Trying to be less precious with my writing, so I did this in two days! I don’t specify this but all dialogue/texts between Ilya and Svetlana are meant to be in Russian.

CW for pretty detailed description of drug usage as well as discussion of the deaths of three actual hockey players, Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, and Wade Belack.

Two days after the 2011 MLH awards, Ilya returned to his apartment in Boston to find Svetlana had trashed the place, not for the first time. The kitchen was an indiscernible mess, and all the pillows had been pulled off the couch and lay strewn about the living room. Cups littered every flat surface containing either the last remnants of drinks or cigarette butts floating in black pools of ash. At least the sheets had been stripped and dragged over to his bedroom door where they sat in a pile he dared not touch.

He called her, understandably angry but too exhausted to raise his voice; she scrambled, saying she’d mixed up the dates and assumed the cleaners would come before he got home, and when he asked who had been at whatever ruinous party she’d thrown she answered, I don’t know, why don’t I invite them all back on Friday?

Perhaps she knew he was incapable of staying mad at her for more than a week, or she sensed the well of frustration and disappointment that had grown ever fuller throughout the season, begging for a swift release ahead of his flight home to Moscow. He probably needed an exorcism.

His rookie season was more difficult than anticipated—that was the kindest way of putting it. He had sustained a shoulder injury towards the end of the playoffs whose medical terminology evaded him but which felt like the muscle had been combed through with the tines of a fork every time he lifted his right arm. And then of course there had been Hollander, baiting him, distracting him, beating him.

So, when Svetlana suggested they destroy his penthouse again he said yes, and tried to sleep on the patio furniture on the balcony while the cleaners scrubbed champagne off his floor.

Years later the details of this summer would disappear in the noxious haze of death that was only just beginning to sneak in. It had been a month of watching Boogaard tributes at every season-ender event. By September two more enforcers would be found dead. Eventually Ilya would come to be grateful that Hollander had won Rookie of the Year because it meant the only questions fielded to him the following season were about how he was going to overtake him again, and not about what it meant for the sport if players’ brains were getting rattled around with such force they literally could not live with the effects of it.

On Friday night Svetlana and her friends filled the apartment, along with a few of his teammates and two dozen more people he didn’t recognize. Hours into it there was some new Drake song blaring that had definitely been played already and his fridge had been sufficiently raided. Lousy guests, but he was about the leave the country, so he supposed it was for the best his food got eaten.

Once half the place had left, Svetlana pulled him into the bedroom and pressed her mouth to his ear.

“I haven’t really said sorry yet, have I,” she whispered, sinking to her knees and looking up at him with half-lidded eyes.

They passed the next hour together in bed, until another couple stumbled into the room and Ilya had to throw a pillow at them to get them to leave. Svetlana shrieked and ducked under the covers they’d pushed to the foot of the bed, even though by that point they were done fucking anyway.

She pulled the sheet around herself like a robe and marched out after them; Ilya heard shouting, mostly in Russian, followed by the usual chorus of groans that meant she was kicking the last of her friends out. He’d always liked that about her—how she could be somewhat hotheaded, it made him feel less self-conscious about his own temper. When she returned she had a framed picture tucked under her arm which she set facedown in front of him where he sat.

“I thought you already apologized,” he said, smiling.

“This is something else.” She was digging through a pile of her things now, and, finding what she was looking for, crawling back over to his side. “For your ego.”

Ilya scoffed, but she just nodded at the frame. “Go on.”

He turned it over and saw his own face grinning back at him—the photo from the draft: him with his Raiders jersey, cocky and proud and beaming, flanked by Shane Hollander and his barely concealed loathing.

“You don’t need Rookie of the Year,” she said. If it were anyone else he would’ve taken it as an empty platitude, nothing more than baseless reassurance, but it was Svetlana and so of course he knew she meant it. “Look at his face,” she pointed at Hollander, “look at how fucking miserable he is. He’s going to be known for the rest of his life as the second overall draft pick of his year.”

