Page 75 of Two for Roughing

Damir studied him briefly, but he got out of the car and let Kilian take his seat. Kilian moved it up until he could reach the pedals. He turned on the ignition and held and released the clutch a few times to get a feel for it. Then he pulled out and into traffic.

The mindless repetition of his feet on the clutch, the gas, and the brake was meditative in a way skating used to be before it became about his failures as a player and a person. He missed when he could just skate and skate and skate until his brain shut up. Maybe he should take up driving through the countryside. Or long walks. Shit, was this how Tom ended up the way he did, with no one but his dog to help him cope? And most people didn’t even know Tom was gay.

Kilian slid into place in line behind a red light and shifted to first gear.

“You’re good at this,” Damir observed.

Kilian hummed, pleased.

Ten minutes away from the apartment, Damir elected to open his mouth again. “We’re meeting a figure skater tomorrow morning at nine. Her name is Valeria. She’s terrifying; you’ll love her.”

Kilian could say so many things in answer. Surely Damir could let the extra coaching go now that Kilian’s days in the NHL were very clearly numbered. He didn’t want to get up early over Christmas break; he didn’t want to get up at all. He wanted to stay in his room, in his bed, and never face the outside world ever again.

What he said was “You think I like people who are terrifying?”

Damir glanced over at him with a smirk. “Don’t you?”

“You’re not terrifying.”

“The rest of the NHL would beg to differ.”

“You’re a smug bastard is what you are.” Kilian didn’t mention that as soon as the rest of the NHL discovered how much Damir enjoyed cooking fancy meals when he was stressed, his reputation as a menacing wall of danger and destruction would be toast.

Damir scoffed and pointed out that his parents were happily married, thank you very much, and he and Kilian bickered the whole way home.

For dinner, Damir heated up something flavorful and delicious with ground lamb and stewed tomatoes. Kilian had never been a big mutton fan. He’d grown up around too many sheep. But when Damir cooked, Kilian would eat anything.

After dinner, Damir asked him about the St. Louis Arches’ PK unit, which led to watching replays on the TV and arguing with each other over the commentators about whether or not the special teams coach was on crack. The replay ended, segueing into a darts quarterfinal, and Damir got strangely invested in the bald guy winning, which Kilian had to mock him for. But darts games lasted a surprisingly long time, and the couch was wide and soft and expansive, so Kilian dozed off somewhere between the fourth and sixth leg of the third game with his head pillowed on Damir’s chest. He became hazily, dizzily aware of being moved later, and then he was laid into soft, cool sheets with a warm body wrapped around him, and the world remained dark.

Kilian woke to the buzzing of Damir’s alarm some hours later, his nose mashed into Damir’s dark chest hair. He smelled of sweat and pencil shavings, and Kilian was in love with him.

It was inconvenient, if unsurprising. Of course he’d fallen for someone who saw him as a pity project, someone who had made it his mission in life to take care of Kilian because he was so utterly incapable of doing a decent job of it himself. He could have made a worse choice and fallen for someone cruel or straight. Damir would be nice about it if he ever found out; he wouldn’t even have to turn Kilian down flat. He could point out that Kilian was out now whether he wanted to be or not, and Damir never could be. A relationship would be doomed from the start. Damir would head home to Russia someday; he couldn’t afford to be associated with an openly gay man. Anyway, Kilian knew he’d be traded or sent down soon enough, meaning they’d both be spared the indignity of having to talk about Kilian’s feelings.

Beneath him, Damir groaned and stretched. “Time’s it?”

“I didn’t set an alarm clock.”

Damir groaned. “Right. Valeria.” He forced himself and Kilian upright using only his core strength, an objectively insane thing to be able to do. “Come on, then.”

They met Valeria—tiny and dark-haired, wearing a beaded purple skating dress—in a practice rink about twenty minutes in the opposite direction from Alliance Arena. She greeted Damir in Russian and nodded at Kilian silently before thrusting figure skates at both of them.

Kilian recognized her instantly. “Hey, you were in the Olymp—”

She shushed him with an impressive glare.

All right, then.

In fairness, Kilian wouldn’t want to be reminded of being in the Olympics either if he’d been narrowly edged out of medaling by a Russian skater who ended up in trouble for a doping scandal two years later. He tried to remember what country she represented. Something in Europe, maybe Romania? No, if she was speaking Russian with Damir, it must be Ukraine.

Valeria shook the figure skates at him again, and Kilian took them with a muttered apology. He was sure there was no such thing as a comfortable skate, but lacing up on the long, rickety benches brought home all the new and different ways in which they could be uncomfortable.

Gliding out onto the ice with no pads left him feeling naked. He wrapped his arms around his middle, where there should have been a thick layer of padding under a jersey, not just a compression shirt. Why was ice so cold?

Kilian had to uncross his arms almost instantly. Not only were the skates formed differently, they also affected his balance. He swore, righting himself, and Valeria laughed.

Great.

This was going to be fun.