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“It’s not like I meant to keep it a secret,” Max says, though he’s not sure Harris can hear him over the sound of his own pacing.
He still hasn’t decided if he wants him to. He was never going to tell anyone. He was going to die with this secret, probably, or at least retire with it in twenty years.
He hasn’t even told Julian and he tells Julian literally everything. Well, almost everything. Except for the bit where he’s in love with him, but that’s mostly irrelevant.
“Okay…” Harris says, exchanging a confused glance with Troy, who shrugs.
“Keep what a secret, exactly?” Troy probes.
Max holds his breath. He should tell them. He came here to tell them, because this is getting weird and he doesn’t know what to do and if he keeps trying to figure it out on his own, his brain might combust.
“ISpeakRussian,” Max blurts out finally, in a rush, all as one word.
Harris lets out a laugh so loud that Max startles. Troy, for his part, doesn’t blink. “Oh my God, kid, don’t scare me like that," Harris says. "I thought you murdered someone. Or cheated on someone, more likely. Do you know how many guys in this league cheat?”
“Uh,” Max answers eloquently.
“Not all of us,” Troy says pointedly to his husband. “Okay, so you speak Russian. So what?”
“So,” Max says, hoping the rest will be obvious, “Roz doesn’t know that I do.”
“Okay. And you’re worried he’ll feel…left out?” Troy says.
“No I…” They don’t know. Of course they don’t. Because they’re lucky enough to not speak Russian.
Max sighs, settles into a seat across from Harris, and starts from the beginning.
***
It makes sense, really.
Of course Roz doesn’t assume the rookie plucked from Cornell knows Russian. Max’s last name is literally Smith.
He’s not famous enough for a Wikipedia page with a detailed early life section, not yet anyway. So no one really knows that his mom’s mom came over from Russia and barely speaks a word of English. She’s too sick to leave the house much these days, so she couldn’t fly out with his parents for their home opener.
It’s not a secret he’s been carefully harboring or anything. It just would be deeply embarrassing to speak Russian with Ilya Rozanov.
Because unlike Ilya Rozanov, Max grew up in the suburbs of fucking Indiana. He learned Russian in bits and pieces, scraps fed to him alongside his grandmother’s blini. His grasp on pronunciation is atrocious.
But he understands it perfectly.
So before Max’s second NHL game, when Ilya turns to his husband and mutters something in Russian, Max knows exactly what he says: If you score tonight, you’ll score later.
“Stop,” Shane says in Russian. “Not here.”
Max blushes and drops his head, staring intently at his skates.
He has no clue how much worse it’s going to get.
***
Their first road trip is, in a word, brutal.
Not game wise. Game wise, they’re playing great. Max scores two goals in one game against New York, along with an assist on one of Shane’s. After, Julian sends him a long string of smiley emojis that make Max’s heart beat stupidly fast.
Max is debating if it would be too much to send a kissy emoji back, when Ilya’s voice rings out, loud and clear. “As soon as we get back, you’re going to ride me harder than you were riding that poor, poor goalie.”
Max’s head pops up, shocked no one’s reacting, because the dude’s basically shouting and somehow he’s not getting chirped within an inch of his life?! It takes a second for Max’s exhausted, mashed potato of a post game brain to realize Roz is speaking Russian.
He sneaks a glance over at Roz, across the aisle from him, Shane listing over in the window seat. He’s gone quiet and is stroking a light hand up Shane’s back.
It’s such a sweet, tame gesture that Max starts to wonder if he hallucinated the words. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility. He really needs to get laid.
“One finger, then two, til you’re begging for more,” Roz says, and okay, nope that was definitely real, Max can see his lips moving now. Shit. Max ducks his head down, scrambling for the AirPods nestled way too deep in his pocket. Luca casts him a concerned glance, which he pointedly ignores. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you beg long. That goal was so beautiful. You think I won’t reward you for that? I’d reward you for every goal if you’d let me. You deserve it. You deserve my—“
Max’s fingers move so quickly, so violently that he drops his headphones in the aisle. He watches in what he swears is slow motion as Ilya leans down and swoops them up.
