Archive of Our Own

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Nicke arrives in Washington in the summer of 2007. “Umbrella” is on the radio in the cab for the second time in forty minutes and he doesn’t know any of the words, but he’s definitely gotten sick of it already. It might not be the most auspicious start to America.He gets dropped off at Michael Nylander’s house in the suburbs of DC with a bag full of hoodies and missing his toothbrush, which he forgot somewhere, or just didn’t pack.When he looks for it, breath sour from the plane, he discovers a huge box of condoms Kris must have shoved into the side pocket of his luggage before he left. Asshole. Nicke has his own condoms, thank you. He's not an animal.-“You’ll be fine,” Nylander says, clapping him awkwardly on the shoulder when he takes him to the practice rink for the first time. “The rinks are small as shit, but you’ll speed up, you’ll see.”Nicke isn’t worried about the rinks. He’s not worried about the hockey, really. He’s got that covered, or they wouldn't have drafted him in the first round. He’s got other shit on his mind.“Don’t chew that.” Nylander pulls the hoodie lace out of Nicke’s mouth like he’s one of his immense herd of children. Nicke glares at him and sticks it back in. “Suit yourself,” Nylander sighs. “Do you remember how to talk, or is that what the oral fixation is for?”Nicke takes the frayed end between his teeth and speaks around it. “I didn’t study.”“Study what?”“English,” Nicke mutters.Nylander roars with laughter, eyes screwed all the way closed. “Can you say ‘I’m open’?”“I’m open,” Nicke repeats, petulantly.“You’ll pick it up,” Nylander says, still visibly amused.Fuck this, the first thing Nicke is doing once he gets paid is buying a car. If he's got a chaperone he can live with that. The kids are fun, and every single Nylander he’s met can talk hockey, which is all Nicke can ever seem to think of to bring up over dinner, but fucked if he’s going to have to ask for a ride every time he wants to go somewhere; somehow he doesn't think Nylander will translate if he asks him how to order a drink.-He doesn’t go in intending to blow Mike Green in the bathroom.Nicke doesn’t think attraction works like that. Sure, he knows who Green is, just like he’s learned pretty much everyone’s names already, but that doesn’t mean he’s set his sights on him from the get go.For one thing, he’s a teammate. Space is not something anyone gets on a team, no matter what they do, so that’s a given. Nicke knows not to shit where he eats, generally.It's just that camp starts in a haze of incomprehensible English from a bunch of guys in suits Nicke does his best to nod along with as Nylander sort of translates the gist, and then suddenly Nicke is surrounded by bodies, all three of them his size or bigger, and the part of him that was dreading this makes his mouth go dry.Ovechkin: of course Nicke remembers him. How could he forget? Big, nervous hands and a big, kind smile and hardly three words between them at the draft, and now here he is, smelling like shampoo and clean sweat and playfully batting Nicke on the arm with a force he feels all the way through his pads.Ovechkin says something cheerful Nicke doesn’t understand and slings a long arm over Semin’s shoulders, drawing him close enough to smash their helmets together, which Semin endures expressionlessly, staring at Nicke in what feels like frank assessment. He’s tawny all over, russet brown hair and freckled across his nose, symmetrical and saturnine in contrast to Ovechkin’s crooked exuberance, and then—“This Greenie,” Ovechkin says, jerking his big chin at Green, who’s leaning on his stick, looking Nicke up and down. He looks so wholesome it’s a little sickening, big brown eyes, straight white teeth and neat stubble doing nothing to ameliorate the messiness of his hair. He actually takes his glove off to shake Nicke’s hand. “He asshole,” Ovechkin continues, giving Nicke a word he actually knows how to play with.“Me too,” Nicke tries.Green laughs at him. Fuck.Nicke catches Ovechkin’s eyes again, using him as a point of contact, a face he knows, has run into, has admired from a distance. Ovechkin wrinkles his broken nose and says something in Russian to Semin, pressing his face into his cheek. Semin grins at him like a shark, all teeth, and says something back, tapping Ovechkin gently in the chest with the back of his glove, and Nicke’s mouth goes quietly dry.They play hockey. Nicke hates how small the rink is, how easy it is to collide with everyone, how Nylander laughs at him when he complains about not understanding the coaches. Nicke bites his jersey in frustration, hating how much he likes it when Green bumps his shoulder and offers him water, how he keeps speaking to him like he thinks if he just tries hard enough Nicke will know what the fuck he’s talking about.Nicke does end up yelling “open!”A puck slaps onto his tape from Ovechkin, and he passes it back, and gradually it becomes clearer and clearer that there will be impact here, curious bodies, Ovechkin and Semin all over each other on the bench in plain sight and Green watching him, letting Nicke watch him back.There’s a solution to this. Nicke is nineteen years old and has always been the youngest on all his teams, but he knows what’s going on. Green isn’t hazing him. Nobody is. They’re waiting. It’s just chemistry. Nicke remembers it, Ovechkin coming towards him with the jersey, Ovechkin coming to say hello at worlds, Ovechkin close and at a distance, and now orbiting around Semin, exerting his gravity in another direction. Nicke tries not to stare.There’s some kind of debrief Nicke is too overstimulated to take in, and then they all hit the showers. Nicke doesn’t look. He can see Green not looking at him, off to the side. Maybe Nicke is imagining it, and maybe he isn't, but there’s the disinterested, entirely inured glance of older guys who’ve seen it all, and then there’s not looking.Nicke has pretty good timing, in general, though the language thing kind of throws a wrench in his gears. In the end he corners Green after Nylander has gone off to talk to some of the older guys, catching him in his boxers with a towel still sitting on top of his head while he digs around in his bag.Bare, his tattoos look even more like places Nicke could put his teeth if he wanted something to bite. Fuck. “You play good,” Nicke tries, shoving his hands in the front pocket of his hoodie, excruciatingly aware of his own mouth making unfamiliar sounds. His hair is still damp, dripping down the back of his neck.“Hey, you too,” Green says, smiling brightly at him.“Come with me?” Nicke looks down at his shorts and raises his eyebrows, pretty much at the end of his useful vocabulary.Green stares at him, then around, then back at Nicke. “Are you—?”Nicke has memorized the layout of the locker room. He shrugs, making it an offer, and heads for the bathroom.Green follows him in.A great flood of relief washes over him. This, Nicke is fluent in. He shoves him back against the door and yanks his shorts down, calmed by familiar ground. Maybe Nicke prefers it slightly when he’s the one getting undone by a stranger’s mouth, but he’s versatile. This is good too, the heavy slide of Green’s circumcised head against his tongue, pressure against the back of his throat and the choked-off sounds Green is making, hands pressed flat against the wood veneer by his hips. Nicke guides them to his hair and makes a pleased noise when Green curses breathily and takes hold. Better. Nicke knows how to make it fast, how to breathe around him, how to swallow when Green comes hot and bitter in his mouth. He eases him through it, sitting back on his heels to wipe off the corners of his mouth, watching Green’s face.“Fuck,” Green says, grinning at him again. “Backy.”Jesus. Well, it could be worse. Nicke has bigger problems, an insistent throb of need and no succinct way of saying he’s not done. Instead he smiles at him. “Greenie,” he tries. “Now you.”Green’s mouth drops open. Progress, Nicke thinks, when Green lets Nicke press himself against him and shove his hand down his leggings, his rough fingers just the wrong side of too dry. Nicke spits in his own palm and reaches down to guide him, face pressed into his clean, rough neck when he comes in his hand. Sweet relief.There’s nothing quite like scratching an itch to improve a strange day. Nicke watches Green wash his hands, enjoying the flex of his arms, the way the flush still hasn’t faded off the back of his neck. Green says something, looking at him in the mirror, but Nicke has no idea what it is.His mother was right. He should really have packed Rosetta Stone. “Bye,” Nicke says, shoving him a little so he knows Nicke gets the intention of whatever he was saying, if not the content, and goes to find Nylander. Maybe he can convince him to stop for doughnuts on the way home.-Camp is two weeks of intense drills which leave Nicke shaky and sometimes, secretly, a little bit nauseous. It doesn't stop him from being ravenous at night, something which seems to fascinate Nylander’s eldest son, who watches Nicke eat like he’s a zoo animal at feeding time.“What’s wrong with you?” William asks him gleefully, in his North American-inflected Swedish.“William!” Mrs. Nylander admonishes. “He’s been working hard, leave him alone.”Nicke waits until she’s gone upstairs to steal William’s uneaten chicken fingers off his plate. “Snitches get stitches,” he threatens, though he does make an effort to work his way through it with slightly more dignity than his own rapidly demolished portion.“I’m going to kick your ass,” William hisses, drinking Nicke’s juice in retaliation.Nicke shouldn’t laugh at an eleven-year-old. “You can try.”“I bet you suck at Mario Kart,” William tells him. “You’re going down.”“Don’t you have homework or something?” Nicke quit school at fifteen, but he’s seen American movies. Currently Michael is out with the girls doing something dance-related, leaving William with Nicke while Mrs. Nylander and the nanny deal with the babies. The whole place is chaos, and Nicke has absolutely no idea how anyone thinks having six kids is a good idea. He and Kris almost killed each other about once a month, and there were only two of them.At least they speak Swedish.“It’s summer,” William says witheringly. “Are you even smart enough to play hockey?”Nicke steals his juice back, staring him down. “Smart enough to beat you at ping-pong.”William slams both his little hands down on the table. “Let’s go, weirdo.”Fuck, it’s a relief to talk to someone.Nicke should absolutely not take such pleasure in what is a truly petty victory, but the way William throws his paddle across the room and lunges for Nicke with a look of feral rage is kind of adorable. Kid’ll be a hockey player someday. Nicke fends him off and runs upstairs, burn in his thighs distant for a second as he beats a retreat back to his bedroom.Soon enough though the exhaustion slams through him, and it’s all he can do to stay awake until nine so he doesn’t completely fuck up his sleep schedule.He wonders what the rest of them are doing. Ovechkin and Semin always disappear together, so they must live close to each other. They must know the city. Green— fuck, Nicke has no idea where he goes, and can’t ask him yet. He hopes they’re all as wrecked as he is. They must be, he’s been near them most of the day nonstop, felt the sweat come off their bodies, heard the rasp of their breath, leaned in when someone threw an arm over his shoulders, wordless solidarity in exertion.He doesn’t fully notice he’s hard until he shifts a little and then suddenly it’s more a reflex than anything else. He strokes himself slowly, spreading the slick from the head around idly, until he gets impatient with himself and speeds up. He comes as quietly as possible, mind a strange blank space filled only with noise, breath and conversations he’s only got half of. He comes in his boxers, so he just skins them off, wipes himself down and throws them across the room before he passes out.-They do things differently in the NHL. Everybody warned him, counselled him, told him to stay in Sweden for a year and develop his game, that it was a different level. He had known, obviously. He went to the draft combine, after all. He rode that fucking bike until every heartbeat throbbed red around the edges of his vision, and he got drafted top ten.It’s the last day of camp and all the younger guys are taping up, talking around him. Nicke elbows Greenie for his roll, letting his fingers linger when Greenie hands it over, enjoying the way Greenie can’t stop himself from looking at Nicke’s mouth. Nicke grins at him and starts on his pads, happy to be in the middle of the organized chaos of a locker room getting ready to hit the ice.On his left Ovechkin is saying something in rapid Russian to Semin, who is almost fully in his lap. They’re watching Nicke and Green again, two sets of laughing eyes, pale blue and a weird light brown Nicke has never seen on anyone but Semin taking in the flush Nicke can feel creeping up his neck. “Fuck off,” he mutters, because that one he learned right away.“We say nothing,” Ovechkin says, smiling innocently.Nicke is too ready to play to be mad about it, until one of the assistant coaches comes up to them, Hanlon in tow. “Nicklas, could we borrow you for a minute?”It takes him a second to parse that they want him to come with them, wondering what they want to borrow before Ovechkin nudges him up. “Go on, Backy.” Fuck, it’s going to stick.Nicke follows them half-dressed into one of the trainer’s suites attached to the locker room, garters holding his socks up and feeling strange about it now that both of them, in their grey suits, are looking at him like he’s draft meat again. Nicke crosses his arms, fighting the urge to blow his hair out of his eyes.Hanlon nods decisively. “You’re really impressing us, Nicklas,” he says paternally, which is immediately suspicious. Hanlon is more of a yelling coach than a coaxing coach, which is fine. Nicke doesn’t give a shit either way, as long as the plays are good.He’s had lots of coaches of different stripes, he knows when he’s being managed. “Okay,” he says, waiting for the rest.The assistant coach comes back from rummaging in a bag with a weight vest. Hanlon takes it, holding it up, most likely to see if it’ll fit. “We’d like to see how you do with some extra conditioning, maybe get a little more speed out of you.”Nicke doesn’t get all of it, but he certainly catches the meaning. He’s heard a lot of iterations of speed over the last few days, and conditioning is an old one, still drilled into him from the combine. He takes the stupid thing, weighing it in his hand, starting to get angry. “Okay,” Nicke repeats, thinking every version of fuck you he knows.He stomps back to his stall with it already on, ready to kill something.Greenie raises both his dumb eyebrows when he sees. “Shit, on your case already?”Ovechkin frowns, looking up. Nicke wishes they’d all just let him gear up in peace so they can get on the ice. Nicke didn’t get where he is by being a pushover. If they want some fucking speed he’ll give it to them. “Bet I am fastest,” he says, meaning it entirely.Semin says something in Russian, looking sidelong at Nicke with a smirk that somehow looks like the perfect natural state of his face, as though every one of his features was designed for only this expression. “Fuck ‘em up,” he says, in heavily accented English, pounding Ovechkin on the thigh and standing to clomp off towards the rink.“Ovi, boys, let’s get moving,” Hanlon yells, and okay, there it is, a little bit of rage. Nicke pulls on his jersey and goes to give the entire coaching staff a gigantic middle finger.-Nicke scores his third scrimmage goal by dangling around the back of the net and flicking it in with as much contempt as he can muster, not even bothering to look at the bench where he knows the coaches are watching. He feels lighter on his feet than he has all week when Ovechkin — Ovi, to everyone, with a great big smile — slams into him, rocketing him into the glass, followed by Greenie, scrubbing a hand over his helmet. Nicke finally lets himself feel it, the surge of vicious satisfaction he’s been chasing. Semin headbutts him when they make a little room, coming in very close. “Good boy,” he says, voice going through Nicke like the sound of a bell before he shoves Nicke in the chest to get some speed up as he skates away.Greenie hooks an arm around his neck, drawing him forward. “We’re gonna get you so drunk, rookie. Fuck, you’re a classic.”Ovi glances at the bench, gliding along beside them. “Look,” he says, happily. “They so mad.”Nicke looks at Hanlon. He is. Nicke smiles at him. Fucking conditioning.-By the end of camp it’s obvious who’s staying and who’s going.Nicke is staying.Nicke is piling into Ovi’s huge car next to Greenie, Semin taking the front seat, cranking up the volume on some disastrous Russian techno and sitting back with his feet up on the dash. Nicke tries to say something about curfew for form’s sake, but Ovi waves him off, hanging a terrifying left without indicating, peeling out of the parking lot at speed. Nicke tumbles into Green, then stays there, pressed against his side.Greenie makes an incredibly gratifying noise.Semin turns around in the front, looks at them both, and tosses a flask at them without a word.Nicke catches it, burning with something a little like the buildup before a game and a little bit something else, days between him and Green in the bathroom now feeling torturous and right at once. He takes a sip, unsurprised to find the flask full of vodka. He drinks again, then holds up up for Greenie. The car bumps over a dip in the road and Greenie chokes a little before he grabs Nicke’s hand to steady it. When Nicke stops laughing he catches Ovi’s eyes in the rear view mirror, watching them.Nicke doesn’t know exactly how to tell him to watch the road, but luckily Semin yells something and grabs the steering wheel, and they just about avoid climbing the curb.-Nicke has been to plenty of bars. He’s been paid to play hockey since he was sixteen, he knows how to drink.He doesn’t know how to drink in America, where he can’t order anything and has a driver’s licence which actually bans him from buying alcohol. Luckily, Ovi has some kind of magic, and they end up behind the rope in some booth that’s too small for all four of them and almost all sound is drowned out by the dancefloor on the other side of the curtain. Umbrella is playing again. The lights are coloured pink and green and blue and red and Nicke is six shots deep by eleven.Greenie’s hand has been on Nicke’s leg for an hour and Nicke is about to lose his mind if he doesn’t do something about it. God, there must be somewhere around here he could take him, a bathroom, a coat closet—Ovi leans forward, interrupting whatever story Greenie is telling that nobody is listening to and grabs Nicke by the chin, fingers slick with condensation from the huge bottle of vodka they’re demolishing. “Okay,” he says. “You want kiss for winning?”Kiss? Kiss who? Nicke hasn’t kissed anyone in — Semin is looking at Green, one knee drawn up into his chest, braced against the sticky table, and Nicke is still pinned by Ovi’s hand.Nicke swallows, still tasting vodka. “Why?”“You a little bit mean today,” Ovi says, pulling him closer. “Make all the coaches mad, show off.” His smile creases all the way up into his eyes. “We celebrate.”Nicke feels like the breath has been punched out of him, happy and unsettled all at once. He leans a bit closer, caught in the gravity well that is Alexander Ovechkin, half a memory from the draft floating up of thinking how big he was, and how warm.Ovi sweeps their glasses out of the way and leans in, lips soft and alcoholic, to catch at Nicke’s mouth. Green’s hand tightens on his thigh, and then Semin slams a flat palm down on the table, breaking everything apart. “When?” He asks, looking between Greenie and Nicke.Nicke doesn’t think he could speak English with a gun to his head right now, throbbing all over, all the way down.Greenie swallows, glancing at Nicke. “Uh… the first day.”Semin clenches his fist, then slowly slumps over into Ovi’s shoulder, laughing out loud. He spills out some Russian, mouth very close to Ovi’s ear between gasps.Ovi grins so widely Nicke thinks he can see his molars. “Greenie. First day? He so pretty you can’t say no?”Greenie squawks, and then Nicke has had enough, drunk enough to be reckless and just sober enough to know if he drinks more he’ll be this turned on until he explodes and won’t be able to do anything about it. He turns towards him and kisses him just to shut him up, sloppy and strange, with Ovi and Semin right there, watching.Greenie almost catches him in the chin with a shocked hand but Nicke grabs his wrist, holding it until he needs to breathe, gasping back a lungful of wet air.“Man, fuck you guys,” Greenie says, “You’re just jealous. Fucking look at him.”Nicke thinks: if someone doesn’t touch me in the next ten minutes I’ll explode.Nicke says: “Where is the bathroom?”-It’s filthy. All the best fucks of Nicke’s life have been filthy, but not like this, still sweaty from only a cursory shower after practice, hat crammed over his hair tipping off onto the sticky floor as Green backs him against the wall. Hands up under his hoodie against his bare waist, thigh between Nicke’s legs, fingers digging into the flesh of his sides, Nicke wants it all. He wants every touch and breath Greenie will give him, every hungry look, before Greenie sinks to his knees and finally guides Nicke’s dick into his mouth.He’s bad at it and Nicke doesn’t care, the uneven rhythm and faint, accidental scrape of teeth absolutely fucking perfect, until Green pulls off with a gasp and Nicke realizes he’s closed his eyes, head thrown back against the graffitied bricks holding him up.Semin and Ovi are watching them, Semin under Ovi’s arm, blocking the door. “Maybe you come home,” Ovi says. “Is not too far.”Nicke thumps his head into the wall, wondering how anyone says “if I die from blue balls I’ll fucking haunt you for the rest of your life” in English.-If someone had told him he would have to give them directions to Ovi’s house later or face death, Nicke would have ended up against the wall, because all he remembers of the trip is the backseat of the car and Green’s teeth finding his earlobe, the edge of his jaw, the side of his neck.Nicke shoves him off, trying not to come in his sweatpants, distantly aware that he left his bag at the rink, and— and then they arrive and there’s some kind of argument happening in the front seat Nicke can’t understand.“Hey guys,” Green says, kicking the back of Semin’s seat. “Sometime this century?”Nicke could kiss him, or fuck him, or both.Describe Ovechkin’s house for a million dollars Nicke thinks, hysterically. He can’t. It’s big. Whatever. It’s got a great big pool lit blue in the darkness, steaming up into the air when the cover comes off, and a pool house behind it with low, long couches, more drinks, a new beat of some Russian hit pounding out of the speakers.He's too drunk for this, flopped back on one of the couches with a furious blush crawling up his neck, flowering in his cheeks. He’s nowhere near drunk enough when Greenie whispers something in his ear Nicke doesn’t catch and strips off his shirt, looking curiously at Semin and Ovi. “Skins?” He asks.Semin, sprawled next to them, makes a dismissive gesture and then, weirdly, cups a hand around the back of Ovi’s neck and drags him across his thighs, kissing him so hard Nicke can’t help but stare.Nicke can’t stop watching. It’s not even the beginning of the season, and he’s already done at least six regretful things tonight alone. He’s too completely trapped in his body, in his own need. He forces himself to look away, and sees Greenie equally transfixed, shirtless and braced up on his hands, muscles standing out in his shoulders.