Work Text:
It feels terrible to think, but Sai Hollander is really dreading the Olympics.
When Sai was ten, she decided that she was going to be a professional hockey player in the NHL. Her first step to accomplishing that was to only show up to tryouts for boys’ teams, with her hair tucked into her helmet and her mouth shut. Young as she was, it was enough to conceal her girlhood for long enough that they would see her skills and want her anyway. Soon enough, the boy part of the boy division became implied, and her need for trickery melted away. While the women’s division always had the qualifying words of women’s or girls’ within its title, the name of the boys’ division dropped the male qualifier altogether. As irritating as this was, it created a loophole for Sai: it wasn’t that girls weren’t allowed to play, just that it was assumed that they wouldn’t. Exploiting this loophole had allowed her to play for Team Canada in the World Juniors instead of the Women’s World Juniors and, eventually, allowed her to play in the National Hockey League at all.
But the Olympics doesn’t have such an exception. The categories are clear; there is a women’s team and a men’s team. And so, when she gets the call, Sai realizes that she will be playing with other women for the first time since 1999. It scares her a little more than she wants to admit.
“Are you looking forward to the Olympic break?” The mic in her face tells her that the reporter is from CBC. “Do you anticipate receiving the captaincy for the Canadian Women’s Team?”
Ever since they had given her the Voyageurs’ captaincy at the beginning of the season, she, and everyone else, had wondered if they would give her the Olympic one as well.
God, the Voyageurs captaincy. That was just another thing, wasn’t it? Just another asterisked achievement. She and Ilya — he, the youngest captain ever and she, the youngest (and only) female captain ever, by virtue of a month and five days.
“Of course I’m looking forward to the Olympics,” she says. “I mean, that’s the dream, right? To represent your country on the world stage?”
“And the captaincy?” The reporter pushes his mic just a bit closer. She can almost feel the foam cover on her lips.
“I trust that the GM will make the right choice for the team as a whole,” she says blandly. “If that choice happens to me, it would be a huge honour to lead my country’s team.”
“Has Rozanov offered to show you around his home country?” asks another reporter, yelling to be heard over the noise.
She knows what they’re asking for. She’s honestly surprised that what they’re thinking still isn’t true.
Despite having spent hours together, alone, Ilya has never pushed her for more. For all that he is soft with her, he has never tried to cross that barrier. She wonders sometimes if it’s only because of what she told him four years ago, or if he has never even thought about her that way at all. She still doesn’t really know which answer she would prefer.
“Roz is from Moscow,” she says, “I don’t think he knows Sochi quite as well. But I’ve been meaning to ask him for food recommendations. Thanks for the reminder.”
While the media tends to push this star crossed lovers idea, most of the League seems to think that while Ilya wants to fuck her, Sai has been refusing him. Whether it’s because she just doesn’t want him or it’s because she’s a lesbian seems to be up in the air. At least, that’s what she gathers from what she hears from her team. They all seem to think it’s the funniest thing in the world, that she is supposedly cock-blocking him, no matter how much she insists they are just friends. It’s sort fucked up to laugh about, but ultimately it’s pretty harmless. She doesn’t like to think about how everyone would react if they thought it was the other way around.
“That’s all for today,” says the media person, Henry. “Thanks everyone!”
The press grumbles as Henry guides her back towards the locker room.
“Good job out there, especially on the Rozanov comment,” he says. “You’re really good at keeping up the intrigue with that.” He winks at her, like he thinks that he knows that the intrigue is a lie.
“Ha,” Sai says. “Intrigue. Yeah.”
It might, she thinks, be time for a rewatch of her favourite movie, When Harry Met Sally. Maybe this time she would figure out the truth: can a woman and a man just be friends?
“I saw your interview.” Ilya’s voice is static-y through the speaker of her BlackBerry Classic. “You want food recommendations, Sai?”
“Oh God, how did you see that already?” Sai is lying down in her hotel bed.
She was alone as Hayden was gone, supervising the rest of the team at a club she hadn’t cared to join them for. One of the good parts about being a girl was that when all the guys went to go and pick up after a game, they didn’t ever expect her to come.
“I swear you were at your game until, like, an hour ago,” she continues. “Do you have alerts on for me or something?”
“Why would I have alerts on for the second-best player in the League?” She could hear the smirk in his voice.
“Oh, fuck you.”
Ilya’s laugh rumbles through the phone.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “I will send you a list. Pelmini, borscht, all of the best ones. I will write little notes, like I know you want me to, with instructions to help you know if you have good ones.”
