Archive of Our Own

Pittsburgh, PA – Fall 2006

Sid wandered his way upstairs from the bathrooms, wiping his hands—still wet from the sink and the lack of paper towels—on his jeans. He’d gotten stuck in the bathroom for an inconvenient amount of time when a couple locals with thick accents recognized him, inexplicably trying to small talk with him while he took a leak. By the time he’d made it back out to the floor, the bouncer that had ushered them in had gestured up the stairwell.

“Friends moved upstairs, kid.”

The stairs up to the mezzanine were crowded, bodies packing the edges in inconvenient clumps, sweating and sticky and smelling of schnapps. One of the guys shouted to him as he reached the landing and Sid could just make out the words over the thumping bass.

“What the fuck, man. Did you go back to Mario’s to take a shit?” It was Talbo who had spoken, and he pushed all the guys down the bench to make room. “Sit the fuck down.”

Sit sat and was immediately given a fresh drink by Brooksy, something pink and filled with melted ice chips, poured straight from a bucket. Sid coughed when it went down, the taste clinging like medicine to his tongue.

“Jesus,” he complained. “We can’t get a couple beers around here?”

“Shit’s free and no one carded you, eh?” Brooksy chirped. “Buck up, Cap. Set a good example for the rest of the kids.”

Sid begrudgingly took another drink of whatever the hell it was and shot Brooksy a glare. Some of the guys had taken to calling him captain this season now that Mario had officially hung up the skates. But he wasn’t. Not yet. The nickname felt a little too much like a jinx.

Across the table, Geno held his own cup up and grinned, showing Sid his wonky front teeth. From the ruddy flush across his cheeks, it seemed like he was already decently on his way to drunk. Sid smiled back.

The guys returned to jawing about whatever: the game, the road trip they had to Canada upcoming and where they were planning to go out in Toronto. “What’d you guys move up here for anyway?” Sid asked Talbo, nudging his arm and leaning in to be heard.

“Trying to get G some ass,” Talbo said, kicking Geno under the table to get his attention. “Followed a group of chicks up here, but someone won’t put his balls on and go talk to ‘em.”

Sid watched Geno roll his eyes. He’d barely been with the team for a few months and shared a language with basically one of them and still the guys had taken a shine to him, razzing him within an inch of his life while he sat there and tried to keep up. But he seemed to like it well enough, or at least he didn’t mind. The trials and tribulations of being a rookie.

“Which one?” Sid asked him, keeping his questioning short the way he’d learned was most likely to get Geno to answer. “Show me?”

Geno took a sip of his drink and licked his lips, doing some funny thing with his mouth as he nodded his head to the bar tucked into the corner of the mezzanine where five or six women were gathered in tight jeans and towering heels. A redhead among them had a heart bejeweled on the ass of her pants and it glinted obviously under the strobing lights.

“Her?” Sid prodded, making a heart with his fingers to explain. But Geno shook his head, smiling sheepishly as he motioned to his own chest, curving his hands out into the air.

Beside him, Talbo had clearly noticed the exchange and devolved into peals of laughter, leaning heavily on Sid’s side and smelling overwhelmingly of body spray.

“Know what you like there, eh pal?” he said between snickers and then copied Geno’s gestures, wiggling his eyebrows all the while. “How ‘bout you go over there and ask for a squeeze.” Geno’s whole face reacted by going a deep crimson.

Sid jabbed Talbo in the side again to get him to shut the fuck up. “C’mon, man,” he said. “Don’t.”

Talbo just held his hands up in surrender.

Once Talbo was sufficiently embroiled in conversation with Bugsy about whether he was going to keep his scoring streak alive through the end of the month, Sid folded his arms and leant forward, watching Geno track his movement with keen eyes.

“You wanna talk to her, right?” Sid asked, speaking to Geno in an almost whisper. Geno nodded. Glanced over at the women again. Licked his lips. Grimaced.

“English,” he said, the admission that seemed to explain everything for the few months Sid had known him. His get-out-of-jail-free card.

“Doesn’t take much to say hi though, right?” Sid wasn’t exactly an expert in picking up women, but he wasn’t so bad as to not know the basics. Friendly greetings and a nice smile could get you a long way. Geno didn’t look terribly convinced, though, and Sid reached out to put a hand on his arm. “C’mon,” he said, giving Geno’s arm a pat. “We’ll go say hi together.”

He stood and Geno stood tentatively in return, following Sid the way he followed Gonch around the rink sometimes, toddling on long limbs like a newborn foal. Sid slowed his own steps until Geno caught up. “With the gold tank top, right?” Sid asked to Geno’s affirmative nod, and then lowered his voice a little. “She’s cute. Nice ass.”

Geno smirked then. “Nice,” he agreed.

The redhead Sid had noticed earlier clearly recognized them as they approached because she tapped her friend on the arm and then turned her body to invite them both in.

“Hey,” Sid waved. “Sidney.”

“Cassidy,” said the redhead, eyeing him with an arched eyebrow. Sid tucked his hair awkwardly behind one ear. It was so fucking hot up there. He was sweating something fierce and probably looked it. Not exactly his finest moment. “You guys lost?”

Geno was still hanging behind his shoulder, so close that Sid could feel him breathing loudly through his mouth. Sid smiled at Cassidy and then her friends in turn, the smile that won over mothers and got reporters off his back. “Nope.”

“Fair,” Cassidy said. She raised her beer to her mouth and took a long drink. She was a little intimidating. Sid kind of liked it. He’d nearly forgotten his intended task when Cassidy nodded her head at Geno lingering. “Who’s your friend?” As if she didn’t already know his name.

“Evgeni,” Geno said, shouldering in next to Sid. “Penguins. Seven-One. Hi.”

Five minutes later and Sid had already downed two tequila shots that he was going to regret in the morning. Cassidy was telling Jenny—one of the blondes—something about her roommate’s boyfriend, who in Sid’s opinion sounded like kind of a tool. He kept hearing Geno laughing behind him, that sly snickering laugh he had sometimes on the bench, a few of the girls peppering him with questions one after the other, clearly too quickly for him to keep up.

“You guys live around here?” Sid asked Jenny, who kept lighting up the front screen of her phone to check the time. Chatting up women in bars wasn’t really his thing, but neither was leaving Geno to the wolves and bailing just because he wanted to shoot the shit with the boys.

“We know the DJ,” Jenny told him, just as the music transitioned and the lights morphed from blue to green.

One of the women Geno was talking to paused mid-sentence and shrieked. “Fuck, you guys,” she crowed, shaking the women on either side of her and looking positively, joyously feral. “It’s the song. C’mon, c’mon.”

All at once the women downed their drinks and dropped the cups and bottles on the bar top the same way the guys all did when catering opened the kitchen at the rink. Purses went on shoulders. One woman tied her hair up. Cassidy took a few bills from Jenny’s hand and shoved them snugly into her bra.

“Wanna dance?” she asked, eyeing Sid with that same fiery eyebrow raised and Sid was a little hard and a little drunk and part of him maybe wanted to agree but he just stood there and shook his head.

“Gonna pass.” They had skate the next afternoon and it was his job to set a good example. And he was an awful dancer besides, far and away bad enough to kill his chances.

Geno on the other hand was grinning ear to ear, a woman draped over each arm, happy to be dragged away to the sweaty mass of bodies below. So that had been a success, at least. Sid locked eyes with him and got him to nod. “Have a blast, bud,” he said. “I’ll be with the boys if you need me.”

Geno did not, in fact, seem to need him at all. Hours passed before Sid spotted him again, hanging around the coat check as Sid and Army were gearing up to leave. Honestly, it had been so long that Sid had assumed Geno left with the whole lot of them and he’d mentally patted himself on the back for a job well done.

“One sec,” Sid said to Army as they rounded the corner. He made his way over to Geno and waved when Geno looked up from his phone.

“Hey man,” he said, looking into the coat check hallway for anyone he recognized and coming up empty. “You strike out or what?”

Geno’s answering smile refuted him, sly and curving up one side until a deep dimple formed in his cheek. That’s when Sid noticed the lipstick smeared across the collar of his t-shirt, the bruising on his neck disguised under the glow of the neon lights.

Sid’s stomach squirmed, but he disguised it by reaching out to pat Geno good-naturedly on the arm. “Guess you didn’t need my help after all, eh big guy?”

Geno flushed pink, or maybe it was just the lighting, sticking his phone into his pocket and shifting back and forth on his feet. “Thanks,” he said, not dropping Sid’s gaze.

Around them the crowd ebbed and flowed, moving through coat check and out the door. Sid could smell Geno’s sweat from how close they were, sticky and familiar from shared days at Mellon. “No worries,” he said. “Anytime.”

.

Boston, MA – Winter 2007

"Someone's getting laaaaaaiiid tonight," Whits shouted as the team funnelled through the corridor leading from the Garden's glossy ice sheet to the locker room. A few of the injured guys who were travelling with them slapped Sid on the back as he passed.

"Gonna spot me a free hat, kid?" Army asked as Sid swung into his stall and started undoing his pads. "Think maybe I deserve it for the big apple, eh?"

"Make sure Jen gives you a Bruins cap," Sid replied and kept removing his gear: his socks sticking to his shin pads, his wrist guard Velcro coming a bit loose. "No one's throwing hats for a Gordie."

Someone threw a hat at him from across the room and it hit Sid square in the face. It smelled like wet socks.

“You guys are fucking hilarious,” Sid said and hurled the cap toward the laundry hamper in the center of the room. It just barely missed.

Army was on a one-man mission to get Sid some ass which seemed like a dumb prospect considering they were in fucking Boston and Army had a truly abysmal amount of game.

“Rub at it a little bit,” Army was telling him as they walked chilly backstreets through Haymarket. “Rough it up. Girls love a good shiner.”

Sid was dubious, but he did it anyway because Army wouldn’t shut the hell up until he did. His first real fight. Throwing fists wasn’t really his thing, but it felt kind of good to get the first one out of the way. Mostly, though, his knuckles just hurt from where they’d collided with Ference’s shoulder.

“Really not looking to get into another fight here, man,” Sid remarked, following the rest of the guys out of the icy December air and into the dark bar, the kind of nondescript Irish pub that Sid had been to a hundred times, clearly crawling with Bruins faithfuls.

“It’s fine,” Whits said, shuffling the lot of them into a booth and then decamping to the bar to order a round.

Geno, who had been mostly quiet on the walk over, hunting and pecking at his phone, slid in after Sid on the sticky bench. “Tough,” he said, motioning to Sid’s black eye and smirking in a way that Sid had come to realize meant that Geno thought he was being particularly clever. For someone who didn’t speak English, Sid thought he was clever a whole lot of the time. “They try to fight? You take.” He punched Sid in the arm and then turned to the rest of the table for approval. Predictably, they all laughed.

The beer was shit, but it wasn’t like Sid was the one buying it. And he didn’t really have much taste. It went down like flavored water, but by the third one Sid was feeling it enough that he let the guys start riling him up.

“C’mon team,” Army slurred, slinging an arm around Whits who brushed him away and stole Army’s hat. “You wanna get Sid some ass, right? Look at that face.”

Scuds reached over and pinched Sid’s cheek. “Looking manly there, Cap. Big improvement.”

