Chapter Text
For one, singular, blissful moment, nothing is wrong when Ilya wakes up.
The curtains are just barely open, bright morning sunlight filtering through; his sheets are freshly washed and soft against his skin; he has woken up two minutes before his alarm, not long enough to be tempted to go back to sleep but to an approximate silence that is infinitely better than the blaring alarm he hates; he is about as bruise-free as he ever is, barely even sore if he’s still enough. He blinks blearily against the light, shifts his body in experimental ways, savouring the brush of fabric on skin, establishing a baseline of all the places he hurts and all the others he needs to push harder. He stretches his arms above his head and his shoulders, well-used to the abuse, hardly even protest. There is no game today but he’ll skate well in practice anyway, unimpeded. It will be a good day, he can feel it.
And then the bubble pops.
With something less like a pinprick and more like a gunshot.
He keeps his phone on silent at night so is blissfully unaware, until the moment that he unlocks it, that there are new notifications coming in every second, almost faster than the system can keep up with. A notification from Twitter appears at the top of the screen as he stares, bewildered. It is replaced with one from Instagram before he even gets the chance to read the preview. Then a text. Then another. An email. Twitter again.
He turns them all off because they’re making his phone slow, and then deliberates. The texts seem like the right place to start, more personal than social media, less serious and official than email.
The first one he reads is from Marlow. Simply, it reads: Fuck, Roz. That’s definitely you in the video. And okay, so this is a scandal. Ilya isn’t half-asleep anymore, not really, roused into wakefulness by whatever the fuck is going on, and still it takes him a moment to muddle through what this might be about.
He hasn’t done any drugs since he was a teenager—thinks, distantly, somewhere outside of himself, of a version of Sasha a few years out of date, not different enough from the version he had been at sixteen, calling Ilya boring for growing up—and he doesn’t dope, doesn’t cheat, earns his wins like everyone else. He is annoying on the ice, he knows this, everybody knows this, nobody would waste their time blowing up his phone over something like a less than ideal hit or an especially impressive penalty. This isn’t that, then. It has nothing to do with hockey. It feels like ice water down his spine when he realises. There are plenty of bad guys in the league—who are bad in different ways to how Ilya is, who hurt their wives and take what is not offered to them, and get into bar fights. But Ilya is not one of them; he gets his aggression out on the ice, doesn’t throw punches off of it, takes care of the people he sleeps with. There’s only one thing this could be.
Fuck.
Fuck.
There’s a video. He doesn’t know when from or who of or what he’s doing specifically, but there’s a video. He scrolls until he sees Jane in his contacts. Holy shit, Ilya. Are you okay? And three missed calls. It almost doesn’t register that he is Ilya again, for the first time since the night that wasn’t. That Hollander—maybe Shane today, or maybe never again—is talking to him now and not too caught up in Rose Fucking Landry to remember he exists. He’d take more pleasure in that if anything were normal, if he wasn’t suddenly aware of his heartbeat and his breathing and the way his entire body feels like it is being puppeted from a distance.
He thinks, instead, about the levels of Hollander’s panic, because they are a thing Ilya is too well acquainted with. How this one is almost subdued—a fourth call, Ilya wants to answer but the puppeteer will not let him—and more concerned than anything else. Shane isn’t in the video. The evidence is flimsy but Ilya is sure of the fact.
And that’s… something. Not enough. The league will still care, though not as much as they would if they knew, and the fans obviously care too, and Russia- But it’s something. He holds onto it, white-knuckled.
He doesn’t know who else has texted—he scrolls and scrolls, and the cyrilic stands out but he doesn’t absorb the content. He cares more than he should but not enough to keep looking. He opens Twitter instead, where everything is less personal, where people mostly aren’t talking to him directly, are concerned with things other than how he’s doing or how he disgraces all the things he loves by being associated with them.
He scrolls twice, doesn’t register the words, then finds the video without even having to search for it.
And yeah, Marley was right: it’s definitely him. He figures the league is going to tell him to deny deny deny when he finally gets round to reading their emails, and he is going to laugh in their faces at the ridiculousness of it. Denial will get them nowhere.
That’s obviously his face on his screen, a few years younger—he doesn’t remember precisely how many, the specifics of this memory blurred by time and booze—but undeniably his, his hair a mess and his cheeks flushed and his eyes glassy every time they look up from the task at hand.
