Chapter Text
Rockeries Point, Ottawa, ON
June, 2022
The pool locker room is nearly empty now, in the middle of the day, and Luca has the run of the place. As usual he relies upon habits long-engrained in his years spent in spaces like this, in the salt-swamp smell of bodies at the brink, and chooses a locker in the back corner, closest to the showers, furthest from the door. He fiddles with his bag, toeing off his slides while he sets the padlock. Then he strips, with the crisp efficiency of someone who has been getting naked in public since his early teens, shimmying into swimmer’s trunks before wrapping a towel around his waist.
The pool, too, is almost empty. This is good. This is a relief to him. Luca chooses a lane and then plunges into the cool water. At once, he feels the difference. He’s enveloped, buoyed up. The sensation soothes the perpetual headaches he can’t will away, the low roil of nausea that barely leaves him. He wishes he could at least pretend at a faster recovery, but that was exactly what had landed him here in the first place; being ferried across town by Shane Hollander in his sensible all-wheel drive to work out for a scant forty-five minutes while Hollander bought groceries.
He swims one length of the pool, then another. He thinks about challenging himself the way he used to as a child to get to the other side without taking a single breath. But he’s under orders. Light activity only, and that mostly because he pleaded for it, promised to be vigilant. And because Hollander had vouched for him. We’ll keep him in line, he’d said, easy as anything. We’ll make sure he behaves. He pushes too hard, and Luca knows he’ll regret it; recalling the sparks in his vision, the clamor in his inner ear that makes him forget which way is up — so he doesn’t force it. Hollander had been clear on that point, when Luca sat in his passenger seat; take it easy, he’d said, or you’ll end up back at square one.
Watch yourself, or this will have to stop.
Luca knows this. He understands the precarity of his position. He has never been allowed to forget it.
He swims for a long time, the gentle pace making him feel like he could go forever. For a while he matches speed with a grey-haired pensioner doing laps in the lane beside him; the gentle trailing length of each stroke like a soothing hand down the line of Luca’s spine. He wants to stay here, always. He doesn’t want to go back to the chilly island of Hollander’s house — he still thinks of it that way, as though both he and Ilya were merely guests there, which is a thought both self-indulgent and false. Ilya is, by all accounts, the happiest of men. And it is obviously Ilya’s house as much as Hollander’s; Ilya’s cars in the garage, his strong, smoky tea in the pantry, his dog running rampant in the yard. But Luca still likes to imagine them engaged in a kind of conspiracy of two, both of them stranded in an archipelago of dull Canadian suburbs, wreathed all around with foreigners speaking a foreign language, both of them exiles. Though of course, Luca’s exile is only temporary. Ilya can never go home again.
That thought, the injustice of it, the tender feelings toward his captain conjured up by it, does make him push his pace, a little. Reach for the beginnings of breathlessness. But the rhythm of his stroke has hypnotized him, and by the time he looks up at the timer ticking on the far wall he realizes with a low rush of alarm in his belly that he’s been swimming far longer than he’s been allotted time. At the end of the lane he gets to his feet, flips his goggles up to his forehead, looks around.
And Hollander is there, watching him from the glass bubble of the observation deck, hands in his pockets, so still, so upright. No way to know how long he’s been standing there. When he finally catches Luca’s eye, he tilts his chin up and gestures with two fingers to the watch on his left hand. Luca can’t tell if he’s angry or merely annoyed, which is somehow worse.
Conscious of Hollander waiting for him, he skips his cool-down, skips the shower for the sake of time, toweling off fast, tugging his clothes back on over damp skin. He still stinks of chlorine when he buckles himself into the passenger seat. His hair, still wet, clings to his forehead, the back of his neck. He knows it's the fashion among their peers to keep it longer, to let it fan and curl out under the line of the helmet, but he’ll have to find a way to get his cut soon, the length driving him a little crazy every time he notices it. And it makes him feel so sloppy, so young. Younger, at least.
He buckles himself in, leaning forward a little, and as both he and Hollander watch, a few drops of water slide from the ends of his curls onto the leather of the seat. Luca swallows. Hollander says nothing.
They pull out of the parking lot, and Luca finds his voice.
“I’m sorry. I lost track of time. I didn’t see the clock.”
“It’s no big deal,” says Hollander, careful and measured. “Did you have a good swim?”
“I did.”
“Any symptoms?”
“None,” says Luca, right away. “I took it easy.”