“Fuck,” Greenie says, eloquently. Nicke couldn’t agree more.Nicke buries a hand in his hair and kisses him, then down his chest, finally getting to bite at the terrible tribal tattoo under his right collarbone, getting to feel his nipple harden in his mouth, against his tongue. By the time Nicke has gotten on top of him — half-dressed, sweatpants around his hips, too hot in a hoodie that will be ruined in the morning— and closed a hand around both of them he’s gone. It’s not slick enough but the right kind of rough, just enough that he’s almost forgotten where he is and who they’re with. That is, until Greenie makes the stupid face Nicke realizes means he’s about to come and drags Nicke over the edge with him. Nicke collapses on his chest, come still sticky between them, dick still sensitive and trapped by his own weight, and he catches sight of Ovi and Semin again.He breathes against Green’s sweaty chest, cheek mashed into his fucking manscaped stubble, and sees Semin sitting with Ovi draped over his lap, stroking his fingers through Ovi’s mess of hair like he’s petting a huge cat. Both of them are watching, Semin’s hand keeping Ovi still.Ovi grins at them, shirt long gone, leaving only the glint of gold in the dim blue light from the pool. Semin says something to him, still looking at Nicke, and strokes a big hand down his spine in a way that makes Nicke ache even more, makes his breath hitch horribly, wondering what that would feel like.Greenie stirs, unsticking Nicke’s cheek from his chest just long enough to pull him closer, arm warm around his waist. “Freaks,” Greenie says, probably to Semin and Ovi, but maybe to all of them.“First day, Greenie,” Ovi says. “We flirt you all last year, and he get you first day.”Green sucks in a breath Nicke can feel all through his body. “I thought you were just— what?”Semin shakes his head, leaning down to say something to Ovi, fingers resting over the back of his neck, pressing into the muscle.“And me?” Nicke mumbles, trying and failing to look away.Greenie scrapes a fingernail across the bottom of Nicke’s lip, sounding a little sheepish when he says: “has anyone ever turned down a blowjob?”Well. Nicke can’t fault him there. He did offer. It’s not really his fault that the itch Nicke thought he’d scratched has actually gotten deeper, grown beneath his skin so that just watching, and —oh, hell, being watched— is almost enough to get him going again.Nicke turns, excruciatingly aware of the eyes on him, and sucks a mark into Greenie’s chest, right under the tattoo, unspeakably relieved when Greenie curses and grabs a handful of his hair, telling him not to stop.-Nicke wakes up naked on a pool lounger, reeking of chlorine and drooling against Greenie’s shoulder. The aftermath of the night is a filthy crust on his belly and an unspeakable taste in his mouth, hair stuck to his tongue somehow until he gags and pulls it out.It’s sunny already and Semin and Ovi are nowhere to be seen, leaving Nicke to deal with Greenie slowly regaining consciousness next to him, moaning when the sun hits his eyes.Nicke doesn’t get hangovers, or at least not bad ones, so all he feels is debauched, a kind of strange lassitude weighing him down, tethering him to the ground. “Fuck,” Greenie groans. “Jesus fuck.”Nicke has no better response to that, so he just sits up, trying to stretch the ache out of his jaw. Greenie paws gently at his back. “Hey, you okay?”Nicke looks back at him, over his shoulder. He’s got a livid bite mark on his chest and his stupid hair is sticking straight up everywhere, and he’s just as dirty as Nicke is. “Yeah,” Nicke says, finding it to be true. “You?”“Well,” Green says, still touching him, thumb moving in a slow arc under his shoulder blade. “It’s not exactly how I expected camp to go.”Nicke can’t form the sentence he actually wants to say, so he just shrugs, hoping it comes across the right way. “Bad?”Greenie frowns at him. “No.”Nicke turns around, scratching at the shaved-down hair under Greenie’s bellybutton, wondering how it can be so thick, enjoying the feel of it beneath his fingers. “Good,” he says, relieved.“I’m gonna kill those motherfuckers though,” Green tells him earnestly, looking at the back door of the house, French windows standing carelessly open. “How was I supposed to know?”“Maybe you are… little bit stupid,” Nicke says, trying not to smile.“Okay, I’ll kill you first,” Greenie says, hooking an arm around his waist before Nicke can react, wrestling for purchase while Nicke starts to laugh, trying to escape as Greenie hauls him towards the pool, only managing to get a grip around him at the last minute so they both topple in.Nicke’s mouth is open when he its the water, but only because he’s still laughing.-Ovi doesn’t have a coffee machine but there’s some kind of black tea simmering in a vat on the stove.Semin is naked, smoking at the kitchen table with a book propped up against a decorative vase with plastic flowers in it while Ovi ignores him and demolishes what looks like two pop tarts with jam spread between them. He’s sitting on the marble counter looking at his phone.Nicke and Greenie are still dripping, draped in some towels they’ve found in the pool house. Nicke’s hair is hopelessly tangled and he can’t find his sweatpants. Greenie’s not in much better shape, though his hoodie doesn’t have jizz on it.Nicke would probably kill any one of them for some snus, but like everything else it’s in his bag at the rink.A great big glob of jam leaks out from between Ovi’s pop-tart sandwich and splats onto his thigh. He swipes it off with his finger and licks it clean. Semin, looking up from his book, points with the hand holding his cigarette and calls him something that sounds rude. Ovi flicks him two fingers, and then seems to notice Green and Nicke. “You swim?” He asks, brightly, no worse for drink. “Tea is on.”Nicke doesn’t like the way it smells, so he just goes up to Semin and takes the cigarette out of his fingers. He hasn’t smoked much, but he feels like it, just for a second. He feels daring. He takes a drag and regrets it immediately, stifling a cough as Semin laughs at him and takes it back. “You—” he turns to Ovi and fires something off, snapping his fingers. “Sasha. Tell.”Ovi laughs, kicking his heels against his empty cabinets. “Sema says you’re too much baby for ruin your lungs.”Nicke likes the way he speaks, likes that they’re all kind of muddling through, even if Nicke is still grasping at straws. “He’s old?”“More old than you,” Ovi says. “You want clothes?”“Dear God, please,” Greenie says, frowning into a mug. “Quick question, is this supposed to taste like ass?”Semin — Sema, Ovi called him, how many names do they have— says something even Nicke can tell is caustic.Ovi chokes on the last piece of pop tart. He refuses to translate, instead hopping off the counter and beckoning them to follow.-When they get back to the rink in time for practice only Semin is dressed in clothes that don’t belong to Ovi.Nicke has already forgotten the hoodie he’s been lent isn’t his for long enough for a lace to find its way into his mouth. He doesn’t think Ovi will care, so he leaves it in there, heading straight for his locker where his stuff is.The first thing he does is shove a snus packet under his lip, relief of it almost immediate.When he yanks his bag out to head for his stall, Nylander is waiting for him behind the door. “Nicklas. A word?” He grabs Nicke by the arm in a firmly paternal way and takes him off to the corner by the row of lockers before he leans in and fucking sniffs him. “Did you have fun?”Nicke has no idea what he smells like but it cannot possibly be good. “We were celebrating the end of camp.”Nylander pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “How hungover are you right now.”“I’m not,” Nicke says defensively. “I feel fine.”“Of course you do, you’re nineteen.” Nylander looks at him in abject exasperation. “Nicke, do you have a phone?”He does. It’s in the bottom of his bag, probably out of batteries. He nods.“Next time you’re planning on a bender, please use it. I’ll come and get you.”Nicke is sure he doesn’t mean it to sound like a threat. “Okay, sure.”“Oh, you’re a liar,” Nylander says. “Be careful with the Russians,” he counsels. “I know Fedorov is going to have a word with them too. Did you get photographed?”“I don’t think so.” He hadn’t spotted any cameras. Luckily that’s one off-ice skill he’s been honing for years.“Remember,” Nylander says, “if you get caught drinking here you’re still underage. If you really want a beer or something we have plenty at the house.”Drinking is really the least of his problems, but if that’s what Nylander is worried about Nicke can at least make the right sounds about it. “Sure. Yeah, I’ll be careful.” Then, because he’s going to have to live with him for at least a few more months, Nicke banishes all memories of Mike Green’s cock in his mouth and offers him some snus.“I quit,” Nylander says, eyeing it with regret. “Will you be home for dinner?”Nicke nods, secretly relieved his stash won’t be depleted before he can get someone to send him more. Nicke doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he has absolutely no intention of being careful of the Russians.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Look, it’s not like Mike has never thought about dudes before. He’s spent most of his life around almost exclusively dudes. He’s seen more dick than most other people, probably, except maybe porn stars and urologists. He’s definitely spent time thinking about dicks; his own, other people’s, the concept behind the dick itself. Do girls actually like it? Why are the balls on the outside? That last one was after getting speared, at which point he’d realised it might be a design flaw.Mike’s first sexual experience was one of the guys in juniors goading him into mutual handies on the road in what he now thinks might have been a round of gay chicken he misinterpreted. Either way it had felt pretty good, and then Mike had gotten laid at a house party in Saskatoon with a girl named Abby who had a nose ring and knew how to put a condom on without looking. Mike had decided that maybe balls-on-the-outside wasn’t such a bad thing after all when he busted in about six minutes. He’d vowed to put up better numbers next time, which she took pretty well. They ended up dating for a few months until she moved away for college, which was fair enough. Neither of them had been dating just each other, which Mike only figured out was probably weird when some of the guys gave him shit for picking up on the road. Whatever, Abby was always okay with it when he came back with new moves.Anyway, all this to say that coming in a Swedish rookie’s mouth on the first day of training camp —within ten metres of management and the coaches and any of their teammates who might have tried to use the toilet right when Mike was backed up against the door losing his mind— wasn’t on his list of top sexual fantasies.It got up to the top of the spank bank right away though, so there’s that.-Nicky is a menace. Sure, he barely speaks English and shows up to practice in the same clothes every day and hasn’t ever met a comb he agreed with, and the first time Mike saw him scoop one of those little packets of tobacco out from under his lip he thought he was hallucinating, but— but Mike’s a sucker. He’s cute. Sue him.“He funny,” Ovi says knowingly, skating up behind him at practice and resting his chin on Mike’s shoulder to breathe in his ear, watching Nicky nodding earnestly while Nylander translates something from the coaches for him, the picture of alert interest.Mike’s not fooled. He remembers Nicky’s face after the weight vest incident, the pure, spiteful disdain all over him. Mike shoves Ovi off, still kind of mad at him for dropping the bomb that he and Sema had been open the whole time Mike was a rookie and neither of them ever bulldozed through a language barrier just to get his dick in their mouth. “Video games at my place later?” He asks, because that was then and this is now, and Mike is still a little pissed at Clarkie for cornering him after the end of camp and asking if Mike wanted a roommate, possibly one who could help him not do anything stupid. “We can do a beer run.”“Sema hate video games,” Ovi says, “what he’ll do?”Mike glares at him. “Come on, dude. Don't make me say it.”Ovi smiles at him in that way he has, pure delight lighting up his face. “Greenie, you mad?”“Yeah, you dick,” Mike whispers. “Dicktease,” he amends.“I don’t know this word,” Ovi lies. “You invite Backy?”Mike looks over at where Nicky is discussing something about his stick very intently with Nylander, who is fighting back one of the only smiles Mike has ever seen him crack. “Think his chaperone will let him out?”“Jailbreak,” Ovi says happily, slapping him in the ass. “Go on, you so nice, good Canadian, not possible Nylander is say no.”“I hate you,” Mike says, skating over to where Nicky is chattering in Swedish, jabbing at the ice with that unconscious violence Mike secretly thinks is a huge turn-on. “Hi,” he starts, bumping Nicky’s shoulder. “Ready for the first roadie?”“Roadie?” Nicky asks, looking at Nylander.Nylander glances at Mike and translates, then relates it in English. “Road trip.”“Yeah,” Nicky says, not moving away from Mike’s side. It’s so weird. From a distance he looks like he should be smaller than he actually is. Maybe it’s the face, which Mike once thought was kind of adorable, all round and soft with that long, pointy nose, until Nicky had gotten close enough for Mike to see the scar in his lip and the terrifying focus in his big green eyes and realised they were exactly the same height.Mike’s gotta stop staring. The curls are already damp with sweat against the back of Nicky’s neck under his helmet. “Wanna come over later? We’re gonna get dinner and play video games,” he says, for Nylander’s benefit.“Mario Kart?” Nicky asks, innocently.Nylander looks between them like he’s a cop trying to figure out how to crack a pair of suspects on one of those shows Mike’s mom likes. He says something in Swedish that makes Nicky smile, an evil little gremlin grin that goes straight through Mike in a truly unfortunate way. “Keep your phone on,” Nylander says finally, in English.“Okay,” Nicky says, biting one of his gloves.Nylander gives up and skates over to where the other old guys are congregating. Mike waits until he’s out of earshot to lean in. “Ovi and Sema are coming.”Nicky glances at him, teeth still buried in the padding on the back of one of his knuckles. He spits the glove out, and Mike can see the little bulge on the right side of his mouth where the tobacco is. “You are driving,” he says decisively. “Ovi drives so bad.”He's got a point, but Mike shoves a glove in his face anyway.-They’re supposed to be wheels-up for Atlanta at the crack of dawn, so of course the first thing that happens when they’re all in Mike’s apartment is that Ovi skins off his shirt and commandeers the stereo. “Hey!” Mike yells, “none of that Russian crap you’re always blasting, my house my rules!”Ovi flicks him two fingers and puts it on anyway, slamming a beer open on Mike’s kitchen table with the heel of his palm. He gives it to Mike as a peace offering. Fuck it. Mike takes it.Mike’s place isn’t Ovi’s place. He’s not Ovi, but luckily for him he’s not trying to be. For one thing then he’d have to deal with Sema being attached to his hip, which comes with its own set of problems.Mike can’t make him out at all, which he’s ninety percent sure is because Sema doesn’t want him to, not because it’s impossible. Mike has played with them for a year and a half plus some time in Hershey, so he knows them on the ice pretty well. Ovi is Ovi; he’s a force of nature and a glorious asshole and weirdly earnest underneath it, but all of that Mike knows because Ovi can’t hide it any more than a puppy can hide when it’s happy. He’s always moving, always goofing around, always working his absolute hardest.Sema is like his shadow, always just kind of there, speaking a language Mike doesn’t understand even though he knows Sema gets most of what anyone says to him in English. Sema and effort are things that go together like oil and water. He can fucking play, but he's not that interested in hustle for hustle’s sake, which even Mike can tell drives management a little nuts.He thought they were a thing. He still thinks they’re a thing. He’s never cottoned on that they were an open thing. He’s never considered the possibility. He never really knew that was something people actually did.Sema and Ovi yell at each other in Russian, taking over the whole sectional, jabbing fingers at each other as Ovi somehow also manages to double-fist some brews, so Mike leaves them to it, beckoning Nicky over. “I’m getting pizza,” Mike tells him. “Cool?”Nicky bites his lip, nibbling at where it’s peeling from an old split in the bottom. Mike is dying to lend him some chapstick. Nicky makes a noise that might be a yes, frowning deeply. “Pineapple,” he says, as though it has just dawned on him. “I want pineapple.”Oh no. Well, it’s probably better that Mike discover at least one boner-killer early, just in case he needs it later. “We’ll get one each,” he decides.-They do not play video games.They drink beer and make out, and by the time the pizza arrives Mike has a boner that he thinks has sucked all the blood out of his brain, dizzy and wet-lipped and very much the butt of the joke when he has to somehow stand up and pay for their food and not traumatise the delivery guy.He manages to get to the kitchen and drop them off before he has to brace himself on the counter and breathe it out for a second, every step dragging his dick against his boxers in a way that he knows is leaving a wet spot. He can feel it, beading up, making it so much worse that he’s going to have to walk all the way back to the living room.He’s just about convinced himself to turn around when he hears a noise behind him. It’s Sema, looking shockingly put together for a naked guy, flying half-mast and smoking a cigarette right there in Mike’s fucking kitchen. “God, put that out,” Mike manages, waving away the smoke.Sema shrugs and comes closer, reaching around Mike for the first box, skin very warm and very close. “Just one,” he says, close to Mike’s ear, before he kisses him on the cheek and grabs a box off the stack to take back to the living room.If the coaches could see that he’d be in for a reaming, Mike thinks, before the thought of reaming actually sinks in and he has to bite back a whine.Somehow he makes it back to the living room with his own pizza in tow and finds that Sema has stubbed his cigarette out in one of Mike’s potted plants and has Ovi up against his chest, one sinewy hand down his pants. The pie he’s grabbed is Nicky’s pineapple horror show, and Nicky is ignoring them in favour of stuffing one whole slice in his mouth almost in one bite.No wonder he gives such good head, Mike thinks hysterically, watching it disappear. His mouth only looks small from the outside.None of this should be making Mike happy. His whole place smells like smoke and socks and the faint hint of jizz he’s sure is about to be everywhere. Sure enough, Ovi says something to Sema before he reaches back and yanks him down into his shoulder by the hair, very obviously done with round one.Nicky's does look up at that, a little bit of pizza grease still staining his mouth which he tongues at absently, eyes fixed on Sema as he takes his hand out of Ovi’s pants and sticks his fingers in his mouth, leaving a white streak on the edge of his lip.Mike is about to pass out. He can’t tell where he wants to be, whether he wants to be Sema or Ovi or whether he wants to do that to Nicky, who is staring with his mouth open.Sema resettles Ovi against his chest, sliding back so Ovi is reclined between his legs, arms looped around him. He says something, biting Ovi’s earlobe, before Ovi bats him away. “Sema want to know if you know how,” he says lazily. “Or—”Sema interrupts him, tweaking his nipple. “Say right way.”Ovi hisses. “Hurry up, Greenie,” he says. “Or Nicky bite your dick off, maybe.”Nicky blushes a splotchy pink all the way up to the roots of his bleached-out hair. Mike puts his pizza down.-Nicky’s phone rings when Mike has him as deep in his mouth as he can take him, Ovi calling pointers from the couch while Sema watches silently, curled in the corner of the sectional with one leg up under him, the only one of them who seems to be in absolutely no rush.All four of them ignore it.-They make it to the plane with plenty of time to spare, their gear already in with the equipment guys and Nicky in one of Mike’s suits, scowling at how tight it is in the arms and thighs.He looks wholesome, hair flattened down with some of Mike’s gel and caffeinated by the big cup of coffee they all stopped for after they swung by Ovi’s house so the Russians could change.It’s only after they’ve all sleepily boarded and found seats and Nicky has passed out against his shoulder that Mike realizes Nylander is glaring at him.Mike shrugs with one shoulder, trying for his best innocent expression. The coaches haven’t noticed anything amiss, though Nylander is sitting with Fedorov, who is smirking silently into his sparkling water. Whatever he thinks they were doing, it’s probably not what it actually was, which is good, because he doesn’t want to imagine Michael Nylander picturing him with a mouthful of dick, much less finally coming between the slick grip of Nicky’s pale thighs.“We were so tired from practice,” he whispers. “We got an early night.”“Good,” Nylander says, slowly. “That’s good.”Fedorov clinks the ice together in his glass, face so tight Mike thinks it might peel off, and then the flight crew is telling them to get ready for takeoff, jet noise insulating Mike from further interrogation.-For some reason, Mike had kind of assumed he’d be given Nicky as a road roommate. On paper it made sense, right? Two guys more or less the same age, and Sema and Ovi get to crash together. Mike’s kind of offended the coaches think he’s less responsible than fucking Ovi and Sema. In their defence, probably, there is nobody on the face of the Earth who loves hockey more than Ovi, so he does at least sleep at night. Still, Mike gets assigned to Steckel, who is nice enough but has boiled his road routine down to something like a science experiment from high school; he recreates the same conditions every time.Mike looks over at Nicky when he gets told he’s rooming with Bradley. Nicky looks back at him and shrugs. Okay, Mike wasn’t alone in making assumptions.They get off the plane pretty quickly, all things considered, and the bus to the hotel is quiet enough that Mike feels weird going back to find Steckel, who is asleep with his eye mask on already. Mike takes a strategic catnap against the window, and then they’re arriving and Nicky is shaking him awake.Ovi drapes himself against half of Mike’s back in the lobby, slamming into the space between him and Nicky and grabbing them both by the shoulders. “Is okay, you come hang out with Sema and me, he so happy for company, look.”Sema is studiously ignoring them, looking very intently at a big fern while the room keys get handed out.“Yeah, he looks thrilled,” Mike says.“Hey, rookie,” Bradley calls, waving Nicky over. “Third floor, let’s go.”Nicky shrugs out from under Ovi and goes to join him, looking back over his shoulder with that blank look on his face Mike thinks means he’s thinking really hard about something and doesn’t want anyone to know.Steckel yawns hugely and waves at Mike, dangling a key card from his fingers. “Dibs on the bed by the window.”Ovi slaps Mike on the ass to give him some momentum before he goes to join Sema.-Steckel is fine. He doesn’t snore or anything, and they've got until tomorrow before they have to actually play a game, though they will have a skate this afternoon. Plenty of time to nap, which is all he’s going to do.Mike pulls out his phone and texts Nicky. Let’s ask them to switch.
