Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories:

M/M, Gen

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationships:

Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova, Svetlana Vetrova & Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau & Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Svetlana Vetrova, Sasha | Ilya Rozanov's Coach's Son, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Team Ensemble (Game Changers), Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, Grigori Rozanov, Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Shane Hollander, Troy Barrett

Additional Tags:

Outing, Coming Out, Ilya Rozanov Gets Outed, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Good Friend Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, period piece imo, Homophobia, Will update tags, ilya is lying to himself 24/7, And to everyone else, ilya gets emotional dommed by the narrative, no AI, obviously, if ai has zero haters i am dead, shane is in the torment nexus, Misogyny, Immigration & Emigration, Marriage of Convenience, Depressed Ilya Rozanov, technically suicidal thoughts for one second, it's all plot? always has been, baby gay troy barrett

Language:

English

Collections:

All the faves, Russia's Anti-Queer Laws Endanger Ilya Rozanov, Zulie's Best of Heated Rivalry

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-03 Updated: 2026-06-26 Words: 45,528 Chapters: 6/?

Lean on me not

Summary

“Honestly, dude, you’re fucking handling this like a champ.”
He’s not. He’s handling it the way he has to, the only way there is to handle it. “Well, I am champ, so.”
Marlow chuckles.
He sounds like he’s about to say something else heartfelt and misinformed, so Ilya flicks on the radio.
--
Ilya gets outed fall 2014. Objectively it's good for gay hockey but it sure doesn't feel like it.

Chapter 1

Chapter Notes

The theme of this fic is the other shoe drops.

I haven’t written a fic in so long I had to make a new account to post this. Show canon bc, book names bc, haven’t read the books, don’t know russian, etc. Let’s all celebrate the return of ao3.

My take on my favorite premise, ilya gets outed. Shout out to my ilya-outing predecessors Deerlie_03 and Lila_Mac whose fics you’re probably reading already because they’re gorgeous. This won’t be truly bleak because that demoralizes me and then I don’t write, but it certainly gets painful before it gets better! Primarily or initially ilya-centric bc im a slavic diaspora queer. ilya-svetlana-sasha holy trinity/three-headed monster and all that. There will be shane eventually, though there’s also shane all the time.

Under the TV’s roar Ilya hears the beep-beep-beep of his door code. Svetlana’s the only person who knows it. She didn’t say she was coming, but she doesn’t always. Maybe he likes the easy intimacy it represents, but he’s not looking forward to having to text her dont come over tonight when he has Hollander here next game. That he always has to announce his hookups to her.

The door opens and closes. He reaches for the remote and turns down the volume a little in response.

It’s Montreal versus Detroit, 2-1. Hollander got their first early in the first period, a sexy slapshot Ilya wouldn’t have left him open for. No one’s scored in the second. He has plans for Hollander, in December.

There’s clattering and clinking in the kitchen, then Svetlana comes in. The room is dark except for the TV. She sets a glass in front of Ilya on the coffee table and takes a sip of her own as she sits.

“Sasha says hello,” she says.

On the TV, Hollander’s line swaps out. “Okay,” Ilya says. He doesn’t want to talk about Sasha, he knows Svetlana knows it.

“You blocked his number.”

“Yes.” Earlier this year, after Sochi. Symbolically: they already hadn’t texted in years and probably weren’t about to start again.

“Good judgment on your part, for once, but it’s cost you a couple of hours, and he had to call me instead. This is important.”

He gives in and looks at her. Her face is dead flat, her eyes lasering—her caring glower, he calls it in his head—and she holds his gaze until he sighs and turns the volume down to a murmur.

Svetlana takes another sip. “Sasha’s father found out about him and men.”

The air barely holds the words. They’ve never spoken about this, not directly. No need to. Ilya isn’t going to be the one to break the silence, but it grows stronger and stronger until he has to.

“Everybody’s always known about that.”

“Everybody always suspected. Now he knows.”

Ilya shrugs, looks back at the game. He rubs his nose. “Why do I need to hear this?”

“He told him about you.”

Ilya blanks for a moment.

“What?”

He can’t get his head around whatever she’s said, and doesn’t want to. “Sveta, what do you mean, told him about me?”

“He was at home, his father was pissed about covering up some dalliance, with a diplomat’s son in Paris, I think, he didn’t give me all the details.” She settles deeper into the couch. “Just that his father confronted him, and they argued, and he said something about fucking his father’s star protégée, and his father threatened him, I guess. He left in the middle of the night and took the first flight back to France, to be safe. Only he was worried about getting sent home, since he doesn’t have any money, his father cut him off, and Europe isn’t very fond of Russians right now, since, you know. The war. Unlikely, but I suppose he panicked. Typical Sasha. So, to make sure he has a strong enough asylum case, he sent a video of you and him to some Russian tabloids, anonymously. Ilya, why is there a video? You know better.”

Ilya’s heart is hammering so hard he can feel it in his knuckles. He feels like he’s been slammed into the boards. Sasha’s father knows. His coach knows. Maybe he’s told Ilya’s father by now. And their video is out there. Everything’s over.

Come on, Ilya, Sasha had said, balancing a shiny new video camera on the mantel, I need something to get me through the school year.

You have plenty of people there for that.

Oh, but you know I get homesick. I want a little reminder of Russia.

And now everyone’s going to know. The worst is happening. His ears hum. The room is either very hot or very cold, and then it’s neither.

“We were fifteen. I was stupid and agreed.”

The next time, when Sasha was home on break, he’d put an SD card in his hand and waved his own with a grin.

Gentler now, Svetlana says, “Yes, well, you were always stupid about Sasha.”

The second period ends. The broadcast cuts to highlights. The worst is happening. The worst is happening. It’s stopped meaning anything. Light from the TV glows in the lines of his glass.

“Nice of him to warn us.”

“So sweet, right?” She gives a single cold laugh. “I think he wanted advice, or reassurance, he’s obviously in a bit of a state. And I imagine he wants your stories to match. But maybe he was being thoughtful, too. Anyway, listen. It’s only four a.m. in Russia, so there’s still a little time. You need to set up a meeting with management, tonight. Better to get ahead of this. Call them now.”

He doesn’t want to call anyone. He wants to bury his head in the couch cushions and wait for this to be over. But he makes his arm move. As long as Svetlana is deciding what to do, it’s basically the same thing.

He scrolls through his most recent contacts—Svetlana, Marlow, Jane—and taps on LeClaire’s. Call. Svetlana reaches over and turns on speakerphone.

Catches himself scripting sentences in his head as it rings, trying to get the English right, something he stopped doing years ago. For some reason his hands are shaky. He tosses his phone on the coffee table and crosses his arms.

“Rozanov, what’s up?” LeClaire has the game on, too, staticky in the background.

“Hi, I, ah…” He glances at Svetlana. What is he supposed to tell him? “I need to have a meeting with you tonight. To talk about um, something. And Morrison. And if a PR person can be there, would be good.”

“Jesus Roz, what’s going on?”

“It’s not bad. I mean, I didn’t do something bad. But there is a problem anyway.”

On the TV Hollander is leaning into a reporter’s mic, hands on his hips, sweat trickling down his neck. The hum of his voice comes faintly from the speakers, then a moment later through the phone. His words are indistinguishable but he’s always saying the same things, we’re feeling good about the game so far but we know it’s too soon to tell, Detroit are playing well too, everyone’s on top of their game tonight.

“I don’t suppose this could be a phone call sort of thing?”

Svetlana shakes her head.

“In person is better, please,” Ilya says. “I know is last minute.”

LeClaire lets out a long sigh. “Okay. Okay, I can get to the rink around nine. I’ll get Chrisa. Morrison might be a tall order but I’ll give him a call. See you in a bit.”

“See you,” Ilya echoes, and LeClaire hangs up. There. His doom is sealed.

Ilya scoops up his vodka. The walls and ceiling warp in the glass. It meets the table again with a tap.

“Good,” Svetlana says. She takes a deep breath, clasps her hands. “So. Obviously you probably shouldn’t go home now either.”

It stirs the sluggish undercurrent of his mind. He can’t go home safely now. Having a father and brother in the government only helps if they protect him; they might enable the violence themselves. He shouldn’t go home. That’s one of the things he’s avoiding thinking. Why is Svetlana making him? He spends most of his time in Moscow hating it and wanting to leave again, but it’s always there to go back to. Now it’s not. Swallowed up, blanked out, yanked away. Wait, not yet, he wants to say, he’s not done with it—

“And you’re here on a work visa, so if the league drops you over this you’re in a pretty bad position. I don’t think they will,” she says quickly, “you just won the cup and MVP, you’re a captain, and you’re a media star. It’d be a terrible move. But if they do, there needs to be a backup plan.”

Something else he can’t think about yet. Everything is sinking, he’s sinking, the room is sinking.

“Ilyusha. Ilya.” Hand on his knee.

He drags his gaze up from the floor. The TV flashes blue on her curls and the side of her cheek.

“If it comes to it, I will marry you so you can stay. Worst come to worst. No matter what else happens, you won’t be sent home. Nothing will happen to you. You don’t have to worry about that part.”

He has never seen her more solemn. He doesn’t speak for a breath, two, three, trying to steady himself.

“Okay,” he mumbles. “Thank you.”

“Of course. What would I do in America without my best friend?”

He laughs, but it’s also a sob. No reason to try to hide it. She can see he’s terrified, she always sees everything about him.

He wishes he had that talent of hers, to make light of something serious while staying so earnest. He can only ever do one or the other. He slumps forward, puts his head in his hands. “Stupid fucking Sasha,” he says. “Doesn’t he have other sex tapes he could have used?”

“One would think, hm? He’s your worst ex, I’ve decided.”

Sasha, his ex. Now they call Sasha his ex. “Not yours, though?”

“Oh, not at all. I handled him. I’m his worst ex.”

“Of course.” She isn’t, by far, they both know.

“Of course. Oh, Ilya.” She moves her hand from his leg to his shoulder as she rises. “Come on, get up, we have to go talk to your coach.”

“You’re coming?”

“Obviously. You need someone smart at a meeting like this. And your legal English has room for improvement,” she calls as she disappears toward the door. Ilya drains his glass and heaves himself up. Everything will be fine, if Svetlana is coming.

It’s the coldest night so far this year. They might get the first snow, though it won’t be much. Svetlana walks straight past Ilya’s cars to her own black two-door Mercedes. Ilya can only follow in a daze and slouch into the passenger seat. LeClaire is going to know anyway because everyone’s going to know, but he still feels stupid soliciting his outrage, driving toward it. He imagines the scene, then stops imagining it.

The radio comes on when Svetlana starts the car, coverage of one of tonight’s games, but she turns it off before he can tell if it’s Shane’s or Ottawa-Toronto.

“You need to think about what you’re going to tell them,” she says as she backs onto the street. “The video is from so long ago, if you wanted to, you could say it was a phase. ‘I was young, everyone experiments,’ et cetera. People believe what they want to hear.”

“No.” There’s a lot Ilya can never admit to being ashamed of, but not this. Never his sexuality. Maybe the one good thing Sasha taught him. He’d worn his own aggressively, lounging in the bleachers at practice like masculinity was beneath him, picking out Ilya with his eyes. If Ilya apologizes for this, maybe the only thing he’s actually unapologetic about, he’ll have to apologize for everything. “I can’t.”

“Okay,” Svetlana says.

Silence stretches one traffic light, another. Ilya tries to work out the wording of the next thing. He lets most of the drive elapse.

“I should have told you.”

Svetlana waves her fingers on the steering wheel. “And said what? You knew I knew.”

But I still didn’t tell you. It should hurt, that he didn’t trust her. She should feel hurt.

“I could have pushed. I didn’t. Let’s leave it at that.”

Ilya doesn’t want to leave it. He feels thrown open, exposed, and wants, frantically, for them to talk since he’s here already. He won’t feel like this long. He flicks his jacket zipper and stares at the dashboard.

Svetlana parks and Ilya looks up and they’re parked next to LeClaire’s car with the stupid cartoon bumper stickers, LeClaire is here already, in the practice rink, waiting for them. His stomach squirms so hard it hurts. It takes him two tries to open the door. He hasn’t been this nervous or this afraid since—since when? Since the day he met the rest of the Bears? Since his first flight to North America? Since Sasha kissed him against the wall in his own father’s office at the rink? Since half an hour ago, when this all started?

There’s nothing to be nervous about. This is already happening, inexorably, all he has to do is let it happen.

Their footsteps echo down the long hallway to LeClaire’s open office. Svetlana gives him a little touch on his back as they reach it, to encourage him in.

LeClaire is leaned back in his chair, elbow on the desk, rewinding tape of New York and Washington on the TV. Chrisa from PR sits on the end.

“Ah, Roz! You made it. And Svetlana, is that right? Sit down, Morrison’s on his way and then we can get into it. Still looking at their power play,” he adds, gesturing at the TV. “Not totally satisfied we’ve got it.”

They sit facing him. LeClaire presses play again and Vaughan, Hunter, and Wagner race up the ice. Ilya fixes on their movements as something legible, something familiar to think about through the wait.

The last set of footsteps come down the hall. Ilya feels a wash of dread all over again. He shoos it away and sits up straight.

General manager Morrison strides into the office with a greeting, pushes the door closed, and pulls a chair up next to the desk. His every movement is short and rigid. He laces his fingers in his lap. Ilya would categorize him as hurried, not quite irritated. It probably won’t make a difference; there is no mood good enough to make him like this news.

“Okay,” LeClaire says. “Let’s get this started.”

LeClaire behind his desk, flanked by Morrison and Chrisa, and Ilya and Svetlana out in the middle of the room. They’re all looking at him. He has to tell them.

“Sorry that I interrupted your evening,” Ilya says, as appeasement. Morrison is wearing one of his smarter suits. He’s going to tell the Bears’ general manager in his nice suit that the internet is about to have a video of him and Sasha fucking.

Morrison takes it: waves his hand and eases back in his chair, relaxed now that he gets to feel magnanimous. “I was already on the way home. You wanted to talk about something,” he prompts.

“It’s, um.” Ilya fights the impulse to take a breath, to move his leg, to move his hands. Everything has gone out of his mind. “It’s that I slept with a friend who is a man in Russia. Many times.” Not the relevant part of this. “And I did not plan that this ever becomes public, because it’s not important, for hockey, but now it will be… known…” He looks at Svetlana. He knows his tenses aren’t quite right, he’s forgetting words he usually knows, it’s like his combine interviews, when he could barely understand the questions, let alone respond, and he’d realized just how slowly and patiently Svetlana had been talking to him when she’d helped him practice.

She nods and takes over. “We were informed that a compromising video of Ilya and Alexander Fedorov, son of the coach Mikhail Fedorov, who I’m sure you know coached Ilya for several years, has been leaked to the Russian media. It’s very old—eight years ago. He wouldn’t be so reckless now, I hope. It’ll likely be released in the morning there, probably about four hours, give or take.”

Ilya takes half a glance at the others, without chancing eye contact. Their faces are controlled, neutral. Postures stiff. Squeamish, he thinks, but he doesn’t find the straining jaws or tautness that belie fury. So it could be worse.

LeClaire and Morrison share a look and LeClaire says, “How compromising?”

“Very,” Ilya says. Gaze back on the floor. “It’s clear that we are us, and it’s clear what happens.”

“Which is…?” Chrisa asks.

“Sex. Which is sex.” Which Ilya is never embarrassed about, except now his face is hot and probably red.

He only ever watched the video twice. The memory card burned a hole in his mind for years, too dangerous to open, too fascinating to destroy. He brought it to Canada with him for World Juniors, bought a video camera, and watched it in a stairwell when they were supposed to be at dinner. He rewound and watched it again. He was so young in the video, so nervous but so deliberate, so earnest about it. Then he popped out the card and crushed it, later, with his skate.

“Roz, I’m going to be gauche here and ask for details,” LeClaire says. “We need to know exactly what we’re dealing with. When you say sex, you mean full-on—?” Before Ilya has to answer one way or the other, LeClaire waves his hand like he’s erasing an imaginary whiteboard. “How explicit is it?”

“Plenty enough.” That’s a real native-speaker phrase. Plenty enough.

“And this is a video someone took of you, or?”

“We recorded,” he mumbles.

“Your face is in it?”

It is.

“Like, full-on, clearly? There’s really no chance of denying it’s you?”

We say each other’s names a lot, he can’t bring himself to tell them. “There is no chance. It’s my face, it is not changed so much.”

“And what about preventing it from being released? I mean, they can’t, can they?”

“At this point there’s not much anyone can do to prevent it,” Svetlana says.

“But you said it’s from fucking eight years ago. That’s fucking child porn, right? That’s something we can actually threaten action about. Who has it, who told you?”

LeClaire’s raised voice isn’t at him but he shrinks a little, internally. Or maybe it’s hearing that phrase in connection to himself. He feels like a child, and his face is burning.

“It was sent to several tabloid sites,” Svetlana says. “We don’t know how many or which ones. Not that we could really make any serious threats from another country, even if we knew who to threaten.”

They’re all quiet for a moment, except for the heating vent blowing.

“Well,” Morrison says with a long exhale, “this is obviously not ideal. And uh, we appreciate how promptly you brought it to our attention. I have to ask. Does this—are you telling us that you’re gay?”

“No. Not, you know. Not only.” Gay enough, though.

“Bisexual?” Chrisa says, like it’s the first time she’s gotten to use it.

He shrugs. “If you want.”

He’s their star player. They won’t get rid of him. The stiffness in the room, and the silence, do not mean they’re getting rid of him. ‘Not ideal’ does not mean they’re getting rid of him.

“Well, I have to say, we’ve never had to deal with a situation quite like this before. I mean, we’ve had our share of scandals, but—” Morrison laughs halfheartedly.

This night is hell. This night is purgatory.

Svetlana folds her hands in her lap. “We should discuss what this means for Ilya and for the team, immediately and moving forward.”

“I wonder if this isn’t a conversation you’d want your agent included in,” Morrison says.

“Ilya probably doesn’t have an agent at the moment. He’s Russian, friends with Fedorov.” And with both their fathers. “We’ll get back to that tomorrow.”

Morrison nods, apparently out of contributions.

“Moving forward, I think there are too many unknowns to really say anything. And a lot of conversations we’ll need to have. Immediately, there’s our response and there’s tomorrow’s game,” LeClaire says, looking back and forth between his colleagues. “If this video comes out, it might be best for Ilya if he doesn’t play tomorrow.”

“I should play,” Ilya blurts. Best ‘for him,’ he can work with that, if their angle is concern for him. “It’s against New York, we need me on the ice. And will be good to show that nothing changes, I am same player, we say it’s not a big deal.”

“It is a big deal, though. I mean, it’s okay if it is. It’s okay to take a break.” Firmer, “I’m not interested in a player who’s not focused on the game, especially not against New York.”

“I will be focused.”

“You say that now, but you don’t know what it’s going to be like, with the reaction.”

No one does.

“Is my specialty, they say, yes? To respond to adversity? Russia does badly at Olympics, I come back and we win Stanley Cup. I play better than normal tomorrow, probably.”

LeClaire looks wearily at Morrison. “We’ll discuss it,” he concedes, which sounds a lot like no. Then at Chrisa. “And our response…”

“Well, either we issue a statement, or we don’t.”

Ilya is supposed to say something. He wasn’t expecting to have any say in this part. Or any part. “What is… what is best?”

“At this point, probably a statement. I mean, I don’t think this is something that’ll just disappear if we don’t say anything. We’d probably draw more attention if we don’t acknowledge it.” Chrisa crosses her arms. “I’d wait until the video’s actually out there, obviously. It’ll depend what exactly the coverage turns out to be. But something fairly run of the mill, ‘the Bears value and support all our players, please be respectful at this time,’ yada yada. I can help you write a statement if you want to post one as well, or you can just leave it to the Bears.”

“I want to,” he says. He doesn’t want to, but he doesn’t want not to even more. He doesn’t want people to read mortification into what is simply privacy.

“Okay. Same deal, keep it standard or, this could be an opportunity to… influence the narrative about your sexuality. I mean, sexual orientation.”

Ilya can’t find the question, or several of the words.

“People are going to have a lot of ideas about your identity,” she tries again. “Nothing we do will get rid of them entirely, but there is some room to push back.”

“He told me he doesn’t want to lie about it,” Svetlana says. They’re all saying ‘it.’ Even Ilya is saying and thinking ‘it.’ “No ‘we were just kids fooling around, I’m not really like that.’”

Chrisa hesitates but then nods. “Okay. That would be the simplest approach, by far. So then, what would you like to say?”

“Um…” What is there to say? Except ‘suck it’?

“You want to come out?”

Ilya Rozanov. Come out. An unfathomable combination. Less likely even than Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander. He looks from one to another of the faces around him. “I guess so, yes.”

—

Chrisa writes him up a couple of drafts to take home and personalize. (“Not too much, though,” Svetlana says.) She shows him what the Bears might post, and what they’ll respond to his post, and what he can respond to theirs. LeClaire and Morrison mutter and peer at LeClaire’s notebook in the corner. They must be so tired of Ilya’s shit.

It’s ten o’clock. Six in the morning in Moscow. Ilya feels like it’s six in the morning here.

“Okay, that’s that.” Chrisa says. “Now we wait. I know it’s going to be really tempting to scroll all night looking for updates, but I promise it’s way better to just hide your phone and go to sleep. There’s nothing else productive you can do.”

“Okay,” Ilya says. Like he’ll be able to sleep either way.

“Yes, Roz, go home and sleep,” says LeClaire. “We need you rested. You’re on tomorrow, but only if you actually fucking sleep.”

Relief pours over him like a post-game shower. He nods.

“I’ll take his phone,” Svetlana says. She puts a hand on his waist and maneuvers him toward the door.

“Just a sec,” LeClaire says. “It would be better if the boys don’t hear about this from the news or the Bears’ social media, alright? We’ve got to think about the bond here. I think the best thing would be for you to tell them, but if that’s not something I can count on you to follow through on, I’ll do it. We’re a team, we have to cohere.”

“Yes,” Ilya says, even though he’d rather eat his neck guard. Going along is the easiest thing, the only thing he can do right now. “I will tell them before team meeting, and then post my statement.”

“Right. Good. Keep it short, though, we’ve got to talk about that power play.” LeClaire grimaces at his own joke.

“And, Ilya.”

He turns back to Chrisa.

“We want you to know how sorry we are this is happening to you. Especially having to deal with being outed in general and this video itself at the same time. You shouldn’t have to be going through this.”

Of course the PR person would say it, but maybe she means it. Morrison and LeClaire nod along soberly, going through the motions.

Mostly Ilya shrugs it off on the ride home, staring out the window at the few stray snowflakes under the streetlights. Whatever, maybe he shouldn’t have to go through it or something, but it doesn’t matter because he can handle it. ‘This video itself’ bothers him less. It’s a more tender moment than he would maybe share with the world, but he’s proud of it, proud of himself in it. When people watch it they’ll think, wow, that was a good sex tape.

“That went promisingly,” Svetlana says. “You still have a job.”

“Yeah. Only because I’m the best.”

“Yes, they want you so bad. As they should, of course, but not everyone can be trusted to think rationally. Morrison’s probably looking up ‘how to stop hating homosexuals’ right now. No, maybe he’s not that bad, but did you see how much he was squirming? I think he thought I was your lawyer and didn’t want to say anything we could use as discrimination.”

Ilya can’t really remember anything from the meeting. “Also because I charmed them years ago. Tricked them into thinking I have a secret heart of gold.”

“Mm, all part of your plan, I see.”

Svetlana stops for pizza on the way when Ilya comes down enough from the evening to realize he never had dinner.

“You’re too good to me,” he says.

“And why don’t you deserve good things?”

For every reason, but he knows she doesn’t actually want to hear an answer, so he licks the grease off another slice and takes a bite.

“I’m taking care of you because you need it. When I have my scandal—which will never happen, I’m too careful—you’ll return the favor.”

She’s right: it’ll never happen. She’ll never need to be taken care of like this. She’d never be so stupid or reckless, and she wouldn’t let it phase her like he has. Ilya will never get to repay her care.

She takes his phone from him the moment they step inside. Makes him go to bed, then sits next to him on top of the blankets.

“So I have to sleep but you get to look at your phone?”

“Yes, exactly. I don’t have to captain a hockey game tomorrow. And I need to keep Chrisa updated on the news. None of them speak Russian.” Two people are going to be up all night scouring gossip sites because of him. They shouldn’t have to deal with this. “It won’t be that much less sleep than usual, anyway,” she adds lightly, like an afterthought, if Ilya didn’t know how intentional her every thought is.

“Mm.” Is this going to be a new structure of their friendship, naming these things instead of just knowing? Stop giving me so much, he wants to say, but instead he goes with, “At least come under the covers.”

She does, and he rests his head against her ribs. She runs one hand through his hair while she scrolls.

And then the fear runs out of him and he finds he’s too wiped out for the panic to catch up to him.

Svetlana’s touch and her smell make him think of the three of them, them and Sasha, hiding out in an unused bedroom back home after a dinner. Suddenly he misses everything, the polished floor, the embroidery on the duvet covers, the pitted driveway winding toward the road, the fucking concrete. The slush in the spring. Moscow slush is different from Boston slush, and the spring is different, secretly more hopeful after a deeper winter. He misses the clubs, and speaking without putting in twice the effort first, and finding clothes he likes, and egg cups, which no one’s heard of here, and things being old, and clandestine parties with his heart in his mouth, and one corner in his room where the sun comes in before he gets up and bounces off a picture frame and blinds him, and his mother’s grave, and his mother, and his father, and Sasha, and Svetlana even though she’s right here, because Russia Svetka is different from Boston Svetka and he’ll probably never be with the other one again.

He presses his forehead harder against her and groans. He doesn’t bother wiping his eyes. He feels too flayed to recoil from vulnerability, he’s way past that right now, though he’ll probably regret it in the morning.

There’s another text he needs to send, but it would cause more distress than reassurance this far before everything’s going to fall apart, and he’s probably asleep already anyway. The most boring schedule in the NHL, except when Ilya comes along to throw it off.

“What are the scores from tonight?” he asks as he drifts off, as his fate hurtles toward him.

—

Svetlana wakes him at eight. He scrambles up. He’s not used to sleeping that late, even without an alarm, and he needs to be the first one at the rink today. He already won’t be.

“It’s on a few Russian sites. Was on more, but it keeps getting taken down. VK, same thing. Some Russian-language expat sites, those will stay up. I haven’t seen any stories in English, but there are starting to be a couple tweets. Nothing that’s getting any attention. Sleep well?”

“Like normal. Did you sleep at all?”

“A couple hours, a couple hours ago. Slow down, your team meeting isn’t until nine.”

“I want to be there early. Just in case.” He has one chance to control how this goes.

“You have never wanted to be early in your life. There’s eggs and sausage if you want.”

He shelves the guilt that she stayed up all night and made breakfast for him for later, when he has time.

“Phone?”

“Don’t look, it won’t help.”

“I have some texts to send.”

She produces it.

Montreal beat Detroit 2-1, no goals after it became the least important thing going on in his living room. Toronto 4-0 against Ottawa.

Ilya gnaws on a sausage while he types with one hand. First to the team chat.

Ilya: I have announcement to give at meeting today, maybe you will hear before, but it should come from me

He knows it’ll only make them more curious, but at least they’ll see this before the video. Even if fewer of them would find the video otherwise. Then the other. He barely has his phone back in his pocket before it buzzes.

Ilya: There is some news but you are not implicated, do not worry

Jane: ?
Jane: Is everything ok?

Ilya starts to type, Dont watch the video, then deletes. “Shit,” he says, and powers his phone off.

He doesn’t let Svetlana drive him again, not with that little sleep. He doesn’t want to die in a fiery crash mere hours after his sex tape leaks. She insists on coming along anyway. Downs her coffee and leaves the cup in the sink. The bare dusting of snow will be gone in an hour.

He doesn’t care if Shane watches the video or not, he just knows it’ll upset Shane if he does. He’ll wish he hadn’t. Ilya will wish he hadn’t, because Hollander isn’t fun when he’s hung up on things. He won’t like that anonymous thousands have seen Ilya’s body. Ilya’s okay with anonymous thousands, just not Hollander. He doesn’t want him to see him how the world is seeing him. He doesn’t want him to see him like that, fervent, somber, wide-eyed, sincere, and believe he’s like that now.

There are other cars in the lot, but not many, not yet. Probably mostly staff. Ilya sits with his hands on the wheel for a moment.

“How does it look now?” he says.

“Just a few tweets. Not about to be trending, sorry to disappoint.”

He whacks her arm without force. “That’s not an aspiration in this case.”

Except it always is, a little bit.