“So slippery off the ice,” Roz chides in English, clicking his tongue. “Like the candy.”
“What?” Max squeaks.
“He's saying you have butterfingers,” Shane supplies from his post of leaning sleepily against the window.
“Oh. Right. Yeah. Ha.” Max doesn’t manage to actually laugh, but he does say it. He reaches a hand out for his AirPods, but Roz holds tight, swipes a thumb over the Winnie the Pooh case.
It’s definitely embarrassing to have as a twenty-one-year-old, he knows, but his dad got it for him and Max brought it on the road for all his games back at Cornell. Sometimes he thinks he got to the Frozen Four by the grace of it alone.
Max stares down at that dingy little case with a ridiculous amount of longing. He wants so badly to shove them in his ears, crank up the volume, and listen to the latest playlist Julian made him until he forgets what he just heard.
But Ilya keeps gripping it, for some reason. Max is starting to wonder if it would be taboo to forcibly claw them out of his captain’s hand.
“You did good tonight, Smithy,” Roz says, spinning the case around in his palm. “Very good.”
“Oh. Uh. Okay. Thanks.” He tries not to think about Roz rewarding Shane for his goal and fails miserably. Ugh, this would all be so much easier if he was straight and didn’t find that stupidly hot.
He needs this bus to go faster. He needs to get back to the hotel and get himself off in the shower thinking about some random, ambiguous set of abs that don’t belong to Ilya Rozanov or Shane Hollander or God forbid Julian.
Or maybe he needs this bus to crash. Maybe, he needs to look Ilya in the eyes and speak some fucking Russian.
Say something. Say anything to let him know that he knows.
But he can’t. He just can’t manage it. He’s frozen by his hyperawareness that he heard something he wasn’t supposed to and his nagging semi.
Roz hands over the AirPods finally, offers Max his signature wry smile before turning away.
“The kid reminds me of you,” Roz says to Shane in Russian, startling Max. Wait, is Ilya talking about him? He can't be. There’s no world where Max is comparable to Shane Fucking Hollander. “When you were his age, I mean. He never gives himself a break. Not that you do now, but you’re getting better, I think. Always getting better.”
“Ilya, I’m sorry, my brain is so fried, I’m only getting like ten percent of this,” Shane says.
“I know, sweetheart.” Ilya drops a kiss to Shane’s temple. “Is for me.”
Well. At least Max’s horniness goes away, replaced by the sweet sensation of guilt.
***
The problem is, there are no other Russians on the team besides Ilya.
There was one, but Sobol was traded two seasons ago, which still gets Max’s grandmother all fired up. Of course Rozanov thinks no one understands what he says to his husband at practice. And after games. And when they’re out for drinks. And in one notable, horrible instance, in the shower.
Honestly, Max sometimes doubts his own understanding. Sometimes when Roz speaks Russian it’s relatively tame, thank God, but just as confusing.
“Did you call the lawn company, my turkey?” Roz says one day after practice. Max frowns. Maybe he needs to work on his Russian. He should really call his grandma.
Shane just nods and whispers, “turkey?” and Roz pats him on the shoulder.
***
It’s a game, Max comes to realize. Roz calls him a random word in Russian, Shane translates it. Simple.
Except it’s not always that simple.
Sometimes, it’s like the November day when Shane drops down for a push up at the gym and Roz shouts across the room in Russian, “You’re always so pretty on your knees, my vacuum.”
Shane flips him off, muttering, “You were the vacuum this morning.”
Max is thankful he has the exercise bike to blame for his blush.
***
“It’s not funny!”
“It’s pretty funny.” Harris is doubled over, practically hyperventilating. Troy reaches a hand out and pats him on the back.
“I can talk to them for you,” Troy says.
“No!” Max reaches a hand up like he’s going to physically stop the wall of muscle that is Troy Barrett. “You can’t. It gets worse. I mean, them not knowing I know gets worse.”