I ask already he says no
Fuck. Mike shouldn’t be turned on, there is absolutely no reason why that should be a turn-on. Okay. I’ll ask Steckel.“Hey, Stecksie, can I ask you something?”Steckel looks up from where he’s digging around in his bag. He’s already got pyjamas on. “Nope.”“Come on, man, you’re just gonna sleep until the game, practically, you don’t want someone who’s gonna do the same?”Steckel fixes him with an unimpressed look. “Greener, you think I asked for this? Coach thinks it’ll be better for you and the rookie to take it easy tonight. No going out on the town, okay? Just take a fucking breather.”“We’re not even gonna go out!”Steckel shrugs. “Take it up with Coach.”Mike briefly imagines how that might go down and immediately decides it’s not worth the yelling. It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. He texts Nicky again. How much cash do u have?
no cash
Fuck. tell brads I’ll pay him $500 Mike sends, before he can regret it.
?
u owe me $500 if he says yes Mike sends, before he puts his phone down. “Stecks,” he says slowly, “I will pay you five hundred dollars to room with Bradley.”Steckel straightens up, looking down at him from every inch of his six-six height. “Greenie, seriously?”“Take it or leave it, man.”Steckel crosses his arms. “Canadian or American?”“Canadian,” Mike tries.“No deal.”“Fine, American!”Steckel raises both eyebrows. “Sure it’s worth it?”“Look dude, are you gonna take the bribe or not?”“Bribe, huh?” Steckel makes a big show of tapping his fingers against his biceps, watching Mike squirm. Fuck him, Mike’s put his cards on the table. He doesn’t owe him an explanation. It just seems fucking wrong that it’s Nicky’s first away game and Mike won’t get to watch him get all excited for it. That seems unfair, just because they’re young enough to still think this is fun.“You don’t have to take care of us,” Mike says decisively. “We can take care of ourselves.”“I bet,” Steckel says, but he spits in his palm and holds it out anyway. “Cash by tomorrow or else. Don't say I never did anything for you.”-Nicky throws his bag down at the foot of the bed by the window and immediately yanks off Mike’s borrowed suit jacket. The shirt underneath doesn’t fit any better, though he guesses Nicky probably has a spare in his travel bag.Then the shirt comes off too and Mike is left just sitting there watching with his mind a complete blank, tired and jubilant all at once.Nicky glances over at him. “Not sleeping?”Oh, right, Mike is still dressed. He starts on the buttons, clumsily working on his collar, when Nicky says: “maybe we try it like Ovi and Sema?”Mike loses control of his hands. “What?”Nicky blushes over his entire body, Mike learns, flush over his pale, hairless chest and under his soft chin and right down his big round arms, but he comes over anyway, climbing gracelessly onto Mike’s bed and shoving him back against the headboard. “Stay dressed,” he says quietly, and Mike is such a goner for him, Swedish accent and weird syntax and all. He drags Nicky forward, suddenly desperate to put his hands on him, to give him this if he wants it.“First roadie,” he says in Nicky’s ear when he’s pressed up against Mike’s front, buttons digging into Mike’s chest and fabric starting to become an infuriating barrier. “You happy?”Nicky makes a petulant little noise and grabs at Mike’s hair, failing to get much purchase in the gel. He smells like airplane and that tobacco he uses and Mike’s toiletries and Mike thinks that if he’d had to miss out on this he would never have forgiven the universe. He teases at the hem of Nicky’s pants until Nicky says something that is probably rude in Swedish and grabs him by the wrist. The top button of his pants pings off and disappears into the space between their beds, but then Mike has his hand around Nicky and is too turned on to care, Nicky’s weight against him and Nicky’s other hand spread over the back of his skull pressing his face into his neck.-Mike wakes up from their nap and can’t figure out where he is for a second, Nicky's arm thrown over his belly and the blankets long gone, legs tangled together in a way that seems hopelessly inextricable.Nicky mumbles something and closes his mouth, lips dragging over the spot on Mike’s chest he’s claimed as his own.Mike hits snooze on the alarm. What were roadies even like before this? Mike doesn’t make much effort to remember, claiming an extra five minutes of sleep instead.-“Hey,” Ovi says at practice, dumping his helmet off while he leans against the boards. “You fuck?”“What?” Mike hisses, looking around for anyone listening in. Sema is skating a passing drill with Nicky and the coaches are watching them, skating alongside. “Shut up!”“Sema bring lube,” Ovi says, not listening to Mike at all. “Maybe we come later.” He waggles his eyebrows, pleased at his own joke. “You trust me, I know. Sex before hockey, is best.” He pauses, considering. “And after, too.”“I should charge you two-fifty each,” Mike mutters.“Is bargain, you’re cheap date,” Ovi says cheerfully, before they’re being whistled in for drills. Mike doesn’t have a chance to reply, but anyway, Ovi’s not wrong.-“A thousand dollars, Greenie?” Clarkie comes up to him in the Thrashers’ guest skate workshop and smacks him upside the head. “Really?”“It was five hundred, actually. Backy owes me half.”“Unbelievable,” Clarkie says under his breath before he sighs heavily. “Look, just… don’t fuck it up, okay? I’ll cover with the coaches.”Mike feels like he’s pretty easy going, generally. He’s been on a defensive line behind Alex Ovechkin and the force of pure bizarre chaos that is Sema for like a year and a half. He’s not a picky eater. He doesn’t make trouble. It’s probably not warranted to be so offended. “Clarkie, lay off. We’re good.”Clarkie eyeballs him, arms crossed skeptically. “Mike. Do I want to know?”“Probably not,” Mike admits. Fuck, he must have internalized more of those cop shows than he thought. “Keep your plausible deniability.”After an eternity of hesitation, Clark punches him gently in the shoulder. “Good talk.”Mike watches him go, wondering if it’s worth mentioning to Nicky that the bribe has made its way back to the captain, but then decides he doesn’t care. Whatever. Worth every penny for the morning alone.-They go out for dinner.Nicky waves at Nylander in the lobby and says something in Swedish, leading Mike out of the hotel before he has a chance to say anything back. “What’s that about?”Mike asks him, when Nicky is frowning at the little cartoon map the concierge gave them with the restaurants circled on it.“He tells me to be back on time,” Nicky says, looking up. “I’m always on time for hockey.” The flexibility implied there is something Mike plans to ask about, but then Nicky shoves the map at him. “No fish.”“You want fish?”Nicky glares at him. “I want not fish.”“Okay, bud,” Mike says, glancing at the offerings. “Outback Steakhouse it is.” It’s a pretty quick walk, considering, and Nicky seems fascinated by the concrete blocks by the hotel, looking up the whole time. When they’ve finally got food, Mike kicks him under the table. “Hey,” he says, when Nicky looks at him, mouth comically full, “what kind of Swede doesn’t like fish?”Nicky throws a crouton at him. Mike catches it in his mouth, and then Nicky chokes a little trying to laugh while he's chewing, setting Mike off too. “Clarkie told me not to fuck up tonight, don’t ruin it!”Nicky swallows, eyes watering. “What are you know about Sweden?”Mike knows fuck all about Sweden, except that they eat that weird slimy fish out of cans and that they produced the Sedin twins, who are terrifying, but Nicky doesn’t have to know that. “They gave us Michael Nylander, so maybe Sweden is just full of dads.”“We are Olympic champions,” Nicky huffs, offended.Mike leans in to wipe a little bit of steak sauce off his chin. “Hurry up,” he says, “Alex says Sema has lube.”-The night before the first game of the regular season is probably not the best time to let Alex Ovechkin and Sasha Semin and all their attendant entropy into their room, but Mike answers the knock with none of that on his mind.He’s got a preemptive boner, almost all the way ready to go, and Nicky is in the bathroom doing fuck-knows-what when they arrive.Mike thinks it should be impossible to be this horny, or at least medically inadvisable. He thinks it should be illegal for Ovi to take off his shirt right away and just flop back on their pushed-together beds with all his big gold chains clinking against his chest. It’s not like Mike never looked before, he just didn’t think touching was an option, and how would he ever have brought it up?Thank God for Nicky, who comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and smiles at them all, even Sema, who’s leaning in the corner by the mirror with his hands in his pockets.It fully transforms his face. He still kind of looks like a demon, but Mike likes it, that little edge of glee.Sema says something to Ovi, jerking his chin at Mike. “Tell him.”Ovi laces his hands behind his head. “Backy,” he says. “You ever finger someone?”Nicky bites his lip. It takes a second for him to shake his head.Sema laughs, a little meanly. “Greenie?”“Girls, yeah,” he says. “No guys.”Ovi looks at Mike and pats the bed. “Sema says we teach Nicky something new. You want?”Mike can feel himself start to lose what’s left of his higher thought functions. “I swear to god, if you ruin me for the game tomorrow—”“We never,” Ovi says, placing a huge hand on his heart. “Is teamwork, Greenie. Hustle.”Mike laughs at him, so unbearably turned on that it comes out more like a giggle. He’s so busy looking anywhere but anybody’s hands that he doesn’t notice Sema coming up behind him and grabbing him by the back of the neck to walk him closer to the bed. It distantly occurs to Mike that he could say no, but he doesn’t want to, not when Nicky is looking at him like that, with his pupils blown all the way out, his little mouth fallen slightly open.Sema is talking and Ovi is translating and Mike is fine with letting it happen, falling onto the bed and letting Sema take his shirt off, letting Nicky join them, towel left in a little heap on the floor.The first slick touch sends a shock through him like being taken to the boards, a reaction of pure adrenaline. Sema still has his had wrapped around the back of his neck, thumb moving slowly over the curve of muscle. Mike is tense all over, face down with a pillow under him, and so alarmingly hard that every minute movement against the covers is a minuscule torture.He’s never been the center of attention before. He’s never had anyone look at him like this, touch him with this combination of appreciation and maybe a little streak of sadism. Mike is going to fucking die if they stop. “Come on, you’re killing me,” he says, meaning it, when Ovi says something to Nicky that might be instruction and might be teasing and is only serving to make the anticipation worse.“You know when we kill you, Greenie,” Ovi says, putting a big hand on his back, between his shoulder blades, impossibly warm and wide. “We coaching.”Mike hates him intensely in that moment, and in the one after for distracting him when Nicky slips a finger in him and it takes him so much by surprise that all he can do is make a weird, unfamiliar sound, tensed all over. Ovi pets him like a cat, gentle touch and a little bit of pressure for Mike to press into, and then Nicky’s fingers are moving, stroking for a little bit of rhythm. It’s strange and intrusive and Mike is so fully immersed in the sensation of it, thinking it can’t possibly get more intense, when Sema lets go of his neck.Mike wants the contact back. He wants to be held down again. He’s not ready for Nicky to slip another finger in, changing the angle just slightly at Sema’s instruction and then— oh, fuck— something whites out inside him, once, again, and Mike really thinks he might be dying of it, trying to push back and sink down into the mattress all at once.At some point in his life Mike knew how to speak, probably. That seems likely. He can’t manage anything approaching speech when Sema pulls him up by the hips and finally, finally gets a hand around his dick.Mike comes in minutes. It feels like a century, Nicky’s fingers still inside him and Sema‘s hand slick and wet and almost not tight enough, making him work for it. It’s agony. It’s amazing. Mike is going to kill them. Nicky’s fingers slip out of him and Mike almost cries, feeling emptier than he knows what to do with.Ovi drags him into his lap, kneading at his shoulders, the spot on the back of his neck where Sema grabbed him. “I’m gonna kill you,” Mike mumbles into his thighs. “I’m gonna—”“We win for sure now,” Ovi says, ignoring him, palming himself through his shorts. “See, I’m tell you. Teamwork.”Nicky comes back from the bathroom and flops down alongside them, flushed and wet. He’s got a look on his face that Mike has never seen before, naked curiosity as he watches Ovi pet him. He reaches out to pat Mike’s cheek, clumsy and damp. “Good?”Mike’s not sure that’s the right word for it, but he’s forestalled from replying by Sema rolling him over and taking his place, crushing Mike into Nicky’s soft, solid side and throwing a leg over him before he pulls Ovi’s shorts down and takes him into his mouth. Ovi’s eyes sweep closed, and Mike gets to watch Ovi come from an intimate distance, gets to admire the look on his face. Mike is naked and sweaty and slick and everything feels a little bit too good, half real, until Nicky mumbles and shoves him over, making himself more comfortable by elbowing Mike in the ribs.It brings him a bit back to earth, just in time for Semin to demand that Ovi tell him to shower before sleeping.Mike would, but he can’t move. It’s probably a little weird to be so fucked out just because someone put two fingers up his ass, but even so, Mike feels floaty and high, to the point where he doesn’t realise he’s zoned out again until someone’s hand lands on his ass. It’s Sema, warm, wide palms and bony fingers, spread over the bottom of his spine. “Greenie. Up.”Mike just sort of flops a hand at him. Sema takes him surprisingly gently and herds him towards the shower, then, after a moment of consideration, steps in with him.He leaves the door open. Mike thinks briefly about all the water that’s gonna get all over the floor then forgets about it, because Sema sniffs one of the hotel shampoo bottles, makes an appraising face and then dumps it over Mike’s head.Mike closes his eyes just in time to avoid the sting, surprised by how much he enjoys it when Sema bats his hands away when it belatedly occurs to him that he should try to help or something. Sema isn’t gentle, precisely, but the pull of his fingers through Mike’s hair does a lot to reunite him with his body, even when Sema starts to scrub at the back of his neck. Mike sort of lets him until he’s rinsing off under the spray, not sure how to mention that he can take it from here, probably. He shoves the hair out of his eyes, finally getting a look at Sema, who is still covered in soap and isn’t getting any of the hot water at all.Mike reaches for him and reels him in, and even though Sema makes a weird face at him he lets him. It’s not the best shower of his life, but Sema does grab the soap again to do Mike’s back, so there’s that.Sema slaps him on the ass before he steps out the open shower door, but gently. Mike stays under the spray for a little while, but eventually he figures out he’s ready to sleep and turns the water off.He was right, half the floor is a puddle, but he just tosses his towel mostly on top of it and heads to bed.Sema is extracting Ovi from the rumpled bed while Nicklas sleepily burrows under the covers. Sema speaks to Ovi in Russian, collecting their clothes and yanking them on without looking. Ovi spots Mike and grins at him with one leg in his sweatpants. Mike can’t remember if he had underwear but it’s nowhere in evidence now. Mike is unprepared for the crushing hug Ovi enfolds him in, but he’s willing to go with it. “Thanks, bud,” Mike mumbles, patting him awkwardly.“We win tomorrow, you see,” Ovi says, releasing him and urging him towards the bed. “Now sleep, look, Nicky is so grumpy alone.”Nicky opens one eye, looks at them all judgmentally, and closes it again. Well, Mike can take that hint. He climbs in naked, gratified that Nicky doesn’t say anything about him being wet, just mumbles something incomprehensible and shoves a big thigh right against Mike’s so they’re touching when Mike falls asleep as though shoved off a cliff.-They take out the Thrashers four-one.Nicky’s first NHL point is a beauty of an assist to Nylander, who taps it into the net almost without looking.The price is one of Ovi’s teeth, lost to a massive high-stick halfway through the game.He gets a round of applause on the bus back to the hotel and fourteen stitches to keep him company. “Don’t worry,” he says grandly, enjoying the attention. “Sema know I still pretty.”Nicky laughs quietly, in his window seat to Mike’s right. “Shoulda lost a few more, Ovi,” Mike calls, for his benefit. “Make an improvement.”Ovi’s grin has got to be aided by Novocaine, Mike thinks, from how wide he manages to smile. “You love it,” he says, delighted with himself.The rest of the guys laugh along, and Mike hopes fervently that none of them can see Nicky’s hand latched around his knee, or the look Semin gives him, arm hooked over the back of his seat to get a better line of sight.Mike kind of likes the missing tooth.-They’re back in DC at ass o’clock in the morning, peeling off for separate cars. Ovi and Sema follow him while Nicky heads off with Nylander, looking completely exhausted. Mike feels that’s a little unwarranted seeing as he was the one who had his internal sexual landscape abruptly rearranged, but Mike also knows what a full season feels like and doesn’t begrudge him his own bed.Mike is expecting Ovi and Sema to go claim Ovi’s car, still here from a few days ago, and they do. He probably shouldn’t feel weird about going home alone. Besides, he’s kind of looking forward to eating three slices of leftover pizza and crashing out.He rallies and drives home. He likes his place. He’s got more space than he knows what to do with and even he knows he’s probably got more money than taste. Still, what’s the point of having it if you can’t have fun?Mike pulls out his laptop, cracks a beer and settles in for an hour of jerking off and online shopping.It turns out that jacuzzis are surprisingly inexpensive when you’re making bank.-The season chugs on, and Mike barely takes in any of it. They win a few, which feels good, and then they lose some, which doesn’t, and slowly his place starts to take on little touches that aren’t his; a ceramic ashtray appears on his deck and a few pairs of Nicky’s sweatpants creep into his laundry.Ovi leaves a big gold chain in his bathroom and Mike puts it on as a joke the next morning before he meets them at practice, but instead of asking for it back, Ovi just hooks a finger in it and tugs, grinning hugely. “Keep it,” he says. “For match.”Mike can’t help but think of it as lucky, even if they never win another game.He hopes they will, though. The losing is making everyone grumpy, even Sema.There’s talk about Hanlon getting fired, which in Mike’s opinion would be deserved, even though it’s none of his business. It’s kind of scary how mad he is after the fact about the training camp incident, even if it did light Nicky up like hellfire. Mike thinks he’s amazing and everyone should be able to see it.Speaking of Nicky, the bad streak seems to be forcing him into a grouchy little ball, all his irritation turning inwards so he spends almost a full week scowling at the coaches as though he can’t figure out how to make his face do anything else.Mike is horribly relieved when Nicky corners him after their shitty homestretch and attempts a smile.