Ilya and Svetlana march toward the long arch of the rink. Can’t stay away. Svetlana splits off toward the offices, then turns back to say, “Ah, your first English news account. They barely have any followers, though.”

So then Ilya is nervous all over again. It’s happening, he thinks, and then reminds himself it’s been happening for hours, it’s going exactly how it was going to go. In which case it basically already happened, and there’s nothing to feel anything about.

He peeks into the dressing room. There’s St-Simon frowning at his phone. He’s reading about Ilya, surely. Ilya’s insides twinge. No one else. He catches a glimpse of the screen and no, it’s a page of blender options.

St-Simon looks up. “Captain, you’re early. Getting ready for your announcement?”

“Maybe, I guess so,” Ilya mumbles.

“Do I get a preview, or are you keeping up the suspense until everyone’s here?”

“I make you wait.” He checks his phone, which is off because he turned it off. He checks the clock. Twenty minutes before team meeting, eons for everyone to check Twitter or be atted or dmed even if they don’t.

In the lounge Hammersmith and Carmichael have their backs turned, stooped over the vat of oatmeal. Three other guys are on the couches. Ilya steps out again before any of them can say anything. Varkov is with a trainer, working on his calf. Eighteen minutes.

He walks down the hall, walks back. The lounge is the place to wait: they can’t talk about him if he’s in there. They might talk to him. He makes the lap again. He leans into the dressing room doorway.

“Don’t check Twitter, okay?” Stupid, now he’s going to check Twitter.

St-Simon sets his phone down. “You’re preoccupied? We can go warm up while we wait. Do bikes.”

“No, no, I want to stay.”

“Sewer ball?”

“No, I am fine.”

St-Simon picks up his phone again.

To apologize, and to keep him away from the news, Ilya says, “You are buying new blender?”

“Yes, the one that I have now has a… electrical problem, I don’t remember the word. It doesn’t turn on.”

Ilya nods. What is he doing. They’re muddling through a conversation in English about blenders like two idiots in Spotlight. Though St-Simon’s English is a lot more consistent than his own.

“You have a, uh…” the word comes to him “shortlist?”

St-Simon pivots on the couch so Ilya can see. “I could get the same one again, but I’m looking for something quieter. Amanda says I don’t wake her up but I know I do, and she has a late shift now. We live in the same house but we barely see each other.”

Ilya hums his understanding.

A text notification pops onto the screen from Maman. Ilya can’t read French but the last word before the message cuts off is his name. St-Simon swipes the message casually away.

Voices jostle in the hallway as their rookies and Connors go by, laughing and shoving each other. Even the rookies are getting this response out of Ilya, this twisting nausea. Just by walking down the hall. He wants to get it over with, but there are still sixteen minutes until the meeting. What if they’re talking?

“Lounge,” he says. He means that he’s going to the lounge, but St-Simon gets up and follows.

He counts ten in the room now. The chatter is loud but lighthearted. He doesn’t think any of these guys have found out yet, either. Curious looks that he ignores. Dubek slaps his arm like he always does, and Feller, their brand-new defenseman, says, “Big news today, cap?” in a deeply oblivious way.

“Patience, patience,” Ilya says.

Dubek claps his hand to his heart. “You’re killing us, Roz. Come on, give us something.”

“Nothing to give.”

“What if we guess it?”

He gives a short, empty laugh. “You will not guess it.”

“You’re not getting fucking traded, are you?”

“No, I am not.”

“Is someone else getting traded?” Feller asks.

“No. Maybe you, if you ask more questions.”

But that only makes Dubek grin. “Is it about the new rink?”

“Of course not. I tell you when I tell everyone, okay? You are toddler who cannot wait?”

“At least tell us, is it good news or bad news?”

He wants to say ‘bad’ just to wipe the stupid smile from his face. But he shouldn’t be telling them even that much. “You will have to see.”

He pushes between them and leans on the back of a couch. He lets the voices around him merge into a drone. He doesn’t have a read on the team, can’t guess how they’re all going to take this. It’s never been worth thinking about. He spends every day with these men, tells them he loves them and is proud of them and means it. There’s the standard talk in the locker room and on the ice, which he’s always been able to dismiss to himself. Now he can’t gauge the real malice underneath.

Which doesn’t matter anyway; it’s okay if there’s malice. He thrives on malice. It would hurt the team, though, if they react poorly, if they stop respecting and trusting him. Bad for cohesion. LeClaire is right to make him walk himself to his own execution.

Kovalev and Kane come in and pick at the buffet table. Varkov comes in. Oregan comes in, and Ilya can tell from how he meets his eyes that he knows. Ilya’s pulse goes harder. Maybe he’s gone viral since he saw Svetlana. Maybe there are actual articles now.

Ten minutes pre, they drift from the lounge to the meeting room. LeClaire and a couple coaching staff have the projector warming up.

Marlow drops into his usual seat next to Ilya. The expression he makes at him is complicated, knowing but also searching. Ilya feels spotlit. He would guess he’s seen some gossipy tweets but not any real details about the video.

He should have told Marlow, he realizes as several more guys file into the room. He should have thought of that. He could’ve called him this morning, or asked to meet up before tape. It feels shitty that he’s going to find out at the same time as everyone else, like he’s any random player on the team and not Ilya’s friend and alternate. Maybe they’ve never actually established their friendship as close, as we-tell-each-other-first, but it’s felt like it could be that, if either of them ever came up with something big to tell. Now Ilya has made it not that. It’ll sting, Marlow finding himself relegated to the pack like this. He should have thought of it.

He counts heads and feels another wave of cold. This has to stop, the whole insides prickling, the feeling like he’s going to faint. He can’t keep doing it. He’s barely aware of the voices around him.

Everyone’s there. LeClaire raises his eyebrows at him.

Ilya stands up. He tries to summon the control he has on the ice. He slaps his hands together, rolls his shoulders back, summons a bit of a slouch.

“Okay, everybody. Announcement, like I promised you.”

The room goes silent. The front rows twisted in their seats. All their faces turned up at him. About a quarter of the team has seen or heard something, he thinks, judging by the intensity of their gazes. From his spot, he can’t see them all at once.

He has something of a script. He practiced it in his head on the way here, in an abstract, hypothetical way, unable to risk approaching the reality of this moment.

“So,” he says. “We start with, we are Stanley-Cup-winning team and I am your captain who you love, yes?”

Some eye rolls, some laughter and ribbing.

“I just want to remind you. In case you forget, because so many concussions in the past. Okay, okay, so. Announcement is, once upon a time I fucked a guy. This is not a isolated incident, for me. Fuck men, fuck women, you know. Does not matter, really, is not anyone’s business. But there is video now, old, from several years ago, but it shows up now. Sex tape, we can call it. So, it doesn’t matter that it’s not anyone’s business, everyone gets to know anyway. So, it’s better that I tell you. Since you will know anyway. It’s not, ah… probably I would never tell you, if this didn’t happen. Is hockey, I get it. It would not be smart. Oh well, not an option anymore. That is the announcement.”

He looks at his teammates look at each other. He reads uncertainty. Definitely discomfort, confusion, denial. No one wants to be the first to speak. Ilya’s proud he used the word ‘several’ so naturally, instead of the generic ‘many.’ He hasn’t chanced a look at Marlow yet.

“I never look at you in the showers, I know you wonder. Not pretty enough for me. Also, the video, probably is better if you don’t watch.” If there’s no prohibition, there’s no breach. “Or, I don’t know, rest of the league will watch, maybe is better strategy also to watch, like, required reading, but if you do, don’t tell me. Also if you have questions, you ask me. If you have problems, no. You don’t have. Everything is clear?”

Now there are a few tentative nods, the rookies and Dubek and Kovalev.

Right up close in his peripheral, Marlow punches his hip and says, “Crystal fucking clear, cap!”

Ilya gets his eyes to pass over him for an instant. Nothing can communicate to him the gratitude he feels.

“Fucking sucks about the video, dude,” Connors says. “Just like, having to know people are watching it and you can’t do anything about it. Nightmare scenario.”

That catches Ilya off guard. He’s prepared for an argument, for a fight, but not for commiseration. All the responses he has ready are antagonistic and suddenly it would be the wrong move, would lose him goodwill he’s not used to needing. He almost says no shit but that’s too unguarded. He’s been too unguarded already. He feels like he’s vomited.

“Yes, well. Now there is confirmation I have always been hot and good at sex, like everyone suspects.”

Dubek half raises his hand. “Are you still playing tonight?”

“Of course,” he says, like there was never any doubt.

“You really got with your coach’s son?” Oregan asks, eyebrows up, looking more impressed than anything else.

“I did, yes, long time ago. Any more questions, or we are done here?”

He glances at LeClaire, who claps once and says, “Yep, eyes up front, boys. Got a couple new points to go over. Rest of the discussion can happen later.” He turns down the lights and the projected rectangle of ice beams.

The curious looks start up when LeClaire releases them to the gym. Like they’re waiting for him to do something. He could snap that they’re not being subtle about it, but they probably know that already and just don’t care. Instead, when Chrisa appears in the hallway, he powers on his phone.

A spew of notifications comes in. (The Russian jumps out to him—twelve missed calls from his brother, five texts. He expected more texts. Nothing from his father.) He swipes them all away and crosses the room, props himself in the doorway. Chrisa is ready, phone out as well.

He copies his statement into Twitter. Chrisa lets out one breath of a laugh as she reads over his edits, which gives him an outsized swell of achievement. He presses post. Chrisa waits a few seconds, then posts the Bears’. Ilya refreshes, likes the post. Chrisa types out a reply to his.

Ilya Rozanov @rozanov81
Good morning everyone, I am bisexual 🩷💜💙 While I am comfortable in my identity, I had no plans of disclosing it as I prefer to keep my personal life separate from hockey. However, without my consent, that information has recently been made public, so I am sharing it now on my own terms as well. See you tonight.

Boston Bears 🐻 @bostonbears
Proud of our MVP! 🧢🏆

Boston Bears 🐻 @bostonbears
The Boston Bears values and supports all our players. We do not tolerate harassment or discrimination against any of our players. We are aware of footage circulating, and are working closely with those affected as the situation develops. We ask that you please respect all our players’ privacy through this turbulent time.

Boston Bears 🐻 @bostonbears
Additionally, we urge all to remember that while the affected player is no longer a minor, distribution of the footage in question remains illegal per federal child exploitation law.

He dislikes ‘turbulent.’ He doesn’t like the expectation that he’s feeling turbulent, when really he’s doing fine. But he doesn’t make her change it.

Ilya muscles through workouts and stretches and gearing up with his head down. The chatter is stilted, when it isn’t absent altogether.

At least on the rink there’s the puck to look at, directions for everyone to follow. He throws himself into it. It’s not normal, but there was never any chance of that. Less rowdy than usual, including himself. He hopes that doesn’t last. He doesn’t hope anything. He wonders what comments they’re holding behind their teeth.

St-Simon works with him on the penalty kill the same as always, fast, methodical, for the off chance Marlow is the reason they’re on the kill. It could mean he’s one of the more open-minded on the team, or that he’s good at keeping it on the ice. He didn’t say anything in the locker room. It doesn’t matter whether or not he’s open-minded; it only matters that they’re still playing well together, they’ll play well together tonight, and he’ll prove he isn’t tearing the team apart. St-Simon doesn’t have to like him.

Most of them give him more space than usual when they skate past into position. They don’t hold his gaze as long. Ilya rolls his eyes to himself.

At the end Marlow challenges Ilya to a race, which makes him feel terrible. He’s putting so much effort into making things normal. It would be ungrateful of Ilya not to go along with it, though, so when he wins he loops back and whacks Marlow’s shoulder.

“It’s unfair, you always pick me because you know I beat you and you never have to pay for lunch.”

“Fool me twice, right, Roz? Don’t forget the extra cheese.”

“You and your fucking extra cheese,” he says as he skates to the edge of the rink.

Chrisa is waiting as the rest of the team files off the ice. He’s going to miss his chance to establish a precedent about the showers, but he goes over. She’s been too generous to blow off.

“A couple things,” she says, gesturing with her phone. “First, responses to other players’ messages.”

“Messages?”

“A couple of people have put out statements of support. It’d be a good move to acknowledge them.”

“Yes, okay,” he says. All he’s thinking, though, is, Who? What are they saying?

“I’m keeping a list, and we’ll go through them once you’re changed. Second, media tonight. Morrison wants to excuse you from press, keep it simple, not risk any drama. I think we ought to lean into the ‘not a big deal’ stance. You know, show that the drama isn’t on our end, we’re being chill about it, have you answer questions like normal.” She pauses. “The concern is whether you can do press how you’ll have to. We’ll do our best with the moderation and banned topics but they’ll still try to ask about it. If we do this, you have to keep things cool, and you have to only answer questions about hockey. The goal is to make everyone else look immature for sensationalizing this.”

“And, what, Morrison thinks that I am not mature? I cannot keep it cool?”

“If you want to, he’ll let me do some practice with you, rehearse some responses, to see if we can make this work.”

“Okay, yes, we do. Can I go shower now?”

Everyone’s out of the shower and getting dressed by the time he makes it to the locker room. He gets his practice jersey off and unstraps his pads with a force he hopes sends a message.

“Marley,” he says, not looking, as he pulls off his shirt.

“What’s up?”

“I have media training date now, cannot go get our lunch. I still pay, though. Wallet is in the dressing room.”

“Fucking eel, should’ve known you’d find a way out of it,” Marlow says. He hauls himself up from the bench. “I’ll let you get away with it this time.”

“I want those pickles on the side. And stop at the cannoli place, yes? Little box?”

“You’re pushing it, dude.”

“Not for me, for Svetlana. You can be nice to her even though you are so mean to me.”

Marlow snorts and ruffles Ilya’s hair and ducks out of the room after Connors and a couple other guys.

He strips the rest of the way and wraps his towel around his waist. The room’s half empty now. The scratches on his back from Montreal last week probably aren’t all the way faded.

“I always thought you and Svetlana were dating,” says Carmichael. “Or, you know, like, something, casually. You’re just friends?”

It’s far from the first time he’s gotten that question. It’s rarely worth trying to explain. “Yes, always we are friends.”

“But what about all the other women? You’re always picking up at clubs and shit.”

“Yes, what about them?”

“None of that was real?”

“Of course it’s real.” He stares down Carmichael, who’s frowning. “I already told you, I do both.”

“Yeah, but—never mind, whatever.” Carmichael reaches for his shoes.

Ilya showers quickly and grabs his phone and goes to find Chrisa in the PR-social media office.

They go through her list of supportive statements. Wanna show support for—doing a brave thing—congrats—facing this head-on—important moment—Ilya opts to like them all in lieu of responding. There’s one from Scott Hunter, who he realizes must be in the building right now. There’s one from Shane.

Shane Hollander @shanehollanderofficial
Nothing but respect for @rozanov81. I’m honored to consider him my rival.

He gets a weird thrill from that.

By the time Chrisa has drilled him on every variation of ‘thank you but I am not answering questions about my personal life at this time,’ Marlow has long since dropped the paper bag by the door and gone off again. Ilya’s panini is cold now. He slips his card back into his wallet.

He finds Svetlana sitting across a row of chairs in the conference room, sandwich wrapper balled up, box of cannoli open in her lap. He flops down next to her and she reaches a hand over to rub his knee.

“We went about this all wrong,” she says.

“Ha?”

“This whole thing. I told you to go straight to team management. I should’ve made you talk to a lawyer.”

“I don’t have a lawyer.”

“I know. Why we’ve all let you get away with it this long, I have no idea. You should get one now.”

“Okay,” Ilya says, but he doesn’t even bother adding it to the mental list of things he should do now. “It went fine, though.”

“By luck. It could have gone disastrously, and we weren’t prepared.”

“Okay, but, it didn’t. It went fine.” But he knows it’s this discipline that sets Svetlana apart from and above him: he’s content with things working out; for Svetlana, working out has to be the only thing they could ever do.

Svetlana doesn’t respond, but licks powdered sugar off her fingers one by one.

“Your cat,” Ilya says as he realizes. “You haven’t been back.”

“My neighbors are feeding her, it’s fine. They do it all the time, whenever I’m home.” She leverages herself upright. “Ladies’ room. Your cannoli have made my hands sticky.”

And for the first time today, Ilya has a minute unclaimed.

He unwraps his sandwich and opens his phone. Text messages, DMs, emails—he’s not dealing with emails right now, and DMs are sure to be mayhem, and his thumb has already tapped on messages anyway. Marlow, a while ago: Gotta run home for a sec which he scrolls past to the chat he’s been waiting to check all day.

Jane: Care to elaborate?

Jane: 🙄be ominous then

Jane: Oh fuck
Jane: Fuck
Jane: Fuck im so sorry this is horrible
Jane: This is so shit are you ok
Jane: Shit your game
Jane: This is fucked

Jane: If theres anything i can do please tell me

Jane: I have to go to practice now

Jane: Well thats one way to do it
Jane: Ok I guess you have this under control
Jane: Thats good
Jane: Too bad you won’t respond

Ilya reads over the whole thing a couple times, then types out his response.

Ilya: my knight in shining armor

Jane: Fuck off
Jane: I was just pissed off because my team was saying shit and Th wasn’t backing me up and i needed to make a point

He takes a bite of his panini.

Ilya: ah so you dont respect me
Ilya: you are not honored
Ilya: you just use me to make your point 😔

Jane: Im regretting it now obviously
Jane: Asshole

Shane starts typing and stops. Ilya chews and stares at his phone, waiting. He still hasn’t responded when Ilya finishes his sandwich. He’s glad that’s resolved then. He brushes off his lap and stands. The gym might be empty again by now and he could do with letting off some steam.

Then LeClaire leans in the open doorway and sees him.

“Oh good, there you are,” he says as he steps in. “Listen, just keeping you in the loop. We just got an email from the league, recommending we scratch you for tonight. Technically they haven’t told us to do anything yet,” he adds before Ilya can respond. “It’s just a recommendation. Our plan is to put off responding as long as we can, then reply last minute that we don’t have time to change the lineup. Not the slickest way to do this, but.” He shrugs.

“Very Bears, this strategy,” Ilya says. “Very messy.”

LeClaire gives him an appreciative clap on the shoulder. “It is too late to pull you,” he says. “We’d be shooting ourselves in the foot. Don’t want to let the league shoot us in the foot, either. Anyway, it’s good for this to be the first game. Admirals. I mean, captained by Scott Hunter, gentleman of hockey. Should stay pretty sportsmanlike.”

“I can handle.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m talking about precedent. Showing this is a non-issue. The game that’ll best prove it is against the Admirals. Otherwise I’d have to bench you until fucking San Francisco. Okay, got to run. Anything happens, we’ll let you know.”

All of this is chance, Ilya thinks as LeClaire ducks back into the hallway. Svetlana is right. Working out is not the only thing this could have done, if it even is working out. He feels a giddy rush. His career, his whole life, comes down to a team management that happens to value his ability enough to put up with the rest of him, even when the league is giving them an easy way out. Even when they all know today’s game isn’t that important, it’s only November and the Admirals, though strong, aren’t as formidable as they were this spring.

He stretches again, he naps, he eats. Management wants him to stick around until call time, ‘in case anything comes up.’ He avoids Varkov and Sebbin on the massage tables. He supposes all the staff have been filled in about it by now, though they treat him more or less like normal. New York has cleared off for the afternoon, so he skates just to have something to do. The hours tick by.

The pre-game media want to know a lot of things. They want to know about his day. They want to know what he thinks his season will look like ‘now.’ They want to know what the energy in the locker room is like today, if the energy is different from other games, and, setting aside the team, how he specifically is feeling going into this game. He does his best to give them some words and takes the first out he sees.

The crowd’s energy is different, he thinks, during warmups, a constant, intense murmur. Ilya kicks the ice. It doesn’t matter how normal he is about this, there’s too much that’s too far out of his control. In the locker room he had to wait, head bowed, while LeClaire instructed his teammates not to rise to vicarious insults. That, not that he thought New York would be too intense about it, and of course Ilya would be getting the brunt of it, and he’d just have to use his words and not his fists, but the rest of the team had to be prepared for chirps about being captained by Ilya, centered by Ilya, sharing a locker room with Ilya, and they didn’t need to be taking any unnecessary penalties. Of course; now his whole team is dragged into his mess.

Admirals red skates into his field of vision. Ilya looks up from his stretch. It’s Scott Hunter, fidgeting with his stick.

“Happy to see you out here, Rozanov,” he says. “You should be really proud of what you’re doing.”

Ilya nods and switches legs.

For a moment there’s movement in Hunter’s eyes, urgency, and then it retreats and he closes his mouth. Ilya can imagine what he’s just chickened out of saying. He basically called it, even if he’d been largely joking.

“And it’s really awful that this is happening, and I think it’s really impressive that you’re playing anyway.”

It’s not impressive, really, he’s just had twelve hours longer than Hunter believes to prepare.

Ilya finishes his stretch and gets up. He’s still feeling aftershocks of honesty so he says, “I begged them to let me.”

“You asked to play? They gave you an out and you asked to play? That’s brave, man. Fuck, that’s admirable.”

“Hey, woah, is too far,” he says, pulling on mock offense, “you do not call me fucking Admiral, just call me a fag.”

Hunter jerks back. His eyebrows furrow, he gives a single angry, disbelieving laugh. The joke has not landed.

Now he has to play it off. “I mean like, I say that Admirals is insult but fag isn’t, not that Admirals are all…” Ilya waves his hand vaguely. “I know you said admirable, not Admiral, was just a chirp—”

“Yeah, yeah, fine, just shake my fucking hand and leave it,” Hunter snaps.

Ilya shakes his hand, knowing he doesn’t deserve this grace. Leave it to him to antagonize even the most genial man in hockey, and one who can even actually relate to his situation. He’s a lost cause.

New York is having one of their good days, unfortunately. It’s a hard, intense game, but LeClaire was right that it’s cleaner than most, cleaner even than their usual games against New York. Hunter must have talked to them. Boston scrapes out a win, barely. Ilya doesn’t score but he gets an assist. No one can look at the game and say they’re not focused tonight, no one can say they’re not clicking as a team. Ilya dislikes being made to think about that. His job should be racking up points and skating circles around the other team. He doesn’t have anything to prove.

He doesn’t meet Hunter’s eye after the game. What message does Ilya think he’s sent with his performance and the outcome of this game? There are no messages for him to think about, he tells the reporters in the locker room, just playing a game and winning, like normal. He peels off his layers and gets in the shower with everyone else, eyes down, ears pounding, and if it bothers anyone they don’t make a show of it, or he’s doing a good job of not noticing. He’s looking at water trickle down the white tiles. He knows it’s quieter than it usually is. He knows it’s tense. They all need to fucking get over themselves.

Marlow volunteers his living room as an alternative for anyone who doesn’t want to go out. Ilya goes straight there, in his passenger seat; Svetlana is driving his car back so she can pick up her own and go home. Ilya is privately relieved not to face the Boston bars just yet. Too many opinions no one deserves to have and he’s not about to deal with.

Squinting out at the dark road, Marlow offers him the gift of a casual conversation about the game, their better plays, a particular bummer of a blocked shot in the last five minutes, but Ilya can’t let it go on.

“I wish I told you before the team,” he says.

“Don’t worry about it, Roz, really. It’s alright.”

Ilya wants to protest because it sounds like Marlow is forgiving him and he didn’t say sorry, was careful not to phrase it as an apology. Ilya Rozanov never apologizes for himself, especially when he knows he ought to. Some barriers must not be breached. But Marlow’s forgiveness is what he was moving toward, even if he didn’t mean to be looking for it, and it was an apology in all but name. He feels an awkward jolt. He’s been apologizing all day. To his team, in his statement that felt so confident, I had no plans of disclosing it, I would never tell you if this didn’t happen, so sorry to make hockey uncomfortable, I swear it was an accident. He’s not sorry. He wants them uncomfortable. It’s just the strategy, which he realizes amounts to sucking up to the league as much as possible to make up for coming out, to apologize for it. That will have to stop. As long as he gets to keep playing, they can be as uncomfortable as they want.

Marlow, though, he is sorry about. But he doesn’t respond. Let Marlow believe he’s given him absolution; Ilya knows he cannot accept it.

“Honestly, dude, you’re fucking handling this like a champ.”

He’s not. He’s handling it the way he has to, the only way there is to handle it. “Well, I am champ, so.”

Marlow chuckles.

He sounds like he’s about to say something else heartfelt and misinformed, so Ilya flicks on the radio.

—er. WBZ was unable to reach Mr. Rozanov for further comment as the Russian player, who was drafted to the Bears as first overall pick in two thousand and nine, got right back to business preparing for this evening’s game against the New York Admirals, who we defeated two-one, but we can expect to hear more from him in the coming days. Twenty fourteen has been a big year for sports coming out stories; while seven out athletes competed at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, more current and past Olympians have come out since the games, including a luger, a figure skater, a swimmer, a Nordic skier, and the goaltender of Canada’s women’s hockey team, which took home gold in February. Ilya Rozanov joins their numbers, but he is the first and only openly LGBT active player in the NHL; he follows in the footsteps of fellow Big Four athletes Robbie Rogers of the MLS and Jason Collins, who announced his retirement from the NBA on Wednesday, a year and a half after coming out as gay. Beyond a brief statement, the Bears have not commented on the captain’s coming out, and official disclosures remain scarce. Of course, Rozanov’s announcement differs from other athletes’ in that it was apparently unplanned, following quickly after the leak o—

Ilya’s fingers finally jerk and change the station.

99.5. Classical. His heart sinks with the grim, iconic descending arpeggio. Swan Lake.

He jams the radio off.

Tonight’s group is small, which might mean people are avoiding him, or that they’d rather go out to let off a hard game. Carmichael and Oregan are treating it as a pregame, Kovalev promises to swing by later unless his night develops favorably. They cluster around Marlow’s overstyled living room, under warm light and an iTunes playlist that hasn’t changed in a year.

Ilya should be helping Marlow with the drinks, but since he’s on a roll being ungrateful and bothersome he lays across the leather armchair and accepts the glass he brings him. He tips his head back and opts not to feel or think anything in particular. The others grumble about the beer, their bruises, their phones that something, something, Ilya doesn’t hear, he’s staring at the scalloped ceiling light, trying to hold onto the distance that carried him through the day.

“Roz?” Connors says, kicking him from the end of the couch. All eyes are on Ilya. He snaps back into the moment.

“Mm?”

“Are you seeing anyone?” he repeats.

Ilya frowns and shoos the question away. “You already know I do not, does not change now.”

“Yeah, but if you were seeing a guy, maybe you wouldn’t have told us, and now you would. So you’re not? Seeing a guy?”

The question is so outlandish it takes him a moment. Seeing a guy. Shane doesn’t count, though he wonders whether they’d say he does. He’s not seeing Shane. He’s not even his only repeat partner, and certainly not his most frequent, or his longest-term. Svetlana, obviously, who now he's probably going to marry.

“No, I see no one like that. Only hookups right now.”

“Do you hook up with guys? Like, currently?” Feller, billeting with Connors, asks wide-eyed.

Ilya suppresses his scowl. It’s a good thing, he supposes, that they’re comfortable asking him questions like this, even if he’d rather they don’t. They could all be cold shouldering him, or too disgusted to even speak the words ‘hook up with guys,’ and they’re not. So it’s best to go along with it.

“Sometimes, yes,” he says.

“Really? When was the last time?”

“A week ago, or so.” Maybe those adverbs are supposed to go in the other order.

“A week?” Marlow says from across the kitchen counter. “Right under our fucking noses? The hell, Roz, how the fuck did you manage that?”

Ilya lifts his hands, drink sloshing.

“Fine, fine. What’s your type, then?” Marlow asks. “In guys, what’s your type?”

He doesn’t want to tell them that. He’s not obligated to; the details aren’t for them anyway. “Same as in girls. Hot. Motivated. Loud in bed.”

“Vague,” Cadyn says. The other rookie, the impertinent one.

Ilya shrugs. “You keep it vague, you have more options to pick from, you get to be picky. Free advice for you.”

“Come on, give us an example, at least,” Marlow says.

“So many options…” He exaggerates a sigh. “It’s hard to choose. I can’t narrow down.”

“Okay,” says Cadyn. “If you had to fuck someone on the team, who would it be?”

He gets a sticky feeling. This is getting stupid. He rolls onto his side to reach for the tequila and refills his glass before he answers. “None of you, I already said, none of you are pretty enough for me.”

“But if you had to.”

“Is bad question, bad for team dynamic. LeClaire tells me to be careful of the team dynamic.”

Connors waves a hand. “Okay, fine, how about the whole league? Who are you picking?”

He could say Shane and they wouldn’t bat an eye. They’d think it’s the best joke all night. It’s stupid to feel like there’s any risk of suspicion.

