Chapter Text
The first time that Rose Landry meets Svetlana Vetrova, she is totally smitten.
For one, Svetlana is gorgeous, like unfairly gorgeous, like God had a favorite and it was clearly Svetlana Vetrova. Gorgeous brown skin that was so clear it practically glistened, curls that looked that they were individually crafted by God himself, and the sweetest, hottest smile that Rose had seen on any woman ever.
And the kicker? She’s fucking hilarious. Like Rose feels like she’s going to pee herself from laughing so hard at the woman in front of her. She’s a little obsessed with Svetlana and she absolutely wants to have more conversations with her, so she shoots her shot.
“Frankly, I think we may have to make a group chat,” Rose says. They’re watching Ilya and Shane play mermaids in the lake. They keep stopping to kiss and decidedly ignoring Svetlana’s questions about the acceptability of homosexuality in the mermaid kingdom. Rose wants Svetlana’s number in part because she wants wants to talk to Svetlana more. Mostly for skin care tips because Svetlana’s skin is truly gorgeous.
“A group chat?” Svetlana asks. She does that smile again and Rose’s stomach does a flip flop. (How does it feel to be God’s favorite, Svetlana?)
“Yes,” Rose answers, suddenly feeling a little self conscious. “Or just a chat, I guess. It would be called Personally Victimized by Queer Hockey Players with an Eight Year Long Situationship.”
“You know, if you want my number, Rose. You can just ask.” Svetlana winks and it is truly unfair that Rose isn’t a lesbian because absolutely that would’ve melted her into a total puddle.
Rose backtracks. “I just meant…”
“Relax, Rose,” Svetlana says then she pulls out her phone and hands it to Rose. Rose would be a fool not to put her number in, if nothing else than for another person to talk hockey and skin care with.
When Rose finishes putting her name in, she gets her own phone back.
Svetlana’s contact reads:
Svetlana Vetrova 😘
* * *
Rose Landry
Do you think Ottawa fans are totally confused as to why a superstar who could’ve gone virtually anywhere came to Ottawa?
Svetlana Vetrova 😘
Yesterday I was listening to a gay hockey podcast and one of them quite literally said: A man only moves to fucking Ottawa for love. I wonder if he’s in a secret gay relationship with Montreal star center, Shane Hollander
Rose Landry
NO FUCKING WAY
Svetlana sends the clip, and sure enough, the woman in a rainbow Philadelphia Sky cap is joking with her friend about Ilya and Shane dating.
Rose Landry
If only they knew! Also thank you for the podcast rec. I am so tired of all the dude bro podcasts.
Svetlana Vetrova 😘
Oh, I have a list. Only hot sapphic podcasters for me. Actually, I have my own podcasts!
Rose Landry
Wow all this just for a secret plug to your podcast?
Svetlana sends a link in response.
Her podcast, After the Whistle, is only produced once a month and she interviews mostly retired hockey players about the changes in the game.
Svetlana radiant in the videos, always smiling unless a certain player or team pisses her off, skin always shining.
After a six hour rabbit hole, Rose texts Svetlana.
Rose Landry
Okay I’m officially obsessed with your podcast.
Svetlana Vetrova 😘
What can I say? The ladies love me 😉
* * *
The second time they meet in person is in Boston.
Rose is doing a press tour for some boring X-Squad sequel that failed the Betchdel Test and she’s bored out of her mind when she gets a text.
Svetlana Vetrova 😘
Saw you on Good Morning Boston. Doing anything tonight?
Rose Landry
Maybe going out with my costars.
Svetlana Vetrova 😘
How about a Bruins game in box seats? I know the caterers and the food is amazing. Oh! And an open bar
Rose Landry
No annoying men who make triple what I did and smelled like seaweed the entire time we were on set to get into character as Aquarium Guy? Im sold!
Svetlana Vetrova 😘
Perfect. Just go to the media booth and there will be a ticket with your name on it.
Rose had a terrible secret. She can’t hold her liquor.
As it stands, she’s about a half shot away from spilling that secret along with her other ones.
Rose knows she’s drunk because it seems like Svetlana is flirting with her which is impossible. Because Rose is straight and so is Svetlana. Probably. Rose has never asked.
She does right then: “Are you gay?”
Svetlana smirks. “Bisexual actually, or pansexual technically. I’m more interested in how people make me feel than what’s in their pants.”
Svetlana is so pretty and Rose quietly envies the fact that she’s able to like boys and girls. Men can be so lousy sometimes, when they’re not secretly gay. Rose would very much like options.
“That sounds so cool. I wish I was gay,” Rose blurts. She is so so so drunk. She doesn’t wish she was gay. It just… it seems so nice to be in a relationship with another woman. Like, marrying Svetlana would be nice, spending their days talking hockey, cooking together, sharing skin care supplies.
“Oh, you’re… not?” Svetlana asks. She looks surprised.
“Nope!” Rose says. She hates to disappoint and Svetlana’s warm brown eyes look a little perplexed. “Sorry,” she adds. And then she feels foolish so she tacks on a: “Not that I would assume you were attracted to me.”