The task at hand being blowing a stranger in a filthy gay bar bathroom stall. It’s all pretty unambiguous. He’s on his knees, there’s spit spilling over his chin, the version of him on the phone breathes in, sinks down until he is nose to pubic bone, is clearly enjoying it. Shit. He pauses the video and throws the phone at the wall.
He’s angry. He wishes he could be angrier, incandescent, ready to burn the whole world down. Mostly he’s just upset. Terrified.
He tries to remember the night. It was somewhere warm, he’s sure, he thinks probably Florida but the city escapes him. He was maybe twenty one and scratching a dangerous itch, breaking curfew somewhere he didn’t think anyone would recognise him, letting only Marley know he was going anywhere at all because they were sharing a room, and waiting until he knew Marley was too close to asleep to want to join him. He can assume the version of this night he relayed the next morning ended with him getting blown in a bathroom stall rather than the other way around.
Anybody who has ever seen his face before could probably tell it is Ilya in the video. Nobody who doesn’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every dick in Florida—straight pubic hair, mousy brown, pale skin, large freckle by the base, thick enough to make his jaw ache but not too big to take all the way down—could even guess who the other guy is. Ilya doesn’t know either. Doesn’t know why he’d post it, why he’d choose to do it now.
Doesn’t know why he let the guy record him. Well, he can assume whatever he was drinking that night probably made him easy to convince, but even in what little of the video he managed to watch, he’d seen himself glance up at the camera enough he had to have known it was there. It’s a crappy video, shaky and poorly lit and recorded on an old camera phone. That didn’t stop him showing off for it, putting on a show for it, letting it ruin his life.
He desperately wants not to care. He is Ilya Rozanov who is loud and flamboyant and European and sleeps around and really, when you think about it, you should have expected something like this from him. He is bisexual. The label fits him like a glove. It isn’t his fault people are too stupid to put two and two together.
But he isn’t just European, he’s Russian. And he’s queer and he knows what happens when those two things come together. He reads, follows along, finds the tiny opposition papers in their weird little corners of the internet that actually report on that sort of thing, and he knows. He knows what happens to people like him in Russia. It hadn’t been his primary motivator when he decided to leave but it had definitely never hurt. And then he watched from outside as everything started to get worse and thought selfishly thank God that isn’t me, thank God I’m safe.
He isn’t safe now. He doesn’t know how the League will react but he can assume they won’t be very happy with the whole thing. Nobody has set any sort of precedent for this; Ilya is going to be the first, and he knows there is a reason for that. He knows that hockey is not an inclusive sport, that Hollander and anybody else who isn’t white is constantly reminded of that fact, that he has been called a cocksucker and a faggot more times than he can count and that’s before anybody else even knew it was true.
He is at the top of the league. His face is basically part of its branding. He isn’t some anonymous bench-warming washout in Buffalo, his absence will not go unnoticed. None of that means they won’t get rid of him. And if they get rid of him he loses his work permit and gets sent back to Russia where his very existence will break the propaganda laws, where he will be a national pride turned national embarrassment, where it will almost be lucky if he gets arrested before he gets attacked.
There is a knock at the door. It does little to stop him spiralling.
“Roz! Open up!” That’s Marlow. He sounds loud which Ilya’s brain interprets as angry. He’s friends with a lot of the guys on his team, Marlow most of all. And he’s loud with them, unabashed. They share a locker room, showers, the close unashamed camaraderie of teammates. They’re going to hate him now. Maybe if he ignores the knocking Marlow will go away.
“Rozy! Come on man, I’m getting worried.”
Maybe answering the door isn’t as bad of an idea as he thinks. Maybe he isn’t giving Marley enough credit. He forces himself to his feet, wraps himself in his blanket as though detergent-scented sheets are going to save him from ridicule, and ends up standing across from Marley in his doorway, staring at his best friend and waiting for the moment everything changes.
“You look like shit,” Marley says because apparently Ilya isn’t the only one who is full of surprises today. He’s probably right. His blanket and his boxers aren’t one of his better outfits, and his hair is surely a mess, and if he looks anything like he feels then shit is a very gentle word.
“Yes,” he says, “is shitty thing.”
“It’s real.” It’s almost a question.
Ilya grimaces and does not say no. “Is not news I am…promiscuous.” It takes him a moment to remember the word but he has heard it often enough that it has stuck.
“You’re gay,” Marley says flatly.
Ilya rolls his eyes, pulls his friend into his house, shuts the door behind them and is infinitely glad the press does not know his address. “Obviously I am not.”
