Archive of Our Own

Zhenya curled up in his designated seat on the flight from Brno to Moscow and rolled his sweatshirt up and stuffed it between his head and the window, closing his eyes so he would look asleep enough that no one would try to talk to him.

Once he could hear enough snoring, he cracked his eyes open and watched the clouds rush by outside the window, and imagined the yellow-green fields and the mountains dotting the ground below. He took a few quick photos as they sunk closer to land and sent them to the team group chat.

training time. slovakia soon!! we win)))

But the warm, heavy feeling of heat in his gut wasn’t going away at all; it was only getting worse. Even in his t-shirt and rolled-up sweatpants he was feeling itchy and overheated, like his insides were too big for his skin. He pulled the sleeve of his sweatshirt out and rubbed it over his neck. He grabbed the half-empty water bottle out of his seat pocket and finished the rest of it in one long swallow.

He didn’t think he was in danger of going under today, or maybe even the next day, but at this point, there was little chance of delaying the inevitable. And not a single part of him was ready for his heat to start up again, certainly not here, where he was supposed to be focused and fired up. Worlds was supposed to be an opportunity to prove his place again: Zhenya Malkin, superstar center, future Hall-Of-Famer. He didn’t have any time for distraction.

At the training center, he slunk into the elevator after Ilyusha and hit a few extra floors for good measure.

“What the fuck?” Ilyusha turned a skeptical eye on him. “Was that really necessary? I’m tired.”

“I need to talk to you,” Zhenya said, nervously flipping his room key around in his sweaty palm. He gave Ilyusha a long look, his most serious face. “I think I’m going into heat soon, like—probably this week.”

“Haha, Zhenya,” Ilyusha replied, rolling his eyes like he thought Zhenya was pulling one over on him. “Very funny.”

“I’m not kidding, c’mon—“ Zhenya pulled his free hand back through his hair, tugging it up, frustrated. It wasn’t as if Ilyusha had never helped him out before. Zhenya had been painfully single last summer and had spent more than one heat writhing on Ilyusha’s knot. Zhenya needed this tournament to go well. He wasn’t above begging. “I’m being serious, please—“

At least his pitiful, pleading face seemed convincing. Ilyusha could probably smell him slicking up a little, trapped in this small space. He put a cool hand on Zhenya’s shoulder. “I’m the captain, Zhenya. You know Vorobiev would have my head on a plate if I—“

“You’re going to let them tell you what to do? Really?” Zhenya asked. “Don’t tell me they want one of their players to end up absent because he can’t keep his own hands out of his ass.”

Ilyusha laughed a little. “Don’t be crude, Zhenya—I’m not the only alpha on this team and you know that. I can’t be distracted by this. I’m sure you can strong-arm one of the others into it if you really try.”

Zhenya didn’t want to have to strong-arm anyone into helping him through this. He wanted to not be dealing with it at all, first off, but if he had to, he at least wanted someone familiar to ride it out with, not an over-confident young alpha he barely knew.

“You’re not making it easy for me to show my best game, here,” Zhenya said petulantly as they reached their actual floor and stepped out into the air-conditioned hall.

“Oh, is that my job now?” Ilyusha turned to look at him as they split off toward their respective rooms. “You’ll figure it out.”

Zhenya frowned at his back as he walked away, the conversation over, and cursed sharply under his breath when he nearly collided with a fake potted plant. Fuck.

In his room, he let himself sulk for exactly twenty minutes, stomping around the room as he hung up his clothes, and sifted through the drawers, and un-made the bed. He felt like an overgrown child about it, but how was he supposed to feel? Ilyusha had been his one familiar chance here, the one person he knew could reliably get him off and get over it, no questions asked. But that was out now.

Maybe he could call someone, and ply them with free tickets to the tournament, but it seemed inconvenient and more than a little desperate. None of his regular summer hookups had ever been more than very casual friends, certainly not the kind that would drop everything at a moment’s notice just to soothe him through an inconveniently-timed heat.

He flopped back onto the bed, rolling his shoulders around until he was comfortable and pecking through his phone. His mother had sent him a video from his uncle’s birthday party, and some of the guys in the group chat had responded to his photo with the expected pitiful chirping.

