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Svetlana blinked at her phone. Ilya hadn’t returned her last text, sent literally a month before. He had not come to Russia over the summer. He hadn’t been confiding in her at all, and while they’d always had periods where they’d drifted out of touch, this one had been different.
She’d found out about his serious injury from a news alert. She’d sent him a quick text that hadn’t been read for two days, and then he’d read it and not responded for another two, until she’d called him. He hadn’t picked up. She hadn’t left a voicemail because she knew better.
He’d written back to that one, but nothing of substance. She was in Russia, she’d gone to Russia in late August and stayed for months this time, the whole beginning of the MLH season, because there was business she had to do. Complicated old real estate deals her father had embroiled himself in and then lost interest, and it was down to her to untangle them.
It was always Svetlana’s job to fix everyone’s fucking problems. Her mother had given up and left, and then had gone and fucking died, and that was her problem too. Her father was her problem now. Her father’s politics, her father’s everything. He used to have some sense of perspective, some distance, even after he’d been drawn into being part of this government, but of late she couldn’t even talk to him about anything. Except hockey. It was the only safe thing. But even that, now, suffered from that horrible pull toward… the inevitable, the black sucking vortex of the toxic power structure he was enmeshed in, where everyone said anything that would please the most powerful, and even the truth had to bend to suit the desires of the center of the vortex. He couldn’t engage with her about the MLH anymore, everything had to be about how Russian hockey was better, because that was what the vortex desired, and truth had to be made to serve, and nothing existed outside of the vortex. And now this trip… his finances were politically entangled, and Svetlana knew that could be disastrous. She was untangling what she could, liquidating what she could. She had seen the way the wind was blowing and she needed her assets liquid, and needed her father not to be so blind to what was happening. But she could not say anything; there was no truth, anymore. There was only what pleased the vortex, or obliteration. And so she had to do what had to be done, without ever saying or doing or even implying anything that failed to please anyone who mattered.
These last few months had been soul-draining and exhausting and she was tired, and she missed her friend. Ilya had been almost unresponsive the whole time.
Possibly that was for the best, as her father at this point could barely tolerate a mention of Ilya’s name without immediately starting to rant about how Ilya had abandoned Russian hockey. But that didn’t mean Ilya couldn’t return her fucking texts. And as far as she knew, Ilya had no real idea he was persona non grata here, nor should he need to.
No, he was just distracted, and fucking-- he was in love, which she hadn’t thought was possible. It didn’t make him a traitor or anything, not in her book anyway, but it was inconvenient timing. And she wasn’t sure he knew how to handle it, which meant this was likely to become yet another fucking problem she was going to be called upon to fix.
She knew who Jane was-- she’d been knew, as the Americans so charmingly put it, and Ilya hadn’t really even needed to admit it. He was in love with Shane Hollander, of course he fucking was and she couldn’t exactly blame him, and he and Shane had worked something out over the summer, she knew that, and it was the kind of thing she’d just sort of always expected he’d keep her abreast of. She’d confided in him, the last time she’d thought something was getting serious. And that had worked out, because he’d been there when she’d realized it wasn’t. It had still been her problem to fix, but at least she hadn’t been lonely about it.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought he could really find happiness with a nice Canadian boy, but, well. He’d have to do a lot of work on himself first, and she’d just sort of expected she’d have to help with that. They’d spent their adolescent years fucking one another up, after all, in collaboration with the myriad forces fucking them up, and she’d needed him to help un-fuck some of that, so it stood to reason he’d need her help un-fucking himself in return. She’d been worried and mildly suspicious when he hadn’t asked for that.
And she was wearily certain that if he never came to her about the un-fucking, she’d be totally unprepared for what he’d have to come to her for help with instead: putting himself back together after this all went to shit. There was no way he wasn’t going to fuck this up. He hadn’t done the work first. Maybe it would be salvageable but there was definitely no way he was going to manage it on his own. She loved him, she did, but he was fucked-up, more fucked-up than even she was. It was all going to go wrong at some point, possibly catastrophically, and she couldn’t help resenting that he was freezing her out for the good part, because she knew she was going to have to be there for the bad part. Because that was always her job, it was always her problem: she had to fix things after other people broke them, it was what she did.