Sai’s heart does something funny in her chest.
“Now you really are making me look forward to the Games.”
A pause. “You were not before?”
Sai backtracks. “I mean, of course I am, it’s an honour.”
“Ah, ah, no media response with me,” Ilya says, tutting her. “Truth only, please.”
Sai sighs. “I don’t know. Women’s hockey is a different game. I guess I’m just nervous because I haven’t played it in a while.”
“How different can it be?” Ilya asks, “What, you don’t want to wear the cage?”
“It’s not just about the helmets—”
“So it is a little bit about the helmet.” Ilya’s voice is teasing and light.
“Maybe,” Sai concedes, her mouth in a small smile despite her words. “But it’s also about how the style of play is completely different.”
“Impossible,” Ilya says. “You are Sai Hollander. You make everyone else look like idiots. Well, everyone but me, of course.”
Despite what Ilya is saying, the women’s game is different from the men’s game, and Sai had dedicated herself to the other kind for the past fifteen years. For one, there is no checking in women’s hockey, and while Sai isn’t exactly the most violent player, checking is still part of her game; to train the reaction out of her was going to be tough but necessary. She isn’t planning on spending all her games in the sin bin. No checking also means a different, more fluid and precise style of play. Sai is honestly excited for that part. Those were the kind of adjectives commentators typically use to describe her play, after all. Her only fear is that, when compared to the other women who played like that all the time, she would suddenly stand out as some sort of oafish brute.
“It cannot be about the hockey,” Ilya says. “I will not believe it. You remember who you are, yes?”
“I know who I am, Ilyusha.”
“You are Sai-Fucking-Hollander,” he says. “Highest hockey IQ in the League. You will be able to adjust. I know you will.”
She holds her phone a little more tenderly, like it actually holds her friend inside it.
He is right, of course. It isn’t really about the hockey. Well, it is a little bit, but most of it is about the same thing as it had been when she was little: the social stuff.
Sai is weird, and girls always seem better equipped at figuring that out. It isn’t that men are stupid or blind; they just don’t really know how a female hockey player is supposed to act. They know how normal girls act. Or maybe, just how WAGs act. Either way, to them, any of her oddities could be ascribed to being a female hockey player. At the Olympics, that flimsy armour would be gone, and her weirdness would be obvious to any of them who cared to look.
“Are you looking forward to the Olympics, Captain?”
“Ah,” he says. “I think I am looking forward to them as much as you are.”
“I see,” she replies. “So very much, then?”
She hears the bitterness slide onto his tongue even as he laughs through the phone. “Obviously, Hollander.”
Sai doesn’t really know much about Ilya’s relationship with Russia. He has always been tight-lipped about it, and it felt wrong to ask Svetlana about it behind his back. She honestly tries to avoid the topic as much as possible. All she really knows is that a darkness always looms over him at the end of the season when he is bound to return.
“Obviously,” she echoes. “Silly me.”
Sai does end up being named captain. With Poulin retired, they tell her she is the ‘obvious’ choice. She has the feeling that it does nothing to endear her to her fellow teammates, and actually probably does the opposite. She couldn’t imagine how angry she would be at the one girl who gets paid more to play hockey than they made at their normal jobs. Fuck, Sai makes more in a year with her base salary than most of them have probably seen in their lives.
It’s not that they’re mean to her or resentful, even. They’re not. Most of them are perfectly nice. But they are watching her, examining her every move. She can practically hear what they’re thinking: this is the girl that gets to play in the League?
It probably makes her act weirder than she normally is, but she honestly doesn’t have time to think about it. Ilya was right when he said that she would adjust. Though she starts a little more violently than the others, and they have to remind her a couple of times that she isn’t allowed to check anyone, her body eventually starts to get the message. The game is smarter but slower, the woman creating plays that most of her boys would never have dreamed of. It’s a bit of a rush for hockey to be a little new again.
She’s riding the high of it when someone finally asks her the question she’s dreading the most. It comes from Liv O’Connor, the second-line centre, as they are undressing in the locker room after one of their first practices before the prelims.
“Why did you start playing with the guys?” Sai can’t really tell from her tone if the question is innocent or not.
The last time Sai had played on a women’s team, it was a girls' U8 team. Though she had spent the previous year on a boys' team, she had been encouraged to switch divisions by a coach. Not because of her talent, but because they were worried she wasn’t getting enough 'girl time'. When it came to actually playing with them, though, girl time was half of the problem. It was as if, in her single year playing with U7 boys, she had completely forgotten what it was like to be a girl. The girls were far more socially adept than the boys had been, even then, with more complex social intuitions. Every conversation felt like a minefield, with subtextual landmines hidden in every other sentence. Unlike the boys, they knew that she was the weird one because she was weird, not because she was a girl.