“Good.”
Around them, the deep green of June presses in against the windows. The road to Hollander’s house cuts beside a nature preserve that rolls serenely past Luca’s passenger side view and separates the tony little suburb where Hollander and Ilya live from the rest of the sprawl of Kanata. Luca’s own place is tucked closer to the city itself, where he can walk to shops and be surrounded by strangers’ faces at all times. But the Centaurs play in Stittsville, on the ragged western edge of town, far from anything that reminds Luca of real civilization, and so this is where Hollander lives, because any excessive distance from the barn is only time wasted, sedentary minutes prolonged, sleep curtailed.
The house itself is also not so much to Luca’s taste; a low-slung modernist slab incongruous against the deep green of maple and hemlock trees, limned with patios and pool and a duckweed-covered pond that Ilya’s dog was constantly plunging into, heedless of orders in either English or Russian. The lot is large, and they can’t see their neighbors from any of the great plate glass windows. As far as Luca knows they don’t even know their neighbors’ names. They’d come here for the privacy, or at least for the convincing illusion of it, and that’s what they’ve found.
__
Luca showers, and dresses, and finds Anya to take her for a long walk, get himself out of the house, out of their way.
He doesn’t stay in the neighborhood. Luca has adopted Ilya and Hollander’s own unspoken mistrust and avoidance of their neighbors, and doesn’t like to risk being sighted by them. Luca doesn’t get recognized as often as he might, certainly not as often as they do, but it had been a shock to arrive in Canada to discover himself already uncomfortably famous, already laden with a burden of expectation he’s never carried before.
More than that, the town and the fans decided right away who they were going to compare him to; with his speed and the way his hands could pull plays seemingly out of thin air, it wasn’t long before they started calling him “Hollander’s successor.” Shane 2.0.
Of course when the nickname was first tossed in his direction Luca had deeply resented it. He'd spent all his life trying desperately to be a different kind of player, to put away his gentleness at the bottom of a drawer and prove that he could fight his way to a win. He idolized Ilya not because he felt they were especially alike in their style but because Ilya was precisely what he aspired to be; a brick wall through which defeat couldn't penetrate. He’d been strangely relieved when Ilya seemed entirely unaware of the comparison to Hollander, that he never acknowledged it even to twist it into a joke. It would have hurt Luca to imagine his loyalties could be seen as at all divided, at all ambiguous.
But of course, that was before.
Together he and Anya pass down the long looped driveway and cross the quiet country road that separates the little subdivision from the nearby park. When they get to the open space of the prairie preserve he lets her off the leash, with a stern German injunction not to seek out any mud puddles. She follows his commands about half the time. He’s trying to teach her ‘sit’ and ‘stay’ and ‘roll over’ in his own language, looks forward to showing off her skills someday. Hollander’s own attempts at disciplining the dog (always “Ilya’s dog”, never their dog, Luca has noticed this) inevitably disintegrate into nothing under the countervailing influence of Ilya’s own indulgence of her.
Luca never had a dog growing up. His parents never saw the point. It would have meant too much risk of disruption in their carefully-curated apartment, too much distraction from their settled and quietly affluent life. They’d been approaching middle age when he’d appeared, unexpected, unaccounted for, and so very unlike the rest of their children. He’d only been manageable on the ice, only entertained by furious speed and skill and the endless repetition of practices, conditioning sessions, games. Luca’s parents did not understand the appeal of games. They understood money and culture and beauty, and where they sat in the pecking order of their colleagues and friends, but they did not understand him. He’d been a boy when they sent him away to school, a place famous for its coaching and discipline and the production of excellent hockey players, and he’d been thrilled to go. Had never looked back.
They walk for a long time, until the sun is flirting with the tops of the oaks and the light is bronzing, the shadows between the trees a deep inky green. Luca knows if he stays out much longer they’ll begin to wonder where he is, and he doesn’t want to risk their displeasure, doesn’t want to delay their routines. So he breaks into a jog, Anya padding contentedly beside him, and they slow together when they reach the drive. Luca enters through the side door, the one which leads into the basement, wiping Anya’s muddy paws with a towel before allowing her further inside. And when he climbs the stairs–
He hears them before he sees them; their low voices blended into one susurration of sound; Hollander’s moan, Ilya’s keening little whine. The sound of their mouths meeting, eager and wet. They’re standing in the kitchen, their lower bodies obscured by the granite-topped island, but Luca can see where they’re pressed together, can see where they’re sharing air. There’s a pink flush high on Hollander’s cheeks. His mouth is glazed, but his eyeline is averted somewhere in the middle distance. He coughs. Ilya, a protesting grumble low in his throat, eventually pulls away, but not before reaching down to palm Hollander’s ass, putting all his strength into the squeeze, so Luca can see the muscles of his upper arm flex and twitch.