Harris stops laughing, probably because of the panic now reaching Max’s eyes. “I’m listening.”
***
It’s not that it gets worse, necessarily. It would be more apt to say that it gets more personal.
Sure, most of the time Roz is just describing what he wants to do to Shane later in frankly excruciating detail. Max has gotten really good at zoning out and daydreaming about puppies.
But when December rolls around, Ilya starts talking about how hard it is, this time of year, with everyone’s families coming to town. How hearing all this talk about home reminds him that he doesn’t have one anymore.
How he misses his mother and hates that he can’t miss his father. How sometimes he thinks of her lonely grave and prays she doesn’t rest her head there, doesn’t wonder why he never visits.
How some days, he’s so tired. Tired of hockey, tired of living, tired of a brain that won’t right itself no matter how much he begs it to. How he can’t wait to retire, to have children. How he hopes they’re nothing like him and everything like Shane.
He says it so quickly, Shane doesn’t seem to understand most of it.
Max wishes he didn’t.
He thinks of so many responses, in Russian and in English. I hear you and I see you and I’m sorry and I don’t think you see the way Shane looks at you, or you’d know for certain you have a home.
Max wants to say that sometimes, he goes back to his stupidly big apartment and nearly collapses with the realization that no amount of goals or wins or money will ever bring his father back. That when Max heard his own name thrown around as an early Calder contender, his first thought was ‘what’s the point if he’s not here to see it?’
Much like the confessions he practices saying to Julian before their weekly phone calls, they die in his throat.
***
Max knows he needs to say something though—that he needed to two months ago.
That’s why he’s here in Harris’s office when he’d rather be literally anywhere else not talking about this ever.
He doesn’t share all the details of what Roz said. It’s too personal, too much to know, let alone share. He’d forget it all if he could.
Max stands, pacing again, and says, “I mean, what do I do? I can’t tell them I know now. It’s way too late for that.”
“It’s really okay,” Troy says far too optimistically. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
“Yeah, you can say that because you're not the one who heard Ilya tell Shane he misses his slutty little mouth."
Troy’s face goes bright red, but Harris looks largely unphased. “He misses it? How? He sees him all the time.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m just saying, they’re not even apart on the road. It’s unfair, really.” Harris casts Troy a heated glance. Great, now Max is thinking about Troy’s slutty little mouth. Play for the gayest team in the NHL, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.
Max clears his throat.
“Anyways!” Harris clears his. “You need to tell them. I promise it’ll be okay. They’ll laugh about it. Well, Shane won’t, obviously. But Ilya definitely will.”
“Fine. I…I will. After we win in Chicago tomorrow.” He can do it. He has to do it. Harris is tagging along for this road trip, so he’ll be there to make sure Max does it.
Besides, his mom’s coming out to the game. If this all goes to hell, he can just quit on the spot, move home, and never show his face in Canada again.
Harris fist pumps the air. “That’s the spirit, my turkey!”
***
They lose. They lose by two and it sucks and most of the mistakes they made were preventable and he can’t tell Roz now. Maybe when they win their first Stanley Cup together, he can say congratulations in Russian and he’ll be too happy to care.
“Smith,” a loud voice booms. He turns to see a guy in security garb beckoning him. Oh God. They know he’s been accidentally spying on his captain and they’re kicking him off the team. “Guest for you.”
Oh. Okay. He exhales in relief. It’s sort of overwhelming how much he needs a hug from his mom right now.
“Guest?” Bood waggles his eyebrows. “You got a girl?”
“It could be a boy,” Wyatt says. “Or a they. Is that the right word?”
“Please stop talking,” Shane says.
“I want to meet Smith’s lover.” Roz grins and heads to the door. For a split second, Max panics that Julian tagged along and he’s never going to hear the end of it.
“Ilya Rozanov!” Max’s grandmother reaches her arms out. His grandmother who watches all of his games at home, who hasn’t seen him play in person in years. She’s here. She’s here. And she’s hugging Rozanov.