Rose wonders if it would be possible to shatter the glass window of the box and go crashing to the ground below. Why is she like this?
“No worries,” Svetlana smirks. “I mean, I’m a little disappointed that you’re…” she pauses and looks at Rose in a way that makes her heart flip. “Heterosexual.”
The rest of the game is fine. Rose tries not be hyperaware of the way she sits next to Svetlana. She’s so fucking pretty. If she dates a woman, that woman is going to be very very lucky.
* * *
Rose doesn’t see Svetlana until Shane invites her to his cottage for the weekend in the summer.
She isn’t expecting Svetlana but when she arrives, and Svetlana is looking fucking perfect as always. She’s suntanning in a bikini that doesn’t leave much to the imagination and Rose feels her cheeks heat. She’s so fucking gorgeous.
“Hey, Rose. It’s been awhile,” Svetlana says.
“Yeah, sorry, I got caught up filming in Bulgaria.”
It was for some film that will probably win an Oscar. Rose will probably be nominated. Her team had liked that she’d been friendly with her costar who was 15 years older than Rose, a terrible kisser, and who thought breath mints and nicotine gum replaced dental care. They’d been photographed a little around the town, mainly because there was very little other places to eat in the tiny town they were filming in.
“What were you filming?” Svetlana asks.
“Some Oscar bait,” Rose answers.
“You could do better than Oscar bait,” Svetlana says. She turns around on the dock and Rose’s eyes are instantly drawn to the way that Svetlana’s thighs and ass ripple as she moves. She’s fucking gorgeous.
“Probably,” Rose says. “But I get paid a few million to play a compelling damsel in distress.”
“I think you could do with a stronger role, like your character in X-Squad, before the bitter white boys complained you weren’t hot enough. I mean, Starlett has an incredible storyline in the comics where she comes out as a…” Svetlana trails off.
Rose, who read every comic that mentioned Starlett’s name when she first got the role, knows this storyline. Starlett realizes she’s a lesbian and marries the love of her life. “She comes out as a lesbian. I was honestly looking forward to that storyline. I cried when I read it in the comics.”
“But it’s too woke for them now,” Svetlana sounds bitter, and Rose can hear her Russian accent creeping into her voice.
Rose, who has never been good at knowing when or how to ask questions, blurts out the worst possible question: “Why do you have a Russian accent sometimes but not all the time?”
“I grew up in Boston,” Svetlana says. She exaggerates the ah sound in Boston, as if to make her point. “But I spent my summers in Russia with my father.”
Rose is expecting it to be the end of the conversation but Svetlana says, “Want to go for a walk?”
Svetlana puts a summer dress over her bikini and Rose does her best not to try and sneak one more glance at how beautiful she is.
They find one of the trails that goes around the lake near Shane’s house.
“So, you lived in Michigan growing up, right?” Svetlana asks.
“Yeah-“ Roses instinct is to do the stupid little hand map and she goes to put her hand up and then lowers it, a little embarrassed.
“No, no,” Svetlana says with that gorgeous smile. “Show me on the hand.”
Rose does, feeling her cheeks heat up as she points at her hometown. Svetlana looks delighted. “I wish Massachusetts was that cool. Or Russia…” she says and then trails off.
“Did you like it in Russia?” Rose asks.
Svetlana’s smile shifts to something sadder. “When I was younger in Russia, summers were nice. It was a lot of fun and my dad usually hung around with American athletes so I wasn’t the only Black kid, but once he retired, and once he started moving up in politics at home… summers got worse. People stopped talking to me. The other kids teased me and anyone who hung out with me. Ilya took quite a few beatings for me.”
Rose frowns. “They beat him?” She asks.
Svetlana nods. “Roughed him up pretty good, probably not much worse than what he dealt with on the rink but people did not like my mom. They did not like me because I was Black. My dad wanted me to be in Russia for high school but I barely lasted a month before he sent me to an international school in Boston. I spent long enough in Russia that the accent creeps in and I’m fluent in Russian, but Boston is home.”
Rose wants to ask a thoughtful question but she figures that there probably isn’t a question that Svetlana hasn’t heard and that Svetlana is sharing this because she wants to and Rose can use Google later and get most of her questions answered.
“So what about you?” Svetlana asks. “Let me guess: Private school, K-12, graduated with the same people you went to kindergarten with?”
“Close,” Rose says. “K-8 private school and then and arts and science boarding school, all girls.”
“My boarding school was all girls,” Svetlana says. “It’s certainly a unique experience: syncing up periods, scouting out the boys in town, and of course the intense relationship with your roommate that feels worse than a breakup when you have a falling out.”
Rose’s cheeks heat up again because she’s remembering Summer and her long blonde hair and how Rose was a little too obsessed with her and how much it hurt when they stopped talking a month before senior showcase.
“Boarding school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but I loved mine.” Svetlana smiles. In the northeast, boarding schools are a dime a dozen. Some of them are very nice.
“Mine was a little strict,” Rose says. There were worse boarding schools to go to, but Mom had selected Rose’s for its rigidity.
