Chapter Eleven
Hayes [reading from a notecard]: You’re moving tomorrow, and the moving company cancelled on you last minute.
Who on the team are you calling? Oooh, okay.
Well, I’d call Mike [Vanderbilt], but honestly, he’s a lazy [bleeping noise].
Tom never picks up his phone. I think my best bet is Breezy.
He has a sweet baby-blue pickup, and he’s the most reliable dude I know.
Jax: Breezy. He’s the kind of guy who wouldn’t even complain about carrying the heavy boxes.
Howie: Have you seen Breezy? There’s the guy you want lifting your stuff.
Fedorov: I think Breezy.
Tom: Breezy, no contest.
Luca: Chris.
Breezy: Oh, God, that’s terrible! Why would a moving company cancel? I don’t know. I guess I’m calling Luca. He’d complain all day, but he always shows up for me.
Top comments:
sealions4lyfe: Okay, I hate to say it, but this is the most wholesome content
calabreezy: Breezy confirmed team beast of burden
sealionsfan8216: With character witnesses like this, why haven’t we given Breezy an A yet?
(From “San Francisco Sea Lions Call Each Other Out For Fun, Part 3,” posted to YouTube on 09/28/2025)
Chris came downstairs to find Dmitriyev at Howie’s throat.
All things considered, it wasn’t what he had expected.
Dmitriyev and Vanderbilt would have made sense after what Chris and Luca had heard from the bathroom earlier, but Howie?
A lot of weird things were happening today.
Like Chris wanting to suck Luca’s dick badly enough that he did it in the unlocked guest room of his team captain’s house—which seemed disrespectful.
The frantic urgency ran away with him when he understood (slow, too slow as always) that Luca was so turned on that he begged for more after a few kisses.
When Chris had thought Luca had offered “coaching” as a favor because Chris refused to charge rent, he’d felt weird and uncomfortable about the whole thing.
But Luca being really, really into the sex?
Game changer. Chris wanted to give Luca everything he wanted, and if he wanted inexpert blowjobs in a barely private location, Chris would deliver.
He’d gotten so into it that he was most of the way hard by the end.
Having Luca shaking and shuddering in his arms made him feel so…
Not powerful, but as though he’d been given something precious to protect.
Something all his. Getting his ex-girlfriends off had been nice, but it had never made him want to burn the world down just to keep them warm.
Doing it with a guy was different.
Who knew?
Coming down the stairs after his first time performing oral sex on a man—after the first time he’d gotten turned on during any sex without significant effort—to find Dmitriyev on his feet, yelling at Howie about stupid Americans, felt like leaving the steam room at the arena and going straight onto the ice.
Howie, red in the face, shouted, “I’m Canadian!”
Dmitriyev bared his teeth in a snarl, which should have made Howie back down, but for some reason, he stepped in close and said, “And Tatars are Russians, too, you stupid fuck, which you’d know if your fucking media wasn’t so fucking—”
“Okay,” Chris said brightly, finagling his way in between the two of them. “I’m sensing a lot of negative energy in here, wow. What brought this on, guys?”
Dmitriyev muttered something in Russian and spat on the floor before stalking out and up the stairs. Howie fell into a seat on the couch.
Jax and Tom exchanged speaking looks.
“Howie,” Tom said. “What was that about?”
Howie’s jaw jutted out. “You heard it. Do I have to apologize to everyone again for thinking Russia is a dictatorship?”
“I mean, maybe to the Russians, if they disagree.” Jax looked around at the group, uncertainty written across every inch of his face. No one present offered reassurance.
Chris didn’t know anything about Russian politics beyond a vague sense that they were Bad with a capital B.
His granddad complained about “commies” sometimes, though he hadn’t done it around Chris since the year Matty spent all of Christmas trying to discuss the collected works of Karl Marx.
Otherwise, he knew there was a war going on and people blamed Russia for fake news—both of which were bad, but apparently not bad enough that anyone who could do something about it had gone ahead and done it.
When the conversation had turned to international politics last summer, Matty had said some things about secured second-strike capability, and since Chris had never heard those words in that order, he had no clue what the rest of the sentence meant either.
He knew he should have looked it up.
“Of course not,” Tom said to Howie in a soothing tone, elbowing Jax into silence and scooting forward on the couch to look at Howie. “But you didn’t say anything about his government to him. You told him his home country is backward, and you called him a stupid fuck.”
“He was being a stupid fuck.”