“Hello!” Roz takes the hug in stride.
“Wow,” Bood says, “she’s older than I expected. Talk about a cougar.” Max doesn't see who, but based on Bood's yelp, someone has the decency to punch him.
“We were so happy he ended up on your team,” his grandmother says. “You take good care of him, I assume?”
Only, she says it in Russian. Because of course she does. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
Well. It’s been fun, this whole life on planet earth thing. If only he wasn’t going to hell. It’d be cool to see his dad again.
Roz’s face breaks into a grin. “Yes! We take such good care of him,” he answers in Russian without missing a beat. Which is something. Maybe. “He takes care of us too. He’s an amazing player. Where are you from?”
They start talking back and forth in rapid Russian, and a little line forms in Shane’s forehead. “Your grandma speaks Russian? That’s your grandma, right?”
Troy shoots him a largely unhelpful, pitying look. “Uh. Yes?” Max says. “It’s—“
His grandmother rushes forward then, nearly topples him over. “My beautiful boy. You were perfect.”
He blinks at her. He considers responding in English, but he can’t. No matter how embarrassing this is about to be, she drove all this way for him. That means something. It means everything, really.
He takes the world’s deepest breath and finally, finally, says in Russian, “Thanks. We did lose though.”
“So? You were the most handsome boy out there. And the fastest.” She squeezes his cheek. He ducks his head, suddenly grateful that only Roz and maybe Holly can understand her. Small blessings. “You’ll be home for the holidays?”
“Yeah, for four days. We’ll bake together,” he assures her.
“Good.” She pats his cheek. “Your father would be so proud of you.”
“Oh.” Max has heard this plenty of times over the past few years. It shouldn’t hit him so hard now, but it does anyway. “Thank you.”
He swallows down every last emotion and keeps his eyes trained on her until his mom helps her back to the car, until her figure’s fully retreated. Then finally, finally, he puts his best game face on and turns to his teammates.
“Hey, so what the fuck was that?” Bood says.
“You speak Russian,” Roz says more plainly. He’s smiling, but his eyes are all wide, an expression Max has never seen from him before. Shock, maybe.
Max has no clue how to answer so he lands on a rather poetic: “Yeah.”
“Shit, man,” Wyatt says. “What else are you hiding from us? Besides your secret girl or boy or they-friend.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Roz asks in Russian.
He shrugs. “My pronunciation isn’t good,” he replies in Russian, dropping his gaze to the floor. “I understand better than I speak.”
“Your pronunciation is fine! Great! You’re too hard on yourself, like always.” Roz pats him on the back. Okay. So maybe this isn’t the end of the world. Maybe this will be nice, even. The familiarity certainly is. And maybe—
“Sorry did you…” He turns toward Shane whose face is somehow redder than a Centaurs jersey. “Did you say you understand Russian?”
“Um. Yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—I shouldn’t have—“
“Wait. So you understand what Roz and Holly say to each other?” Dykstra pieces it together first. Loudly. In case anyone missed it somehow.
Well, it’s not like he can deny it now. “…yes?”
“I’m so sorry.” Shane looks like he wants to die. Max is acutely familiar with the feeling. Ilya, annoyingly, just looks gleeful.
“No, I’m sorry,” Max says. “I should have told you back in October.”
“Why didn’t you?” Shane folds his arms tight.
“Shane. Is obvious why,” Roz says. “He is…what is the word in English? Pervert. He is a pervert.”
“No!” Max shrieks.
“Oh, so that means whatever the fuck you guys are saying in Russian is perv material?” Wyatt says.
“Oh shiiit,” Dykstra whispers like this is a revelation somehow.
“Of course,” Roz says, unphased. “We are very sexy.”
“He shouldn’t have been saying any of that at work.” Shane seems to have pivoted from anger back to shame. “I’ve told him that. Many times.”
“Yeah,” Max says. “I, uh, know.”