Any other day. Today he can’t seem to open his mouth without telling the truth and meaning it.

He skims for an alternative—there are other hot men in the league—but none of them make good answers. And he’s curious, and he’s been on the receiving end of this too long.

“You pick for me. Set me up.”

They bicker a while and then Oregan, back from the bathroom, says, “Guys, come on, Hollander! It’s the only choice.”

Ilya gives a very real snort of laughter into his glass. “Okay, you guys are done, you are terrible choosers.” And in a flash of brilliance, “Hollander probably isn’t even gay, would be a terrible fuck.”

“Are there other gay players? Or, whatever?” Feller asks. Are there. Are there.

“In the whole league? Definitely.”

“But you don’t know any?”

“I am supposed to know all gay players? With, ah, hive mind?”

“I don’t know, I mean, how did you know your…” he gestures at his phone. “You know, your Russian coach’s son. How did you know he was gay?”

Sasha. Ilya’s chest goes light.

Everyone could tell. It was everything about him. A disgrace to his father, always, but he’d lent his family glamor as well. The incorrigible, elegant son, sent off to French boarding school because he was so completely incompatible with Moscow life. He could get away with it. Ilya hadn’t learned how to yet, at that point. Everyone could tell about him, too.

He misses Sasha so much.

“You want tips? You look for boyfriend now? Because girls do not work out so well?”

Feller holds up his hands. “Just asking.”

—

Ilya goes home to a dark house that swallows the slam of the door and the shuffle of his slides on the bare floor.

He leans over the sink and drinks straight from the faucet, wipes his mouth on his arm, a little dizzy. He turns around, catches his breath for a minute. Slides down to the heated floor.

The vague glow of the moon and the streetlights on the other side of his screen of trees sets the kitchen in big shapes of grey and black. It just reaches him in his cramped alley between the counter and the island. The scuff of his breathing takes up the whole space.

He kicks the island with his heel. Then again. It doesn’t make as loud a sound as he needs, but the thump feels good all the way up his leg. He kicks it again.

He’s exhausted, and he’s buzzing with energy, and he wants to cause damage, and he wants to fall to the floor but he’s already there.

He’s in it now. He’s a day into total disaster and he needs to fucking get used to it. He hasn’t had a chance, no one will leave him alone long enough for him to take care of it. He’s run out of strategies to not be alone. Svetlana has made her exit. He should have gone out tonight, then he’d either still be out or he’d have made it to his bed without this stupid spectacle.

No more Russia. He’s gotten that far already. Until policies change, which isn’t worth hoping for, which they might never, his passport is just a fancy red booklet with a washed-out picture of him looking pissed and a series of visas pasted in. But everything else has changed, too, absolutely everything, as he’s always been aware it would, as he’s contemplated both to keep himself focused and to turn himself on when he feels like jerking off but isn’t aroused enough. His career has changed, even if he’s not sure how yet. His position within the league, and the league has changed, and the media, and the fans, and his standing to his own team. His team has changed. Even though they played with him today, even though they won, and none of them have antagonized him, even if they never do, it’ll never be easy again. Normal is gone. His sponsorships have probably changed. His deal might change. His friendship with Svetlana is spinning into new territory, which wouldn’t be bad except any change is bad. He built a taut balance for himself here, made his compromises, directed the attention where it suited him, everyone gets what they want and he gets the thinnest margin of breathing room. So much for that. Accept it, get over it. His mind moves toward the video and Sasha, but that’s still too big, he pulls away at the last moment. Not relevant anyway.

He allows himself a final kick and then sits still.

When he gets up he doesn’t feel any better. He cannot approach the bed, which is so huge and white and empty. Like the house. After five years, the whole place has nothing to do with him, he never bothered. He’ll need to russify it, to get through this. He needs to find the heaviest, most elaborate tasseled curtains. All the things he was glad to leave behind in Moscow, he’s going to need them now. The fur rug could probably be okay under a different coffee table, next to a different couch. He gets out his phone to text Svetlana. He’s a little too drunk to get the keyboard to switch so he types out in Latin characters, i need all of my moms lace next time you go home. That sounds demanding, though, when she’s been so nice to him, unforgivably nice, as in, he cannot be forgiven for how nice she’s being to him, so he adds, please, and while he’s at it, all of the photos, anything you can find.

He’s going to end up one of those pitiful expats that can never let go and builds a mini Russia to atrophy in instead of ever going out into the real world.

Svetlana doesn’t respond, of course. She must be done putting up with him, fed up with his neediness and his unpersonability. It was only a matter of time.

He has other Russian texts he can read, though. From his brother.

Brat: Answer the fucking phone

Brat: Coward as well not a surprise, can’t even show your face

Brat: Father will never survive this disgrace, you’re killing him, you should have thought of that before pulling this, you have no shame, at least he knows the truth now, you never fooled me but he chose not to see it. So much for the perfect son

Brat: So you’re leaving us all behind
Brat: Embarrassing the whole family and then running away, no help, no care, no duty

Woah, that’s too far.

Ilya: why wouldn’t i still help
Ilya: unless youre embarrassed to accept money from me

Ilya stares at the murky reflection of the room in the blank TV screen and thinks of his father. Now he knows. Finally he knows. Often he wonders whether his mother knew, how much longer she would have had to stay alive for him to tell her, whether he ever would have, since it took Sasha to make him okay about it and he would’ve slapped Sasha’s hand away from his waist if he’d been feeling a little less numb and reckless at the time. He has to believe he would have told her. He’s not sure, looking back, when he started to know. Anyway, now his father knows who he is. Maybe he’s livid. Maybe he’s been staring out the window, motionless. What exactly is he thinking? That after everything, Ilya turned out like this after all. Did Fedorov tell him, or did Andrei? Or some government buddy of his? He still hasn’t heard anything from his father; maybe he never will. It would be the best strategy: as long as he doesn’t reveal what kind of disappointed he is, Ilya will imagine them all. He types out, how is father?

Chapter End Notes

I’m writing mostly on my phone on the subway so please don’t be afraid to point out typos.

I have a loooong outline and many notes but idk how long this will be or how long it’ll take me to write it! But I promise when I start something I finish it. I wanted to have something of a buffer before I started posting but seven weeks have gone by and unfortunately I need to post first so the external sense of duty/obligation helps me prioritize. I’d like to be ambitious and say expect an update in about a week, but i’m researching as I go and now i have to learn to write a hockey game like i have any idea what’s going on… so maybe two weeks. We’re moving out of logisticsville into actual story yay.

Assume that when Ilya is speaking or texting with Svetlana it’s in russian. If it ever gets ambiguous I’ll try to clarify in text. I personally think diminutives often stick out in English so I’m not using them very much but know that they’re there in spirit. Apologies for any inaccuracies with ilya's english, the languages I have experience with produce an overlapping but not identical set of mistakes.

Sidenote I originally had sasha goad his dad with the video and his dad leaking it, but it seemed much more likely the dad would try to sweep it under the rug so I made him post it himself. and then it turns out that’s a lot like what happens in one of the other ilya outing fics you should go read. something something inescapable parallels across universes.

Anyway I’d say sorry for the dick jokes but they basically write themselves. If you comment I’ll love you.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

a little hockey-themed violence and blood in this one. I’ve watched so much hockey in the past two weeks.

Svetlana has found him a lawyer. She promises more details when she gets there. She’s bringing breakfast.

There’s no reason for her to come over. He’s a little pissed at her, actually; she can’t leave him alone for five fucking minutes. Worse than her coming is having to ask her not to. Instead he says ok, gets her cup out of the sink and rinses it.

He woke up solid, pent up, wrung out. He gives yesterday a wide berth—probably the most pathetic he’s ever been, and not worth even thinking about.

“So,” she says around her croissant. “Agent’s out, confirmed?”

“Confirmed.” He began attacking his email this morning, before slamming his laptop shut.

“I’ve got a list. You can pick who to try first. In the meantime we should get through all your messages.”

“I can take care of my messages.”

“Are you taking care of them, though?”

“I will.”

Svetlana looks at him for a moment. Wipes pastry flakes off her lip with a finger. “Okay,” she says. “Eat your bagel.”

He picks it up and takes a resentful bite.

“If there was going to be a leak, this is a good one,” she says.

Mouth full, Ilya furrows his eyebrows at her.

“Because it’s so old. Because you were so young. It’s a little less straightforward for the league to show any kind of significant disapproval, because they’d really be disapproving of a fifteen-year-old kid. And crime victim.”

Ilya considers his fifteen-year-old self, moaning on video on the internet, softening the blow for twenty-three-year-old him now. It does feel like the video part of this is happening next to him, not to him.

“And because, it being from so long ago, it doesn’t really have implications about your current lifestyle. They don’t have any excuse to expect any more drama out of you. More than usual, I mean. All in all, you’re not that much more of a liability now.”

Ilya grunts around his bagel.

Svetlana eyes him. “Unless there’s anything else that might make it worse,” she says.

Cream cheese is caked to his tongue. Maybe she’s asking him. This is a moment, Ilya notices, when he could say it.

“There’s nothing,” he says. “It won’t get worse.”

“Okay,” she says, like she doesn’t believe it.

He’s never won a staring contest with Svetlana and he’s not about to now. He breaks her gaze to pull up the list she texted. Right below her thread is his brother’s. No response yet, even though it’s well into the afternoon there. He opens the list.

“Have you heard from anyone? Your father, my brother?”

“My father, yes.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing much.”

“Really? Not that I’m a disgrace to Russia and his old team?”

Svetlana shrugs. “More or less. Like I said, nothing.”

“And my family?” She’s listed relevant represented players next to each agent, and whatever else she’s managed to find out.

“Nothing he didn’t say to you first. He just wasn’t certain you were getting his messages.”

He can’t ask her about his father; he hasn’t told her anything’s wrong. She probably knows anyway. There’s something else he’s starting to worry about, though.

“What does this mean for you? Being associated with me? Do you think there’ll be trouble when you go home?”

“I’m just saying I’m not associated.” She says it like she really doesn’t care, and he’d believe it if she weren’t perched in his kitchen right now. It’s the right choice, he reminds himself. He should be relieved on her behalf and not disappointed she’s lying about him already, easily, casually. Reading it, she says, “They don’t deserve to know.”

He nods and tries to frame it that way. They don’t deserve to know. That’s the hardness that’s always come naturally to Sasha and Svetlana, and not to him.

A new email notification comes in. A call today that management and his brand new lawyer are going to handle—he taps it—with the commissioner.

Svetlana shifts forward to read as well.

“She’s connecting you with a friend in immigration, too,” she says.

“Right.” He keeps his tone passive. “Does it look doable?”

“Of course. It just takes fucking forever. As long as the league keeps you around, it’ll get there. Or she mentioned you could try to claim political asylum, which could get you residency sooner but I wasn’t clear on the citizenship process after that. It’ll all get explained, though.”

“And… if that doesn’t work out. If it makes the difference, you would actually marry me?”

She pokes at the crumbs on the counter. Stupid of him to ask. It was probably just something she said to reassure him while he was mid breakdown. He’s always getting his own hopes up about things, getting too cozy. A little glumly, a little rigidly, she says, “Well. Like I said. Worst case scenario.”

“Because of home.”

“Fuck home,” she snaps. “I’ll do whatever I need to to keep you here and safe. Let’s just not make it plan A.”

He nods because he doesn’t know what else to do.

—

The call is still going when he’s off the ice and out of the showers. He paces the hallway outside the GM’s office, getting looks as the rest of the team disperses for lunch. Morrison’s voice hums indistinctly through the door. (The call is bullshit and a waste of time, according to LeClaire before he left practice to join it, and Ilya shouldn’t worry about it. The commissioner didn’t want him to play yesterday, and he doesn’t want him to play tomorrow, and he’s disappointed the Bears didn’t follow his recommendation the first time, and he doesn’t actually have anything he can suspend him over. Ilya isn’t worried, he just thinks it’s stupid. He already proved he can play like before; he doesn’t know what else the commissioner wants out of him. At least he doesn’t have to be on the call himself.)

Something has slammed shut between him and Svetlana. He can’t get it out of his head. He knows he shouldn’t have expected anything, it’s too much to ask of her, but he didn’t ask it of her, until she said it. Why is she taking it back now? Why like this?

And then he’s indignant on Russia’s behalf, maybe stupidly, that she would dismiss it when she still has it, that she can say ‘fuck home’ like she means it, that she isn’t holding on tight. She can’t really mean it. Ilya didn’t. But if she does, or thinks she does, then she’s reluctant for another reason. Obviously Ilya’s not exactly husband material, but they would be how they already are and just technically be married. Apparently that’s Svetlana’s worst case scenario. He shouldn’t be so disappointed about something he couldn’t expect in the first place.

At about noon the voices finally settle. Ilya gets up from his crouch.

He doesn’t even want to marry Svetlana. Or, he doesn’t want to need to. It’s just her face, her tone, that he can’t stop thinking about. Whatever. She’s right: it’s an option to have, but not their first option.

The door opens. LeClaire steps out, runs a hand through his hair. “We're good for tomorrow,” he says. “In-person meeting on Monday.”

“Monday, why? Where in person? We go to Toronto on Monday.”

“In person here, the commissioner's coming in the morning, flight right after.” He starts down the hallway. Ilya goes after him.

“But why another meeting?”

“Well, we've got to ‘monitor the situation’ and ‘consider possible courses of action,’ of course.”

“But we already chose the course of action. Commissioner cannot stop that I play, you said.”

“He can’t. What he can do is make our lives really fucking difficult, if he wants to. So whatever meetings he wants to do, we’re going to do. We don’t want to be in a fight with the league.” They’ve gotten to the lounge. LeClaire jams a paper cup under the coffee machine. “Listen. Yesterday was good, alright? Went great. But not every game is going to be like that. I’m going to ask you to tone it down a bit on the ice, no intentional penalties, less chirping. No fights. Nothing provocative. Just until things die down.”

“Everybody chirp, it’s part of the game.”

“I’m aware. We just need you on your best behavior right now. The commissioner’s worried about you being ‘erratic.’” Air quotes with one hand. “Reputation as a dirty player and all. He’s worried about you affecting the NHL’s image.”

Ilya fights his rising frustration. “But… it’s how I play. Always how I played. It never was a problem before.” It’s the reason they picked him over Hollander. Boston’s kind of player.

“I know, Roz. Believe me. We just have to convince the league they’re not getting into a shit storm with you. We do our little song and dance for them, and eventually they’ll leave us alone and everything will go back to normal. It always does.”

“It’s sabotage. I shouldn’t play the game? I shouldn’t have a strategy?”

“I’m fucking serious. You’re going to keep it clean and civil for a while. I get that you’re not happy about that. It blows. No one’s happy about any of this right now. There are a lot of expectations, a lot of pressure, and I know the majority of that is on you, but if you want to be able to keep playing, you’re going to have to work with us on this.”

He’s going to explode. “Okay, yes, I will do it. But if someone hits, I hit back.”

“It would be better if you don’t make them hit you in the first place,” LeClaire says, but he sounds resigned about it. He fills a second cup and turns to go, one in each hand. “You can play a couple months without fighting, it’s not the end of the world.”

There are a lot of things Ilya can’t articulate, not in English, not angry. Yes, he can play nice, he did it for the Olympics, yes he can keep his mouth shut and stop baiting. But his attitude has always been an asset, has lent him respect. Rozanov, what a menace. Now he’s ‘provocative.’ LeClaire’s asking him, basically, to declaw himself. Try to maybe please the league, and sacrifice his dignity on the ice for his efforts. He doubts anything he does will please the league anyway.

—

When Ilya comes in on Sunday the breakfast crowd goes quiet. They don’t look guilty or even standoffish, just doubtful.

“You are all shy now?” he says. “You cannot speak until captain tells you?” This is how it is now, never mind that nothing about him has actually changed, this is how it’s going to be.

He grits his teeth through team meeting, gearing up, morning skate. He wins Marlow’s race by more than he really has to. They hobble back to the locker room.

Irritation is starting to share room in his chest with an unease that keeps coming back. Ilya undresses quickly, silently, and hunched over. He feels furtive and bumbling at once. He gets in the shower not really seeing anything, and with a prickly feeling running through him, like yesterday, and like after the game. It’s come back from the beginning of adolescent hockey, when showering with his team started to have a significance for him that he didn’t understand yet and didn’t like. He feels young again now, and helpless, and obvious. He lets the water run into his face.

He picked an agent more or less at random and, after some back and forth exchanges last night, when he checks his phone Svetlana and his email inform him she’s taking him on. He doesn’t even feel the relief. He gets the paninis and snaps when Marlow asks how he’s holding up. He’s gotten too comfortable prying.

—

Ilya slumps into his stall after the game. 2-4, and not even an assist to soften the loss. He’s lost his point streak. New Jersey picked him out early and stayed on him the whole time. He was good. He didn’t start anything, even though they deserved it, and has some astonishing bruises across his hip and his right lat to show for it. He’s not supposed to be an easy target. If they’re going to hit him this hard now, he should at least be sending them off with a broken nose or a gap in their teeth so they hesitate next time.

“Well,” LeClaire says into the dismal room. “I guess we’ll be getting a lot of use out of our power play this season.”

On the one hand, Ilya feels the referees were not calling particularly diligently or consistently, and generally weren’t doing their job. And he’s sure at least a couple of the epithets were within hearing.

On the other hand, he thinks as he pulls out of the parking lot, what a disgrace it would be, to be singled out for official protection. It’s lose-lose. It’s stupid, and unfair, and he sounds whiny even to himself even though he’s right.

He kicks his shoes off and digs an ice pack out of the freezer. The whole thing rattles when he closes it. He leans on the counter, pack on his hip with one hand, phone in the other.

Ilya: what were they saying

Jane: ?

Ilya: your team
Ilya: about me

Jane: Calling you a faggot and stuff
Jane: And talking about sex

Jane: Like what they think you do, and what’s in the video

Ilya: and how i play?

Jane: Yeah
Jane: A bit

He allows himself a silent scoff. Not like any of this isn’t the same as what New Jersey was saying to him an hour ago.

Ilya: and how big my dick is?

Jane: Once or twice i think

Ilya: they don’t want to admit it
Ilya: not you though
Ilya: you know

Shane’s typing bubble pops up, disappears, pops up.

Jane: I know

He imagines him fretting over those words, chewing on his lip. He pictures how he must have been in the locker room, having to play it cool, which he never can. Listening, red-faced, as his team describes Ilya’s sex life, describes him getting fucked probably, not knowing they’re talking about Shane. Probably getting turned on despite himself.

Ilya sets aside the ice pack and sticks his hand down the back of his boxers to warm it up.

Ilya: teammates dont know what they’re talking about
Ilya: you like how big it is

No response. Ilya’s got him really flustered, then. He can’t decide which image is better, Shane tossing his phone aside in mortification over the mildest thing, or Shane scrambling to get out his dildo, hands shaking. It doesn’t take much, with Shane. But why pick. He jerks off braced against the counter and only afterward gets Marlow’s text choosing a club. It’s barely eleven, and they get a late start tomorrow, and he still feels restless, so he gets changed and goes back out.

—

The commissioner looks pinched, physically and emotionally, across the conference table. His hair is unconvincingly brown for how little there is. Ilya sits straight shouldered in his staidest suit, crammed between his new lawyer and his new agent, trying to look like he didn’t get home from a hookup six and a half hours ago. He nods when it seems like he’s supposed to and lets them do the talking.

They both seem nice enough: genial, unyielding women in silk and tweed. The lawyer is hot. They’re on his side because that’s their job.

The conversation goes around in circles of legalese he has no hope of understanding. The commissioner wants him to talk about something, or maybe to not talk about something. He does in fact reference the league’s image several times. He says the word ‘precedent’ a lot.

Ilya’s agent, Cesarini, says, “I think Ilya’s actions over the past three days have shown how professionally—”

Last night he almost asked whether Shane had gotten off too, but remembered in time that he’s trying to keep their texts infrequent. He’ll ask him in December—in two and a half weeks—maybe he’ll make him describe it, before they do anything. Get him all embarrassed first. Maybe still fully dressed. He puzzles through the logistics of getting his clothes off him piece by piece without interrupting.

A chair grates backward. LeClaire is saying, “That’s settled, then,” and extending a hand to the commissioner. Ilya follows suit and thanks him, though he doesn’t know for what. He can beg language barrier and have one of them summarize for him later. Cesarini says she’ll call him later about media requests. Media requests?

What’s clear is that he’s still playing, and no longer on a sort of probationary, game-by-game basis. Unless he does whatever the league decides is a fuckup, he’s back on. One question he can drape a sheet over in his mind.

The commissioner straightens his suit and leaves.

“Debrief with me for a sec,” LeClaire says.

He claps him on the arm and leads him across the hall into his office. Calls back that they’ll be at the airport in half an hour. Clicks the door shut gently.

“I want to keep your expectations realistic. This isn’t the end of it, just so you know. That won’t be the last meeting.”

Ilya nods.

“So what I said about on-ice behavior still stands.”

He knows he shouldn’t argue. They’ll just go around in circles again. But his frustration has risen right back up, making him itchy. “But he said I can play. He said it’s back to business as usual, just no more surprises.”

“He said that because it’s what made sense to say. On Saturday it was ‘the league is concerned,’ today it’s ‘the league doesn’t care but certain parties are concerned.’ All he cares about is what’ll keep everything running nice and easy. Right now, the best thing for him to do is nothing. Doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way.” LeClaire takes a breath and laces his hands together. “You’re a high-profile player. You’re half the face of the league, basically. That has some advantages, definitely. But people are going to start asking if you’re really the kind of player who should be representing the league. People are already asking that. Don’t make them easy to listen to.”

“And…” Ilya shrugs, waves his hand. “These people, they want that the league is represented by a weak, cowardly sissy who does not fight back? They would like that more?”

“This doesn’t have to be a conversation, you know that, Roz? I don’t have to let you talk to me like that.” He raises his eyebrows at Ilya, waiting.

Ilya concedes, looks down.

When LeClaire is satisfied he says, “A lot of very powerful people aren’t very happy about you right now. GMs, owners—not ours, obviously, you just got him a cup—they don’t want a, uh, an LGBT player topping the league. They don’t want you in the league. Hockey’s, you know, hockey, it’s a masculine sport. Obviously they can’t say that officially or publicly, but they can complain about other stuff. Next thing you know it’s ‘Rozanov always takes things too far,’ ‘he’s uncontrollable,’ ‘Rozanov has never really embodied the spirit and values of hockey,’ ‘Rozanov continually disrespects our beloved sport.’ We can’t give them anything. We give them nothing to work with.”

“Those are quotes people said?”

LeClaire opens his mouth, closes it, slumps a little. “Don’t worry about it. Your job is the game. But we’re not talking about this a third time.”

—

That afternoon Cesarini berates him over the phone for not having a publicist, which no one ever told him he was supposed to have, that’s what Chrisa’s for, or a manager. Ilya always thought having an agent and a manager was probably redundant, and his old agent never suggested he find one. It seemed like a lot to keep track of, anyway. Cesarini berates his old agent too, emblematically, whose certification she says should be revoked, and then makes him undelete all his interview requests and forward them to her. It takes him half an hour perched on the edge of his hotel bed to get through them all. He doesn’t want to do any interviews, or articles, or appearances. The league doesn’t want him to, either. Cesarini says he should have options lined up for when they change their minds in about a month and want some good PR about him. Also that it might be useful to do one anyway, to get the non-hockey public’s eye on him. After the call he throws a pillow on the floor and lies back on the bed, and then he goes to team dinner.

—

Late in the second period Toronto ties them 2-2. Ilya turns in his chase and drifts to the bench; St-Simon’s line will take the faceoff. He flops down in their place. His hip aches, his ribs are still throbbing from a hard check earlier, his cheekbone burns.

It’s been a rough, grueling game in front of a feverish audience.

Marlow scoots next to him and takes a squirt of water. “Fast little fuck,” he says as the goal replay on the jumbotron ends. “Feller’ll have to hang further back next time.”

Privately Ilya thinks Feller will have to learn how to steal the puck next time, too, but it’s not really his fault more than anyone’s, more than Connors’s for passing to Ilya when he was so closely guarded, more than Ilya’s for not keeping it. He holds out his hand for Marlow’s water bottle.

The second line gets it back from Toronto and flocks into their zone. Two minutes left in the period. At a minute and a half Varkov and Feller swap out.

Ilya feels LeClaire’s hand on his shoulder. “Good restraint. You’re keeping it smart out there.”

Two periods of playing the noble martyr to Toronto’s cartoon goons. The narrative is the narrative, he wants to tell him, if people are going to call him dirty they’ll do it either way.

It’s like Toronto is playing a game: who can hit Ilya the hardest without getting called. Not that they haven’t been getting called. Three of the power plays the Bears have gotten were penalties Ilya drew, only one goal out of that, though. For the ones that should have been calls and weren’t, they’ve had a scrum and a half.

“I am a piñata,” he responds, but he keeps the argument out of his voice.

Across the blinding ice, Toronto’s goalie claps a glove down on top of the puck. Ilya heaves himself up for the faceoff, calves twinging. Twenty seconds of play, and then he’ll get a blessed eighteen minutes’ respite.

Toronto sends out their third line, responsible for Ilya’s matching bruised elbows.

Ilya squats forward. It’s no less weird this game than last, coming up to center ice aware that everyone watching him knows. Half the arena has probably seen the video.

He wins the faceoff and sweeps the puck to Carmichael, who gets it to Connors, who chips it behind the net to Marlow, who shoots but the rebound off the goalie pad is weird and the Toronto defenseman, by fortune of being so slow, is in the right place to slam it toward the blue line. Carmichael catches up and battles for it but now the clock has run out.

Ilya glides gratefully to the edge of the ice.

He pulls off his helmet and wipes his face as they tromp down the tunnel. Pressure on his cheek stings a little. He finds his water bottle in the sticky locker room and gulps down a few mouthfuls of gatorade, bites absently at the tip.

Marlow stretches out one leg and then the other, chewing on a protein bar. He shakes his head. “These guys,” he says.

Ilya grunts, the closest he’s allowing himself to assent.

A PR person—not Chrisa—gestures at the hallway for media but Ilya waves him off. He can imagine the questions he’d get. He’s taken quite a few falls off of checks from the Guardians, how is he feeling right now? Like he’s taken quite a few falls. What does he think is contributing to Toronto’s particularly physical strategy today? There’s no right way to answer that question. They send out Hammersmith instead. Ilya holds his water bottle to his cheek and closed his eyes.

Ilya’s line starts the third period. Toronto sends out their first as well, who got that last goal. Young, and riding mostly on talent.

Toronto’s center slides up to the mark. He makes lazy eye contact with Ilya and then spits straight down between his own skates.

The referee hasn’t leaned down yet so Ilya says, quietly, “My mouth is up here.”

Then the referee is ready and the center has to snap his blade to the ice for the drop.

Toronto gets it but Marlow checks their wing against the boards and steals it back and dumps it. The puck spins away across open ice.

The goalie moves calmly behind the net and gives it a little bump to one of the defensemen, who whacks it back to neutral.

The right wing swoops over in a blue blur and carries it into the Bears’ zone, just ahead of Carmichael.

Ilya is keeping alongside the center, the scratch of their skates matching. He cranes his neck to see around him. When the pass comes, he pokes his stick through the gap between his skates, blade in front of his blade.

The center’s shot flies a little wobbly, a little slow, into Oregan’s glove. The whistle blows high and sharp.

The center pushes Ilya’s shoulder vaguely as he turns. He’s sweaty and red under his visor. “I bet they take turns with you in the locker room,” he says.

Ilya keeps pace. He feels good.

“You think about this a lot? Sex fantasy, for you?”

“Fucks up your play, but you like it too much to stop.”

Ilya leans in close. “You watch my video very closely. Maybe you wish it were your mouth on my dick.”

The center exaggerates a grimace. “Who knows where that thing’s been.”

They’ve made it to the faceoff dot.

Ilya snags the puck this time, pushes it between his legs to Carmichael, and races after the rest of his line.

They’re out of their zone, across the neutral zone, into Toronto’s. Marlow keeps the puck away from their defense long enough to pass to Ilya. He can only scrape a hard turn and pass it back.

Marlow takes a shot, deflected again with a thunk. Ilya sprints forward for the rebound but the goalie bats that one out of the air. The center swipes it away from the net.

For a moment Kohn gets it back and keeps it in the zone, but a Guardian steals it again.

Ilya shoulders past a couple of guys. Lingers in the middle as Connors and Carmichael intercept the puck and send it his way. He turns and pushes as far toward the Guardians as he can, then passes backward, moves over to the left to make space.