“I need your help,” Nicky says to him, after practice and after the shower, when Mike is dressed, so it can’t be the usual kind of hand he wants.“Sure, bud,” Mike says, confused. “What’s up?”Nicky hitches his bag higher up on his shoulder, frowning like he does when he’s organizing his sentence in English before he says it. “How do I buy a car?”Mike forces himself not to laugh. “I’ll come with you if you want,” he says, feeling horribly fond all of a sudden. He has no idea what to do with it, so he puts it in the section of his mind Nicky has begun to occupy and smiles at him. It’s the perfect distraction. Mike wants nothing more than to go car shopping, right the fuck now. “What kind of car do you want?”Nicky’s eyes light up, cautious delight spreading over his pointy face. “A Mercedes,” he says. “Big one.”“Eurotrash,” Mike ribs, poking him in the stomach.Nicky swats his hand away, still smiling. “Biggest one. With a big stereo.”“I can help with that,” Mike says, trying not to sound as goofy as he feels. “Say the word.”“Tomorrow?” Nicky asks, like he thinks maybe Mike has somewhere else to be.“Tomorrow,” Mike confirms, slinging an arm around his soft waist and heading for the exit. “Getting sick of bumming rides?”Nicky huffs, looping an arm over Mike’s shoulders. “Maybe you bum rides from me, now.”Mike’s a fucking goner. “Seems fair,” he says, already planning the after part, when he convinces Nicky to buy a car with a backseat big enough for two hockey players to fool around in. Somehow, he doesn’t think Nicky will resist that particular ulterior motive, if the way he smirks when Mike offers him a lift back to Nylander’s is any indication.If Mike is oddly touched to be the one Nicky asked for help in the first place, well, that can go in the box too, right along with reason and rationality, and the little voice that’s berating him from having missed out on all this when he still thought teammates were off limits. There’s a lot to be said for new experiences.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Do you think he’s bored at Nylander’s?”Sema groans and turns the page of his book. His morning cigarette is between his fingers, burning down at a steady pace and filling the kitchen with its horrible smell. Sasha has gotten used to it, but has never quite managed to like it. Harry Potter must have done something wildly interesting for Sema to be ignoring him. Sasha’s sure he can be more interesting than some kid wizard. Sasha calls his name, sing-song, from where he’s leaning over the breakfast bar. Sema glares at him. “I’m reading. Shut up.” As if to punctuate this, he finally smokes the last of his stupid tobacco, cheeks hollowing out while he inhales.“That shit’ll kill you.”“Pest,” Sema mutters, smoke curling out of his nose like a dragon. “What do you know about shit that’ll kill you, you’re from Moscow.”Success. Sasha has gotten him to look up from his book. “I thought you liked Krasnoyarsk. Always talking about how great Siberia is, Sanya. Best winters! Big spaces!”Sema tries very hard not to smirk at him, stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray on the table Sasha is going to make him empty immediately. “You wouldn’t last a day.”“Good thing we live in America now,” Sasha says, seeing his opening. “Do you think Nicky is bored at Nylander’s?”Sema eyeballs him, closing his book and setting it down. “It’s six in the morning, Sasha. He’s probably on his way to morning skate. You can ask him, not me.”“Grumpy.”Sema rolls his eyes. “Depends how much he likes kids,” he says, finally. “And speaking Swedish.”Ah. Technically, Sema has his own apartment. Technically, Sasha lives alone. Sasha has been there a couple times. It’s closer to downtown, and Sema is about his size if not his weight, so Sasha doesn’t mind borrowing his shirts. They look great on him. Still, it’s not where Sema lives. “Should we invite him to the bathhouse next time we go?”Sema snorts unattractively. “Absolutely not.”“Swedes love saunas!” Sasha is basing this on absolutely nothing, but he feels like it’s true. Besides, Nicky would go all pink and sweaty, and Sasha loves that.“Have we ever taken Mike?”Sasha is forced to concede that they have not, though of course it’s not a fair comparison. Mike hadn’t had a clue last year, and Sasha’s interest wasn’t urgent enough to make an issue of it, until he’d seen Greenie melt like a popsicle as soon as Nicky sucked him off. “He’s not Swedish. Maybe we can take both.”“Maybe we don’t do anything, and play hockey instead.” Sema opens his book again, even though they have to leave in ten minutes to be on time, and he’s still naked.“Or we go to Nylander’s,” Sasha says, struck by his own brilliance.Sema shakes his head silently, vetoing without a word. Fine. Sasha will go himself. Nylander might hate everyone but Fedorov and maybe Nicky, but Sasha is very charming. Sasha can make it work.-Nicky is at team breakfast nursing a cup of coffee that’s got so much milk in it it even looks sweet, which Sasha appreciates. He’s swathed in a hoodie that comes down over his fingers and he’s blinking sleepily at the conversation Green and Fehrsy are having around him. Sasha relates. Sasha shoves all three of them over to make room for him and Sema. Nicky grins at him when Greenie squawks, not seeming to care that he has coffee on the sleeves of his hoodie now. He just sticks one in his mouth to suck at the stain. That can’t be hygienic. Sasha loves it, watching his thin lips and sharp little teeth work at the fabric.“I am thinking,” Sasha says, fully not caring that Greenie is glaring at him. “Maybe we come over later, bring food, Nylander is not have to feed extra hockey player, we hang out and play games.”“What games?” Nicky asks, suspiciously.“Come over where?” Greenie says, ignoring Fehrsy completely.“Nylander’s,” Sasha says. “He is have a big house, no?”“I’ll have to ask,” Nicky says, picking the sentence out slowly. Almost a third of the way through the season his English is already getting better, Sasha is impressed. He needs to teach him more dirty words.“So ask!”Nicky glances over at where Nylander is leaning back against the side of a booth with his eyes closed, catching an extra fifteen minutes of sleep before they have to start gearing up. “After practice,” Nicky says decisively. “He is usually in a better mood after practice.”“He is not being nice?” Sasha will kill him. Sasha had lived at George McPhee’s house for his rookie year and gotten treated like a prince. That’s not fair.“No, no,” Nicky says, waving his sweaterpaws a little. “I think maybe, I’m like a kid. He has lots of kids. It’s easier, all at once.”“I told you this was a bad idea,” Sema says, in Russian.“You said no such thing,” Sasha informs him. “Eat your bagel.”Greenie looks bemused, his eyebrows trying their best to meet in the middle of his face. If he was as lucky as Sasha they would meet already, and he wouldn’t have to scrunch up so much. “What the fuck are we talking about?”“Language, boys!” Fehrsy says, patting Nicky on the top of his hat. “We can’t give the rookie bad habits!”“Fuck off, Fehrsy,” Nicky says, hitting every syllable.“Too late, eh?” Fehr says, cheerfully. “See you on the ice, kids.”“He’s my age,” Green says, watching him go. “Wait, are we actually going to Nylander’s?”“Is where Nicky lives,” Sasha says, slinging an arm around him and stealing his sweet coffee. It’s perfect. It tastes more like sugar than anything else.Nicky snatches it back, quick like a cat. “You don’t have to.”Sasha pauses. “You want not?”“He wants you to drop it,” Sema says, finishing off his cream cheese bagel to drive home his point.As if to prove Sema wrong, Nicky shrugs. He’s so solid, round and big under his clothes. Sasha is hellishly into it. “No, I— sure. I ask.”Sasha grins at Sema, delighted to be right, as usual.Sema smears a fingertip of cream cheese down his nose.-The thing is, they suck. Sure they had a pretty good streak at the beginning of the season, but since then they’ve been losing like it’s going out of style.Sasha doesn’t think it’s his fault. It can’t be when he’s been scoring like a god, but he definitely thinks they could be playing better, generally. As far as he’s concerned it’s teething problems. They’re going to be amazing. Once they all get the hang of each other it’s going to be phenomenal.He expresses this to Sema on their way to Nylander’s house. Sema tells him to shut up while the navigation is talking, and Sasha misses their next left and has to do a u-turn. People are terrible drivers in Virginia. Sasha really doesn’t think all that honking is necessary.Sema rolls down the window to give them the finger, leaving Sasha with his silent judgement as he finds the route again. “You didn’t have to come,” Sasha reminds him.“And leave you alone with the rookie?”“Greenie is coming too.”Sema levels one of those long, judgemental looks at him that Sasha kind of hates and also finds unbearably attractive. “That’s so much better.”“There’ll be kids. You love kids.” Sema grumbles but Sasha knows he’s right. “Bedsides,” he says, “I think Backy is taking all the losing personally.”“He should be taking bad coaching personally.”“Sedition!” Sasha crows, swinging into the driveway and parking more or less straight next to the Nylanders’ fleet of clean, sensible cars. He leaves it running while he pokes Sema in the ribs, drawing a little yelp of laughter. “Mutiny! Insubordination!”“Hello, Alex,” Michael Nylander says, suddenly standing at the open driver’s side window, lights from his driveway reflecting off his head. “Could you please park better?”“Do what the old man says, Sasha, you love that,” Sema says, tone achingly polite.“Sure,” Sasha says in English, smiling easily. “We bring sushi,” Sasha says, nodding at the cooler bag they grabbed on the way over.“Nicke and Mike are playing ping pong,” Nylander says by way of an answer. “I’m sure they’ll be happy.” He steps back and crosses his arms, apparently intent on watching to make sure Sasha parks exactly parallel to his cars. Sasha grins at him and does it, making minute adjustments for a good three minutes.“He’s going to kill you,” Sema says, trying very hard not to laugh.“He can’t,” Sasha says, waving at Nylander, whose jaw is visibly clenched. “He needs me to win.”Sema smirks at his phone, and Sasha finally turns off the car.-The basement is down a set of wooden stairs, with that low ceiling that’s always a little damp all basements in old houses have, and it currently contains a scene of dimly-lit chaos not unlike an improbably wholesome Bosch painting.There are four Nylander children yelling, two boys and two girls with identical heads of straight blonde hair from age about eleven to seven. They’re all shrieking in Swedish and English as Nicky and Mike face off across the chipped ping-pong table, playing doubles with the two eldest.Mike curses and throws his paddle into the net when Nicky and the tallest girl score a point off a quick rally to a chorus of impressed outrage from the kids.“You good babysitter,” Sasha says, delighted at the riot of noise. Everyone looks up.“Oh my god, Ovi’s here,” one of the boys says, elbowing his sister. Celebrity never gets old.“These kids are monsters,” Sema says, waving at them.“You were raised by wolves,” Sasha says through his teeth, “you should feel at home.”Nicky smiles at them, high-fiving his doubles partner. “Now we have enough for tournament,” he says, while Greenie and one of the boys are engaged in a very in-depth strategy session.“I get Ovi,” the youngest girl says, immediately staring right at him. “We’re gonna kill.” Sasha immediately decides he likes it here.“Does she know you’re terrible at ping-pong?” Sema asks, hefting the paddle the youngest boy hands him with a very serious look on his face for the kids’ benefit.“She’ll forgive me,” Sasha says.They get roped into a round robin, in theory, but all three of the other teams end up cycling around to going up against Nicky and Michelle Nylander, who keep routinely destroying the rest of them. William kicks the leg of the table the next time he and Mike go down with one point to go. “You’re the worst,” he hisses at them.“Actually,” Nicky says, slowly, an evil grin on his sweaty face. “I think we are the best.”Michelle shrieks when William says something in Swedish that sounds bad, and then there’s just a lot of yelling, the Swedish kids reverting to their little blonde scrum and Ovi feeling deeply contented at the look on Sema’s face. “I told you this would be fun,” he says, gathering ping-pong paddles.“I’m going to fuck him so hard he cries one day,” Sema says, looking at Nicky.“Special treatment? I’m jealous.”“Did you guys bring food?” Mike asks, because he can always be relied upon to have a one-track mind. “I’m starving.”Sasha dumps the paddles on the table. “Sushi, is upstairs.”The Nylander kids all look at Nicky, almost identical grins of chaotic delight on their faces. Nicky tosses a ping-pong ball with a distinctly over-casual flick of his wrist. Sasha looks at Mike for a clue, but William Nylander laughs first. “Nicke only eats chicken fingers.”Nicky bares his teeth at him, saying something in Swedish. This must be how everyone else feels when he and Sema speak Russian. Poor Mike, sad and monolingual, no secret language to argue with children in. “He eats steak too,” Mike points out.God, Sasha misses hanging out with kids. They should do this more often. “We should do this more often,” he tells Sema.“Nylander’s here,” Sema says, looking up the creaky basement stairs to where Michael is indeed watching them all with a look of paternal exasperation.Ovi waves at him.“Dinner,” Michael says. Maybe Ovi’s an optimist, but he thinks he’s trying not to smile back. They’ll win him over yet.-Sasha is not an idiot. Sasha knows how to shop in bulk. He has at least three pairs of sweatpant-jeans, and multiple copies of his favourite coca-cola shirt. He knows how to buy enough food for twelve people. It just never occurred to him that Nicky might not like fish. He’s Swedish. he thought that was illegal in Sweden, like having strong opinions about geopolitics in public and wearing bright colours on weekdays.He watches Nicky poke at a piece of raw tuna suspiciously with a chopstick and revises his opinion about the Swedish palate. “You don’t like sushi?”“I’ve never eaten it,” Nicky says, still glaring at the fish on his plate. “I don’t like fish.”Michael Nylander demonstrates how to use chopsticks, which at least seems like a challenge Nicky is keen to take up. He gets it pretty quickly, but has yet to actually put any food in his mouth.“Picky,” Sema says, happily stealing Sasha’s neglected California rolls. “Do you think he’s as picky in bed?”“You know he’s not,” Sasha says, fending him off. He doesn’t particularly want to deal with Sema being weird right now. At the other end of the table Mike is having a chopstick sword fight with William and holding a conversation with Mrs. Nylander at the same time. Sasha briefly debates asking Mike to pass the soy sauce just to see which one he fucks up first, but then the tiny kid sitting to his left tugs on his sleeve and makes a little face like he’s supposed to lean in.“Is it true?” She asks him, like they’re spies passing secrets.“What is true?” He whispers.She rolls her big blue eyes at him. “Dad says he’s got seven kids now. Is it true?”Sasha stifles the laugh that threatens to erupt from his chest. “Yeah?” He glances over at Nylander and Nicky; Nylander is pointing at the different kinds of rolls and watching Nicky eat them, ignoring his look of pure distrust. “I think he mean Nicky is like new kid, not he is real new kid.”“Oh.” She eats a piece of salmon with her fingers. “What’s the difference?”“He not really a kid,” Sasha offers.“Will he still teach me to play golf?” she asks.“He play golf?”She graces him with one of those withering Nylander looks Sasha has recently realised is entirely genetic. “Don’t you know anything?”“Guess not,” Sasha whispers cheerfully, offering her his seaweed as a consolation prize. She chomps it down like it’s spaghetti, so at least she’s obeying her seafaring national heritage.He leans back over to Sema, just in time to see Nylander clap Nicky on the shoulder when he experimentally nips a corner off some sashimi. “Can you play golf?”“Golf is for old men who are waiting to die,” Sema says derisively. “I’d rather go cross-country skiing.”Sema hates cross-country skiing. “Mini golf?”“You’re on your own,” Sema says, finally catching on. “Don’t fuck him without me.”“Come on,” Sasha tells him. “What ever happened to good, clean fun?”“You know what, I take it back,” Sema says, smiling at Nicky. “I think we should all go play golf, we can wear those shirts with collars, listen to all the Americans talk about the economy, and then take them to the banya after.” He pointedly drinks Sasha’s coke, pretending it’s some kind of fine benevarge, sticking his pinky out. “I’ll put it in my calendar.”“Oh, shut up,” Sasha says, stealing it back. “This was fun. You can’t ruin it. I’ll think of something.” Sasha’s only experience with golf was that one time he crushed a hole-in-one. He kind of wants to keep his 100% win record there, so maybe he should come up with a better plan. Still, probably not the banya. That’s more of a third-date kind of thing, though Sasha still thinks Mike would probably enjoy the shaving.-The thing is, Sasha has known Sanya Semin for most of his adult life. Sure, Sema is from a city in the middle of a barren wilderness that barely has an ice rink, and then he somehow managed to get to another one with a slightly bigger ice rink, but he’s still one of the most brilliant players Sasha has ever seen. Sasha appreciates good hockey. Sasha has had his eye on him a long time.He thinks maybe Sema might have a different memory of meeting him, because he’s a little older than Sasha and might not remember Sasha specifically smashing him into the boards with great pleasure when he was still playing for Traktor, but Sasha does.The important part is that Sema was already here when Sasha arrived, and he was still a ludicrously strange and wonderful player, and also knew all the best places for Russians to go when they were sick of speaking English in DC. He was pretty patient about coming to get Sasha at George’s house, even though he’d already started pretending he spoke no English at all long before Sasha showed up, mostly, Sasha thinks, to avoid having to talk about hockey with the people who paid them to play it.It didn’t exactly come as a shock that there were banyas in Washington, but only because Sasha hadn’t known enough to think it was unusual. He definitely knew he probably wasn’t supposed to fuck a teammate, but who was Sema going to tell? Fedorov? Fedya probably wouldn’t have cared, though Sasha knows enough to know that it’s always better to leave certain things unspoken. That’s just how it is, like how Sema moved into his house as soon as Sasha bought it and never left. Neither one of them talked about it, it just happened. Sasha likes it, Sema likes it, end of story.Given all that, Sasha maybe should have expected that actually trying to have a conversation about Nicky and Mike is not as easy as it should be.Remember when I was a rookie and you seduced me? How did you do it? doesn’t seem like a good opener, because Sasha was easy and Sema was hot and shaved his pubes in front of him in the semi-public space in the corner of the Russian baths and then offered to do his, so that question answered itself before it was asked. Seduced implies resistance.Usually, Sasha finds the baths very relaxing. It’s hot and the steam makes everyone’s naked body look great no matter what. The whole place has a hazy, lazy glow that makes it easy to check out people’s asses without it being a big deal, and Sasha finds the amount of attention he gets from fellow aesthetes gratifying.Tonight he’s restless even after multiple trips to the cold plunge and one mean hand-job from Sema in the sauna. He tries to nap on a lounger in the cooler steam room, but even that isn’t as soothing as he wants it to be. “What’s the big deal if I do fuck him without you?” He asks, jumping into the middle of a thought.Sema takes his towel off his face, eyeing Sasha knowingly from the next recliner over. “You’re trying to make me jealous? It won’t work. I don’t like you enough.”Sasha starts stroking himself a little and Sema watches, making a liar of himself. “It was your idea to see if Mike was up for it,” he points out.