1. Novi
ONE
Novi
You’d think after spending seventeen years making a name for myself, I wouldn’t be so nervous walking into practice first day back. These flutters, they’re for rookies. Not for someone going for his one-thousandth NHL game this season.
I heard a rumor during last year’s Stanley Cup game that I haven’t been able to shake all summer. I’ve done my best to stay offline and ignore it, but even when I got weak and looked up hockey news, there wasn’t anything there.
Probably a good thing.
I shove my gear bag in my cubby right as a text goes off. One glance at the screen, and I reluctantly open the message, knowing it’s going to be peak Ezra.
Pala-SOOK:
Happy “lose every game to Boston” season, bestie!
I refuse to smile. Or be amused. Ezra Palaszczuk decided we were best friends the moment we officially met off the ice.
I’ll never admit it out loud to anyone, but I’ve always been in awe of him—and borderline resentful.
He gets to have everything I’ve ever wanted.
So while being friends with Ezra is something I want, I’m also careful not to get too close.
Being linked with his Queer Collective isn’t something I can risk, but I didn’t know how badly I needed that connection until I had it.
Ignoring a large and important part of myself has worn on me.
The locker room is empty, so I switch on voice to text and reply.
“You are embarrassing yourself.”
Pala-SOOK:
Nothing new there.
This time, my lips twitch, but I tuck my phone in my pocket without replying.
Even with the messages as a distraction, I can’t shake that lump building in my gut, and I remind myself that nothing is confirmed yet.
And if the worst happens, he’s the one who should be nervous.
Not me. I’ve played with LA for seven years now. This is my home.
Colby Kessinger cannot take that from me.
Ah, I hope. He had me under his spell once, but I was young and reckless then. I’m much smarter and better prepared to handle him if it comes to that.
I stuff my hands into the pockets of my sweatpants and head up the hall to the video room.
We’re meeting our coaches this morning since Trent Beller retired last year, and there have been staffing changes in the hopes of a better season.
I’ve won two Stanley Cups, but none since moving to LA, and at thirty-eight, I’m running out of chances to get my name on there again.
I’ve given myself two more years of hockey before I hang up my skates and get to live the life I’ve kept secret for so long.
Out of the spotlight, I’ll be able to finally have a relationship, and while giving up hockey isn’t something that will be easy, knowing I will have that freedom helps.
Not many get to play as long as me, and I’m grateful to have this career and my life in the States.
By the time I retire, I will have lived here as long as I lived in Russia, but I think I’ll always miss my country.
The nostalgia of home. The pretty buildings and familiar language.
Novy God. Sometimes the sadness falls on me that I can never go back, but it doesn’t last long.
Russia, the people, my family, they’re all things I love.
The law is not. The government is a joke. But not a funny one.
Russia keeps going backward.
Most of my team is waiting, and I can already guess the topics of conversation. Vacations, babies, proposals, and weddings. These are things we do in the off-season.
More specifically, things they do.
My off-season was spent attending other people’s weddings, fielding messages from Ezra, and visiting glory holes. What a life.
Still, after the months off, just walking in here feels like home. The mostly familiar faces, the same large white room crammed full of ergonomic recliner chairs, the LA logo on the back wall, and that familiar scent of too many body sprays in one place.
I will miss this one day.
Turkey gives me the two-finger wave thing that he does, and I slide into the back row with him.
These English speakers kept butchering his surname Atatürk, so that’s the nickname he’s stuck with.
If they’d tried that with me and called me Russia, it would get confusing, considering there are three other Russians on our team.
The media gives me enough nicknames like that as it is. Novi is what everyone calls me now, but Angry Russian was from early in my career and still pops up occasionally. It’s hilarious. Only, I laugh on the inside so they don’t see I have a big sense of humor.
I’m really a puppy.
“How are those knees, old boy?” Turkey asks.
“I have the knees of a twenty-year-old. You’re the one who spent three weeks on IR last season.”
“Hey, why you gotta bring that up?”
“Have to make sure you young plucks know your place.”
“Think you mean young bucks.”
Got him. “Huh. Do I?” I make a mental note to add a mark next to Turkey’s name in my phone later.
I don’t know when my game of having them correct my English started, but it’s always amused me how easily they think I mess everything up.