“Too bad,” Svetlana responds. “Mine was relaxed enough I could count on them to not tell my dad when I got caught kissing girls.”
“Would he not approve?” Rose asks and then kicks herself because it’s really none of her business.
“He is very old fashioned,” Svetlana says, “And he agrees with Russia about homosexuality.“
“Oh,” Rose says. And then for some reason she says: “My grandparents were like that, not Russian,” she clarifies needlessly. “Against gay people, but my aunt is gay, so she and my mom and their brother just stopped talking to their parents.”
“It sounds like your mom is a good sister,” Svetlana says. “My brother would do the same for me. But I figure there’s no point in coming out unless I’m actually getting serious with a woman.”
“Makes sense,” Rose says. And then she blurts out a question before she can think better of it: “How did you know?” She asks. “That you were… bisexual?”
“Well, that would be courtesy of the intense friendship I had with my roommate. We used to… practice kissing,” Svetlana says with a bit of a wicked grin. “I caught feelings a little too hard.”
Rose decidedly does not think of practicing kissing with Summer of warm lips that tasted like vanilla lip balm and sunshine. She didn’t catch feelings though because she’s not a lesbian.
They’ve completed their loop around the lake and hopefully the boys are done fooling around.
They are, and Shane is making burgers and he’s made entirely too many so they sit at the picnic tables and start eating.
They’re trading stories about dating. Svetlana has some funny ones about dating Irish boys and girls in Boston.
“You and your redheads,” Ilya jokes and for some reason, Rose’s cheeks flush.
“Hey, what can I say, I have a type.” Svetlana is so fucking gorgeous and Rose feels like every time she meets her she finds new proof Svetlana is God’s favorite. It’s so unfair.
“Rose has a type too,” Shane says, because he’s a fucking asshole. “Gay guys.” He grins and the entire table starts laughing.
“It’s not my fault most of my ex boyfriends are gay,” Rose pouts.
Svetlana finds this very interesting and her intense eyes bore into Rose as Rose flounders to explain that she grew up a theater kid, that most of the guys she knew were gay, that there were half a dozen closet cases in Hollywood that dated women solely for the image and were utter assholes, that she’s really really busy and it’s totally not her fault that most of her boyfriends were gay.
“Define most,” Svetlana says. She smirks as she takes a sip of her beer. She is so fucking pretty. She’d probably know immediately if a guy was gay because they wouldn’t be staring at how gorgeous she was.
Rose doesn’t answer so Shane, the traitor, chimes in: “Eighty percent, right?”
Rose is fucking mortified for some reason but she nods.
Svetlana hums. “What about the other twenty percent?”
“Well,” Rose looks down and doesn’t know quite how to explain. “They weren’t technically boyfriends…”
Shane gets it immediately because Rose explained it to him once.
“What do you mean?” Svetlana asks.
“Well I thought they were boyfriends when we dated but it turns out, well, they’re ex-girlfriends now.”
“How are they girlfriends if you thought they were boyfriends?” Ilya Rozanov actually looks surprisingly adorable when he’s confused.
Svetlana says something to Ilya in Russian. When the furrow in his brow deepens she says something else. And then Ilya goes: “Oh!”
“That is very good that your ex-girlfriends, they started living as themselves,” Ilya smiles. He’s so sweet.
“So, how many people have you dated?” Svetlana asks.
“Ten or eleven,” Rose answers.
“So, eight of them were gay?” Svetlana asks.
“I mean… yeah but that’s just theater girl luck,” Rose says. “All the good guys are gay!“
There’s laughter from everyone at the table and Svetlana’s lips quirk ever so slightly too. Rose can’t help her own laughter.
“But you’ve never dated a straight guy?” Svetlana asks.
“Not yet, but there’s still time,” Rose says. There’s still plenty of time. The new costar of her upcoming project is pretty attractive and he wasn’t a total dick at their chemistry read.
“Well, best of luck to you in that avenue. I find that straight boys can be…” Svetlana waves a hand in the air. “Well, I don’t date them.”
“They’re a lot of work,” Rose says. “Honestly, I wish I could date girls. It seems easier.”
Svetlana starts giggling so hard Rose wonders if she’s had too many beers. “Spoken like someone who has never dated women,” she laughs airily. “Trust me, it is not all that it seems to be. Women can be just as bad as this one can be.” She pokes Ilya as if to make her point.
He pokes her back and then it starts a poking war that rapidly escalates into the entire table having a food fight.
Rose has too much fun with it, there’s not much food left on the table, mostly burger buns and fruit, and it’s a very sticky fight.
Rose’s best move is managing to get a dollop of cream cheese dip on Svetlana’s nose.
It’s a massive glob, so some of it slides to Svetlana’s upper lip. Svetlana looks directly at Rose and then carefully, slowly licks her upper lip.
Svetlana is so fucking gorgeous.
Roses stomach flip flops again and if Rose were a lesbian, she might’ve kissed Svetlana then and there.
Unfortunately, Rose isn’t a lesbian, and that really is a damn shame.