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One thing about Harris and Troy is that they have become a Hosting Couple. This is funny to Ilya, because Troy clearly hates having people over. Harris loves it, and Troy loves Harris, and he loves the Centaurs, so he tolerates being one half of a Hosting Couple—the half that buys the booze and makes the playlist and calls the cleaner for the day before, rather than the half who sets the menu and brainstorms games in case the pace of the party lulls. One time, Harris made the Centaurs play a round of Mario Party that almost ended in teeth getting knocked out.
Ilya and Shane have spent a lot of pleasant nights at Troy and Harris’s place, but now Ilya’s here alone, which is fine. He knew them first, after all. They are his friends. He feels good about this. That’s what he tells himself as he parks the car and pops a piece of nicotine gum.
It does not hit like smoking does. But Ilya is trying to be better to himself.
He hauls some Costco-sized bags of burgers from the trunk. They aren’t literally from Costco because he’s a better captain than that—they’re from Shane’s preferred butcher, a few blocks from their place, whose eyes bugged out of his head when Ilya placed the order last month. Oh, well. It takes a lot of meat to feed an NHL team.
Alongside the burgers, he’s got hot dogs, smokies, veggie burgers for a few of the WAGs, and a single salmon burger for a lone pescetarian. Super prepared and not at all distracted, the captain of the Ottawa Centaurs swaggers up to Harris and Troy’s front door and then realizing he has no hands to ring the bell with. Too full of meat, he thinks slyly, and kicks the door three times.
“Jesus!” That sounds like Barret. “Fucking come in!”
“I have no hands!” Ilya shouts.
“Sorry!” Then the door opens, Harris grinning and red-faced on the other side. “Hi! Wow.”
“We have a doorbell,” says Troy from the kitchen, which is visible from the foyer because they have a very mid-2010s open floor plan going on in here.
“My hands were too full of meat to ring the doorbell,” says Ilya, pleased with himself.
“I bet,” says Troy drily. He is cutting limes into lime wedges, hair falling into his piercing eyes as he leans over the counter. “How’s Hollander?”
Ilya rolls his eyes. “Happy he did not have to come to your stupid party.” He is wearing an old Boston tank from a billion years ago, logo faded, just to be contrary. Harris is wearing a pink t-shirt that says “true north strong and queer.” Even Troy has an old Team Canada tee on. Ilya didn’t think they made t-shirts for the Winter Olympics. He is baffled as always by this ridiculous country.
Because he’s the meat guy—ha—Ilya is early. Not too early, but the first one here. But he’s still getting the grill lit up when Dykstra shows up. Ilya can tell it’s him because he literally has a bluetooth speaker on his shoulder and he’s already blasting Old Town Road. Susie is hanging off his free hand, and behind him, Caitlin is carrying a very large bowl of pasta salad. She waves at Ilya, and he watches as she kisses Harris on both cheeks. Harris points her over to him, and Ilya almost panics before he realizes that she’s heading for the huge table in the backyard, topped with a blue-and-white checked tablecloth.
“Hey, Roz,” she says. The tip of her nose is sunburned. “How’s your summer?”
Ilya adjusts his sunglasses. “Too fucking hot,” he says. “And I am training my ass off but I am not getting any faster. You?”
“We went camping last week,” she says. “Susie caught her first trout.”
Ilya’s mouth opens, and then he remembers about fish and Canadians, closes it and says, “That is great.”
“Not like she wanted to eat it!” Dykstra calls, overhearing them. He tosses Cait a can of beer—she drinks only English brown ale, for some reason—and cracks his own, a Bud Light, even though he can afford actual good beer. “She thought the bones were gross.”
“Bones are gross,” says Susie.
“Do you like fishing?” asks Ilya. It’s crazy that Susie can talk now. Sentences and everything!
“I like boats.”
Caitlin shows him a picture of Susie with her many-pocketed vest and khaki fishing hat, and then a picture of her sitting on Dykstra’s shoulders, looking tired, and then a picture of her with her fish, which is big enough that he’s a little surprised that she could reel it in. “Dad helped,” Cait confesses. It is weird when married couples refer to each other as mom or dad, Ilya reflects, and resolves never to do it, even when he hopefully has a tiny little Shane running around his house someday.
The grill is pre-heating, so Ilya feels safe enough to leave it for a while and stretch out in a lawn chair. The sun on his skin almost makes him feel alive. He hates that Dykstra’s wife is here, but that isn’t their fault. Caitlin is great. It’s just that Shane’s not here, and Ilya wants to go curl up alone in a ball in his closet, or maybe have a cigarette.