“I saw the video, dude.”
“You watched?”
Marley goes suddenly very red. It’s as good as a yes.
“Whole thing?”
“Roz.”
“Maybe you’re a little gay too,” he reasons, shrugging and trying a little too hard to act in a way that is supposed to come to him naturally, like breathing. Marlow isn’t running away, he reminds himself, which counts for something.
“Rozanov.” He says it like a warning, the stress on the wrong syllable the same way it always is. He has never corrected anyone and he isn’t going to start now.
“I am bisexual.”
“Oh.” And then, “I guess that maybe makes sense.”
“Yes,” Ilya agrees, “it does.”
“Everyone is freaking out, you know? Most of the guys are worried about you and I think Coach is going to have a heart attack if you don’t get back to him or the GM soon.”
“They hate me.”
“I think they just want to hear whether or not it’s really you.”
Ilya presses his lips into a line. “Obviously is me. Was not trying to hide face at the time.”
“You could still deny it.”
“Nyet.” The Russian comes out the way he wants it to, sharp and familiar and without the boxiness of English. “Anyone who believes is not me is idiot.” He lets out a long breath and shakes his head. “Could not go home anyway.”
“What?”
“Hockey players,” Ilya says, fondly exasperated, falling back onto his couch and into something that is not quite a familiar rhythm but that does run parallel to one. “Not the smartest people.”
“What are you talking about?”
“No interest in international politics,” he goes on. “Russia,” he says slowly, like Marlow is actually stupid, “does not like people like me.”
“This is a big deal.”
“I had not noticed.”
“Like a really big deal. You really need to get back to management, man. Has your agent said anything?”
“Probably that I am fired. Agent is from Russia, won’t want to be associated with me. I did not read emails. Or most texts.”
“We’ll go through them together,” Marlow promises, putting a hand on Ilya’s shoulder. Their friendship usually doesn’t look anything like this but extenuating circumstances, he supposes. Marlow cares about him and today this is what caring about him looks like: nothing like it did yesterday. “Who’s the guy? In the video?”
“No idea.”
“You suck many guys off in public bathrooms?”
“What do you think?” He’s done it a few times, not that many, when he was wound-up enough for the risk to feel worth it, or when the risk felt momentarily like the only thing worth living for. When he was thinking about Hollander, mostly, but not running after him.
“You were pretty good at it,” Marlow mutters, more or less to himself. Ilya’s eyebrows shoot up and a painful laugh rips its way out of his sore throat.
“You did watch whole thing! More than once? You take notes? Wish for demonstration? I am flattered but you are not my type, Marley.”
“Fuck you, Roz. Your type is anything with a pulse.”
“Is problematic, I think,” Ilya says, delighted enough by the panic-stricken face Marlow makes to forget for just a moment that his life is over.
“Shit, really? I’m not homophobic, you know that. I just, I don’t know how to do this or what I’m supposed to say-”
“You do fine.” He rolls his eyes. “Thank you. For coming. For being… normal.”
“I guess the surprise is gone. Like I said, it kinda makes sense.”
“Da.” It does. Ilya knows that. Alexei always seemed to be able to tell, or at least to be able to guess. Before Ilya had ever even spoken a word to Sasha. Before he had figured it out for himself. Sasha could tell too, without the same insulting sting. But most people don’t think to look past the women he takes to bed, don’t stop to think about it. They’re going to now. Everyone is.
“So… are guys really better at it?”
“What the fuck?”
“It’s just that I heard gay guys were better at giving other guys head than women were…”
“Who told you this?”
“I don’t know dude but you did seem like you were into it.”
“You keep talking about video, I am going to assume you jack off to it.”
“Glad to see you’re as annoying as ever. I just don’t think I’ve ever seen a girl look like she enjoyed doing that so much.”
“You are having bad sex.”
The official advice—which is a friendlier label than it deserves—is, in fact, deny deny deny. Ilya does, in fact, laugh at it. Not happily, probably. Manically, more like. Like his sanity is spilling out of his mouth. Marley looks terrified of him. Or for him. He hopes it’s the first one.
He says, on a phone call Marley very much bullied him into answering, “This is stupid and you are all idiots.”