But even if he pried himself free of Hollander and somehow still had enough of himself intact to survive it, he was never going to be able to fit himself back into the mold of a proper Russian hockey star. He never really had fit into it in the first place; he had only ever managed it because nobody had been looking that hard for him not to. But he wasn’t. He was far too flamboyant for the KHL, and skated far over the line of what would be tolerable for the MLH but for the bright shining undeniable star of his sheer fucking talent. He was too brilliant, a shooting star. He would have already wrecked himself in Russia, she knew it; his family would have sucked him dry and he’d have burned out trying to survive. The distance had been crucial, and secondly, the dislocation. The flamboyance could be passed off, in North America, as just being too European. Xenophobia blinded people to it, but he was-- he was so queer, so obviously queer. It would have been messy death here, but in North America he could plausibly deny it, at least a little, and then once he was free of hockey, nobody would care. But he had to get himself some kind of permanent resident status or something, because he could not come back to Russia then.
She had no idea what his plan was now, now that he was so disastrously entwined with the least suitable person possible. But she also knew he couldn’t be other than what he was, and that was that.
She’d started making arrangements to come back to Boston to help care for him when he was injured, and had been astonished when she’d told him this (she’d called to let him know it would take her a little time to wind up her affairs here) and he’d flatly refused her. He knew what she was doing in Moscow, he knew it was complicated and important, but she was damn sure he knew he was more important than that. This all could wait. He was a horrible patient and nobody else would be able to put up with him.
But he’d refused, and told her he would change the locks on his apartment and not let her in if she came, and she thought about calling his bluff. But. She… didn’t know how he was, now. And that stung a little. She didn’t know if he really would do it.
She’d never really wondered before. He could always do unexpected things, but had never really surprised her before. She’d always known about how far the limits of his self-destructiveness, his impulsivity, would go.
But she didn’t know, right now. He had outgrown her knowledge of him. (And, she suspected, she’d outgrown his knowledge of her. He only barely understood what she was here doing. He had no idea what the stakes were like, now.)
She knew enough to understand that he didn’t want her to ignore his wishes in this. Some friends would be hurt if she listened to their words and did as they asked rather than what they truly wanted, but not Ilya. So she’d settled for bare check-ins, and even those had tapered off as he recovered from surgery. The last text he’d sent her had been a photo showing that he could stand on his own without crutches, and when she’d followed up with a snarky observation about his fashion sense, he simply hadn’t responded.
And now he was coming to Russia. For, she calculated, precisely the amount of time he’d need to for a visa renewal.
His visa was good for up to five years, and she was pretty sure he still had a few more months to do it. She couldn’t think why he was cramming it in now. Unless he’d heard something she hadn’t, or had a plan she didn’t know about. He was a free agent at the end of the season, but he hadn’t said anything to her, and the obvious career move was to dangle the prospect of leaving in front of the Raiders just long enough to get them to up their bid on him.
She considered that a moment, then sent back:
She went herself to get him from the airport instead of just booking him a car. He had a single crutch, and wasn’t really using it for walking but was leaning on it heavily. He had no checked luggage, just a shoulder bag. And he looked awful, tired and hard-edged.
She kissed him, just a friendly buss on the mouth, and was startled when he opened his mouth, just a little, just a sweet kitten-lick across her lips. It was too fast for her to respond, and he’d already pulled away as her eyes flew open to look at him.
He pressed his shoulder to her cheek like he needed to be held, so she did. “Ilyushka,” she whispered. “I worried.”
“I am sorry,” he murmured. “I’m not a good friend to you lately.”
She took his bag from him, and he didn’t have the agility to resist. He followed along, holding her hand, using the crutch with his other one, foot off the ground. He wasn’t in bad shape, wasn’t too thin-- he’d been eating all right, then, and whoever was overseeing his recovery had been taking the opportunity to get him bulked up a bit. He looked good, he just looked so tired.
“I will not complain,” she said. “But I am worried.” They navigated the exit, and she led him to the car she’d called. Once they were settled, she asked, “Do you want to see anyone while you’re in town?”
“No,” he said. “I am here only for visa renewal. I don’t even want anyone in my family to know I’m here.”
“What about friends?” she asked. “What about maybe brushing up on some important contacts?”
He looked over at her, then. He hadn’t really been making eye contact up to now, which was reasonable given what they’d been doing, but now it hit her with some force how different his face looked. He was tired, but he was resolved about something. And he was-- older. She hadn’t seen him in long enough that he was visibly older, his bones sharper, his face leaner but his jaw heavier. “Sveta,” he said quietly. “I don’t really care about anyone here but you.”