It’s not just players. Dale rolls up with a ton of buns (which are from Costco). Ilya wishes that he could butter them and toss those on the grill too, get them nice and crisped up, but frankly, there is too much meat to cook.
“Thanks,” he says when Dale drops the bags on the big backyard table that’s quickly becoming an official food repository. “Wow, pre-sliced. Fancy man.”
“The unofficial slogan of any equipment manager is ‘be prepared.’”
Hazy turns up in full-on Canada garb. He looks like a walking advertisement for the tourism board in his maple-leaf-bedecked t-shirt, red shorts, Team Canada ball cap, and red-and-white sunglasses. His wife, Lisa, is dressed normally, in a floral romper. Ilya grins.
“This is cute,” he says, gesturing at her. “Where did you get this? Would look incredible on me.”
“In Toronto!” Lisa says. She beams. “There was one in a purple colourway that I think you could totally rock.” She’s on call, her pager with her, and she cracks a Diet Coke instead of a beer, putting on a show of melancholy as she leaves Hazy to the guys and retreats to do some playlist triage with Cait. Dykstra’s speaker is now playing Tate Macrae. Ilya hates this song. He should get up and join the growing crowd, but his chair is comfortable. The sun makes him sleepy. He finds that he doesn’t quite know how to be in a group anymore.
Haas arrives alone again, which Ilya makes a mental note of. He’s got so many tubs of ice cream that Troy has to haul some down to the chest freezer in the basement—not before letting Chiron get a big lick of vanilla off a spoon.
“We’ll pay for that later,” Harris warns, and Troy sticks his tongue out.
“It’s not my fault that Chrion is a very, very good boy.”
When Bood rolls up with Cassie, he’s got all his tattoos on display in a muscle tank with a map of Trinidad on it. “I am resisting global imperialism,” he tells Harris very seriously upon being chirped for not taking the holiday to heart. Harris goes so white that Ilya considers medical intervention before Bood claps him on the shoulder and says, “I’m fucking with you, man.” Milo is wearing the most adorable tiny baby-sized sunhat (featuring an image of Bluey) and chilling in a super decked-out all-terrain stroller that Bood can roll over the grassy backyard with ease.
When the grill’s hot enough, and the party busy enough, Ilya cracks another beer and hauls himself over to get down to business. His body feels burdensome today, aching and bruised from training, sweaty in the heat, and he can already feel where he’s probably going to burn on his shoulders. Shane would be bothering him about sunscreen. And a hat, probably. A hat would have been a good idea—and Shane would have remembered to bring one.
Ilya subdivides the grill into burgers and hot dogs, with a little meatless corner cordoned off.
“Here.” It’s Troy, trotting over with an apron crumpled in his outstretched hand. “Wouldn’t want to ruin your look.”
Ilya raises an eyebrow. “Look?”
It’s a stupid gag apron. It says Grill Daddy in bright rainbow lettering.
“You are feeding the corporatization of Pride,” says Ilya.
“Harris thought it was funny.” Has Shane narced on Ilya? Do these people know about Grill Daddy Rozanov? It’s not important. There’s already a grease stain on the hem of his shirt, so he puts the cursed thing on. “Also, I think gay people made it.”
“Wow, diversity win. Gay people also can have bad taste.”
Troy thwacks him playfully upside the head. “We didn’t invite you here to make jokes, Cap.”
Ilya flips him off.
It’s nice to have a task, though. Ilya’s not introverted—far from it—but talking to all his teammates feels hard right now. There’s a lot he can’t say to them. How’s his summer been? Well, he keeps having nightmares that Shane has to stay in inpatient treatment forever, and also Ilya is not making progress in training at all. Really, he’s just barely avoiding off-season decline in strength and speed. He can’t call his husband half as much as he’d like and, oh, yeah, his husband tried to fucking starve himself and is the recent recipient of a shiny new mental health diagnosis that neither of them really understand. His summer has been great. How’s the lake house!?
And that’s why he’s avoiding the team, really, hiding out behind the grill like a wuss. He doesn’t want to be a dick to them, but the thought of answering even a single question about his life makes him want to commit arson.
The meat starts to smell good. The veggie burgers cook too fast, charring almost as soon as Ilya puts them on the grill, and he takes them off with some remorse, knowing they’ll be cold by the time everything else is ready.