“None of you are gonna find him a fuckin’ girl, man,” Whits complained. “Give it up. We’re in enemy territory.”

“Maybe he needs a mustache,” TK said, and turned to Sid, deadly serious. “You got a Sharpie in your pocket, right? Keep your hat over your eyes, give you a nice ‘stache, with your dick out no one’s gonna know you from Adam.”

All of Sid’s friends were truly unhinged. “You’re not drawing on my face, man,” he said, pulling away when TK tried to lunge for him, careening right into Geno’s side. “Jesus.”

TK snatched his beer bottle instead and drained it, dramatically wiping his mouth. “Your loss.”

Geno grabbed Sid’s shoulders, righted him, and then held out his mostly full beer. “Want?”

Sid shook his head, but Geno stubbornly continued his offering. “Leak,” he said, one of his favorite new words. He gestured to the washroom and then pushed the beer in Sid’s direction, the condensation leaving a wet trail on the tabletop. “For you.”

Geno got up without another word, shoving his way out of the booth, his long frame disappearing into the crowd. Conversation closed.

Across the table, TK and Army were snickering in Sid’s direction. “I see how it is,” Army said. “He’s nice to you.”

“Guess I know how we can get you laid, eh,” TK chimed in and looked around the table for backup. “Who’s volunteering to steal G’s room key?”

Sid wasn’t so sure he was joking and he felt a little itchy about it, thinking about Geno wanting to—well. Had he really been looking at Sid like that? “C’mon, guys,” he said, trying to put the kibosh on the whole scheme. “Cut it out.”

But TK got one last dumb jab in, because none of these assholes knew when to let up. “I’m just saying,” he said, and made a lewd gesture with his beer until Whits leaned over and smacked the bottle out of his hand, sending the foamy dregs across TK’s shirt and lap and the tabletop in a familiar pandemonium.

Geno was gone for a long time, so long that Sid thought he might not have gone to the washroom at all, and perhaps had left entirely, traipsing the icy streets back to their hotel without his coat. Perhaps he’d left with someone, as he was wont to do. Sid tried to recall if he’d been drunk enough to warrant Sid’s concern, but he couldn’t.

Sid was talking to Tanger about their respective plans for the upcoming holiday break when Geno appeared again, forcefully scooting into the booth after a curvy blonde with braided hair and a big lipsticked smile. All of the guys at the table turned with cocked heads.

“Hello,” Whits said, really dragging out the word.

“Yulia,” Geno said, gesturing to the girl. “Pittsburgh.”

That was when Sid noticed the toque she was wearing, Pitt blue and gold with a puffy pompom and a few Greek letters embroidered on one side. Sorority letters, probably, though Sid had no idea which one.

Sid held out his hand for Yulia to shake while Geno looked on expectantly and Sid had a feeling where this was going. Geno was going to get an earful on the plane tomorrow. At least she wasn’t a Bruins fan.

“Sid,” he said, because it was habit and also made him feel less like he was a person who everybody already thought they knew. “You went to Pitt?”

“Grad school,” she explained. “Psychotherapy.”

“Oh,” Sid said, clutching his beer. That seemed like a lot of work. “Cool.”

Whits interjected from across the table, leaning forward on his elbows. “You know G?”

Behind Yulia, Geno snorted. “You think all Russian know each other?” he replied in mock offense. “No. Stupid. I’m only like—” He trailed off, clearly losing the rest of his comeback in translation, though his face and his comically puffed-up attitude said enough.

Whits put his arms up. “Whoa whoa, big guy,” he said, drunk enough that he was slurring one word into the other. Someone probably needed to take him home. “Cool it.”

“You cool,” Geno said, fussy as ever in a way that never failed to be amusing. Sid looked at Yulia and then both of them cracked a smile.

Crazy, Sid mouthed to her and she shrugged as if to reply, What can you do?

“I think I need another drink,” Yulia said as the guys were still squabbling, loud enough that they could hear. She put her hand on Sid’s outstretched arm. “Wanna buy me one while your friends are working this out?”

She was good at this, Sid had to give her that. Smooth and at ease with her friendly eyes challenging him and the neck of her shirt showing just a hint of her tits, the same kind of tits that Geno always seemed to go for. From over her shoulder, Geno was back to watching Sid’s face for his reaction, clearly pleased with himself and his catch. Jesus.

“Yeah,” Sid said, because why the hell not. “Okay.”

Maybe Sid would fuck her and maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d just buy her a drink and go into the washroom and get her lipstick all over his shirt collar for his troubles and have to toss it because he didn’t want Nathalie to see it in the laundry. Maybe they’d just talk: hockey, psychology, shitty beer. But he’d get the full nine yards from the guys regardless, all of them showing up for breakfast at the hotel tomorrow ready to undress him until he pinked up and squirmed. And he’d laugh. And he’d let them. Another day of his favorite life in all the world.

And as he followed Yulia’s swaying ass all the way to the crowded bar he thought that no matter what happened tonight, probably he was pretty fucking lucky.

And there was no way in hell that he was Geno’s type.

.

South Side Flats, PA – Late Spring 2008

The locker room after they shut out Philadelphia in game five was filled to the brim with raw, animal joy. Flower running around in his underwear. Bugsy laughing and throwing sweaty towels at Tanger’s head. Sid’s third full season and they were already staring it down: a chance at the Stanley Cup. Just a week away.

Sid leaned back against the wall and let his legs go boneless, smiling and staring into space until TK tossed a wet glove and hit him in the head.

“Cap!” TK shouted, already fully dressed and pulling on his shoes. “Mario’s? Buy you a round?”

Sid hesitated a little because he really was exhausted and fit to be rolled into bed, but TK clearly wasn’t taking no for an answer.

“C’mon, Cap. Rest of the guys are going,” he said, weaving his way through the bodies until he reached Sid’s stall. Sitting in the stall next to him, Geno snorted and shook his shower-wet hair at TK like an overly large dog and TK turned on him. “You’re gonna come, right Eugene?”

“I’m come,” Geno said, the traitor. He absolutely knew Sid was a sucker for some peer pressure. “Come, Sid. Don’t sleep. I buy you drink.”

Which was how Sid ended up at Mario’s in South Side sandwiched between Bugsy and Geno at the bar with his trusty rum and Coke sweating in his palm. He was only halfway through one drink and he’d already signed a couple of bar napkins and someone’s boobs.

“Think coach is gonna let us have a break before the final?” Bugsy asked, leaning over Sid with his sloshy cup of beer. “Gimme some time to nap.”

Geno snorted loudly. “You wish, Bugsy. You need practice.”

“What’s this idiot going on about?” Whits asked from some distance down the bar, hoisting himself out of his seat and coming around to drape himself across Bugsy’s back.

“He wish girls talk him,” Geno chirped, slinging a heavy arm around Sid’s shoulders, breathing boozily into Sid’s neck and really hamming it up. “But too ugly.”

Sid only narrowly escaped getting smacked in the face by a full cup of IC Light when the chirping devolved into shouting and Whits snatched Bugsy’s beer from his hand as he pulled it back to aim. The bartender was eyeing them with disapproval, and it wasn’t their usual guy which meant he was probably only a few minutes from kicking them out. “Guys, guys,” he said, trying to get their attention. “Shut the fuck up. You wanna get booted?”

After some moaning and groaning, they mostly settled, breaking off into a smattering of conversations down the length of the bar.

When Sid’s drink got down to just melting ice, Geno leaned over and shook the glass in his huge hand. “You want?” he asked, and then reached into his wallet and pulled out a credit card. “I buy.”

Sid was already feeling it, but one more couldn’t hurt if he made sure to chug a liter of water and an Advil tonight before he passed out. He nodded and even let Geno pick, which ended in them clinking matching glasses filled with what looked and smelled like straight juice.

“Does this even have alcohol in it?” Sid asked, eyeing the fading colors from red to pink to glowing orange. Maybe he’d only need half a liter if this thing was mainly for looks. But under the bursting sweetness, the aftertaste burned.

Geno watched Sid and took a long sip of his own, the pink-orange mix sticking to his upper lip when he pulled it away. “Tequila,” he said and then a few things in Russian that Sid didn’t understand. “Good?”

It was clear from his expression that Geno wanted Sid’s approval and Sid was powerless not to give it to him when Sid’s nodded reply made him smile from ear to ear like that. And anyway, it was kind of good.

They drank in relative quiet, Geno looking around the bar as Sid watched the game replay on TV. Geno nudged him at one point, tapping his shoulder and pointing into the dark above the bar.

“Look,” Geno said. “Pens.”

Near the ceiling were several stained-glass windows, each of them emblazoned with the logo of a Pittsburgh championship team: Pirates, Steelers, Penguins. Sid could see the years etched there: 1991, 1992. Back to back. Maybe he would have a year of his own there one day, but he tried to push the thought to the back of his brain before it would materialize in full and jinx them: maybe it would be this year.

“I want,” Geno said, still pointing upward, his expression both awed and determined. “Us.”

They drank to it, the promise of the future and all its nebulousness, but before Sid could put his glass down, TK barreled in and slung an arm around his neck.

“Boys,” TK said, looking back and forth between Sid and Geno and already smelling of beer.

“TK,” Geno said, deadpan.

TK dragged them both over to a booth filled with their teammates: Flower and Whits, Tanger, Talbo. A couple of girls were leaning over the side of the table talking animatedly with Talbo who was clearly trying his best to get them to sit down.

"There's room, baby, c'mon," he kept saying, patting his knee.

"Let's just pull up another table," one of the girls said and then impressed Sid by grabbing one and hauling it over wholesale before anyone could say no.

It seemed to be a theme, because an hour later and she had the whole table wrapped around her finger, Sid included. And he didn’t usually do that kind of thing, really. Okay, he did, but not that often. He was nearly twenty-one now. A man.

But they’d punched their ticket to the Finals. He could let a bit loose for a night.

The girl’s name was Laura. She had long dark hair and defined muscles in her forearms and a shiny silver watch strap that Sid kept staring at mid-sentence in a bid not to stare too obviously at her chest. He was taking it slow. Casual. From the way her body was turned toward his in her chair while they spoke, she didn’t seem to hate it.

Out of the corner of his eye he kept catching glimpses of Geno taking it so fast he might be well on his way to racking up another speeding ticket. And it was clear that Geno’s contemplative mood was long gone. He had Laura’s friend—who had talked to Sid so briefly that he couldn’t recall her name—in his lap. His hand in her hair. Even over the sound of the bar around them, Sid could hear wet, noisy slips of tongue.

“You up for a round?” Laura asked him, pointing to where a few of the guys were filtering toward the pool tables. Brooksy jostled Sid’s chair on his way out of the booth. “Your friends said you might be.”

They wiped the floor with Talbo and Flower, both of whom spent a lot of time waggling their eyebrows in Sid’s direction while Laura bent over to line up a shot. Sid smiled at her after, feeling raw and wild. They stared at each other for an awkwardly long beat and then Sid raised his hand for a high-five.

“Good game, Crosby,” she said, the smooth line of her hip still cocked against the table’s edge. “First star.”

Sid couldn’t help his grin. Winning felt great. The booze felt great. He was at least half-hard in his jeans. “I’ll take it,” he said.