It hurt, weirdly. She had to take a breath. “Ilyushka,” she said. But there wasn’t really anything else to say.
He wasn’t wrong. Trying now to suck up to the ones who cared, here, would be too little too late. She knew already that many of the other Russians in the MLH said among themselves (and sometimes where she could hear) that Ilya Grigoryevich thought too much of himself now, thought himself too American, was too happy to put Pride tape on his stick for warm-ups and be in photo ops and pretend gay bullshit with the orange mascot for attention. The old hurt of him humiliating his country in the Olympics only to return home and win the championship Cup, unfair as it was, dogged him in every one of these conversations.
She hadn’t been sure how much he knew it. But she thought, looking at him now, that he did know. That this was really his last visit. She knew now, without him saying: he was doing this early so that he’d never have to come back. He was making another plan. Ad he hadn’t told her what it was.
“We can be hermits,” she said finally. “I have no other real plans for this week.” She was going to tie off all her loose ends this week, she resolved, and leave, either with or without him.
She put him in her guestroom. She’d already gone shopping, and had a bag full of all the various things he always stocked up on while here, already set on top of the dresser in that room. His favorite candies, proper tea, a pack of the one brand of socks they didn’t import to the US that he particularly liked. She had a bathrobe in there that was his, a pair of slides that were his, some socks and underwear and a t-shirt that was his. It was ludicrous that he’d planned to stay in a hotel.
He used her shower, and came out to her living room in shorts, no crutch, tank top, unzipped hoodie, bare feet in the slides he had of course immediately found next to the dresser. She looked, of course, at his bare knee, looked at the thin red lines of the surgical incisions. They were good, skillful, unobtrusive, undeniable. He was undeniably limping, still. The injured leg was visibly less muscular than the other one.
“Don’t ask when I’ll come back to skating,” he said, looking even more tired.
“I wasn’t going to,” she said.
He sighed, settling down. “You don’t need to,” he admitted. “You can tell by looking.”
“Two weeks,” she said, “and it will be too soon but you will do it anyway.”
He smiled, but did not look at her. “Well,” he said. “How are you?”
“You don’t want to hear the saga,” she groaned. “In fact I don’t want to tell you the saga. I will ask your advice later, when you have slept, I know you know how to look at contracts as well as I do. But I don’t want to talk business with you now. And I have nothing else going on here but business, except for politics, which is infinitely worse.”
“That sounds miserable,” he said. She pointed to the drink she’d already put on the side table for him. “I am sorry I haven’t been around to distract you at all.”
“You could reply to my texts,” she said forlornly.
“I am sorry,” he said again. “I have been a terrible friend.”
“Make it up to me,” she said, “by telling me what the fuck is going on with you.”
And was that it? He’d refused her coming to help him because he felt like he didn’t deserve it? Idiot. What was the use of that?
It wasn’t that easy, it took a bit more coaxing. She had dinner delivered, things she knew he couldn’t get in Boston, and the pleasure of the food cracked his shell a little. She’d feared he was going into one of his dark phases, which was usually what happened if he was injured enough to miss even a week of hockey. But he wasn’t. There was light there, glimmering through; he was just tired.
But eventually she pried him open.
“I told you I was going to see Shane,” he said, speaking of what he’d done over the summer. “So, yes, I did. I spent two weeks at his stupid crazy mansion cottage.”
“And it was good,” she said.
He nodded, which she knew was possibly the understatement of the century, because something behind his reserved expression was glowing in a way she’d actually never seen before.
She threw her spoon at him. “Oh my God,” she said.
He caught it, and returned it to her, with a tiny smile. “I didn’t say anything,” he said.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “Jesus. So it was good.”
“It was good,” he said.
“You can’t tell me it was just sex,” she said.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
“Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god. So?”
“So?” he said, and shrugged.
“So what now?” she asked. “Are you going to keep pretending you hate each other?”
“No,” he said. “Well. Sort of.”
“You idiot,” she said, “you can’t do that.”
“No,” he said, “I know. I know we can’t. We have--” He sighed. “We do have a plan. It’s just. A slow plan.”
“Tell me the plan,” she said.
He dropped his gaze, looked away. “You’ll hate it,” he said.
She knew, then, and it was cold and certain. “Oh fuck,” she said, despairing, “you’re leaving Boston.”
“Yes,” he said, stung. “I have to.”
