Chapter Twelve
“… After months of pro-LGBTQIA+ charity work, the sudden trade of forward Kilian Howard just as images of him in a compromising position with another man emerge casts the San Francisco Sea Lions’s dedication to the cause into question. Was it all for show?”
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Jefferson Howard: Kilian, if you’re reading this, please call me back
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
Damir cringed, instinctively moving his shower caddy in front of his dick.
Practice had been over for all of five minutes, and he was trying to get through cleanup as fast as humanly possible so he could rescue Kilian from the front office, where he’d been called the second Coach had ended the session.
Lissy, as always unconcerned by social niceties such as personal space, came closer to lower his voice further. “What the article says about Howie? He is? Gay?”
Damir grunted noncommittally.
“Come on, Damir.”
A first-name callout. How novel.
“If he’s not ready, I can’t speak for him.”
“Commendable of you, but surely that ship has sailed?”
Damir said nothing. He knew Lissy was right.
Short of PR digging a suitably bottle-blonde fiancée out of the woodwork, preferably already pregnant, Kilian was out, ready or not.
Kilian could deny it all he wanted, but the rumor would persist. Damir should know—people still joked about how he didn’t “carpet munch.”
In the last day and a half since the article dropped, Kilian had barely spoken.
He spent the remainder of the flight home staring out the window, jaw set and eyes wet.
Damir recognized a boy who’d been told not to cry often enough that he hated to be seen doing it. Like knew like. So, he didn’t push.
He also didn’t push when they got to the apartment.
Ketchup opened his mouth, presumably to ask, but Damir elbowed him into silence, and Kilian disappeared into his room.
He left his phone on the kitchen counter, where it lit up over and over again.
Finally, Damir turned it face down so he’d stop flinching every time a new notification arrived, and then he went to his room.
After two hours of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, he gave up on sleep, went back to the kitchen, and started meal prepping.
Kilian emerged from his own room at five in the morning, looking as if he’d gotten the same amount of rest. He ignored his phone and settled on one of the bar stools with a cutting board and every onion in the apartment.
Damir watched him warily for a few minutes, but when no conversation was forthcoming, he showed Kilian the best way to chop onions and let him work at it.
If Damir pretended to ignore him, Kilian could pretend the onions were what caused the tears.
I want to be that person for gay kids, Damir remembered. Maybe the article could be a blessing in disguise. Maybe it was what Kilian had been waiting for.
Maybe.
The brief, thready hope had persisted until they had to go to practice, and Kilian spoke not a single word to anyone. He kept his back turned while he changed; he followed instructions to a tee; he didn’t meet anyone’s eye.
With practice over and Kilian absent, Lissy’s urgently hissed, “What do I do?” was no surprise. The problem was, Damir didn’t know the answer, not for Kilian, not for himself, and certainly not for Lissy.
“It’s not about you,” he snapped before he could stop himself.
“I know,” Lissy claimed, “but it’s my locker room. How do I make it…I don’t know, welcoming? Not shit for him? What do I do?”
Oh. Oh.
A week ago, Damir would have had a list of suggestions as long as his arm for how to make the locker room less shit.
No more naked pep talks. No more helicopter.
Less alcohol showers, or if they absolutely had to douse the first star in spirits, they should clean it up themselves and not leave it for whatever poor staff member drew the short straw.
No more discussion of everyone’s favorite sex acts.
They’d all heard about Ketchup’s joy in cunnilingus more than enough.
“Nothing,” Damir said, voice cracking on the word. “You don’t change a thing.”
“But…” Lissy looked down at himself. “I should wear pants more often, shouldn’t I?”
Damir had waited years to hear those words. Sadly, his days of witnessing Lissy in all his debatable glory were nowhere near over. “You’ve never treated me differently even though I have different beliefs. Don’t do it to him either.”
“That isn’t the same.”
It was the same. It was exactly the same, and Damir nearly said as much, the words tripping up to the tip of his tongue and clinging tight to his gritted teeth before he could let them fall out.
The thought of coming out himself had occurred to Damir in the three seconds between when the first journalist had asked Kilian and when Damir realized what had happened.
Kilian was a deer in the headlights, and Damir wanted nothing more than to jump between him and oncoming traffic.