Talbo walked by and patted him on the arm. “Good game, kid,” he said. “Maybe take it easy on your old man next time.”

“You leaving?” Sid asked.

Talbo looked between Sid and Laura and smiled like he could see each and every one of Sid’s thoughts. “See you tomorrow, man. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Talbo gave him a couple more pats for good measure and then left him there, lingering under the odd green light over the pool table, Laura looking at him expectantly, watching him twitch with her dark eyes.

“You uh,” Sid said. “You live around here?”

“Maybe,” she said, and when his face fell, she reached out to give his foot a soft kick. “Yeah. Ten minute walk tops.”

Sid was glad she got the hint. Picking up girls at bars was always a pretty weird endeavor, which was part of the reason Sid didn’t usually bother. It would be less weird if they kissed, maybe. If Sid held the girls’ heads in his hands the way Geno always did. Tongue in their mouths. Hand down the back of their pants. Clearly it worked. But it wasn’t his style.

Sid kissed her once they’d turned the corner from 16th to some side street tucked beside an old church, the same dilapidated red brick that was smattered generously across the Pittsburgh landscape. He held her dark hair in one hand and kissed her softly until she pressed herself against him.

“Didn’t say I lived this close,” she said and laughed into his mouth.

“Just wanted to,” Sid said, pulling her in for another kiss, the kind of quick, messy kiss of the decently drunk. Somewhere in the middle of it their teeth clicked. “You know.”

“I don’t mind,” Laura said, smiling and taking him by the hand, their sweaty palms gripped around each other like the teenagers they no longer were. Like it was Sid’s first time all over again. Reckless. Thrilling. Dumb.

Her apartment was the same apartment Sid saw everywhere. Two stories with a small concrete stoop. Sagging awning over the front door. He barely noticed it when she turned his back against the screen door and put her tongue in his mouth, wet and sloppy in a way that never failed to lead to sex.

“God, I can’t believe you,” Laura said between kisses. “Your mouth. I’ve wanted to kiss you all night.”

“All night?” Sid asked, because it was a total line. There was no way he’d been that impressive. “Really?”

“Okay, fine,” she admitted. “Since you neglected to mention you were so good at pool, then.”

“We did cream them pretty good, eh,” Sid said, pulling her hair back from her neck to kiss the flushed skin below her jaw as she jingled the keys in the door. He didn’t think she was wearing any perfume and he liked it a lot. The salty musk of damp skin.

It took them twice the normal amount of time to climb the stairs between kisses. And then again to unlock the interior door.

“Quiet,” Laura said, laughing and shushing him. “My roommate might be asleep.” Sid was too busy biting her ear to care, and anyways, he couldn’t be noisy if his mouth was occupied. Win-win.

But whoever was home wasn’t being quiet at all, their voices echoing down the narrow front hall. A feminine moan. A deep voice murmuring too low for Sid to understand.

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Laura hissed under her breath, twisting out of Sid’s hold and leaving him lingering there between a guitar case and a coat rack full of reusable bags as she inspected the source of the noise. He was mentally preparing to be kicked out, but Laura just looked back at him and rolled her eyes. “C’mon.”

But the voices in the living room weren’t strangers. He saw the girl first—her short blond hair, the same blond hair that had tangled around Geno’s fingers at the bar. And Geno.

Sid was frozen for a moment, unable to decide whether to stay or go or even how to stop looking. The girl was in Geno’s lap again, on the couch with her shirt discarded and her tits out of her bra. Geno’s head was bent into her neck, no doubt kissing her in the same spot Sid had kissed Laura not even twenty feet away. And it would probably be better just to leave, but he couldn’t, the same way he couldn’t stop himself from laughing at Geno’s terrible jokes.

In Geno’s arms, the girl looked small, the same kind of girl he always went for. Out of his league. But watching them, Sid got it maybe. Geno was attentive and slow with her, romantic almost, the way that some girls seemed to like.

“C’mon,” Laura said, tugging at his hand.

In Laura’s room, under her body on her cramped twin bed, Sid couldn’t stop seeing it. Geno’s hands on the girl’s skin. Her flushed red mouth. Laura pulled Sid’s dick out of his shorts and it felt great in her hand, the same way it always felt great when someone touched your dick. But he could hear them, Geno and the girl and her stream of laughing moans. And it was weird right?

“Are you sure we should—” Sid said, putting a hand on Laura’s pale shoulder to still her as she bent her head. He couldn’t decide if maybe he should stop. But stop and what? Go out to the living room and say something? That was probably weirder, to make it a big deal.

Laura cocked her head at him and just smiled. “That?” she asked, clearly more amused than Sid felt. Like it was cool and normal. Like it happened all the time. “It’s kinda funny, right?”

The sound of Geno groaning through the closed door, his low voice murmuring the way he did on the bench sometimes, felt less than funny. Sid got hot all over and then turned his head aside on the pillow and blew out a long, awkward breath.

“Hey,” Laura said, reaching up to grab his chin. “M’right here, big guy.” She climbed on top of him, settling herself over his dick still inexplicably mostly hard and hanging out of his shorts. She smiled at him and bent to kiss his mouth, sucking and sucking at his tongue until he thought his brain might fall out of his ears and stain her tie-dyed pillow case.

Sid was rubbing himself against her underwear mindlessly, over and over to the rhythm of the muffled sounds from the room beyond. “Fuck,” he said when he could feel wetness leaking through Laura’s underwear and easing the way.

She flipped her hair aside and bent to bite a deep mark on the side of his neck and then chuckled. “You like that?” she asked, low and warm against his skin, and he couldn’t decide if she meant the kiss or her slick pussy or the sound of skin slapping tellingly through the wall, Geno’s stupidly dramatic groans that would be playing on loop for the rest of the month at minimum in Sid’s head.

“Yeah,” he answered anyway and didn’t want to think about what that said.

.

Sewickley, PA – Fall 2010

“Who the fuck decorated this place?” Sid asked, stepping into the foyer of Geno’s palatial house. Catherine handed Geno a foil-wrapped tray of cookies and Sid slid his and Catherine’s shoes onto the mat. “I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve been here.”

“I invite!” Geno said, leading Sid and Catherine down the marble hall, past doorway upon doorway and into the kitchen where Oksana was eating out of an open container of pineapple rings and doing her nails. “Maybe you read my text, you come.”

Sid had only met Oksana a few times before in passing at some team function or another and she kind of scared him with her shockingly blonde hair and her designer sunglasses and the way she never smiled.

“Hi,” Sid said and gestured to Catherine standing at his side. “My girlfriend. I don’t think you guys have met.”

They definitely hadn’t. When Sid started dating Catherine at the end of last season, Oksana had been clear in another time-zone, somewhere in Moscow while she and Geno were on one of their infamous ‘breaks.’

“Catherine,” she said, holding her hand out for Oksana to shake.

Sid left them to it and followed Geno around for a few minutes on a quick tour of the place that mostly included Geno waxing poetic about the entire room he had dedicated to table tennis.

“I think this is meant to be a dining room or something,” Sid said.

Geno ignored him, showing him the framed jerseys he was planning to hang, a large portrait of the team from the year they’d won the Cup together. “Looks good,” Sid said, and warmed considerably when he saw the size of Geno’s smile.

“I thought you said you were having some of the other guys over?” Sid asked, when the doorbell didn’t ring.

“Guys?” Geno asked, still trying to cut the foil off a bottle of wine without much success. “No. Other guys come like, last year. Flower, Talbo. You don’t come, so—dinner.”

“Oh,” Sid said. He scratched the back of his neck and grabbed the wine from Geno’s hand. “Here. Let me.”

They sat in the dining room to eat, clustered around the end of the giant table eating delivery from some local Russian place Sid had never heard of.

“This is really good,” Catherine remarked, putting another dumpling onto her plate. “What did you say was in this again?”

“Lamb,” Geno said, mouth entirely full of potato. “How you say—little leaf?”

“Herbs,” Sid said, and then to Catherine, “I think it’s dill. I read it’s in like—basically every Russian meal.”

“How long are you in Pittsburgh for?” Sid asked Oksana. He picked around the tomatoes in his salad and slid them onto Catherine’s plate.

“Maybe little bit,” Oksana replied. “Zhenya want me to move here, but not sure.” Sid noticed that Geno looked more than a little irritated about it, like he’d asked her in confidence and didn’t want anyone else to know.

“Well,” Catherine said, blissfully ignorant to the years of agonizing drama on the topic. “That’s a big decision for sure.”

Sid took the middleground, shoving another dumpling into his mouth and swallowing it in one bite. “There’s definitely a lot to do while you’re here,” he said, determined to sidestep the minefield of Geno’s relationship woes at all costs. “I think there might be a WAG charity event coming up actually, if you want me to ask around for some numbers.”

Sid knew from Vero’s complaining that Oksana didn’t really socialize with the rest of the wives and girlfriends much. She seemed to show up to games and sit by herself in one of Geno’s seats, yelling and waving her bedazzled Penguins scarf in the air on the jumbotron. And that was fine. It wasn’t like she had to want to be their friend.

“Maybe,” Oksana said, already ignoring them in favor of pecking noisily at her phone.

Geno got up, pushing his chair across the tile with a loud squeak and clearing his throat. “Dessert?”

After the cookies were eaten and most of the plates were cleared, Sid wasn’t really sure what came next. He’d been to teammates’ houses for meals before, but mostly it was the married guys and the whole thing felt like family dinner. He helped do the dishes. He played with the kids.

At Geno’s, there was none of that. Just Catherine sitting a little awkwardly at his side. Geno and Oksana playing house. As much as they got along, Sid didn’t spend a lot of time with Geno when they weren’t around the other guys, Geno acting and reacting to the group. It seemed that a different Geno lived in this house. Quieter. More reserved.

“So,” Sid said, rocking back and forth on his socked feet. “You wanna watch a movie or something?” He knew how to watch movies with Geno. They’d done it a million times on the road. Sitting with Army or Talbo or someone between them, Geno yelling loudly when he didn’t like what was happening on screen.

Catherine patted Sid’s arm. “Didn’t you wanna watch that new one with DiCaprio?” she asked. “Invention? Inception? I can’t remember what it was called.”

“Inception,” Geno said, perking up. He loved a good thriller. “With like, dreams.” He searched around on his phone for a minute and then, his mind made up, said, “Yes, okay. Let’s watch.”

Oksana disappeared upstairs for a few minutes before the movie started, coming back down to the den in basically the same outfit she’d left in except the fancy pink skirt had become fancy pink sweatpants. She held a blanket out toward Catherine where she was perched on the edge of the loveseat. “You want?” she asked, putting her arms around her body and shivering dramatically. “Air in here. Cold.”

The blanket in question was bright blue and patterned with tiger stripes. Catherine wrapped it around her shoulders and snuggled into Sid’s side. “This is nice,” she said, nudging him with her elbow.

It was nice. Catherine was nice and Sid liked her a lot, enough that he was starting to feel excited about introducing her to his friends. She seemed to get him. And she was funny and had good taste in TV shows and mostly didn’t mind when he wanted to talk about hockey during dinner. His parents were planning to meet her when they came into town for the holidays. And that was nice too.