Out of his field of vision someone slams the puck across the line, all the way to the far corner. Toronto’s center gets to it first. He passes to his wing, back to neutral before the ice can get crowded. Ilya jabs his blade once, twice, and scoops the puck away.

The wing stays right behind him. Ilya carries the puck over the line again, he’s closer to the side than he’d like but there’s no one to pass to and no space to move into himself.

The center comes up from the goal line, hunched slightly, and slams him shoulder-to-mouth into the boards.

The glass shakes. A ripple of sound from the crowd.

Ilya drops flat to the ice for a moment. Then he’s on his knees, still sliding, a feeling like a hole puncher down his lip. The impact is ringing in his ears.

He gets his skates under him and turns and it’s only been a second, the guy is only a couple paces ahead of him. Connors is already sweeping his blade under the center’s and scooping the puck away. Ilya’s breath comes back.

He moves to the middle, in front of the net. Blood has made it down to his chin. He wipes it on his sleeve and fixes his stance.

(A new, unwelcome part of his brain notes that this is really good optics, dramatic, stoic, reassuring everyone of his masculinity and therefore hockey’s.)

He tracks the blur of the puck between Connors and Kohn, Kohn and Marlow, mouth throbbing, hoping none of them do anything stupid. He only has until the next stoppage and it needs to be a goal.

It’s not. After another fifteen seconds’ back and forth, it’s Toronto’s goalie’s knees trapping the puck to the ice.

The moment the whistle goes, Marlow skates up face-to-face with the center, who drops his gloves immediately. Ilya scoots backward to watch them circle. They grab each other’s jerseys. Marlow is taller, and longer armed, and the center is nineteen, but he deserves it.

The arena roars.

One of the referees is pulling Ilya by the arm. “I did nothing,” Ilya says.

“Got to get checked out. Your face.”

Ilya forgot about his face. He cranes his neck for a glimpse of the fight as momentum carries him the rest of the way to the bench.

The medic makes him sit and wipes at his chin.

“It’s okay,” Ilya says. “It’s not deep.” But the p is hard to form.

The medic’s gloved fingers prod his mouth.

“It’s already dry, you’ll make it bleed again,” he tries.

Behind him the shouting and drumming of sticks on the boards has gotten more intense. He wants to see.

“How are your teeth?”

“Good,” he says, and opens his mouth anyway.

The medic grunts in agreement. His finger swipes in front of Ilya’s gum, where his teeth have left a little puncture on the inside of his lip. Ilya manages not to flinch.

He returns his attention to the split. “I’d feel better with a couple of stitches in this.”

Ilya groans. “Can you do glue?”

“Goes too far into your mouth.”

“Can you do stitches in eighteen-and-a-half minutes? Please?”

The medic gives him a look like, seriously? but then dips his head. “If it opens up again you’ll be right back here,” he says, mostly to himself. He cleans the rest of Ilya’s lip but leaves the slit itself crusted.

From the inside cut a little pool of blood is collecting in the bottom of his mouth. He tries to swallow it surreptitiously.

The roaring subsides. He catches the jumbotron out of the corner of his eye, Marlow and the center being slowly disentangled by the linesmen.

LeClaire is navigating down the bench toward him. Ilya reaches for his helmet.

“Your jersey,” an equipment person says, holding up a replacement. “Can’t play with blood.”

He looks down. There’s the smear on his white sleeve, and he sees he dripped on his collar, too.

“It’s not very much,” he says. Pretends the m doesn’t hurt. Marlow’s skating toward the box.

The equipment person shrugs. “It’s the rule.”

“If we played at home, no one could see the blood and I would still play.”

“You’d be done already if you weren’t arguing.”

Ilya clamps his gloves between his knees and lets two people pull off one jersey and on the other and fasten it.

The referee is announcing a major each—no instigation for Marlow, to Ilya’s relief.

Hammersmith’s line takes the first shift, just long enough for Ilya and Connors to catch their breath to make the most of five minutes without Toronto’s star center. They go on with St-Simon, whose line is getting picked for parts.

It really is a shame, he thinks, not to get to play in his bloody jersey. The morbid, indulgent spectacle of it.

He comes off and squirts water in his mouth and around his neck. Johansson and Kovalev take his place to bounce off Toronto for a bit, then Hammersmith again. Then he’s up next.

“I’ve got—” Connors says as the puck flies by but no one, after all, tries to swap. “I’ve got Cadyn.” He hops onto the half wall. Varkov idles with the puck behind the net long enough for the rest of the line to get to the bench.

Ilya swings his legs over, sliding into the pass from Varkov. St-Simon’s skates hit the ice behind him.

Ilya leaves him the puck and ducks around to the other side. The pass zips backward to Feller, forward to him. He crouches down and sprints over the blue line, keeping St-Simon just in sight.

Almost at the goal line, he flicks the puck across. St-Simon snaps it into the net before the goalie’s skate can cover the gap.

Ilya veers around the back of the net to wrap him and Connors in a hug. Feller and Varkov plaster themselves around them. Ilya savors the crowd’s groan, the rush as he fist bumps down the bench after St-Simon, with a rough kind of satisfaction.

Forty-eight seconds left of the major. St-Simon takes the faceoff and wins. Ilya traps the puck and braces against a check and keeps it. St-Simon is racing forward and a lane opens up and Ilya passes across to Connors. Ilya goes for the right circle, but the left side has gotten too cluttered for them to do anything with it. He swings behind the goal.

St-Simon sees and chips it to him. Ilya skids.

Since the whole game is turning out to be annoying he lifts the puck over the group for Varkov and dashes back to the weak side.

Varkov is backing slowly toward the blue line. Ilya cuts in to the slot so fast he bumps into the Guardian who’s been tailing him.

He gets Varkov’s pass, gets defense on both sides immediately. He wards one away with his shoulder so he can maneuver. Pushes on the other’s stick. At the same time as he manages a messy shot, he feels a hard line of pain across the side of his back. Momentum takes him onto his elbows.

He hears the whistle, but no goal horn.

The ice is right up close between his clenched gloves, wet from his breath. He’s only getting half-breaths. He gets up as another pair of skates flashes by.

Varkov is yelling, and some Guardians are yelling, and the crowd is yelling, he skates toward the bench and the bench is yelling. Someone has opened the door for him but he just leans his hands against the barrier, trying to give himself a minute.

“All good?” a trainer says.

Ilya tries to say yeah but nothing comes out. There’s a smooth, heavy weight in his chest. He nods, breathes. He just needs a minute. He yanks his hand out of his glove and makes a grabbing motion, and a water bottle is put into it. He drinks.

Everyone else on the ice is in the scrum now. He tries again.

“I just need a minute,” he says.

“Wind knocked out of you?”

He nods. The pressure is giving way to a deep ache.

“That looked like your ribs, how’s that feeling? Deep breath for me?”

He takes one, holds it at the top like it’s not excruciating, lets it out evenly. He gives a thumbs up.

He’s not chancing sitting out the rest of the game.

The referees have broken up the scrum. One of them strides over from their huddle.

“Everyone’s getting two minutes for roughing, and an extra two for sixty-one for cross checking,” he says. “I don’t want there to be any arguments, because I could go harder. Play had already stopped when eighteen grabbed him.”

“No arguments,” Ilya agrees.

Under his breath, over Ilya’s shoulder, once the referee has gone over to Toronto’s bench, LeClaire mutters, “That should have been checking from behind. That’s bullshit.”

The best thing to say is nothing.

He counts it out in his head as the whole building boos or ooohs the call. Toronto is choosing two minutes short-handed two players. At least thirty-three seconds with Marlow, Feller, Varkov, Connors, and St-Simon in the box, and seven Guardians in the other. Then hope for a stoppage, Marlow and the center back, up to eighty-seven seconds. They have a five-on-three and half their top six are in the box, plus Ilya trying to look casual leaning on the half wall to stay upright.

Ilya shifts his weight experimentally and he can move now, so he steps in the door and eases onto the bench.

“Are you going to be ready to go on when Marley’s out?” LeClaire says.

“Yes,” Ilya says, which means he’ll have to be. He tongues the cut on the inside of his lip.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Ham, Sebby, Kane, keep it on the goal, either we get a goal or we get a stoppage and we start in their zone with Marley, Roz, and Cade. Mike and Kohn will stay on. Get out there.”

The Bears lose the faceoff but get it back, bounce it around the defense for a while. Next to Ilya on the bench, Dubek shouts encouragement. Ilya wipes his forehead and then twists the towel back and forth in his hands, watching the ice. He licks sweat off his top lip. The major runs out. Carmichael gets a shot that just barely deflects off a skater’s stick, and the goalie covers it before anyone can get the rebound. Marlow and the Toronto center come out of the boxes. Hammersmith gives Ilya an arm bump as Ilya goes on and he comes off.

Ilya faces off with the center again, who’s fresh and grinning, but whose entire line is two defensemen. Squatting for the drop hurts. His ribs, his hip. He wins the puck and it flies to Kohn. Ilya cuts forward to the goal line, falling into a mechanical control to get enough air without breathing too deep.

They ricochet the puck around. Toronto’s goalie saves, and saves, and saves. The center swipes a rebound away toward the blue line. Carmichael lunges for it, the puck deflects off the end of his blade into the boards. It stays in.

Ilya comes up and gets control of it. His side is burning.

Carmichael slips into Ilya’s spot by the circle. Ilya passes to Kohn, who crowds in closer with Marlow and Cadyn. Ilya glances at the row of heads on the bench, he might have time to swap out before the puck comes this way again, and the goal horn blares.

The line is piling around Cadyn, fists up behind the net, making the boards wobble. Ilya tries not to look slow skating over to them.

Twenty-eight more seconds, now five on four, and then they can get everyone back. LeClaire is keeping them on to try to do it again.

Ilya’s throat is dry and everything aches and he ought to sit down. He tells himself that he can, soon, so soon. He wants a goal of his own so badly, to show them. A second goal; he got the first of the game.

“You take the faceoff,” he says to Cadyn, because Ilya won’t win it, and to fuck with Toronto, giving it to a rookie winger for practice since they’re up two with a man advantage.

The puck shoots out to the side. Marlow snags it and takes off. Ilya does too, this is less than thirty seconds, he can do this for thirty more seconds, and they get around the defense.

They have a wide open stretch and the goalie, tensing at the far end.

Marlow passes in front of Ilya and he sprints to it, swerves into the slot—a defenseman has caught up. He swerves back out and stops hard behind the goal line.

He chips it to Cadyn, hurtling down the left side, who one-times it into the top corner of the net and smashes into the boards.

Equal to the triumph in Ilya’s chest and the prick that it wasn’t his, as he pulls Cadyn to his feet and winces at the motion and prods him to go celebrate up front, is the relief that play has stopped.

They’re up three goals and evenly matched and at the next stoppage, unless it’s in the next nine seconds, they’ll get a whole unit of skaters. LeClaire had better start playing defensively.

He does: fourth line on to get in the way and tire Toronto out. Ilya leans on his elbows on the bench, but that hurts his elbows. But he’s too tired not to.

“I can’t believe that wasn’t boarding,” Marlow says. “That fucking shit-streak. Fucking showed them, though.”

Ilya nods and wipes his nose.

The boxes empty. Ilya and Marlow scooch down the bench. “I miss my extra space,” Ilya says to Connors and St-Simon when they sit. Connors takes off his glove to whack him with it.

Just under twelve minutes to keep things how they are. Ilya goes back on at eight, makes a couple passes, and swaps back off as early as he can without drawing notice. He needs to finish in the game. Toronto doesn’t get to see him disappear to the dressing room. On again at four and a half. The air rushes cold on his lip because it’s reopened a little. Toronto has the last word with a goal from their first line center, two minutes left in the game, and Ilya wants to break his stick over his back. Then the buzzer goes off and they’ve still won and the audience groans like this isn’t clearly how it was going to go the whole third period.

Ilya gets over the boards by jumping up onto his ass and then shifting his legs one at a time, no pushing or pulling motions. He gives Oregan a ginger hug and counts down his teammates as he fistbumps them until he can plod down the tunnel after them. His neck is cold and sweaty. He’d like to pass out.

He drops his helmet and gloves in his stall. Wiggling slowly out of his jersey tests his range of movement.

He gets the straps on his shoulder pads undone and then he has to give up.

“Marley,” he mumbles under the hubbub.

“Sup.”

“I can’t take it off.”

Marlow lifts the shoulder pads over his head. Ilya takes a cursory lukewarm shower and lets them stitch his lip and check his ribs and whatever else they want to do.

—

He gets his window seat without argument for once. They persuaded a trainer to do a last-minute milkshake run. Ilya slouches with his and chews on the straw. He’s got an ice pack stuffed in the back of his jacket. He’s wiped.

“Roz, dude,” Kohn says. “Did you see Hollander’s interview?”

Ilya sits up, winces. The Voyageurs are on a road trip in California. They have a game that ought to be about to finish.

“Talked about you. Hold on. Here.” Kohn scrubs through the video and props it on the table, punches the volume up.

It’s an intermission interview, screen recorded, posted all of ten minutes ago on someone’s Twitter. Hollander’s damp hair sticks to his forehead in little spikes.

Out of frame a reporter is asking, “—an eventful week in the hockey world. Shane, you initially voiced support for the Bears’ Ilya Rozanov following his coming out on Friday. Tell us more about your perspective on the whole situation.”

Hollander shrugs, hands on his hips. His arms look so big. “I don’t know, I don’t think I have anything to add.”

“How do you think this is going to impact your ongoing rivalry with Rozanov?”

“It’s not. I’ve answered that.”

“Not at all?”

“Just, I guess, I’m here for the hockey, I like to beat him fair and square, and not because of anything he’s having to deal with off the ice. Simple as that.” A pause.

“Simple as that?” someone else prompts.

“Yeah, I mean, the focus should stay on him as a player, and not, you know, this other, irrelevant thing about him.”

“And that’s an experience you share with Rozanov.”

Shane’s face stays blank. “Sorry, that I share?”

“How much of your support for Rozanov comes from your experience as a prominent Asian player? Are the hurdles he’s now facing familiar to you?”

“Oh.” He does a casual little laugh. You’re not slick, Ilya wants to whisper to him, I know that was relief. “No, I mean, I wouldn’t put it like that. You know, you hear things on the ice, but that’s all. I wouldn’t compare them.”

Connors hisses in sympathy.

“‘Hear things on the ice,’ what kind of things?”

Shane pauses a moment, recognizing his mistake, and shakes his head. “Nah, I don’t want to spend my time on that.”

Ilya is transfixed, watching him clench his jaw and rub his forehead with the back of his thumb. He’s so uncertain and so bullish at the same time. Why isn’t he leaving before it gets any worse? Why is he letting them ask?

“Do you think Rozanov is facing additional on-ice adversity because of his identity, then?”

“It’s not up to me to judge that.”

“Have you seen Boston’s game against Toronto earlier today?”

“I’ve been focusing on our game, but sure, we saw some clips.”

“Would you say, as a lot of people are, that it was an unusually violent game?”

“I think it, I mean, it… I don’t have any insight. It sounds like that’s what people are saying. Like I said, I’ve been focusing on my team’s game.” Shane nods and turns to go. The clip ends.

Kohn pockets his phone.

“He’s going to get shit for that,” Connors says. “God, they don’t fucking let up. They were asking me about it in post game, too. They’re like, ‘Do you think the Guardians were targeting Rozy?’ ‘I can’t speak to their strategy.’ What am I supposed to fucking say? ‘Did you feel like some of those hits were excessive force?’ Did you see the fucking game? You know as well as I do. You want an insider opinion, better ask Roz, oh wait, you can’t, because it’s kind of fucking hard to do media availability when you’re getting your mouth patched up. Jesus fucking Christ. Like what do we even say to that shit?”

Marlow nudges Cadyn across the aisle. “They ask you, too?”

“Yeah,” he says, staring at his cup. “I got five seconds of like, oh, two goals, star of the game, two months into your rookie year, you’re doing great, and then they were asking about physical games and how I felt seeing plays like that and the future of the season and stuff.”

“What did you say?” says Feller. More askable than how did you feel?

“Word for word, ‘I don’t know, I just got here.’”

Both tables snort.

“Sorry, Cadey,” Marlow says, “should’ve been your moment. The next party will be in your honor.”

“Well, except I’m only the one who scored because they were too focused on Roz. So it evens out?”

“Nah. Cadey party, tomorrow afternoon. What do we have in the afternoon? Okay, Cadey cocktail hour.”

When they dim the lights, Ilya stares through his purple reflection in the window. It’s pitch black out. He slurps his milkshake. His impulse is to text Shane, something like thank you or sorry or you’re hot when you’re frustrated. But the last time he texted him was only two days ago, and he’s keeping it sparser than that.

—

‘Cocktail hour’ at Marlow’s bleeds into dinner into beers with Marlow, Connors, and Varkov in a corner booth in Cambridge. Ilya should have hosted the party, but Marlow likes to and Ilya suspects he’s affording him a little space, relieving some of the stress Marlow’s presuming he feels now.

In the end, when he got home last night, he sent, more grumpy interviews please.

The lights are soft, verging on dingy, and the squishy booth seats are taller than Marlow. Varkov being here makes Ilya feel like they’re all rookies whom he’s buying drinks, though that never happened: Marlow was drafted the year before him and Connors got traded later. Varkov is twelve, thirteen years older than them, the last generation of real Soviets, overlapped a year in the league with Svetlana’s father, though he wasn’t on the Bears yet then.

“So you’re really on for Friday?” Connors says.

“‘Tentatively,’” Ilya mimics. “I might not play many minutes.” Nothing, as far as anyone can tell, is fractured or torn or sprained. It just hurts a whole lot and he’s a little slow.

“You can take a game off,” Marlow says. He bumps their shoulders together. “Five minutes of Roz is better than whoever they’d call up, but we can manage a game without you. You can’t be pushing yourself this hard in November.”

It’s not about that. He doesn’t know how to say it. He can’t miss a game because of Toronto. They can’t know they’re why he’s out. That he was in a no-contact jersey today is concession enough.

“I will skip the game after, if I still feel—” he wobbles his hand. “If I skip this one, Guardians win.”

He catches Connors and Marlow’s exchanged look but neither of them try to argue.

“That was a shit show,” Marlow agrees.

Varkov grunts into his beer. “Shameful. Satisfying, though.”

“It was intent to injure, the whole game,” Connors says. “Refs should be fucking fired. That new center is such a brat. Kent? He didn’t get half of what’s coming for him. I know it was all of them, but especially him. Someone needs to fucking make him take it. He—fuck, sorry Roz, I didn’t mean—” He rubs his hands over his face.

Ilya feels his cheeks getting hot, and doesn’t know what to do about it. He says nothing, meets none of their gazes.

Connors sighs. “This whole thing is so weird. I’m sorry dude, I’m trying. It’s been really weird with Feller.”

“Not Feller?” Marlow says in dismay, which Ilya knows means there are others.

“No, he’s fine, I’m just walking around the house and I don’t know what to say.”

They both look at Ilya as if for advice, and he doesn’t have any, so he says, “How is the team? When I’m not around.”

Silence drags out.

“Okay, mostly,” Marlow says. “Good. I think for a lot of the guys, they just need some time to get used to it. It’s just a couple of them who are causing problems.” (He feels bitterly vindicated, and realizes he doesn’t like it.)

“Who.”

Marlow looks like he’s going to hedge, but then he says, “Hanse. Kane.”

“Sebby,” Varkov says. “He tried to talk to me. Thought I would agree.” Ilya knows the feeling.

“We shut them down pretty quick, though. They know to keep it to themselves.”

Keeping it to themselves, he supposes, is better than not. It’s better he know than not. It still makes him feel weird. He doubts confronting them himself would achieve anything, though it would scratch an itch. Asking LeClaire to handle it is the sissy thing to do. The rest of the team, probably, could work on them, but he can’t even begin to put that request into words. Leave it, he thinks. Whatever, leave it.

Marlow says, “Is it okay to say it actually makes so much sense about you? I wouldn’t have guessed, but also—” he gestures at Ilya, presumably at his hair, which looks good, and his shirt, which is silk and not buttoned all the way up. Maybe, too, that he’s leaning on his elbow with his arm up, hand under his chin, instead of flat on the table.

The lurch Ilya feels is less pronounced than it’s been in the past, the habitual they noticed accompanied by they already know. He feels like he’s slipped up, but there is no slipping up anymore. He wants to argue that he dressed like this because Marlow told him they might go out after, and also that it makes sense because it’s true. He glances a question at Varkov.

He had the option of billeting with Varkov his rookie year, the idea obviously being to ease the transition by putting him with a Russian speaker. A lot of things probably would have been a lot easier if he had, but he worried that something he said or did, that he didn’t catch and couldn’t help saying or doing, would betray him. He’d noticed by then that North Americans didn’t read him the way Russians did. It was in everything, what they said, and how they said it, and how they looked at him. It was bewildering. It felt like a prank.

On the one hand, things had already been fine for years. Once he got better at hockey than everyone and stopped talking except to boast, there stopped being any problems. His coaches, his father, his teammates treated him with relief: he was normal after all, he’d just taken a minute to find his footing. On the other hand, better not to take chances. Other queers back home could always tell. They still can. In Russia they gravitate toward him because, to the right person, it is still so obvious what’s going on with him. Here not even the other queers think he’s queer, like after everything none of it counted, he’s secretly been straight this whole time.

For a moment he feels an urge to tell Varkov that. I didn’t billet with you because I was afraid you’d know.

“I just thought, Moscow boy,” Varkov says. He takes a long sip and then says, “I may waive my no-trade for appearances and ask them not to trade me anyway. If I do, know that I don’t mean it.”

And Ilya feels like shit because he didn’t think about that.

“I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t really up to you.”

“Hold on, why? What appearances?” Marlow says.

“New law in Russia,” Ilya says, staring at his lap. “Illegal to… endorse gay life if children could see. Maybe to be—” it’s from social, it has to do with social, it’s “—associated with me, is to endorse.”

“What, just for being on the same team?”

Varkov seesaws his head. “Not as far as the law is concerned. It’s only a fine anyway. The problem is that there’s been more violence since it passed. Some of the threats for Rozanov are spilling over. I’m discussing with my team. He was important for Russia, like, sports-hero. This is a big deal there right now.”

“I have not looked,” Ilya admits.

“Don’t.”

After a moment Connors says, “So you’re going to pretend to want to leave the team?”

“It’s something I may do. It would make them leave me alone, but it would look bad to everyone here.”

Not to mention the risk. The Bears’ front office is good, but not that good. If it were beneficial to trade him, and they could, they would. Varkov has been the core of their defense for a decade, through the worst of the slump, the return, the cup, and Ilya might be taking away the security of his final few seasons.

“But it also may not help, since I’m still fighting for him on the ice. That sends a stronger message than anything I say, no?”

“You don’t have to fight for me,” Ilya offers.

Varkov shoos him away. “Of course I will. But also, I don’t want to go back. So maybe I’ll say nothing. If they harass my family, I can tell them to denounce me. We have to wait and see.”

Ilya meets his eyes for an instant. He understands. There’s a lot not to want to go back to that has nothing to do with being gay. Lately, horribly, relief has started to creep into Ilya’s rotation of feelings about Russia.

Marlow’s phone buzzes. Dubek and Kovalev are headed to a club across the river, why not join them? Ilya feels a sudden aversion. He’s done with this whole drawn-out evening. When he says he’s just going to go home and rest up, none of them look surprised.

He idles on the sidewalk, night air cold on his cheeks, after they’ve gone, having caved to a cigarette. (Two weeks until he sees Hollander again, and if he’s going to have one ever, it’s after Toronto.) The crawling claustrophobic feeling has gone too.

It’s windy, and sprinkling snow again, and the street is busy for a Wednesday night. There’s a chilly triangle between his scarf and the open collar of his shirt. He circles the space between two elms outgrowing the pavement.

It occurs to him what he can do. Whatever else, he’s at liberty now. He can just go to gay clubs if he wants, whenever he wants. No consequences left. He just can. He knows where they all are, he notices without meaning to.

He stubs out his cigarette. He’s not sure he even wants to, but he can, and it’s a thing to do. Ten, fifteen minute walk. Why not, he thinks to himself. Why not. He flicks away the butt and starts up the street.

People are drifting out of restaurants, moving in chattering flocks with their arms crossed against the cold. The trunks of some of the trees have been wrapped in lights. He passes pools of music at each lit doorway.

A few blocks away he starts to get jittery. It’s stupid; he knows this is Boston and nothing can happen that hasn’t already. He can’t get it through his head. He feels seven years younger, half a foot shorter, walking with his head down and his fingers clutched around a stub of eyeliner in his pocket.

He had a hunger for something, to discover something or connect to something, independent of Sasha in his long absences, try stuff out with someone other than Sasha. He was putting together his individual balancing act, figuring out a combination of Sasha’s defiance and his own posturing. He wanted something else all his own.

Sasha went to clubs, of course, when he was visiting from school, but only to be rebellious. He came home complaining that Moscow’s scene was rudimentary compared to France, too decentralized, no fun, sad and half-assed. Like it was Moscow’s fault, like he and Sasha weren’t coming of age at the dying end of a real scene at all, as it retreated into hibernation. You could be provocatively, luxuriously gay in France, Sasha told him, there was a history there, a culture, it was all there to revel in. It’s here, too, Ilya didn’t answer. Sasha could go be one of those French boys if he wanted; Ilya is a Russian faggot forever.

The actual period he went to clubs in Moscow was only a year. Bodily harm he could risk, and his father’s wrath at least abstractly, but then he started to be notable, he was going to be captain at World Juniors, his face was in pictures and on news sites. Which was part of the plan anyway, which he couldn’t risk. He’d be off the team if they knew, and then he’d never get out. He dropped his mother’s eyeliner in a ditch. He’s been to maybe two basement parties in the years since.

He stops on the sidewalk outside the club. Nothing he can do or think can ease his heart rate. Then, since he might look like some pitifully repressed guy hyping himself up to go in for the very first time, he puts his shoulders back and strolls toward the bouncer, wallet already in his hand.

The air is hot and damp, the crowd middling. He adds his coat to a heap on a bench. The music is pop-y, not really his vibe, but the DJ is doing decent things with it. People are dancing and shouting in one another’s ears over the music, like any club. The room is deep and narrow, high-ceilinged, moody but not properly dark. The DJ’s at the very back. Bathroom sign on the left.

Ignoring his pulse, he edges around to the bar and orders a shot. The light is mostly pink, flashing slowly. He looks over the crowd and is underwhelmed, and then disappointed, and then confused about his disappointment. He just feels like something’s missing.

The bartender is hot; bartenders always are. Sort of lanky. Ilya has to be asleep long before he’ll get off work. There’s a man in a tank top who’s appealingly bulky, but the way he’s dancing annoys him. He toys with his empty glass.

He lets the room’s current move him next to a guy a little taller than him, dark-haired, a day or two of beard, women’s earrings. He catches his eye, catches it again, without either of them fully looking at each other. He lets his arm brush against the man’s back. He turns so he’s dancing into Ilya, legs pressing, shifting away, pressing again. He rests an arm over Ilya’s shoulder, bringing them face to face in the intermittent light.

The man freezes for a moment. His eyes move around Ilya’s face a little too long, too intensely, and Ilya realizes how he must look. His cheekbone is dark and still a little swollen, he has a line of stitches up his lip. He looks gay bashed. He is, kind of.

He knew about it happening to people back home, people he knew or people they knew, clubs ransacked, sometimes burned. He remembers about the march in 2005, and the following March, and April, and May, sneaking silent glances at the news. It always could happen. But it never happened to him. And now here he is in America, in the West, and it’s happening to him multiple times a week for work—for the work that got him and is keeping him out of Russia. Not that he wasn’t getting bashed before, but now it’s gay.

Ilya considers explaining it’s from hockey, but he suspects this guy wouldn’t find that as hot as he should. “We can try like this,” he says close to his ear, a little too loud to be smooth. “You kiss me very gently, I bite.”

The man leans his nose next to Ilya’s and kisses his top lip. His beard scratches the stitches, which makes Ilya’s skin and dick prickle. What a pity that he can’t suck him off. He really wants to. It’ll have to be a handjob kind of night.

He opens his mouth a little, tilts his head to drag his teeth across the man’s cheek to his ear, holding the earring out of the way. He catches his satisfied sound under the music.

His hand comes up Ilya’s back and presses hard and Ilya doesn’t quite hide his wince. He reaches over and slides the hand down to his ass. Leans his head back for him to kiss his way under his chin for a bit.