“I’m not having this conversation,” Sema says, still watching Sasha slowly harden. “Do what you want.”“You’re the one who told me not to.”“And now I’m telling you I don’t care.”“I don’t believe you,” Sasha says smugly, only half hard but willing to go again if Sema wants to make it worth his while.Sema sighs heavily. “Do you want me to make you shut up?”Sasha grins at him. “I thought you didn’t like me enough.”Sema tosses his face towel away and sits up. Oh, look at that, Sasha is hard again.Maybe there’s something not quite wired right in him that his favourite thing in the world is for Sema to play at losing his temper at him a little, backing him into a corner of the hottest room and telling him he's impossible with his hands fisted in Sasha’s steam-damp hair and his cock down Sasha’s throat, but whatever. He likes what he likes. He’ll be pressing at the little bruises the tiles leave on his knees for at least a day. It’s perfect.-Sasha does like to win. It's not possible to do what he does without wanting to win, without craving it, without having some kind of deep need for that rush. If he didn't, he wouldn't be Sasha.By the time they’ve tanked yet again in the third period deep into some dismal Florida trip Sasha is almost ready to pull a Zhenya and lose his cool all over the hotel room, but he has enough self-respect to know he’d be mad at himself in the morning.Sema sacks out facedown as soon as they get back to the hotel, which in itself is also infuriating. He kind of wants to fight him. It’s too hot in Florida and the whiplash from the muggy wetness outside to the dry, preservative cold of the hotel is giving him a headache.The worst part is that it’s nobody’s fault. Sasha’s been scoring. Sanya’s been scoring. Nicky’s been producing solid assists. Hell, even Greenie has smacked a few in. It’s maddening. Sasha flops down next to Sema, hoping his sleepiness will rub off on him, but all it does is make Sasha painfully aware of how alert he is and how much Sema is not going to help tonight.That’s fair enough. Sasha can amuse himself.He’d rather not, though.He doesn’t think anyone is in a better mood than he is, but even so he makes his way down the hall to Mike and Nicky’s room. Nicky answers the door dripping wet in a towel. Sasha can hear the shower running in the bathroom, and figures Mike must be in there too.“You come in?” Nicky asks him, when Sasha doesn’t say anything.Sasha does.He sits on the bed while Nicky and Mike finish up in the shower. It doesn’t take long, and Nicky comes back first, slightly drier than he had been a few minutes ago. The wet footprints in the hotel carpet are still dark blue by the door.Nicky drops his towel on the floor and shoves Sasha over to burrow under the covers. They always push the beds together, making themselves a big nest to sleep in. Sasha finds it unbearably charming, but Sasha has other ideas tonight. “You want to go out?”“Out where?” Nicky sticks his head out from where he’s clumping the sheets into some kind of weird blanket lump.Sasha shrugs. “Out.”“Who’s going out?” Greenie looks fucking exhausted, yawning even before he finishes his sentence.“Ovi, maybe,” Nicky says, frowning. “And me.”Sasha shouldn’t be this happy about two words, but he is.“Have fun,” Mike mumbles. He did get more minutes than usual, and Sasha is distantly disappointed he won’t be joining them, but Nicky is climbing back out of his damp bed cocoon and digging through his bag for clothes. He yanks on a hoodie without even sniffing it, but Sasha doesn’t care. He picks a pair of sweatpants that look great on his ass, so who is he to complain.-They end up at a pirate-themed bar by the water, because Florida is a circle of hell right out of the Inferno.Sasha orders a drink that comes in a treasure chest with six straws. “Three for me, three for you,” he says, when Nicky wrinkles his nose.Nicky shrugs and tries it, cheeks hollowing out around all three. “Gross,” he pronounces, drinking again.Sasha feels better already.“We suck,” Nicky says, after crunching through the mouthful of slushy rum. “Not you, but—”“We get better,” Sasha promises him. “Soon, I think.”Nicky glares mutinously at him, but he’s starting to go rosy from the drink, which Sasha suspects is much stronger than it tastes. It had a skull and bones next to it on the menu. “You’re already better.”Sasha could usually talk about hockey all day, but tonight he really doesn’t feel like it. He remembers probably every play of the game, every bad call from the refs, every time Nicky spat his mouth guard out between his teeth to chomp on it furiously, but Sasha wants a night away from the ice. They’re not even supposed to be out, so they’re halfway there. He looks around. This place is a tourist trap, full of weeknight drinkers and playing jaunty fake-pirate music through the bad speakers.“Let’s play game,” Sasha suggests, struck by a brilliant idea.Nicky follows his eyes. “No.”The dartboard has a fake wanted poster printed on it with a faded drawing of Blackbeard. It’s perfect. “You win points, I tell you a secret.”Nicky chews on a straw, eyeing him across their treasure chest of booze. “If you win points?”“Then you tell me secret.”Nicky wraps the end of the straw he’s masticating around his finger, flattening it into a spiral. “You are going down,” he decides, picking up the plastic box to take it with them.It takes a second for them to figure out the darts are released by a quarter in a slot which provokes a canned voice yelling “Avast!” at them, but then they have six brightly-coloured darts each and have found a table on which to prop their treasure chest of rum. Nicky takes a long sip. “Who’s first?”“You go first,” Sasha offers, because he’s never played darts and doesn’t know the rules.Nicky crunches down some more slush, squares up and goes to stand on the line. He throws right-handed and lands only an inch or so to the left of the bullseye. “Now what?”“You don’t know how to play?”“No.”“Me either,” Sasha admits.Nicky laughs at him, that huge smile cutting across his face again. It makes him look younger in an instant, and Sasha immediately feels better about the whole day. “I tell you secret anyway,” he says, squaring up to throw his own dart. “I wait for you. Since draft. When is Backy coming? We need him in Washington. Tell him, please. I say this to reporters.”Nicky watches Sasha throw lefty and hit Blackbeard in the forehead. “No way.”“Is true,” Sasha admits. “Sema is laughing at me.”Nicky bites at his lower lip, thoughtfully dragging it under his teeth and leaving it pink and damp. “Everyone told me, stay in Sweden. I think, okay, I’ll stay, come in stronger. But I’m not playing as good as in Sweden.”Sasha pulls Nicky in to take his turn, pressed up against Sasha’s chest. “Throw, and I tell you one more.” Nicky throws. It sticks in the pocked wall to the side of the board. Nicky makes a noise of outrage, furious with himself in an instant for not getting a dart on a stupid dartboard in the worst bar in Florida. “This why,” Sasha says, low and quiet. “Remember, at Worlds? We meet and you too shy to say hello? But you so mean on the ice, want to win always.” He tweaks Nicky’s nose, wanting all of his attention. “Like me.”“Michael told me to be careful with you,” Nicky mutters, batting his hand away.“What is Michael know?” Sasha asks. “Wait and see, we make magic.” He might be telling himself as much as he is Nicky, but it still feels true. “Now you. Tell me secret.”Nicky flushes scarlet. “That was my secret.”“Bad secret.”Nicky glances around at the bar, the people milling around the counter, the girls having a party in the corner, their little alcove filled with stupid games. He swallows, and Sasha can almost feel it, that subtle little displacement of air. Maybe nobody would call Nicky handsome, exactly, his face a set of strange, fine features, but bright and mobile and perfect together. Sasha really has been waiting for him. He hasn’t been pining, but Sasha wants to win. Sasha knows they’re building him a team. He’s watched Nicky for years, waiting for him to show up. This wasn’t part of that want, the missing piece which is how badly Sasha wants to make him scream. That’s newer. “I ask, then,” Sasha says. “Why you ask Mike, first day? He prettier than me?”Nicky reels back and punches him full in the arm. “You were— all over— he wanted to!”It’s like three sentences smashed together, but Sasha still thinks he gets the gist. He laughs, rubbing the spot where Nicky nailed him. “Good!” He grabs the chest of rum, now depleted, and holds it out as an offering. “You okay?”Nicky does him the favour of thinking about it before answering. God, Sasha wishes he spoke Russian. But then he wouldn’t be Nicky. “Yeah. I wish we win more.”“This is also not secret,” Sasha points out, chasing the last of the rum, beginning to feel pleasantly warm and drowsy.Nicky sticks his hand in the chest and grabs a few of the last big ice cubes. He tosses them into is mouth like they’re chips and eats them, making a sound like gravel in a lawnmower. “I’ve never kissed a girl,” Nicky says, through his mouthful of ice, staring at Sasha.“So?” Sasha puts the chest down. “You want?”Nicky shrugs. “I don’t know.”“You say if you want. We go out, meet girls too.” Sasha’s probably imagining it, but he thinks Nicky’s shoulders come down a little. Sasha’s kissed plenty of girls. He loves girls, the way they smell good and know all sorts of strange arcane things and how to inflict that wonderful, unfamiliar pain of beauty on him. He remembers once a girl he knew tried to tweeze his eyebrows and the tiny prickling sting of it had gone right through his body and had lasted weeks as an echo every time he saw the bare space above his nose. He doesn’t think Nicky will take him up on it. “Or maybe you just kiss me.”Nicky’s eyes flick down, his long, pale eyelashes catching the horrible bar lighting. “I like that more.”This is unbearable. Sasha wants to take him back to the hotel and wake up Sema and Mike and make them admire him too, strip him out of his hoodie with the chewed-down laces and mess up his uncombed hair. “We go?”Nicky smiles at him, a little one, only just the edges of his teeth showing. “What’s the score?”Sasha has completely forgotten the board. “Is tie,” he lies.“Liar,” Nicky says, but he lets Sasha drag him outside by the sleeve to get a cab anyway.-Sasha falls asleep between Nicky and Mike, who only grumbles a little when they wake him up to climb in. “You guys smell like booze,” he mutters, shoving his face into the back of Sasha’s neck. “Where’d you go?”“Somewhere terrible,” Sasha assures him, loving the warm solidity of him. He pats his hand, looped over Sasha’s belly. “Don’t worry, Nicky come back in one piece.”“He’s a demon, he’s not the one I was worried about,” Mike slurs. “Okay, go the fuck to sleep.”Sasha is only too happy to oblige.In the morning they all taste like sleep and dry air. They have to rush for the plane, and Sasha can’t stop pulling at his collar where Greenie’s beard burn has left a tender patch on the side of his neck, but Sema just hands him a bottle of cold water and smirks, so all is right with the world for takeoff.-As with so many things hockey, improvement comes at a price. Hanlon gets fired and replaced by Bruce Boudreau, who has that kind of sweetly cajoling style that reeks of condescension, but they do start pulling in points.Michael Nylander tears his rotator cuff just after Nicky’s 20th birthday, going down in a faceoff that takes him out of the next few matches. It sucks. Sasha hates seeing people get injured like that, the kind of thing that’s a reminder of how much it takes out of them to play the way they play. He doesn’t like seeing him come to practice in a sling and go straight off to the trainers, he doesn’t like the way it obliquely reminds him that there’s age to come.He loves the way it bumps Nicky up to the first line. Fuck, it’s perfect. It’s perfect, Nicky in the middle, watching the ice like he does, never doing anything until it’s just the right time to do it, blessing Sasha and Sema and everyone else with his beautiful passes.Sasha feels a little bad for loving it so much, but he can’t help it. He can’t even keep a lid on it when the press ask him about it.“You’re being embarrassing,” Sema says, just out of range of the microphones after a win, a glorious win, two in row.“What did he say?” One of the reporters asks.“He say is good to click too,” Sasha lies, grinning at him.Sema smiles in a way that tells Sasha he knows exactly how full of shit Sasha is. “Tell them the Swedish kid, whatsisname, he’s pretty good.”“He says he think Nicky is rookie of the year,” Sasha translates, and then his time is up and they’re clearing off to talk to Bruce.Sema sits down next to him and drops an arm over his shoulders. “Look,” he says, elbow hooked over the back of Sasha’s neck directing his attention to where Nicky is bent earnestly towards Fedya, listening while he explains something with his hands. “Your rookie is making friends.”“He’s everyone’s rookie.”Fedya looks up and sees them watching, raising both eyebrows and saying something that makes Nicky go a splotchy pink. Nicky raises both his slender hands cautiously, but whatever Fedya says seems to ease him off, a little smile coming over him when Fedya goes back to what he was saying. Sema jostles him and Sasha realizes he’s been staring. “Come on,” Sema says, “I need you to tell the trainers that my hamstrings are tighter than Malkin’s sphincter.”Greenie joins them when they’re heading for the massage tables, falling into step. Sasha grabs him around the waist, slapping a hand against his bare side in greeting. God, he feels good. “Hey, Greenie.”“Do you think Michael will be back soon?” He asks, after Sasha has explained Sema’s hamstrings and decided he might as well ask for some neck work.Sasha claims his own table, sprawling out facedown to wait. “I dunno. I hope he okay.”Greenie sits on the last table with his legs hanging off the edge, heels kicking back and forth. “Yeah,” he says. “But the lines are pretty good, eh?”Sasha smiles at him, extending a hand. To his right, Sema has started breathing like he’s on the bike while the new trainer —a German guy Sasha happily thinks might be some variety of actual sadist— starts to pulverize the backs of his thighs. Greenie fistbumps him instead of holding his hand, but that’s fine too. “How you feel?” Sasha asks, low.Greenie smiles at him. “Did I tell you guys I have a jacuzzi now?”Sasha is delighted beyond measure. “Since when?”Greenie laces his hands behind his head, visibly self-satisfied. “They finished installing it yesterday.”Sasha hopes it has good filters. They’re going to ruin that thing. “You want us coming over?”Greenie looks around a little to make sure nobody is listening, but the trainer —Jurgen? Jurgen— is too busy torturing Sema to pay attention to them, and everyone else is still in the locker room, showering, getting dressed, getting ready to go home. He leans in a little closer. “I’m still mad at you, you fuck. I thought you and that asshole had your own thing, you know, a Russian thing.”Sasha reaches his hand out again, beckoning Greenie down. He puts a hand on his cheek, patting him gently. “Greenie, if we knew you so easy all is need is one look, maybe we try harder.” Greenie isn’t a blusher, but Sasha can read the look on his face, and it’s almost as easy to tell. “We come over later,” Sasha says, giving him one last pat for good measure. “Make sure jacuzzi is right size.”-It should be impossible, Sasha thinks, to look this good. Impossible or illegal, maybe, but it isn’t, so the world will just have to deal with it. Mike lets them in. Nicky is already there, sprawled on the couch playing NHL 2006 with the collar of his t-shirt in his mouth. Mike is shirtless and has a bite mark on his belly, so Sasha doesn’t feel too bad for having dressed up.“What are you wearing?” Mike asks, incredulously.“Is fashion,” Sema says, stepping past Ovi to mess up Mike’s hair.Mike bats him away, looking genuinely perplexed. “Why?”Sasha is a little put out he hasn’t gotten Nicky’s attention, though he understands that winning is imperative. He’s also a little put out Nicky isn’t playing as him, but that’s okay. He’ll have his own avatar next year, Sasha can already feel it. That being said, he’s not sure his red shorts are being properly appreciated. “Is always good time,” he points out, though he suspects it’s lost on his audience of plebeians, and December might not be thigh season. Never mind. All the clothes are coming off soon anyway.“Whatever.” Greenie offers them a beer, which Sasha takes, and then Sema pulls out the vodka he’s brought. It’s sort of a toast to Nicky on the first line, sort of a toast to nothing, crowded onto Mike’s huge couch watching Nicky lose his round before he furiously turns off the console. It’s sort of a toast to being young when Sasha, seized with inspiration, goes to stand over him, pours a sip into his own mouth and then tips his chin up. God, he’s pretty. That beautiful face, heavy thighs and solid shoulders, but it’s the way he moves that Sasha likes best, like he knows exactly where his weight is. Sasha could watch him for hours. Nicky’s lips part. Sasha kisses him, letting the vodka flow out. Nicky swallows hard, open-mouthed against Sasha’s lips.“Christ,” Mike mutters, staring at them. “Are we going to try this thing or what?”Sasha glances at Sema, who is watching them from his spot on the couch, legs spread open and a hand laying across one of his hips, drumming at the strip of skin exposed below his shirt. “Happy, Sasha?” He asks, smiling half a smile.“I’m always happy,” Sasha tells him, two fingers still in the soft, rounded space under Nicky’s small chin. It’s a lie, but it’s probably true right then. He’s happy right now, and the rest of the time it hardly matters.He turns back to Nicky, brushing a kiss across his closed lips again. “Happy?” He asks, in English.Nicky blinks at him, eyes a little glassy, lips wet, flushed the way Sasha loves. “Why not?”“Come on,” Mike tells Sema, sliding off the couch. “Let’s go turn the jets on.”Sema hesitates for a second, but then he goes, bumping shoulders with Mike as they head for the balcony.“We should go too,” Nicky says, making no move to do so.“Yeah,” Sasha manages, too full to move, brimming over. “You first.”Nicky grabs his hand, using it to pull himself up. He’s tall enough to bump his forehead into Sasha’s nose when they overbalance a little, tall enough to laugh into the side of his neck, his hair in Sasha’s face smelling the way it always does, a little like the inside of his hat and a little more like the shampoo he uses, whatever it is. “We have a game tomorrow,” Nicky mutters, righting himself.“You think we gonna be tired?”Nicky shoves his hair back behind his ears, smirking a little. “Not too tired.”Sasha kisses him again, just to mess up his hair. Nicky laughs into his mouth, pulling away. “I think they’re yelling at us.”They are. “Okay, we don’t keep them waiting.”Sasha leaves all his clothes in a pile on the floor.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The Swedish kid is going to stay.Sanya could have predicted that from day one of camp, and doesn’t need Sasha to keep telling him, but he won’t shut up about it.“Look at him,” Sasha says, jabbing an elbow under his ribs as they watch Bäckström skate circles around the other rookies. “I told you he was amazing.”