There were a handful of teams who could really use Ilya’s talents. Svetlana ran through them in her mind. Most of them didn’t deserve him. “Easiest if you could be on a team with him,” she said, “but I cannot think of a single team that could afford you both that could actually use you both.” She sighed. “You’re wasted as a winger, but both of you are too good for a second line.”
“He can play wing,” Ilya said mildly, but she could tell from how mild it was that he was trying to provoke her.
“A massive, criminal waste of his abilities,” she said, “but you know that as well as I do. No, you’d have to center the first two lines.” Ilya was a good playmaker, but Hollander was so consummately a playmaker that it made no sense to put him on the wing. Ilya had a yes-and ability, paired with his almost-supernatural ability to read people, that made him adaptable like that. Hollander… did not. He could only really execute his own plays. But his plays were so good that this wasn’t really a detraction. Ilya was sometimes very reactive, which meant he responded better to reversals than Hollander, but also meant occasionally in times of stress when under-coached he failed to come up with a strategy in the first place and had to wait for something to happen so he could react to it. “That would be… a deep bench,” she said. A really savvy coach would switch up which was first and which was second from game to game, keep opponents from ever knowing who to put out, from ever being able to breathe. Fuck, that would be incredible. “An expensive one.”
“No, I know,” Ilya said. “We really can’t play on the same team.” He sighed again. “I want a Canadian passport. So I need a Canadian team to sponsor me.”
Sveta sucked her teeth. Most of the teams on her mental list for Ilya were American teams, which made sense just from sheer numbers. But, more importantly, this was confirmation of what she’d already guessed. He was, more or less, defecting. The Russians in the groupchat were right. He was done with Russia. He was too… it wasn’t arrogance, it was that he knew as well as anyone that he was not what pleased the vortex, here. She’d always known it. He’d always known it. And you had to please the vortex, or cease to exist.
He wasn’t safe here even now. He could never really come back. He’d always been too bright, too different, too flamboyant, too fucking queer. He couldn’t really fit in in the MLH either; they liked their hockey players not so bright, not so sharp, and definitely not so queer, but he might survive long enough to retire and then no one would care.
It was really his only chance for survival. He needed a Canadian passport. Sveta couldn’t even really be mad at him. And they’d always had a half-discussed last-ditch emergency plan of her marrying him for a US green card, but given the way things were going, American citizenship wasn’t nearly as tempting as it had been before.
“Winnipeg,” she said, “could just barely fit you under the salary cap, needs a star center, doesn’t really deserve you.” Winnipeg had only relocated a few years prior, and had not adjusted all that well. It was hard going, unglamorous, unrewarding, but they did have a good goalie and a pretty solid defensive line. There was potential there.
He shook his head. “I don’t want to be that far,” he said. Fair; Winnipeg was the middle of fucking nowhere.
“There’s nowhere close,” she said. “What, he won’t move for you? What if you went to Edmonton and he went to Calgary?”
“The Western Conference doesn’t deserve us,” Ilya said, amused. “Also, no, Calgary couldn’t afford either of us, and Edmonton wouldn’t want to.” Edmonton did have a pretty solid offense, that was a fair point.
“It’s not like you-- what, Ottawa? You’d go to Ottawa? Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
He didn’t say anything and she instantly knew. “No,” she said, genuinely horrified. “Ilya! No! Don’t go to fucking Ottawa!”
“It’s right there,” he said. Then, worse, “His parents live there.”
“Let him to go to Ottawa then!” she said. “Oh my God! Let him go, take the hometown discount, take it upon himself-- let him revitalize the franchise, let him do it. You can’t do that, Ilya. It would be pointless, it would be career suicide, it would be so inexplicable-- everyone will be digging through your whole life trying to figure out why you would do this. You will be so investigated you will never have a moment’s peace. And Boston will have riots, Ilya, you can’t do this to me, my house will get burned down!”
“He’s not a free agent,” Ilya said. “And he loves Montreal.”
“He will be a free agent soon enough!” Svetlana said. “He will be! End of next year! Fuck Montreal, they don’t deserve him, anywhere they have ever gone he has carried them on his back like a fucking donkey! Let him do it, he’s got the hometown angle-- you take a bridge contract, give Boston two or three more years, they’ll give you so much money and they’ll be so good to you, and you’ll win the Cup next year, if you heal well. You love Boston! Why should you have to give up Boston? You love it and they love you!”
“After this season?” He tapped his knee. “I haven’t done shit for them all season.”