Luca peers over his own shoulder, pretending to seek out Anya, but really to give them another second to compose themselves. When he turns around again, Ilya is standing at the open fridge, fishing for something, and Hollander’s pulling cutlery from an open drawer.
“Dinner will be ready soon,” Hollander says, and gestures for Luca to go and wash his hands.
He feeds Anya first, having taken on this small duty for himself, since Ilya and Hollander allow him so few chores. He’s here to recover, they say. He’s here for himself.
Afterward, he stands for a long time at the sink, scrubbing under his nails, between his fingers, the hot water pinking his palms.
__
This is how it happened. The third game of the first round of the playoffs, and they were hopelessly outmatched against Carolina. Their big, mean thirdline center had sniffed out an obvious target in Luca, had already boarded him twice without a whistle. The second time, Luca’s head snapped forward against the plexiglass, feeling the impact but also the smarting sting as the visor of his helmet bit into the skin. His ears rang with it.
The third time, the hit happened on open ice, and Luca went down hard.
He’d risen at once, protesting when the trainers came to take a look at him. The lines on the ice swam a little in front of his eyes, but nothing was wrong, not really — he could keep going. They were down a goal with 10 minutes in the third, and they could still make it happen.
They don’t make it happen. After the march through the tunnel Luca excused himself, stomach twisted with sudden nausea, and if he retched into the toilet bowl it was only because he’d pushed things a little too hard, took too many hits at the smelling salts, and it happened sometimes. Some guy was always the puker. Luca was just grateful it hadn’t happened while he was still on the bench, that his body had given him enough of a reprieve to wait until now.
In Luca’s memory, playoffs were always like this; games ran together in such a way Luca never really registered the hours in between, never remembered eating or sleeping or the speeches that Ilya made, all of them personal, all of them rooted in his bone-deep belief that they could still make it happen, that they belonged there, that they weren’t in so far over their heads they couldn’t even see the surface of the water anymore.
The next game. The mean center, again, emboldened. They had the Cens in their jaws and they knew it. When the next hit came, it happened fast, not five minutes in, and Luca was laid out flat. And when he tried to lift his head to follow the sound of Ilya’s voice, Ilya the beacon of years, the bright star by which Luca had navigated the whole of his professional life, his vision snapped in two. His tongue was heavy in his mouth. English was beyond him, but even saying the words in German made him sound like he was drunk, dead drunk, lost to the world drunk, browned out. Mir geht es gut.
Mir geht es gut.
He heard the rest of the game from the therapy suite, familiar sterile smells in an unfamiliar barn. He heard the home crowd swell with joy at each goal and then settle once their lead became insurmountable. And he was still there when it was over, and Coach Wiebe came in, Hollander at his heels. Ilya was still tied up in post-game press, spinning the loss with as much dignity and composure as he could. They wouldn’t get their little jokes out of Rozanov that night, their cute sound bites, their flippant little boasts. Sometimes Luca thought the press were even more hungry to hound Ilya after a loss, because of how good it felt to see a confident man humiliated and brought low.
They talked over him, Wiebe and the team doctor and Hollander, who spoke for the captaincy, for Ilya, as surely as if he had been there himself. Luca knew without being told that he was out of it, that it would be weeks before he was cleared to play again, but it didn’t matter. The whole thing was over, the whole beautiful dream, their chance to prove the world wrong ground to a bitter halt.
There was no need to keep him overnight for monitoring, so they bundled him back onto the bus with everyone else, back to the hotel in the humid center of Raleigh, and he blasted the AC and sat in the center of a cold shower, battling back his vertigo, his anger, his grief.
He made a stab at recovering from home. Since leaving his rookie billet at Hayes’s house, he’d moved into an economical but respectable apartment near the young bustle of downtown, where everyone said he ought to live, even if it meant his commute to the arena was longer than anyone else’s, and he didn’t really care for the crowds that hung around the bars and the coffee shops and the little boutique gyms. But he did like living alone, appreciated the privacy and the chance to feel like a grown man. He started dating again, properly now he had a place to host and Ottawa did not lack for young gay guys who landed on the sweeter side and were willing to talk over dinner once or twice before getting a hand in his pants.