“Right.” Shane clears his throat. “Yeah.”
“Okay, what the hell do they say?” Bood says. “You have to tell us.”
“We’ll haze the shit out of you if you don’t, rookie,” Dykstra says with a glare that’s probably meant to be menacing.
“Sorry, I can’t,” Max says, because he’s not stupid enough to cross Ilya Rozanov. Also he’s pretty sure his cheeks will melt from heat if he repeats that shit to the whole team. “You’ll have to learn Russian.”
“We’ll get it out of you,” Bood says, earning an approving nod from Dykstra.
“You won’t. He barely told us,” Troy says, then seems to realize too late what he’s confessed to. “I mean. He told me and Harris yesterday. That he understood. That’s all.”
“Yeah,” Harris’s voice calls from down the hall where he’s been scrolling on his phone. “Ask Ilya about Shane’s slutty little mouth.”
“Oh my God.” Shane groans into his hands while everyone else whoops and catcalls. “I’m divorcing you. I’m serving the papers tonight.”
“No,” Roz says. “You would miss me too much. My mouth is slutty too.”
“Wow. This is…not what I expected when your mom invited me to tag along.”
Max’s head swivels to see Julian standing there, hands buried in the pockets of his jean jacket, gorgeous as ever.
Great. What’s next? Is the clown who scared him at his ninth birthday going to make an appearance?
“Julian! Hey!” Max says, and his voice cracks. Like full on cracks right down the middle. As if he’s fifteen years old.
Max moves forward to hug him, then thinks better of it at the last second and pulls his arms back, nearly falling over. “What are you, uh, doing here?”
Julian’s forehead wrinkles. “Watching you play?”
“Right. Yeah. Totally.”
“This is painful,” Roz says in Russian.
“No, don’t—“
“You want to fuck him, so fuck him.” Roz gives Julian an excruciatingly long once over. “Or have him fuck you, probably.”
“Please, he—“
“Relax. Don’t overcomplicate this, Smithy.”
Julian’s eyebrows lift til they’re practically skyborne. Max is pretty sure he’s going to be having nightmares about today for the rest of his life.
“They call you Smithy?” Julian asks simply. In perfect Russian, his pronunciation always better than Max’s. Ever the over achiever.
For the second time today, Ilya’s eyes widen in surprise. “Uh, Ilya, this is Julian,” Max says, way, way too late. “We grew up together. He’s, uh, still in college. He studies Russian literature. Julian, this is Ilya Rozanov and…company.”
“Company?” Bood whispers. “What the hell?”
“I can’t believe the kid’s dating a genius,” Wyatt says. “That’s supposed to be my thing!”
“Wait, if he has a boyfriend, why does he always kinda seem like he needs to get laid?” Dykstra says.
“Because the child lives in America,” Bood says. “Phone sex only. A modern day tragedy.”
Yeah, Max is starting to remember why he didn’t introduce Julian to his teammates at the game he came to in October. Luckily, Julian seems to be mostly focused on Ilya. Or not luckily, maybe.
“Huh,” Julian says. “Based on the poster my roommate has of you, I thought you’d be shorter for some reason.”
“Your roommate’s a hockey fan?” Max asks, surprised he hasn’t heard this before.
Julian smirks. “No.”
Roz lets out a howling laugh, pats Julian on the back a little too roughly. “I like you. Okay, anyone else speak Russian? No more secrets.”
“I feel like I’ve picked up some things from sharing hotel walls with you guys,” Wyatt says.
“Totally,” Dystra agrees. “At least ‘more’ and ‘harder’.”
“This team is all pervs,” Roz says, grinning. “How do you know this is what we are saying?”
“The kid will tell us.”
“No I won’t!”
"Your boyfriend will then."
“Can we please stop discussing this?” Shane looks close to ripping his hair out. Or maybe his husband's hair.
Everyone keeps discussing it anyway, of course. Julian leans in close in the meantime, his breath hot on Max’s cheek. “415,” he says.
“What?”