Management continues with the same vapid nonsense as before, as though they haven’t even heard him. Something like “your image is important and iconic and this is entirely incongruous with it. It’s beside the point that we all know it’s you, Rozanov: people will believe what they want to believe. They don’t want to believe this.” The words wash over him and they don’t mean anything. He thinks he gets the gist: this won’t go away but eventually, if he gives them nothing, people might get tired of asking.
The damage is done already. “It is me and I will look like asshole if I say it is not.”
That does make them pause. He can feel the brand new steely coldness in the room through the phone. “What does that mean?” The way they ask it is cautious, weary. The way Marley looks at him is almost proud.
He rolls his eyes. “Everyone knows already. I will be the only one not talking about it.” He wants some modicum of control back. His phone pings with a text from one of the few numbers he hasn’t blocked for the time being: Hollander’s.
Ilya, it says again, please. And Ilya is weak to this man with his stupid freckles and his weak backhand, even if he ran, even if he is fucking Rose Fucking Landry so he writes the first response he has written all day.
I am okay, it says, because he still doesn’t feel like being honest. Out now, I think.
You’re really going to come out?
No other choice.
There are emails. Shock, disappointment, anger. His agent is gone, his manager is gone, Boston’s PR team is cursing his name. He asks them to draft him an honest statement. It calms them down a little, surprisingly, when they know they aren’t being expected to do the impossible.
They just need to dress up the truth in fancy language. I am Ilya Rozanov. I am bisexual. I am just as good at hockey as I was before you saw me with a dick in my mouth. Simple.
He’s scratched for at least the next game. He thinks that’s unsurprising but unfair, seeing as he hasn’t actually broken any rules. He hopes it isn’t the start of the league trying to kick him under the rug, trying to make people forget his name, his face, the monster he is on ice. The way they loved him yesterday.
Marley reads an email from Commissioner Crowell over his shoulder, parsing the dense, conspicuously neutral language Ilya isn’t even trying to translate in his head. It’s stiflingly polite and irate beneath the surface. He gets the idea and figures the individual words are just a waste of his time.
Marley sucks in air through his fake front teeth. “Crowell is out for your blood.”
“I’m sure is not the only one.”
“Crowell is a powerful man, Roz.”
“So am I.” He isn’t sure if he means it. He doesn’t know if that matters.
“What happens if…?”
He applies for asylum somewhere like Canada maybe, where there is precedent queer Russians being kept safe. He loses hockey, loses the league, loses the challenge and the only thing he has ever been good at. He loses the thing that defines him. He loses his mind. And that’s the best-case scenario. “I don’t want to think about it.”
He posts the PR statement without proofreading it. He keeps his notifications turned off. Marley had to leave eventually and nobody else has shown up.
Ilya’s not good at being alone. Even as a kid, when his family fell apart, lost the warmth at its centre and became icy and isolating, he was never alone through it. Svetlana was always there back then. Sveta with her wild hair and wilder eyes and the way she has always been able to see right through him. Sveta who steals attention in every crowd, who treats every room like she owns it, who belongs in every space she enters. Sveta who he has never actually told but who has always seen right through him, since Sasha and right the way through into Jane.
And when there wasn’t Sveta there was Sasha, and when there was no Sasha either there were practices and training camps. Coaches who looked at a group of talented kids and only saw him, what he was and what he could be, who shouted and commanded respect and made him do drills when the power cut for the thousandth time even though there was no light to see by, until he knew the game and the rhythm of it with his eyes shut. And then there were the other kids, who resented him for it even if the only attention the coaches had to offer was harsh and bruising and relentless. Who could not hate him because he was still fun. Shared dorms and hotel rooms, shared space on the ice, an elbow in his ribs, a tooth slicing into his fist.
And yesterday there was Boston, his city where he was never anonymous, where people knew his name and revered it. Where his teammates thought he made for good company. Where there was never a shortage of women who wanted to go home with him.
Today there is still Boston, he supposes. But it isn’t his.
He feels like an alien, sitting in his own home drinking his own imported vodka, fiddling with his own half-empty pack of cigarettes and deciding not to smoke another one. He feels like an alien a lot of the time. In a country where the trees aren’t quite right and the buildings are even worse, where nobody speaks his language and it takes a constant, concerted effort to understand and be understood and the nuance gets lost in translation anyway. Where he holds his tongue in the wrong part of his mouth and his body language isn’t right either. Rozanov is a thing he performs. In varying shades but always a performance. The ladies’ man. The hockey captain. One half of Hollander-and-Rozanov: the unpredictable one, the wild card, that everyone loves but nobody really likes.
