Chapter Text
Some of the most earth-shattering things to happen in Stanley Kowalski’s life have happened in bathrooms adjacent to hockey events.
In 2017, at the All Star weekend in Tampa, Kowalski believed, for a brief and surreal moment, that Ilya Rozanov was coming on to him in the men’s room of the hotel bar. This was unexpected, but Kowalski owes a significant portion of his professional success to his reaction time. In the restroom in question, Kowalski called on the skills he had honed on the ice and made a move in order to capitalize on a potentially fleeting opportunity.
It didn’t work out the way he hoped. Rozanov was not looking for company. At least, not for his company. He knows (well, now, due to subsequent events, he knows) that Ilya Rozanov is absolutely not above engaging in amorous activities in the hypothetically sanitary facilities of establishments that serve food and drink. In this case, however, Rozanov had a different project in mind.
Rozanov offered Kowalski a bet. If his team won the cup, Kowalski would come out. If Rozanov’s team won the cup, he would do the same. Rozanov said lots of guys were doing it. Even if use of the phrase “lots of guys” hadn’t blown Kowalski’s mind and suspended his judgment, it would have been an easy bet for Kowalski to take. His team is in a slump that management thinks they can buy their way out of, as if players like Hollander and Rozanov come up for the draft every year. The idiots traded Tanner Dillon to Ottawa when they could have developed him into a fantastic wing. There is close to no chance that the bet will ever force Kowalski’s hand. It felt like Rozanov was offering to make the jack of spades jump out of a brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in Kowalski’s ear.
(Despite moving to Ottawa, Rozanov hasn’t been alarmed enough about his odds to take real avoidant steps, like playing badly. When Rozanov moved, it was all Kowalski could do to keep from texting to ask if he was clocking Mindy’s cheesecake. There’s no way Rozanov would have understood the reference by himself, but Rozanov hangs out with Scott Hunter, who hangs out with Eric Bennett. Kowalski is pretty sure a Harvard education includes some exposure to classic Broadway. Rozanov could manage, or outsource, the Sky Masterson-themed chirps from there. Kowalski plays for a team whose logo is a flying butthole, so he’s dealt with worse things than Guys & Dolls jokes, but it would open a whole can of worms with his teammates. He’d have to explain how Rozanov came up with the idea, and why Kowalski was talking to him at all. This is the kind of strategic level Kowalski thinks at. It’s fortunate for his career that he has good reaction time, because otherwise all the mental processing dedicated to theater references would kill him on the ice.)
After Kowalski signed on to come out in unlikely circumstances, Rozanov kept in touch. Kowalski has never in his life had so much evidence that anyone is paying attention to what he says. Once, Kowalski complained about homophobia from Carolina, and then spent playoffs watching Carolina get humiliatingly demolished in ways that had Gay Army written all over them. After years of feeling completely alone, Kowalski nearly died of joy when he realized Rozanov’s “lots of guys” actually exist.
Rozanov and Hunter are committed to making a jack jump out of their deck once or twice every year. Kowalski knows they have plans about it, so he’ll wait until he wins the cup, or retires, or until they ask him, and then he’ll do his best to squirt cider in the commissioner’s ear. He owes Rozanov, and all the other gay players he doesn’t know the names of. He’s already out to his family anyway. It’s not like they’d make him own up that he’s seriously into early Marlon Brando.
The Cup Bet was also central to the second earth-shattering thing to happen to Stanley Kowalski in a bathroom in connection with a professional hockey event. Because of the bet, Kowalski was invited to an off-site party while he was in Vegas for the MLH awards. It was there that he met Cooper Lee.
Kowalski did not know Cooper Lee’s name when the man fell off a barstool on him, and he didn’t get a chance to ask. When he reviews this memory – which he does on a schedule he has chosen not to interrogate – he pastes in the name he learned later, via morally unassailable internet research into the Irina Foundation. You can’t stalk a charitable foundation. (Kowalski is also not interrogating the statistical incidence of fancy words in his stream of consciousness when he thinks about Cooper Lee. He’s not trying to come up with thoughts that would impress a lawyer. That would be ridiculous.) Cooper Lee never told Kowalski what he preferred to be called, so Kowalski has labelled him with his last name, the way he would a fellow hockey player.
Unlike everyone else at the party, Lee was not a professional hockey player. Lee was – is, the man’s not dead or retired or anything – an adult human whose livelihood does not rest on Roger Crowell. A person who makes a living not by innate talent, or physical skill, but with his brain. Making a living with his brain means that Lee has to have one, and that brain has to be of high enough quality that Lee can’t be in the habit of making truly terrible mistakes. He would never accidentally trip getting off a barstool, fall against someone’s chest, and stay there longer than strictly necessary. That sequence of events could absolutely happen, but not by accident.
Fresh off the barstool, Lee put his left hand on Kowalski’s right bicep and said “oh my.”
Kowalski tensed his thigh against the other man’s. “Would you like to get out of here?”