An ache of nostalgia hits him so hard it hurts. He misses this but in Moscow. He misses the intensity. There was always an edge, a lightness, one eye on the door, a corner of the mind with an escape plan and a lie for tomorrow. He misses having to clutch at enjoyment and treasure it. He misses the stakes. And, he knew instinctively not to express to Sasha even then, the wonder. The stories about the 90s, what people explained to him about his body. The time in the corner in someone’s apartment, party tuned out in the background, squinting in the low light at battered copies of magazines that lived for an issue or two each back when things were going somewhere, that he didn’t dare take home to actually read. (When this one was printed, he didn’t know yet. When that one was printed, his mother was still alive.) The understanding, the furtive community, the trust. He wonders if the people he knew, who he’ll never see again, have seen about him—they must have, everyone in Russia must have by now—if they were rooted in hot-cheeked terror when they saw the news, if they reminisced about him, if they’re jealous because he got out.

This club in Boston is neutered. He presses his stomach against the man’s, leans into the hand on his crotch, and grieves that he doesn’t have a secret anymore, and all the rooms in Moscow he’ll never be in again.

Chapter End Notes

1. Thank you so much for your lovely thoughtful kind comments, if I didn’t reply it’s because I couldn’t think of something adequate or fruitful to say. I’m feeling very gratified about the details people are noticing. Truly the ultimate reward is the reader seeing what you did there. Sorry to ask for anything ever but if you like this fic i would be so thrilled if you shared it with people! Re: new account.
PARTICULARLY thank you TheFearlessDark for mentioning some legal/logistical/administrative stuff I had not come to on my own aka publicist and manager. In an effort to stay vaguely on track I’m sweeping as much of it as I can under the rug of ilya’s misogyny and latent depression/executive dysfunction/alienation from agency over his life. but it’s there now.

2. I’m aware I’m diverging somewhat from ilya’s book-canonical sexuality discovery timeline. yolo or whatever. With regard to ilya and power and top vs vers, I present this compelling quote about the gay russian porn Ilya would have had access to as a teenager:

“Here too was a subtle message that coded effeminacy and submission as powerful, because of the desire it evoked in the viewer; the specter of the abject prison bottom was implicitly countered with a more positive understanding of masculine submissiveness and its attractions.”

(Shane, of course, would love to be an abject prison bottom.) I wish I’d found this book earlier and could have read more of it before writing as I’m sure there’s so much more to discover.

3. I wrote five different outlines. I mulled it over. I read two thirds of the CBA. I wrote a few new outlines. I have a two-year arc and a three-year arc that is simultaneously more plausible irl and too tidy/convenient. I’m thrilled to tell you I no longer know where this is going! two weeks is seeming like a manageable update schedule for me, evidence thus far notwithstanding, except chapter 4 will be very brief so it’ll be 4+5 that time.

4. lastly… ugh I don’t know. I’m trying to resist word-of-the-authoring interpretations because that’s for you to do and I should just get out of the way, but I have a lot of thoughts about the bears and hockey in general. The bears are supportive in this one because in groups men reproduce whatever stance is prevalent and acceptable. often they don’t even have a developed individual opinion underneath. because of ilya’s high value/respect on the team and his established bonds (aka he’s captain and the best and marlow immediately voices support), the bears quickly become a setting hostile to conscious homophobia. they’re not pretending to be accepting, they are accepting, because that’s how malleable they are. also because it’s hockey and you don’t mess with their bro (to paraphrase a closeted nhl player in the early 2000s)! this does not mean the bears are enlightened or that they’re deconstructing patriarchal systems of harm. they’re just exhibiting homosocial behaviors. yesterday I read in the game by eric anderson (devastating but also hopeful, i highly recommend) and this post and i was like, oh right, men’s sports are rotten all the way through, I should give up on this fic, and then i was like, by that logic the whole world is rotten through and we still write about it, and then i was like, wait I knew all this already and the whole point is the contradiction. that’s been in my notes the whole time. so we’re back on but I guess I just want it to be clear that that’s my angle here? i’m not airbrushing sports institutions but i’m not excusing their reality either by not airbrushing them, it’s just the inevitable setting of the fic and it’s not surprising. basically expect the hockey to be a bit of a bummer (got curious—wiktionary says this definition does not have a homophobic etym! it’s from the german for stroll apparently), but an interesting bummer.

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

Short chapter bc that was the place to pause. I'm sitting on my hands to limit the narration because i don't believe ilya is processing all of this in real time. this has become truly a period piece due to the immigration stuff

Having perused the russian administrative and criminal codes of the time, I’ve gone back and minorly changed some wording. If you read ch 2 more than a week ago or you want to apply it to your own fic writing here’s

a little summary

- in 2014 the maximum penalty a private citizen could face for exposing minors to ‘ propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’ was an administrative fine of 5 000 to 100 000 rubles (150-3000 usd or 120-2400 eur around the time of the amendment in 2013) (100 000 only applicable if media/internet is involved). higher fines for public officers and corporations, and non-citizens could be detained for two weeks and/or deported
- the law was sparsely enforced at the time; its primary ramification was the implicit sanctioning of homophobic violence, which increased substantially and was rarely prosecuted
- only in the past couple of years has russia 1 expanded propaganda to all society, not just children, 2 designated ‘lgbt ideology’ as extremist (thus subject to criminal code articles about extremist organizing and action), 3 begun revoking citizenship—mostly of naturalized citizens opposing russia’s invasion of ukraine, under the claim that they lied in their oath of service/fealty/? to russia and thus their citizenship was never valid to begin with
- apart from two cases of sketchy confiscation/refusal to renew targeting political dissidents, it seems like the only vaguely applicable scenario for passport revocation in 2014 would be an outstanding arrest warrant in order to force return (haven’t found any info tbh but it’s an option in other countries so prob russia too), but there’s nothing legitimate to charge ilya with. Most likely they’d rather he stay away than return but can’t make him do either.
- so ilya technically can go home in 2014, he’s not in any legal danger
- just immense potential illegal danger

-bonus, in case anyone else ever wants to grant sasha asylum in france in 2014: the eu did not oblige countries to grant asylum based on queerness bc russia was not criminally targeting it yet—russians had to individually prove that they specifically were at significant, probable risk of harm. anti-russian sentiment bc of crimea is a relevant consideration; at the time of this article’s release, germany had rejected or not decided on 98% of russian asylum applicants, but for the very first time ever granted a russian asylum for being queer.

Ilya opens his eyes. His bedroom is dim still. His phone is buzzing—that’s what’s woken him. He feels around for it on the nightstand.

“Hello?”

“What is this, ‘hello’? You’ve become so American now you’ve forgotten how to answer the phone?”

Ilya hunches upright. A splitting bolt of pain goes through his ribs. He flops back limp on the bed, just keeping the groan in.

The nausea has hit him as hard as the first night, full-body prickle. His heart is hammering.

“Hello, Father,” he corrects in Russian.

Stupid not to check the ID. Stupid to think it would be anyone else at—he pulls his phone away to check—four a.m. Eastern. He’s had two hours of sleep.

“Ah. ‘Hello Father,’ there we go. I have to make you take everything seriously. You chose that league of yours so you could slack off. Is that acceptable? Did I raise you to plateau?”

“No, Father,” Ilya says.

“No. You’d have to be good already to plateau. And for that you’d have to train. I expect more from you.”

The feeling falters a little. His father, it seems, is not calling about recent events. He’s going to ignore it. Okay. Ilya can do that. He’ll take what he can get.

“I know, Father.”

“Oh, you know? You know, do you? Know and do nothing. Should have stayed in the KHL.”

You liked that the NHL is higher status, Ilya wants to say, but he knows it won’t help. Arguments with his father are one sided and no shorter for it. It’s far from the first time they’ve had this particular conversation.

“You’d be the best by now, with a little discipline. But you had to run off to play in America.” ‘Play’ like a child does, not hockey ‘play.’

“Sorry, Father.”

“Not sorry enough, or you’d remember you’re still Russian. Even in America, you’re still Russian, remember that. You’re still representing us. Russia is counting on you.”

He frowns into space. Russia isn’t counting on him for anything anymore.

The realization unfolds slowly, coldly, like sinking into mud. His father doesn’t remember. That’s why he’s calling, and why he didn’t before. His father is speaking to him because he doesn’t remember right now.

Ilya closes his eyes.

“Of course, Father,” he says. “I remember.”

“So you say—”

He lays there while his father talks, giving assent and acknowledgement in the gaps, until his tone shifts and he becomes conversational, distant.

There’s enough of a pause for Ilya to say, “Are you at home?”

“Of course.”

“Is my brother there?”

“Your brother? He never visits. God is testing me with two useless sons.”

“Where’s Polina?”

“Why should I know? Out visiting, if you ask me.”

“Okay,” Ilya says. He rubs his face. This would be a lot easier if he could just hand the phone over. They’d have no choice but to take it. “When Polina gets home, can you tell her to call me?”

His father gives a distracted grunt.

“Father? Will you tell her to call me?”

“Yes, yes, if you want to that badly. You won’t have anything to talk about.”

“Okay. Thank you, Father.” He suspects he won’t, or he’ll forget to, or he’ll remember why Ilya has gone nearly a week unbadgered. “I have to go now.”

“Fine, go, go.” Ilya can see him waving his hand.

The call ends.

Ilya drops his arm to the pillow, phone loose in his hand. He waits, and waits. The ceiling, he registers for the first time, is lit up with a weird glow.

His ribs have settled into a low, angry burn. He’s not sure what he did with the ice pack.

He inches to the edge of the bed and rolls onto his side. He brings one leg and then the other off the mattress, breathes very slowly, pushes himself upright with his arms.

His foot bumps against the ice pack, squishy in a cold puddle on the floor.

When he looks up the view out the windows is gray and luminous: a fine layer of snow over the grass and the line of trees, though it’s stopped falling now. He slouches to the kitchen for a new ice pack.

—

Skipping optional practice means texting that he’s skipping optional practice, which he doesn’t want to do. If he goes, he’ll have a much harder time getting out of dinner tonight. He doesn’t want to do that even more. He sends the text and sits at the counter with his dirty plate and a burnt sausage haze in the air. He swipes away six-day-old messages unread. They’ve diminished but not ceased since then. Would he like to delete or delete and block? Just delete. He doesn’t want to run out of messages to swipe. LeClaire says okay but he’d like him to come in this afternoon for a rib checkin. He might do that. Make a trainer stay late on Thanksgiving because he can’t make himself go to practice. It would be just like him. In the Thanksgiving For Strays chat he tells the boys he actually has plans with Svetlana, oops. He turns off his phone so they can’t protest. Now he’s all accounted for: everyone thinks he’s with someone else. He’ll order takeout tonight. He backs his car down the driveway and back up so it’ll look like he’s gone somewhere today.

—

“Dude,” Connors says when Ilya gets back with the paninis, “have you seen the photos they got of Toronto? You look sick as fuck.”

Ilya accepts the phone. Under the ESPN headline Boxes full as Bears overcome Guardians in penalty-packed game is his figure lunging mid pass, framed behind a blurry Guardian’s shoulder, face stony, open mouth shining dark red. He does look sick as fuck.

He slides his tongue over the stitches. Tomorrow they’ll take them out before the flight to Denver. Four days is really not that bad, it’s a non-injury, but it’s driving him crazy. Like ants marching up and down his lip.

“New profile picture for Twitter, maybe,” Ilya agrees, though Cesarini has set him up with a publicist who’ll probably have opinions about that.

The next headline down is from Thursday, Opinion: Fighting is a Hairy Thread in the Fabric of Hockey. His eyes heat seek to Shane’s name—Voyageurs’ Shane Hollander walks back racism claims from Tuesday, published half an hour ago.

He scrolls back to the top and hands back the phone, mouth flat like just seeing his name didn’t make his stomach twist. He has to fix that. He sees his name all the time.

Hollander didn’t have anything to say to his last text. He often doesn’t. On the drive home Ilya wonders how horny he can get him before their game. He composes a couple of messages in his head. Maybe he should just send a dick pic. Just a bulge pic, make him imagine the rest. He considers start stretching. He wonders if Hollander would take that seriously. A few more days, then he’ll text.

Svetlana’s car is already in the driveway, and Svetlana is already at the kitchen counter with her computer and a cup of coffee. Ilya leans against the sink to block the scorched pan from view, though she’s already seen it and, rationally, has no reason to suspect how long it’s been there.

Svetlana calls the immigration lawyer.

For five minutes or so Ilya doesn’t follow a word. He has to trust Svetlana’s fingers smacking across the keyboard. Then the lawyer stops for breath and says, “Basically six months to a couple years, and then a year after that he can apply for residency. You should prepare yourself for it to be on the longer side.”

“What can we do to speed it up?” Svetlana says.

“Nothing’s guaranteed to help. It’s just how strong the case is, and how many applicants there are, and to what extent they do or don’t have their shit together at USCIS. You really can’t predict it, it’s entirely case by case. It’s individual asylum, not refugee.”

“But this is a strong case,” she prompts. “A lot of people have gotten asylum this way.”

“LGBT Russians have had a pretty high success rate the last couple of years, yes. But the shorter ones, the six months, the nine months, those are the exception, not the rule. It’s totally normal to feel a sense of urgency about it, no one wants to live with that uncertainty, but it’s just how the process goes. Ilya’s existing visa status puts him in a pretty stable position in the meantime, hard as it is to wait.”

Svetlana makes a face at the blank phone screen. In a smooth, amenable voice she says, “Two years is manageable.”

Ilya tries to picture it. In two years he’ll be in his seventh season in the league. Feller and Cadyn will be finishing their ELCs. He’ll have fucked Hollander around ten more times.

“It goes by.” The lawyer pauses, and then adds, “To keep you prepared for all possibilities, if the case is denied, you still get to take it to a judge to appeal. The wait for a hearing right now is three to four years. Just don’t want you to be blindsided, if it comes to that.”

“You think he might be denied?”

“I highly doubt it, but I can’t give you an outright no. There have been a lot of successful cases lately, but there’ve been a lot more applicants, too, and there are asylum caps. LGBT Russian applicants have increased by an order of magnitude over the past few years. Put it this way, they’re not looking for a reason to grant asylum, they’re looking for a reason not to. We just have to put together the strongest case we can, which is why we’re on this call.”

“Right,” Svetlana says. “You’re going to help him prove—?”

“Well-founded fear of future persecution,” the lawyer recites. “That’s built on a combination of general context and personal testimony. I have a file of news coverage that’s contributed to past cases. I can walk Ilya through writing his statement of past persecution—any assaults or arrests, assaults especially that involved police reports or medical attention. Documentation of injury tends to be very compelling, if you happen to have taken pictures.”

Svetlana glances at him, as much a question as a cue to speak.

“There is nothing,” Ilya says. “No past persecution. I always was very careful.”

Does it mean she wasn’t sure? Is she wondering whether something ever happened to him, knowing he wouldn’t have told her? All his teenage bruises were from hockey, but it occurs to him she can’t know that for certain. Excepting that she always knows everything.

A pause on the line. “I see. Okay. That makes sense, obviously, lack of evidence of persecution because you were protecting yourself from persecution. Ironic, right?”

“Is it going to be a problem?” Svetlana says.

“No. It’s just less straightforward. The whole thing is still about future persecution. We’re just, instead of saying what happened before can happen again, we’re proving it can happen in the future even though it hasn’t happened before.”

Because it hasn’t happened before, Ilya thinks, but he can’t put the English together fast enough.

“Of course it can happen in the future. Violence is basically state-sanctioned there.”

“That’s not the concern. A ruling last year pretty well established Russian governmental inability or unwillingness to protect LGBT citizens from persecution. The concern is proving Ilya is at significant risk of targeting in the first place.”

“He’s got plenty of death threats,” Svetlana offers. “Graphic.”

“I did a little searching. He’s got plenty of death threats in English, too.”

Svetlana pauses, frowns at the phone. “Yes…?”

“They’re going to want to hear something a bit more… a bit more Russian.”

“More Russian.”

“Yeah. More colorful. Or actually, if you can prove any of the threats are serious and connected to one of the active hate groups, Occupy Pedophilia, that kind of thing, that would help.”

“We’ll look at that,” Svetlana says, typing again. “What about his fame? Does being a recognizable high-profile figure do anything for him?”

“Maybe. We’d have to prove his status contributes greater risk than insulation, since there are LGBT celebrities in Russia.”

Not that many.

“It’s different for me,” Ilya says. “I am not Moiseev. I am sports celebrity. It is like, betrayal.”

“Right,” says the lawyer, not sounding totally confident. “There are a couple people I’ll reach out to about that, about the notoriety angle. I just think it’ll be hard to prove, but leave no stone unturned and all that. I think looking for threats from hate groups and from anyone you know personally could give us something to work with, though, both in degree of danger and specificity of what you risk facing.”

Ilya’s not sure what he risks facing. Going back to Russia is so out of the question that it hadn’t occurred to him before today that anyone might think otherwise. He doesn’t know what would happen. Anything. Everything. It’s not a train of thought he seeks out.

He knows it wouldn’t be instant death as soon as he stepped off the plane. He has a nebulous idea of permanent injury and sequestration. The not knowing is part of it. Along with it, the helplessness. His overwhelming image is of being in a whitewashed cell, or facedown on the sidewalk or in the woods, thinking that he should have known better than to risk it.

“What about just getting a green card through his work visa?” Svetlana says, tapping her fingernails on the countertop. “Would that actually be more certain?”

“Green card from a P-1A? It’s possible, I guess, but I wouldn’t call it certain. And, not exactly my expertise, but you’d probably be looking at exceptional ability. My impression was that you’re seeking residency options independent of athletic condition.”

“Never mind, then. Asylum is the most certain, then, in your opinion?”

“Well, technically, marriage is the most certain. Conditional residency, minimum two years, maximum two years, done, permanent residency, easy peasy. To be serious, though, I do think you still have a good case. It’s not as clean-cut as you want going into this, but I want you to know we haven’t seen any gay Russians full-out rejected. If they haven’t been granted asylum, it’s because it’s still pending or they’re waiting to appeal. No one’s been deported.”

Svetlana says they’ll talk it over and hangs up. She sighs in a measured, pointed way and closes her laptop. Licks the last of her coffee out of the cup.

“You look like shit,” she says. “I watched on Tuesday. I’m surprised they’re letting you on the ice.”

Ilya shrugs. “It was nothing lasting.”

“Just don’t telegraph when you’re out there. You’ve been slouching right the whole call. Buffalo defense will target that kind of thing. Pity about that trade, you could use a proper enforcer this year.”

“You said he was dead weight right up until we were lifting the cup. You said it was an embarrassment for him to get a cup win on the technicality of happening to be on the team.”

“Because there were better trades for a cup run, if Morrison had been willing to take a risk. Just because it was obviously your year doesn’t mean he should’ve played conservatively. This year that’s exactly what you need to do. Anyway.” She stuffs the computer in her tote and gets up. “Good luck tonight, get some rest, et cetera. I’ll send you the notes later.”

—

Don’t think about the asylum stuff, Svetlana told him before she left. On the plane, it’s hard not to. He knows there are death threats. Some of the texts are death threats, though he only reads the previews. People have been sending death threats about Ilya beating their teams, or losing but denying them a shutout, about injuring their favorite players, since before he made it to the NHL. Of course, they’re not funny now. For eight days he’s been doing a faultless job of not looking. What does ‘graphic’ mean? How graphic? How many? How serious? He tries to think about Colorado but they’re hardly distracting. He could think about Hollander but he doesn’t want to get hard on the team plane. He suspects it’s only a matter of time before he looks. How graphic?

How tangled up, that his ability to stay here is less certain than his inability to go home. Now he has to fight hard for residency, and probably eventually citizenship, that he doesn’t truly want. He loves living in America, but he thought he’d keep going back and forth, to the extent he thought about it at all. He never expected to die here, or at least not grow old. Certainly not be buried here.

How graphic?

He tunes into the conversation across the aisle. Feller’s girlfriend broke up with him when he was home for Thanksgiving. He’s slumped all the way forward onto the table.

“Two-and-a-half months long distance,” he groans. “We were together for two years, and that’s all it took.”

“At least she had the decency to wait and do it in person,” Cadyn says. He pats his back. “Phone breakups suck ass.”

Dubek waves a hand. “Nah, she kept you tied down for months when she could’ve set you free. It’s cruel to wait.”

“Not true, he was not totally tied down. We got him to hook up with that girl at the Carolina preseason, remember?” St-Simon says.

“Oh, we did. Good thing you didn’t save yourself for her then, since she was going to do this to you all along. What does she expect?”

“She was probably sleeping around, too. What a whore. Fuck her, a bachelor is the only way to start your professional career.”

“Yes, now we get to show you real clubbing,” Ilya says, leaning over his armrest. “You should have great sex every night you want. We get you two girls, make up for lost time.” He likes that phrase, ‘lost time,’ more poetic than English usually allows.

Marlow raised an imaginary glass in a toast. “Tomorrow you can beat up Colorado about it, Fellah, tonight we’re getting you laid.”

“I just want to lay in a puddle,” Feller says into the table.

“No, come on, it’ll make you feel better,” Dubek says. “We’ll find you a real hottie. I had this one girl last time we were in Denver—not that you should settle for seconds, but—she was—hold on I’ll show you.” He thumbs through his phone.

St-Simon peers over his shoulder and snorts. “You look like ass in that photo. Crop yourself out.”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m telling you because I love you. Imagine that it gets out. You do not want to look like that on the internet.”

“Chill, dude, no one has it.”

Connors’s head snaps toward Ilya. He gets out, “Actually, though, how did—” before Marlow elbows him into silence.

Ilya looks back and forth between them. Connors fusses with his tie like he was never about to say something. Marlow seems to be trying for a blank look.

This is about the video, he realizes. They’re trying to avoid it, and probably have been all week. They think he doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Ask,” he says.

“Do you know how it got leaked? Or who did it?”

The other table is listening too now.

“I did not try to find out.”

“There’s not an investigation or something?” Marlow says.

“Investigation would be in Russia. So, maybe. I did not contact.”

“You don’t want to press charges? I want to see whoever did this fucking destroyed, that shit’s vile.”

Ilya shrugs his head and says what he and Svetlana came up with. “It already happened. It’s over now. It would just mean more attention.”

The guys groan their agreement.

There’s a feeling in Ilya’s stomach that won’t settle. He’s aware covering for Sasha for this is not very distant from Sasha’s own excuses about various ex lovers. But also, it’s so distant. It’s nothing like that. He wants to come loudly to his defense. If they knew it was Sasha—if they knew Sasha—they wouldn’t jump to ‘vile.’ They’d understand there are extenuating circumstances. Ilya can’t defend him without exposing him.

—

Early in the second period against Chicago, a defenseman catches Ilya’s foot in his check. They both go down. Ilya gasps with his cheek to the ice for a moment, then he gets up and wobbles to the bench by grace of his ankle hurting too much to feel. The defenseman gets a game misconduct; once they get his skate off, Ilya has to be helped to the dressing room.

He’s out for the last game of the road trip. They win anyway because St. Louis is shit this year. The call up flies back with them. Ilya should be doing more to incorporate him into the group, even if it’s only for one to two more games. He is, after all, the captain. His teammates promise Colorado and Chicago are both getting brawls next time they play.

He wonders about his father, who hasn’t called again. He’s never wanted his father to call before, but he wants it now as much as he dreads it. As long as his brother isn’t texting, it’s his only point of contact. He wants to know that they’re okay. His father will only call when he’s not okay, though, and he shouldn’t want that. No calls is good. No news is good news. How bad will things have to get before his brother reaches out?

Marlow asks if he’s really good to drive himself home and Ilya can’t even think of a retort so he doesn’t respond at all.

The living room lights are on, glowing on the thin snow. Svetlana texted that she’s come over. Because he has to be fucking babied. Ilya limps to the door.

He finds her on the couch, legs tucked up, back straight. He can’t read her face at all.

He leans his weight against the doorway.

“I’ll do it,” she says.

Ilya waits, but that’s supposed to be enough. “Do what?” he says.

“Marry you.”

He keeps his expression flat, squashes down his unforgivable relief. If she weren’t saying it like eating a stone, like she’s facing down the Shtyki.

“You don’t have to,” he says.

“I know I don’t have to. But look at you. You’re hardly standing.”

He evens out his weight, which sends a spike of pain up his leg.

“One of these fuckers could take you off the ice for good.”

“The lawyer said they wouldn’t deport me while I have an asylum case pending.”

“I was on the call, too,” Svetlana says. She shakes her head. “It doesn’t feel like enough. I want to know that you’re safe.”

Ilya thinks that’s something of a fantasy.

“It looks good. We’ve known each other since we were kids, I’m at your house all the time, we fuck. We’d ace the interview.”

Because he feels he has to try every argument, he says, “And what about home? Your father?”

“We’ll elope, obviously.” Her voice isn’t sharp enough to carry through the humor. “We can do a courthouse wedding. I doubt the Russian authorities care enough to monitor Boston’s marriage records. I don’t think it would really change anything there, except to my family.”

Ilya searches for another problem. He can’t let her do this for him.

“We’ll just be quiet about it. The fewer people know, the better, anyway.”

That stings, which is a reassurance. He latches onto it. “Okay, then,” he says. “During Christmas break?”

“I’ll check the schedule.” She straightens her shoulders and gives him that look again. He might never get used to somber Svetlana. “So we’re absolutely on the same page, this is only for your green card. And taxes.”

“Of course.” Is that what this is about?

Svetlana nods to herself. “But you still have to get me a ring,” she says.

He goes over and sits next to her.

—

Ilya’s body is tough and always has been; by Friday he’s playing again and when he crawls out of bed on Saturday to piss, the pain in his ankle isn’t that much worse than the general soreness of muscles well-used. As long as he doesn’t cough, or sneeze, or laugh, his ribs don’t even hurt either.

In boxers and his slides he fries eggs and scrolls through the notifications that have built up overnight. The texts from unknown numbers have reached a slow, reliable frequency. The emails, he’s discovered, he can ignore until his publicist makes him read and decide something about them. He sees Jane and 2:43 a.m. and his stomach jitters. He scrambles to open the message.

Jane: We’re done with this, not worth the risk. It was fun

It feels like a palm to the nose. He’s stuck for a moment. His throat is stuck. He feels around for the knob and turns the burner off because he cannot burn the fucking pan again. Eyes still on his phone. Of course, he thinks. He should have been expecting this.

He runs over the message again, looking for the gap, whatever space Hollander has left for him to pry open and change his mind, but doesn’t find one. Of course. His ears are roaring.

Hollander’s right that it’s not worth it. What are they losing, really? Five hookups over the past four years, some sexting, a lot of jerking off to the sexting and the hookups and what he was planning for them to do next. It’s barely a choice. Of course it’s too dangerous now. Because of him. It was always going to end. Face burning, he sends, ok. He knew it was always going to end. There’s nothing to care about losing because it was, by necessity, just really hot sex. Too much of a risk now for nothing. He shouldn’t feel this bad. He feels so bad. All he can hear is his pulse.

It’s just that if he’d known it was the last time, he would have gone a little easier on the couch so they could have had a third round in the shower. Or he would have gone harder, so Hollander would have felt him as long as possible after. He has to go to practice.

Chapter 4

KG: Hi Scott, I know we said low contact for a while but I’ve been wanting to check in about what’s going on. I’m here if you need someone to talk to. No obligation to respond if not

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

I’d like to say this is late because it’s particularly long or took extra research but it’s not. It’s just late, it’ll happen again. I wasn't satisfied with it and needed to give it more time and it was extremely worth it.

UPDATE 5/30 ugh sorry yall i am working away at the next chapter. everything keeps happening...

Ilya drives home on Sunday night (a loss) with his hair still wet, running into his ears. The Bears are keeping him on media availability as normal, every couple games, like he agreed they should. The questions have not stopped. They throw in two, and now three, questions about the game first, as if to get him comfortable, and then it’s back to his coming out statement, and his opinions on Russian policy, and whether he thinks the You Can Play initiative is making a difference. Ilya doesn’t have anything to say about his coming out statement: Chrisa wrote it, he tried to add a flag to be obnoxious but there wasn’t one, so he put the hearts instead. And cut a sentence about appreciation. There’s nothing about Russian politics that he wants to tell them. He hasn’t really paid attention to You Can Play. Obviously he can play. He’s getting very good at reciting non-answers. 

And really, Ilya would rather do press than not, since someone has to, and all the questions will be about him anyway, he might as well be the one answering.

He feels squeezed like a sponge from the game. Tired to the bone, and restless. He has a new array of bruises on his thigh and obliques. He shifts in his seat, squints through the sleet at a red light. He smacks the windshield wipers on. Smacks the center console.

But he’s been feeling like shit since before the game. It lurks in him, churning, simmering. He couldn’t produce the reassuring words he’s supposed to after a loss.