There is no one to perform for now. Even if there was, everyone would know, suddenly, that there is an artifice to it, even if they can’t tell where. They would know that he was hiding something so he’s probably hiding more. They’d poke and prod and turn him over and they’d see. Hollander is a hockey robot, everybody knows this, and Rozanov is a shitshow, an animal, a monster. Shane, all desperate and breathy and honest, and Ilya, spoken in that same way when they had been able to stop pretending for a moment before they remembered with world-shaking clarity who they were supposed to be, are none of those things.
His notifications are still off. He’s sure plenty of people are seeing, liking, commenting on his statement. He’s sure some of them are kind and some of them have choice words for him he has heard too many times before. The guys have stopped texting, which is something. He doesn’t know what.
The hockey of it all is as dealt with as it can be right now. Not dealt with enough. He is still vibrating out of his skin at the uncertainty, at not knowing if he will still have a job in a week, a month, a year. He tries not to think about it, finishes his vodka and lets himself feel just a little bit heavy, a little bit slow.
He gets an email. It’s weird immediately, starting with the fact it addresses him as Mr. Rozanov without then going on to imply, however subtly, that its sender would quite like to see his head on a stake. It’s not news that people are going to want to talk to him now, now he is the only out queer player in league history and this is more, suddenly, than a video everyone was expecting him to say wasn’t him, even though nobody would believe him.
It’s different now. Or it isn’t, at all, but everyone wants it to be. It means something. To people who don’t give a shit about hockey and have never heard his name and wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a lineup 24 hours ago. To the people from some talk show he has never heard of who are emailing him because they want the first chat with hockey’s cocksucking superstar now that everybody knows about his proclivities. He should say no.
He doesn’t want to talk to people he has never met about anything at all, let alone this. But, he thinks, I want to be undeniable. If people outside of the hockey world know about him and care about him then there will be more pressure on the league and the commissioner than he could create himself. Then this will be bigger than him and bigger than the rug they were already going to have to wrestle to sweep him under.
So, half drunk and a little bit delirious and no longer under the thumb of management that would, perhaps wisely, tell him absolutely not if he was even stupid enough to ask about something like this, he agrees.
It starts with lewd jokes, a locker room that is too excited when Shane walks into it, a team that is more vulgar than usual which is already a pretty high bar.
“Did you hear about Rozanov?” There’s something weirdly joyful about the way JJ says it. Shane shakes his head and is then treated, all at once, to three different guys spinning their phones around like they’ve been waiting for the chance, to a video of dim lighting and sound muffled by the reverberation of music outside, to a face he knows well in a familiarly compromising position.
“What?” he basically squeaks, turning away from the screens as soon as he has registered what is on them.
“I know!” one of the guys says emphatically, awed and delighted. He gets it now, that they all think Rozanov is ruined by this, that the grudging, hateful respect they had for him is all gone now. He isn’t a better player than them anymore, he’s just some guy on his knees who doesn’t belong in the sport, who obviously can’t stay in it anymore. Shane swallows, feels his hands shake and his head swim. They’d think the same if it was him
It wouldn’t be him, because he doesn’t do casual hook-ups or gay bars or admitting to anyone but Rose Landry that sometimes he almost wishes he could. But it would be him, because he is gay even if nobody knows it, and he likes being on his knees as much as Rozanov does. Everything his teammates say to demean his rival falls flat against the back of his skull, sinks into his skin and into his bones. Even if they don’t know it, they’re talking about him.
He texts Rozanov as soon as he can—calls him Ilya like it fixes anything—and catastrophizes and catastrophizes and catastrophizes as the others shriek and laugh and chirp and any other time maybe it would occur to Shane to shut down someone calling someone else a faggot in his locker room, but they’re going about it with gusto today and he just needs to leave. He doesn’t shower, just changes even though his skin is sticky with sweat and he smells bad and feels worse, and basically runs back to his car.
Hayden is basically the only one who notices. He follows Shane out, calm and not cruel, and he casts a glance back at the door as it closes behind him, his nose screwed up. “They’re dicks,” he says, achingly sincere.
“Huh?”
Hayden shrugs. “I don’t like the guy but it sucks, you know? That something like this would happen to anyone. Even Rozanov. And they’re all just-” he waves a hand, makes another face, and steps closer to Shane and further away from everyone else.
“He must be terrified,” Shane says. He knows he is, and this has nothing to do with him.