My accent has morphed into a bastardized American one by this point, but they all still underestimate me.
I’m very smart.
“Welcome back,” Coach Whelan says as he walks into the room. “I hope you’re all ready for a big season and didn’t overindulge during the time off.” The look on his face makes it clear he knows most of the guys did. “Wouldn’t want anyone throwing up from reconditioning.”
Turkey leans in closer. “He’s sadistic, I swear.”
“Da. I like it.”
“You would.”
This is only Turkey’s third season. He’ll get used to it.
“We’ve got some new faces on board this year. Make sure to give a shout-out to Percy and Landers, who we snapped up from the East Coast. We’ve got the strongest team we’ve seen in years, and we’re going all the way.”
Percy, Landers. Yes. Good. Now, move on to the coaching staff and the reason we’re here.
The team lets out a cheer, but I’m too busy being distracted by the potential ghost from my past to give it my full enthusiasm.
You’d think that close to two decades would be enough to rid his ridiculous face from my mind.
All chubby cheeks and puppy dog eyes. The way he’d get so frustrated when he ruined a play that I’d want to go and make him laugh to get rid of the concentration lines in his forehead.
It was hard to find someone I wasn’t self-conscious around when I moved here, but there was something about Colby that made me feel like I could be myself. Always smiling. Always joking.
Until that very funny joking night where something happened that frightened the hell out of me. The moment Colby went to touch me filled my dreams for years afterward because of how deeply I wanted it. How, just moments before he reached, a stray thought had snuck into my mind.
What would it be like to kiss him?
To kiss a man. I still don’t know.
Somehow, the seventeen years between then and now disappear, and I’m feeling that elated terror all over again.
Soon, Coach will introduce the team. Soon, I’ll know that he’s not here.
Rumors happen all the time in hockey. People change their minds easily.
Maybe Westly Dalton had heard it wrong and it wasn’t Colby coming here at all.
It’s not safe for me with him around because after hiding who I am all these years, I’m sure he knows. I’m sure he remembers the way I looked at him, how tongue-tied I got after that moment, how I was too embarrassed to room with him and didn’t trust myself to be strong.
I was so obvious.
Twenty-one-year-old Novi was an idiot.
And yet, there’s a very small part of me that’s worried after all this buildup, his name won’t be called at all.
“Most of the support staff have stayed on this year, but with Beller’s retirement, Ackerman has stepped into the head video coach role, with two new assistants joining us.
Paul Nowak has come to us from New Jersey.
” There’s a random yew as Nowak walks in and flicks a quick wave like he’d rather be anywhere but the center of attention.
I’m too busy looking behind him though. “And from Penn State, Frozen Four–winning coach, Colby Kessinger.”
Fuck .
My gut hollows like the morning after having too much to drink.
But the man who walks in behind Nowak … it takes me a second to recognize him.
The chubby cheeks are gone, and in their place is a strong jawline.
His shoulders and chest are broader, his black hair is longer, and those concentration lines in his forehead have become permanent, along with the happy creases by his eyes.
Colby Kessinger is no longer the young man who taunted my attraction. Now, he’s much, much worse.
He says something that I miss because I’m too busy picking out all the changes. Have I changed as much as he has? Does he know I’m here? Will he even recognize me?
Is he going to tell everyone about me?
Or has he forgotten me and the touch and the way I was never myself with him again?
Coach takes over, running through some expectations for the year, and as he does, I watch Colby scan the room. Nowak leans in to say something to him, and they both muffle their laughs.
I tell myself it’s time to look away now, but my eyeballs aren’t listening.
Seventeen years.
Almost half of my life has gone by since that one season we played together. Roomed together. Since he forced me to admit to myself that what I was feeling for men wasn’t an accident or all in my head.
He wasn’t the one who made me realize I’m gay, but he was the one who forced me to admit it to myself.
A flash of him lying under me crosses my mind. Black hair all ruffled, gray eyes fading from amusement to that intensity I felt in my chest.
My body seizes up the same way it did back then, when I’d snatched up his hand and panicked in a way I’d never panicked before.
I didn’t have the English words then for how freaked-out I was, but I do now, and so when Colby’s gaze finally drifts closer and connects with mine, it hits me all at once.
Ya v glubokom der’me.
I’m in deep shit.