Chapter Thirteen #2
It was inconvenient, if unsurprising. Of course he’d fallen for someone who saw him as a pity project, someone who had made it his mission in life to take care of Kilian because he was so utterly incapable of doing a decent job of it himself.
He could have made a worse choice and fallen for someone cruel or straight.
Damir would be nice about it if he ever found out; he wouldn’t even have to turn Kilian down flat.
He could point out that Kilian was out now whether he wanted to be or not, and Damir never could be.
A relationship would be doomed from the start.
Damir would head home to Russia someday; he couldn’t afford to be associated with an openly gay man.
Anyway, Kilian knew he’d be traded or sent down soon enough, meaning they’d both be spared the indignity of having to talk about Kilian’s feelings.
Beneath him, Damir groaned and stretched. “Time’s it?”
“I didn’t set an alarm clock.”
Damir groaned. “Right. Valeria.” He forced himself and Kilian upright using only his core strength, an objectively insane thing to be able to do. “Come on, then.”
They met Valeria—tiny and dark-haired, wearing a beaded purple skating dress—in a practice rink about twenty minutes in the opposite direction from Alliance Arena. She greeted Damir in Russian and nodded at Kilian silently before thrusting figure skates at both of them.
Kilian recognized her instantly. “Hey, you were in the Olymp—”
She shushed him with an impressive glare.
All right, then.
In fairness, Kilian wouldn’t want to be reminded of being in the Olympics either if he’d been narrowly edged out of medaling by a Russian skater who ended up in trouble for a doping scandal two years later.
He tried to remember what country she represented.
Something in Europe, maybe Romania? No, if she was speaking Russian with Damir, it must be Ukraine.
Valeria shook the figure skates at him again, and Kilian took them with a muttered apology. He was sure there was no such thing as a comfortable skate, but lacing up on the long, rickety benches brought home all the new and different ways in which they could be uncomfortable.
Gliding out onto the ice with no pads left him feeling naked. He wrapped his arms around his middle, where there should have been a thick layer of padding under a jersey, not just a compression shirt. Why was ice so cold?
Kilian had to uncross his arms almost instantly. Not only were the skates formed differently, they also affected his balance. He swore, righting himself, and Valeria laughed.
Great.
This was going to be fun.
She had them warm up using nothing but stretches and the tempo of their skating, one of the less fun ways to warm up in hockey.
Ever since he began playing, Kilian had practiced stickhandling religiously.
His skating was shit, so he had to be good at something.
He rarely set foot on the ice without holding a stick, and before long, its absence bothered him more than the missing layers.
Valeria noticed at once.
“You skate like you are expecting to fall on your face,” she chided. “Long motions, Kilian. Trust yourself.”
He grunted in frustration and tried again, but she was already shaking her head before he’d gone more than a few paces.
“Look, I’m a shitty skater. The faster we can all accept that, the better,” he told her.
“Bullshit.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Bullshit. You have tree-trunk thighs. Use them. Come on. Go long on your left leg and hold the right outstretched behind you.”
He did as she asked, wobbling precariously.
“Higher.”
He tried but overbalanced and fell. He should have worn pads for this.
Valeria skated to a stop beside him. She poked him with the tip of her skate. “Up.”
“Haven’t I proved I suck enough?”
The look she gave him made him want to sink below the ice and freeze there for a couple millennia. Kilian glanced to Damir. “You were right. She’s terrifying.”
“Up. Again.”
She drilled him on it over and over. First, she made him lift the outstretched leg higher each time he skated past till he could hold it up without falling.
Then, she corrected the angle of his upper body until it formed a perfect line with his leg.
After an hour, Kilian was drenched in sweat, and his quads burned with exertion. Then she had him add his arms.
“You know I’m not actually going to be figure skating, right?”
She shrugged. “You want to be confident when you skate? You need to feel like you look good. I want to know I’m pretty. You, too, yes?”
The notion struck Kilian in the pit of his belly.
Valeria had made no indication she knew or cared who he was and what might have been in the news about him.
She certainly wasn’t going easy on him, not the way Damir did by cooking for him, spanking him, and letting him sleep in his bed.
She wasn’t pandering to him. She wasn’t patronizing him.
Valeria had been hired to help him improve, and she thought he could look pretty while skating.