As the opening credits began, Geno passed around the wine he’d brought in from dinner, doling it out in little plastic cups. Sid nursed his a little but dumped the rest into Catherine’s cup when Geno wasn’t looking. “Here,” he said, clinking her cup with his empty one. “For you.”

“So kind,” she teased, smiling. As he turned back to the movie she leaned over and gave him a kiss.

The movie was good and Sid got pretty focused. It was interesting in a way that made him think. And it didn’t hurt that there were a lot of guys in really sharp suits. Every so often, Catherine would lean over to ask him something: ‘Did you see that guy in the background?’ or ‘I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that book before.’ But mostly she just ran her hand idly over Sid’s inseam the way she always did when they watched TV. As usual, the sheer proximity of her hand to his dick made him a little horny.

“Cut it out,” he said, when he had to adjust himself for the third time.

“Maybe I won’t,” she whispered, a wicked twist to her mouth and an empty cup of wine dangling from her hand.

“Okay, missy,” he said, grabbing the cup and setting it on the carpet. “That’s enough.”

On the adjoining loveseat, Geno and Oksana were whispering to each other, low enough that Sid couldn’t make out the words. He tried to turn his attention back to the movie, but he couldn’t focus. To top it off, he’d somehow missed an important transition and now whatever was going on was set in a scene he didn’t understand.

After a while he realized that whatever Geno and Oksana were doing, they weren’t just talking. They were fooling around. He watched out of the corner of his eye: Oksana’s face tucked into Geno’s, her shiny manicure wrapped around his neck. They had a blanket wrapped around their entwined bodies and under it, Sid could make out the motion of someone’s hand.

It didn’t take long for Catherine to notice, leaning in toward Sid to whisper, “Are they really?”

Sid nodded, feeling distinctly uncomfortable and trapped in the dark room, the only light the flickering glow of the TV. But it was clear that Catherine was curious, craning her head around him to sneak a peek.

“They’re gonna see you,” he reminded her, but she just shrugged one shoulder.

“So,” she said, a smile spreading over her face that said she was up to absolutely nothing good. “If they didn’t want us to see, maybe they shouldn’t have--you know.”

Under their own blanket, her fingers roamed his inseam with purpose, digging into the muscle there and getting dangerously close to his dick that was traitorously getting hard because he was a twenty-three-year-old with no self-control.

“Cat, seriously,” he warned, avoiding her gaze by turning his head aside on the cushion, but when he did he found Geno looking at him with a heavy-lidded gaze.

It should have put an end to it, maybe. He’d been caught. Geno knew. But instead, the uncomfortable squirming in his gut egged him on. Across from him, Geno blinked lazily, swiping his tongue across his stupidly fat mouth.

When Catherine’s hand slid up to unbutton his jeans, he let her, twitching as she took him in her hand. Geno turned his face back into Oksana’s searching hands, but Sid couldn’t stop watching them. The way Oksana moved was so fluid, so sure, guiding Geno’s body where she wanted it to be. Putting his hands on her body. Her waist. Her tits.

But as much as he tried to deny it, it wasn’t Oksana’s body he was watching, the perfect soft lines of her hips under Geno’s eager hands. It was Geno’s. The strong line of his throat beneath Oksana’s tongue, the sharp curve of his jaw.

Part of him felt a little gross about the whole thing, because there was definitely something weird about letting Catherine touch him and watching this. Thinking about--someone else, maybe, in the theoretical sense of the word. Catherine wasn’t theoretical. She was real. And she was good for him. Beautiful with her pale green eyes and her easy smile. She gave good, if unpracticed, head and it pretty much always blew Sid’s mind. But if it stayed theoretical maybe it was--fine. It wasn’t like he was thinking about Geno specifically. He was just figuring some shit out.

Pretense cast aside, Sid pulled Catherine’s chin toward him and captured her mouth in a kiss, open-mouthed and sloppy and warm as she jacked him off inside his underwear. He wondered if it was the same, when a man kissed you. Was it harder? Were they more generous with their teeth?

Across the room, he could hear someone crawling off the couch, the leather sticking to their skin as they moved. And he knew what he would see if he looked.

There was the slick sound of Oksana’s mouth. Geno’s murmured curses. Sid shifted Catherine around in his lap, trying to focus on her body, the way she was getting wet against his thigh. He snuck a hand into her underwear and touched her there, letting her ride his hand and suck what was sure to be a gruesome hickey into his neck.

When he closed his eyes, he felt like he was right back in that tiny twin bed in South Side, the last time they’d--done this, whatever it was they kept doing. Listening to the sounds of Geno moaning through the wall and wondering. But that was the thing, right? He didn’t have to wonder anymore when he could look over and see another man’s hard dick. Right out there in the open, highlighted in the blue glare of the TV. And he would know then. More than he’d known before.

Catherine was so wet under his fingers and she moaned when he slipped two of them inside her, her ass riding a dangerous path against his dick. And he was sure in that moment that he was going to come inside his boxers and his custom-made jeans, right there on his teammate’s shitty leather couch.

“Fuck, Sid,” Catherine said into his ear, low and wild. “Can you see--he’s so fucking big and she just. Jesus.” It surprised him a little, how into the whole thing Catherine seemed, the watching. And it felt a little like permission, enough that Sid dared to open his eyes.

Oksana’s head was in Geno’s lap, her perfect bun pulled loose from Geno’s hands. She had her mouth around him: shiny and obscene, leaving lipgloss in a long dirty smear up Geno’s shaft. Above her, Geno’s head was bent, looking down at her as he fucked her mouth.

Catherine felt so good in his arms, warm and familiar as she directed Sid’s hand to her clit. But all Sid could do was wonder what Geno was thinking. Was he listening to them? Did he get off on knowing he was being watched?

And maybe it made Sid a terrible person, because as Catherine rubbed herself to orgasm on his fingers, it was all he could do not to will Geno to look over again and open his eyes.

.

Santa Monica, CA – Summer 2013

Geno broke it off with Oksana in May for the umpteenth time and by June he was in Sid’s kitchen in his Santa Monica condo, sitting on the counter with his feet dangling and a half-eaten mango in his fist.

“Aren’t you gonna change?” Sid asked, nodding to Geno’s t-shirt and shorts as he secured a fresh trash bag inside the can. “Where the fuck did you get that shirt, anyway?”

Geno just smirked around a bite of mango and shook his head. “It’s good. Why I change?”

Sid didn’t really care what Geno wore, but the shirt was a bright, lemon yellow, emblazoned with some drawing of Sid’s number and likeness that he’d never seen before in his life. And that was, well—they were going to dinner. Just with Andy and Comrie some of their mutual LA acquaintances that Sid saw only a couple of times a year, but. “It’s—” Sid said, but didn’t know how to finish that sentence or organize his thoughts.

“Conversation starter,” Geno said as he hopped down from the counter. “People ask me I say, oh, it’s just favorite shirt for favorite player. Everyone agrees.”

Geno was always saying fucking embarrassing shit like that to Sid or to the media team during interviews and it never failed to make Sid feel two-hundred feet tall and microscopic all at once. But Geno was the best, one of Sid’s favorite teammates and favorite people. He flushed hot under the collar of his own shirt and shut the cabinet door with a shrug. “Your funeral.”

Dinner was the usual affair, just a bunch of guys talking shop over steaks and beers. Geno had ordered a bottle of white wine that he made Sid help him drink and by the time they got the check Sid was most of the way to pleasantly drunk.

“Pink,” Geno commented as they waited at the valet for their cab home. He put the back of his hand to Sid’s cheek. “Warm.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Sid said and smacked his hand away.

“Drunk,” Geno said and then returned to his phone.

It was brisk outside for June in California and Sid rubbed a hand up and down one arm until the goosebumps eased, rocking back and forth on his heels. Beside him, Geno’s fingers were embroiled in a serious-sounding text conversation.

“Sid,” Geno shoved his phone under Sid’s nose. “Friends go here tonight. Know I’m in town. Want to go?”

Sid felt like he needed to sack out on the couch for a few hours with a Gatorade. He was still taking pain pills for his busted jaw sometimes and he could feel it getting stiff. He scrunched up his mouth, but with Geno it was always hard to say no.

“Come,” Geno said, like it was a done deal. Their cab pulled up to the curb and the valet ushered them over, opening the doors.

“Maybe you don’t need drink more though,” Geno said, sliding in after Sid in the cramped back seat that felt comically small holding two large adult men. Geno gave the cabbie the new address.

He was just a bit of a lightweight. So what? Water was wet. “M’not that drunk,” Sid tried valiantly to protest and slumped his head back against the seat rest as the car screeched away from the curb.

Going out in LA always made Sid feel like he was invisible. Just a guy in a town where everybody was somebody. It made it easier, sometimes, if he wanted to--well. It was refreshing to feel like he didn’t have to maintain his spotless façade: straight, clean-cut, the kind of model citizen you took home to mom.

He felt even more invisible amongst Geno’s LA friends in the bar slash restaurant slash upscale dance club. It was weirdly bright inside, but there were so many colors of lights reflecting off the gaudy chandeliers that Sid wasn’t sure he could read his own name. As they passed from the main floor to the lounge, Sid could smell a fruity wave of champagne.

None of Geno’s friends were familiar to him, but they all greeted him warmly—each standing from the table in turn to offer him perfume-laden hugs and kisses to his cheeks. One of the women—Yana—towered over Sid in her pointy heels.

“Hello, hello Sidney Crosby,” she said to him in a sing-song voice that said that she was absolutely familiar with him based on nothing but Geno’s gabbing. Sid could only imagine what kind of things she’d been told.

“Sid is fine,” he replied.

“Take this,” another friend said, shoving a glass of something fizzy into his hand that went down smooth and burned warm. Beside him Geno was already deeply engaged in a terse back and forth with someone in Russian, going on and on and gesturing with his hands so wildly that he nearly knocked over his drink. In some ways, this night was nothing like the nights Sid had shared with countless teammates and friends over the years: the coordinated accessories, the lack of cheap beer. In others, it was all just the same.

“That’s you, right?” Yana asked him between rounds, raising one perfect eyebrow and pointing at Geno’s shirt. “Eight Seven.”

Despite his earlier protests to the contrary, Sid was drunk enough that he blushed. “Uh—” he said, and then just nodded. “Unfortunately.”

“Cute,” she teased, and then reached out to take a sip of his newest glass of rum and soda, slurping noisily through the tiny straw. “He like you.”

“I mean—” Sid replied awkwardly the way he always did when people suggested a guy might be into him. What was he supposed to say? ‘Maybe I’ve thought about it. Maybe I’ve seen his dick.’ And his face must have given him away because Yana just started laughing into her hand.

“Not like that,” she said between snickers. She was cute, even with her eyes crinkled up. “Jesus.”

Instead of thinking about it longer than he needed to, he pushed the thoughts down and took a drink. “C’mon,” he said, because he was drunk and kind of stupid and focusing on something he had to actively work at was better than the alternative. “Wanna dance?”

Sid had not gotten better at dancing over the years. If anything, he’d become rustier. It had never been his preferred pick-up method when he could just as easily buy someone a drink and talk to them instead of staring at the back of their sweaty head. But Yana was a good dancer, and she was taller than him in her shoes and kept laughing at him slyly and showing him how to lead.