“I don’t want to have to feel bad for Rozanov.”
“But…?”
“I feel bad for fucking Rozanov! It’s not like he did anything actually wrong, y’know? And I hate playing him, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a good player. He’s earned it. I wouldn’t have guessed he was gay, but…”
Shane squints at him. “What’s happening?”
Hayden groans. “I like to think I’m a decent guy, and Jackie would never have married me if I wasn’t, but it’s hard to have principles when they mean defending Ilya Fucking Rozanov.”
Shane laughs at that, just a little bit. It’s cold enough he can see his breath curling up into the air, wispy and ephemeral. Part of him can’t help but wonder what might have happened if that had been him in the video, or if someone had put pieces he didn’t even realise he had left lying around together and figured out that there was something—or had been something—between him and Rozanov. But Hayden is still Hayden anyway.
He wonders, as he all but falls into Hayden and hugs him in a way they absolutely do not hug, if maybe he is giving himself away.
Shane had told his parents about the break up not long after it happened. He hadn’t meant to but they were very invested in his life—overbearing from time to time, maybe, if he wasn’t feeling especially generous—and they’d asked about her and he hadn’t felt like lying more than he had to. He’s been sparse on details and intends on remaining that way, and his mom keeps not quite asking but sending him long, probing glances instead which isn’t very much better.
She has been staying with him in Montreal for the past couple of days, ostensibly for a work thing. Maybe also to comfort him through the perceived angst of his big break up that hasn’t actually made him angsty at all. It’s been nice having her there, if he’s honest. But now he’s dreading having to talk to her. She never has nice things to say about Rozanov and everyone seems to want to talk about him today.
“Did you hear about Rozanov?” Her words are the same as JJ’s but the tone is all different. She sounds upset, maybe, or worried. Something like that.
He doesn’t want to talk about it. He says “it sucks for him,” and means it even if it doesn’t come out right, because he knows he has to say something.
She shakes her head, her eyes soft and her brow tightly knitted. “Nobody’s going to envy him, that’s for sure.”
She is there with him when the statement is released—My privacy was breached and, though my hand is being forced, I am not ashamed to be bisexual. She cocks her eyebrows and whistles lowly at her phonescreen. “Not the response I was expecting,” she admits after a moment.
“What were you expecting?”
“You know the league too, Shane. And Rozanov. I wasn’t expecting anything.” She is expecting the interview he announces the next day even less.
She shows it to him, looking more confused than she usually does but a lot less confused than he feels. The top responses are all from other players, ones willing to step up and call him brave, like he had a choice—none, Shane notices, brave enough to say thank you, at least in such a public forum. He sees Cliff Marlow’s name and he knows Rozanov is friends with him so it shouldn’t be a surprise but it really is.
He has to say something, he realises. Because his name and Rozanov’s are always put together. Hollander-and-Rozanov, always at the top and always battling it out and neither really quite welcome but both always present. Because everyone from sports journalists to strangers on the street is always asking him about Ilya Rozanov before they ask about anything else. Because at some point Shane’s silence becomes telling, starts to give off the wrong impression. Because he does care.
The first tweet he sees when he opens the app says has it been long enough for me to comment on what a throat goat Rozanov is or…? He closes it again immediately and takes a deep breath, suddenly aware that the video is out there, that he might see more of it than the first few incriminating frames. He watches videos of Rozanov a lot, studies the way he plays and the way he looks into cameras like he is commanding them, the way he inhabits his body and does all these things Shane has just never been able to wrap his head around. He doesn’t want to watch this one. It’s out there, of course, and Shane has seen him in even more intimate positions, but Rozanov wanted him there then. Now he’d probably prefer people stopped looking. And, Shane can admit, thinking not for the first time about the beers and the way they’d made him fuzzy at the Ciel, about dancing with Rose and staring across a crowd at Rozanov staring back, his lips on some stranger’s neck, he doesn’t want to see Rozanov like that with anyone other than him.
He opens the app again anyway and pointedly does not scroll. Ilya Rozanov and I have always respected each other as players and it saddens me to see what has happened to him recently. I want to congratulate him on how well he has handled it so far and remind everyone who is reading this that hockey is for everyone, even if it is hard to feel welcome sometimes. He should run it past his mom before he posts it but he doesn’t. It’s all PR-friendly language anyway, and he hasn’t given away more than he means to, or even said anything untrue. It’s just that he hasn’t really said anything true either. He can’t afford to.
