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Ilya spent most of his adult life keeping three big secrets close to his chest. The first was the fact that he liked fucking men just as much as women. The second was the fact that Shane Hollander was one of the men he liked fucking, and after enough time, the only one he could imagine fucking. The third was the fact that he couldn’t hear the lyrics to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” without tearing up.
The third secret was technically older than the other two. It wasn’t something he could help. Hearing that song instantly took him back to the linoleum floor of his childhood kitchen, listening to his mother sing along to ABBA.
His mother still had more good days than bad, when Ilya was that small, and she would take advantage of a free afternoon to pull out her old ABBA records with their USSR-approved cover art. She didn’t speak any English, not really, but by virtue of sheer repetition, she had managed to learn the shape of the words, if not their meaning. Her own accent would layer over the lilting Swedish accents of the original lyrics, another layer of harmony as she swayed over the suds in the kitchen sink.
That was how he tried to remember her. Sunlit and singing.
His father had scrubbed most traces of her from the apartment when she died. Family photos disappeared from the mantlepiece. Her clothes vanished. Her perfume was gone from her vanity, and then her vanity was replaced by a bookshelf. When he looked for the album that she used to show him, from her cut-short career as a teenage ballerina, he couldn’t find the faded pink satin volume. The ABBA albums, however, remained, growing dusty in their wooden cabinet.
Perhaps his father had simply forgotten them. He had never been particularly good at keeping track of the things that his mother was interested in.
As a teenager, in the cavernous dark of the empty apartment when his father stayed later and later at work and Alexei went out with his friends, Ilya would sometimes pull out one of those records, put it on the player, and drop the needle.
It was good for his English, he told himself. Most of the records in the cabinet were hers, but all of them, except for the ABBA records, were in Russian.
His conviction that he would make it to the NHL was growing day-by-day, as he pushed his way through drills with a ruthless-edged, vicious satisfaction. As reporters and scouts started to come calling to his games. He would make the KHL soon, but that league was too small to contain him; he wanted the big show. And that meant learning enough English to survive in a locker room or a press conference.
He would lay on the floor by the speaker, pilfered drink from his father’s stash in his hand, and close his eyes to try to absorb the lyrics.
Chiquitita, tell me what’s wrong
Sometimes he wondered if his mother had somehow understood the lyrics. Perhaps there had been translations on the record sleeve. Perhaps she had borrowed a Russian-English dictionary from his father’s bookshelf, somehow managed to puzzle her way through the Latin characters to identify the words and piece together the meaning.
You’re enchained by your own sorrow
Or perhaps she had simply sensed the meaning of the song, through the universal magic of music, or some shit like that.
In your eyes there is no hope for tomorrow.
Alexei came home earlier than he anticipated once, when Ilya was still laying on the floor halfway through the Voulez-Vous album. Alexei reeked of cigarettes and alcohol even from across the room, his eyes too old for his face.
Ilya sat up but stayed on the floor, tensed and waited for his reaction. But Alexei had only stood there, swaying a bit. Moved by the pounding disco beat or swaying due to drunkenness, Ilya couldn’t tell. In the end, Alexei hadn’t even had to say the words. Just gave him a look, the look that said I know what you are, I know who listens to this kind of music, and stomped up to his bedroom in a cloud of his own misery.
Now, finally, the first two of his secrets were no longer secrets. The whole world, or whatever segment of it cared about hockey players’ sexualities, knew that he liked fucking men. He had certainly made sure that the whole world knew that he liked fucking Shane Hollander, specifically. That was why he was currently on mandatory time out from Twitter, which was very unfair and wholly undeserved.
That meant there was one secret left. As far as he was concerned, he could take his ABBA secret to the grave.
Ilya tended to listen to a steady diet of rap, dubstep, and reggaeton. He did genuinely like it. In the wild years of his early twenties, if there wasn’t a club remix, he wasn’t interested. Thankfully NHL locker rooms didn’t tend to play much ABBA, even though their songs would sometimes play in brief snippets during intermission at the arena.
There had been one incident after their cup win when Ilya threw himself a little too hard into a club remix of “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme A Man After Midnight,” but fortunately Marly had been so drunk at that point that all four members of ABBA could have been right in front of him and he wouldn’t have noticed a thing.
But as he stood in the sunlit kitchen, filling the sink with sudsy water for their breakfast dishes even though Shane always rolled his eyes when he did dishes by hand, telling him that dishwashers were actually more efficient when fully loaded, the piano chords of “Dancing Queen” started to echo through his head.