After a while, a few more of Geno’s friends joined them, sifting in through the crowd of bodies until they were all pressed together in a sweaty, smiling mass. Geno stood in the middle of them, long arms thrown up in the air, another small blonde tucked into his side. A slow smirk spread up his face when Sid caught his eye.

They always seemed to find themselves there, somehow. And it had been a few years of Oksana between. Catherine hadn’t worked out in the end and Sid had spent a good few years trying to find a girlfriend who wasn’t so adept at breaking up with him. Fat chance. Such was the life of a man who lived half the year out of an overfilled suitcase.

But there again were Geno’s eyes watching him through the drunken cloud. Music playing that Sid couldn’t name. A body pressed against his. Two, three. Sid was half-hard and dancing decidedly off-beat and when Yana put her hands on him to guide his rhythm, he let her.

“I like the—” Yana said, pressing her thumb into his lower lip to reveal his missing bottom teeth. “How’d you lose them?”

“Hockey,” he said, swaying to the beat under her capable hands. “I’d say it was a really impressive fight, but uh—definitely a lie.”

Yana got even closer, leaning in to whisper into his ear. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Your secret is safe with me.”

As the set went on, the floor got more and more cramped, bodies packing in until Sid was just shifting back and forth between Yana’s soft body and who knows what else. Sid got—not necessarily better, but looser, maybe. Closed his eyes and just let himself be.

Geno grew closer the longer they danced, and Sid heard him before he saw him, the unmistakable sound of his low, sly chuckle over the music.

“Good dancer,” he said, by way of greeting, clearly teasing.

“Am I?” Sid asked.

“Not terrible,” Yana interjected. She reached a hand up to pinch Geno’s arm and Sid delighted in watching him flinch. “Good at taking notes.”

Geno only hummed in response, his hands sliding down to bracket Yana’s hips just below Sid’s hands and Sid had no fucking clue what they were doing. Geno smiled at her. Turned his head back to shout when someone called his name. It was clear what Geno thought they were doing: nothing, just the same thing he’d done a million times in a million different clubs across the world.

But Sid was aware of all of it: Geno’s sweaty hands so close to his own, the smell of his cologne. As Sid watched, his stupid yellow shirt glowed bright under the strobing lights.

When the beat changed to something more down-tempo, Sid took the opportunity for a breather. “Anyone want some water?” he asked. “I’m gonna—”

He begged a sloshy cup of ice water off one of the bartenders and leaned back against the bar, watching the mass of bodies undulating. In the center of them was Geno, neatly framed against Yana’s body, arms enveloping her in a sweaty embrace. A friend said something to him over his shoulder and he threw his head back and guffawed with familiar laughter, his eyes disappearing into small slits.

Sid felt mesmerized, the same way he always felt when Geno was near, his attention tugging back and forth with Geno’s whims. He was so—he was a lot of things. And Sid had known him for so long, had seen him bloom from a nervous child tugging at Gonch’s shirttails into this confident and vibrant man.

Sid choked down a refill of his water and by the time he was starting on his third Geno was wandering toward him, talking with Yana about something that made her duck her head and flush. When they reached him, Geno crammed in close, slinging his arm lazily around Sid’s shoulders.

“You’re disgusting,” Sid said, because Geno was dripping sweat all over his neck.

“Give to me.” Geno reached over and grabbed Sid’s newly filled water, pouring the lot of it down his throat and making a whole mess.

Sid watched as Yana rolled her eyes, kicking at Geno’s leg with her shoe. “Thanks for water,” she said pointedly, and then called Geno an asshole in Russian, one of the few words Sid knew.

Sid flagged the bartender down for another round of water with an apologetic smile and a ten-dollar bill. As he passed them around, Geno asked. “You tired?”

“Uh—” In truth, Sid was surprisingly worn out for someone who regularly tracked his lung capacity for a living. But he knew from experience that whenever he was ready to go home, Geno would be out for at least another few hours. “I guess.”

“Okay, good.” Geno smoothed his hands down his t-shirt, right over Sid’s cartoon face. “I say goodbye to friends. Call cab.”

As quickly as he’d made his mind up, he was gone, off into the throng to give air kisses and backslaps to the beat.

“He something,” Yana said, leaning next to Sid in the spot Geno had vacated, her soft laughter vibrating in Sid’s bones.

“You can say that again.” Sid just stared after him slightly flummoxed, but unfazed. It wasn’t the first time Geno was inexplicably fucking weird. “How did you meet him, anyway?”

Yana stirred the ice in her cup with one manicured finger. “We date,” she said. “Long time ago. When I live in Miami. He’s so young, you know? So sweet.”

Sid didn’t know much about that Geno, only bits and pieces of it from the few times he’d walked in on Geno talking to his mother over the phone or playing with Gonch’s daughters in the Mellon lounge. “It didn’t work out, then?”

“No, no—” She said, still terrifyingly attractive with her nose scrunched up in distaste. “We mostly friends. I’m not like—don’t want to follow anyone around, always hockey, moving. It’s not for me.”

“Yeah,” Sid said. Every girl he’d ever dated had realized the same thing eventually. But it was clear from her body language—the way she’d danced with him, put her hands all over his body—that Yana had no qualms about flirting with hockey players, at the very least. Maybe that was just what he needed, something casual. A friend. Sid was a nobody here. He could make some mistakes. “Actually, you uh—you wanna head back with us? G might just head to bed, but we could—”

Yana looked down at him in a way that made it feel like she was looking right through him. “We could—” she parroted, trailing off the same way that Sid had. “Okay. Sure.”

Somehow, in the mess of it, Geno had wrangled a cab and he followed Sid and Yana into the backseat. Sid could hear them talking softly to each other in Russian as the driver pulled out onto the freeway and wondered what they were saying. Probably something nosy about him, because that was always what Geno was saying.

Geno spent the last few minutes of the ride with his head propped up against the window, his eyes closed and his mouth hanging open while Sid and Yana shared an amused smile.

When they got to the condo, all the lights were off, only the lamps on the back deck casting the main living area in a hazy, dream-like glow. Geno went in ahead of them, toeing off his shoes and making himself comfortable in a place where he clearly felt a bit at home. Sid expected him to want to head upstairs as soon as they got inside, but instead he could hear him in the living area putting around and knocking things out of place.

“Where you put my cards?” he asked over the sound of a concerning clatter.

“You think I play when you’re not around?” Sid asked, gesturing to Yana like ‘who the fuck does this guy think he is.’ “Where did you put your cards?”

Geno mumbled to himself on and off as Sid divested himself of his shoes and hung up Yana’s bag on an empty coat hook in the front hall.

“Sorry about that,” he said, because apologizing for your house guest who wouldn’t go to bed already so you could get back to your planned hookup seemed fraught. Yana just shrugged like ‘what can you do’, running a hand up Sid’s arm.

Sid took her heels from her outstretched hand, setting them next to his sneakers. “I don’t know how you wear those.”

“Very powerful feet,” she said, punctuating it with a wink.

Yana followed Sid to the kitchen table where Geno had found a deck of cards and was fanning them out in front of him like a kingpin ready to collect his winnings.

“I thought you were tired,” Sid said to Geno’s resulting shrug and then he turned to Yana who was tucking herself into a chair. “You need anything?”

“Where’s wine?” Geno interjected, but Sid continued ignoring him, uncertain as to why Geno couldn’t just go the fuck to bed already, but resigned to playing at least one hand.

Yana shook her head. “Zhenya,” she said to draw Geno’s attention, and then said something short and sharp to him that got him to hand her half the deck. As Sid wandered into the kitchen, he could hear cards shuffling.

Maybe a stiff drink is what it would take to get Geno to pass out. Hadn’t he been the one to round them up in the first place? Goading Sid into taking him home? Sid pulled a half-drunk bottle from the fridge and a fresh one from the cupboard and filched a few glasses out of the dishwasher. When he turned around, Yana was standing there and he startled nearly enough to drop something.

“Jesus,” he said, tightening his grip.

She ducked her head, sheepish. A loose auburn wave fell down over her cheek. “Hey.”

“Did you need something?” He held up the wine and the glasses between them like an offering. “I’ve got—”

Instead of answering, Yana stepped into his orbit, pressing her body against his like she’d done on the dance floor earlier in the evening. “Nope,” she said.

Sid couldn’t help but notice that she was shorter than him now without her heels on, her nose brushing his chin. She took the bottle from his hand and slotted their mouths together, kissing him wet and slow. Behind them, Sid heard the clink of the bottle hitting the counter.

“Yana,” Sid said between kisses, trying not to catch her lip with the uneven edges of his missing teeth. “He’s gonna—”

“He what,” she said, her hand working him over through the fabric of his pants. “Shh.”

But Sid couldn’t stop wondering if Geno could hear them around the half-built corner of the wall. Was he listening? Did Sid want him to be?

“He’s gonna hear us,” Sid choked out as he tried to muffle a moan. “Let’s just wait until he goes to bed, okay? It’s only--” But the clock over the microwave read half past midnight. Sid groaned internally.

“Don’t mind if he hear,” Yana said flippantly. “Maybe you make more noise, he likes that.”

“Um,” Yana went to pull at the button on Sid’s pants and Sid stilled her hand. “I don’t think he wants to--”

“He don’t want to hear you moan?” Yana asked.

“I mean, it’s probably a little weird, right?” Sid said, trying not to think about all the ways he didn’t think it was weird at all. Geno’s quiet moans in his ear over and over in the dark.

“Maybe, maybe not,” she said. She brought a hand up and raked it through Sid’s hair, her fingers catching on the sweaty curls.

When Sid didn’t answer, she kept talking, musing to herself as her fingers trailed the planes of Sid’s face. “He tell me about, once or twice, you know?” She kept dragging her thumb over his lip the same way she’d done before, playing with the flesh like it was a toy. “Not with me, but--” Her voice trailed off, and Sid let his mind fill in the unsaid answer to his question, his chest going tight. “I hear stories about. With man.”

“Oh.” Sid’s heart was beating so fast. But his brain tried to wrap sense around it. What did it mean, really? It could be just another thing Geno did in the life Sid didn’t know about. Like his favorite novels. His laundry habits. Just another pedestrian thing about a man.

Sid returned from the kitchen with the wine in hand and tried to put it out of his mind, thunking the open bottle down near Geno’s arm.

“You pour?” Geno asked, flipping his glass over and looking at Sid imploringly. He was such an asshole.

“Absolutely not,” Sid said, reaching forward to grab his hand of cards.

The three of them played a round of a game that Sid didn’t know the name of and only mostly understood after Geno’s hasty explanation, discarding cards until Geno—predictably—won.

“You’re sure you aren’t trying to move to Vegas and change careers?” Sid asked him, taking a sip of his wine.

“I stay with team,” Geno said, shuffling the deck for another round. “Everyone so bad at cards. Make more money.”

It was true that Geno made a pretty penny off the guys when they let him play for cash. But Sid had heard his fair share of Geno’s complaints. “Don’t get cocky,” he said. “Tanger tells me how much you cheat on the plane.”