He sits down as far from his mom as he can on the couch and stares at the TV as the ads play and he counts down to the Rozanov interview. They’ve been texting for the past couple of days, like people who do more than have sex and run away, but it has been sparse and panicked and there has been a very worrying lack of news in that time. Ilya is still scratched and he has no idea when he’ll be playing next and he has mentioned the nicest guys on his team by name, which makes the absence of all the others all the more conspicuous.
“He doesn’t have any representation,” he tells him mom, forgetting for just a moment to worry about whether or not that is public knowledge.
He watches her wince. “Poor kid.” He doesn’t know what to do with that so looks back at the screen as the talk show intro plays and the dull hosts rattle through their welcomes and the itinerary.
The Rozanov interview is pre-recorded, they say, because they wanted to make the guy feel as comfortable as they could. One of the two hosts, a young woman with shoulder-length mousy brown hair and a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes, makes a point of adding “we wanted to make sure he was okay with all the footage we were sharing.” To his side his mother hums and he realises that, right now, he doesn’t know how to read her.
The footage fades in on Ilya looking too comfortable in the very pink arm chair he is sprawled across to anyone who doesn’t know how to read the tenseness in the corner of his mouth and the way his eyes are just a fraction too wide. The interviewer across from him, the woman from earlier, is sitting much more properly, with her feet flat on the floor and her knees together and her back straight.
“Ilya Rozanov,” she says. He acknowledges her with a nod. “I’ve been a big fan for a long time.”
His smile is so familiar it makes Shane’s teeth hurt. “I am a very good player.”
She smiles and, this time, appears to mean it, even if she can’t quite disguise the apprehension. “Unfortunately that’s not why everyone is suddenly so interested in you.”
“No,” he agrees, his hair practically glowing gold under the stage lights. Shane wants, more than anything, to hug him, to tell him it will all be alright. He wants, for the first time, to lie until he believes it too.
“Could you tell us what it was like? Realising that the video was out there?”
Ilya breathes in deeply and looks right at the camera, his eyes bright and diamond-hard. “I woke up and everybody knew, suddenly, something I never really told anybody. Do not tell anybody I said this, but I was scared of what it meant for my career, for my safety. I can’t go home now. Some man whose name I do not remember and don’t think I ever knew took that from me.” It’s not what Shane is expecting from him, not that he knows what that is. It’s too honest, vulnerable—charismatic, sure, but not a joke like he has turned every other interview he has ever done into.
The interview goes on and Shane watches the way he fidgets in his seat, the way he crosses his arms then uncrosses them, the way he slides the orthodox cross along the chain then lifts the cold metal to his lips and holds it there, gently, between them.
“His English is better than I remember,” Shane’s mom says, leaning forwards with her hands braced on her knees like she wants to get closer to the screen, wants to see the minutiae of every passing moment.
He nods his agreement even though she isn’t looking. Ilya’s accent is as strong as ever but he is remembering the parts of grammar he usually forgets or disregards. He speaks to be understood and he thinks, more often than not, that articles are expendable, a sign that English does not trust its speakers not to be idiots. Shane knows a lot about Ilya Rozanov he can never admit to knowing and he feels more guilty about it now than ever.
“They’re good answers.” They are. Interspersed with jokes, sure, because Shane has known Ilya for long enough to know that even when he barely spoke English he had chirping down to an art, but good. Real. “If he doesn’t have to be an asshole why does he always insist on it?”
“I think it’s mostly an act,” Shane admits from somewhere outside of himself, staring at Ilya on his TV screen as he pulls on a curl and it bounces stubbornly back into place. “I remember the first interview we did together, after the draft. I stepped in because I realised he didn’t understand the question.”
He doesn’t like the way his mom looks at him, seeking eye contact he won’t give her. “It must’ve been hard,” she admits almost grudgingly, “being so young and alone in a foreign country where you barely speak the language.”
“You and Hayden are both being very nice about him recently.”
She sighs. “Because it feels like a dick move to be anything else right now. I don’t like it.”
On-screen Ilya is talking about being the best and not being sure whether or not it’s enough anymore. He is talking about Post-Soviet Russia and having a father in the military police, about the way he has always been watched, singled out, polished by Russian coaches who’d make the strictest American youth hockey coach balk, about the blackouts and the Occidental allure of the NHL, about the dark and always being first in and last out. “I wanted to leave,” he explains like it is nothing. “Everyone always talked about the KHL but if hockey could not get me out of Russia then I needed to be better. I needed to be best.” He shakes his head, grimacing at his leather shoes. “Doesn’t mean I never wanted to be able to go back. Now in America I will always be The Russian, but Russia will not want me. Ironic, no?”