Sid had sent him a separate message, the way he usually did. have fun! wish i was there. hope canada wins, haha. :)

Zhenya didn’t want to be irritated, but he kind of was. Sid hadn’t ended their season any more injured than Zhenya was, and yet he had declined to come here in favor of what—another month of rest and reflection? They had so many months of summer ahead of them. Zhenya couldn’t help but think that if Sid was here, well—. But he hadn’t wanted to come, even when Zhenya had asked him about it.

He typed and deleted multiple responses, and dropped his phone on his chest and picked it up again, trying to figure out the right thing to say. He didn’t know why it was so hard. They’d been friends for almost thirteen years now, a steady and unchanging part of Zhenya’s life. Zhenya’s stupid feelings didn’t need to get in the way.

i go into heat soon, maybe. maybe canada do ok if i’m not play. he typed, and let his phone rest loosely in his hand and closed his eyes, listening to the quick skip of his heartbeat as he waited for a reply.

He wasn’t even sure what he wanted Sid to say. ‘Sorry, that sucks’? What he really wanted was for Sid to be here, next to him in bed in this stale dormitory, his hands in Zhenya’s hair and his knot in Zhenya’s ass, just like it had been for all of this season and the last, but Sid didn’t want to be. It was the time for Zhenya to stop thinking about it.

His phone vibrated in his hand with Sid’s reply. oof. bad timing.

Bad timing was right. Maybe if Zhenya had played better against the Islanders, he would still be in Pittsburgh now, and this inconvenient heat would be made slightly less inconvenient by Sid’s presence. Zhenya could make him come over after practice and feed him leftovers from the freezer and ride him into the couch and go out the next night and win. Rinse and repeat.

Zhenya debated what to reply, but nothing seemed sufficient, because he wanted to whine about it for a while, but what would Sid do? Fly all the way to fucking Moscow and hole up in Zhenya’s dorm? Unlikely. He’d already rejected Zhenya’s overtures once; Zhenya didn’t need him to do it again. (((((

He flipped his phone over and plugged it in and went to shower before lunch, so none of the guys would smell it on him, the lingering arousal from thinking about Sid plowing him into the mattress, the nervous sour smell of his sweat. In the shower he let himself daydream a little, thinking about a dumb fantasy where he found himself alone in some public restroom in Old Town, and some guy he didn’t know pressed him against the sinks and let him have it, knotted him with his cheek smashed against the grimy mirror, hands held roughly in the crease of Zhenya’s hips.

Except the faceless guy quickly dissolved into Sid’s face, and the bathroom was Zhenya’s own, back in Pittsburgh, with the marble tile and the his-and-hers sinks. Zhenya didn’t even fight it, this dumb fantasy that couldn’t hurt because Sid had no idea. He couldn’t judge Zhenya for continuing to think of him, or stripping his dick and coming way quicker than he had expected, all the way up the flushed wet line of his chest.

Zhenya didn’t feel embarrassed about it until Sanya leaned over to him at lunch and said, “You smell really ripe, Malych,” his eyebrows raised suggestively. Zhenya’s face burned, but he speared a potato and gave Sanya a dirty look in response.

“Shut up,” Zhenya replied, quiet and mean under his breath. Sanya was an omega too, one of the only ones still on the team, and Zhenya knew he could tell exactly why Zhenya smelled like he did. But Zhenya didn’t want word to get out any earlier than it had to. He was trying to squash this problem like a bug, preferably as soon as possible. Preferably last week.

He jerked off again before bed, rutting uselessly against the mattress like a teenager, and promised himself that he would leave a very generous tip for the cleaning staff so he wouldn’t feel so guilty about soiling the sheets with his slick and come. He sent a rash text to Sid while he was brushing his teeth: heat sucks!! why i don’t take pills before(((( because no one else wanted to listen to him complain about it. Afterward, he dropped down onto the dry, cool side of the bed and slept like the dead, snoring loudly into the pillow.

“I don’t know if you’ll even make it through the week, buddy,” Ilyusha said, holding the door to the amenities building open and allowing Zhenya to pass through. “You reek right now.”

Zhenya frowned at him, annoyed that he felt the need to comment on it at all. “You going to do something about it?” But Ilyusha ignored him and walked on, leading them through the halls to the steam room, waving at the pool attendant, whistling a little. His whistling was driving Zhenya mad.