“You won them a championship,” Sveta said. “And you’ll do it again!”
“In 2015!” he said. “No one cares now about 2015.”
“Uh,” she said, “a lot of people do, don’t worry. My father does, for one.”
Ilya rolled his eyes. “He was happy enough to refuse to help me with this visa,” he said.
She frowned at him. “You asked?”
“I didn’t ask for much,” Ilya said. “I just asked if he could help make sure it was expedited on our end. He said, more or less, no. He still can’t forgive me for not coming back to play more KHL hockey like my dad wanted.”
He knew, then. She dragged her hands down her face, but she couldn’t deny this.
Ilya shook his head. “No one cares about 2015,” he said. “This is my chance to make a clean break with Boston. If I let them entice me to stay a little longer then it’ll be that much harder to ever leave.”
“Do you want to?” she asked. She knew Ilya liked Boston. She liked Boston. They liked Boston together and Boston generally liked them.
“Yes,” he said, not looking at her.
“You don’t,” she said. “You want to have a new life with your boyfriend. You don’t want to leave Boston. Those are two different things.”
“I have to leave Boston to have a life with my boyfriend,” he said. “It’s a simple and complete sentence.”
“But you can’t go to Ottawa,” she moaned. “This is stupid and it makes no sense. It is so contrary to everything you have ever done. There will be riots, Ilya!”
“Well,” he said. “It’s not like Shane could leave Montreal. It would be even more out of character for him.”
“But he has family in Ottawa,” Svetlana said. “He could more or less treat it like an active retirement and everyone would think he was a lovable eccentric. Superstar brings two, maybe three championships to Montreal and then gets whimsical and eccentric, decides to return to his hometown, makes a fun little hobby of rehabbing their pathetic hockey program-- you know they’re in danger of losing that franchise, it is only because it’s a matter of national pride that there’s a team there at all-- and then once he spends a year or two slogging away in the salt mines in fucking Stittsville, suddenly his longtime rival is enticed to come join him after having won a second, maybe third championship in Boston-- Ilya Rozanov is suddenly revealed to be a big softie, comes to Shane Hollander’s little semi-retirement camp where presumably Hollander has been making room in the roster, and then the two of them play three more years together, win another Cup or two, retire together, and then come out as having been gay together the whole time and it’s a huge scandal but by then you have married him for citizenship and nobody can hurt you and anyway you’ve been pretty openly living together and fucking all you want for the previous three years and nobody’s going to have said a word because anyone in a position to notice is too aware of what a good thing you are for the local community.”
Ilya had his chin on his hand, watching her. “It’s a good story,” he said quietly. “But that’s not how we’re doing it.”
“It’s the only way that makes sense,” Svetlana said, gesturing wildly. “It has to be him first.”
“I can’t live that long,” Ilya said. “You know how I get. I can’t do it.”
“It’s not that much longer,” she said. “And if he doesn’t pry himself out of Montreal while the going’s good--”
“I have to go first,” Ilya said. “Because my contract is up. I don’t have to tell anyone why.”
“You have to come up with something,” Svetlana said.
“I don’t,” he said stubbornly. “People move for stupid reasons all the time. Why did Gretzky go to LA?”
She sighed deeply, dragging both hands down her face. “Because LA was decent,” she said. “And you know people are still saying horrible shit about his wife over it! Hockey has never forgiven her. Fucking Ottawa makes even less sense. People will be suspicious. Everything you do will be so scrutinized. You will be hated, so much. And you will lose games, Ilya. You will lose, in Ottawa. You can’t rebuild that team in less than, mm probably three years, and only that if they get a fucking goalie worth the name. Three years at least of losing, Ilya. Three years of the bottom of the league. Three years of being mocked ceaselessly. Everyone will assume there’s money or something, that you have some stupid selfish reason, that you’re arrogant and thought you could do something no one could-- they will think the worst of you. God! Any other team, Ilya. You could go to the Guardians. For you they would make room.”
“Ugh,” he said. “No I fucking couldn’t, I’d go to prison the first week because I would punch Dallas Kent’s fucking teeth down his throat and then squeeze down until they punctured his jugular and he bled out.”
“He is an insufferable shit,” Sveta allowed.
“Also I hate Toronto,” Ilya said. “It’s like if New York got hit by a shrink ray and gave up on life.”
“The food’s good,” she offered.
“No it isn’t,” Ilya said. Well, now he was just being disagreeable.
