, or worse than nothing.

He pulled his briefs on. In the hotel room, Rozanov was propped up on a mound of pillows with the blanket pulled to his hips. He was watching TV. “I took painkiller,” he said. “In twenty minutes I can fuck you.”

Onscreen, a bunch of old ladies were sitting around a table. A laugh track punctuated their conversation. Shane hovered, standing. “Do you know what this show is?”

“Of course I know Golden Girls. I learned English from this.” When Shane turned to him, Rozanov was already looking his way. Shane could have told him not to bother, that he had an early morning, that he should go. But he didn’t. He sat on top of the duvet, leaning back against the headboard.

Onscreen, the lady with a Southern accent was yelling at the one with a squeaky voice. Rozanov laughed loudly and never at the moments the laugh track did. When he and Hannah had watched TV together, Shane had always spent most of his energy paying attention to when she was laughing, so he could laugh at the same time, so she wouldn’t think he found weird things funny. But Rozanov was weird enough that copying him would not result in acting normal, so Shane didn’t try. He could smell Rozanov’s hair stuff, which he’d seen him putting in a few times after they showered together. He wished he could smell his sweat, but Rozanov was too clean and too far away. His body was at least a foot away from Shane’s, but his legs were angled so their ankles would almost be touching, if Shane was under the sheets too. Shane could feel him shifting on the bed, adjusting the pillows.

“What’s wrong with your back?” Shane asked when the show broke for commercials, and immediately felt like an idiot. No hockey player in their right mind would let their division rival know exactly how they’d been injured. When everyone found out about Da Costa’s upper ankle sprain, the guys on the Oaks went after it so hard it fractured. If Shane told his team what was wrong with Rozanov, it wouldn’t matter that the Metros were good guys—the same thing would happen. That was the game. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I know.” Rozanov’s head was a little bit tilted, and he had a weird look on his face. Shane thought that was the end of it. But then he said, “Herniated disc. Lumbar.”

“Shit,” Shane said with feeling, before he could decide whether a less intense reaction would be more appropriate under the circumstances. It wasn’t a bad injury, as things went, but it was one Shane associated with old guys, goalies, back-clutching, and pained deliberation over whether to get surgery. He was suddenly and intensely impressed by how well Rozanov had played that night. “That sucks.”

Rozanov shrugged. “It will not kill me. The doctor is making me thrust to fix it.” His fake teeth glinted bluish in the light from the screen when he smiled. “I’m the expert of that.”

Shane rolled his eyes. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“I know you won’t. That is why I told.” He smiled again. “You would have to say it made me limp-dicked. Of course you won’t tell.”

“I wouldn’t tell them that.”

“How would you explain, then?”

“I could have figured it out from how you were moving.”

“From staring at what part of me? At the end of my spine. Also known as the ass.”

Shane shoved Rozanov, then remembered. “Sorry.”

“Ow! My fucking disc!” Rozanov made a show of rubbing his back, then mashed his hand in Shane’s face.

“Shut up.” He shook Rozanov off, then wished he hadn’t. It had felt good to touch him. He was having this weird feeling, thinking about Rozanov’s lower back. He wanted to make the pain go away the same way he wanted to make Rozanov hard, the same way he wanted to make Rozanov cum. He wanted him to feel good. Outside of sex, the feeling was unfamiliar. “I can give you a massage,” he surprised himself by saying.

“You are a masseuse too?”

“No,” Shane said. “I could just do what the PT does to me when I pull something. I know it wouldn’t fix your spine. But if the muscles are tight around it.” Rozanov kept looking at him. “Or, whatever. I don’t know. Dumb idea.”

Rozanov kicked off the blankets. He rolled over and scooted down the bed, pillowing his head on his arms. “Okay,” he said, raising his eyebrows at Shane. He was naked. His cheek was a little bit smushed against his forearm. Shane had never had such an uninterrupted view of his moles, which were everywhere. The light hair on his ass and in the curve of his lower back glinted in the light. There was a shadow of yellowish bruise, almost faded, curving from his waist to his hip.

“One second,” Shane said, and went to get the complimentary bottle of lotion.

He sat over the back of Rozanov’s thighs, not quite putting his weight down. It took a lot of effort not to grind down, and it also took a lot of effort not to grab Rozanov’s ass. He got his hands lotioned, rubbed them together to warm them up, then hovered over Rozanov’s lower back. Gently, he laid his hands down. Rozanov’s skin was smooth and warm. Shane cleared his throat. “Tell me where.”

“On the right. By the spine. It feels fucked.”

Shane pressed his thumb in a careful line alongside Rozanov’s spine. The skin dragged gently along his path. Rozanov sighed quietly. “Is that okay?”

Rozanov hummed. “It can be harder.”

“Okay.” Shane tried pressing into his thumb, then put his other hand on top to lean on it. When he dragged his hand down this time, Rozanov let out a cracked noise. “Are you good?”