Of course Hollander would call it off. Of course he should. Here, apparently, is the limit of what Ilya can make him do. To be seen together is too massive a risk. Before, the league’s total lack of imagination gave them a cushion; now that everyone knows Ilya would take a dick as soon as anything else, take to it enthusiastically, their minds would go only one place, and they’d be right. Hollander is smart to end it now. Smart and disciplined, unlike Ilya, who never even thought of it and might not have changed anything if he had. Of course Hollander would have to step up and make the decision for both of them. It’s just that he didn’t expect it of him. He thought Hollander was deeper in it than himself. Apparently not.

The light turns. The car ahead of him doesn’t move, so he slams on the horn. The driver sticks a hand out the window to gesture at him as, finally, the car creeps forward. At this rate—at night, with the sleet, with this cockroach in front of him—his hair will be dry by the time he gets home.

—

The last half hour of practice happens without him. The trainers are taking what they predict will be their last look at his ankle while LeClaire builds four minutes of power play that doesn’t involve Ilya at all, in case, as is starting to happen, the penalty he draws takes him out of the game.

He’s the best by a bigger margin on the kill, anyway.

When he left the ice, Varkov was pulling Feller to a corner, teaching him how to balance against his own hand clutched in a jersey to throw a punch right. Varkov doesn’t fight as often as he might, but he’s been in the league long enough for infamy and a twenty-minute highlights compilation. Varkov hulks and Feller is taller, still growing into his limbs. He’ll train him up as a proper heavyweight. Hopefully keep him more than an enforcer at the same time. Before Ilya overshadowed it all, their rookie-vet defense pair storyline was one of the better this season.

The trainer pushes the ball of Ilya’s foot up toward his shin. Presses behind his ankle.

“How’s that?”

“Good,” Ilya says, though actually it twinges a little still. He stares at the ceiling.

The trainer can tell. “Range of motion is back to normal, at least.”

Most of the team, by the end of the season, will be able to add competent fighting to their resumes. He’s giving them plenty of practice. He can’t help the little spark he gets when one of them skates up to whoever has just knocked him flat or slashed him too many times out of view of the referees. Even as he wants to say he can take care of himself. Even as he knows it’s the expectation, that it would be shameful of them not to. Any number of his teammates might be defending him without actually caring at all, because it’s what you do.

He can’t tell. It’s been eating at him. He knows Marlow and Connors have his back. He thinks a lot of them are pretty comfortable, or at least neutral. He can list off Varkov, St-Simon, Carmichael, who seem to be taking it well. Feller is impressionable enough, passed between Connors and Varkov’s supervision, not to cause problems, and Cadyn does whatever Feller does. But you can never really rely on things like that. 

They’d told him Johansson, Kane, Sebbin. He’s been thinking about that for almost two weeks. He would not have picked them out as the most resistant, which is troubling. Ilya should have noticed. He hasn’t been paying close enough attention. But maybe it’s only that he expects all of them to be resistant. The backup he’s getting still doesn’t make sense. It’s far from convenient. No one is spared in the chirps or press, or from what he hears, on the internet.

Good thing he’s the best. But once he’s not, once he’s out more games than he’s on, once they nail the new power play and they’re not counting on him for the next cup. He won’t be worth it forever.

“Okay,” the trainer says at last, patting his shin. “You’re good to go. Keep icing it after games, please, for a few days. And let us know if you don’t notice any improvement.”

Ilya grunts and gets up.

The rest of the guys get to the dressing room at the same time he does, laughing and elbowing. Sebbin right in the middle of it. Holding his tongue.

“How’s the foot, cap?” Kovalev says. “Can we count on you for Montreal?”

Three days. The flip Ilya’s stomach does isn’t the fun kind.

Dubek whips Kovalev’s crotch with his t-shirt. “We have a whole-ass other game first, dimwit. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“We have a game against Tampa, no one fucking cares. Top priority: revenge on Montreal for ruining our sweep.”

Hammersmith locks his fingers in Dubek’s hair and shakes him gently. “Haven’t washed all the West Coast off you yet,” he says. “You’re a Bear now, all you care about is beating Montreal. November was a shame and a pity and we’re cutting their throats about it on Thursday. We’re fucking them dead.”

“Down their throats and up their asses,” Carmichael recites cheerfully.

That was more or less Ilya’s plan for Hollander. He feels sick. Stupid of him to expect it.

“Roz? Foot?” Marlow says.

“Foot is fine,” Ilya snaps. He wiggles it in the air. “Foot is better than half of you assholes, all by itself. Montreal will not know what hit them,” he adds, which he knows is only tepidly, mechanically inspiring. 

Marlow rubs Ilya’s shoulder. “Thank fucking god,” he says anyway. “You’ve been released, then? Vicky wants to check out this new place his girlfriend found.”

“You will report back this place. I am busy already.”

“Busy doing fucking what? Our afternoon’s wide open.”

“Wide open, so I make plans.” Ilya waves his hand. “Secret captain business. I cannot do fucking lunch date.”

“Okay,” Marlow says.

Ilya expects him to say something else but he scoops up his bag and walks out. There he goes, making Marlow leave. There Marlow goes, leaving.

He shoves his dress shoes on and laces them in quick jerks.

“Getting snazzy, Roz,” someone says.

“It’s called taste,” Ilya says.

The truth is that he does have plans, and Svetlana gave him a dress code. 

He bodies the exterior door and drives halfway home, gets on I-95 South.

The parking lot is empty when he gets there. Cracked and patched and dwarfing the building itself, an unpromising white cube in what’s only one step removed from a strip mall. A row of short, tastefully bare saplings.

He bounces his leg against the footwell. Where is she? He’d like to get out and have a cigarette while he waits but he suspects she’d scold him for going in smelling like it. That’s the problem with America, not enough people smoke. They notice it on you and their faces twitch like they’ve discovered a dirty secret. Back home everything smells a little like cigarettes. No one can tell and no one cares, anyway.

Svetlana pulls into the lot and parks two spots over. She snaps shut her sunglasses as she gets out of the car and tucks them into her purse.

“This is the place? Really?” Ilya says.

“Who did all the research?”

Like she would have trusted anything he came up with. “There’s a fucking bow on it.”

“I’m aware,” she says, short.

“What are we going to say? Hard to keep it quiet if tomorrow it’s ‘Rozanov spotted ring shopping’ all over the magazines.”

“That’s why we’re in fucking Burlington on a Monday afternoon. I just told them my boyfriend wants to propose but I’m picky and want to choose the ring, and you’re my friend who’s helping me decide.”

Which is a lie every which way. Svetlana rejects his stylistic opinion as often as she accepts it. Ilya’s not sure what he’s doing here, actually, but he’s not about to ask.

“And when I pay?”

“We’re not buying it today. I’ll say I have a joint account or something. That was going to be a problem no matter what.”

She adjusts her hair and leads him to the door. Their reflections flash in the glass before she opens it.

There’s a doorman, at least, in a bow tie. Behind him, arcs of glass cases stretch across a thin geometric carpet.

Their sales associate sweeps forward to greet them and lead them to a counter. There’s a preliminary array of rings out on a little lined tray, selected, he gathers, based on an email exchange.

Ilya’s eyes have caught on a shining backdrop, Rolex green with the little crown, set in the far wall. This place is classy enough not to have promotional photos, but he can see Hollander’s anyway: suit with no tie so Ilya wants to stick his face in his collar, looking to the side, hand in his pocket with the watch just showing. Looking suaver than he ever has in real life. The display gleams under its track light. Ilya feels it in his groin.

Hollander’s smile when Ilya teased him about it, Mr Rolex, even as he told him to fuck off.

He forces his attention back to the counter. 

Svetlana is touching his arm and saying, “This is my friend, I apologize for his very poor English.”

Okay. So he doesn’t speak English. What is she trying to do?

“Thoughts?” Svetlana says in Russian, pressing her fingers into the velvet on either side of a band.

The sales associate has on a blank standby smile.

“You only wear gold,” Ilya says.

“Gold engagement rings are garish.”

“What about your ring with the rubies?”

“You mean my mom’s ring? I don’t want another.”

An early-on anniversary present from her father, which Svetlana wheedled possession of when they were sixteen. If Ilya could give her his mother’s engagement ring, would she accept it? But he can’t. It lives on his brother’s wife’s finger because he married first. I’m surprised your father didn’t reuse it for Polina, Svetlana had said, and Ilya had been mad for a week even though she was right.

“You’re never going to wear it anyway,” he grumbles. She wouldn’t let people believe she’s under anyone’s claim.

She shrugs. “Isn’t that hot? To have it and leave it at home? How about this one?”

“You’re kidding, right? It’s hideous.”

“It has to have something on the band, though,” Svetlana says. She nudges another and clicks her tongue. “Fanciful. Contemporary designs have no depth.”

“What about ‘vintage inspired?’” He translates so the sales agent won’t pick it up.

“Trying to be something it’s not. This one’s nice, but it’s only three thousand dollars…”

He tries to see what she sees in it. More traditional than he thought she’d go for, but maybe she wants that, a ring her family would nod approvingly at. To make up for marrying Ilya? Not that they’re ever going to know. Not that she ever shows signs of caring what they think. She’s always telling Ilya not to.

“What about this one?” he says.

“Too thin, it looks like it’s about to fall over. And too…” She touches a finger to her bottom lip, one of her stalling-for-time gestures. It’s supposed to look casual. “Too wag-y,” she mumbles.

St-Simon’s fiancée’s does look similar, he supposes.

“That one’s from our new partnership,” the associate says in English.

Svetlana smiles at her meaninglessly and moves on. “Why is this one twelve thousand dollars?”

“It’s vintage Tiffany,” Ilya says.

“It doesn’t look Tiffany. It should look it. And I don’t want someone else’s ring. It should be about me.”

“You don’t want a new design because the styles are bad, you don’t want vintage-style because it’s try-hard, you don’t want actual vintage. You know you can design your own, right?”

“Too involved,” she says, eyes still on the tray. Then, serious, “I’m not going to be one.” 

A wag. 

“Obviously,” Ilya says.

“Including abstractly.”

“I know.”

The silence stretches out. Then she says, “I like this one.”

He gives it a fair eye. “It looks like an Easter loaf.” After he says it, he supposes it might not be a criticism.

“What do you have similar to this one?” Svetlana says to the associate, who zips away to oblige.

While she’s gone, Svetlana reaches over and gives Ilya’s wrist a squeeze and a little rub. 

Ilya stands totally still. Does she want him to lean into it, or would she let go? He doesn’t want her to stop. The display cases might not be blocking them from the doorman’s view, but if she isn’t worrying about that, neither is he.

The associate comes back with a stack of shallow blue boxes and Svetlana lets go. God forbid she see and think there’s something between them, which there’s not, or guess that they’re the ones getting married, which they are. They’re ridiculous.

“Sometimes you don’t find what you’re looking for first try,” the associate says gently as she slips off the lids. “I also have binders of our selection at other locations.”

No, Svetlana wants the perfect ring and she wants to get it over with. She leans over the boxes only for a moment before plucking one out. “What do you think?”

It does look like the average of the seven in the tray. He likes it, which he doesn’t think matters. He can’t tell what she’s trying to get from him. Are you asking your green card fiancé or your best friend or your judgy friend you like to shop with? he wants to ask. He says, “It’s up to you.”

Wrong answer. She bites her lips together and he knows he has disheartened her.

“It’s good,” Ilya blurts. “It looks good. It’s like, stately, but fun.”

“You think?” She holds it up next to her face. “Mmm, you think I should go for stately?” She makes herself frown, but can’t hold it and giggles. Ilya relaxes. He feels high on achievement.

“I think you can make stately glamorous,” he says. Is that too far? “Versus straight glamorous, which is low-hanging fruit.”

“Well, in that case.”

She turns to the associate to negotiate resizing and financing, and suddenly it’s real again. The buzz is gone. That’s Svetlana’s engagement ring for the engagement she has with him. They are going to get married. She’s gone hard again too.

He wonders if she chose such an expensive ring because she deserves it, or if it’s her way of trying to make him feel that he’s paying her back for the favor of marrying him. As if a ring could cover that.

They walk past the Rolex display, which is screaming at him, back to their cars. He feels like he can sense it even once they’re out of the store.

Svetlana stops between their cars. “Maybe we should just call it a day,” she says. The itinerary—pick a pair of wedding bands out at the antique market. Svetlana said this way they get the real elopement experience. The images Ilya has of elopement involve running away in the middle of the night by train or speeding car.

“Okay,” Ilya says. “Or we could be done with it.”

“Okay. Maybe I just pick. Since we only need them for five minutes.”

“Should I not come along?”

“No, come. It’ll just be quick. Whatever I can find.”

He follows Svetlana’s car onto the ramp and wonders if anyone has ever had less idea what they’re doing than them.

—

He gives her space at the market. Or he’s giving himself space. He turns an idle circle around the room. His bruises are itching like crazy. French and English tableware, frames probably worth more without the paintings in them, a slick, heavy-looking bureau. He traces the decorative edge of one of the frames, a shadowy full-length portrait laid on its side. He bets Shane would have opinions about a place like this. It would have been fun to bring him, not that that was the kind of thing they did. 

For a moment the ludicrous image of him and Shane picking out second-hand rings for a secret courthouse wedding comes into his mind. He shoves it away.

Around a spindly inlaid table are eight slouched dining chairs. The upholstery on the seats is different, the tilted backs are carved differently, but they are so, so much like the ones in the gloomy dining room back home.

He glances around and crosses to the setup. He rubs his palm over the glossy wood. A feeling bulges in his chest.

He doesn’t know if they’re actually Russian. The ones at home might not be Russian. It doesn’t matter.

Ilya is stuck there looking at the chairs. He wants to ask about them. He doesn’t want Svetlana to watch him ask about them. 

But she’s inevitably going to see them, she’s always at his house lately, they’re going to share an address soon, if on paper only. He cannot hide the chairs from Svetlana. He trudges past her to the desk, ears roaring.

The set is thirty-two thousand dollars. They’re mahogany, the seats are—Ilya waves the guy with the clipboard away, he’s getting them already, he doesn’t need convincing. They have a delivery service, if he just puts his address here. He does.

Svetlana’s footsteps come up the narrow aisle and stop. If she says anything about the chairs he thinks he’ll die. She waits with her arms folded.

At home he paces along the windows. He stacks up his old chairs and pushes them to the corner. He’ll need to get rid of them. No, he’ll hold onto them for team events, he’s not trusting anyone on the new ones, except for Svetlana. (Shane would have been careful.) Maybe he’ll use the old ones outside.

The delivery truck pulls up late in the afternoon. The snow melted before Ilya could get around to setting up the clearing service, except for a pair of compacted ruts leading down to the street. They bring the chairs in one by one—“Leave them,” he says, waving at the hall, “I will set them.”—and he signs and they leave and he’s alone with his chairs.

He approaches them slowly, stiffly. He kneels next to one of the armchairs and puts his nose to the junction of the arm and stile. 

The varnish smells exactly like at home. Sweet, dusty. He breathes and breathes.

—

Ilya is on pregame media tonight. He’s always on media against Hollander. He stands in front of his stall. They adjust the camera, Marlow just out of frame untangling his pants.

“So, rematch against Montreal, how’s the team feeling? Should we be expecting a high-energy game?” one of the cluster says.

He needs to see Hollander, he needs not to. He fried his eggs this morning feeling like he was going to rattle out of his skin. He turned up the heat because he was itching to get to the rink, get around people, and broke the spatula scraping bits of burnt egg out of the pan. The adrenaline has been going all day. He went too hard at practice; nothing’s ever enough for him. Connors had to tell him to chill out on the ERG, man, they need him to play tonight. Ilya has no hold on himself. He didn’t sleep a wink in the afternoon. He fought with his suit. Feverish grin for the walk-in. 

Last night he couldn’t stop thinking about it—they’re in the air—they’ve landed—he’s getting ready to sleep—he texted Svetlana and ate her out on the couch, and after she came she said, “You didn’t really enjoy that.” She didn’t comment on the chairs. Ilya didn’t know if he wanted her to stay over or not, so he asked and she said it would be better for her to go, and as soon as he was alone again he was as tense and nauseous as before. He hadn’t expected to feel this awful. Considering how bad he was feeling already. He’s let himself be so much more affected than he thought. He can’t really be surprised, though; he’s never able to help himself.

“Team feels good,” Ilya says. “Energy, yes. The boys always want to play Montreal.”

“Even after your loss against them last month? Especially after?”

“It was a fluke last time, we forgot already.” He looks from one reporter to another. Behind them, Kohn crawls after his tape that has rolled away.

“It’s been three weeks since your coming out, how would you say your game and Boston’s game have changed?”

Ilya shrugs. “I would not say. We played hard before, we play hard now.”

“In the games you’ve played since coming out, though, hits against you have increased markedly,” the same reporter says. “Any comment?”

“No.” Bad to hear it laid out like that. Satisfying, too, though. “Sounds like you have the statistics already.” He gestures to the next microphone.

“Boston in general stumbled a bit in November, what are you doing to get back on track?”

‘Stumble’ is a strong word, in Ilya’s opinion. They’re still doing well. And none of it is in their control. It doesn’t matter how great they play when half their games are as physical as playoffs. The guys are handling the frustration better than they should have to. “We practice, we play the next game.”

“And what do you think of your chances against the Voyageurs, who had an extremely strong start to the season and have similarly hit a shaky patch lately?”

“I think our chances are good.”

“How are you approaching the game? Anything in particular you’ve been planning?”

“Win. But that is not very particular. You, yes?”

“Any words for Shane Hollander today?”

He clenches his jaw. Any words. Any words? “No,” he says. His head is buzzing.

He wants to tell him to change his mind. Say, it’s worth it. Absolutely not. He doesn’t want to say anything. He wants not to care.

The microphone comes back to him.

“Sorry, repeat?” he says.

“What did it mean for you to represent Russia in Sochi this year? Did you feel conflicted? Scared?”

This again. “Not conflicted,” he says, which is not totally true. “I am proud to be Russian and to represent Russians. Other questions about the game?—Okay, thank you.”

The crew shuffles around to get a clip from Johansson.

Ilya gets on his shoulder pads and struggles into his jersey. He feels hot. He’s about to see him. He does up his laces, grabs his gloves. If he’s this bad already, what about on the ice? He feels queasy imagining it. How is he going to be when he sees him? How is Hollander going to be? He takes his spot next to Marlow as they collect in the tunnel. Marlow bumps his shoulder. Ilya remembers to bump him back.

He hits the butt of his stick against the carpet. He tries to rest against the wall but pushes right back off again. 

He just needs to see his face. He needs to see it on his face, and then—what? He just needs to see it. 

“Someone’s ready for Montreal today,” Marlow says. “I guess we don’t have to worry about Hollander tonight, huh?”

Ilya jerks out a laugh. He wants to scream.

The announcer’s voice comes murkily down from the rink and they file out for warmups.

Ilya squints against the glare at the group of white Montreal helmets. He misses a fistbump as he steps onto the ice.

There’s Hollander, taking the lap he always does. Ilya’s heart goes straight to his mouth. 

Hollander glides behind the net. Ilya skates slowly backward to stay facing him, but he doesn’t meet Ilya’s gaze. He loops back around for a puck and shoots into the empty net without ever looking past the center line. Ilya stops. Not even for a second?

“Rozy?” Connors says, drifting by in a curve.

Ilya follows him back to the slot for their own routine. He glances over his shoulder between shots. Hollander is never looking back. His heart pounds.

Connors says something to him, he doesn’t catch it, and gives him a concluding stick tap. Ilya is too taut to move.

The countdown clock has never moved so slowly. Hollander still won’t look. Burning, Ilya does his stretches. He stares at his gloves on his stick on the ice. Glances across the rink. Stares at his stick.

Montreal begins to gather at the boards. Ilya gets up and goes to the door. Varkov goes, and then Marlow, and finally Ilya steps off.

Hollander didn’t look at him once.

He won’t even look at him. His eyes slip right past. And when they face off? he wonders while LeClaire gives his speech. Both their lines are starting, of course.

The team turns to him for his addition. “Okay, it’s Montreal,” is all he comes up with. “You know what to do.”

They make barking and growling sounds as they line up again. Ilya is supposed to chime in but can’t.

The lights have been dimmed. Ilya zips out when his turn comes, does a couple of circles, and stands on the blue line. He holds his shoulders straight for both anthems. He watches Hollander out of the corner of his eye, his sure, familiar posture. The lights come up.

He slides over to the faceoff dot.

Hollander skates up in slow, even strides, eyes fixed on the referee and then the ice. He leans down. He’s so near.

Ilya takes in his jaw, his mouth, the practiced set of his stance, and to his dismay feels a spike of arousal. All this, and his first thought is still how much he wants to fuck him. His stomach churns with it.

He crouches as well. He stares at Hollander’s face. His eyelids don’t twitch up for even a moment. Like Ilya isn’t there, like he’s facing off empty ice.

Ilya drops a breath. The referee gestures. He gets his stick to the ice only by reflex. He barely registers the puck before Hollander swipes it away.

One of Montreal’s defensemen gets it and bumps it forward to the left wing. Feller is already on him. 

Hollander races past Ilya’s shoulder. He chases after him, but he gets the pass and swipes it across before Ilya catches up.

The tip of Varkov’s blade comes out and deflects the puck behind the net. Ilya and Hollander both skid and change direction. Feller has gotten to it. His eyes meet Ilya’s for an instant before he passes. 

IIya spins to keep it away from Hollander’s stick. 

The magnet of his presence shifts from one shoulder to the other and he scoops it away anyway. It streaks to a defenseman. Hollander cuts to the circle and the puck comes back. When Ilya’s blade comes down in front of his, he’s already shot.

Oregan bats it away easily. Varkov picks it up, passes to Connors, who gets it out of the zone.

Ilya sprints to take his place in the offense, ears rushing. Marlow has the puck. He dodges past the wing and passes to Ilya. For a moment there’s a lane. Then Hollander’s stick blocking his range. He sends it to Connors instead and goes for the slot.

Hollander is in front of him again. He skates to the side. Varkov passes to him. He arcs around and sees mostly a white blur. He tries to shift, but takes Hollander’s check full in the shoulder. Hollander’s face is set, eyes on the ice. The puck flies over the blue line.

Ilya sees Varkov get control of it. On the other side, LeClaire’s voice. St-Simon’s line is getting up from the bench. He races over and hops the barrier—he can do it without pain again—and sits down heavily. He grabs a water bottle and takes a long squirt.

The audience has a constant chatter going. Marlow bumps his elbow. Ilya hands him the bottle.

“That was a fucking mess,” Marlow says.

Ilya grunts. He was playing like shit. He’s not in it. He’s reeling, seething, stuck.

Hollander will full-body slam him, but not look at him.

He feels LeClaire move along behind the bench and braces. But he doesn’t say anything to Ilya. He probably knows Ilya knows. Ilya will make himself do better.

He watches St-Simon try a few shots as his breathing levels out. The queasy feeling stays. The third line goes on. Montreal’s third swap for their second.

“Okay,” LeClaire says, “Connie, Roz, Marley, go.”

They get up. The puck is skimming away across Montreal’s empty zone. Sebbin glides toward the bench and Ilya jumps down in his place. Marlow gives him a pat and rushes past him for the far side.

Ilya checks Montreal’s right wing as he comes over the blue line and steals the puck. Pass backward to Carmichael, forward to Marlow. Ilya keeps pace with him as he shoulders past a Voyageur into their zone.

A defenseman collides with Marlow and the boards. Marlow stays up, but the puck is gone. Whipping toward the wing.

Ilya dashes for it, races to the slot before Montreal can get in his way. The goalie tenses. Ilya angles himself for the bottom right, lifts the puck at the last moment. The goalie reaches from his knees. The puck just glances off his glove.

Ilya loops behind the goal. Connors has gotten the rebound, shoots, gets the rebound again. Too many Voyageurs in the way now.

“Pass—pass—” Ilya calls, and Connors flicks the puck to him. Ilya smacks it up to Carmichael, to Kohn.

The wing barrels over and they scuffle for it against the boards. And then the rest of Montreal’s line is swapping out for Hollander’s. Ilya grits his teeth.

Another Voyageur and Marlow are trying to prod the puck free. Carmichael drifts behind them in the neutral zone.

Ilya and Hollander are right next to each other, waiting. Hollander has to be aware of it, he’s gone tight, but the charge between them is missing.

The puck skips out of the clump toward them. Hollander is on it in a snap. He’s past Ilya, past Carmichael, swerves in front of the goal, swerves again and pushes the puck between Oregan’s leg and the post.

He makes a neat curve away from the boards to exchange pats with his line.

Ilya’s line is back off.

On the bench he tears his gloves off, scrabbles for the water. He squeezes it over his face and wipes it up under his visor. What the fuck, he thinks. He wipes his nose.

LeClaire’s hand on his shoulder. “What was that? What’s up?”

Ilya nods.

“It’s a question, Rozy, something’s going on.” But before Ilya has to come up with an answer, LeClaire is shouting, “Keep it, keep it!” across the ice and he’s moving away down the bench.

Marlow and Connors go on with St-Simon. They come off. Eight minutes left in the period. LeClaire sends him on again.

He steps into a pass from Dubek and ducks around Montreal’s center. A defenseman tries to steal the puck. Ilya shoves him. The defenseman shoves back. Ilya’s foot hits something and he  lands flat on his arms.

The whistle shrieks.

Ilya gets up, wipes snow from his chin.

Marlow’s skates scrape to a stop beside him. He holds him in place with one hand, brushes down his jersey with the other. “Good, cap?” he says.

Ilya tests his ankle. “Good,” he says.

LeClaire is beckoning him to the bench, though. The medics are ready at the door. Ilya makes a show of skating totally normally on both feet. Off comes the skate anyway.

Montreal gets two minutes for tripping. Ilya does up his laces as St-Simon takes the faceoff. The unit swarms Montreal’s zone and twenty seconds later the goal horn blasts. Kane coasts along the bench for his fist bumps.

When Ilya goes on against Hollander again he’s buzzing. He can barely think. Hollander steals the puck from him, and steals it again. He misses a pass from Connors. Hollander’s defenseman gets it and zig-zags to the goal.

Oregan claps his glove down over the puck.

The defenseman shoves between Ilya and Hollander as they glide to the circle. “Slow today, Rozanov,” he says. “Been taking it too hard? Fucking perv. I don’t know why they let you on the ice with us.”

Ilya ought to respond. He’s too muddled. He squats down and loses the faceoff.

The first period ends 1-1. Slouched in his stall, Ilya tosses his helmet between his skates and wipes sweat off his face and out of his collar. He leans his forehead on his fists. St-Simon steps around him to go talk to Montreal’s reporters in French.

He should have been prepared. He didn’t quite believe Hollander was serious, because Ilya is an idiot who can never stop himself from hoping. He didn’t even know he didn’t believe it. 

He does now. Hollander is serious, it’s really over. The towel is limp in Ilya’s hand. His pulse thunders in his ears. He has a searing, surging feeling.

He feels around for his phone. He pulls up their thread, reads the last texts automatically. you like how big it is. more grumpy interviews please. The need is obvious. He’s so fucking stupid.

He deletes the thread. Switches over to contacts, deletes Jane. He jams his helmet back on. 

Okay. He’s done.

LeClaire gives his hype-up: tied after the first period, just need to stay on the puck, stay on the net, get some goals.

“Rozy,” he says, “are you going to play for me this period? Is it worth my time to start you?”

“Yes,” Ilya says.

They march up the tunnel.

Ilya steps onto the ice. He crouches at the center of the Bears logo. The referee’s hand comes out between them and drops the puck and Ilya snaps it to the side.

Marlow scoops it up. He barrels through a check. The defense catches up with him.

Ilya sprints forward, turns in a little circle to get Hollander out of the way, and slips behind Marlow. Marlow passes and pushes in toward the defense. Ilya carries it along the boards to the goal line, pivots, cuts up.

Hollander tries to get the puck away from him. Marlow calls a warning as one of the defensemen appears on his other side. 

Ilya skids to his knees. He whacks the puck between Hollander and the defenseman.

It falls snug against Marlow’s blade. Ilya gets his skates back under him as Marlow races forward and shoots straight to the back of the net. The horn goes off. Marlow roars and slaps the glass.

Ilya wraps an arm around him and Connors. Marlow shakes them both by the helmet. Fourteen seconds into the period.

They line up again for the faceoff. Ilya almost has it, but then Hollander’s stick comes forward and hooks it back.

It doesn’t matter: Connors steals it and takes off toward Montreal. Ilya follows after. Connors passes to him and sprints ahead.

Ilya dodges a check. The Voyageur’s blade smacks his wrist, but the referees don’t catch it. He passes back to Connors.