“If you’re so bent on being pathetic,” she countered, “go to fucking Buffalo.”
“They won’t give me a Canadian passport,” Ilya said.
“The food is better than Ottawa if you know where to look,” she said. “And the arena is actually in the city.”
“Such as it is,” Ilya said. Well, fair, it wasn’t a very big city. Sveta didn’t mind going there occasionally, because you could get superlative food if you knew where to look, but there wasn’t a lot of nightlife. “No, I need a Canadian passport.”
“Marry him,” Svetlana said.
“It would be public,” Ilya said, getting a little heated for the first time. “And then both our careers are over.”
“You don’t know that,” she said, but he was right.
“Anyway it’s not instant, for Canadians,” he went on, in a different tone. Quieter. “It doesn’t go into effect right away. I still might get deported, if it goes badly. He maybe couldn’t save me, if my team dropped me and the timing was bad, not even with a marriage certificate.”
“There’s got to be some kind of better way,” Sveta moaned, collapsing back in her chair. She wasn’t sure he was right about Canadian citizenship but in this case he’d done more research than her, so she wasn’t going to argue.
“If Yuna Hollander can’t think of a better way,” Ilya said, “then there isn’t one.”
Sveta sat up. “Oh,” she said. Yuna Hollander was one of the keenest, most brutal managers in the hockey world. She hadn’t considered that Yuna was on the case, here. “Oh my god is she managing you?”
“She’s… some,” Ilya said.
“Oh my god,” Svetlana said. “Well. Okay.”
“We’re also going to start a charity together,” Ilya said. “Shane and I. As a reason to hang out. So people can see us being friends and not rivals. She’s kind of… in charge of that, partly.”
“Okay fine,” Svetlana said. “But do it from Boston. You don’t have to be in Ottawa to do that.”
“We’re starting it before I move,” Ilya said. “I just spent a week in Montreal doing preliminary work for it.”
“You what,” Svetlana said.
Ilya fidgeted with his ear, one of his oldest nervous tells. “I got two weeks’ leave to go to Russia to renew my visa,” he said, “and I spent ten days of it in Montreal instead.”
She reached over and tugged at the neck of his shirt to expose the bruise she’d noticed there. Yes, it was a bite bruise. A fresh one, maybe a day old, maybe two. “Okay,” she said, “you’re really too much.” She gave the bruise a long, calculating look. Well, now she knew what Shane Hollander’s teeth looked like. Mm, she’d noticed before that they were too nice for a hockey player. He’d had them straightened at some point, which was sheer madness, but to be fair to him in ten years of serious hockey he’d never had any knocked out.
Ilya rolled his gaze over to hers, tentatively, like a dog checking in to see if his master was angry. Which wasn’t a dynamic they tended to have, but sometimes, when he was a little guilty, they did. Her impulse was to press her thumb down hard on the bruise and make him flinch and squirm. But she wasn’t sure anymore that she had the right.
She let him see her think about it, moved her thumb like she was going to, but instead she just brushed lightly over it and pulled her hand back. “Well,” she said. “Are you ashamed of him?”
“No,” Ilya said, twitching with the aborted flinch, and now stung by her words.
“Then why won’t you tell me?” she asked, sitting back collectedly.
He took a breath, looking hurt just for a flash, and she knew then. She understood. “I wasn’t…” he said quietly, and he couldn’t look at her. “I wasn’t sure.”
She nodded, and saw him flick his eyes up to see that. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been sure of what he wanted. He hadn’t been sure he would get it. “But now you know,” she said softly. “He means it.”
“He means it,” Ilya said, very quietly.
You couldn’t speak of a blessing that hadn’t come to pass, couldn’t even call too much attention to something that was sure, for fear of jinxing it. She knew that, down deep in her bones. Even to admit to her what he wanted was too close to that. It was the same reason you named your baby Ugly One, or Unlucky, and never boasted of your children’s achievements. It just invited bad fortune.
She held out her arms and he came and put his head against her chest. After that it only took a little rearranging to get his leg in the right position, and he put his head in her lap and she petted his hair the way he liked. That, at least, had never changed, not since they were kids.
“So he means it,” she murmured. “What does he mean by it, my love?”
“He loves me,” Ilya whispered, almost shyly. “He said so.” He was on his back, his bad leg elevated carefully on a cushion, and he had his eyes closed. Her legs were tucked up, nicely padded with one of her throw blankets, the other over Ilya to keep his feet warm. His body was familiar, warm, smelled of her soap. His hair was on the short side, he’d cut it for the beginning of the season probably.