“So what,” he said as he stared down at the photo, running his hand over the carved frame. Part of him wanted to put his fist through the glass, into whose face he couldn’t decide.

“So, he has something to prove because of you. There will always be a voice in his head telling him he’ll never be as good as Ilya Rozanov.” Svetlana tapped the center of his chest with one finger. “You put that there.”

Her hand drifted up to his chin and turned his face to look at her. “Let him chase you,” she shrugged. “Who knows, it might take you all the way to the cup.”

He laughed and shook his head once, clearing away the dust and the cobwebs that had collected over weeks of living out of suitcases and taking his losses home with him every night.

“When did you get so good at pep talks?”

“Oh please, don’t think this changes anything—you’re a good fuck and nothing more,” she said, pushing her fingers through his hair, though her eyes softened a fraction. “Now will you please do a line off your face with me?”

What followed was not entirely unfamiliar—well, cocaine was more of a postseason indulgence than anything else, but watching Svetlana tip the contents of the bag she’d grabbed earlier and cut it with a card was a sight that recalled other formless nights which bumped against nearly empty pockets of his memory. She took the first line and dragged her fingertip through the remnants, holding it up to his mouth for him to rub into his gums. While he did the second she pressed her thumb over Hollander’s face.

“Let’s do one for him,” she hummed, “the size of his dick. I wonder how small it is.”

Ilya couldn’t stifle the cough that burst forth upon hearing her words, and a bit of the coke blew across the glass, smearing over his lopsided grin. For a split second he thought she must know by some telepathic, sex-forged channel of communication, she must have fucking smelled it on him that not only did he know exactly how big Hollander’s dick was, he knew what it tasted like, what it felt like in his hand and on his tongue.

Svetlana just giggled. “Come on, it can’t be that big. I don’t know anybody who’s fucked him.”

“Fuck, I don’t know.” Ilya sat up, thinking only of how eager Hollander had been in his hotel room in Nashville four months ago. He cleared his throat—that bitter, chemical aftertaste—and held up his thumb, turning it around as if to inspect the unit of measurement.

“Mean,” she said, already with the card in her hand again, “but fair. I’ll take half.”

When it was his turn she handed him the rolled up dollar and he wondered if his thoughts were loud enough for her to hear. Evidently they were enough to get him hard again, which she did notice.

Maybe it was the comedown or he was so occupied by the memory of Hollander’s lips around him that he’d missed something else entirely, but when they finished she rolled over and left him staring at the ceiling. Sometimes it was like this, when they fucked; she would get this faraway look and Ilya could only hope it wasn’t regret. He never brought it up because he really, desperately needed her to remain in his life. And talking wasn’t something he was especially good at, even with her.

He let her go to wherever it was she went in those moments and quietly found the photo where it had fallen to floor, wiping it off. He sent a picture of it to Hollander, neatly cropped to fit the edges of the wood frame, and got back into bed.

Leaning over he kissed the smooth plane of Svetlana’s shoulder blade. “Thank you,” he mumbled against her skin.

She reached up and held his head there, sighing into the pillow. A few minutes went by before she shuffled into the bathroom and Ilya checked his phone again once he heard the shower running.

Jane: Reminiscing on better days?

A strange thing tugged in his mind as he realized this was probably the only picture of Hollander he would be able to keep. Such a shame he looks so unhappy in it, he thought, more than a little smug. He knew he would get rid of it eventually, and supposed it might conveniently get lost in his next move. It had only been a year and the apartment was beginning to feel somewhat ostentatious. A more refined, more mature place might be nice. Out of the city, with its people and its hunger and its constant fucking noise.

He fell asleep that night with Svetlana curled under his arm and dreamed of Boogaard’s right fist—scarred, bloody, razing indiscriminately. Big enough to strike fear into even the most imposing of players, big enough to punch a hole through anybody’s skull.

—

Ilya blinked. He’d been standing in front of the dresser for God knows how long. His phone lit up with a notification and he opened it to three new texts from Shane.

Jane: Ok meeting is done. Be there in thirsty.