“I’m in the same hotel as you.” Julian grazes a hand on Max’s elbow and then, as quickly as he came, he’s gone.
Max swallows hard. He searches for an air vent he can do some deep breathing under or something, because Jesus, and finds Roz staring at him with a shit eating grin. Wonderful.
“Aww. I was right,” he declares in Russian, slinging a hand over Max’s shoulder. “You’re just like Shane.”
“I’m not sure I want to know what that means.”
“You’re a bottom, right?”
“Yeah, I definitely didn’t want to know.”
“You’ve heard all our conversations.” Ilya rolls his eyes. “I know you already know.”
Oh. Right. “Whatever,” Max mumbles, in English this time. The guys all head inside to grab their shit and get out of here now that the show’s over. Roz stays in the hallway though, watching Max, frowning. “What?”
“You are not going to his room?” Ilya says. Max isn’t sure what on his face confirms this, but Roz lets out a loud groan. “Max. You have to. Captain’s orders. If you do not get laid tonight I will have Wiebe send you down to the AHL, goodbye.”
“I—I can’t.”
“Hockey players are allowed to be gay now,” Ilya says seriously. “I know you were not born yet, but Scott Hunter changed the laws.”
Max snorts. “It’s not that. It’s…he lives in America.”
“So?” Ilya throws his hands in the air. “Do I have to tell you more bedtime stories? Once upon a time, a Russian in Boston fell for a stupid Canadian and now they are the sexiest couple in history and win Stanley Cups together.”
“You were together when you were in Boston?” Max blurts out. Sue him, he’s a gay guy who grew up playing hockey. He’s a little invested in their epic love story.
“What, you think I went to Ottawa for fun?”
“I went to Ottawa for fun,” Max mutters. Because he got other offers when he graduated, better offers, but none of them could give him what Ottawa does. This. A team that’s accepting and kind and weirdly invested in if he gets his ass pounded.
“Yes, because Ottawa is good now. You’re welcome,” Roz says. “Look…Max…” He narrows his eyes. It’s a face Max recognizes from his grandmother, when she’s trying to speak English to their neighbors and failing.
“What is it?” he asks softly, in Russian this time.
Ilya smiles appreciatively. “You’re like me,” he says.
“I thought I was like Shane.”
“No, I mean you understand how short life really is. You’ve been forced to learn.”
Max remembers the supportive hand Ilya clapped on his shoulder on his father’s birthday last month. He still has no clue how Ilya knew, how he seems to know literally everything always, but he’s grateful for it.
“Yeah. I…I do.”
“Then don’t waste it. If a hot, funny guy who can speak to your grandmother wants to be with you, let him. Have fun. The rest will work out. I promise.”
“Okay.” Max nods. Fuck. Roz is right. What is he doing? Why is he wasting a single day of his precious life pretending not to be stupidly, ridiculously in love with Julian? “Okay, yeah.”
“Yeah!” Ilya cheers, finally turning back to the locker room. He stops before he opens the door, turns, and says, “Maybe not too much fun? We’re in 315. I won’t mind, but Shane gets grumpy when he loses sleep.”
Max sputters.
Then, he pulls out his phone and writes a text to Julian, sending his own hotel room number as an alternative.
Julian responds with a string of hearts. Fuck yeah.
He heads into the locker room to grab his stuff and get the hell to Julian, when he’s slapped in the chest with something. He looks down to see a strip of condoms and some lube packets, looks back up to see Ilya grinning at him.
“Seriously?” Max mutters when the guys who haven’t gone to the bus yet start catcalling again.
“Been awhile for you, yes?” Ilya shrugs.
“Dude,” Bood says. “Was that in your gear bag?”
Everyone starts shouting louder in light of this revelation, and Max takes advantage of the distraction to shove the condoms and lube in his pocket.
Ilya Rozanov, his childhood idol, his captain, maybe even his friend, catches his eye and winks.
Max is probably gonna be red til new years, but man is he glad he came to Ottawa.