“He’s smart,” Shane’s mom says, like she’s surprised by it.
He can’t help the withering way he looks at her. “Of course he is. You don’t get as good as he is by accident.”
“You’re better.”
“Well I worked for it too.”
“Everyone was always talking about your hockey IQ though. Nobody ever mentioned his.”
“Because it didn’t fit his image.” Shane shrugs and watches Ilya undermine his image over and over and over again in a cosy studio under warm lighting wearing nice clothes that don’t look like they’ve ever been worked out in. “I was the nerdy little Asian kid and he was the feral Russian beast and we were so different in every conceivable way. Doesn’t matter if it was true, just that it sold.”
“I just can’t believe I fell for it.”
“You get away with a lot when you are foreign,” Ilya says. Shane spoke over the question the interviewer asked him. “You can dress wrong and say the wrong things and nobody thinks about it. I was not good at hiding. I didn’t need to try. I know who I am and I am comfortable with it, even if I don’t like that everybody else knows too.”
“What do you think it means to be the first out queer player in the NHL?”
“That is the-” he waves a hand, seeking the words. From 500 kilometres away, Shane wants to fill them in for him. Ilya gives up. “-big question. Nobody knows and now I will find out. Next time someone calls me cocksucker I will say yes, this is fact, there is a video. Next time someone calls me a faggot I will say more or less instead of just thinking it. After that, who knows.” The bad words are bleeped for TV but they’re easy to fill in.
“And there will be a next time?”
“Yes. And I will win anyway because it doesn’t actually make me worse at hockey. Maybe even makes me better. Maybe they should try.”
“What do you think about the people out there who are calling you a role model?”
“No no no,” he waves his hands and his mouth forms into a soft sort of shape, one Shane can imagine breathing his name unselfconsciously before reality interrupted the moment. “I am terrible role model. Never wanted to be role model.” The words are faster, less thought-out. The articles become extraneous again. “I am asshole on ice and off. Not someone to look up to. We are everywhere, yes?” he gestures to his own chest then away from it. “Even where nobody wants us, in Russia and in hockey and everywhere else. Is not just me. One day someone will do it properly and come out because they want to, because they have beautiful love story to share, and not because they made bad decision when they were drunk. Wait for them. They will be better than me.” Shane doesn’t miss his mom leaning so far forwards she almost falls off the sofa. Her face does something strange and painful and thoughtful.
“Do you know of other queer players in the league, then?”
Shane holds his breath even though he knows Ilya would never tell. “It’s just numbers,” he says. “Statistics. 500 players in the league. I am not the only one.” He sees the interviewer open her mouth and picks up quickly where he left off. “I will not speculate about others. If they want to tell, I will not do it for them.”
“He’s not what I thought,” Shane’s mom says, looking intently at the screen long after Ilya has left it.
“I can’t believe he did that,” Shane says back, because if he were in Ilya’s shoes it would have been one of the last things he would have agreed to.
“It might have been a good idea.” He looks at her, head cocked to the side. She shrugs. “The league has been pretty quiet. He’s putting pressure on them, escalating the issue. The more people there are in his corner the worse it looks on the league if they drop him and the harder it is for them to pretend he never existed.”
“You think they would?” He pretends he isn’t terrified of that thought, that everything he has ever worked for could be undone because he just so happens to be wired wrong. That it wouldn’t all just become that much harder, but instead become impossible.
“I think he’s the first for a reason.” She looks older than usual, sitting there with her head in her hands and looking at her slippers. “He needs representation.”
“His old agent and manager were Russian. They dropped him.”
She scowls at Shane’s hardwood flooring. “Then he’s better off without them. Have you been speaking to him?”
“What?”
“He must have told you that, right? I didn’t see it posted anywhere.”
Shane figures it’s more suspicious if he desperately lies here than if he tells the truth. “I reached out when it all happened,” he admits, which is honest. “Figured he should know someone had his back. I’ve always liked playing against him and I don’t want to stop because everyone is too hung up on who he sleeps with.”
“You have his number?”
“Yeah, I guess. Why?”
“Could you pass it along to me? Just for the time being I want to offer him my help.”