Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Anna couldn’t look away as Raits stroked his large cock. It was red and hard in his hand and she couldn’t help imagining what it would feel like inside of her, it was so big .

She was boiling with embarrassment but also with desire; her panties were soaked and her skin was so hot she felt delirious with fever.

“Not here,” she choked out.

Joan Dutch, The Puck Stops Here

.

“What is this?” Ilya asked, looking at the book in Marly’s hand doubtfully. He had never seen Marly with a book before. In fact, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Marly was illiterate if not for his incessant tweeting.

“It’s a book, bro,” Cliff said with a wide grin that showed off all his gleaming white fake teeth.

Ilya raised his eyebrows.

“Oh,” Consy said, coming over. “Is that the new Dutch? I heard it was super hot.”

“It’s a beauty,” Marly said. “On fire. The girl is such a fucking rocket.”

Ilya looked between them, entirely befuddled. “You read this?” he asked.

“I haven’t read this one,” Consy said. “But I’ve read her other books. You haven’t? Oh, I forgot, you’re not part of the book group.”

There was a book group? Ilya looked around, suspicious. This must be some sort of prank.

“We invited you,” Consy continued, “but I think you were distracted?”

“He was texting that Montreal girl,” Marly supplied.

“Oh,” Consy said, knowingly.

Ilya tried glaring at them but his glares had stopped working on them years ago.

“You get together and talk about book?” Ilya asked, certain now that this was a prank.

“It’s like a really fucking good book,” Marly said.

“Yeah,” Consy agreed. “The author really knows her hockey. I’ve heard speculation that she’s, like, a hockey writer or something.”

Ilya looked skeptically at the cover, which depicted a very large man who, yes, could conceivably be a hockey player, kissing a much smaller woman.

“This is book about hockey?” he asked.

“No,” Consy said. “It’s about a hockey player who falls in love with… what’s this one?”

Marly looked at the back of the book. “A chick who’s also a hockey player.”

Consy nodded his head. “The last one I read, The Puck Stops Here, was about a goalie who hooked up with the equipment manager.”

“Who was girl?” Ilya asked.

“Of course,” Consy said, like who else would a hockey player hook up with, and Ilya had to resist the impulse to roll his eyes. “It was really good except there were times when the author got way too into describing the advantages and disadvantages of different pieces of equipment. Like there was a whole tirade about CCM’s new glove design.”

Ilya found himself intrigued despite himself. “New glove design is problem,” he said. “Too stiff fingers.”

“Hey,” Church called, jogging over to them. “What is the hold-up? I am so hungry.”

“Waiting for you, bro,” Marly said and they headed out into the New York evening.

“You read the new Dutch book?” Church asked, peering over Marly’s shoulder. “Where did you find it?”

“I got my connections,” Marly said, with a wink.

“Dude, I’ve told you a hundred times, you’ve just got to pre-order it,” Consy said. “That’s not a hook-up, that’s just, like, how people normally get books.”

“I will ask my agent,” Church said.

“Oh my god,” Consy exclaimed. “Don’t ask your agent. Bro, your agency charges you like three hundred an hour. Just fucking go on Amazon.”

“You shouldn’t use Amazon,” Marly said. “I heard they, like, don’t pay their workers or something.”

“Are you still hooking up with that hippie chick?” Consy asked.

“Dude,” Marly said, “vegans are fucking hot. And they tell you things about, like, why grass is bad.”

“Grass is bad?” Ilya asked, hopefully. Maybe he could find an excuse to never go golfing again.

“Look, man, I don’t know,” Marly told him. “She starts going on about like pollinators and shit. She’s wicked smart.”

“What is the pollinators?” Church asked.

“Bees or something, right?” Consy said.

“Yeah, I think,” Marly agreed.

“What does grass have to do with bees though?” Consy asked.

“I don’t know,” Marly said again.

“So Amazon is bad for bees?” Church pressed.

Marly frowned. “No, like, I think they’re two different things. Like Amazon has these great deals on shipping because their workers have to piss in bottles or something?”

“What?” Ilya asked.

“Do they sell the piss?” Church asked. “What does that have to do with shipping?”

“I don’t know!” Marly said again. “She just tells me things!”

“Okay,” Consy said. “If you can’t get it on Amazon I guess you could go to like…” he frowned in thought.

“A bookstore?” Ilya suggested.

They all looked at him in surprise.