The other half of the problem was the difference in how girls and boys were treated by adults. The coaches didn’t treat the girls as seriously as the boys. For most Canadian boys, the NHL dream felt, in some way, achievable, especially when they were young, and the most talented of them had yet to truly emerge. Coaches treated them both as kids, but also as serious prospects. There was little of that on the girls' team. It didn’t matter how serious little Sai insisted she was; with no professional league, there was a distinct lack of pressure and intensity that they were willing to give her. Some of the other girls were just as serious as Sai, of course they were, but without having played with the boys, they had no idea how much better the coaches could be. Sai knew.
It only took a month of the girls' league for Sai to beg her mom to switch her back, and though Yuna knew it would be harder for her, she agreed. Since then, that single year of U9 girls hockey had been forgotten to history, and Sai Hollander had been the singular exception that everyone had only allowed because her skill had become undeniable.
But all of that was too hard to unpack in a locker room.
“I dunno, really,” Sai lies. “I sort of always played with the boys.”
“And they just let you?” asks another player, a defenseman (or defensewoman? She wasn’t really sure. Wasn’t ‘man’ sometimes used in a gender neutral way?) from Alberta, Sunny White.
“I guess they cared more about the goals I was scoring than my gender,” Sai replies, frowning. She didn’t really know, but it was the most probable answer she could think of.
“I should have asked my mom to make me play with the boys,” mutters Sydney Hoeser, their first-line left wing. She’s the captain of the Polaire, Montreal’s CWHL team. Sai feels a bit bad that she doesn’t know her better, considering that. “Maybe I could’ve been making ten million dollars a year, too.”
Sai fights off the inexplicable urge to correct her. While Ilya is making around that much—9.81 million AAV on a seven-year deal—she was only making 7.24 million AAV. Well, maybe only is the wrong word to use there. Obviously, it is a lot of money, but it is her mother’s opinion that she is still being underpaid. As much as it feels selfish to think, Sai agrees. Ilya hadn’t won Rookie of the Year, nor had he really performed better than she had in the two seasons after that. They are rivals, equals; their pay should reflect that. It was pretty obvious to the world at large what the difference between them was that keeps her contract as ‘low’ as it is.
Thankfully, she manages to keep her mouth shut and doesn’t say any of that. They might actually start hating her if she had. After all, she wasn’t exactly the biggest victim of the gender pay gap in this room.
“I’m very lucky,” she says quickly, bowing her head a little bit, as if they might be able to read her gratefulness by looking at the crown of her head instead of her blank, robot-like face. She knows that it throws people off sometimes.
Thankfully, the conversation moves on from her soon after that. Eventually, they make it out of the locker room, and everyone begins to split off, predictably, without her. Even though there are plans to hang out as a team later, it doesn’t really escape her notice that she isn’t invited to anything ‘unofficial’. She tells herself that it’s fine, that they aren’t really her teammates. She probably wouldn’t see any of them until the next Olympics after this one ended. It wasn’t the end of the world if they weren’t really friends, right?
She wanders to the Olympic Village by herself and ends up stumbling into the ice cream shop. Though she doesn’t normally allow herself this kind of thing, she thinks that it might make her feel better.
“Just vanilla, please,” she says. When they pass it over the counter, she mutters, “Spasibo.”
It was one of the first things that Ilya taught her in Russian because, according to him, she was a polite Canadian, so she would get lots of use from it, yes?
She’s put her earphones in and started to text Ilya when she feels someone’s hands on her shoulders.
“Holly!” says Carter Vaughn, “Funny seeing you here. I thought Team Canada had practice right now? New York Marley was telling me about it.”
“That’s the men’s team, Vaughny,” she says. “I am a woman, you know? We finished our practice a half hour ago.”
Vaughn blinks, like he really had forgotten she was a woman. Next to him, Scott Hunter looks close to face-palming.
“Right, what am I thinking, obviously,” he says.
They sit down next to her.
“How is it, playing with the girls?” Hunter asks, polite as ever.
“Good. Different, I guess.” She eats a small scoop of her ice cream. It’s almost crazy how sweet it is. “How about you? How’s your practices?”
