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To Ilya’s surprise, the girlfriend of the 2018 - 2019 season is the same as the one of the season before. Tory, who styles her microbraids into complicated up-dos and favors bright eyeshadows and is generally much too cool for Marly.
“I told him you are too smart for him,” Ilya tells her when she lets him into the condo. “But you’re still here so maybe I was wrong.”
She snorts. “Maybe he didn’t want to deal with too many changes at once,” she replies and Ilya feels like he’s being scolded, maybe.
Cliff Marlow appears from behind her. He’s changed from his post-game suit into a black t-shirt and sweatpants. “How’s your nose?”
“Not broken,” Ilya says. His face is sore and he might have a bruise for a few days, but at least he doesn’t have his profile rearranged again. His nose has changed shape several times already and he quite likes the way it looks right now. Or at least how it looks when it hasn’t been recently hit by a hockey player’s elbow. “I wonder how many times you can break your nose before it stops working?”
“Like, for breathing or for smelling?” Marly frowns.
“Can you smell if you don’t breathe?”
Tory shakes her head. “Maybe I am too smart for this.”
She turns around and disappears deeper into the condo. Marly watches her go until his gaze can’t follow her anymore, only then returns his attention to Ilya again. Ilya doesn’t blame him. If it was Shane, Ilya would be acting the same.
“Come in,” Marly gives his shoulder a friendly shove, then steers him towards the living room.
They don’t hug. They never do off the ice.
And now they won’t be hugging on the ice either.
Ilya would never admit out loud that he misses it. The simple familiarity of Marly’s celebratory hugs, the way he used to know the exact rhythm of a punch to the shoulder, then an embrace, then a pat against his shoulder-blade. Like it was a secret handshake.
It’s been just a few months.
Cliff Marlow was a constant in his life since Ilya first stepped into the Raiders’ locker room, it’s natural that not having him by his side is disorienting.
He just needs to get used to the patterns of the Centaurs.
“Will your team be pissed that you’re hanging out with enemy?” Ilya asks when Marly points him to a familiar armchair. He has beer for Ilya, because Marly can’t keep up with Ilya’s vodka consumption and has a weird thing about them drinking different beverages.
“What about yours?” Marly asks, throwing himself onto the sofa.
The living room looks like Ilya remembers, which shouldn’t be too shocking. It’s been less than half a year since he’s been here last, just before the Raiders’ fell out of the playoffs last season. Yet it feels like a lifetime ago.
Or a different life.
Or—
Sometimes, Ilya’s current life feels like a dream. Hazy. Unreal. Not quite solid; like something would shake him awake at any moment and he would be back to the old patterns, back to his life in Boston. It’s a bittersweet thought.
“My team doesn’t want you dead.”
He keeps telling himself it doesn’t matter whether Boston hates him or loves him. As long as it has any reaction to him at all. That’s easier to say when the hatred isn’t shoved into his face.
Marly pins him down with his gaze. “Roz. We found out from the news, you shithead. With everyone else.”
Ilya focuses on fidgeting with the tap of his beer can.
It has been cowardly of him, to leave without a goodbye. He had been their captain for many years, told them he loved them after hundreds of games, and mostly meant it, and then he simply switched teams, no speech and no explanation. The truth was, he had no idea how to say goodbye to them without telling them the truth. Not in words they’d understand, not in a way that would make the situation make sense to someone who wasn’t so in love with Shane Hollander that he couldn’t breathe properly if he didn’t hear from him for a day.
“It’s just work,” he says now with a huff. “Is not personal.”
Marly’s eyebrows knit. “Is that what we are? Coworkers?”
Ilya turns his gaze away from Marly’s frown. He scans the familiar room. Marly doesn’t keep his trophies in the living room, but there’s a framed photo on one of the shelves, a picture of most of the team in casual wear, some of it Raiders’ branded, all of them grinning, arms around each other. Ilya can’t see it very well from where he’s sitting, but he knows it well. He knows that in it, he has his fist on Marly’s shoulder, Stanley Cup Champion ring visible, and he’s facing to the side, grinning at the guys with him rather than into the barrel of the camera.
He and Marly, they don’t talk about feelings. They don’t talk about anything serious at all. They send each other stupid memes and links to porn.
They don’t sit in tense silences.
The last time Ilya felt this uneasy around Cliff Marlow, Shane Hollander was not yet his boyfriend and was lying in a hospital bed, where Marly’d accidentally put him.
“Remember when you had your knee injured?” he asks, turning his eyes back to his former teammate. Miserable few weeks that turned into miserable couple of months of Marly on the injured reserve, unsure whether he’d be able to return. He had a nurse, and his mother and his sister and his girlfriend of the season taking turns cooking for him, and yet Ilya shoved up at his place every day. Every day when he wasn’t on a roadie, regardless of if there was a practice, or a game. Regardless of whether he would be meeting Shane later, not that Marly would know anyway. Ilya visited every day, to play video games and watch stupid movies and stupider reality shows and talk about their teammates’ latest antics and not talk about hockey. “Am I coworker?”
Marly doesn’t reply, because he doesn’t need to.
He takes a long gulp of his beer.
“The guys are pissed you left us for more money,” he says finally.
Of all the theories for why he’s changed teams, this one bothers Ilya the most. He likes what money can do for him, especially now that he’s no longer spending huge portions of it on his brother’s drugs and gambling, but he would give it all up if he could have a real life with Shane. He wouldn’t replace anyone with money.