“Oh yeah,” Consy said. “There are like whole stores for books. Huh.”

“Here’s the place,” Marly said, as he reached the door of the restaurant and they followed him in, crowding in the small entryway until the host found their reservation and led them to the table.

.

Aimee loved her mother, but sometimes she needed some space. “I’m going to find the washroom,” she told her and disappeared into the maze of corridors that formed the interior of the practice arena. Luckily, her sense of direction held true and in a few minutes she was slipping out a door marked ‘Emergency Exit Only’. Someone had propped it open with a brick.

The cold air hit her like a blow, but she didn’t mind. She took a deep breath and wrapped her coat a little tighter around herself, wishing she’d brought her beanie with her. A clicking sound made her turn and she almost gasped out loud at the sight.

A boy— a man really— about Aimee’s age was leaning against the wall, right next to a ‘no smoking’ sign, trying to light a cigarette. But it wasn’t the flagrant attempted violation of the rules that made her heart quicken; it was his halo of bright curls, his strong jaw, the wideness of his shoulders.

Suddenly, Aimee realized she knew that handsome face; It was Igor Sharov, Captain of the Russian Men’s World Juniors team and the number one heartthrob in Aimee’s locker room.

She must have made a sound, because Sharov looked over at her and raised his eyebrows.

“Hi,” she said, hoping her blush wasn’t too visible. “I’m Aimee Montclair. I’m on the Canadian Woman’s World Juniors team. You’re Igor Sharov, right? I was watching you play— your playing is beautiful.”

She remembered, suddenly, that men didn’t like that kind of thing. “I mean, it’s really good. You’re, uh, a really good player.”

Her face was burning despite the cold. Sharov looked her over, skimming his eyes from where her brown hair was piled messily on top of her head down to her dirty sneakers and back up. He smirked. “I know,” he said.

Joan Dutch, Pucky Go Lucky

.

Ilya dropped the book onto his lap and looked around. This had to be a joke, right? There was no way… but none of his teammates were looking at him, waiting to shout that he’d been pranked. The book Marly had loaned him was an ordinary looking paper-back, a jacked half-naked blonde man holding an extremely thin brown-haired woman dressed in a pink negligee— clearly not reflecting the contents of the book, not if she was supposed to be a hockey player. It had all the normal things books had; information about publication and the blurbs on the back about how good it was, even a preview of the author’s next book ‘The Puck Stops Here’ in the back.

The edges were worn, like Marly had carried it around for a long time. Surely this was way too much effort to go to for a prank.

And on top of all that, Ilya realized, was that no one knew about the first time he’d met Hollander except Hollander. There was only one person who could have… He looked at the name on the cover again. Joan Dutch… Dutch… That was a person from…

“Fuck!” Ilya exclaimed. Across the aisle, Portland started and looked over at him.

“Paper cut,” Ilya explained. He turned to the back of the book.

Joan is an avid hockey fan who lives in Montreal. She spends her summers hiking, kayaking, and spending time in the sun and is a lifelong Voyageurs fan.

It couldn’t be, could it? Ilya flipped ahead.

Aimee looked up at Sharov as he pinned her against the hotel room wall. “I’ve never done this before,” she admitted in a small voice. “Go easy on me?”

Sharov ducked his head to kiss her neck lightly. “Of course,” he said, with surprising tenderness. It was a sharp contrast to the hardness of his cock, which was digging into her hip. Just the feeling of it pressing against her made her mouth water. What would it feel like in her mouth, on her tongue? Would Sharov think she was a slut if she wanted to find out?

He flipped ahead further.

Sharov teased her entrance with his fingers and Aimee was torn between begging him to push them deeper and nerves. “You play with you here?” he asked. “Or are you too virgin?”

“Fuck off,” she hissed. “I’ve got a… a thing?”

“A thing?” he repeated, his fingers tracing up and down from her clit to her hole. It was all she could do not to gasp and rut against him.

“A dildo,” Aimee spit out.

Sharov’s fingers stopped moving and Aimee had to grit her teeth not to rock back on them. “What color?” he asked. “How big is it?”

“Shut the fuck up,” she said and he laughed.

Ilya flipped all the way to the back.

Igor dropped the last box onto the stack and wipe his face with the back of his hand. “All finished?” he asked. “Why you have so much stuff? Books so heavy!”

“That’s the last one,” she agreed, putting her box down as well. She looked around with satisfaction, already thinking about how she was going to decorate. How they were going to decorate. How they were going to merge their lives together, from now on.

