Chapter Sixteen #2
Damir was surly and poorly rested when he got out of bed and put on his favorite suit.
Some men wore more traditional garb to the mosque, but Damir didn’t have any, and besides, he liked the idea of wearing what he thought of as his best clothes regardless of what they were.
He paired the suit, so rich a gray it was nearly lavender, with a deep green shirt and no tie.
He considered styling his hair the way he usually did when he meant to look good.
But the wind off Lake Michigan had turned well below freezing over the last few days, so he pulled on a beanie and shrugged into his peacoat.
Men who usually hung about outside to smoke and chat crowded the mosque, keeping out of the cold.
Damir slipped out of his shoes and completed his ablutions, his mind still half-occupied with Kilian rather than the other men in the washroom.
He took a deep breath to let go of the thoughts and picked a spot toward the back.
Ever since he’d rediscovered the practice a week ago, Damir had prayed once every day.
It wasn’t a conscious plan. But he’d catch sight of Kilian smiling at something his parents did, or he’d hear Kilian laughing at something a teammate said in the group chat, and a rush of emotion would overtake Damir all over again.
He didn’t know how to hold it inside his ribcage without screaming in ecstasy or crying in agony; the inescapable enormity of it could not fit inside him.
“We pray so Allah knows we appreciate what He does for us,” Damir’s Baba had said when Damir asked why they did it so often.
At the time, Damir had given a surly, teenage huff.
What had Allah done for them but made them hated and even persecuted in Russia?
What had Allah done for Damir but made him in such a way that His own teachings rejected?
It turned out Damir had to grow up and live his life and fall in love to understand it wasn’t anything Allah had done for him but the pure joy of being able to live in this world and experience these things.
Damir breathed deeply through the ritual motions and the familiar words and let go of the sadness that Kilian didn’t want him back so he could celebrate that they had met at all.
He would keep praying, he decided.
Kilian’s rejection of anything more serious between them was a blow, but experiencing the feelings in the first place awakened Damir to how good it felt to find things to be thankful for and joyful about.
The world around Damir was difficult, unkind, and prejudiced enough to warrant his frequent surliness.
Rising above it was a skill he’d had as a child and lost before he could appreciate how important it was.
As an adult, he could relearn and practice it like any other ability.
After, he stuck around long enough to sign a few baseball caps and T-shirts. One boy asked him hesitantly about his teammate, “the redhead,” and whether he really was gay. He lowered his voice so much on the last word Damir could barely hear him.
“Yes,” Damir told the boy. “He is. And he’s very brave, I think.”
The boy’s father placed a hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t disagree.
He asked Damir about his season, and Damir found himself drawn into a brief conversation about the rigors of an athlete’s meal plan and whether he could keep halal on the road.
He’d spoken about these things before, but only with Kilian.
Commiserating with other Muslims about the mundane irritations of life as a minority reminded him that no matter what he chose, he did have a community here.
Even though he’d been wary and resentful of it to the point that he hadn’t dared trying to become a true part of it.
Maybe it was time to change that.
The brief glimpse of inner peace inspired Damir.
On the short walk home, he called his agent to get the ball rolling on a potential future.
He’d hoped for an immediate and quick resolution, but his agent gave him nothing but a promise to look into it.
As a result, he arrived home in a strange mood, hopeful and anxious, at peace and devastated all at once.
Had they been alone, he might have told Kilian all about it, but they had company.
Kilian brimmed with stories about shopping with his mother, blossoming under the ability to make his own choices about walk-in fashion.
Damir wouldn’t steal Kilian’s moment with his own worries.
Unchecked, they persisted to the next day, through his workout and his nap all the way up until they left for the arena.
Kilian took the driver’s seat as a matter of course, so Damir took the passenger side.
Ketchup and the Howards sat in the back, Ketchup immediately slouching low because “everyone knew you didn’t need a seatbelt there. ”
“You’re going to die in a preventable car accident,” Damir told him as Kilian pulled out of the garage and into traffic.
Damir could get used to having a chauffeur.
Someone to drive around in the middle of the day through all the stops and starts.
