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The best thing about America was its freedoms. On this side of the Atlantic, Ilya Rozanov was free to play hockey, ignore his brother’s phone calls, fuck whoever he wanted, and even to demolish an ice cream sundae the size of a newborn at 4 am after a night of doing all of the above.
Ilya dropped his sticky spoon into the rocky-road-slicked bowl and flopped back into the floor of his hotel room with a groan, drumming on his uncomfortably full stomach.
He wiggled his toes deep into the lush patterned carpet and hummed with pleasure overload.
He’d harvested and feasted on all delights today, professional, carnal, and culinary. If he had the energy, he’d indulge in a cigarette before bed. But that would require movement and energy that Ilya barely had and didn’t want to expend. Maybe he’d sleep here, on the freshly-vaccuumed floor of a posh hotel with his cell phone digging into his back, and no view of the TV he’d turned on for noise.
The ice cream was making slow work of absorbing the alcohol in his system, but he didn’t mind. A vodka and ice cream soaked existence was blurry at the edges, sparkly and sweet, reminding him wide open, gates unlocked, walls down.
A tispy Ilya actually yelped and giggled when his cell phone vibrated underneath him, literally tittilating the skin beneath him.
Only contracting the muscles needed to roll over, he did so, sloppy like a half-animated rag doll. He pawed from the device and squinted at the screen. Alexei wasn’t going to spoil this day, but it might be fun to cuss him out.
Jane
Shane and Ilya almost never spoke on the phone. In that buzzy, sticky moment after a hat trick of goals, orgasms, and ice cream flavors, Ilya had no idea why.
“Привет” he greeted melodiously, almost singing. [“Hi.”] He tucked arm behind his head.
The line crackled. There was a string of silence, and then a series of dragging, spongy breaths.
Ilya raised his eyebrows. “Surprising me more every day, Hollander,” he said. He moved his hand into his pants.
The heavy breathing continued, but it was truncated by a very unsexy cough, and a brittle sound, not a sob or a groan, but a soft, broken utterance.
Ilya’s hand stilled. Something uncomfortable and cold flared in his belly.
“Shane?”
More guttural wheezes.
Despite their years of hooking up, Ilya couldn’t answer the most basic questions about Shane, not his favorite color, or his pre-game routine, or where he was born. But you couldn’t be intimate with someone, share their space, or be present in some of the biggest moments of their lives without absorbing some information about them. And Ilya knew Shane was prone to anxiety.
Ilya switched his phone to speaker and furiously tapped on his phone, pulling up the bookmarked page about the Metros stats. They’d lost four consecutive games. Another quick search revealed the brutal headlines:
Hollander’s only hattrick is a series of loses
Metros Captain ushers in a cringe-worthy losing streak
Shane Hollander’s reign is a losing one
“Hey, hey, Shane,” he said calmly. “Is before or after?”
A wet clearing of the throat, “...a-after…” Shane managed. Between the uncharacteristic smallness of his voice and the slight echoing, Ilya pictured Shane, a majestic specimen of a man, all biceps and thick, powerful thighs, cowering and wounded in a generic hotel bathroom.
Ilya’s mind whirred. “Are you breathing okay?”
Shane took an exaggerated deep breath, always willing to obey. “Can y-you just talk?”
Distraction. Ilya could do that. He turned off the TV, and the city lights reflected in its darkened screen–a plane of black dotted with blurred sparkling lights. That’s all it took for a thought to ignite.
“I went to a hockey tournament in Reykjavík before draft. We won, of course, but it’s is not point. The first day there, they let us explore the country. We went to the black sand beach with piles of weirdly shaped rocks and a volcano. It was very cool. It looked like different planet. But on the way back to hotel, we drove through just open land with stubby short bushes and little houses along the way,” Ilya laid back, falling into the memory.
“I saw this man just with his cows. The bushy, fuzzy, cute ones. He wasn’t herding them or milking them or anything. He was just laying in the field with them. Feeding them carrots in the white sun. He seemed so free and so happy with his cows, no pressure to win or score goals. I think about that sometimes…when hockey gets hard. Or life gets hard. Just saying ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck you’ and finding a bit of land in Iceland, getting some cows, and be just being.”
A breathy laugh, and a sniff. “You’d get bored in an hour.”
Something like relief flowed through Ilya and he smiled wide. “Probably, yes. What about you? What is your escape plan?”
Shane didn’t hesitate. “Flipping houses. But I wouldn’t want a huge or corporate, just something small. I’d buy the houses and do some of the work myself, make sure to keep the character of the houses.”
“Of course,” Ilya shot back, humoring him.
“It’s boring, I know.”
Later, Ilya would blame the vodka and the ice cream. “Boring isn’t always bad. Sometimes boring is safe and dependable,” Ilya explained.
Shane sighed, but it sounded more peaceful like he was exhaling stress. “I should sleep.”
“Yes, you should.”
“Thanks, Ilya.”
“Next time you call me breathing heavy, it better be for sexy reasons. Less panic.”
Ilya could hear Shane’s smile through the phone. “No promises.”
Fin