“Team USA has got this in the bag, baby,” Vaughny gloats good-naturedly. “Your guys don’t stand a chance.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
If she is being honest, she really doesn’t know who is going to win the Men’s Division. The Canadian team’s defence is very good, with JJ, Price, and the Marley brothers holding down the fort. The major hole is, to her dismay, at centre. She knows that if she were playing with the men, their chances of gold would be much better. Without her, they are left with the aging Lukas Brown holding down the first line.
“Hey, have you gotten those food recommendations from Roz?” asks Vaughn.
“Has everyone seen that clip?” Sai asks, sighing.
“Not our fault the only people in the League that most people are interested in are you two, Rook,” Hunter says, shrugging.
“Can’t exactly blame them,” Vaughny said. “I mean, the media eats it up, all the will-they, won’t-they stuff. It makes for a good story.”
“Vaughny,” Hunter mutters, elbowing him slightly. He sends her an apologetic look. “Really?”
“It’s fine,” Sai says, automatically, “I mean, I know what everyone thinks. I’m not stupid.”
“Still, sorry, man,” Vaughny says. “Or girl, I guess. Sorry, girl.” He winces at himself. “Oh, man.”
“Quit while you’re ahead, Vaughny,” Sai says, smiling. “Trust me.”
“Quitting,” he says, nodding. “Definitely quitting.”
“Are you planning on watching any other events?” Hunter asks, sweeping in to save his teammate, albeit a little late.
“Maybe figure skating?” Sai says. “My friend Joe is competing. We used to train together, so I’d like to catch it. Would you guys wanna come with?”
“Hell yeah, Holly,” Vaughny says, reinvigorated. “Show up for any dude who’s that brave.”
Sai frowns. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m assuming your friend might be gay?” Vaughny says. “I mean… fucking brave for a dude to show up to a place like this and be like: hey, here’s me. Russia is not safe for folks like that. Fucking balls of steel, man.”
Sai feels herself stutter physically. For all he had been stuffing his foot in his mouth before, Vaughny somehow seems to catch it.
“Oh shit,” he says, “I didn’t even think. Are you—”
“Vaughny!” Hunter snaps. It’s enough to get her out of her head, only because the tone he was taking on was so uncharacteristic for him. “I think you should stop talking.”
“Stopping,” Vaughny mutters. “Definitely stopping.”
“I’m going to go,” Sai says. Her body feels far away from her right now, her mind disconnected, floating off somewhere unknown to her. “See you guys later.”
“Holly, wait—”
Sai doesn’t stick around, all but running out of the ice cream shop. Unluckily for her, Hunter runs after her.
“Hey, Rook, it’s okay,” he says. “Come with me. Can we go sit somewhere? Give you a chance to breathe? The Team USA building is around the corner. Vaughny is my roommate and I told him to fuck off of the next bit, so you can get some privacy, okay?”
Sai feels herself nodding, despite herself. Time slips away as Hunter guides her to his room, barely registering the change in scenery. She only really comes back to herself when Hunter sits her down on his bed.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he says. “Whatever is wrong, if it is about your sexuality or not, it’s none of my business.” He pauses and looks upwards towards the ceiling before he places his hand on her shoulder. “Listen. Kid. Can I tell you something?”
She blinks, then makes the effort to look at him. There is something like hesitation in his eyes, and maybe resolve. She isn’t really sure, though. Still, she nods slowly.
“I’m—” he grimaces. “I’m gay. So, if you are too, just know that… you’re not alone in it, okay?”
For a second, Sai doesn’t say anything at all. Her jaw just drops, just a little bit. Scott Hunter was gay?
Interpreting her silence, he stutters to continue.
“If you’re not, that’s okay too,” he says, “But I would appreciate you keeping that little fact to yourself, regardless.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” she says automatically. “Never. I would never do that to someone. Ever.”
“Thank you—”
“And I am. Maybe?” She almost can’t believe she’s saying it, that the words are tumbling out of her without much input from her brain. “I think I might like both, maybe? I’m not… I’m not really sure. I don’t date, really.”
It feels weird to say out loud. It gives the words a weird permanence. Even though Sai has long suspected her own gayness, she has never talked about it before. It was something that has lived alone, in her head. It also doesn’t really feel right to say both, like it is that simple. But it wasn’t like she could say women and Ilya Rozanov. That would be a fucking mess.
“That’s okay,” Hunter says. “You don’t have to know right now. There’s no deadline.”
Ilya probably would’ve made a joke there. Something like, there is for you, old man, because you’re going to die of old age, except a lot smoother and funnier. Not that Ilya would ever have this conversation with Hunter. Fuck, why is she even thinking of Ilya right now?
