Chapter Thirteen
Kayleigh [off-screen]: How do you like living in the States?
Dmitriyev: [translates into Russian]
Fedorov: Is good. Very loud, very busy, but good.
Kayleigh: Has there been anything shocking or surprising for you about the team?
Dmitriyev: [translates into Russian]
Fedorov: [turns to Dmitriyev, speaks at length in Russian. The words “pot of gold” are distinguishable partway through.]
Dmitriyev: He says is fun team, nice guys, but very boring. No surprises.
Top comments:
sealions4lyfe: anyone else get the feeling Fedorov said something completely different?
SFCLions: Jax Grant and his stupid shelter are dividing the team and this is proof!
howza68: @SFCLions—not cool. Anyone can play hockey.
hockeyfanofcolor: some of y’all are really telling on yourselves in the comments. That is not the face of a guy who hates helping out at an LGBTQ+ shelter. Dude looks like an excited puppy.
(From “Meet this year’s Sea Lion Rookie,” posted in The Rookery, the direct-to-consumer streaming service of the San Francisco Sea Lions and all associated teams, on 11/07/2024)
There was something wrong with Chris.
Scratch that. A lot of things were wrong with Chris. He had trouble understanding subtext, he hated serious movies because they made him think too hard, and he was a total pushover. But right now, something very specific and very embarrassing was wrong with him.
He kept getting hard.
Not randomly, the way he had a few times when he was a teenager and his body sent out bizarre signals all over the place regardless of what happened on around him.
No, now he reacted to every tiny thing Luca did for no apparent reason.
Watching him drink a smoothie out of a straw made Chris zone out, imagining those lips in other places.
Spotting him in the weight room while his biceps flexed and released in his tank top was so intense that Chris had to carry his towel in front of him on the way out.
Just sitting next to him on the couch while they watched TV made Chris chub up to the point where he had to cover himself in a blanket despite being much too warm.
This had never happened to him with any girl he’d dated in the past.
Did it mean he was gay? Was latent gayness a thing?
He wanted to ask Howie. Howie had said he didn’t know about his own orientation until last year; he must have some insights to share.
But Howie wasn’t talking to him. Chris tried reaching out via text, and he’d approached Howie in the locker room on three separate occasions, but every time, Howie brushed him off.
Howie was doing fine without him. Granted, not at hockey, the team entered a worrying losing skid after Halloween, and Howie’s failure to make his passes connect formed a big part of that.
Off the ice, though, he’d taken a slot in post-game media in order to tell the whole world it wasn’t cool for hockey fans to use hate speech online.
Apparently, the deal with Denisov being Tatar went deeper than Chris had known.
He still hadn’t looked it up.
When he tried, he ended up with the raw steak thing, which looked delicious, and then he got distracted making dinner.
He wanted to tell Howie he was proud of him for taking a stand. He wanted to have Howie explain the whole thing to him. He wanted to ask Luca’s advice on all of it, but he could barely get a sentence out around Luca without getting all weird and fluttery and turned on.
All he ended up doing was liking the Instagram post of the interview, leaving a comment praising Howie, and scouring the rest of the comment section over and over for people being dicks.
In combination with how awkward Tom, Jax, and Phil were being around him, Chris had trouble falling asleep at night.
Worries about his body behaving in ways he didn’t recognize, his friends not talking to him, and the team’s poor performance tumbled repeatedly around his mind.
He hadn’t felt so uneasy since his first month in the NHL, when he spent every day waiting for Coach Trout to pull him aside and let him know there had been a misunderstanding—that Chris ought to be down in San Diego with the AHL team, and he’d been too stupid to realize it when they told him.
He should never have said anything. He should have taken the A and the responsibility and kept his head down.
The one bright spot in the week was the team’s Secret Santa. Chris had pulled Tom, and despite the frankly insane ten-dollar spending limit Lindy imposed, he had at least six ideas of things he could get to make Tom loosen up toward him again.
He wondered if he should broach the topic of the sudden erections with Luca. Luca had agreed to be his sex coach, after all. But ever since Halloween, Luca hadn’t approached him a single time, even though he’d seemed so into it before. Maybe Chris gave terrible blowjobs.
Either way, with everything going on, Chris was glad to escape to the shelter the morning before their rematch against Chicago.
He’d been avoiding going there for a few weeks now, though usually, he went every other week.