“Thank you, Sasha, I have eyes.”Sasha taps his tongue against the back of his teeth, like he does whenever Sanya is being sarcastic; trying to rile him up is just a game, just like everything else. Sanya steals his water bottle out of his hands, leaning back against him, letting Sasha take his weight. “Good hands,” he offers, following the drill they’re sitting out. “Think they’ll put him up centre?”“They’d better.” Sasha slings an arm around him, all of him hot and solid and unbearable. “We’re fucking terrible.”Sanya laughs before he can stop himself. They really are. He tracks something else, watching Green in with the other defensemen. He keeps glancing up and letting some stupid smile take over his face every time he catches sight of Bäckström. “Your pet has a crush.”“He’s not my pet,” Sasha says peacefully, jostling him. “More like a prospect.”“He’s never going to blow you.”“That’s what I have you for.”Sanya rolls his eyes, about to say something cutting back, but then they’re being called in for drills. It can wait, and Sasha is more or less right, anyway. At least it’s mutual, and Sanya can also make him speak English for him when he can’t be bothered.Russians have been in this league for decades, and does a single coach even bother to learn how to say hello? Of course not. Disgraceful.-So, maybe Sanya was wrong about whether Mike Green would ever open his mouth for anyone’s cock. He’s graceful enough to admit it when he’s mistaken, especially when it’s personally gratifying. The thing is, Sanya could maybe do without Sasha being quite so happy about it.-Sanya has a few places he goes when he wants some alone time, but he doesn’t want that often. He’s spent plenty of time alone. Not being alone is kind of the newer part of his life, or at least the richer part of it.He wakes up stuck to Sasha’s side towards the end of the regular season aching all over, a nagging thing in the back of his knee making itself known as soon as he stumbles back to consciousness, aching for a cigarette.Sasha, Sasha the goal-scoring genius, Sasha the name-stealer, Sasha the furnace. Sanya would happily give over his name for him, among other things. Still, he’s too fucking hot. He elbows him away, trying not to want the warmth back when it’s gone and goes to smoke and stretch in the kitchen.He's bent over his own thighs, wondering about nothing much when Sasha surfaces, setting up a pot of tea and going for a soda right away. He’s got a freezer full of food from his mother and he still eats whatever’s closest to hand. “Pass me my cigarettes,” Sanya asks him, curling a leg over to stretch the hip joint, not warmed up enough but not ready to stand yet.Sasha tosses them at him without looking and Sanya lights one, leaning both elbows on the floor, hands propping up his chin so he can watch Sasha stir his tea and chug his soda at the same time. They have a rhythm. It’s their rhythm. Sanya isn’t sure whether what’s been creeping in lately is jealousy. He doesn’t have anything to be jealous of.“Stiff?” Sasha asks, watching him from his perch on the counter. He has so many chairs and he still sits up on his own kitchen surfaces like he’s a kid trying to reach the cabinet with the sweets in it.Sanya exhales at him. “It’s normal.”“Sauna later,” Sasha says, smiling at him. “You’ll relax.”“I’m perfectly relaxed,” Sanya says, butt between his teeth. Something in his hip creaks and then releases, finally giving in to his weight. It doesn’t feel good, precisely, but it’s still a relief.-They might actually make the playoffs. Sanya can’t pretend he doesn’t care. He very much does care. It just seems difficult to maintain that constant state of pumped-up moto bullshit that seems like an extra-contractual requirement for every job in North America.“We’re gonna make it, boys!” Brooks yells, slurping down what looks like a jug of blended moss as soon as they arrive for team breakfast. “Last push, let’s go!”“Does he know we’re not playing until later?” Sanya asks Sasha, but Sasha isn’t paying attention. He’s spotted Nicky and Green, abandoning Sanya to go harass them, leaving him standing by the coffee station to assemble the strongest coffee he can manage.He’s just about caffeinated when Fedorov slides up next to him to join in, bumping him gently in greeting. “Sema. You’re glaring.”“I’m on the press rotation tonight,” he says.Fedorov laughs at him. “Just don’t tell them you’re fucking Sasha again.” Fedya offers him a sugar cube. “We have a reputation to maintain.”“You loved it, you old goat,” Sanya says. “You’re just mad you have to talk.”“Some of us enjoy it,” Fedya tells him. “Some of us have been here a very long time.” He raises his mug before retreating back to where all the old guys congregate, Americans and Russians and Canadians and Michael Nylander and the rest. Sanya has no idea what they talk about. Retirement? Movies? Erectile dysfunction?Sasha is draped over Greenie, stealing his smoked salmon while Nicky wrinkles his nose. Sanya joins them, slotting himself under Sasha’s other arm. “Do you think the old guys know?” He asks, knowing only Sasha will understand.“Know what?” Sasha offers him the last of Greenie’s salmon. Sanya eats it out of his fingers just because it makes Nicky grimace.“That you’re a bad influence and a moral delinquent?”“That’s you,” Sasha says, stealing a sip of his coffee. “Say good morning.”“Good morning,” Sanya parrots, leggings squeaking against the vinyl of their big, plush booths, leaning into Sasha’s big, warm body. Could be worse, he thinks. Could definitely be worse.-They win the game, and Sanya stands in front of a row of microphones with faces behind them, all of them asking him to explain his goal, one he pushed in on his belly, just on the off chance it would hit the net. There’s no explanation; he shrugs, looking to see if anyone is close enough to fabricate an answer for him. Nicky is off in the corner next to Greenie glaring at his own dumb questions, and he doesn’t speak Russian anyway. No point looking there.Sasha’s not on media, and Fedya is already in with the trainers, something about his ankles. Sanya could make fun of him for it, probably, but Fedya reminds him of the old guys in Krasnoyarsk who were always talking about the war. Which war? Doesn’t matter. The War. In all fairness, very few of them had been as battered as he is, so maybe he has a free pass to be as bitchy as he likes while he’s getting taped from toe to ballsack.Sanya shrugs at the closest reporter. “Don’t know,” he says, slowly. “Is just goal.”The guy keeps his mic up, hoping for something better, but Sanya isn’t about it tell him it really just seemed like it might be fun, and it was. Sasha is the one who gets to have fun. Sanya is there to make him look good, which is exactly what he does, most of the time. He can’t get a fucking break with the refs, but if it wasn’t him it would someone else they took a dislike to, so it might as well be him; he’s good enough to play through it.Finally press is over. Sasha is waiting for him in the lounge with a two-litre bottle of Mountain Dew and a pack of potato chips open on his lap, lips greasy from having eaten what looks like most of the bag. He looks up when he catches sight of Sanya watching him. “Sauna?”“Those things aren’t in the diet plan,” Sanya teases. “And they give you gas, you animal.”“The soda is for you,” Sasha says, cracking it open so it fizzes over his fingers. He sticks them in his mouth, making an obscene face around them.“You’re disgusting,” Sanya tells him, taking the bottle anyway.Sasha insists on driving, which is always an exercise in tempting fate, but Sanya figures fate probably owes him one at this point.When they careen into the parking lot behind the baths Sanya has aged a year and Sasha is over-caffeinated, hyped on a win at home and looking like he wants to be settled down. Sanya wants to.It has never really stopped baffling him that Americans don’t know how to bathe. Sure, they shower, but that’s not bathing. That’s not letting the steam draw out all the crap you’d rather not think about, or letting the bath release your muscles. That’s not getting back into your body and letting it be a body with other bodies. Then again, they’re puritans, so maybe it makes sense. They’re allergic to the kind of comfort baths can offer like this.The fact that this place is more or less tacitly reserved for men who like other men took a while to dawn on him, but Sanya is one of them. Not exclusively, but close enough.Sasha doesn’t seem to care that they draw looks, but he never minds that. Sasha is a creature of admiration. There’s something a little bit innocent about it, how he strikes up conversations with the other Russians seeking a slice of home and the Americans looking for something else with equal grace. Sometimes he says yes, against logic and responsibility. Most of the time he says no, goes red and relaxed in the steam with all of himself on display, like a great big lion at a zoo, indifferent to his audience.He flops down next to Sanya when he’s done in the hottest pool, a towel wrapped around his head and a deep evenness to his breath, great bellows of his lungs rising in his chest. “What’s the matter?” Sasha asks him, stroking himself absently. “Something hurts?”“No, I’m fine.” He is. He’s a little preoccupied, watching him, but he isn’t upset. “I’m going to go shave.”“You want help?”“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sanya tells him, trying not to smile. “You’re going to do it for me.”Sasha grins at him, delighted. “Are you sure you should trust me? I'm very tired. I might not have steady hands. Very dangerous.”Sanya pretends to consider the disadvantages. This is an old game, and a welcome one. “Well,” he says, “if you cut me I'll have to come up with a punishment.”“You get more with honey, Sema.” Still, he sits up. “Maybe you should ask me nicely.”“Maybe you should do as you're told,” Sanya offers, spread out over his bench, watching as Sasha hardens, slow and easy.Sasha licks his lips. “Make me.”There it is. Sanya is a little too relieved, maybe, but soon enough Sasha is kneeling between his legs, doing the delicate, intimate work that Sanya can still vividly remember setting for him the first time, how it had made Sasha’s entire face a picture of wonder, mouth open and eyes dark.He takes a thick handful of Sasha’s hair, careful not to pull while the razor glides over the inside of his thigh, rasp of it against the grain of his hair sending a shiver through his skin that pools under his navel, ready and waiting.Sasha has his lower lip between his teeth and one hand gripped around the underside of Sanya’s knee, holding him steady. His breath is hot, hotter even than the air in the bath. Sanya will be harder than he can stand in minutes, but he's a veteran of this; he can wait until Sasha is done and pretend it's effortless. He does it every time, and then he gets to feel the back of Sasha’s throat, swallowing around him, the strange shivery slide of Sasha’s beard against newly-shaved skin, and gets to know it’s only him that has him just like this.-Their schedule doesn’t leave them a lot of time, but they seem to find it anyway.Maybe it’s Sasha, with his knack for squeezing every possible thing out of a moment, with his endless smile and his ridiculous joy and his tiny red shorts he refuses to stop wearing. Maybe it’s because that’s what it is to be young, to be filled with energy and keep flinging it out to see where it lands, but Sanya’s not sure he’s ever felt quite like that, or how Sasha manages to include them all in it.There are a bunch of cameras following them today for something or other; Sanya does his best to avoid them while Sasha hams it up as usual, and then he notices he’s not the only one.Nicky goes red up the sides of his neck faster than anyone else Sanya has ever met, and stays red after the camera people have moved on, following Sasha down the hall while he corners Greenie and puts him in a headlock.Nicky licks his lips, watching them.Speaking of young.Sanya remembers being his age. He wasn’t in the NHL. He wasn’t being paid a ludicrous amount of money to fuck around.That’s not fair. Nicky takes it all seriously, the media and the game and the travelling. Sanya hopes he takes the rest of it seriously too. It’s not the kind of thing he can ask him. He doesn’t know what he’d say.Instead he leans against the breezeblock wall next to him and bumps him with an elbow. Nicky grins his demon grin and bumps him back, flush fading away. Sanya jerks his chin at the spectacle, watching as Sasha steals the mic and starts asking Mike questions that make his face go all tight. “Funny,” Sanya offers, waiting to see what Nicky says.Nicky swallows. “He’s amazing,” he breathes, eyes tracking them like a flying puck, like a play he’s desperate to memorize.He's still innocent-looking, Sanya thinks. He’s got a baby face he might never grow out of, and big, open eyes. He’s got the end of one of the laces of his hoodie pinched in the corner of his mouth more often than not, and he smells like sweat and spray-on deodorant and that tobacco he’s always got under his lip.He frowns when he’s fucking, faint eyebrows crunched down towards his unbroken nose. He makes very little noise. Sasha’s obsessed with him, with the easy way he cracked Mike wide open as though Sasha hadn’t done the same thing to Sanya. Well, that one was mutual. He can’t put it wholly on Sasha. Sanya already knew what he wanted. It was no awakening for him, not the way it had seemed to be for Mike.The problem, Sanya thinks, is that now it’s open, whatever it is, it’s going to be a devil to close it again.Nicky laughs soundlessly at something at the end of the hall, in no rush to move, content to share the moment. Sanya tucks a little curl away behind his ear, wondering where his hat’s gone.Nicky looks up at him, hands buried deep in the front pocket of his sweatshirt, chewing thoughtfully on the frayed end of the string. He’s going to grind his teeth to dust one day, if he keeps them all. The way he knocks defensemen over with that ass of his, he probably won’t. “Come on,” Sanya says, wondering if he’ll say yes.“Now?” Nicky spits out the lace, hands moving in their cavernous pocket. Sasha and Greenie have disappeared, along with the camera crew and their forest of boom mics and light shields and pretty women with clipboards. They have a little time before anyone misses them, one of those little moments Sasha has created again, even if it’s by absence this time.“Now,” Sanya says, heading for the old training rooms, the ones that were always a little bit damp before they cored out the new ones and moved all the staff over the off-season. They’re still there, beds and all, waiting for better use.Nicky follows him.Sanya slams him back against the closed doors, sending them rattling in their ageing hinges. Nicky lets him, lips parted, curls starting to come loose from behind his ears.Sanya understands plenty of English and Nicky speaks no Russian, so it’s up to him to ask. It would be very easy to let his hands do the talking, to pull at the fraying hem of his hoodie and tug it up over his head, strip him half bare and see all of him, his tiny, dark nipples and his faint blonde hair and the soft curves of his chest.Instead, Sanya braces himself on the door behind them and kisses him, slow and deep, memorizing the taste, the way he makes a soft, startled noise into his mouth before he kisses back, the way he digs his little fingers hesitantly into the meat under Sanya’s shoulders instead of pushing him away.Someone walks down the hall, footsteps echoing through the aluminium doors, and Nicky sighs when Sanya pulls away. He’s hard, pressing into Sanya's hip, his mouth obscenely wet. Sanya knows what he likes to do with it, how happy he can look right after, when his little frown is gone and he’s spent and loose.God, there’s something wrong with him, that he’s still looking, trying to figure it out.“What?” Nicky asks him, watching Sanya watch him. He slides a big, soft thigh between Sanya’s legs, gently drawing him closer. “Is this better?”It is, shock of friction perfectly rough, but it’s not what Sanya wants. Sanya wants to see the rest of him, the part out of sight. Sanya wants to make sure he’s who he thinks he is. He leans in again and misses Nicky’s mouth, nipping sharply at his earlobe, teeth catching on the flesh. Nicke yelps, hands scrabbling for grip before Sanya stills him, licking over the bite to ease the sting. “You come over tonight,” he says. “Yes?”“Why?” Nicky whispers, more astutely than Sanya expected.“Surprise,” Sanya says, after searching for the word.“I hate surprises,” Nicky says. Sanya thinks he’s being honest.“Too bad,” Sanya tells him, willing himself to pull away.Nicky watches his face, thigh still slowly dragging along the underside of Sanya’s cock, against the insides of his legs, sweatpants doing nothing to ameliorate the sensation. “Okay,” Nicky says, at last, fingers pressing in again, rounded fingertips and soft, dry palms against his back, hot through the thin fabric of Sanya’s t-shirt.Sanya shouldn’t leave him like this. They have a game later, and nobody plays well when they’re hurting.The worst part of him thinks Greenie could take care of it, but Sanya can’t bring himself to be that cruel. He does like to make people wait, but not like this, not because he just wants to see what happens.He kisses him again, on his lips, down his neck, under the soft collar of his shirt, before he sticks two fingers in his open mouth, pressing down into his soft tongue. Nicky makes an awful noise, a sound like a distant sob, wet, in the back of his throat.Sanya drags his fingers out soaked, unbitten, just wet enough to make it good when he finally yanks Nicky’s sweatpants down and takes him in hand, dragging his thumb across the head the way he’s seen Nicky do before, counting down the seconds before he comes.-“Did you invite Nicky over?” Sasha squirts water at him. “You like him now?”Sanya swats the bottle out of his hand, distracted from the play on the ice and still short of breath from his last shift. “What the fuck is your problem?”“I just told you.”Sanya sucks in a deep breath, then another. “I like him.”On the ice Nicky is centring the second line, play is moving. Sanya is keyed up, ready to get off the bench and away from this half of a conversation, back to where things make sense. It would make more sense if Nicky was on the first line, but who is Sanya to question coaches. Maybe it’s to rest him. Maybe it’s a little frightening how well he clicks in with Sasha, and Bruce doesn’t want to give up the advantage of surprise.“You want to fuck him,” Sasha says, eyes tracking the play, watching the rhythm of it. “Not the same thing.”“Fuck you,” Sanya manages, and then Boudreau is barking their names and they’re flying over the boards, out onto the ice. The rest will have to wait.-They make the playoffs.They make the motherfucking playoffs, and Nicky is coming over tonight and so is Mike.Sanya hears Sasha invite him, watches them across the other side of Sasha’s chest and tries to figure out whether he’s jubilant or furious, and can’t come to a satisfying conclusion.-Mike and Nicky take Mike’s car.Sanya snatches the keys to Sasha’s, not in the mood to dance with death tonight.“It’s my car,” Sasha points out, so delighted to have made the playoffs. He’s made himself happy. He’s made everyone happy, every person who relies on him, who has expectations of him, who wants him to succeed.“You drive like shit,” Sanya says, “so just let me, okay?”Sasha looks at him, arms crossed in the parking lot, back to shorts and a t-shirt now that the weather is above freezing. “You hate driving here.”“I hate this conversation,” Sanya snaps. “Get in the car.”Sasha heaves an enormous sigh, rolls his eyes, and lunges too quickly for Sanya to avoid, grabbing back the keys and wrapping his fist so tightly around them that's his knuckles go white in the fluorescent overheads.