Chris flicked Howie on the ear. “If I called you that, you would be pissed.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I am a stupid fuck.”
“At least he knows it,” Jax muttered.
“But being a dumbass doesn’t mean you get to say bigoted shit!”
Silence greeted Howie’s outburst.
“Um, Howie?” Ben tried. “I think you might need to catch us all up on what exactly he said wrong.”
“Denisov’s a Russian Tatar. Dmitriyev and every other Russian in the league won’t let him forget it.
” Howie sighed and rubbed a hand through his hair, getting glitter in his curls.
“Also, the hit wasn’t intentional, and he apologized to me.
” He pulled himself up on the coffee table, and the instant he was upright, all the blood drained from his face. “I’m gonna go…throw up or something.”
He lurched out the door and toward the bathroom. Shortly after, the unmistakable sound of retching followed.
Tom turned to Jax. “You want Dmitriyev or Howie?”
“Christ.” Jax let his head drop back against the couch. “Neither? I’m the hype-guy; you’re the supportive-captain-pep-talk-guy. And I need to google some shit before I know what I think about all this.”
Phil grunted in agreement. “Since when does Howie care about Russian politics?”
“Since Denisov apologized to him, I guess,” Chris said. It didn’t quite add up, though, because—
“Denisov had it out for him the whole third period, long after the hit. He gave up so many chances to mess with Howie.” Luca shook his head. “And when would they have had time to talk about different Russian ethnicities? We were with him all day.”
They had been—from morning skate up until Howie had begged off the party that night even though he got the final goal.
At the time, Chris thought it seemed unlike him, but he’d taken a heavy hit and had some painkillers.
Chris should have asked then, but he’d gotten too caught up in his own worries about dating and sex and Luca and the team.
He hadn’t checked in with Howie since their talk in the weight room weeks ago.
“I’ll talk to Howie,” Chris blurted out. “I don’t know anything about Russia, but I know Howie.”
“Good man,” Jax said. “This is why you should—”
Luca kicked him before he could mention the A, and Chris could have kissed him in thankfulness.
Or just kissed him in general; his lips were so soft, and they still looked all red and puffy from before, and—
“I guess I’ll try Dmitriyev, then,” Tom said doubtfully.
“Don’t mention Cheryl,” Chris advised.
“Cheryl?” Tom asked.
Chris looked around. Jax and Phil had the same question marks on their faces as Tom. Hayes wasn’t listening, occupied instead by staring at Phil as if Phil were a riddle he could solve. Christ, did no one on this team pay attention?
“Never mind.”
“You got this,” Jax told Tom and blew him a kiss.
“Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on!” Hayes’s eyes went wide. He pointed to Phil and Ben. “First you and—and now you?” He turned to Tom.
Jax heaved a heavy, world-weary sigh. He patted Tom on the shoulder. “Go fix the goalie. I’ll deal with him.”
Tom nodded and headed up the stairs to find Dmitriyev.
Chris followed suit and rapped on the bathroom door.
There was no response, but Howie might be mid-vomit, so he pushed the door open. Thankfully, Howie seemed to be done. Chris had a bad tendency toward sympathy nausea. Howie sat on the floor, legs splayed out in front of him.
“How are you doing, man?” Chris lowered himself to sit next to Howie.
“Oh, great, fantastic. I blew up at our goalie and then threw up in my idol’s bathroom, and I came to a team party dressed as fuckin’ Peter Pan, like no one will think—will realize—”
“Trust me, they won’t.”
Howie shot him a look. “No offense, bro, but just because you don’t notice shit…”
That hurt more than Chris thought it would.
He told himself daily to be less of an idiot, but hearing it from Howie stung.
Howie didn’t know half the things Chris did about the team.
But he was hurting, so Chris took a breath, swallowed his own hurt, and bumped their shoulders together.
“I noticed you didn’t come party in my room in Chicago. ”
Howie pinched the fabric of his tights between two fingers. “My hip hurt.”
“Uh-huh, and Denisov came by to apologize, huh?”
Howie didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to.
“Are you seeing him?”
Howie scoffed. “Seeing him. What are you—eighty? We fucked once.”
“And then you did a deep dive on Russian Tartars?”
“Tatars.”
“That’s what I said.”
“No, you said it with two Rs. Tartar is the fancy raw steak thingy.”
“Oh.” Chris had never heard of tartar or Tatars before tonight, so he thought he was doing pretty well. Then again, Denisov would probably disagree. “Like, I agree it’s not cool of Dmitriyev to…say what he said.”