“Feels good,” Rozanov said. “Strong hands. If only you could use this for your backhand.”

“Fuck you.” Shane dragged his hand along Rozanov’s spine again. It was kind of hypnotic: the feeling of his skin, the look of his back, the sound of his little sighs and hums. Shane could only see a sliver of Rozanov’s face from where he was, but he could tell that his eyes were closed and his mouth was barely open. He wondered whether Rozanov was drooling. He wanted to touch his mouth to check.

Shane was hard, and Rozanov could definitely tell, given that his boner was wedged up firmly against the back of Rozanov’s thigh, moving when he moved. But Shane didn’t feel the instinctive embarrassment that he usually did when he got hard, even in front of Rozanov, who had seen him hard more than anyone else over the past four years. They were too close right now for it to feel like a big deal. He let himself take breaks to trace lines between Rozanov’s moles. There was a shape kind of like the Big Dipper near the base of his ribs.

He didn’t quite lose track of time: he knew that it had been longer than he’d spent blowing Rozanov, twelve minutes at least, when Rozanov reached back and squeezed Shane’s thigh. “Hollander,” he said.

Shane stopped. “Yeah?”

“If I flip you now my back will be fucked again.”

“Oh.” Shane kneeled up and scooted over to the side. Then Rozanov was turning onto his side and reaching for Shane, pulling him close until he had his arm around Shane’s back, his hand between his shoulder blades, his tongue filling Shane’s mouth.

A hockey stick was just a piece of wood, a puck was just rubber, a goal was just metal and netting, and a rink was just frozen water, polished to a shine. But in a game, they all felt like something else, and what they became in turn became the only thing. It was a whole world you could live in. That was how Rozanov felt to Shane. His tongue was just a tongue, made out of whatever muscle and tissue and weird skin anyone else’s tongue was made of. His chest was like anyone else’s chest. His dick—still not all the way hard, but warm and firmer, now, against Shane’s hip—was no different from Shane’s dick, or from any of the thousands of dicks Shane had glanced away from in locker rooms. But his body felt to Shane like something other than what it was. Sometimes Shane wanted to be closer to him than anyone could get to another person, including through anal. A few times when they were fucking he had had the nearly irresistible urge to wrap his arms and legs around Rozanov. He’d resisted it, because he doubted it would be sexy to Rozanov to have Shane clinging to him like a koala while he was trying to hit his prostate.

But he couldn’t quite resist it now. He hitched his thigh over Rozanov’s hip. “Is your back…”

“This is good,” Rozanov said. “On the side like this.” He was grabbing Shane’s ass, pulling him closer. Shane pressed in until he had one of Rozanov’s thighs between his and could feel the hair on Rozanov’s stomach rubbing against his skin. Shane wanted his underwear off, but he’d have to pull away to get rid of them, so he didn’t bother. Besides, he liked how Rozanov was playing with the waistband, letting the elastic snap back against Shane’s skin, dipping his hand in to curl his fingers against the base of his spine.

“Oh fuck,” Shane said. “Rozanov.”

“Hollander.” As he squeezed Shane’s ass under the fabric of his briefs, definitely stretching them out, he made a kind of funny growly noise. It used to be that Shane could never tell whether he was joking when he did that, which made him wonder if Rozanov was making fun of him. With time, he’d realized that he was both joking and not joking. He wanted to make Shane hard, and he wanted to make Shane roll his eyes. The result was a feeling Shane never had anywhere else.

Rozanov was kissing Shane’s neck, using a little bit of teeth, the way he liked it. He wished he could ask for more, wished Rozanov could leave purple bites all over him. He wished that no one would suspect anything, or that everyone would, that they would all know exactly what had happened between them, what had been happening for years, and it wouldn’t matter. He pushed his face against Rozanov’s damp scalp. “I might,” Shane said. “I think I’m gonna.”

Rozanov let out something between a grunt and a sigh. He held him tighter. “Come on, Hollander. Cum in your panties.” He pulled away just enough to look at him, raising his eyebrows.

“What?” Shane tried to say, but then he was coming, flush against Rozanov’s strong thigh while Rozanov squeezed him closer rhythmically, almost like he was pulling Shane onto his dick, filling him up.

He stayed pressed as close as he could get to Rozanov for a moment. Then he flopped onto his back. Rozanov was half-hard. He was flushed all over, and the hair on his chest was flattened damply against his skin. Shane wanted to shove his face in his armpit, where light brown hair tufted out, and inhale. Instead, he reached for Rozanov’s hip. “Do you want…”

Rozanov shook his head. The side of his body was still lined up with Shane’s shoulder. “The problem is thrusting.” He patted Shane’s side. “This is perfect.”

He probably didn’t know what that sounded like. Shane let himself lie there in silent agreement for six minutes anyway.