“Are you… are you worried, being here?” she asks. “Are you safe?”
“I take a lot of precautions, Rook,” Hunter says. “If nobody has found out about me in the last fifteen years I’ve been in the League, they’re not going to find out now.”
She must make a face because Hunter nudges her with his shoulder.
“It will be different for you,” he says. “Better. I don’t think you would have to hide for fifteen years if you found a girl that you loved. I mean, half of the league sort of thinks you’re a lesbian already, and none of them care nearly half as much as they would if they found out about me.” He grimaces.
She knows it’s true. It’s pretty fucked up, actually.
“Thanks, Hunter,” she mutters. “I don’t… just thanks, I guess.”
“No problem, Rook,” he mutters, smiling at her tightly. “That’s what us old fucks are for, right?”
“Right,” she laughs a little, lightness returning. “Of course. How could I forget?”
Sai’s Olympics are over before she really knows it.
It went well. Or, the hockey went well, at least. Really well, as told by the gold medal, already hanging around her neck. Sai only mistakenly checks a player once, in their first game against Switzerland, but quickly remembers the different rules after that. She still hasn’t heard the end of it about it, with commentators all being sure to mention her more man-ish style of play compared to the other players. It is a weird contrast to the way they had always described her before—as graceful, or dancer-like—whenever she was on NHL ice. She wasn’t sure which version she hates more.
The social part kind of plays out exactly how she expects it to. They invite her to team things, but nobody is really interested in getting to know her more than that. Well, that is maybe an over-exaggeration. One girl on the team texts her, Selene Martin. She is on the Polaire with Hoeser, a forward, and the youngest person on the Olympic team, being a year younger than Sai.
Sai isn’t really able to stop crying when she checks her phone the morning after the game and sees her message.
| Selene Martin (Polaire/Olympics): hey hollzy! playing with you during these games has been super fun. if you’re ever free, we should definitely hang in mtl! (don’t worry ik youre super busy with the voys, so no pressure :D)
Sai is sure to message her back quickly, affirming her desire to hang out. She doesn’t really have very many girl friends, other than Svetlana, who lives in Boston.
But other than that single text from Selene, they cheer when she scores for them on the ice and slap her on the back in the locker room, but that is it. They are, at the end of it, colleagues for less than a month. She shows up and does her job, and it is all that they want from her. It was fine.
In contrast to her Olympic success, Russia loses to Latvia in the quarters. It’s a fucking shit show. Their goalie is terrible, and their lines are playing together like it’s the first time they’ve ever seen each other, let alone stepped on the ice as a team. Ilya plays his heart out, like he always does, but it’s not enough. His wings aren’t there to support him, and he can’t make a fucking play, so they take a five-nothing loss and get kicked out of their own tournament.
Sai texts him as soon as it’s over.
| Jane: You played well. I’m sorry about the loss.
He doesn’t respond, and she tries not to take it personally. She knows that she would be similarly unreasonable if that happened to her. Since the women had started their games earlier, she had ended up playing the final match the day after Russia was knocked out and hadn’t gotten the chance to track Ilya down. Since the men’s final match isn’t until three days later, she’s able to stick around, looking for him around the corners of the Village before she heads back to Montreal and the season starts up again.
He manages to avoid her until she’s watching Joe’s short program with Vaughny and Scott, who are taking a break from training before their gold medal match with Canada the following day. She escapes the two of them with a mumble about the washroom.
“Hey.”
Ilya’s head snaps up at the sound of her voice, and his face seems to go through several expressions at once before it falls into something stony.
“What, you got sick of Hunter?”
Sai feels her heart drop to her feet.
“What?”
“Was he a bad fuck?” Ilya asks, his voice uncharacteristically sharp.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice isn’t shaking. It’s not. “What do you mean by that?”
“I am not idiot,” he says. “You and Hunter went to his hotel room, alone. Now you watch figure skating together.”
“Vaughny is watching with us too,” she says. “And how did you even find out about that? Was it... was it on the news?”
“Fuck, Hollander, no it was not on news. I saw you. Was going to come say hi, but you found different company.” He runs his hands through his hair. It’s longer than normal, and the curls have gotten a little unruly. She likes it. “I get it. You have Hunter now. You do not need to pity me anymore. You can leave me alone.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Sai feels like she is losing the thread of the conversation, like she has fallen asleep and woken up in a strange world where nothing makes any fucking sense. “I don’t pity you. You’re my friend. You know that.”