He couldn’t for all the many reasons it was a bad idea in general—his parents lived in Russia, he lived in Russia in the off-season, his religious fans would turn on him in an instant, the NHL, as a whole, would turn on him in an instant.
And the list went on. But he wished he could make things easier for Kilian.
“It’s close enough,” Damir told Lissy as evenly as he could. “Don’t make him feel different. Don’t single him out. If anyone else treats him like shit or says anything, make an example of them. People are going to think whatever they want, but don’t let them say it out loud.”
After a long pause in which he studied Damir far too closely for comfort, Lissy nodded sharply. “Fair enough. And thank you for taking care of things when…well. Thank you.”
For once, Damir was glad of his reputation as a monosyllabic grump. He couldn’t have spoken if he’d tried.
After his shower, he tracked Kilian down in the PR office. The door was angled open but only Brianna’s voice wafted into the corridor.
“…so ultimately, it’s a question of what you want. Let us know, talk to your agent, to your…partner? No? Okay. We can ‘no comment’ till the cows come home. It’s up to you.”
Damir peeked around the corner. Kilian sat at the edge of the visitor’s chair, staring at the floor.
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
There was a long, pregnant pause in which Brianna watched him expectantly, but he made no further reply. Damir cleared his throat.
Both of them turned toward the door.
“You ready to go?” Damir asked.
Kilian nodded and got to his feet.
He remained silent on the drive home. Damir had never been good about filling silences, not the way Ketchup was, but Ketchup had stayed at the rink to work with the trainers.
Damir could have said something about Lissy, about the earnest attempts of straight men to be allies, but he didn’t know how to start the conversation.
Besides, what could it accomplish besides reminding Kilian he was alone in this, and while Damir could help, he didn’t?
Damir stalled out a record five times on the drive home.
Kilian vanished into his room as soon as they got there.
Thanks to the insomnia of the last day, Damir had done all the cooking he’d need to for the next month or so. He had nothing to prepare, and if he worked out now, he’d overexert himself. It was a relief when his mother called.
“Mama? It’s not Thursday.”
“Yes, Damir, I’m not senile yet.” The half-amused, half-resigned timbre of her voice reminded Damir of a hundred moments from his childhood.
She had sounded like that when he brought home a snail he’d found on the sidewalk on his way home from school in February and couldn’t leave there in case it froze.
She’d sounded like that when he’d gotten in trouble for pretending to sneeze around a very loud “bismillah” every time his science teacher gave too much homework.
She’d sounded exactly like that when he came racing home from the frozen-over pond behind the neighboring high-rise, his father’s old skates clutched in his hands and the words “I want to play hockey” on his lips.
“Is everything all right? Is Papa sick again? Are you sick?”
She clicked her tongue impatiently. “No one’s sick. Who are you—Aunt Zeyneb? Can’t a woman call her son on a different day than she usually does?”
Damir settled on the couch, phone clenched between his cheek and his shoulder as he clicked the TV on and the sound off instantly.
If she heard, she would accuse him of not paying attention.
But he couldn’t talk to her without something happening in the background, just as he knew she had something bubbling away on the stove while she spoke. “Not for no reason. What happened?”
“I thought I would ask you the same question.”
“Me?”
“Mm.” Damir’s mother heaved a great sigh.
She must be sitting at the kitchen table with the knife in her hand and something in need of chopping before her, her glasses on a countertop, where she’d forget about them and then search the whole apartment when she noticed their absence from her head. “Damyasha. The boy on your team?”
Dismay and homesickness flooded Damir in equal measure.
He thought of himself as Tatar more than Russian most times, a member of a disparate group more than a person tethered to a certain location by birth.
But hearing the nickname took him back to the tall apartment building, the narrow hallways, the icy winters, the happy fluent mix of languages surrounding him at all times.
How was it possible to miss a place he hated living in so much?
“You saw,” he said and wondered what she thought. He’d wondered what she thought about these things for a long time.
“I saw. He is your friend?”
Damir paused for a long moment. If he confirmed it, would she take it to mean they were more than friends? If he denied it, would she think him as full of hatred as so many Americans assumed a Muslim must be? “He’s staying in my spare room.”
“Hm.”