“Really?” Sanya asks, incredulous.“It’s my car,” Sasha repeats, “and you’re being an asshole.”“Forgive me for wanting to make you happy,” Sanya hears himself hiss, too tired to stop himself, too raw for Sasha, of all people, Sasha to be forcing the issue.It’s not supposed to happen like this. Sasha can do whatever he wants, no matter what they’ve tacitly been pretending. It has almost nothing to do with sex, who he’s fucking or why. Sasha has fucked dozens of people while Sanya has been around. Sanya has joined in. Sanya has enjoyed himself. Sanya doesn’t fucking own him.Sasha’s never done this with another teammate before. Sasha has never brought up whether Sanya likes someone before. Sanya has never had to think about whether he does or not.Sasha is still holding the keys in a fist, frozen in the shitty lights. At this rate Mike and Nicky will be sitting in Sasha’s driveway wondering if they’ve finally been pulled over by ten cops at once assuming the car is being driven by a drunkard. Sanya will never voice how deeply he believes Sasha is just too lucky for that.Sasha lowers his voice. “What?”“It doesn’t fucking matter,” Sanya mutters. “If you don’t give me the keys I’m going to take a cab.”Sasha opens his hand, but keeps them, ring dangling off his fingers. “Are you just doing this for me?”Fuck. Fuck this, fuck him, fuck talking about it. “Not everything is about you,” he snaps. “Have fun. I bet they’re waiting by now.”If he goes back quickly enough the rink will still be open and he can figure out where he left his wallet. It takes so much more effort than he’s expecting to turn and start walking away.“Sanya!”It’s too late. Sanya doesn’t have a lot of pride when it comes to Sasha, but he does have some.-“That was a bad surprise,” Nicky says to him in the morning, at conditioning.He’s picked the bike right next to him, the one Sasha usually uses. Sasha is ignoring him, lifting weights in another room. Mike had walked towards the row of bikes too before Nicky had glared him away, which at least means this ambush was planned on the fly, and Nicky hasn’t premeditated his attack.“I’m surprised you can even sit on that thing today,” Sanya says in Russian, spotting the new bruise under his collar.Kozlov loses his rhythm and nearly takes a nosedive off the stairmaster.Nicky pedals harder, even though there’s no way he can understand what Sanya’s implying. “Where did you go?”“My place,” Sanya tells him. It’s one of the more well-worn phrases in his vocabulary, from before Sasha arrived. Usually it has a question mark after it and comes out after a lot of booze, but it’s been sitting in a box, of late.“I thought you lived with Alex,” Nicky says breathlessly, starting to go blotchy from exertion. His hair is dirty under his hat and he’s got the beginning of a little breakout on his cheek, and he’s still someone Sanya wouldn’t mind taking home, if he ran into him somewhere else. If Sanya has a type, it’s the bright-eyed ones. It makes Sanya want to pull his stupid bleached hair. It makes him want to bend him over so he can’t see his face.“Oh my god,” Kozlov says, jumping off the stairs. “Get a fucking room.”“Fuck off,” Sanya tells him, bending back over the handlebars. “Like you haven’t been blowing Fedya for decades.”Kozlov stands in front of the bike so Sanya has to pedal at him and get the odd sensation of going nowhere even though he kind of wants to run him over. “I’m straight,” Kozlov says, patting him on the top of his head. “And I know better than to fall madly in love with the first kid who jerked me off in the showers. I also remember it’s possible to like more than one person at a time.”Nicky’s bike whirs to a stop. He sits there, breathing hard, sweat all down his chest and glistening on the back of his arms. “Should I go?”“Answer him, Sanya,” Kozlov says. “Should he go?”“This is none of your business,” Sanya says, as calmly as he can manage. “Stay,” he says to Nicky. “I go.”“No fucking way,” Nicky mutters, glaring at Kozlov. “Look, can you—” he mimes a shooing motion, looking more imperious than Sanya had thought him capable of. “This is stupid.”Kozlov laughs at them, smiling so widely his eyes almost disappear. “Just in time for playoffs, too,” he says, taking a step back.“Who gives a fuck about playoffs,” Sanya mutters.Kozlov sobers a little, sweeping his sweat-soaked hair off his face and taking a breath. “You do, don’t you?”Sanya does. Kozlov takes his silence as his answer, and goes somewhere else, taking his towel and water bottle with him.Nicky starts pedalling slowly, watching him go. “You okay?” He asks, finally, only half looking at him, as though Sanya might bolt if he meets his eyes again. “I did something?”Sanya doesn’t have enough words for this. He needs Sasha in the middle to soften him, to make him a person who can be this generous. “He stupid,” he manages, meaning Kozlov. “Not you.”“It would have been better if you’d been there,” Nicky says slowly, picking around his words. English is such a stupid language. Nobody can ever seem to be direct. “Alex was upset.”But none of you stopped, Sanya thinks, wondering if he’s trying to conjure bitterness on purpose. “He get over it.”Nicky sighs. “Do you want to fuck me or no?” He asks, pulling one elbow up to stretch his stiff shoulder, biting his lip at the strain. “Greenie says you never look at him, before, too. Just Alex.”Sanya looks around. The room is empty, some miracle or some kind of whisper along the team grapevine, that cardio is off-limits until they’re done. It’s a small world. It’s a self-contained universe of hotel rooms and locker rooms and weight rooms and always the same bodies, always the same rhythms. Sanya is the one who’s off the beat, though that might be stretching the metaphor. “You. Alex. Green. You happy?”Nicky lowers his elbow, all pretence of still working out abandoned. “Yes,” he says simply.“Why?”Nicky stares at him, big, clear green eyes and almost invisible eyelashes. “Because it’s good.”There’s a word Sanya wants and can’t remember, stilled on the tip of his tongue. “Easy?”Nicky shrugs. “Not really. Still good.”“Was easy, me and Sasha,” Sanya tells him. It feels like being sliced open, as though he’s quietly vivisected himself, flayed himself down the middle.Nicky reaches across the space between the bikes, touching him lightly on the arm. He leaves his fingers there, on the curve of muscle just beneath the sleeve of his shirt. He doesn’t say anything for long enough that Sanya thinks that’s it, that they’ve run out of language between them, but then Nicky is grabbing him by the forearm and hauling him off his bike, scrambling to his feet to push Sanya to the mirrored wall, using his deceptive weight to box him in. “Easy like this?” Nicky asks.Sanya wants to push him off. Sanya wants to push him around. Sanya wants him to be less real. Sanya doesn’t want to look at him like this. Sanya flicks his hat off with two fingers and grabs a handful of his damp hair, pulling so hard Nicky hisses at him, breath escaping between his teeth like a cat. He’d let him. Nicky is solid enough to let him figure it out this way, to test the fit.Sanya likes him. It’s the most dangerous thing he can think of, the most precarious he’s ever felt.He kisses him like he’s taking something. Nicky nips right back, sharp little teeth and wet, soft tongue. He tries to imagine him kissing Sasha like this and can’t. It wouldn’t be like this between them. It wouldn’t be like meeting like.Sanya tightens his grip on his hair, pulling Nicky back to get a look at him, to get a breath. “Not easy,” he says, because it’s true. It’s closer to true than anything else. He still kisses him again.-They can’t talk, not just the two of them, not in any way that really matters, but then again, maybe they’d manage.Sanya doesn’t really want to talk, anyway.Sanya wants this endless day to be over, for the game tape to stop running, for the coaches to stop proselytizing, for anyone to stand up and leave. He frequently thinks they would all be doing better if any management had the presence of mind to just let them play hockey, but that’s a distant annoyance at best.Sanya wants Nicky to stop playing with his mouth so much, and to climb out of Mike’s lap.Sanya wants to put this to bed, whatever is brewing up between them.Sanya wants to put his fingers in his mouth again.Sasha watches him across the room all morning until Sanya gives up at lunchtime and crosses their stupid invisible rubicon. He dug and filled it himself, so he might as well ford it. “What?” He asks, stealing his coke. “You’re staring.”Sasha grins at him, wide and delighted, and just like that, Sanya’s forgiven.It will never cease to amaze him how Sasha’s generosity can be so limitless.“Are you coming home?” Sasha asks him.“Yes,” Sanya says. “This day has already lasted a thousand years.”“Dramatic,” Sasha observes, because he might be generous but he’s not a fool. “What did Nicky say?”“I don’t speak English,” Sanya lies.Sasha pats him on the thigh and leaves his hand there, warm and heavy.-It shouldn’t be strange that they’re all at Sasha’s house again for this. It isn’t, until Sasha suggests the bedroom.It’s not Sanya’s bedroom, really, but it’s where he sleeps and where most of his stuff is, barring a big suit bag in the guest room at the end of the hall with all his formal crap in it.Nicky looks at him with one hand on the door frame, Mike Green stacked up behind him, blocked by his body. “Nicky. What—“Sanya remembers thinking he was unremarkable. Sanya also remembers the weight vest incident, the spiteful glory of him taking ownership of his skill and body in a way Sanya doesn’t think he knows is extraordinary. He doesn’t think it’ll be easy. “Come in,” Sanya says.“We were going to,” Mike gripes, because Mike is a gentle soul and a good person, who doesn’t ever seem like he’ll realize he’s not the only guy who’s ever had an epiphany with someone’s fingers in him. “If Nicky would just move his big ass.”Sasha laughs out loud. “He’s right,” he tells Sanya, in Russian. “It is big.”“Lucky for all of us,” Sanya says quietly, taking Nicky by the wrist.-Sanya has very few solid preferences when it comes to sex. Likes and dislikes seem academic when it comes down to it, like having some kind of checklist for what is essentially organic, a process of bodies meeting that finds its own rhythm. With Sasha it's a game, a long settling into each other they’ve had years to play around with.With Mike it’s a little bit innocent, a look back at discoveries and surprises and the shocked pleasure of new experiences.Sanya doesn’t know Nicky like this. Sanya doesn’t really know him at all, except for how that seems less and less true even as he thinks it. There are clues, if he looks for them. There are things he wants to do with him that Nicky would let him do.Sanya has certain things he will always want to keep between him and Sasha and certain things he’ll never be able to tell him even if he wants to. Maybe some of it if is aimed towards the future, questions he’d like to ask and threats he’d like to make, but the rest of it is just the kind of thing that falls out of his mouth when he’s least expecting it, and only makes sense in Russian.Nicky leaves his wrist in Sanya’s grip and steps away from Mike at his back, creating space. “Well,” he says, quiet. “Hurry up, would you?”-He’s watched him, is the thing. Sanya has seen the lingering glances and the way Nicky’s little mouth falls open when Sanya pulls Sasha’s hair, the way Nicky can’t stop looking whenever there’s a bruise left behind where nothing hockey-related could have placed it.He hurries up. Nicky undresses with the complete lack of grace anyone frequently naked around their friends and colleagues eventually develops, nothing coy about the way he strips off his shirt and dumps it on the floor, nothing teasing in the way he kicks off his shorts.Nicky might have a finely tuned sense for where the cameras are, something Sanya might have wanted to ask him about at some point, if they ever had more than eight words in common, but he can’t and right now he doesn’t have to.“You’re not going to like this,” he says to Sasha, dragging Nicky onto the bed, still rumpled from the morning. It’s the kind of casual mess he’s always been happy to live in, as long as it was his too. It feels a bit strange knowing he wasn’t part of making this one, but he pushes the thought away, Nicky making a pleased noise at being roughly handled but not softened by it in the slightest.“What am I not going to like?” Sasha asks, climbing in with them, Mike not far behind.Sanya grins at him, tugging at Nicky’s hair, enjoying the way he looks like he’s just about to fight back. “Get out,” he says, waving at the world beyond the bed, wherever it might be. It already seems to be fading.“Are you serious?”Mike looks between them, bemused. “What’s happening?”“Take him with you,” Sanya says, “or you can stay and watch.”Mike has a hand on Nicky’s naked back, and Nicky, looking straight at Sanya for a second, carefully removes it. “Not yet,” he says, glancing over for confirmation. Sanya can feel his own smile, possibly too wide.“Stay and watch,” Sanya tells Sasha, then, before English deserts him entirely: “don’t touch.”Nicky covers Sasha’s moan of outrage by losing patience and bowling Sanya over onto his back, pillows breaking his fall, mingled scent of them briefly overwhelming before Nicky is stripping him out of the rest of his clothes, hands suddenly everywhere. Sanya would never let Sasha do this, not without telling him to first, but he waits until Nicky has satisfied himself to stop him, grabbing him loosely by the wrists. Fuck, he’s so hard, and he can’t even remember it happening, reaction autonomous, divorced from how complicated this will always be. Maybe complicated’s no bad thing, if it gets him here. “Sasha,” Sanya says, forcing himself to sound calm, “tell him where the lube is.”Sasha has always caught on to games quickly. He has Mike by the waist, pressed up against the headboard, and Sanya can barely see his hand moving, keeping Mike close, both of them watching with nearly-identical expressions of dismay. “Nicky,” Sasha rasps, getting his attention and translating, pointing at the bedside table. “Over there.”Sanya has missed out on a lot, forcing himself to ignore it, the way the expansion of their quiet little circle of two has brought out the part of him that is hungrier than he knows what to do with.So what if Nicky plays golf and thinks it’s not an unspeakable luxury to be a picky eater. So what if Mike is always two steps behind them, playing catch-up through discovery. Nicky coats his fingers the way he did for Mike last time, clearly expecting Sanya to roll over, but instead Sanya pulls him closer by the shoulders and kisses him again, quick and hard, before he tears his mouth away, glancing at Sasha again.Sasha’s eyes are huge and dark, both he and Mike transfixed, which turns out to be exactly what Sanya wants. “Tell him to stretch himself,” Sanya rasps out, hand around the back of Nicky’s neck, feeling the rigid flex of his muscles beneath the thick fall of his hair.When Sasha relays the command, Nicky makes a punched-out sound, face pressed into Sanya’s shoulder, but he pulls away to do it anyway, eyes heavy-lidded, flicking past him to glance at their audience. When he looks back, Sanya can tell he understands, that this is for them and also not for them at all, a collision that needs to happen, two objects meeting at the same velocity.Nicky sits back to make a show of it, completely unselfconscious, and Sanya takes a moment to appreciate it, to truly sink into the anticipation of it. It makes it truly all the sweeter when Nicky insists on being on top, flattening him down against the rucked-up blankets and sinking down onto him. He refuses to let Sanya set the pace until he’s red and shaking, big and dense and so hot, all around him, that Sanya almost gives in and surrenders, but he can’t, it wouldn’t be what either of them needs.Instead he changes the angle, cants his hips just cruelly enough that Nicky loses his advantage and Sanya manages to get him by the hair again, taking a grip to rival the way Nicky is dragging red stripes into his chest, nails catching on the fine stubble. “Can you come just from this?” Sanya asks, knowing Nicky won’t understand, but he hears Sasha curse out of sight, hears Mike’s breathless fuck almost as though from a distance before he pulls Nicky closer, not caring that their rhythm is hopelessly lost, that he’s almost mindless with it. He bites at him, anywhere, not even aiming, and the bright, sharp pain of it seems to be enough to send Nicky over the edge, everything going tight and wordless as Sanya finally follows him, letting go of the last of his control.-Sanya is always the first one up, but on this particular morning he’s not awake alone for long.Nicky stumbles into the kitchen wearing a pair of Sasha’s tight boxers and Mike’s ugly green hoodie, his hair squashed up on one side and a pillow crease in his face.He blinks sleepily at Sanya for a second before he gets himself a glass of water, starting to raid the cabinets. He stares vacantly at the toaster before he puts a slice of white bread in it and waits.Sanya lights his morning cigarette and watches him, wondering why it doesn’t feel so strange when Nicky finds a jar of desiccated instant coffee and makes a noise that sounds vaguely happy, or when he sits down opposite Sanya at the counter and starts to crunch through his breakfast.Sanya smokes at him, watching him eat. It doesn’t feel all that different, sharing space with him. He knows him better than he wanted to, maybe, but when Nicky offers him a bite of his toast he takes it.Nicky musters a sleepy little grimace, and Sanya catches sight of the bite mark he put on him, just below the drooping neckline of his hoodie. It’s newer than the rest from the night before, and the sight is oddly satisfying, as is the face Nicky makes when he adjusts the way he’s sitting a little, folding a leg up under him on the chair. Sanya finishes his cigarette and stubs it out, reaching for Nicky’s coffee.Nicky lets him. “Ovi snores,” he says, when he’s started to look slightly more alert.“Yeah,” Sanya agrees, giving back his coffee. “His—“ Sanya forgets the word for nose and taps his own. “Broke so much.”Nicky huffs softly, staring into his mug. “Needs a bodyguard.”“He is bodyguard,” Sanya says, watching Nicky’s face.Nicky blinks at him, still shaking off sleep, but— Sanya thinks he understands.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