Shane had gone over to his parents’ cottage to help his dad set up the new wi-fi extender to get their new smart TV connected to the internet. Ilya would have gone along had Shane not told him to stay, promising that he would be back soon and they could go swimming in the early afternoon.
Any adventure in helping his parents with technology inevitably turned into a multi-hour affair, given that Shane’s competency with technology rested solely upon his ability to read instructions and enter passwords using remote controls. Still, it was nice. It was the kind of thing that a dutiful son should do, and Ilya’s husband was nothing if not dutiful.
Which meant that there would be no one around to judge his music choices, if Ilya happened to pull up ABBA.
He pulled up the playlist that he had compiled years ago of his mother’s favorites, labeled in Cyrillic so that his teammates wouldn’t select the playlist when he was on the aux. Next to “sex playlist,” “locker room for win,” “workout rap,” and “bangerzzzzz,” who would look twice at a playlist labeled “мама”?
He pressed play and closed his eyes.
You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen…
She had been so young. He was older now than she had ever gotten to be. He had always been so worried about becoming his father; it was supposed to be inevitable. But the older he got, the less he could fathom going after someone that young and trapping them in a miserable cage.
Aaaaand that did it. He was tearing up.
Over the sound of the music and his own hands scrubbing at a crusted omelet pan in the sink, he barely registered the sound of the front door opening until he heard Shane’s footsteps walking into the kitchen. He looked up at his husband and froze with his hands in the sink, waiting to be laughed at.
“Hi,” Shane said.
“Hi,” Ilya replied, trying to keep his voice steady. He sounded snotty to his own ears. ABBA was still playing in the background, tinny over his phone speakers and endlessly incriminating.
“…You okay?” Shane asked, because they were trying this thing at the suggestion of their respective therapists where they communicated about their emotions and were honest with each other. Very annoying concept.
Ilya felt heat rising in his cheeks—not that he was blushing, obviously, but the warm dishwater was clearly getting to him. Slowly, Ilya extracted a hand from the soapy sink and wiped it dry on his own pants. He reached out, tapped his phone screen, and paused the music.
“Oh, you don’t have to pause your music,” Shane said. “I was going to go change so we can swim. Unless you want to eat lunch first?”
Huh. This was not the reaction Ilya was expecting. “You like ABBA?” he asked.
“Who?”
Ilya stared at him. He knew that his husband’s music tastes extended to “whatever lyric-free electronic music Apple Music suggests to me first.” Shane generally preferred listening to his own breathing while working out. He said that podcasts were more engaging than music when he was driving. He would listen to affirmations on loop while visualizing plays. He was endlessly weird. It was delightful.
Still, there was no way. Right?
“You are fucking with me?” Ilya asked.
“What? No,” Shane said. “Why would I be fucking with you?”
“I know you do not like music, but you do not live under a rock.”
Shane looked down at the floor and shuffled his feet, which meant that he was feeling ashamed that he had done something incorrectly. The only thing to do was to tease him until he snapped back and started feeling more like himself. Ilya blinked back the remainder of his tears and found a grin spreading across his face.
“You must be last person on the planet to not know ‘Dancing Queen.’ Everyone knows this. Penguins on South Pole listen to ‘Dancing Queen.’”
“I don’t pay attention to music!”
“I think they might not let you be gay anymore. ABBA is entry-level requirement.”
“Fuck off. We’re married. That’s, like, advanced-level gay.”
There he was. Ilya turned back to the dishes, still grinning.
“You know we have a dishwasher, right?” Shane said. “It’s actually more efficient to run a fully-loaded dishwasher than to wash dishes by hand.”
Ilya was impressed that it had taken Shane that long to say it. “I know,” he said.
Ilya started scrubbing at the stupid burned-on egg in the corner again, which was Shane’s fault for being so distracting when he was trying to cook. Shane would go change, now, and the ABBA incident would be forgotten. Except when he glanced up, his husband was still standing there with a furrowed brow.
“Were you crying?” Shane asked.
“Mama’s favorite,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the sink.
“Ah,” Shane said, then paused for a moment as he often did when Ilya’s mother came up. He was cautious, trying not to say the wrong thing. No one else had ever been so careful with him. “You know I wasn’t going to make fun of you, right?”
Ilya nodded. The tears were prickling in his eyes again. Galina liked to say things like giving himself permission to feel his feelings, but he hated to feel like a whiny crybaby blubber bitch. It’s just Shane, he told himself.
“Would you show me?” Shane said, because he was the best thing in the world.
Ilya reached out and pressed play.