The last time he went, he’d felt so superfluous and out of place that he had been conveniently busy with hockey or Luca or Halloween ever since.
But it was important he showed up regularly, and he was relieved to get back into his usual routine.
Maybe it would make him feel more normal.
When he got there, gray clouds covered the sky, and a light drizzle sprinkled his shoulders on the way from his car to the building, which meant no street hockey.
But the door was open, and the sound of twenty-odd voices carried from various rooms. Maybe Chris could help out with homework or something.
He’d been decent at English in high school, and maybe some of the kids were taking French.
As soon as he stepped through the door, five foot three inches of teenager—and another six inches of Afro—barreled into him, knocking the breath from his lungs.
“Chris! I knew you’d come back. Some of the others said you wouldn’t, but I knew!”
“Hi, Jayden,” Chris said, returning the hug he hadn’t expected to get. “Didn’t know you cared, buddy. And of course I came back!”
Jayden wrenched his way out of Chris’s grasp as fast as he’d arrived. “Of course I care, man. You’re my favorite.” As if he hadn’t just blown Chris’s mind, he headed down the corridor toward the main common area, where the kids were spread out around the room.
They were doing homework.
Jayden pushed Chris in the direction of one of the free chairs and got him a Gatorade, which was very kind of him.
“You don’t have to be nice to me,” Chris told him. “I promise I’ll keep coming either way.”
Rolling his eyes, Jayden said, “Yeah. That’s why I’m doing it.”
“Oh. Sweet.”
“So what’s kept you away?”
“I…” Chris considered what he could tell a teenager. Anything to do with sudden and confusing erections was out. “You’ll hate me if I say grown-up stuff, huh?”
“I’m fifteen.”
“No shit! Did I miss your birthday, dude?”
“Whatever.”
“Not whatever. Did you have a party? Tell me all about it!”
Jayden fixed him with an unimpressed look. “You’re changing the subject.”
Chris sighed. “Okay, so we’ve been having some drama on the team, I guess. Some of the guys have been keeping secrets, and some of the other guys got upset about it.”
“You don’t have to dumb it way down for me.”
“No, I know. But I can’t say much. It’s other people’s secrets, you know?”
Jayden nodded sagely. “Got it. But now everyone knows?”
“Not everyone. There’s a few Russian guys on the team, and they’re a whole different culture, so it can be hard.
” It was a dimension to the problem Chris hadn’t considered before Halloween—how different it would be for the Russians to acclimate to having queer teammates.
He wished he knew more about the world. Then he wouldn’t always be blindsided by these things.
It made him think, in retrospect, that he’d been too harsh on Tom and Jax.
He should apologize.
Jayden’s forehead wrinkled up on a frown. “Sucks. Sounds like when I had to explain to Alicia why she couldn’t touch my hair. We got into a whole big thing, and Mara had to call us both into her office.”
Chris blinked. “Is hair touching a cultural thing? I thought it was rude to touch people’s hair without their permission.”
Three kids at the table near him cracked up, including Jayden. Chris winced. There he went again, being an idiot about everything.
But Jayden must have caught sight of his expression because once he’d stopped laughing, he said, “Oh, no, dude, you’re totally right. It is rude, but people do it to Black people all the time anyway.”
Chris breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ve never been too dumb to be racist before.”
Jayden burst into laughter again, and Chloe, who had yet to speak more than three words when any given hockey player spoke to her, started snickering too.
It wasn’t so bad to be laughed at when Chris had made the joke himself.
By the time everyone calmed down, he’d caught sight of the French homework spread out on the table.
He might know nothing about their lives, but he did know when to use the plus-que-parfait instead of the imparfait.
Mara joined them as they were finishing up on the worksheets. “You are a lifesaver,” she said. “I’m the rare gay girl who’s good at math and terrible at languages.”
“Oh, I’m just from Montreal,” Chris demurred.
Shaking her head at him, Mara tutted. “You also speak Italian—don’t lie.”
“Seriously?” Jayden said. “That’s so cool. All I know is Spanish.”
“Spanish is awesome!” Chris said. “It’s the second-best romance language after Italian.”
“Won’t they kick you out of Canada for dissing French?” Mara asked.
“I’m not making the national team anyway. Besides, French has too many accents, and the spelling is dumb.”
“I’m telling Emily you said so,” Jayden said, and vaulted off his chair to find the girl whom Chris had been helping with her homework.