They get eliminated from the playoffs in the first round.As furious as he is about it, it seems so much less important than other things.Ovi gets signed for thirteen years, and the whole time from when he tells Nicke —catching him by the sleeve nearly alight with excitement— to when they can celebrate feels like a year. Ovi’s restless bouncing on the balls of his feet when he finds Nicke in the lounge arguing with Brooks over the blender and the long ride down to his car with a journalist politely scrutinizing them all scrapes against his nerves, every part of him itching to take him somewhere out of sight. Ovi’s happiness is a living thing, a vibration Nicke thinks everyone should be able to feel.The car doors close and Ovi lets out a scream of delight so pure it makes all the hair stand up on Nicke’s arms and he can’t help joining in, swept up in his joy.Fuck. Thirteen years. They’ll have plenty more playoffs.He takes Ovi’s face in his hands and drags him into a kiss, wet and open-mouthed, both of them still laughing.“You next,” Ovi says, when they have to stop or fuck in the front seat, nipping at his bottom lip. “You see, next year, they sign you forever.”Nicke has never really understood the appeal of that word before.-Nicke has no idea how Ovi gets the word around so fast, but they all end up at his anyway, Nicke and Mike, Ovi and Sema in Sasha’s pool, tired and wired in equal measure.He finds himself surfacing next to Sema, steam rising off the chlorinated water as he blows air out of his nose, scraping his hair off his face.Sema has both elbows hooked over the lip of the shallow end, sitting on the step ringing the edge. He looks thin, spare from the end of the season. Nicke hopes his back hasn’t been bothering him after any one of the mammoth hits he seemed to attract, and decides not to ask. It’s not the kind of question Sema answers. Nicky settles down beside him, watching Mike dunk Ovi with a little whoop. “Thirteen years,” he says, leaving it in the air between them.Sema shrugs, looking past him. “Perfect,” he says.Nicke knows there could be a universe of layers beneath that, but Sema is right: it is perfect for him. Ovi loves it here. Nicke is starting to love it too.He’s too tired to say much more, but of all of them Sema is the one it's easiest to be quiet with.It’s all shattered when Mike darts over and grabs Nicke by the knees, smiling up at him, lit from below by the pool lights. “Come on,” he says, voice distorted by the water, “Ovi is plotting revenge, I can tell.”Nicke lets himself be dragged back into the pool, just in time for Ovi to swim past and wrestle Mike’s trunks off.Nicke figures that’s fair; he was the only one still wearing them.There’s something good about the water here, the buoyant sensation settling into him under his skin. It might last a minute or for as long as they’re all in its strange, cool gravity, but time seems almost meaningless now with how much of it there seems to be, all stretching out in front of them.-Two days after the end of their playoffs run is a fucking stupid time to throw a party. They’ve been eliminated, the fans are pissed off, the city is still labouring under their sports curse, and Nicky is drunkenly listing onto Mike’s shoulder in his ridiculous hot tub, listening to him argue with Ovi and Sema. He’s been wet more than he’s been dry for days, maybe. He’s not entirely sure how they go there.“No, see, we have to, before everyone leaves,” Mike is saying, pawing at Nicky’s thigh under the bubbles while Nicky drinks flat beer out of Mike’s bottle and declines to weigh in. “You guys are going to Russia and Nicky is going back to Mars and I’m—”Nicky pinches him. Mike yelps. “Costume party,” Nicky says, tipsily, before he closes his eyes again. Everything is so bright, over saturated. The last of the adrenaline has faded and body feels like it might be sore forever, hips aching from skating through eighty-two games and a post-season and from having been spread over Mike’s bed with Sasha’s fingers keeping him just on the edge of coming for what felt like an hour. He hiccups gently. “I go as Arsène Wenger.”“Who?” Mike asks, as Ovi chokes on his beer.“No, no. You be referee,” Ovi says, delighted, and the matter is settled.-They end up taking over a bar downtown, them, a bunch of people Ovi knows, because Ovi knows everyone; there are so many pretty girls he almost goes cross-eyed trying to keep track of who’s making out with who, but that could be because as soon as he arrives someone shoves a full bottle of champagne at him and he takes it.Halfway through the night he’s been champagne drunk for hours. It feels like he’s been floating through the disappointment of their elimination in a haze of gentle optimism, and he has no idea what to do with it.The sensation is alien, making him feel like he’s walking around without his head, or like it’s attached to a string like a balloon and he’ll have to reel it back in at some point.He finds Ovi by his bright yellow Wizards jersey and blows his whistle at him, catching his attention from the circle of people he’s charming, wanting nothing more than for Ovi to look at him, and not at any of these strangers. They’re perfectly nice strangers. Nicky has already kissed at least one of them with no serious intent; that belongs to other people.“You so drunk,” Ovi says fondly and not an ounce more sober, stealing Nicky’s whistle and blowing it right back at him. “Underage,” he says, grinning. “Illegal.”“Arrest me,” Nicky mutters, stepping in closer.“Hey guys!” A voice says, somewhere to Nicky’s right. “Smile!”Ovi crushes him into his side just in time for a photographer to snap a picture of them, Nicky with an almost-empty bottle in his hand and Ovi so happy he might as well be wearing a sign, all of him lit up in neon.It’s hard not to get swept away by it, even if in the picture, when it comes out, Nicky looks like he’s contemplating a murder. He hates the interruption, the brief intrusion of the world beyond them. It’s just as well the photographer moves on, because Nicky doesn’t think he can keep on like this, so close and with so many clothes in the way. He’s losing his awareness, that sense he has for outside eyes. “Where are the others?”Ovi shrugs, smelling like beer and sweat and the last of his overpowering cologne, sweated off on the dance floor.“We find them,” he says, dragging Nicky along with him as he cuts through the crowd.They collect Mike from a ring of girls who look much too cool to be talking to him, showing them his tattoos as though they aren’t terrible and a testament to his poor decision making skills. Mike catches sight of them and makes his excuses, gently headbutting Ovi as a greeting. “You guys look wasted,” he says, vodka on his breath. “Where’s Sema?”“We’re looking,” Nicky explains.Mike grins and joins the search party.They find Sema with his hand down the coat guy’s pants, buried in the back of the coat check closet, his tawny hair a mess and his matching Wizards jersey lost somewhere in the mess of tumbled coats and the pale, freckled expanse of his shoulders gleaming with sweat in the warm, dim lights.The coat guy spots them first, going wild-eyed, pushing Sema back. Sema looks over his shoulder, edging towards furious, then he sees it’s just them. “Busy,” he says shortly, turning back.“We’ll be back in a second,” Mike says, suggesting another drink before the go.All three of them end up at the bar, sharing a bottle of something Nicky can barely even taste at this point. Ovi blows the whistle at Sema when he surfaces from the crowd, beard-burn across his cheeks and the side of his neck. His jersey is on crooked, rucked up strangely under his arms. He says something in Russian to Ovi, leaning both elbows on the bar and cracking his neck.Nicky thinks his fingers look wet, heating from the inside at the thought.“Are we getting out of here?” Mike asks.“Please,” Nicky whispers, wanting to be whisked through the crush of people, half of whom have already taken photos with them and half of whom seem as though they might ask. He wants Ovi’s charisma to part them like the Red Sea from that one movie the Nylander kids made him watch that gave him nightmares about enormous fish. He wants to fall asleep on someone’s chest and wake up there in the morning.Ovi grants him his wish while Mike calls them a cab, absolutely none of them sober enough to drive.They end up at Mike’s again because it’s closest, all of them cramming into his bed.Nicky ends up naked and overheated, and wakes up halfway through the night sandwiched between Ovi’s back and Mike’s scratchy chest, but even though he thinks maybe he should move, get some air, he doesn’t.He’ll have a whole summer of air.People will ask him how his first NHL season went, whether he’s sad about the playoffs, whether he’s excited to go back, and all of sudden he starts laughing, a still-drunk wheeze that turns into an awful chuckle when Sema raises his head, hair crushed up on one side, to glare at him.“What?” Mike mumbles, waking up. “What’s happening?”“I have to go home,” Nicky says, catching a breath. “I have to go back to Sweden.”Sema looks unimpressed, muttering something in Russian before he puts two fingers to Nicky’s lips. “Shh,” he says, finally, looking him in the eye. “For tomorrow.”He’s right, obviously. It’s a thought for the morning, not for now.Still, he extricates himself and goes to get a glass of water, room only spinning a little.He’s sitting on Mike’s huge deck reluctantly rehydrating when Ovi stumbles out to join him, naked and damp with sweat, clutching a glass of his own. He’s still wearing the whistle, nestled over his gold chains.“You really want to be the ref, huh?” Nicky says, making room for him on the outdoor couch.“Maybe I get good calls now,” he says, smiling knowingly at his own joke.He’s so sweet. Nicky has no idea how it doesn’t just leak out of him, how people can’t see it. He doesn’t even know he’s giving it away for free. It’s criminal, how good he is, enduring all the jabs and bullshit calls just because he’s better than everyone else and he still always manages to smile about it. It should be illegal. America should have better laws.Ovi manoeuvres them so Nicky is leaning back against him, both of them looking over the dark skyline, only a few lights on in the vast spread of buildings. It’s the biggest city Nicky has ever lived in, and by every scale on this continent it’s small. He feels tiny all of a sudden, reduced and insignificant. He drinks his water.“You not happy for Sweden?” Ovi asks him. “Soon is Worlds, we go to Canada first. Swedes first, then Sweden.”Nicke has almost forgotten about that. Almost. “I won’t be easy on you.”“Good,” Ovi says into his hair. “This year Russia is win, you have no chances.”Nicky almost elbows him, but doesn't feel like it, adjusting at the last minute to settle more comfortably against his chest. “We’ll see.”They lapse into comfortable silence, breathing together in drunken syncope. Ovi rubs a hand down his arm, a casual warming gesture even though the night is sticky and hot, and Nicke breathes out a shaky sigh, breaking the rhythm.“What’s wrong?” Ovi asks him, still stroking him.Nicke debates telling him it's nothing, but— but it would be a lie, and it’s not a good enough reason to lie to him. He doesn’t want to. “What if— we go home, and then we come back, and— things are different.”Ovi makes a thoughtful sound, but doesn’t answer for a while. Nicke is about to tell him never mind, make a joke out of it, when Ovi pulls him a little closer for a second, more a quiet hug than anything else. “Things always different,” he says, “I think every year is new one. You new this year. Is good, some changes.”Nicke aches all of a sudden, a deep, bodiless pain that nevertheless works its way into his joints and under his sternum. It was good. It still is.He laces his fingers in with Ovi’s, right hand to right hand, clammy from his water glass. Ovi’s palm is rough, still healing his post-season blisters. “It’s that easy?”“Sometimes,” Ovi says, gripping back. The he ruins it by saying: “maybe we don’t want training new rookie, bite everything, can’t play darts,” and Nicke is forced to tickle him until he howls and knocks a glass off the wicker table with one flailing knee, scattering shards all across the balcony floor.-Russia beats Canada for the gold and Sweden gets ignominiously turfed out for bronze by Finland, so Nicke is the only one of them who goes home without a medal. Still, in their handshake line after Russia knocks them down to the Bronze medal match, Ovi leans down to bump their helmets together, whispering something so filthy in his ear Nicke can’t do anything but smile stupidly at him, noses brushing before they both have to move on.Sema punches him in the shoulder as he passes, smirking around his mouth guard. They don’t have to say anything.They don’t have time to spend a night together in Halifax, but Mike makes a point to find him before his charter to the airport, pushing him into an alcove in Team Sweden’s hotel lobby to kiss him goodbye for the summer.Nicke debates taking him to the bathroom, for old time’s sake, but they’re both exhausted, end-of-the-season spare and besides, this summer will be short. Maybe next summer will be shorter.First, he has to go home.-Nicky arrives back in Washington in the summer of 2008. “Umbrella” has been replaced with “I Kissed A Girl,” but otherwise, everything looks exactly the same.He’ll be twenty-one in November. He arrives at the Nylanders’ house on a sticky afternoon and is welcomed in by seven heads of bright blonde hair and Michael’s bald scalp, dragging him into a one-armed hug. He’s moving a little gingerly, shoulder still in recovery from his summer of surgeries.Nicky can’t help the pang of weird nostalgia he gets when he remembers he’s not moving back in. No more impromptu basement ping-pong tournaments and no more crushingly awkward home-game family dinners and no more paternal cajoling to eat better protein. It’s the end of something, kind of, except for how all anyone can talk about is how promising their new lines are, how young their team is getting, how Washington might have a real chance this year.It’s hard to keep it all out of his head, even as Michael fishes out his car keys from where they’ve been hiding all summer in the stuff drawer of their little crescent-shaped hall table.“What’s the matter, Nicke?” Michael teases him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. I’m old but I’m definitely not dead yet.”The house is a mess of toys and yelling kids and unfinished summer projects and Nicke feels perilously close to losing it, after a long flight and six weeks of— of questions about America, of good beer and the right food and air that smelled exactly how he remembered it but seemed strange anyway. “No, no, nothing,” he says, clenching the keys in his fist so that they cut into his palm. “I haven’t been to my apartment yet.”He’s rented it from afar, and has never seen it in the flesh. It’s probably fine. He won’t spend that much time there, if last year is any indication.“Let’s take a drive,” Michael suggests, “you can take me to Starbucks, get me away from the heavy lifting I’m not supposed to be doing.”Nicke swallows. “Okay.”Michael fastens his seatbelt without much trouble, so he must be on the mend. The thought is reassuring. Nicke drives along the wide, quiet roads of suburban Virginia, getting used to the sunlight and the signs and all the wide-spaced houses set back off the road. He still knows the way.Michael lets the silence stretch for a bit before he leans back in his seat, apparently satisfied that Nicke can be trusted to drive without him needing to be on high alert to grab the wheel. “So, you didn’t follow any of my advice,” Michael says, laughing when Nicke looks at him. “Eyes on the road. I’m not mad.”“I don’t care if you’re mad,” Nicke mutters, pointedly putting his blinker on a hundred metres before he intends to turn.Michael rolls his eyes, but Nicke is shocked to realize it seems more fond than genuinely exasperated. Fuck, Nicke might really miss living with him. “Are you happy to be back?” Michael asks him, before telling him he’s driving too close to the car in front of them heading into the drive-through.Nicke eases off the pedal, thinking about it. “Yeah,” he decides. “Yeah, I am.”“Well, you speak better English now, at least. I was wondering if all you’d learn to say was “fuck” or something.”Nicke is prevented from pointing out he spoke more than one word when he arrived anyway by reaching the ordering box. He rolls down the window to ask for something obscenely sugary, a bunch of lemonades for the kids and a latte for Mrs. Nylander. “I learned more than “fuck,”” Nicke says, holding in his laugh. “I also learned “blow me” and—“Michael starts to laugh. “Stop, stop.” He gets himself together, presenting his credit card when they reach the window, waving away Nicke’s attempts to pay and holding the whole precarious tray in his lap when Nicke hands it to him.It’s so weird that Nicke won’t be hauling his bag up their big, battered staircase again this year. He’ll get used to it, but he thinks maybe he owes Michael more of a thank you than he’s given him, if it feels this odd not to move back in. “Michael I—““Don’t strain yourself,” Michael says, stretching his neck a little as Nicky pulls back onto the street. “You can pick up the kids from school sometimes, if you really want to make up for making the last of my hair fall out. Give Camilla a break.”“Sure you trust me to drive them?” Nicke asks, only half joking.Michael shrugs with one shoulder. “You’re a grown-up, Nicke.” It’s not an answer, as such, but Nicke can’t get a word in, even to tease a little, before Michael continues. “You’ll be fine.”Nicke swallows the weird lump in his throat along with what feels like three ounces of cream, wondering if Michael is still talking about the school run. “I know,” he says. “I know what to do, now.”“Try not to blow anyone in the bathroom on the first day, though.”Nicke chokes on the slushy ice that rushes up his straw when he sucks too hard and Michael starts laughing in earnest, deep and low in his chest. His reflexes are still good enough to save the drinks. “Oh, your face. Nicke, it’s okay, take a deep breath.”“You knew?” The whole of last season flashes out in front of him: late nights and shared clothes, the stupid, bubbling happiness caught under his sternum like champagne under a cork. Oh, fuck. Fuck.Michael wipes a tear out of his eye, still chuckling, before he pats Nicke gently on the forearm. Distantly, he’s aware that all his hair is standing up. “Oh, kid. You’re as subtle as a brick through a window. We could’ve used your moon eyes as a lamp.”Nicke feels himself colouring all the way up his face, prickling heat up under his collar and into his hair. He keeps both hands perfectly positioned on the wheel, trying very hard not to panic. He pulls into a parking spot by an empty curb, nothing but the suburban quiet all around them, birds chirping cheerfully in the lush trees. God, fuck birds. Nicke has plenty he wants to say but none of it will come out; a litany of threats and a rush of creeping fear all tangled up, wordless and fragile.“Hey,” Nylander says quietly. “I’m sorry. Springing it on you, that’s not fair.” He stops there for a second, suddenly more hesitant than Nicke knows what to with. “It seems— seems like it’s okay,” Michael continues, finally. “You didn’t need my advice in the first place.”Nicke lets out a long, shaky breath. He’s not relieved, but it feels strange to have it acknowledged, this knot he’s tied himself in willingly. “I don’t know,” he allows, unsure what to do with Michael’s sincerity, still hot all over from mortification and a little bit of residual fear, lingering like a bad taste. “I’m still not old enough to drink.”“Can’t help you there,” Michael says. “Only time.”“Can I still come over for dinner?” Nicke asks, trying to sound casual.Michael smiles at him at him. Nicke has no idea if this is what he looks like when he’s being gentle, but it doesn’t feel like pity, either. “If you don’t you might die of scurvy, so I hope you do.”Nicke takes his stupid frothy drink and finishes it, not trusting himself wholly to say anything in return. It’s too much, all of a sudden, a great, ugly part of him that would have come out to fight if he’d let it slowly going quiet again in the silence that’s easing back to comfortable between them. “Okay,” he says finally. “I will.”Michael nods, taking Nicke’s empty cup and putting it in the cup holder. “Come on. They’ll call missing persons soon. I know you’ve got nerves of steel.”He always thought it would have to stay a secret, at least in name. He’s never thought about how to talk about it. It’s the kind of thing that escapes words in any language. Nicke doesn’t think it needs any. He turns the car back on, feeling it grumble back to life all through his spine.He drops Michael off with the lemonades and comes in for a minute to say hello to the kids and Mrs. Nylander, who tells him he looks well, which is a lie and half, after that car ride, but when it’s all done, he’s just about ready to go find his new place.He already has three texts from Ovi and Sema and one from Mike, so even if he hates it, he won’t have to stay. He’s got plenty of homes in Washington.-