She caressed his face. He hadn’t shaved since the day before, probably, so he was scratchy. The hair on his jaw came in thicker and thicker, every time she was with him, and it had been a long enough gap that it was very different now. This, she thought, was probably as thick as it would get. He was twenty-six now, and she twenty-seven; they were not children, and they weren’t really even young anymore. “It’s different when someone says it now,” she said. “Isn’t it.” They’d said it to one another so many times, and the first thousand times they’d been too young to really know what it meant.
He opened his eyes. “Maybe,” he said.
“You’ve loved him for years,” she said.
“And he loved me,” Ilya said. He believed it. “Maybe not the whole time. But he did. He’s braver than me, he named it first. Well, in English anyway.”
“I should have bet money on it,” she said, tugging gently at his hair, and he laughed, letting his eyes fall back closed. “I knew you loved him. It’s been a long time, Ilya.”
“I think I always did,” Ilya said, eyes staying closed. “I think I was doomed from the start.”
“I have to meet him,” she said. “You’ve been keeping him from me on purpose, haven’t you.”
He opened his eyes and considered her, too dopey and shyly pleased to be contrary. “Maybe,” he said, honest and vulnerable. “I was worried you’d see too much.”
She laughed. “Not seeing him in person didn’t stop me from seeing too much!” she said.
“I know,” he said, and let his eyes fall closed again. “But not seeing him meant you couldn’t say something to him and maybe scare him off.”
“I wouldn’t scare anyone,” Svetlana said, pushing his still-damp curls back away from his face. He hadn’t put any product in them, they’d dry fluffy and he’d look silly. But he wasn’t planning on going anywhere.
He’d have to fix them before tomorrow, though. The embassy might make him take a new picture.
“I was doing my absolute best not to scare him,” Ilya said. “I thought he would… I had to not be too intense, you know?”
“Is that what finally worked?” Svetlana asked. “You stayed aloof and cool enough that he finally confessed all his feelings to you because you were just so devastatingly calm and collected?”
“No,” Ilya said, eyes tighter shut. “No, I-- cried all over him.”
She petted his hair with both hands, working her fingers through to his scalp. “Good boy,” she said. “I knew that was what you needed. Did you actually tell him anything true?”
“Yes,” Ilya said.
“I knew you could do it,” she said. She had not known it at all. Maybe he wasn’t as fucked-up as she thought. “Oh, my sweet, I knew you could do it. What did you tell him?”
“He knows about my mom,” Ilya said.
“Oh,” she said, going still. She hadn’t expected that. She resumed her petting. “What like-- all of it?”
Ilya nodded, eyes still closed. She pressed her thumb gently on the crease between his eyebrows, smoothing it away. “The charity we’re going to start,” he murmured. “We’re going to name it after her.”
“Oh,” Svetlana said.
“We’ll fundraise for mental health organizations,” he said. “Suicide prevention.”
“Oh,” she said again, softer, and smoothed her hands down both sides of his face. “Okay.”
He opened his eyes, then, and looked up at her. “Will you help?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Though, I don’t know that any of my particular talents are useful.”
He laughed. “You have more talents than anyone,” he said. “Undoubtedly something will be useful.”
It wasn’t untrue. He had hockey. She had many other things. She also had more education than he did. “But you have Yuna Hollander,” she pointed out.
He smiled. “I do,” he said. “She hasn’t entirely forgiven me for skating for Boston, but apart from that she’s all in.”
“Can she cook?” Svetlana wondered.
“No,” Ilya said decisively. “Not really, I don’t think. But David can.”
“I wondered what his role was,” Svetlana said, amused.
“Mostly I think he is why Shane is tall,” Ilya said.
“I need Yuna Hollander’s number,” Svetlana said. “Then I can tell you how much I could help you or not.”
She spent the next three days tying things off as neatly as she cared to (more neatly than her father deserved, certainly, but neatly enough that perhaps the vortex would not take any particular note of her extricating herself from it; she could not risk burning any bridges there), and flew back to Boston with Ilya. He held her hand when the plane took off. Which she didn’t need, and hadn’t had in a long time, but he knew she liked that.
He was still hers, but he was more than that, and really always had been. She rubbed her thumb over his knuckles and yawned to crack her ears, and he glanced over at her and smiled.