Connors shoots. The goalie deflects it off his pad. Marlow scoops it up and shoots. 

This time Hollander gets the rebound. Ilya races to him and jams his blade against his. He heaves the puck to Feller.

Feller chips it to Marlow. He one-times it. The goalie clamps it under his pads. The whistle comes.

Ilya’s line switches out.

He rolls his shoulders, stretches his neck. LeClaire tells them that was a good fucking shift. Ilya feels too hollow to really absorb it. He squirts water into his mouth. He feels night-cold at his core.

He contributes a supportive shout when Kovalev pins a Voyageur against the half wall and steals the puck. Bangs his stick when Carmichael drops his gloves after too many hard hits on Ilya. Hollander’s line goes on. LeClaire calls Johansson to the bench and sends Ilya out. He swings his leg over the barrier and hurtles into play.

Boston is up 4-2 when the game runs out. Ilya hops the boards to give Oregan his hug and stands by the door with his hand out as the team files off. Across the ice, Hollander gives his linemates a pat on the arm. He and Ilya both got a goal and an assist. The Bears whoop and holler in the locker room, and LeClaire gives them a round of congratulations.

As he goes into the showers Marlow says, “Bar tonight. We’re having a proper fucking celebration for this one.”

“No exceptions,” Ilya says. He’s starting to feel kind of horrible, heavy in his chest. “I’d better see all your sorry asses in there. We save you a drink if you’re on media.” He shakes his head under the spray.

—

They take up a row of tables in the center of the room. Ilya leans on his elbows, grip loose around his empty glass. The light is low and red, and he can smell the dry smell of the floor. Connors and Kovalev shout and joke on either side of him. He thumbs at the logo on the glass.

It’s really over. It’s over. He’s never going to be with Hollander again. Wow, he thinks, and, fuck.

Hammersmith grips St-Simon’s arm and jostles him and tells him how filthy his goal was.

“Disgusting,” Kovalev says. “You deserve your dick sucked for that. I’ll do it if Amanda doesn’t do her duty.”

Ilya grins. “Big team player, this guy.”

“Hey, you’ve got to be ready to put yourself on the line for the win.”

“Not needed,” St-Simon says. “Amanda takes good care of me.”

Someone has slid a fresh beer in front of Ilya. He takes a gulp.

Of course Hollander never cared about him. As he shouldn’t. He was delusional to worry he was getting too attached. Of course he wouldn’t and didn’t get attached. Good thing, too, because he shouldn’t. How stupid, to think there was anything to resist. It’s been nothing the whole time.

“—best man?” Kovalev is saying.

“He could make us fight for it. Best season, best man.”

“Great. So it would automatically be Roz and we have to sit through whatever batshit speech he comes up with.”

“Okay, obviously I will win, but instead I will choose best man. How about that?” Ilya says. “Hammy, move your arm, Beck barely can touch the table.”

From two tables down, Oregan leans back in his chair to shout to him. Ilya laughs. Marlow gets shots to do with him.

The group dwindles and they migrate to a booth. Ilya sits in the corner and rubs his knuckles back and forth on the table. They get Kovalev to talk to a woman at the bar. He comes back and tells them eighty percent success. It’s time to go. 

Marlow and Ilya share a cab, though they live only vaguely in the same direction. They take turns apologizing to the driver for that. The driver keeps trying to tell them it doesn’t make a difference, a mile’s a mile. Ilya has ended up with both their phones, and squints at their lock screens a minute before he knows which one to hand over. Marlow reaches out and hugs his head when they get to Ilya’s house. What a sap, they’ll see each other in nine hours. God, don’t remind him. And ‘sap’ doesn’t actually have to do with sappy.

Ilya clambers out into his driveway and is blinded by the automatic light. He nails the door code. He chugs a glass of water so he won’t be anyone’s problem tomorrow. One more. He flops at the dining table.

He lets the house tilt for a bit. He still feels charged, roiling. He’s still thinking about Shane. He’s probably too drunk to jerk off.

No: he’s hard.

He rubs his hand over the crotch of his pants. Look at him, about to masturbate about a guy who dumped him who didn’t even dump him because there was nothing to dump, Ilya saw to that. Not in one of the new chairs, though.

One hand on his dick, he finds the light in the bedroom and then the bathroom. The shower for easy cleanup. He kneels and unzips his pants. No lube in here. He cannot possibly stand up again. He scoots across the tiles and gets down the conditioner from its alcove, squirts a cold coconutty puddle of it into his palm.

He thinks about Hollander last time, his cheekbone under Ilya’s thumb, gasping while Ilya pounded him against the couch. He slides his hand up his dick. Hollander, on his own couch, so he’ll remember every time he’s in the room, slack, savoring—fucking Hollander frantically—his hips jerk forward, he speeds up his hand—Hollander bent over the couch, mouth open, whole body lurching under every pump, hot against Ilya’s palm and thighs and dick, he braces his other hand against the tiles and comes.

He pushes his pants and boxers down to his knees and reaches for the shower head. Fumbles with the knob. The water coughs and comes out cold. He washes off his dick and angles the stream at the tiles, cum and conditioner run into the drain. When he bought the house, he had the detachable head swapped in with the loose, hazy idea of Hollander using it. Years ago. Stupid. Now Hollander has never come here, and never will. His knees hurt. Usually he loves jerking off but tonight he pulls himself upright and wobbles to his bed feeling dull and sodden.

—

Ilya gets dressed after practice on Saturday with his tongue tight in his mouth. He rubs his towel over his hair one more time and tosses it in his stall. He finds his phone. Two texts from Svetlana, 24 at 14:00 and Two days for a honeymoon.

“Toronto? I thought Buffalo,” Sebbin says.

“Seb. Those aren’t even in the same country,” Oregan says.

“I know that, but they’re right fucking next to each other. Give me a fucking break.”

“I definitely heard it was a Canadian team. Weird time for them to be shopping, though, right?”

He sends back a thumbs up. Finishes getting on his sweatshirt.

The muddy feeling has not gone away. Oh god, he keeps thinking. Oh god. He thinks it must radiate from him.

He leans to wrestle on his shoes. The chatter goes on above his head. If any of them asked what’s up with him he could snap at them, but they’re not going to, they expect him to be doing shit, given everything. No one knows about Hollander. It’s like it never happened, it might as well not have, as far as the world is concerned. He’s sitting here with this astounding void and no one can even tell it’s going on.

Across the room Cadyn says, “Come on, just say like, hey, what are you up to this week.”

“I don’t know,” says Feller.

“Be fucking serious right now.”

“Fellah,” Ilya says. “Universe gives you a girl who asks to give you her number, and you do not text?”

“I think I’m just not over it yet.”

“This is how you get over it,” Kohn says.

“I just don’t—”

“I can crash at Marley’s for a night if that’s the problem,” Connors says. “Have the place to yourself.”

“Here, give me your phone.” Kohn takes it out of his hands.

Ilya skips out on pizza making, which he forgot was today and does not want to do. He tells them he has to call his lawyer (he doesn’t, but actually, he probably does) and goes home. He sags at the counter.

His transfer has gone through. His father called him again yesterday. Still nothing from his brother after the initial texts, so he wired him a few thousand dollars, in case. He pulls up the highlights from Montreal’s game last night. Hollander is on it three times; he’s watched it that many times already, too. The ache is there, like every time. He had to go find it on the NHL website because he’s still not looking at Twitter. It’s only a matter of time, though, before he gives in and lets himself.

He goes over to smell the chairs again. Slowly they’re changing the scent of the whole house. But they’re at odds with everything, the lights, the fireplace, the black slab of a table.

At home there’d be a tablecloth, he realizes, heavy and with an embroidered edge. Where do you even get good tablecloths? At home they just come from the wardrobe.

At home there would be a wardrobe in the corner.

— 

They lose in overtime in Philadelphia, but at least since it’s an afternoon game they’ll be home in time to meet up at Marlow’s. Ilya is only half out of his gear when Morrison ducks into the locker room and says, “Rozy, can I grab you for a minute?”

The closest conversations pause. He looks to Marlow and Connors, then shrugs his head and gets up. He tries to guess what it’s about this time and comes up blank. He’ll find out soon enough.

In wet socks he follows Morrison down the hall into a conference room. White laminate table, office chairs.

Ilya stands with his shoulders straight. He doesn’t know whether Morrison wants him to sit. Morrison leans against the back of a chair, so Ilya leans against the door. The metal is cold through his top.

“We’ve got a trade for Kane,” Morrison says. “Official as of about ten minutes ago. I just talked to him. Wanted to give you a heads-up before we tell the boys.”

A knot of voices go by in the hallway. “Because it’s about me?” Ilya says.

“Yeah. It is. He wanted a trade. I know that’s pretty shit, but that’s how it’s going to be sometimes. I mean, we’ve had him for three years and he’s been a reliable guy, but when there’s tension, there’s tension. We’re getting Troy Barrett from Toronto. Probably getting to Boston before we do.”

“Toronto like four stitches in my mouth? That Toronto?”

“We were very clear,” Morrison says, hands raised, “there’s not going to be any of that. It would kind of defeat the point, wouldn’t it?”

“He’s so young. And short.” Not that there’s anything to argue about. The trade is done.

Morrison puffs out a breath. “I know. We’re hardly looking for young players right now. But also, he’s got a year and a half on his ELC, so at least we’re getting him dirt cheap. And he plays right wing, so we can move Kove up, or Sebby and put Kove on center. And he’s fast, and he can fight.” Necessary on the Bears now. “When it comes down to it, he’s who we could get. I’d love to have kept Kane, but you don’t want a guy on your team who doesn’t want to be on your team.”

“And Barrett does want?”

“Obviously he doesn’t have any say in it, but his agent was pretty proactive. Put it this way: it’s a rough time to be a Bear right now, but the boys are sticking through, except for the exception. We’ve got a good room. But everyone out there is glad this didn’t happen on their team. If we can find someone who’s able to look past that and fit with the room and remember he’s joining a great fucking team, I’m taking him.”

Ilya bows his head in concession. “Kane in Toronto I don’t look forward, though.”

“Oh, no, Kanie’s going to LA. New backup goalie to Toronto. Technically that means we’ll be playing him sooner, actually. I want to go ask about billeting. I’d love to put him with you, but obviously that wouldn’t look great. I think Mikey was a backup option in September.” He makes a shooing motion and Ilya shuffles away from the door.

—

An hour into the night, and they all keep checking their phones. The same playlist as always. Ilya is lying across the armchair.

“Isn’t he such a brat, though?” Connors says. “I’m not arguing with his points. But remember our preseason?”

“I think fifty-fifty he’s the kind of brat you like when he’s on your team,” Kovalev says.

“I just hope it’s not, you can take the player out of Toronto but you can’t take Toronto out of the player.”

“If it is, we just trade him away again.”

Marlow refreshes his map and says, “They’re almost here.”

Then the buzzer goes and he jumps up to answer it. Ilya climbs into something of a sitting position. The guys on the couch crane their necks. What a fucking welcome, Ilya thinks.

Marlow opens the door. He’s basically as tall as it.

“Hey, boys,” Carmichael says, “look what I found.” He’s got his arm around Troy Barrett’s shoulder in a brand new Bears hoodie. Barrett’s eyes go all over the room, meet Ilya’s only for a second. Hands in his hoodie pocket. Ilya thinks he looks kind of standoffish, kind of nervous. He wonders what exactly Carmichael’s warning ended up entailing.

They shuffle around to make room on the couch. Marlow uncaps a beer and puts it in Barrett’s hand. He hasn’t said anything yet except hey and thank you. This boy is going to be intense.

“So what do we call you?” Marlow says. “Barry? Brett? Bare?”

“Kind of meant to be. Bare,” says Dubek.

“I guess,” Barrett says. He looks at Ilya again, and away.

“You ever get tired of Mikey’s salty ass food, we can talk to him for you,” Oregan says.

“Man, fuck off. It tastes better. I barely cook anyway.”

Barrett takes a long sip and leans forward, arms propped on his knees, into the circle.

Chapter End Notes

This one goes out to ticklefighthockey/saysthemagpie’s Ilya shame thesis. It’s like smelling salts to me

I think I’ve figured out where this is going, which turns out to be where I planned for it to go in the first place but now I’m happier about how it gets there. Technically I have several more chapters before I have to make any decisions, but between my current options of 1 logical conclusion or 2 good story, I’m likely to choose good story. I’m letting you know RIGHT NOW I love a mixed bag ending. Consider yourself promised/warned.

Everyone doing meta in the comments I love you, I’m writing this for you and I’m trying reeaaally hard not to expound in responses.

What elseeee I know cap/captain is usually capitalized when used vocatively, I just like it uncapitalized better so I’m treating it like ‘bro’ and ‘dude’. Don’t trust this as a hockey strategy resource because I don’t understand it at all yet… recently I grasped the concept of a zone entry. The title, since I keep forgetting, is from winter panes by silver rein, which as a whole is a mite melodramatic for this fic, but just the one line is infinitely applicable.

Chapter 6

Chapter Notes

Goodness fucking gracious! Two months! I'm SO sorry y'all. I know I don't owe anyone promptness or whatever, I don't care, I'm saying sorry anyway because I want to.

“Okay trip?” Hammersmith says.

Barrett says, “Fine.”

“How long did you have, did you get to pack any?”

“A bit.”

“Settling in? Did you meet Laura?” An enthusiastic chorus goes around the room.

“Yeah.”

“Laura’s the best,” Kovalev says, “Mikey lucked the fuck out, you’re going to get pampered there. I wish we could all marry her.”

Carmichael shakes his head, grinning. There pass a second, two seconds, three seconds too long without anyone saying anything. Ilya watches Barrett’s face move from a thin smile to a surreptitious glance around the circle to a neutral mid-distance stare.

Finally, Connors says, “I was surprised Toronto gave you up.”

The room stills. This is what they’ve all been wondering about, theorizing about before he arrived.

“Whatever it took,” Barrett says, flat. His eyes are on his hands, rolling his bottle between them. “Goaltending was ass.”

Oregan squints at him. “Did you know it was coming?”

“No.”

“Your line had so much chemistry, though,” Connors tries again. “You and Kent. You’re like a matched pair.”

Barrett shrugs and says, “They’ll give him someone else.”

Either he didn’t notice the question, or the answer is no. Maybe both, Ilya supposes. Or maybe he’s a very slick liar. Ilya doesn’t think so. Liar, but not slick. For what must be the third or fourth time, Barrett chances a look at him, sees that he’s watching him, and looks away.

“Hey,” Dubek says, “first trade’s rough. Every trade’s rough. You get yanked out of your life and plopped down somewhere else away from all your boys because the GM decides he wanted someone else more.”

“Jeez, Beck, you want to go back to California that bad?” Connors says.

“Fuck no, I like my cup. Come on, I’m just saying, this is day one, he can say it’s shit. We won’t get offended.”

Barrett doesn’t say anything, just swigs his beer.

So he doesn’t think it’s shit. He’s glad for the trade, maybe. But he doesn’t want them to know that, or he’d be saying as much.

It’s more than just Boston being a great fucking team. If that were all, it wouldn't occur to him to worry they'd think something else—so there’s a something else he’s worried about.

Not many reasons out there to appreciate being traded to Boston, to Ilya’s team, right now. Ilya glances at his teammates. Are you seeing this? he wants to say, but no one else seems to be having this revelation.

“Well,” says Kohn from the floor, “welcome to the Bears. You’re marked now. Get used to not taking the bait.”

Barrett would know, of course; he was on the giving end of it this morning. He shrugs again, like, there are always trade offs.

A song ends and a new one starts on Marlow’s built-in speakers. Ilya is very careful not to move, not even to pick up his drink. It feels like anything might snag the moment and break it. The guys don’t mention the overflow harassment often. Certainly not directly. It has to be fucking with them, though, to be targeted how they are and not even be gay.

Maybe that’s in Barrett’s shrug, too—that at least for him it’ll be true?

“It gets old pretty quick,” Carmichael says. “You chirp back or you just ignore it. And you tell us if anyone’s taking it too far.”

Barrett nods. Then he looks up, looks around at them, and says, “I’m sorry about Kane.” It’s the first thing that’s come out of his mouth unprompted all night.

“Kanie’s loss,” Marlow says.

“He didn’t tell anyone, did he?” Kovalev says. “That he was trying to trade?”

“No,” says Marlow. “But Lec asked me about him last week. If he was causing distractions or anything. I told him yeah, a bit, but I thought it was just to talk to him or something. I didn’t think he was that serious.”

“Makes sense,” Hammersmith says. “Wouldn’t want to tell us he wanted to leave if he wasn’t sure it would go through. Not when we all know why. Guess I’m losing you to the second line, Kovie.”

Kovalev thumps his hand over his heart. “I’d never leave you. Maybe Barrett’ll get up there. I’d love to see him with Vic and Cadey. Babysitter line.”

St-Simon isn’t there: making the most of the few hours of overlap between his and his fiancée’s schedules. He’s working on getting her to quit. Cadyn for once hasn’t spoken much; now he rolls his eyes and laughs along.

“You have a girl you had to leave behind or anything?” Connors says.

“Nah,” Barrett says, dismissive, like, who wants to be locked down?

Obviously you don’t have to be gay to not have a girlfriend. But this has the sound of an excuse he’s very familiar with telling. So maybe he can pull it off smoothly, as long as he knows it’s coming. Ilya thinks of Shane’s lies, which were always paper thin no matter how prepared, and misses him way too much. He tips back the rest of his beer and swaps it for a new one.

“Boston clubs are going to love you. The college girls in this town? Best fucking place to be a twenty-year-old,” Connors says.

Barrett nods. Approvingly? Politely? Reservedly. Hard-to-get is an okay cover, Ilya supposes, if he’s too all-the-way gay for the occasional performative hookup. This is incredible.

It’s getting late, and they have to be at the rink on time in the morning to hear all about what they did wrong in Philadelphia and what they’re going to do right against Columbus on Wednesday. Oregan gets up to leave and, like a row of dominos, everyone else does too. Barrett gets a round of shoulder pats as Carmichael leads him out.

Ilya is barely out of his cab when the texts come in.

MARLEYY: so quite the guy
MARLEYY: im optimistic about him
MARLEYY: thoughts boys

Connie: Big word

MARLEYY: bro cmon

Connie: Better thn it could be yeah, thought hed be way more of a dick. Hard switch from last game
Connie: But he seems pretty chill, mike thinks so too

They really don’t see it. No one can ever see it, even though they know you can be gay in the NHL, even though they asked him about other players, it doesn’t occur to them.

Connie: And f getting more young teammates is good

MARLEYY: roz thoughts

Ilya has a lot of thoughts. Will Barrett fucking chill out with the team and ever say more than five words together. If he really is gay, how did this kid make it through a season and a half on the Guardians, who were intense even before November. Everything aside, will he even fit with them on the ice.

What he knows Marlow’s really asking, though, is whether Ilya feels comfortable around Barrett, which is a ludicrous, inconsequential question in any circumstances and comedic in this one. No one else in the world knows how funny this is. But first and foremost it’s a stupid question and Ilya doesn’t feel like answering.

—

Barrett at least shows signs of fitting with them on the ice. LeClaire tries him with Johansson, with Sebbin and Hammersmith, with St-Simon and Cadyn. At tomorrow’s game he’ll play mostly with Hammersmith, even though it’s a waste of his speed, and only a couple of shifts with St-Simon. Ilya doesn’t think it’ll stick. Barrett isn’t upset to be going from the first line to the third; Ilya watches him, but there’s no stiffness or sloppy swallowed resentment.

Barrett is yielding, Ilya recognizes. He defers. He tries to be what’s needed. He’s trying very hard—Ilya would like to tell him to ease up, this isn’t training camp, it’s the middle of the season, he’s made the fucking roster, but he doesn’t want to interfere. It’s more interesting to watch.

Stripping for the showers Marlow nods at Barrett’s dick and says, “Not bad.” Barrett doesn’t seem fazed. Ilya supposes at this point he has not to be.

—

Last minute, Ilya bails on bowling. He’s been feeling it coming on, but only sends the text after when he was supposed to leave and didn’t. He sits at the kitchen counter with his elbows out. The kitchen is a mess. So is the living room, his bedroom. It occurs to him the cleaners are supposed to come today, while he’s at bowling. But now he’s not at bowling.

He emails them to cancel. It’ll be even worse next week, but that doesn’t really exist.

He has a new email from his publicist: a possible article to co-write, taking stock of his life a month after coming out, what he’s learned, what doors have opened. A la Jason Collins, Sports Illustrated, linked. Jason Collins who just retired? he wants to snipe. He lasted a year, super inspiring. He clicks the link and leans his chin on his hand while it loads.

Why NBA center Jason Collins is coming out now. Subtitle, I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay. I didn't set out to be the first. Since he is, he’s happy to start the conversation. To pave the way, since no one has already. Is he really? Presumably. He chose to come out. Ilya has never felt that drive.

Collins wants to be genuine and authentic and truthful. Ilya gets a jolt of disgust. He thinks, at the same time, both when has he ever been that? and, when has he ever not? Four paragraphs in and he’s already losing patience. Collins had to confront who he really was. Basketball was both his love and a distraction from himself. Collins came out to his aunt and from that moment on he was more comfortable in his own skin. Ilya is plenty comfortable in his own skin. He loves his own skin. Collins is overthinking it, making it into a big deal and then having to deal with it, crawling toward answers Ilya slid through before his U15 victory.

He scrolls. Collins was envious of his straight friend for marching in the Boston pride parade. Oh god. They’re going to try to put Ilya in the parade, aren’t they? They can’t make him. Can they?

The recent Boston Marathon bomb—no. Ilya scrolls. Collins realized that things can change in an instant. Ilya has known that for a long time and taken comfort in it. His main thought about the bombing was, why did they have to be Russian?

Specifically: leave it to a pair of Chechens, barely Russian except in name, to fuck it up for the rest of them, in this oblivious country that doesn’t know the difference.

Collins recognized and resisted his attractions in high school. Ilya converts in his head—end of basic plus secondary. He and Sasha were hooking up throughout that, when they were speaking at all. Sasha was setting the video camera on the mantel. Ilya was sneaking off to clubs. Ilya was moaning into Sasha’s shoulder getting jerked off upstairs at a dinner party. Ilya and Svetlana were bonding like hot iron. Sasha was coming back from school taller than him. Luckily Collins’s gay uncle was always the perfect role model of a loving, compassionate, stable long-term relationship.

One time Ilya was crammed on a couch, trailing his hand along the shoulder blade of a guy he’d hook up with later that night, at the apartment of two gray-haired men. Ilya didn’t know, and now will never know, how long they’d been together. But everyone knew they were the exception in both love and age.

It’s not a very good article; it wanders all over, his parents, and Jesus, and wanting to start a family, and America’s civil rights movement, and coming out preemptively as he shouldn’t have to live under the threat of being outed. Ilya supposes that’s what happened to him—being outed. But coming out was never something he planned to do, and therefore not something that could be taken from him. It’s more like, people didn’t know, and now they know. Holy fuck, Collins is seven feet tall? Collins goes against the gay stereotype and he thinks a lot of players will be shocked. The gay stereotype. It actually makes so much sense about you, Marlow said. The gay stereotype.

Collins has struggled with suicidal ideation. Okay. What does that have to do with being gay?

I’m glad I’m coming out in 2013 rather than 2003, Collins writes. The climate has shifted; public opinion has shifted.

Sometimes Ilya thinks about thinking about being of a country that is not opposed to his existence. To live knowing his government had his back. Sweden or Canada where there would not be this dead gap between himself and home, where a deep piece of him could rest.

It’s not worth even thinking about.

Ilya makes the rest of the article whoosh up his screen. Then he emails back that he’s not interested. He has nothing to say.

He checks: the highlight videos are up last night’s games. He watched the individual clip of Hollander’s goal five to ten times when it was posted; now the whole game snips by. There he is on the ice—there he is—and there—Montreal lost, but Hollander’s goal, a breakaway, just him and the goalie, was stunning. He waits for it, and waits for it, and it still jolts him when the video cuts. The camera tracks him up the ice, mouth open, face set, cut to behind, HOLLANDER 24, he trails closer and then suddenly, surprise backhand right past the goalie’s knee. Cool and slick as anything, unbothered.

A month ago Ilya might have texted him about it, you will not be so cool when i get to you, or, you will not get away with that / you will—pay for it, be humbled, something like that. Doesn’t matter now. But he still wants to. It’s still his impulse to rile him.

It comes over him again that he and Hollander are done. He doesn’t know what to do with that. He’s never been in the NHL and not involved with Hollander, present tense. This is brand new for him.

Good thing Hollander cut it off, because Ilya wouldn’t have, ever. He’s not disciplined or foresightful enough, he’s not good like Hollander is. He would have kept feeding on him as long as he let him.

It was just a few fucks. It would have been a few more just this season, if not for Ilya. He watches the highlights again.

The afternoon stretches before him in a puddle. He can’t quite reach for any of the things he ought to be doing. He can’t quite check. This is when he would usually go to Twitter but he shouldn’t, he’s trying so hard not to.

Drinking is something to do, but he can see how that would look from the outside, skipping a team event to go home and drink alone. He could get Svetlana to come over so it’s not alone—but no, she’d have something to say about the state of the house. He stills his leg, which has been bouncing against the stool. He’ll work out first, at least. He groans and gets up and drags himself to his gym. Look at him: being so dutiful, doing things right. He doubts it’ll last.

—

Marlow offers to get the sandwiches with him. Usually, when he does this, it’s because he has something to say.

It doesn’t take him long. He drops into the passenger seat and as soon as Ilya has backed out of the lot says, “So is everything good with you?”

“Everything is good, yes,” Ilya says. Even Marlow can’t leave him the fuck alone. He pays extra attention to the road signs.

“For sure?”

“Yes, for sure. Why it would not be?”

“Because of—” At the edge of his vision, Marlow gestures like he’s presenting a platter. “I don’t know, dude, you’ve been skipping fucking everything. You didn’t go to Hammy’s last week. You didn’t sign up for Secret Santa. I’m just trying to check on you or something.”

Ilya’s grip is tight on the wheel. Marlow needs to shut up. He says nothing.

“Do you have Christmas plans?” Marlow says. “You should crash my family dinner. Christmas Eve, whole day thing, tons of booze and food. I don’t want you cooped up for three days.”

Christmas Eve—that’s the twenty-fourth. “I have plans already. With Svetlana.”

Marlow nods. “Okay. But do you really, or are you just saying that?”

“What do you mean, just saying? Of course really.”

The car behind him honks. The light has turned green. Ilya switches pedals and they lurch forward. Marlow’s hand jumps to the door panel.

“You told me your Christmas isn’t until January,” he says. “No fucking way you’re always busy.”

“No break in January, so we make plans now.”

“Bring her along, then. We don’t bite.”

“I cannot,” Ilya says. “We have actual plans, cannot change.”

“Doing fucking what?”

“Doing fuck you, that’s what.”

“Okay,” Marlow says, and looks straight ahead.

Ilya clenches his jaw. He’s so selfish. Marlow is only trying to help, and look how Ilya has rewarded him. He deserves so much better. Ilya can’t explain that he really is busy on the twenty-fourth; he and Svetlana agreed not to tell anyone. And he wouldn’t want to tell him, even if he were allowed. He should at least apologize, but he can’t do that either, can’t even begin.

“Feeling pretty good about Barrett,” Marlow says.

“Yes.” He can see what Marlow is doing, changing the subject, giving him another kindness when he’s done everything to forfeit it. Stop it, he wants to tell him. But he takes it anyway. No wonder Hollander was glad to get away from him. Good that he got out, that he’s back to the life he’s supposed to have. “I like him on PK with me.”

“I’ll fucking say. Wish he’d lighten the fuck up, though. He’s more nervy than the rookies. Getting along with them, though. Great chemistry with Cadey. Not that we were expecting a straight Kane replacement, but fuck, dude, it could be good line.”

Finally they’ve reached the panini place. Ilya cannot get out of the car fast enough.

—

On Christmas Eve Ilya puts on his most unassuming suit and gets in his most discreet car and drives fifty miles west on I-90 for the second time in a week. They’ve chosen a town small enough and dead enough that hopefully no one notices them.

Yesterday his father called for the third time. Three calls in a month has never been concerning, but three memory lapses is. How many of their calls were episodes before, and Ilya just didn’t know? It was hard sometimes to tell how much he remembered. Now it’s simple. If he’s calling, it’s because he’s forgotten why he’s not calling.

This time, when his father asked when he was coming over next, Ilya thought, flatly, fuck it. It wasn’t like he’d remember anyway.

“I’m in America,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” his father said, “I meant when are you visiting?”

“I can’t.”

There was silence on the line for a moment. His father doesn’t like to admit an informational disadvantage by asking a true question. But eventually he said, “And why is that? Why do you think that?”