She observed him—a big, tall, broad man, who played a full-contact sport for a living—and still thought he could look pretty.
He took a breath.
“Yeah. All right. Again.”
By the time she finished with him, Kilian could do the exercise with ease. Every part of his legs ached, from his thighs to his knees to the insteps of his feet, but he was well on his way to getting the hang of a crossover the way figure skaters did them.
Kilian trudged off to the locker room, exhausted in the best way. His brain was finally quiet, his body worn out, and he knew exactly who he wanted to be for the first time.
Damir sat on one of the benches in the locker room, hunched over and scrolling through his phone. He looked up when Kilian and Valeria entered.
“Lazy,” Valeria told him. “You pay me for skating lesson, and you quit after half.”
Damir shrugged. “I paid you for an hour. It’s been three.”
Kilian winced. He’d totally bogarted Damir’s lesson. “Shit, sorry. Um, I can—”
“Shut up,” they both told him simultaneously.
“When you come back?” Valeria asked. “Kilian needs work.”
Damir snorted. “Charming. Two weeks? We have a homestand then.”
“Yes. I will see you.” In a fluid motion, Valeria bent down, unlaced her skates, and removed them. She slipped into heavy, warm boots and zipped a thick parka that went past her knees over her skating dress. Then she muttered a Russian goodbye and was gone.
“Wow,” Kilian said to the slam of the locker room door. “Rude.”
“Very,” Damir agreed. “You had fun?”
“I’m sorry I lost track of the time. You don’t have to bring me next time. I can—”
“Are you kidding?” Damir shook his head. “I haven’t seen you so happy to be on the ice in—ever, I think. You’re coming back. If I can learn something watching the two of you, good, but even if it’s just for you, I would pay for a year’s worth of skating lessons.”
Kilian looked down at the damp spots on the linoleum where his skates had dripped melted ice shavings.
Damir wasn’t making it easy to avoid feeling things.
“Do you have plans for the day?” Damir asked after they’d changed into street clothes and were leaving the rink. He got into the passenger seat as a matter of course, allowing Kilian to drive again.
Kilian blew out a long breath through his teeth. “I think I need to call my agent.”
Damir nodded once. “Maybe shower first. Put on something nice.”
Kilian rolled his eyes. “Stop taking care of me. I’ll be fine.”
He would be. So what if Derek dumped him off the client list?
So what if the Firecrackers sent him down or kicked him out of the organization entirely?
What was the worst that could happen? He’d have to stop playing hockey and figure out a real job?
Him and every other twenty-year-old on the planet.
He knew who he was and what he wanted to say, and no one could take either of those from him.
At Damir’s, Kilian set his phone to charge in the built-in charging station at the desk in his room.
After three days of constant notifications and zero attention from him, it had shut down in self-defense.
Kilian eyed it with trepidation. The phone didn’t look scary, all alone on the empty desk.
Not when contrasted with the clutter covering every other surface of the room.
The boxes Breezy had express-shipped to Kilian lined the floor.
Clothes hung off the edges of the cartons instead of the hangers in the closet.
The stack of papers he’d signed when he joined the team sat on the nightstand, and his duvet lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of the bed.
Damir always made his bed.
Of course he did. He hated mess, another reason he was out of Kilian’s league.
With a sigh, Kilian dumped his workout gear in the shipping box he used as a laundry basket and headed for the shower. When he was scrubbed clean and dressed in his favorite jeans and, after some deliberation, the light blue crop top, Kilian turned his phone on.
Immediately, the chimes and buzzes of a million messages on every app under the sun started pouring in.
It would be a while until the phone had processed everything.
Kilian turned off the sound and sat at the desk.
On his first day here, he’d spent some time snooping and had noticed the notepad and pens Damir kept in the top drawer for his guests.
Typical Damir—understated, practical, and classy.
They were really nice pens, too, and they matched the detailing on the desk.
Damir had such an eye for aesthetics. Kilian had guessed as much from his suits and shirts, but his apartment was impeccable.
If Kilian stayed here, he’d have to level up so he wouldn’t get on Damir’s nerves. Or—no.
He couldn’t follow that line of thinking.
Not when what he was about to do meant there’d be no future for them. When Christmas break ended, he would need to find his own place.