“Tanger’s liar,” Geno said. But before Sid could open his mouth and protest otherwise, Geno dealt out the next hand.

Geno got sloppier about hiding his hand the more wine he drank, but it didn’t stop him from wiping the floor with them again. Or demanding another round. Sid was absolutely going to blame it on Yana who was rubbing her foot against him under the table, up his ankle and under his pant leg. If she kept that up for much longer, Sid was going to have to do more than readjust himself.

“Maybe we call it a night,” Sid suggested, as Geno scooped up the latest discard pile.

But Geno couldn’t take a fucking hint. “Best three,” he said.

“You already won two,” Sid reminded him. At the rate they were going, Sid was going to be the one passing out early.

Geno shook the wine bottle and topped everyone off without asking. “We finish wine.”

Yana said something to Geno in Russian, glancing back at Sid as she spoke. Geno continued moving the cards back and forth between his large hands. “Just one,” she mouthed to Sid.

The game got raucous quickly. Sid had picked up enough of the rules to see Geno trying to bend them and wasn’t shy about letting him know. And it wasn’t like Sid was usually the type to make a fuss about getting his dick wet, but Geno was just being fucking weird.

“Wrong suit!” he said, reaching out to grab at Geno’s cards. “Show me your hand, c’mon.”

“No! No! Ow!” Geno shouted dramatically and then yelped when Sid grabbed his wine glass and held it squarely out of his reach.

“You’re cut off,” Sid said and dumped Geno’s wine into his own glass to Geno’s resulting glare.

Across the table, Yana plunked her one remaining card down atop Geno’s and wiped her empty hands. “Trump,” she said, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms, a smug smile on her face.

Sid and Geno both leaned over to look at it. Ace of diamonds.

“No more cards. I win.” The recycled air in the room was heavy with—something. A bit of her eyeliner was smeared around the corner of her eye as she looked back and forth between them. “What’s my prize?”

“I give you prize,” Geno said, mockingly under his breath, and leaned over the corner of the table to give her a showy, sloppy kiss. Yana held him there for a moment, kissing him like a person who had kissed him a lot of times before and knew how to exploit it, fingers catching him at the base of his hairline, her thumb pressing into his jaw. Geno went visibly limp under her hands. And that was something to think about.

Sid coughed and they pulled apart, Geno’s smile wet and sloppy and self-satisfied. Sid felt his heart beating faster and he squashed it, shaking his head. “Think it’s actually time for bed now,” he said, abandoning his plans and rising awkwardly from the table. The clock read sometime past one in the morning. What a strange night it had been.

Yana grabbed his wrist. “You just watch?” she said, like she could see right through him. “Come here.”

Sid hesitated for a moment but went, unsure what he was getting himself into, the unknown possibility lingering somewhere just out of reach. When she’d lured him across the room, Yana slid her hand up his arm, tugging him in by the hem of his sleeve. “Where’s my kiss,” she said, her breath smelling like wine. “I win.”

“Yana,” he said.

Their kiss was just as hot and heavy as it had been in the kitchen, handsy and wet, fueled by the taste of alcohol and lack of sleep. Behind her shoulder, Geno lingered unmoving and Sid felt like things were about to spiral rapidly out of his control.

He’d seen Geno kiss a lot of women over the years, doing whatever it was they did in the dark. It didn’t have to mean anything, but had it? Sid had heard tall tales from his teammates of guys taking home some chick together. ‘Really giving it to her,’ they always said. ‘One just wasn’t enough.’

And Sid had thought about it once, sitting in Geno’s den all those years ago and crossing that line. But they’d never talked about it. Like it hadn’t meant anything at all. And there were still lines they hadn’t crossed.

Sid tried to school his face into a neutral façade as Yana pulled Geno over and into their embrace, Geno kissing her neck, her ear, his hands snaking around her torso to unbutton a few buttons on her blouse. And Sid didn’t move from Yana’s mouth. It felt like moving would prove that all of this was something—more than just two friends enjoying a woman’s body.

It didn’t matter what Sid wanted. It could just be.

As Sid kissed Yana’s mouth, he could smell Geno’s cologne again, that same surprisingly floral scent. As he undid Yana’s jeans he could smell traces of Geno’s sweat—salty and pungent, masculine. If he closed his eyes, he thought perhaps he could imagine they were still dancing.

Sid had been with a man before, but never another man with a woman between. It was a lot of arranging. Limbs in odd places. Who touched who and when. He couldn’t unhear what Yana had said to him: ‘He tell me about, once or twice.’ So Geno had touched another man. Or at least he’d gone so far as this.

Geno was skilled at stripping Yana of her clothes, tugging her jeans from her long legs, undoing the remaining buttons of her top and lifting her tits from her bra. He sucked one darkened nipple into his mouth and then looked up at Sid gaping at them like a fish, holding the other breast out for Sid’s mouth.

Never one to refuse what he was told, Sid took Yana’s breast in his own hand, putting his mouth on her until she pebbled up under his tongue. Geno’s face was so close that his hair tickled Sid’s temple. A fleeting thought crossed his mind that just a few inches closer and they could--

Above him, Yana hissed in pleasure. Under him, he could feel Geno tucking his hand between Yana’s legs, moving with practiced ease.

“Sid,” Yana said, pulling Sid’s mouth to her own as Geno worked her over, kissing him and whispering nonsense into his mouth that made him sweat. “So good with his hand,” she said, and, “maybe you want to touch, too.”

“I want to,” Sid admitted. There was no way in hell he would say no. Yana was so fucking attractive. Polished in the ways he had learned not to be terrified by. Brash in a way that was refreshing, with her sly humor and her shamelessly eager hands.

“You good like that?” she asked him, slipping her thumb between his open lips, like he would somehow admit if he wasn’t. “Or maybe your mouth.”

Geno untangled himself and pulled his shirt off, blessedly discarding it somewhere clear across the room. But Sid put his face between Yana’s spread thighs for a long time before he dared strip off his own clothes, sucking at her clit and her sensitive inner thighs until she mewled. It didn’t even make sense to be so shy all of a sudden. Geno had seen him naked, just like anyone else he shared a life or a locker room with. But it felt different, now. Purposeful. Sid knew what it was like to get naked for a man.

When he finally did, he found Geno looking at him, watching him unzip his pants as he touched Yana again with nimble fingers, sliding them through the wet mess Sid had made with his mouth.

Sid furrowed his brow for a moment, trying to ask without speaking. ‘This is cool, right?’ he wanted to say. ‘It’s okay if I want this?’ Inside the confines of his underwear, he was memorably, painfully hard.

Geno didn’t stop watching as Sid pulled his underwear off, standing there without dignity and crossing that line. “Something on my face?” Sid asked, because he was coming to the realization that he didn’t just want Geno to watch him, he wanted him to like what he saw.

“No,” Geno said, brow furrowed.

As Geno discarded the remainder of his own clothes, Sid’s attention turned to Yana. From the couch, she watched them idly, her eyes dark with interest and her hands on her body, shamelessly exploring the expanse of her own skin. She took Sid in hand when he got close enough and guided him between her legs.

The inside of her felt so fucking good, her pussy warm and snug around him, good enough that he didn’t care that he was tired or that the carpet was going to be hell on his knees. As Sid fucked her, Geno dropped down next to Yana on the couch, using his palm to turn her face for a kiss.

For all that he’d seen Geno’s dick, even hard and leaking in Oksana’s mouth, he’d never seen it so close. Fat and swollen, leaking a little onto his thigh. Sid watched Yana wrap her hand around it, thrusting inelegantly into her as he imagined the hand was his own. Without any of the preamble. Without the dance.

Sitting there, Geno got visibly more impatient, so much so that Sid nearly stopped what he was doing to laugh. After a few minutes, he tucked a free hand between Sid and Yana’s bodies, pinching her clit until she lobbied him with a glare.

“Greedy,” he said in his typical way.

“Did you want something?” Sid asked, emphasising it with one long thrust.

“Yes,” Geno said, matter of fact. The same stupid tone he used to bully Sid during practice that would never not remind Sid of this moment now. “Move.”

“Rude,” Yana chided, but when Sid pulled out she climbed into Geno’s lap without complaint, spreading herself over his narrow hips and lining up with his dick.

The whole thing felt like porn come to life. Like Sid had fallen asleep in the cab and was dreaming about a spank bank memory from his parents’ computer circa 2005. Geno’s head blissed out against the couch arm as Yana rode him, his dick appearing and disappearing from view. Unsure of what else to do, Sid put his hands in the fold of Yana’s hips and let her lead, watching her shapely ass move up and down.

“You can touch,” she said, turning back to look at him, her mouth dropping open in a soundless moan.

Sid dug his fingers in. “I’m touching.”

“No,” was all she got out before she slumped forward, collapsing into Geno’s chest as he thrust up from below.

“Touch her ass,” Geno said crassly. When Sid looked at him, he could see Geno smiling self-satisfactorily through the waves of her hair. “She like it, right?”

The question was more for Yana than Sid and when Yana nodded against Geno’s body, Sid squatted down far enough that his thighs ached, running his hands from her hips to her ass cheeks, feeling the solid muscle underneath. He wet two fingers with his tongue and brushed them over her hole, rubbing the way that made him a little nuts when he did it to himself.

“More,” she said, but the spit wasn’t nearly wet enough to justify going inside. Without overthinking, he slid his fingers down to wet them with her pussy before he remembered that Geno was there, dick stuffed inside her where she was dripping.

Sid’s hand stilled for a moment, caught hovering over some boundary that might not exist. If he touched Geno there, he wouldn’t be able to un-touch him. And that seemed like the most frightening thing of all.

Geno made the choice for him, sliding abruptly out of Yana, his cockhead dripping a slick admixture all over Sid’s hand. “Do it,” Geno hissed, and Sid did. Sliding two fingers into her pussy and dragging the wet mess of it back to her ass as she let Geno resituate himself inside.

Sid pressed his chest to Yana’s back as he slid a finger into her ass, kissing messily at her shoulder and listening to her moan. Maybe it was the wine or the late hour or some combination of the loaded feelings, but it felt like the best sex Sid had ever had. The most terrifying and confusing. Some part of him didn’t want it to stop.

But whatever part of him that was wouldn’t get their wish, because there was no way in hell he was going to last. Not with Geno’s precome all over his hand, Yana keening wildly in his ear.

He wanted to pretend that it was her moans that took him over, that egged him on as he rutted against her back like a hard-up rookie about to blow. But it was Geno talking to her, low and soft. The same few phrases over and over. And Sid didn’t speak the language, but he liked to think he got the gist.

If you asked Sid about it later, he couldn’t remember whether he’d come on Yana’s back or the floor. What he’d said. When or where he’d finally fallen asleep. What he could remember was Geno’s face, his eyes over Yana’s shoulder, looking at Sid like he was wholly new.

.

Sewickley, PA – Fall 2013

September brought a lot of familiar things. Hockey, the pile of stone pavers the contractors still hadn’t removed from Sid’s front lawn, catching up with teammates about vacations and babies, and weddings he’d missed.

Usually, Geno had a lot to say. A trip to Bali. A new card trick. A week spent living with a hungry tiger at the Moscow Zoo. But Sid hadn’t spoken more than four or five words to him since June. And it was fine. They didn’t need to talk, really.