“It’s not safe for me,” Ilya said, not quite convinced he was talking.

“Not safe! Of course it’s safe. What a pussy. What have you come up with this time?”

Ilya took a breath through his nose. “The propaganda law last year. I can’t. Everyone knows I’m queer.” Belatedly, he wondered if his father even knew what that meant, in the know, or if he sounded absurd. His father has always been profoundly not in the know about some things, and he can never predict which. But he did know.

“No, you’re not,” his father said, and Ilya sat there a moment considering all the things he could say and then hung up. He turned his phone over and over in his hands. What had he thought his father would say?

Svetlana has their marriage license and a little black dress. The engagement ring beams. They go up the courthouse steps together.

Christmas music is playing inside. There’s plastic snow, and real garlands. Ilya’s mother is not on their license: the little -- will impound the record, restricting its access to themselves and any legal representation. No one has spoken about her since she died, except his father when he doesn’t remember. There’s little concrete evidence Ilya does know who his mother is, and none of it in English. Unlucky to begin his citizenship process on a lie, maybe, but it will not be discovered.

He stares at the dash marks. She’s even more gone. He has made her not exist.

They are married by a tall, gray woman, using someone else’s rings. That other partnership cannot have lasted, for them to end up in an antique shop. It takes fifteen minutes. They kiss. They’re good at that—they were one another’s practice.

On the drive back Ilya thinks, to love and care for as long as they both shall live, it’s not not true. They do love each other, at least. Svetlana doesn’t need his care and he doesn’t want hers, but there’s a version of this in which his stomach isn’t sinking and he doesn’t feel as uncertain as he did this morning. He has no idea what would make it better.

They get back to Svetlana’s penthouse by 4:30. They got an extra good bottle of vodka for this. Ilya dribbles it into a pair of glasses and they toast at her marble counter, the cat winding between their legs. Over Svetlana’s shoulder, lights are flicking on in other buildings.

Ilya has a memory, one of those moments that sometimes emerge out of the blank of adolescence, of sitting on Svetlana’s window seat in her big bedroom in Moscow, passing back and forth a bottle taken from her father, after Sasha had dismissed him or he’d dismissed himself. One of the times.

“When did you know?” he says. “About me and Sasha?”

Svetlana plays with her glass. She shrugs. “That dinner with all our dads. First time I saw you in a room together. They had you sit next to each other and I looked at you and thought, ‘oh, they’ve fucked.’”

Ilya’s heart spikes like it’s still a secret. “The first time? Really?”

“Well, Sasha looks like he’s fucked everybody. But I knew you both already, and you were both, you know. One suspected. I suppose I didn’t know, but I had a pretty strong conviction. And I was right.” She raises her glass.

“Of course you were.”

“Did you think I didn’t know?”

“I don’t know.” Mostly he just didn’t think. Or he’d thought, as long as they never talked about it, it might be that she didn’t know.

Svetlana beckons for the bottle. He pushes it toward her and she refills their glasses.

“You both do this thing,” she says. She reaches one arm under the other and cups the dip between her shoulder and triceps. “During sex. You’re the only two who’ve ever gripped right there. I figured you must have gotten it from one another.”

He takes a sip to avoid her eyes. Sasha did it first, and it was surprising, and it felt good, kind of tender and kind of practical to pull him down. So when Ilya was topping he’d do it back, and, apparently, has kept doing it.

It occurs to him now that it started the year Ilya began training truly seriously. He touches his partners like that because Sasha liked how big his arms were getting. The ache comes over him so hard he can barely breathe.

Svetlana clicks her tongue. “Anyway. The evening’s going to be endless. Not even a game to watch. Where should we order?”

They get sushi and eat it on the couch, rings in a bright little pile on the coffee table glass. They have a piece of paper now that says they’re married. The vodka is half gone.

Svetlana has her legs across Ilya’s lap. Ilya’s hand on her shin. It’s never been weird before today. What are we doing? he wants to say.

They’ve retreated to the topic of the league. Buffalo is dragging itself along, Ottawa isn’t. Toronto hasn’t quite found its offensive footing in the week and a half since the trade.

“That was an idiotic move on their part,” Svetlana says, “I don’t understand it. They had a goalie problem, yes, but you don’t just throw away a pair like Kent and Barrett. Kent is excellent, but he can’t play all by himself. They’ve set their rebuild back a year at least, and for what?”

Ilya grunts. “What do you think of Barrett?” he says.

“We all know he’s fast. He’s small, so he’s smart, you know I like that. He’s got potential, but he has to entirely relearn his play. You can see where he’s still anticipating what Kent would do, not Sebbin or St-Simon or you.”

He’s really trying to find out if she suspects Barrett, too, but he’s not sure how to ask that without alerting her if she doesn’t. Instead he says, “He’s trying.”

Svetlana shrugs and puts a piece of sushi in her mouth.

They finish eating and it’s still only seven.

Ilya puts together the rings, the vodka, the sprawling on the couch. Are they celebrating or are they pretending nothing has happened? Nothing really has happened, unless they want it to have. Does Svetlana want it? She always talks about the marriage as an annoyance, as nothing, but then she does these things to turn it special. He doesn’t know what she wants. He feels like he’s always guessing wrong.

He puts it away—Svetlana has made the sacrifice of marrying him, he can deal with a little confusion. Maybe the confusion is his end of the deal, to make it fair.

But he can never restrain himself. “So. Now we’re married,” he says. He feels idiotic saying it, but he has to, he has to hear her say something about it, that she can’t believe it or that she can, or that it doesn’t change anything, or something.

“The twisting mysteries of fate,” she says, light but not quite open.

Ilya leans forward and refills his glass.

The apartment is high ceilinged, large windowed, white made interesting by moulding and translucent curtains. Those details are a little bit like home, he realizes. The living room looks down on light-wrapped city trees and thin piles of snow on the adjacent roofs. The coffee table is a disc of glass on asymmetrical legs.

He plays count-the-Christmas-trees through the windows across the street. Svetlana turns on the TV, flicks through a few channels, sighs and turns it back off.

“Anything from Russia?” Ilya says.

“Nothing from your family still?”

He’s not about to tell her about his father’s calls. No is suddenly unutterable, so he says, “Of course not.”

“Hm. I’m sure I’ll see them over Christmas, I’ll tell you how they are.”

Ilya shrugs his head dismissively. He doesn’t care all that much, not like she’s implying. But she is being so generous. She must be nearing the limit of bullshit she’ll tolerate. He makes it a moment longer. “Thanks,” he says.

A pit is opening up in him. He forgot she’d be going home for actual Christmas—of course she is, and she should, he just forgot and now it’s hit him. The prospect of her absence looms.

“How long are you going again?”

“Fourth through twelfth.”

Eight days is fine. It’s nothing. They’ll be on a road trip for most of that anyway, so he won’t even be here to not see her. He feels stricken regardless. He doesn’t want her to go. Would she stay if he asked? Not that he can ask that.

The cat hops off the couch and goes to the windowsill.

Svetlana has a little crystal slab clock on a shelf, with no visible mechanism. Ilya watches the hands silently shift.

“New York has been doing well again lately,” Svetlana says. “I wonder what it is.”

They’ve got a six-game streak going into the break. “Whole string of good days,” Ilya says.

“Hunter’s had a string of good days, at least. How long do you think it’ll last this time?”

He thinks about New York, not targeting him. He thinks about Hunter shaking his hand, Hunter almost confessing and then not. He does wonder what’s going on with Hunter. But he can't bring himself to care about New York’s performance. “I don’t know. A few weeks.”

“I think if it lasts until All Stars, it’ll last through the season. Montreal’s odd, though. All over the place, no cohesion.”

It’s like someone has chucked a bucket of ice water straight through his skin. “Mhm,” Ilya manages.

“Their strategy is good, their roster is okay, they should be good. Something must be up in their locker room.”

“Right,” Ilya says, though he hasn’t absorbed a word of it. He rubs his nose. She didn’t even say his name, just Montreal, and his stomach has dropped.

“Or their coach, you need strong coaching but the way he talks to the press, it’s not hard to doubt whether he’s always going about it productively.”

It’s stupid of him, and obvious, but he can’t help it. He lifts Svetlana’s legs off his lap and stands and says, “Bathroom.”

His leg has fallen asleep under hers; he hobbles around the corner prodding it until it tingles back into life.

He really does need to use the bathroom. He pisses in a long stream, one hand on the wall, and puts the seat back down after or else she’ll kill him. He presses his face against the cold tile. He’s maybe a little drunker than he planned at this point in the evening. Nothing he can't handle, though.

It keeps not getting easier, or less, or bearable. He thinks about Hollander and he feels exactly how he has every day since Hollander called it off. And over nothing. Hollander is still top of the scoring race, and here’s Ilya wanting to take out his organs and drop them in the sink. He thinks maybe he’s never gotten over anyone in his life.

If Svetlana ever leaves him, he’s fucked. She probably will, there’s no way she can put up with him for long, Hollander couldn’t even put up with him, even the hottest sex of his life wasn’t worth it. And now with this—married—whatever they're doing—the wick is just burning faster.

He wonders if Svetlana knows. Or if she didn’t, maybe she does now. How would she know? She knew about him and Sasha the whole time. Unless there’s something else, she said. Does that mean she knows?

He can’t ask, in case she doesn’t know. And there’s nothing to know anymore, anyway.

He goes back into the living room, but Svetlana isn’t there. Light is coming from the kitchen. He steps around the partial wall. She’s lifting a little cake out of a box on the counter. Squat white sides, chocolate on top. Bird’s milk. It wobbles as she slips her fingers out from under the board.

Ilya has gone rigid. “What’s this?” he says.

“I got it from this grocer down the street. They sell it in slices.”

That’s not what he meant. He doesn’t know what he meant. How many years has it been since he’s had bird’s milk cake? He yearns toward and away from it. It’s not even a particular favorite, but suddenly it’s a glossy, spongy concentration of home. It’s radiating home, bleeding it all over the green marble.

He feels heat in his eyes and pushes back on the current behind it.

“Fine, then,” he says.

Svetlana shoots him a reproving look, but cuts the cake. The chocolate dimples under the knife. She pushes his plate towards him.

He can imagine it on his tongue already. He wants to breathe it, to lick it, to keep it under a dome to look at forever. He puts his hands in his pockets. It’s still building.He goes to the living room and gets the vodka. Bottle clenched in one hand, their two glasses in the other, he stands tense on the carpet. He’s about to either explode or collapse. With his two free fingers he rubs his mother’s necklace.

He has to eat the cake. Or else Svetlana be witness to him unable to eat the cake.

And also, a cake—so they’re celebrating? Is that what Svetlana wants? He wants to scream.

Ilya goes back to the kitchen. He sets the cups on the counter and pours them the last of the vodka. Svetlana gives him a plate with a big wedge of cake. His fork sinks straight through.

On the candies, the chocolate flakes and crumples around the marshmallow when you bite; on the cake it’s smooth and soft. He moves his tongue through a creamy mouthful and tastes sweet, sweet, sweet. Chocolate at the back of his mouth, cold tangy mousse in the middle, sodden sponge behind his teeth. You don’t even have to chew.

He takes a sip, scoops up another forkful. Lets the taste fill his mouth again.

He eats it, bite by bite, with his head rushing and his hip braced against the counter. Their forks clink and scrape. The heating comes on and then off. Ilya puts his plate down and Svetlana gestures to cut him another slice.

“Later,” he says.

Svetlana shrugs. She reaches out and wipes up a smear of mousse from the foil board, licks it off her fingertip.

“Well,” she says. “Is it the wedding celebration you always dreamed of?”

So they are celebrating? They’re acknowledging it? Ilya has left behind bafflement and frustration and only stands, lost. He’s certain she dodged it when he said it earlier, when he said married, but now she’ll talk about it.

Ilya considers. He never expected to end up married. Except, when he had thought about it, he had supposed it would probably be Svetlana.

“Sure,” he says.

“Really?”

“I mean, I never thought about wedding dreams, and this one isn’t all that real anyway, so.”

Svetlana gets a troubled face, kind of pinched and sad. “Is it because of your mother?” she says.

“What?”

“It’s not a real marriage because your mother isn’t on the license? You didn’t have to. I said you didn’t have to.”

Ilya wasn't even thinking about that. He should have been. He shakes his head and cuts another sliver of cake, just to have something to do, arranges it on Svetlana’s plate. “I know,” he says.

Of course he had to.

“Okay,” Svetlana says. She slides her fork through the tip of the slice. “It’s just a piece of paper.”

“Right.”

She squints at him, then takes her bite. Ilya tightens his grip on his glass. Wasn’t he supposed to agree with her? Wasn’t that what he just said, too? Why is she looking at him like that, then?

Then she sighs and gets up and puts her hand on his ass. Ilya moves his head automatically to kiss her. He pushes his plate out of the way, lifts her onto the counter. Hikes the hem of her dress up and holds the pad of her thigh. Her skin is so warm. He kisses across her cheek, down her neck.

“Let’s do this on a bed,” she says.

Fucking Svetlana is not enough. It is simple and familiar, and reassuring while he’s doing it, and then everything comes right back. The last of the cake between his teeth, the spinning room, the guessing. He lies on his stomach, limbs splayed, trying to breathe like he’s sleeping. Svetlana is totally still on the other side of the bed; it’ll be hours until she falls asleep. He stares at the blotch of light coming under the curtains.

He wonders if it’s still called hooking up if they’re married.

He thinks about his mother, who he has erased. He’s spent so long trying to hold on to her, only to now do this. He sees the empty line where her name should be, he’s shut her off, he’s doing what his father and everyone and even sometimes Svetlana have done.

Like this, his mother won’t know. She can’t witness this, he worries, can’t watch over this because she isn’t on the license. I’m sorry, Mama, he tries to tell her, but he worries she can’t hear that either.

He needed to make this okay for Svetlana. She said she’d marry him, but that no one could know. It’s been years since she had any interest in becoming a married woman. After everything she’s been doing for him, he had to offer something to balance the scales. It was just a piece of paper, and if getting it restricted made Svetlana feel better, he could leave a field blank. You don’t have to doesn’t really mean that.

But it was his mother, all of his mother kept inside him. And this is what he’s chosen to do.

—

The end of the break cannot come soon enough. Maybe the hits take a toll, and Ilya dreads returning to them, but he craves the ice, the focus, the exhaustion. He drums his fingers on the wheel on his way to practice, stays long in the gym, and goes to bed aching after the game. He looks around the locker room and tries out thinking of himself as one of the married players, but he can’t make it fit.

LeClaire pulls him aside three days back from the break. He’s been with the trainers getting his shoulder checked out after a bad hit last night.

Ilya stands tall and straight; they’re only in the hallway, so it must not be so serious, but he can never really guess anymore.

“I’d like you to talk to Barrett,” LeClaire says.

“Barrett?” Ilya says. About being gay?

“Encourage him to chill out a little. Naturally we want the dedication, but as is he’s going to run himself into the ground.”

“Okay,” Ilya says. “I will. But why me?”

LeClaire raises his eyebrows at him. “Well, you’re captain, for starters. And whenever I tell him, he nods a whole bunch and goes right back to drills. It’s like he thinks it’s a trick. Might be more receptive if it’s a word of advice from a teammate-authority figure.” He gestures like he’s rotating a globe.

So Ilya loiters next practice until Barrett is finally into and out of the showers. By now the only other person left is Hammersmith, toweling off his hair and strolling naked back to the dressing room anyway.

Barrett rummages in his stall—Kane’s stall—towel tight around his waist.

“Hey, Bare,” Ilya says.

Barrett stills and turns around. “Yeah?” he says, face stolidly blank.

“You stop push so hard, no good. We want that you last the whole season. It’s only December, you know.”

“I know,” Barrett says.

“Yes? You know? Does not look like you know.”

Barrett shrugs, eyes on the ground. Ilya sighs through his nose.

“Listen,” he says. “You get traded once, it’s a surprise, seems like, it happened, will happen again, you try to prevent. But you try too much. You are on the team, team wants you. Team will only not want you if you train too much and lose all your bulk halfway through the season.”

The ethics of instilling this new fear are maybe questionable—Barrett’s eyebrows lower. But Ilya doesn’t know what else might get through to him. Ilya sees a glimpse of it from his perspective: certainly gay, still brand new to the league, thrown by Kane and luck onto the best team possible for him, desperate to stay. Confronted about it by Ilya, who he might not know knows. Apparently not on the verge of telling him. Ilya wouldn’t, in his place.

“I’m just committing myself to the team,” Barrett mumbles. “Everyone should.”

“Maybe you commit too much. Difficult to do, very impressive. But you have to pace yourself, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You will do that?”

“Yes, I will, I’ll pace myself,” Barrett says, still staring at the floor.

Ilya heaves himself up from the bench, pats him on the shoulder, and goes out.

—

They have a game on the thirtieth, which Svetlana says is the league finally being considerate for once. After practice on the thirty-first he texts that he’s on his way. Svetlana is just balling up the white to-go bags and stuffing them in the trash when he gets there. On the counter: a row of foil containers, lids fogged up. Together they uncrimp the edges to uncover the salads, pies, pelmeni, duck. They crowd their plates and perch on the couch and turn on the game, New York versus Detroit.

The Detroit commentators come on with matching ties to talk over clips of the last games. Ilya thinks back to the first few days—Detroit wasn’t as bad as Toronto, but it was bad.

But Hunter, of course, doesn’t have to think about that, because no one knows about him.

“So, New York will win,” Svetlana says. “Well. Hunter will win. Want to bet?”

“No,” Ilya says. “He’ll probably win.”

“Hm,” Svetlana says.

The puck drops. Ilya bites into a hand pie. Hunter wins the faceoff and his wing takes off with it down the ice. The commentator deadpans his faceoff win percentage, which is apparently the highest it’s been since his remarkable third year in the league.

The second period finds their plates empty, glasses full. New York is up 2-1. “Defense is embarrassing,” Svetlana says. “Both teams. It’s New Year’s, but it’s still an actual game.” She jabs her hand at the TV, then returns it to Ilya’s hair. Her fingertips move in slow circles on his scalp. He lets eyelids relax a little.

Her phone buzzes. She squirms to get it out of her pocket. Ilya lifts his head off her lap. He can see the screen but she says anyway, “It’s Sasha!” She gets up off the couch as she answers, and goes down the hall.

Ilya sits up. His hand closes on the remote, warm from Svetlana half sitting on it.

It hadn’t occurred to him that Svetlana and Sasha would still be in contact—he just hasn’t thought about it.

It’s 5:48, almost midnight in France. Svetlana is the person Sasha wants to be talking to on New Year’s Eve. Ilya wonders how much they’ve been in contact. Maybe a lot, maybe every day.

He’s getting a cold, snuffed-out feeling. He turns the volume up.

He thinks of Svetlana as more his than Sasha’s, even if they have a lot in common that Ilya doesn’t. Their similarities have always pushed them apart, he thought. Maybe not. It has nothing to do with him, but he’s thinking of Svetlana’s voice, her bright face as she saw the ID, and feeling like shit. It’s a stupid, unreasonable expectation, that she not be so delighted to hear from Sasha, he knows better than to have it. But how can she be happy to hear from him? From him?

If he hadn’t blocked him almost a year ago, would he be calling Ilya right now? No. Or only to fuck with him.

Svetlana’s laugh comes from her bedroom.

Ilya scoops more herring onto his plate. He shouldn’t feel betrayed, he has no right. He has no reason, really, to feel bad. New York has scored again, apparently.

Maybe Sasha is her respite from him. Ilya eats up her time, her energy, her independence, and then she needs Sasha to recover from it all, to laugh and talk, to be unburdened for a moment.

The mayonnaise sours in his mouth. He takes another bite. He scrapes his fork across his plate to get the last of it, then folds his arms and watches the clock. On cue, there’s a quiet, joyful cheer from Svetlana’s bedroom, and then muffled syllables that he knows are happy new year.

After another couple minutes’ conversation, Svetlana comes back and tucks herself onto the couch. She reloads her plate. “That was Sasha,” she says, like there’s nothing wrong. “He seems to be doing okay.”

Ilya doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t care how Sasha’s doing. Svetlana snuggles against him, but it’s like she’s wood.

New York wins and they switch over to New Jersey-Montreal, which has just started, though Ilya would sort of rather gouge his eyes out. There were times, before, when he watched all of Hollander’s games and all the recaps and it wasn’t enough, and the five or six games against each other a year were unbearably few. Now it feels constant. It’s too much now, as well as not enough. He still watches it all anyway, Svetlana pressed solid and separate into his side.

Hollander is just so good. He’s gorgeous on the ice. Ilya wants his hands on Hollander’s thighs, his hot hole. He wants Hollander to want him still. It tugs on him.

The game goes to overtime and Ilya hopes it takes them forever to score, so he can get a few more minutes watching Hollander slide around their defense, or finding him on the bench at the corner of the camera, leaning on his elbows, mouth set. And then New Jersey manages a goal out of a pileup in front of the net. Hollander skates toward the bench, patting his teammates mechanically on the arm.

“Okay,” Svetlana says, “I’m going to go get ready.”

Ilya stays on the couch and waits through the replays and the commentary until it’s Hollander in the locker room in just his base layer, reciting phrases into the microphone. He’s towelled most of the sweat off, hair sticking up in spikes.

Hollander is restrained and elusive in his interviews in a way Ilya can never be. Ilya can give a good interview, but only a certain kind. He can entertain. He can’t play the game Hollander does, doesn’t know how to dodge or dull. Interviews since November have been arduous and muddled.

Hollander’s face is cold and flat as always.

The broadcast cuts to ads. Ilya drums his fingers on his arm. He wonders what Sasha and Svetlana talked about.

Everyone is going away from him.

He gets up. “Is my red shirt still here?” he shouts down the hallway.

“Where would it have gone?” Svetlana calls back.

He changes and fixes his hair. Under the little cylinder lights, his mother’s necklace shines in the triangle of his collar. He looks good.

Svetlana steps into the bathroom doorway. She spreads her arms slightly like, well? Short white dress, shiny heels and eyeshadow, the lighter of her fur coats.

“Very New Year’s,” Ilya says. “Hot Snegurochka.”

For a moment her mouth twitches into her displeased smile, but she doesn’t say anything. Ilya’s fucked it up again—he thought she’d laugh.

Sasha probably knows the right compliment for her.

The car to the club is silent. Ilya stares at the back of the driver’s headrest, Svetlana taps at her phone. Ilya is itching to move. The dead air of the car presses in.

Ilya’s phone buzzes. He works it out of his pocket, buzzing again.

MARLEYY: roz
MARLEYY: whats it gonna take

Connie: 40 minutes to go, got a seat in our booth with your name on it

MARLEYY: some real hotties here too

Connie: Both kinds

MARLEYY: cmon its not new years wo roz

Connie: We’re down on our knees
Connie: ;)

He puts his phone away.

—

“You missed out, man,” Marlow says as he gets his pads on. “Place was—wait, what did we learn last night—kinetic. Should’ve been there.”

“Could’ve gotten mad pussy, too,” Carmichael says. “There was this one chick we were watching that we all thought, if Rozy was here, he’d be all over her. Dark hair, kind of serious.” He says it like he’s trying to entice him.

“Or dick!” says Kovalev.

The locker room differentiates into nods, awkward laughs, a couple averted gazes. Ilya watches Barrett out of the corner of his eye, who’s studiously putting on his skates.

Ilya says, “Joke’s on you, I get mad pussy anyway.”

“Svetlana?” Carmichael says. “I thought you told me you were just friends.”

“No, not Svetlana.” Just a girl at the club, tallish, with good cheekbones. It was at her place, a little rushed. “She is wingman.”

“Well, you still missed seven-eight-nine getting plastered. How are you feeling, boys?” Connors nudges Feller with his knee, cranes around him to get a look at Cadyn and Barrett.

“Remember Rozy’s rookie year?” Carmichael says. “That was insane. Couldn’t go to half our usual spots. Good thing you guys aren’t as recognizable, we couldn’t get him in half the time because they’d go, we know that’s Rozanov and he’s only nineteen. And he was all, but I’m Russian, I have been drinking since before I could talk, and we were thinking, duh it’s Rozanov, it’s your honor to let him in. What a load of bullshit.”

Feller groans, but he doesn’t look hungover as all that. Ilya’s got a headache himself, and everything feels sore.

—

Ilya doesn’t see Svetlana again before she goes home. The next day, the last game before the road trip, he hops the boards for a shift in the second period. He gets the puck from Kohn, who’s been holding it behind the net, and turns toward the blue line. One of St. Louis’s skaters cross checks him in the hip and he slips forward. His shoulder crunches against the boards.

He suspects it’s bad, though he can’t feel it yet. Just numb, heavy. His stick is gone. He’s getting up to his knees, and now one of the linesmen is lifting on his other arm, the one he can move. Connors is on his other side.

Now it hurts—dull, bone-deep. Connors and the linesman are saying things. Ilya shifts his weight to skate to the bench and his shoulder, jostled, roars.

In his peripheral there are a couple figures, he registers one of them as Barrett, fighting the guy who checked him, never mind that he’s five inches shorter. It should be Marlow fighting, but Marlow’s in the box for tripping.

He gets to the door, which is already open. His arm bumps against the wall and throbs again. He stumbles down the tunnel. There’s a medic’s hand on his back. He lets himself be sat down, jersey worked off. That takes two people. They get his pads undone, too, and one of the medics prods around his shoulder.

“Dislocated, we’re going to pop it back,” he says.

Ilya has subluxed his shoulder a couple times, but he’s never fully dislocated it before. It’ll probably happen again now. He grunts and braces himself. Hammersmith loves to recount how much worse reduction is than the dislocation itself.

“Not yet, we’ve got to lay you down,” the medic says.

Ilya swings his legs up onto the table. He still had his skates on. One of the medics maneuvers him onto his back. The other one holds his arm, and pulls, and turns. Ilya swears and kicks his blade against the table.

“Okay! All set, Roz,” he says. “I’m just going to sit here with some ice.”

He leans a cloth pack on Ilya’s shoulder. The pain is almost gone now, just a low echo. He stares at the ceiling.

They let him go back out to watch the third period. They were tied when he left, and now Boston’s up two. Feller scores an empty netter in the last seconds. After the game they give Ilya a sling and LeClaire tells him he’s out for a week—better now, when there’s half the season left, than to deal with it worse later. He’s right, but Ilya grinds his teeth anyway.

“That should have been a match penalty,” LeClaire says. “That should have been a fucking suspension. They can issue game misconducts all day and it does fuck all.”

They both know why it wasn’t. The referees called the highest penalty they could without calling it deliberate injury. If they issued a match penalty for this, a lot of other things would count, too, and then the league would have to acknowledge there’s a problem.

Marlow claps him on the other shoulder and says, “Rest up, cap.” He gets the C for the road trip and Ilya goes home.

Chapter End Notes

1 I realized I didn’t mention Sasha a single time last chapter. We can’t be having that! I’m ecstatic to announce that this is no longer the only work in the Svetlana & Sasha tag! Woohoo! I haven’t had a chance to read the other one yet bc I’m trying to be good and update first, but you all should.

2 Ilya is racist about Chechnya because highkey he would be. He’ll get worse when. You know. Anyway racial hierarchies fuck you up including when you’re white. I hope the underlying tangle of ‘white supremacist and nationalist stances within Eastern Europe and Russia as exacerbated by EE/R’s middling, uncertain status under Western white/cultural supremacy’ is adequately apparent to the reader, because Ilya is sure not thinking about it with that much clarity.

3 Two months! Yikes. Basically I started writing this fic amid a deep emotional/energetic slump and working on it has largely gotten me out of it. Unfortunately for the update schedule that means I’m doing things now and have a lot less time to work on this. Since the last chapter I have: been visited by a friend, family, another friend, other family, and then visited family myself; gone to seven parties, two open mics, three readings, and a concert; applied to a million jobs and had four interviews; scheduled my annual checkup and actually went and did it; read eleven books; gone on four dates; and also lain motionless in bed past noon several times because nothing’s ever fully better. Moving forward I suspect I’ll rarely manage an update in less than two weeks, but I’ll try to keep it around three weeks because I really missed working on this! I am however still figuring out how to work on it consistently when I'm not depressed. But I promise I am going to finish it no matter what.

4 Jason Collins article https://www.si.com/more-sports/2013/04/29/jason-collins-gay-nba-player

5 everyone who said baby gay troy, you’re more right than you know and I’m adding it to the tags

6 I don't know if per Massachusetts law a restricted marriage license just means that no one can see the license itself, or that no one even has access to the information that a license for the two people in question exists. I'm interpreting it as the latter and focusing my research efforts elsewhere.