Jane: Thirty*

Jane: I miss you!!!!!!

Were he several years younger he would have replied with something like, trouble thinking straight? But he was indeed twenty-nine, and he didn’t feel like playing games anymore.

Lily: I miss youuuuuu hurry hurry

Lily: Speed

Lily: Highway patrol are very slow they will not catch you

Lily: I will pay for ticket if they do

He was right about the photo—it was the only one that could be held onto. For a long time it collected dust in a box in his closet, but then it moved with him to his house in Boston. The last season he played there he wrote Love, Sveta across the glass in sharpie so it could be tastefully displayed in his bedroom without raising any suspicions. Now it sat on their dresser in the cottage, where he brought it every summer. A miracle he hadn’t tossed it out for one reason or another, he thought, as if he ever had a reason.

For a moment he tried to recall if he ever told Shane about that night, if he gave any indication that he suspected someone had done coke off of a photo of him at eighteen, let alone Ilya. Probably not, although he didn’t think Shane would be all that scandalized by it. It was more likely he just wouldn’t care that much.

Absently he wondered if snorting Lexapro would have the same effect as taking it normally. Time was fucking relentless, what quick work it had made of him. In a year he would be thirty—but, he reminded himself, Shane would have to go first.

Recently Ilya had confessed that he liked that Shane was older than him. He didn’t know why, just that those handful of weeks in late spring seemed to last forever. Shane had called him a pervert for enjoying their “uncomfortable one-month age gap relationship” as he backed him up against the wall and then the memory veered into another territory altogether, but yes, there would inevitably be a short (yet not insignificant!) period of time when Shane was in his thirties and Ilya was still in the decade of life where staying up all night and getting wasted was within the realm of possibility. He fell asleep before eleven yesterday.

The other odd thing was that he was already a whole year older than Boogaard was when he died. In a weird twist of fate this had aligned with the end of his first season in Ottawa—another he had perhaps naively anticipated being easier, though the second season was marginally better. He thought maybe it was because Boogaard was the one player he was genuinely terrified of that he’d concocted this whole ghostly parallel between the two of them. It didn’t make sense; Ilya wasn’t an enforcer, he wasn’t in and out of rehab, he wasn’t getting beat over the head half the time he was on the ice. Realistically it was wrapped up in his general wariness-about-painkillers thing. Shame for liking how they made him feel, guilt for being able to stop taking them without much difficulty.

He snapped a picture of the photo and sent it to Svetlana, hovering over the text she’d sent last week asking when he would be in Boston next. Almost a decade ago she had held his face between both hands and said, I will never forgive you if you get CTE, and I will never fucking forgive this sport, which, at the time, had pulled him from the bright blur of doubt he’d fallen into that summer. It was kind of romantic—devoting your life to something that could kill you, succumbing to the knowledge that if given the chance, it absolutely would. Certainly there were times in his life when he felt that torment was his sole birthright and the vortex of pain he had been born into was simply reiterating itself in hockey. Athletes were constantly dodging injury and addiction just to find that injury and addiction were perhaps the only things promised to them. Glory was reserved for a lucky few, and it was what Shane wanted.

He’d spent a long time thinking he was letting Shane trail after him before he realized he was the one doing all the chasing, even now. Once, at his place in Ottawa, he woke up standing in the gym as though even in sleep he could not stop moving.

And it was nice, having someone who distilled every action so completely it was almost binary: you are doing this for hockey, or you are doing this for Shane. The choice was simple. But it didn’t stop him from wondering on occasion if he had made his life smaller. The thought kept him up at night like the sound of Shane’s voice when they’d sat at the table with his parents for the first time—he’s trying to be loyal to me, not Boston. The terror of thinking he had betrayed himself balanced perfectly by the thrill of knowing Shane liked it. Total equilibrium.

“Ilya?” He heard Shane call when he walked through the door twenty minutes later. His footsteps followed into the kitchen, past the hallway and into the backyard where Ilya had sequestered himself in a corner of the grass.