From the outside, Ilya looks in, watching people have fun as though through plexiglass. He hates that he can’t stop thinking about what Shane would be doing here. Trying to avoid burger buns, probably. Or maybe that’s not fair. Maybe treatment is helping and maybe things are getting better. Maybe Shane would be looking for ice cream because sometimes you need to eat dessert first. Maybe if Shane were here, ice cream wouldn’t be terrifying anymore.
Ilya remembers cookies. Well, he can dream. And Shane’s not here, so it doesn’t matter anyway.
He’s pulling the first batch of hot dogs off the grill, stacking them delicately on a platter with metal tongs, when he spots Troy sauntering over to the table impressively balancing plates of toppings: onions, sauerkraut, bacon, and pickled jalapenos join the standards already laid out, butter lettuce and early-season tomatoes and sliced cheddar. There are three varieties of mustard.
“Smells good over here,” Troy says, smiling. “Grill Daddy.”
Ilya brandishes his tongs. “Make yourself useful.”
Troy ferries the platter over, which enables Ilya to start loading up the second platter with burger patties. Already, kids are swarming the table, their dads helping them build hot dogs.
“What do we say?” Dykstra is asking Susie, who yells, too loudly, “THANK YOU ROZY!”
“Tell your kid to call me Ilya!” Ilya says, exasperated. Dykstra blows him a kiss.
“Thank you, Rozy,” Troy says with a smirk when he picks up the burger platter. There’s still a lot of meat—Ilya will probably do another round later. But for now, he covers the grill, wipes sweat from his upper lip, and cracks another beer. It’s too fucking hot. “You okay, man? You’ve been hiding out over here.”
“I am starving to death,” Ilya says instead of answering Troy’s question. “Let’s get in line before these children get all the food.”
They take their very full plates to the big circle of lawn chairs where most of the team has gathered. From where they’re sitting, they can watch the kids (and Chiron) run through the sprinkler, ruining their clothes. It’s late afternoon now, and the sun is getting lower, even though it won’t set for hours. The light has a gentler quality to it. It’s still baking out. Ilya dabs sweat from his forehead with his napkin and gulps his beer.
He settles into a conversation-in-progress about the draft, the next season, people placing bets on the rookies even though training camps are still far-off and rosters haven’t been decided. He eats his burger. Juice drips messily down his chin and he thinks about Shane. He wants Shane to kiss it all away, or fuck it all away. Both, in that order. He put too many pickled jalapenos on his burger and he’ll pay for it later. Also, the bun is too soft. He should have grilled them.
Susie takes a tumble in the sprinkler and runs to Dykstra to be healed by a little kiss on her knee. Bood bounces Milo on his knee and drinks his beer with his one free hand. A lot of the WAGs are inside, sheltering in the air conditioning, letting their husbands make sure the kids don’t kill themselves while they drink Harris’s famous white wine sangria. Harris is adding Chappell Roan songs to the playlist. Ilya should be happy.
Ilya’s miserable.
“Can’t believe Hollander wouldn’t even leave rehab for Canada Day,” Bood says. “Not even for your grill skills!”
Ilya tries to joke. “Hollander can enjoy my meat any day of the week. This is only special occasion for you.”
People laugh and Ilya’s stomach feels hollow. He’s not hungry anymore.
“He doing okay?” asks Haas. Sweet kid—he looks genuinely concerned.
“Stop trying to distract people from the fact that you came here without a date again,” he says, and hates himself for it. He remembers how much Shane hated getting chirped for that kind of thing before he was out. Not that Haas is necessarily queer. Well, maybe he is. It could go either way. Ilya wouldn’t put money on it.
Haas puts his hands up. “I am busy! Working on my career!”
“Must be tough to find a date when you’re busy being a hot millionaire star athlete.” Troy is clearly not really commiserating. He’s trying to get a rise out of Haas, and it works, because the kid protests and turns beet red. Eventually he regains his sense and flicks a spoonful of potato salad at Troy. It lands square in his lap and Troy rolls his eyes.
“Well now I have to change!” And off he goes, leaving Ilya to the sharks.
This is his team. His guys. He trusts them more than almost anyone else. More than that, they’re Shane’s team. They’d be in his corner. Ilya tried to tell Shane that, but Shane couldn’t hear it. That’s fine. It’s Shane’s life. The decision to create more pointless secrets has nothing to do with Ilya at all.
Someone else is asking him about Shane now. Dillon wants to know if he’ll be okay for training camp, probably hoping at least a little to get promoted up to first line. Not gonna happen, Ilya wants to snap, but doesn’t, because he’s a great captain and a professional.
Hazy looks at him seriously. “And you’re good?” he asks.