“Is not about money,” he groans, even though he’s still not sure what to say when Marly inevitably asks what it is about. He can’t tell him the truth, because the truth is not just his to tell.
“I know!” Marly snaps and when Ilya blinks in surprise, he sighs. “I went to Coach. I may have been very unpleasant ranting about management not trying to outbid fucking Ottawa. He said they offered more, but you didn’t take it. He wasn’t happy about it.”
“Ottawa gave me a no-trade clause,” Ilya shrugs, hoping Marly doesn’t ever check whether Boston offered it, too.
Marly snorts. “You think Boston would trade you?”
He shrugs again. “I’m not getting any younger, Marly. Maybe they would not now, or next year. But I need— I can’t risk life where I can be traded. Even over the border. I need… stable. Is very important to me that I can plan future. Because—” He glares at his beer. “I’m never going back to Russia.”
“You’re thinking citizenship?”
Ilya’s shoulders are sore from the game they played earlier that day, but he shrugs them again.
“I didn’t realize you hated Russia that much.”
He flinches. “I don’t.”
There’s nothing for him back there, he tells himself, he tells Shane, he tells Svetlana.
It’s a lie.
There are so many things he’s missed this summer, and the summer before. That he misses every day.
He misses hearing his language around him. He misses being able to step into any store and reliably find good vodka and candy flavored like childhood nostalgia. He misses good bread. He misses people who know to wear house slippers indoors. He even misses that stupid cartoon about that stupid wolf chasing after a stupid rabbit. He could find it on YouTube, yes, but he can never just randomly land on an episode on the TV here.
He misses the familiar streets and his Moscow apartment. He hates the idea of Alexei spreading in it, swapping Ilya’s furniture for his own.
He misses placing flowers on his mother’s grave and telling her about his season.
“I love Russia,” he says, trying to not choke on the honesty of it. “I just can’t return. You see, I committed a crime.” He tries to make it a joke. He grimaces as if he wasn’t serious at all.
As if he wasn’t saying too much.
Marly still startles.
Maybe it’s because Ilya’s eyes have gotten misty, and don’t play along with his attempt to play it off as a joke.
“Is not a violent crime,” Ilya says, hoping against hope that Marly’s many-times concussed brain will jump to tax evasion or involvement with Bratva. “There’s no victim. Is just I can’t go back to Russia again, because it could be bad.”
Even though he’s still hiding, it’s better if he does it on this side of the ocean. He knows his family too well. Alexei is not above blackmailing him, or worse, using him to blackmail Shane if Ilya slips.
Marly’s staring at him.
Finally, he exhales. “Fuck you, Roz. And you couldn’t stay in Boston? No one is deporting Ilya Rozanov.”
“Don’t ask me to explain,” Ilya snaps, then adds, pleading: “Just don’t.”
They fall into uneasy silence, drinking their beers and glaring at each other.
Tory walks into the room.
She seems surprised to find Ilya still there. “You two are very quiet. I thought maybe you’d left. Do you want to order food?”
Ilya shakes his head. “Am leaving, actually.”
He’s already told Marly too much.
If it was only about Ilya, he would tell Marly everything and he wouldn’t even care that much how Marly’d react. Better to be hated for having a beautiful, talented boyfriend than being loved for some distorted image of him people had in their heads. For this crime, he’d face punishment with his head held high.
But it’s not only about Ilya. Shane’s career is also on the line, and Shane’s happiness is worth more than anything else in Ilya’s life.
So he gets up before he gives Marly anything more.
He almost puts his old address into the Uber app. To the mansion he no longer owns. As of three weeks ago, officially. He misses that, too. Especially when he sleeps alone in a hotel room bed in the city where he’s supposed to be living.
The reconstruction on his Ottawa house will be done, soon. He won’t be homeless for much longer.
“Roz,” Marly stops him in the hallway.
And then he grabs Ilya and pulls him into a hug that would embarrass a bear.
“Fuck you, Roz, you fucking motherfucker,” he says into Ilya’s shoulder.
Ilya laughs so that he doesn’t cry. “Excellent fucking speech, Marly. You sure English is your first language?”
“Fuck you.” The hug twists into a loose chokehold as Marly roughly rubs his knuckles into Ilya’s curls.
Ilya leaves Marly’s condo laughing.
Tears don’t start filling his eyes until he’s in the back of the Uber. He blinks them away. Life is good, he reminds himself. He’s flying to Ottawa in the morning and there’s no game the next day, and Montreál has no game either. He’ll see his boyfriend’s dick and freckles. Maybe he’ll see his boyfriend’s family, too, and they’ll act like he belongs. If he’s very lucky, David Hollander will ask him to help with puzzles and crosswords. If he’s luckier still, Yuna Hollander will rub his shoulder and tell him to have dessert and ask him for updates of his work calendar. And maybe, if the universe is truly good to him, he’ll get to stay the night in the same bed as Shane and wake up with a large hockey player cutting off his circulation.
The next two weeks, all his games are at home.
Shane’s are as well.
Life is okay.
Life is good.
Ilya is okay.
So he doesn’t know why his chest aches. In this moment, he’s not sure what he should fill it with. His boyfriend, or his country, or Cliff fucking Marlow and the rest of the Boston Raiders.
He texts Marly his new address.
He almost types “Maybe they’ll hate me less”, but that’s too raw. And not true. No one hates him, not even Carmichael who almost broke his nose just a few hours ago. They love him. They are hurt, because they love him.
He wonders whether that'd still be true if they saw all of him.