But it wasn’t any good. None of it was any good. After a few days he had to admit he was too unwell; too dizzy to drive himself to his therapy appointments, too nauseous to keep anything down. He slept all day, took too long to answer his texts, and when another conversation happened over his head (he was lucky it didn’t happen behind his back) it was decided he would stay with his captain until his recovery progressed at a more satisfactory pace. Luca should have objected, should have insisted on having more of a say, but the prior week had sanded off all the sharp edges of his pride, so when he was ordered to pack a bag and trundle along like a good boy to the sprawling house in the Rockeries, he did as he was told.
It was only later, much later, when he forced himself to sit and watch the whole sixty minutes of game tape, that he’d seen Hollander drop his gloves almost as soon as Luca’s body hit the ice, corner the center, pulp one side of his face and darken his jaw a plum-purple, before sitting his five minutes so stone faced and focused he might have been a plaster cast of himself.
—
After dinner, Luca and Hollander proceed downstairs to the cool of the basement, to the quiet little room beside the gym where Hollander had placed two low chairs facing the wall. Hollander folds himself into a half lotus and they sit for half an hour in silence, while Luca tries to meditate the way Hollander taught him to.
He can’t really explain the exercise yet. It’s just something they do, something they started doing together when Luca was moved to Hollander’s line and felt himself start to plateau, his progress stagnating, the realization of his potential still some nebulous distance away and he was running out of new tricks to try. Hollander didn’t try to oversell it, just offered it quietly as something he’d found worked well for him, and just as in everything else Luca was obedient to instruction. Some days he felt like it did help; he could carry this quiet feeling in his mind to other things, to other situations. Other days, like today, it just feels like a waste of time, and all he’s doing is listening to the sound of Hollander breathing.
Ilya doesn’t object when they do this, doesn’t poke fun the way Luca first expected him to, the way he always expects him to when Hollander does something at all peculiar. He just looks up from his place on the couch where he’s sprawled out watching a Red Sox game, and says he’ll be there when Hollander gets back.
After their allotted half hour Hollander goes upstairs. Luca stays behind, slipping into the well-appointed home gym to do his stretches and his vestibular PT. By the time he returns upstairs, Hollander and Ilya have already gone to bed. The house is quiet. Luca goes to his own room at the far end of the hall, two doors down from the master bedroom. Anya follows him. She’d gotten in the habit of sleeping in his room almost as soon as he arrived, maybe sensing in him someone in need of companionship but, more likely recognizing a prey animal when she sees one, indulging her instinct to herd. She curls up in her plush little mattress at the foot of his bed while he shrugs off his shirt, pulls off his sweats. He brushes his teeth, washes his face, smearing acne cream over his forehead and chin, and then slips between the sheets.
He lies there for a long time, waiting for sleep to creep up behind him, to put its hand over his mouth. But the minutes pass, relentless, and the house is so quiet, so quiet he’s not sure he’ll ever hear another sound, so quiet it begins to oppress him, to leave him with nothing but his imagination, and when he decides he can’t stand it any more he swings his legs over the edge of the bed, settles his weight evenly on both feet, giving himself one last chance to do something else, to make a different decision. But he was never going to make a different decision.
He stands up, crosses to the bathroom, a jack-and-jill connecting his bedroom to the one adjoining; a design meant to accommodate the children of a large and happy family. He opens the door to the other side, crossing the empty bedroom to stand at the far wall, the one that divides this room from theirs, from the place where Hollander and Ilya sleep. But they’re not asleep, not now, not so early in the night, and Luca has to be patient, has to listen for a syrupy moment, pressing his ear to the drywall. But the house is new-built and the walls are thin, and it doesn’t take too long before he hears what he’s listening for, that signature sound; Hollander’s in-drawn breath. Ragged, heavy. An unmistakable wet, viscous slide. With his artist’s eye he can’t help but picture what they’re doing, matching shapes to sounds, and so he can see as as clearly as though he were there — the round hollow of Ilya’s mouth around Hollander’s cock, holding him deep, making it last, and Luca slips a hand beneath the elastic of his boxers, palming himself, and then stroking in time, muffling his own sounds with the back of his free hand. Soon he will stop doing this. Soon, it will lose its novelty, and he will find his shame again. Soon.
But not yet.