Fuck, he means well, but he’s not exactly great at reading the room, or waiting for an appropriate moment to ask a question that very suddenly is going to make Ilya cry. Swallowing the lump in his throat, Ilya stands so abruptly that his lawn chair topples behind him.
He shakes his near-empty bottle. “More beer,” he says. “Don’t miss me too much.” His voice sounds thick and strained.
Why are there fucking people everywhere? Ilya’s shaking as he walks away, trying to look normal and chill and cool. He tosses his bottle in the recycling and goes inside under the pretense of looking for different, better beer. He’d prefer vodka, really, but Troy and Harris never have it (something about Harris having a traumatic experience with the stuff when he was eighteen).
Cassie and Caitlin and Lisa are gathered around the kitchen island with Harris, who is topping up glasses. “Ilya! Sangria, queen?” Harris is obviously a little tipsy. He only calls people queen when he’s a little tipsy, and his round cheeks are very flushed, like ripe apples. Ilya nods numbly.
“Da. Spasibo.” Harris is an icon who understands at least this much Russian and presses a cold wine glass into Ilya’s hand. He shouldn’t down it, but he does. It’s sweet, a dry tang right on the tail of the swallow. Ilya feels it all the way down.
Lisa says, “You should tell Shane that we missed him today!”
Ilya starts to actually cry. Or, his face is hot, and he can’t seem to open his mouth. He’s a dam holding something back that wants to explode out all at once. There’s wet on his cheeks and he sets his glass down on the table.
“Da, I will,” he says, trying to pretend he’s not crying. But Lisa and Caitlin and Cassie and Harris are all looking at him in a super concerned way.
“We should go sit down,” says Cassie. “I love my husband, but I love air conditioning and that sectional more.”
It is a comfortable sectional—huge and squishy and forest green, the sort that can be reconfigured at will to fit the room. Ilya lets himself be guided to it with the WAGs.
“Are we hanging out in here now? Thank fuck,” says Troy, emerging from an upper floor in a pair of gym shorts and a crop top that says “doing butt stuff” and has a cartoon image of a skeleton doing squats on it.
“What, are those your training clothes, Barrett? Fuck, thought we were worth better than that.” Ilya’s heart isn’t in the chirp, though. It just sounds pathetic.
He sees Harris and Troy make eye contact, and Troy grabs the sangria pitcher and a spare glass from the counter before making his way over to the group on the couch. He perches beside Harris, crosses his legs, and takes a long sip before leaning forward. “C’mon, Roz, what’s going on?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“What? Why not?” Harris asks. He looks genuinely surprised. Ilya wonders how his life is so uncomplicated that secrets are shocking.
“Girl, we can do cone of silence,” says Cait. She sips her drink. “I’m not just going to go automatically blab to Evan.”
Lisa laughs. “You could fill a book with gossip Wyatt doesn’t know.”
“That’s sad,” says Cassie. “He loves gossip.”
“Sometimes you have to make necessary sacrifices,” Lisa says. “Like now.” She mimes zipping her lips.
“Buddy, we love you, but you have been acting so weird.” Harris looks at him sympathetically.
“Even more weird than usual,” Troy says helpfully.
“It’s really not mine to say.” Ilya looks sadly into his empty glass, which Troy takes the hint to refill. Looks like Ilya’s crashing here tonight. Yippee. And he’s still in his apron, crying in tacky gay Pride merch on Canada Day. What is his life?
Cassie looks like she’s thinking. “Maybe it’s not yours to tell, but your experience is. If you’re sad, you can talk about that.”
“Obviously I am sad.” It sounds rude, but he didn’t mean it like that. “I am crying like an idiot.”
Cassie rolls her eyes. “Can this be a toxic-masculinity-free zone for like ten minutes, please? You are crying, period. Not like anything.”
“Right,” Ilya says, chastened, “sorry.”
She rubs his shoulder. “You’re fine. What’s going on?”
“I am worried about Shane,” Ilya says carefully. Yes, that’s neutral. It contains no forbidden information. “And I miss him.”
A chorus of awwwwws from the group tells him that they all feel very sorry for him. That kind of makes him feel worse.
“Can’t get out there to visit? I wouldn’t have thought they’d be assholes about that,” says Lisa. Ilya knows that she’s thinking about Hazy’s past injuries and stints in physical therapy and rehab. That’s the snag that the lie catches on, and now he has to redirect.
“I don’t know if I can take care of him when he comes home. I am worrying about everything… logistics.” Ilya’s hands are shaking. He can’t do this. “Fuck. Sorry. I cannot talk about it.”