Sid spent most of his time manning the grill, throwing up a wave with his tongs as teammates trickled in from the front drive and regretting his decision not to hire a caterer.

“Nice digs, man,” Suttsy said, loitering near the grill with a burger hanging half-in-half-out of his mouth. “That pool heated?”

“Should be,” Sid said, cocking a brow. “You think I’m gonna make you fuckers jump in a cold pool?”

Suttsy held his hands up in surrender and laughed. “I don’t know, Cap.” He took another bite of his burger and gave Sid’s back a hearty slap as he wandered off into the fray. “Never know what kind of weird shit you Maritimers might be into.”

Sid chuckled to himself as he moved another rack of hotdogs from the grill to the plate, basking in the feeling of a new season on the horizon, this team full of guys who had turned into his home.

As much as he tried not to, Sid’s eye caught repeatedly on Geno, talking with Nealer near the cornhole set-up and looking really good, better than he had any right to look in shorts so full of artfully-placed holes.

He’d snuck into the party while Sid was in the bathroom, and still Sid didn’t know what to say. ‘How was your summer? Did you know I spent most of the last couple months thinking about touching your dick?’ somehow seemed less than ideal.

It was clear that something had gotten lost in translation, somewhere in the middle of all the weird hookups and finally, actually--well. Sid didn’t know what he’d thought would happen, probably because he hadn’t been thinking much at all. He’d been living in the moment. And now that moment had come back to bite him in the ass.

It was inconvenient to be attracted to a teammate. Even more so when that teammate was a friend. And Sid had done both. Big fat rookie mistake.

Beyond being avoidant, nothing else about Geno seemed out of place. He was being his usual, horrendously loud self and by the time Sid was done slinging burgers, Geno was narrating a boisterous game of chicken by the pool.

“Penalty!” he yelled, waving his sunglasses around in the general direction of where a few rookies had toppled over into the deep end. “Five-minute. You lose.”

“There’s no penalties in chicken!” someone shouted from the pool, Engo or Brooksy; Sid couldn’t tell. “I’m gonna pull your ass in here if you don’t shut the fuck up.”

So Geno was fine. It was Sid who was being weird, making something out of nothing, just another impulsive conquest in Geno’s crazy life. Sid had been--there. Convenient, maybe. A person Geno trusted not to make things a big deal.

He distracted himself by kicking Flower’s ass at cornhole a few times and got himself embroiled in a lengthy conversation with Duper about his family trip to Mexico and all the hijinks his kids had forced him to endure. By the time the sun was setting, his concerns felt mostly washed over with the uncomplicated joy of good conversation and cold beer.

The guys with families departed early to relieve babysitters and get the kids to bed. Sid fully expected Geno to leave with them, because he wasn’t sure Geno had met a party he couldn’t show up late to and peace out of before anyone noticed he was gone. But when the last few stragglers rumbled down his driveway and Sid did his cursory trash sweep of the back deck, he noticed Geno still there, sitting alone beside the pool.

Sid left his bag of trash on the stairs and walked out into the yard, the grass gone cool under his bare feet. It was dark by then, the only light in the yard the lanterns and the ambient blue light from the pool.

The shape of Geno’s body was highlighted by it, the blue drawing a line down his profile as he noted Sid’s approach.

“Hey,” Sid said awkwardly, hovering a few feet away, feeling somewhat like a guest intruding in his own home. “Thought you went home.”

Geno didn’t say anything in reply, just kicked his feet back and forth, causing ripples to undulate across the surface of the pool. That, more than anything, was what made Sid sit down beside him. They’d been friends long enough that Sid knew Geno didn’t just put his cards on the table; he waited for you to come to him.

“Not tired,” Geno said when Sid dunked his own grassy feet into the water.

“No?” Sid asked. “Guess you’re the only one. Guys are getting too old to go all night.”

Geno just hummed and they sat in thick, awkward silence. It was barely September and still the weather hadn’t cooled down much, the back of Sid’s neck dotted over with sweat.

“Listen, I--” Sid started to say, just as Geno said, “Sid.”

“Sorry,” Sid said, looking down at his feet and praying it wouldn’t be this awkward between them all year. Clearly Sid had overstepped a line. “You go first.”

Part of him expected Geno to talk about anything else: his summer vacation, Sid’s landscaping, his thoughts on how they could gear up to win another Cup. But instead, Geno said, “Sid, I.” When Sid looked over at him, he was picking at his fingernails. “We don’t talk much this summer.”

“I was busy, yeah,” Sid said, which wasn’t a lie. But he was busy every summer. Training, ice time, trips out to the bay with his friends back home. More than once that summer he’d found himself hovering over Geno’s contact on his phone, waiting for pictures of outlandish adventures that hadn’t come. It wasn’t what he’d wanted from Geno, not really, but it was at least the status quo.

“I’m busy too, but,” Geno blew out a breath, looking into the dark of Sid’s privacy trees. Sid hated that Geno wouldn’t really look him in the eye. It only made it worse to know how royally he’d fucked things up between them. “Maybe I miss, you know? Picture of family, blurry picture of face.”

Sid rubbed at his eyes, exhausted and confused. It certainly hadn’t been the thing Sid expected him to say. “I don’t send you photos of my face,” he said. But he saw how they could go on and on like this, endless circles without ever getting to the point at all. Geno would go home eventually, back to his house and his life that Sid wasn’t part of. His rotating cast of girlfriends and friends.

“Listen, G.” Sid didn’t want this to go on forever. He wanted to say his peace and let Geno forgive him in six months or twenty--anything besides hanging in limbo. He wasn’t going to tip-toe around his own team. “I know I was out of line, okay. In Los Angeles.” He pulled his feet from the water and turned toward Geno’s body, still sitting just out of reach. “I crossed a line I shouldn’t have crossed there, and I shouldn’t have made it a thing. I was drunk, probably, but--”

“Cross line?” Geno asked, finally turning to look at him. Sid noticed the sunburn on his face--deep color running the bridge of his nose.

“Took it too far,” Sid explained. He was terrible at articulating himself. Talking about his feelings was terrible and he wished that Geno would just read between the lines. “I shouldn’t have, with Yana--I should’ve just gone to bed.”

Geno was quiet for a minute, long enough that Sid thought that might be the end of it. And Geno would say his goodnights and leave. But he caught Sid’s eye and quietly asked, “What line you think you cross?”

Sid stared back at him unmoving, caught in Geno’s searching gaze. Well, fine, if Geno really wanted him to say it. He would put it in layman’s terms if that’s what it took.

“We shouldn’t have both fucked her, okay?” Sid threw his hands up. “I got it in my head that--well, I don’t know what I got in my head. She said something to me about you and I took it the wrong way. It’s--I’m not trying to make things weird, but clearly I did. So, I’m sorry.” He rubbed at his eyes. Maybe if he was lucky, this would all just be a shitty dream.

“What Yana say?” Geno asked slowly, like he should be afraid of the answer.

“She told me you’d been with a man before.” Sid hissed quietly. He wasn’t proud of the fact that he’d gone snooping around about it. At that moment it had felt like his get-out-of-jail-free card. If Geno had done that, then it wasn’t wrong if Sid wanted it. But clearly it had been. “Well, not in so many words, but. I let it mean what I wanted it to mean.”

“What you think,” Geno asked, and Sid hated the way it sounded like he was walking on eggshells every time he opened his mouth. If he was trying not to make Sid mad it wasn’t working. “What you want it mean?”

“Come on, G, can’t we just leave it?” Sid said, loud enough that he hoped his neighbors couldn’t hear. “I’m not trying to play twenty questions and air my dirty laundry, okay? I just wanted to say I’m sorry. And we can get over it. Move on.”

“Move on,” Geno parroted. Sid fucking hated when he did that. Like he couldn’t just say what was on his own mind.

“Yeah, move on,” Sid repeated. He was feeling pretty heated now, about ready to march into the house and leave Geno to pass out in the pool. “It was easy enough before, right? We didn’t have to talk about the fact that you let me watch your girlfriend suck you off in your home. It’s just guy stuff. It happens. Laugh it off.”

There were so many years of bullshit in it. All the times Sid had looked at Geno across a bar and caught him looking back and wondered what he was thinking. All the things he had tried to make those looks mean. He’d seen guys get themselves in pretty big messes over the years and thought he was being careful, cautious. All along he’d been creating his own mess.

“It’s not easy!” Geno said, scrambling to his feet, hackles rising. “You think I just--you think I let anyone see? It’s game?”

“I don’t know,” Sid said, because he didn’t think it could be anything else, not after months of frosty silence. “Isn’t that what guys do? They play games? Maybe it was fun to go out and fuck around and pretend like it was nothing when we were nineteen, but--I’m over it, okay? I can’t handle shit being weird between us during the season, so. It needs to stop.”

“I don’t want,” Geno said.

“Yeah, Geno,” Sid hissed cruelly, his mouth twisting into a tight, uncomfortable line. “Your radio silence this summer made that abundantly clear.” Sid rose to his own feet, brushing dampness from his shorts and ready to high-tail it right to bed.

“No,” Geno said desperately. “I don’t want stop.”

Sid’s heart beat so hard it felt like it would thump right out of his chest. “You--” he began, not wanting to be yanked around when it would only get his hopes up. “I don’t think you heard me. I can’t do any of this with you anymore. No girls. None of it. It--it means more to me and I didn’t want to fucking tell you that shit because it’s embarrassing, but.”

Sid wasn’t sure if it felt better or worse to have it out there, his feelings in a heap across the wet concrete. Feelings he couldn’t take back.

Geno’s hand grabbed his wrist. “Say again,” Geno said quietly.

Sid tried to wrench himself away, but Geno’s grip was surprisingly firm. “I need to go to bed, Geno, c’mon.” He shook his head. “You’re not drunk enough. I know you heard what I--”

“Say again,” Geno repeated, his expression so open and wild that Sid thought he might fall right in. “It means more to you.”

Hope did nauseating cartwheels in Sid’s stomach, flipping and rolling until he felt sick.

But Geno went on. “To me, it mean something for--maybe for long time. I--” Sid didn’t know if it would be better to listen to the rest or to let the earth swallow him whole. “I think you don’t feel, so. I don’t say.”

“G,” he said. It felt hard to breathe.

Geno stepped tentatively closer to him, reaching down to take Sid’s hand between two of his own. “When I meet you, I think--you nice. Sweet. Cute smile.” He smiled to himself, down at their entwined hands and then up at Sid’s waiting gaze. “You smell so bad, but--I want to know you.”

Sid laughed unexpectedly. Geno did always know how to spin a line. “I--smelled bad?” he asked, amusement clear in his voice.

“Shh,” Geno admonished, doing that stupid thing with his nose that Sid had always liked, one side scrunching up in pleasant irritation. “I think maybe always I know I like guys, too. Like, small thing, you know? And I try, but. It’s not so easy. Not worth it to risk.” Sid knew the feeling, how stupidly careful he had to be. “I only do sometimes with--”

“With a woman,” Sid finished for him. With a woman, like they’d done. A safe place to explore.