“I’m afraid I can’t just leave,” Lee said, “but I bet…”
Kowalski went along, expecting that Lee would have identified a storage closet, or found his way to the unoccupied restaurant kitchen, someplace you could plausibly fit someone Kowalski’s size. Kowalski gets a little euphoric any time Rozanov passes on messages from other gay players, so he shouldn’t have been operating heavy machinery or making decisions on the same evening that he attended a party with seventeen queer players and a lawyer. This is what he tells himself to explain how he wound up making out with a very hot, very handsy lawyer in a bathroom stall.
The venue would have worked better for two horny lawyers. It seemed to work just fine for Lee. For Kowalski, it was a cramped space defined by breakable objects. It was tough to find anywhere to put his feet. He didn’t dare lean on anything, not even Lee. Lee is about his height, but he’s not built for full-contact sports. He’s got beautiful hazel eyes behind adorable wire-rimmed glasses, and long graceful hands that, based on the grip he has on Kowalski’s waist, under his tuxedo jacket and over his dress shirt, are a lot stronger than they look. Kowalski tilted his head and kissed down the side of Lee’s neck, pulling him closer. He was yanking Lee’s shirt out of his trousers when they heard the door open.
The door slammed shut, and there was a click as someone threw the lock. Lee tried to smile at him reassuringly, converting it to a silent snort at a sound like someone being shoved against a wall. Kowalski could have kicked himself for missing the lock. He could have been braced against a wall, dammit. It sounded like whoever was out there was making out, so Kowalski and Lee, suppressing laughter, carried on with what they’d been doing. Kowalski had about reached the limits of what he could access with Lee’s tie askew and was working on loosening it when he heard “Marry me, Shane.”
Lee froze. He put two fingers on Kowalski’s lips to keep him quiet. His eyes sparkled. He wasn’t bad looking in the bar, but the look on his face right then – he was practically on fire. There were a few seconds of silence before Shane Hollander said “What the fuck?”
As Shane goddamn Hollander and Ilya goddamn Rozanov discussed whether they would or would not get married immediately, Lee silently tucked his shirt back in and straightened his tie. There was a series of gestures that Kowalski interpreted as “I have to go deal with this.” Kowalski nodded. Lee pecked him quickly on the cheek and went forth, into the rest of the men’s room.
Kowalski relatched the stall after Lee left. He needed a minute.
Kowalski has given passing thought to the question of whether Lee knows his name. Kowalski isn’t Scott Hunter or Shane Hollander - no one is seeking him out to advertise menswear. He doesn’t appear on magazine covers. He’s a professional athlete, so he’s not completely low profile. He doesn’t know whether Lee has a list of people in on the bet. He considered being bothered by that possibility, but if Lee has that list, it’s probably covered under legal confidentiality. Maybe the guy knew the names of everyone at that party. Maybe he’s a Detroit hockey fan. Maybe Lee has some unassailably moral way of his own to research guys he makes out with. Maybe he doesn’t bother. Maybe, since he actually is low profile, Lee can pick up a fresh guy at a gay bar in Toronto every night (his professional bio is on the website of a law firm in Toronto, and includes a head shot that assures Kowalski he wasn’t imagining how attractive the guy is), and he sees no need to keep track of them. Maybe he wants what happens in Vegas to stay in Vegas.
Kowalski is not interested in keeping things in Vegas. He doesn’t want to date anyone who doesn’t want to date him, but he wants Lee to want to date him, and this year, he wants to take that back with him to Detroit. Kowalski starts this process by doing the same things he did last year. He goes to the MHL awards. He goes to the reprise of the party.
Cooper Lee isn’t there.
Kowalski has obviously learned nothing since the day he let his hope be unreasonably inflated by some lyrics from Rent, and tried to kiss the best baritone in his high school. Lee is a really high-powered lawyer. He doesn’t have time to trail around after Ilya Rozanov, and if he did (which he doesn’t, because that would be ridiculous), he wouldn’t necessarily have moments to spare for a guy from Detroit who just happened to be in the same place. What, Kowalski asks himself (as he did after the incident with the lead baritone), did he think was going to happen?
Lee not being where Kowalski hoped he would be is probably the best thing that could happen – if he had shown up, Kowalski would only embarrass himself. As it is, without his main target, Kowalski makes a radical strategy change for the evening: he dives into being a complete slut. His spare hotel room key is burning a hole in his pocket. He only barely resists coming on to Shane Hollander. (Rozanov and Brophy got into a dustup at one of these things two years back. Rumor has that it was about Hollander somehow.) He discovers an inner gossip queen he didn’t know existed – when Rozanov and Hollander announce that they’re married, he whines so that he can tell the room he witnessed (okay, overheard) their engagement. It feels good for about a second. As soon as the conversation moves on, Kowalski is glad Lee wasn’t around to see it.
He wants to kick himself for thinking that. There’s no point regretting that people he barely knows didn’t come to this party.
Kowalski doesn’t make it to the official MHL afterparty. He winds up singing karaoke with a few other gay players, and then in a hotel room with one of them. He gets dressed around four in the morning, and has to do a walk of shame to the front desk to ask for a replacement keycard. On the way back to his own floor, he notices that his reflection has a hickey below the right ear.