Lisa’s a bit of a pusher, though, and she pushes. She sounds like Galina when she says, “You deserve support, too. He’s getting his, and you need yours.”
“It’s not like he even wants the support he is getting,” Ilya snaps. “He was so fucking mad at me for making him get it. And now everything is fucked up!”
Suddenly the room feels very quiet and still. He knows he’s said something that doesn’t fit with their agreed-upon narrative, and he’s fucked Shane over and betrayed him and if his husband didn’t resent him enough already then he definitely will now. Ilya feels nauseous. He shouldn’t have drank so much. He wants to smoke, to settle his stomach. Lisa’s squinting at him. She’s got her doctor face on.
But it’s Harris who says, “Ilya, are you okay? Like, really.”
Ilya shakes his head. “No. Not really.” He sighs. It’s too late to lie anyway. He can’t ask permission so he’d better get ready to ask for forgiveness. “Shane’s not doing physio. He is at mental health inpatient clinic. In Guelph.”
Harris laughs. Strangely, it makes Ilya feel better. “Sorry!” he says right away, looking horrified. “It’s not funny. It’s just, Guelph.”
Ilya smiles drily. “I know. Fucking Guelph.”
Then he glances around at the WAGs and Troy, panicked. “You cannot tell anyone. Not Dykstra —” he points at Caitlin— “or Hazy—” at Lisa— “especially not Bood.” He points at Cassie last. “He will literally kill me.”
“Does cone of silence mean nothing to you?” Cait asks in mock horror.
Still shaking, Ilya somehow believes her. He runs a hand through his messy hair, still damp with sweat that’s gone cold now in the climate control. “He is doing treatment for… eating problems.” Why he feels squeamish about saying the thing outright, he doesn’t know. He’s already fucked up enough, after all.
The women are all quiet for a second. Troy looks baffled, a little. Harris nods solemnly. Then he says, “Who all knows that?”
Ilya thinks. “Well, five of you. Coach Wiebe. Team people, Marina, doctors… Hayden Pike.” He makes a face when he says that just so everyone will know that he doesn’t approve. “Rose Landry. And his parents and me. Technically also my therapist but she is legally bound to secrecy.”
“You can legally bind me to secrecy,” says Cassie. “I’ve signed like a hundred NDAs at this point.”
Ilya can watch Lisa trying to turn off her doctor brain. She doesn’t quite succeed. “When people have eating disorders, it’s really important that their families be supported,” she says, and Ilya feels warm hearing her call him Shane’s family. He knows he is—they live together, they work together, they file their stupid taxes together—but it still feels good to hear.
“He didn’t want people to know,” Ilya says quietly. “It is… stigma, with men, I think.”
Harris opens his mouth. He closes it. Then he opens it again and says, “A lot of gay guys have body stuff.” The way he says it makes Ilya think maybe he isn’t speaking about hypotheticals.
Ilya can’t explain the ins and outs of the thing in front of everyone. He nods. “Yes. I have been reading about it.”
“We’re here for you,” Troy says. “And Hollander, duh. But you too. Gotta be a huge bummer, living alone all off-season.”
Ilya nods. “Huge bummer.”
Then it’s almost normal, except, well, they know. And he’s still a little teary, but the rest of his sangria goes down easier. No one asks any more questions even though Ilya can tell that they want to. He’s a little drunk, but it feels warm, fuzzy, soft. He misses Shane, but he’s not lonely. How could he be?
Maybe they’ll fight later, when he admits what he said—who he told. For now, Ilya’s just happy to feel like someone else is helping him carry this.
“HEY, ROZY!” Hazy yells from outside. “THE KIDS ARE HUNGRY!”
Troy smirks at him. “Sounds like you gotta put that ass to work, Roz.”
“Not my fault I am in high demand. The people cannot get enough of me.”
When he gets up, he sways a bit, and Troy says, “Don’t burn down our house, please!”
Ilya scoffs. “Insurance money can probably buy you a place that is actually nice.”
“Wow, you wound me,” says Harris, who spent a long time decorating the place when they bought it. “No clean towels for you tonight.”
As he’s walking outside, Ilya realizes that he never actually asked to stay over, and feels warm.
The sun is shining. The team is happy, Dillon singing along to Dancing On My Own by Robyn, off-key, so Ilya guesses that Harris has total command of the speaker now. Kids are laughing. In the spray of the sprinkler, he sees light refracted into a rainbow.
It’s a pretty good day. Ilya straightens his apron and cracks open the grill again as the sun creeps closer to the horizon.