Geno nodded, and then admitted, a little sheepish, “I don’t think you like guys, Sid. I think maybe you just have fun, you know? And so many years go by and--maybe I lose moment. If I don’t do.”

“I like guys, G,” Sid said with a laugh, watching Geno blush. The feeling in his stomach swelled, out toward his skin, down toward his toes. Geno was just--putting it all out there. His feelings. His insecurities. All the things Sid hadn’t been able to say.

One step closer and their toes were touching. Sid looked up at Geno’s fond, familiar face, cast across with hazy blue-orange light. “I didn’t stop thinking about it,” Sid said. “On the plane home to Halifax I lay there trying to sleep thinking ‘what if I had kissed him.’ I wanted to. I can’t tell you how many times over the summer I wanted to call you and say--” He stopped for a moment to laugh at his own self-imposed misery. “Well, I was pretty convinced you were gonna tell me to fuck off.”

He pulled his hand from between them and put it on Geno’s face, his palm cupping the cool shape of Geno’s cheek. There was patchy stubble there, bits and pieces that Sid rubbed over with his thumb.

“I don’t tell you to fuck off,” Geno said, his breath washing over Sid’s face.

Sid kissed him, sloppy and a little off-center, not caring much for finesse. He’d seen Geno kiss what felt like hundreds of women, and still he didn’t kiss like Sid expected, his lips soft and open and a little tentative under Sid’s own.

But Geno’s hands were far less tentative in their explorations, roaming across Sid’s arms and torso and up under the hem of his shirt until the butterflies in Sid’s body formed a tornado.

“Jesus,” Sid hissed when Geno’s palms grabbed a healthy handful of his ass. “Someone’s going to see you.”

“You think they don’t already see?” Geno asked, that familiar teasing lilt to his words. He bent his mouth to Sid’s ear, his words vibrating against Sid’s skin. “Oh, wow, my neighbor Sidney kiss man in his yard, but it’s fine. Nothing to see. They just friends.”

Sid had enough of it. He wanted to do this in private, alone in a room where no one could see. Just him and Geno and the silent, unknowing walls of his home.

“C’mon,” Sid urged, tugging his shirt back into place and leading Geno inside, nearly knocking over the towering trash as they passed through the sliding glass doors.

Once inside, Geno stopped inexplicably to look around, peering around the kitchen island into the living room as Sid locked the patio door.

“What the hell are you looking at?” Sid asked, going to retrieve him before he sniffed out all of Sid’s most private things.

“House.” Geno picked some decorative napkin holder up off Sid’s counter and inspected it. “It’s nice.”

Sid reached out to snatch the stupid thing and set it back on the counter. “Oh my god,” he said, catching hold of Geno’s belt loop and tugging him in. “You’re insufferable. Get over here.”

“So impatient,” Geno chided when he was within range.

“Yes,” Sid said flatly. “Here.” He shoved Geno into a nondescript guest room off the dining area that had recently been cleaned. Fresh sheets. New lightbulb in the standing lamp by the door. He flicked the light on and pushed Geno toward the twin bed in the far corner.

“This your room?” Geno asked, brow creased with confusion as he gave the room a once-over, probably noting its spare decoration and small size.

“Nope,” Sid said without explanation, because Geno was lucky Sid had scruples enough not to strip down on the kitchen floor. He pulled his t-shirt over his head. “Well? Take your shirt off. C’mon.”

Geno raised a skeptical eyebrow, but did as he was told, pulling his shirt off and letting Sid look his fill. Sid felt like he was cataloguing all the things about Geno’s body that he hadn’t let himself before: his chest slightly concave in the center, a birthmark on his ribs. “What,” Geno said, wary under Sid's heated gaze.

“Nothing,” Sid said, and went to him, climbing atop Geno on the mattress and muscling him down, his hand cupped around the back of Geno’s head to stop it hitting the nearest wall.

Geno kissed him fiercely this time, groping with his hands and his tongue as Sid’s body trapped him there against the sheets. The moment Sid put his lips to Geno’s pulse point, Geno began to squirm.

“Is that why you do this?” Sid asked him, not letting up once he realized he could elicit such a good reaction from it. “I see you kiss their necks and I always thought, girls are just into that, right? But it’s you.”

Geno only turned his head aside, the movement of his body saying what he wouldn’t. “I like it,” Sid said. “I like that you’re into it.”

“Sid,” Geno said, his cheeks burning pink with embarrassment that he tried to hide by rolling them over and pulling Sid’s face into his hands. For a moment he just held Sid there, slowing time down where Sid wanted to speed it up. “You so...” Geno’s words trailed into nothingness, swallowed up by the silence of the room. And Sid didn’t know what to do with himself--his body, his face, just lying there and being looked at so openly by another man.

In all his exploration, Sid had never done that. He’d fucked men and made them come. Shared smiles and laughter. A glass of wine. A bed. But he’d never wanted that, all of the messy, complicated things he wanted to have with Geno. The things that made it worth the risk.

“I’m gonna go grey,” he said, trying to deflect from the welter of feelings bubbling up inside his chest. “Before you’re done looking at me.”

“Hmm,” Geno said, “Maybe.”

It was slower than he would’ve imagined it, more drawn out as Geno stripped Sid’s shorts off and touched him, running his fingers up and down between his legs until Sid was so hard he wanted to cry. “I’m going to kill you,” Sid said through gritted teeth as Geno finally wrapped his hand around Sid’s dick.

“You don’t kill,” Geno said, smug, giving Sid’s dick a wicked twist. He left the bed for a moment to tug off his own shorts and underwear, returning to the space between Sid’s legs naked and unashamed. “Who make sure you win second Stanley Cup?”

Sid laughed, trying not to think about how long it had been since the first, each year getting further away. Geno took him in hand again, playing with Sid’s dick like it was the only one he’d ever seen, sliding the foreskin up and down with his fingers, rubbing just under the head. “I might actually kill you at this rate,” Sid said, propping himself up on his elbows and staring down at Geno’s work, his dick twitching and impatient in Geno’s palm. “Jesus, Geno--c’mon.”

“It’s--” Geno said, defensive and retreating. “I try before but like, just hand, we kiss.” He looked down at his own lap, obscuring his face from Sid’s eyes. “I never do this before, with only man.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Sid said, scrambling up to sit, putting his open palms on Geno’s splayed knees, smoothing his ruffled feathers. “How many guys do you think I’ve slept with? Because it’s not a lot.”

Geno shrugged, his shoulders fully touching his ears. “I want you think I’m good, you know?” he said, clearly embarrassed by his supposed inexperience, looking not unlike the shy boy he'd been once with his clunky speech and slow, awkward smiles.

“It’s good,” Sid assured him, directing Geno’s gaze to his dick, pink and still most of the way hard against his stomach. He pulled Geno back into his arms. “C’mon. It’s so good. Kiss me.”

Geno did kiss him, opening his mouth for Sid’s searching tongue, letting Sid press him into the corner where the bed met the wall. “Let me touch you,” Sid pleaded, licking his hand and wrapping it around Geno’s cock between them, feeling it grow big and solid inside his hand. “You don’t know how much I wanted to do this before,” he said. “You were so fucking close and I. I thought what if I just--you know?”

“I want you to,” Geno said, thrusting inelegantly into Sid’s fist, precome welling up and smearing across Sid’s thumb. “After I’m inside her and I touch you? Only for a second, but I almost come like, right there.”

“Fuck,” Sid hissed, hiding his eyes in the sweaty curve of Geno’s neck, mouthing loosely as his hand twisted with purpose on Geno’s cock. “That’s so hot,” he said and then laughed at his own admission. “Why is that so hot?”

“Sid,” Geno moaned. Sid kept kissing him all over--his neck, his jaw, his hairline, all the places Sid had tried and failed to force himself not to notice with anything other than friendly observation. When Geno said his name a second time, and a third, Sid dropped a kiss on Geno’s open, panting mouth.

“This is gonna be over before you get your hands on me again if you don’t stop that,” Sid told him, but it was barely a few more thrusts before it was Geno rolling over the edge, spilling across Sid’s fingers and still chanting his name.

“Well,” Sid said, wiping Geno’s come off on his own dick and watching Geno’s eyes follow the motion with clear interest. “I guess that solves that--”

Geno gave him no time to finish, tackling him down to the bed with a thump and pressing their mouths together. “Shut up,” he said, vicious in the way he tugged at Sid’s lower lip. "Shut up."

When Geno wormed his way down Sid’s body and put Sid’s dick in his mouth, Sid hissed out a long breath, clenching and unclenching his hands and trying not to bury them deep in Geno’s hair. Geno sucked experimentally at first, the kind of thing people did when they weren’t sure how to coordinate their lips with their tongue.

“Hey,” Sid said, brushing his fingers along Geno’s cheek as Geno pulled off and tried to go a little deeper. “You’re doing great.”

The first time Sid had sucked a dick he gagged more than was probably recommended or sexy, the head a strange intrusion as it passed over his tongue. But Geno’s skill level felt irrelevant. That was Geno’s mouth on him, Geno’s cheek under his hands, Geno’s fingers clenched so hard on Sid’s thigh they might leave a mark.

The whole of it was more than he could take, and Sid was embarrassed at how close he was, spiraling towards the finish line with every un-practiced flick of Geno’s tongue.

“G,” he warned, bucking softly into Geno’s mouth that felt so lush around him Sid thought he might die. “I’m gonna--”

Geno pulled off while Sid finished, resting his cheek on Sid’s leg and staring up at him with dark, hooded eyes. He rubbed at the underside of Sid’s dick until it was a sloppy, softening mess. Afterward, Sid just looked at him, returning Geno’s self-satisfied gaze and trying to catch his own ragged breath.

As Sid spaced out, Geno scratched an idle hand up Sid’s abdomen, running it through a patch of dry come and catching Sid’s belly button. “Smooth,” he said.

“What? You know I don’t have any hair there,” Sid said, returning Geno’s smile with a sleepy, soundless laugh. “Don’t act surprised.”

Geno crawled up his body and gave him a long, slow, spine-melting kiss before settling himself next to Sid on the pillow. “Want to touch so much,” Geno mused, running a hand over Sid’s nearby arm. “I’m so scared, though, like. Maybe if I do, you disappear. It’s dream.”

“I don’t think I’d disappear,” Sid said, stretching his arms up and yawning. “It’s my house.”

It had felt like a dream, though, in some ways. All those things he’d seen and never spoken about. Sometimes he’d lain awake in his bed at the Lemieux house and wondered if he’d hallucinated it. Geno’s voice. His eyes watching Sid in the dark and his muffled, echoing moans.

But it had been real. And it was real now: Geno lying buck-naked in Sid’s first floor guest bed, the air from the overhead fan cool on Sid’s face. No one was between them now, only skin.

“Sid,” Geno said. Sid’s eyes were closed and his voice sounded far away.

“Yeah?” Sid asked.

“Why we don’t go to your bed?”

Sid let the question linger for a moment, parsing the words as he succumbed lazily to sleep. “You know what,” he said, amused at his own sloppy overeagerness. The twin bed. The tiny room. He let his eyes drift open for a moment, curling on his side to touch a hand to Geno’s face, tracing the familiar lines and feeling them anew. “I have no idea.”

.