“Hey,” Shane said, bending to run his hands over his shoulders, kissing the top of his head. “What’s up?”

Ilya hummed and tilted his chin up, staring into Shane’s teeth as he smiled down at him. “Did you watch Boogaard’s last game?”

“Uh, yeah I think so,” he faltered as he sat down next to him, grimacing at the memory. “Ottawa, right? Fucking rough.”

“Was just thinking about that summer after he died,” Ilya said. Shane was nodding, trying to study his face. He could always tell by the barely perceptible way his eyebrows knit together, it meant that whatever Ilya was talking about meant basically nothing to him, but he would find his way in eventually.

The corners of his mouth twitched. “The summer after I got Rookie of the Year,” he corrected.

Predictable, prideful. It made his heart swell. “How many rookies of the year have there been since then?”

“Nine,” Shane said with a dignified edge, “but who’s counting.” He pushed a few curls away from Ilya’s eyes and let his fingers stay there, twirling in the ends of them. “You look nice.”

“I look like this every day.”

He shook his head. “You’re more relaxed this time of year.”

Ilya pressed his cheek into Shane’s palm, smiling against it. “Is this your way of telling me I should work out more,” he asked.

Shane rolled his bottom lip between his teeth, looking very much like he could devour Ilya alive. He didn’t answer, just leaned in to kiss him, and the sound of it was swallowed up in the song of insects trilling all around them.

Before he stood up to leave he ran the pad of his thumb over Ilya’s eyebrow and town to his jaw, curling over the joint that worked so much sometimes it locked itself shut—a recent development, and not one that affected his playing but seemed to prove the wear was adding up nonetheless. “I’ll be inside.”

He felt the drag of the air when he turned his head to the side to catch the last of Shane’s presence as he made his way back towards the house. His phone buzzed in his pocket.

Sveta: Those were the days…

If Shane thought he was complacent, it wasn’t a big enough issue for him to raise yet. If Ilya thought this about himself he figured he would have done something about it by now, but this appeared to be the whole deal with complacency. Shane was as magnanimous a partner as he was a player, he would never say that Ilya was lazy. That was the fun part, reading it in everything else—the way he let his alarm keep ringing so Ilya would wake up with him, how he always wanted him faster, harder. Thinking about it made him shiver despite the high sun.

Ilya: And I thought I would never be tamed

In truth he did feel different. Domesticated was maybe the proper word for it, it sounded like growth, like maturity. More distinguished than saying he felt like an exhilarated teen whenever he snuck out of the house to go smoke, or that he found a single grey hair and it made him spiral for a week.

The one time he truly panicked over it all was during a hurdle in the contract negotiations regarding his trade to Ottawa, where for a brief moment it looked like the entire thing might fall through—his visa, his money, his career, everything—and he had thought, for the first time and the last, I have made a terrible mistake. Of course, his lawyers had it resolved before anyone could say what he’d been thinking out loud.

Sveta: I always knew you were a lapdog

Sveta: You come to heel quite easily ))

He was slow to get up; faintly he could hear the sound of the television which either meant Shane was cooking or that he had turned it up just loud enough for Ilya to know it was time to come in. Sooner or later he would tell him about the dreams of his mother, about choosing. The selfish part of him hoped whatever spirit of discontent was closing in on him would go away on its own.

For now he was needed, and the alternative was—oblivion, annihilation, worse. So he went inside.

I’m gonna get in that man’s head if it’s the last thing I do!

The New York Times wrote a series of articles on the circumstances of Derek Boogaard’s death, which I feel like I should link here considering how much it’s referenced in this. The first can be found here, the second is here, and the third, here. They are all are haunting and, for me, brought up a lot of complicated feelings about hockey as a sport.

There was another more recent article I read before writing this about drug use in the NHL and the NHLPA Player Assistance Program, a very interesting read if you’re curious about the topic. Drugs are bad but our systems are worse!

The title is lcd soundsystem, of course.

Thank you for reading, comments are much appreciated <3