He didn’t mind it so much at night when the roads were clear, but now, when everyone who owned a car in Chicago was on the road with them, he couldn’t deny having Kilian take care of things helped him relax.
Could he ask Kilian to never move out and drive him everywhere?
But no, Kilian didn’t want to be that person for Damir, and Damir had to learn to accept it. He scowled at the thought.
“Wow, what crawled up your ass and died?” Ketchup drawled.
Mr. Howard cleared his throat.
In the rearview mirror, Damir saw Ketchup wince.
“Um, sorry, Coach Howard,” Ketchup said. “Denny, what crawled up your butt and died?”
Damir had no intention of answering the question honestly, but with Kilian’s father’s eyes boring into the back of his head, he felt compelled to say something. “Tough call with my agent yesterday.”
At Alliance Arena, they pointed the Howards in the direction of the friends and family section.
Damir waved goodbye wordlessly before going straight for the training bicycle.
He wasn’t ready to talk to Ketchup about what, exactly, he’d discussed with his agent, much less prolonged exposure to Lissy’s newest locker-room playlist. And if he had to sit in his stall next to Kilian and watch him get changed, flashing his shy smile over at Damir every now and again whenever someone said or did something he knew would amuse Damir, he might explode.
He met up with the team for warm-ups but kept mostly to himself, doing shooting practice on an unsuspecting Petterson and repeating a few of the skating exercises Valeria had taught him and Kilian. He could see Kilian doing the same, and it made him smile despite his mood.
Perhaps Damir’s purpose in Kilian’s life was to teach him how to trust himself on the ice and in bed.
Damir’d had other people to learn from—Sasha and Kyrill for the latter and his parents and early coaches for the former.
Could Damir be happy with being a stepping stone for Kilian?
Leaving an indelible mark on Kilian’s life and then exiting it graciously when they were no longer teammates?
The thought made preemptive grief claw up through his stomach, empty and bitter.
He clenched his jaw and gripped his stick tighter.
As he’d predicted, the game was tight, not because they were evenly matched but because the Firecrackers played slow and lazy, glutted on the holiday break and their own recent success.
They played two periods of frustrating back and forth, leaving the score tied at 1–1.
By the third, Damir was ready to bite through his mouthguard out of frustration.
He’d told Rocky what the issues were, yet the first D-pair gave up chance after chance to the Fury, forcing Petterson to stand on his head. They ought to be better than this.
The second line skated out for a faceoff after Petterson threw himself bodily on the puck, stopping play and disallowing any further shots on goal.
Kilian got into position at the center, bent down over the puck with his stick in place.
The Fury’s second-line centerman skated into place opposite him and said something Damir couldn’t hear from the bench.
Kilian straightened, spat out his mouthguard, and answered.
The referee gave him a sharp look, and he put the mouth guard in again, returning to game readiness.
The puck dropped, and Kilian stole it away, passing behind himself to Fulls and racing up the ice, but the Fury’s centerman chased after him and grabbed him by the jersey. Kilian stumbled, allowing the man to grab his arms as well, and then the refs blew their whistles, and play was stopped again.
“Yes,” Ketchup muttered beside Damir on the bench. “Two-minute power play. Nice work, Howie.”
The Fury player protested the call, gesticulating harshly at the linesmen.
Kilian held both hands up, shrugging innocently.
Menace.
The debate raged on.
“What the fuck?” Matheson asked a few spots over. “That was blatant holding. How are they still yapping?”
Coach Simmons tapped Damir on the shoulder, and he hopped the boards. By rights, smoothing out rough penalty calls was Lissy’s job as captain, but Damir got sent to do it more and more often. He tried not to think too hard about what that signified.
He skated up to the group building around the referee and the two skaters and shouldered his way through in time to hear Kilian say, “He told me not to check out his ass. I answered to reassure him!”
The linesman looked between the two players. The guy from Minnesota was red-faced and breathing hard, while Kilian looked largely amused.
“Sexual harassment isn’t part of the rulebook,” the linesman said hesitantly, eyes darting back and forth between the two players. “However…”
The Minnesotan opened his mouth, presumably to explain how Kilian’s behavior constituted harassment.