“Good,” Igor said and caught her around the waist from behind. He kissed her neck. “Now we need to break in bed, yes?”

Aimee laughed and spun around, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him back. “We need to christen every room of the house,” she told him.

“Got to start, then.”

“We’ve got all the time in the world.”

Ilya was still staring, mind blank, at the book when the plane came to a stop and everyone starting bustling around, grabbing their bags and coats.

“You finish already, bud?” Marly asked and Ilya looked down to see the book still open to the last page in his lap. “Good read, huh? I think I actually learned something about offensive plays from it.”

“About time,” Ilya chirped, automatically.

Marly reached to take the book from him and Ilya snatched it up and wrapped an arm around it.

“Not finished,” he said as Marly’s eyebrow shot up. “Just looking to see ending.”

“Okay, okay,” Marly said, holding up his hands. “Give it back whenever.” He shrugged on his coat and shouldered his bag. “You gonna hang out in the plane all night?”

Ilya realized that almost all of the other players had filtered off the plane and he stood, pulling his jacket and bag from the overhead. “Just do not want traffic,” he lied.

“Okay,” Marly said, clearly not buying it. He led the way off the plane, into the cold winter air. The private terminal of Logan was quiet this time of night, a few staff speaking quietly to each other in one corner. They passed through the terminal and into the parking garage, to where their SUVs were parked side by side. “See you at practice later, bro,” Marly said, climbing into his.

“Yeah,” Ilya agreed, unlocking his car and climbing in. He realized he was still holding the book and dropped it on the passenger seat, then took a deep breath and started the vehicle.

The one good thing about getting back in the middle of the night was that there was no Boston traffic. Ilya made it to his house without incident, dumped his bag beside the front door, grabbed a Gatorade and flopped down on his couch. He looked down at the book again, then grabbed his laptop from his coffee table.

Joan Dutch, he searched. The first few results were from booksellers, then a Facebook page. He clicked on it, but it was clearly run by the author’s publicist. There was a website too, but it only contained information about the books.

Ilya cracked his neck and browsed the next few pages. Book reviews, some more social media that gave no impression of the actual author. It was clear that ‘Joan Dutch’ was a pen name, but apparently that was common for romance authors.

Finally, on the fourth page of results:

Ilya was just about to close the window with the title of another post caught his eye.

Ilya looked up ’self-insert’ and then felt his face flush. Hollander was… did that mean Hollander wanted to be a women?

No, Ilya decided immediately. He flipped to the end of the book. There was a passage... yes:

Aimee was intimidated by the WAGs at first. She felt so massive beside them, with her hockey mass and height. They weren’t all identical but most of them had the kind of polished look you only get when you’re dedicated to you looks, go to a beauty parlor every week, and spend thousands of dollars and an hour a day on your makeup.

Igor didn’t want a woman like that, she reminded herself, as she found her seat. A pretty brunette smiled at her, introduced herself as ‘Macy, Nile Richards’ girlfriend,’ and gave her a cocktail. Igor had chosen her, had invited her to move in with him, had introduced her to his friends and teammates. Igor had chosen Aimee out of all the woman who had (and still did) throw themselves at him. So it didn’t matter that she didn’t dye her hair platinum blonde or restrict herself to only three calories a day or wear shoes that made Aimee’s feet ache just to look at them. All that mattered was her and Igor. And Igor was skating out onto the ice to the roaring cheers of the Manchester crowd.

No, Hollander didn’t want to be a woman. Ilya’s stomach tightened and he resisted the urge to— something. Scream or topple over the coffee table or call Hollander and say… what? Accuse him of writing his book or sympathize with how he felt or confess the amount of time Ilya spent thinking about him?

Tell him he felt the same way?

Ilya swore and leaned his head on the backrest of the couch, staring up at the ceiling. It’s not like it changed anything. No matter how Hollander felt— no matter how Ilya felt— it’s not like they could be together. Even the little they did, the few times a year they saw each other, the occasional text was a risk Ilya shouldn’t have indulged in, not if he wanted to ever go back to Russia.

So maybe Hollander wanted something more. (Maybe Ilya did). It wasn’t like they could have it.

Ilya put the book and laptop on the coffee table and stretched out on his sofa. It was after 4 in the morning— he should go to bed. His bed was so big and empty. He fell asleep on the couch.