“Right. Your friend.” He says it stiffly. She can see the way his grip tightens around the barrier that overlooks the rink. “Is he your friend too?”
“I mean, I guess?” she says, exasperated and tired. She doesn’t understand this conversation at all. “I don’t know him that well. We know each other and we’re friendly. Is that what friends are?”
He is not looking at her. “Is that what we are, Hollander?”
“Of course not,” she says. “You’re my best friend. That’s different.”
Ilya is silent, and his eyes are closed as he continues to grip the bannister.
“I care about you, you know?” she whispers. “I texted you. You’re the one who didn’t answer.”
Ilya curses in Russian under his breath.
“I’m sorry,” he manages. “I don’t…” he trails off and shakes his head. “I cannot talk about this here. Can we go to your room?”
“Of course,” she says automatically. Her roommate had already gone home, unable to take time off work with the games over for her.
She walks up to him to grab his hand and squeezes it once. The tension bleeds out of him, and they make the walk to Team Canada’s building in silence.
Ilya looks small sitting on her bed. It doesn’t really make any sense. He’s as tall as she is and wider than her by about half a foot; he shouldn’t ever look so small. But there is something about the curve of his shoulders that makes it look like he is shrinking into himself.
“I should not have said that to you.”
“No, you shouldn’t have.” She walks across the room to join him on the bed. “It was really mean, Ilyusha.”
His face crumples further at her use of his diminutive. “I am sorry.”
“I forgive you.” The words come out easily. He nods silently, like he is trying to convince himself that she means it. She leans her head against his shoulder, just so he can feel the press of her skin against his.
“I am…” He trails off, then swallows. His fists squeeze themselves into tight little balls. “I do not like who I am here.”
“In Russia?”
“Yes,” he replies. “I am not myself, I think. I become…” He crumples. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I am sorry.”
Sai doesn’t know what else to do besides running her hand up and down his back.
“Fuck,” he mutters. “Fuck! I am sorry.”
“No more sorries,” she mutters. “I told you. I forgive you. That’s the end of it, okay? Don’t hold onto it.”
He nods. She can see that tears are gathering in his eyes.
“You’re my best friend,” she says. “Not Hunter. Hunter was just… in the right place at the right time. I was freaking out, and he offered me his room for some privacy. That’s it.”
“You were freaking out?” Ilya’s voice is a little clearer now. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“It was nothing,” Sai says, shaking her head. “It was just something Vaughny said.”
“Vaughn said something that freaked you out?” Ilya asks. “I will kill him. I play Admirals in one month.”
“No, it wasn’t Vaughny’s fault,” Sai says. She can’t help but smile at Ilya’s reaction. “He just…” She swallows, taking a second to breathe. “He said something about how my friend Joe was brave for coming to Russia.”
“The figure skater?”
Sai smiles again, because of course Ilya remembers.
“Yes, him,” she says. “He said that Joe was brave for coming to Russia because he was probably gay. Because, you know, figure skating, I guess. I freaked out because…” She takes a deep breath. “Because I think I’m gay. At least a little bit.”
“A little bit?” Ilya asks.
“I think the word for it is bisexual.” She knows it’s bisexual, but it feels weird to admit that aloud, like it will implicate her for doing gay research, or something. Never mind that she sort of did. “When you like both. Men and women, I mean.”
More like man and women, she thought.
“Is that the word?” Ilya asks, “I did not know in English. Me too.”
Sai blinks. “You too?”
“What, you are homophobic now?” He asks, scoffing. “You do not think I look gay? This is stereotype, Hollander.” He says stereotype slowly, Ste-re-o-type, like it might be the first time he’s said it aloud. It makes her unbearably fond of him.
“I am not homophobic!” She says, hitting him lightly. “God, you are the worst, Ilyusha.”
They laugh and roll around on the bed for a second. When they settle back down again, she asks, “Is this why you don’t like Russia?”
“I did not say I do not like Russia,” Ilya says, “I said I do not like who I am in Russia. Is different.”
Sai isn’t really sure that it is. Not meaningfully, at least. But she doesn’t fight him on it, not today. Not while they were still here.
“It is part of it,” Ilya admits quietly. “Not all of it, though. But it is hard, sometimes, when your home does not love you.”
Unlike before, his voice is not teary, but sort of flat, like he is not so angry about it anymore and has accepted it.
Sai runs her hand up and down his back.
“I’m sorry, Ilyusha,” she mutters. “That must be so hard.”
“No sorries,” he says, echoing her. “No more sorries.”
“No more sorries,” Sai agrees. “Okay.”