Zhenya debated leaving his towel on in the steam room, mostly because he was feeling prickly, because there was nothing that could mask his scent at this point. Any alpha within striking distance would know—his heat was soon, he couldn’t stop it. Unsurprisingly, Kuch kept sneaking weird little half glances at him through the steam, like he was trying to decide if Zhenya smelled appealing enough. Part of him wanted to be offended about it—of course he smelled good, he was the most appealing. Anyone would be so lucky.

But the other part was curious—he and Kuch hadn’t ever spent much time together, and he had only recently found out that Kuch was an alpha at all. He was bonded to someone—a woman that Zhenya had only met once in passing. But he was looking at Zhenya like that, a clearly assessing gaze.

Zhenya untied his towel and spread out a little, showing off the long swath of his inner thighs and his dick, shiny from more than just sweat. He leaned back against the high bench and closed his eyes, floating a little in the oppressive heat, letting everything get loose. When he slit his eyes open again, even Ilyusha, for all his protests about what he could and couldn’t do, was looking his way.

They took a break before long, shuffling out into the change room together like sweaty prunes. Zhenya walked ahead of the rest of them, scratching at his overheated neck, completely naked still except for his slides. Let them look.

When he pulled his phone from his locker, a reply from Sid awaited him. sorry, bud. he had sent an hour ago, as if he was at all to blame for Zhenya’s heat, halfway across the world. He always apologized for everything, like someone had told him once that it was polite. There was a long gap before the next message for some reason. you find someone to help with your heat?

Zhenya rolled his eyes. Sid would be a mother hen until the end of time.

“I told you,” Ilyusha said, swatting Zhenya across the ass with his towel. “That was quite the display in there, Zhenya.”

“So what?” Zhenya asked, tying his towel low around his waist and cinching it with a double knot. He stuffed his things back in his locker, and flipped his phone back and forth between his hands. “You want me to find someone to knot me? Well—“

“Yeah, okay—“ Ilyusha said. They walked to the sunroom, where it was warm enough to sit and bask in the light and drink tea and eat until it was time to go back and sweat again. Zhenya’s stomach grumbled. “He’s married though, maybe look elsewhere.”

Zhenya shrugged, and pressed Ilyusha until he went through the door and let him be. If Kuch wanted to look at Zhenya, Zhenya would let him—and maybe he would let him do more, if it came down to it. He had a pretty unfortunate beard going, which Zhenya didn’t love, but he could do much worse. It was just one heat.

It was frustrating that everyone still wanted to manage him—he wasn’t nineteen anymore, letting strangers fuck him and tell everyone about it. Ilyusha could politely help Zhenya with his heat like he had last summer, or he could shut up about it. Case closed.

Zhenya debated how to respond to Sid. He was irritated, still, that Sid seemed to care about him now, halfway around the world, when he could have just as easily been in Slovakia already, training with Team Canada and waiting for Zhenya to arrive. He could have been with Zhenya for God’s sake, even if he didn’t want to play.

The rest of the guys wrangled Zhenya into a photo op over lunch, and Zhenya made Ilyusha send him one of the photos, the best one, where he looked pink-chested and his eyes weren’t half-closed. maybe)) he sent to Sid, with the photo attached alongside, feeling maybe a little mean.

He didn’t expect a response right away, but when one came, it wasn’t really what he had hoped. He had wanted Sid to feel jealous, maybe—to show his hand, to look at Zhenya’s sweaty skin and crooked smile and feel some primal proprietary urge, something more than friendship. Instead, he just said looks like you’ve got it all under control.

Zhenya slumped back on the bench and downed the rest of his tea and filched a couple of crackers from Kirya’s plate and frowned, feeling himself flushing hot with flickers of mixed embarrassment and arousal.

“Hey, I was eating that!” Kirya protested. Zhenya just filched another and got up and left, back to the solitude of his rooms, where he could slick up all over the bed and stew in his disappointment, not in control at all.

It stayed on Zhenya’s mind all through their flight to Bratislava, and through their next practice, keeping him a little off-center, hot inside his head and his shorts. He flubbed shot after shot thinking about it, until Vasya shouted out to him from the crease. “Want me to stand still, Malych?” Zhenya did another lap around and fired his hardest wrister top shelf, right under the corner of the bar.

“You think I was trying before?” he shouted, snowing Vasya a little on his way past the goal, trying to look unamused and not show his hand.

His legs felt like absolute jello in the locker room after, the way they always did now on this side of thirty. But it was worse today, the hot, messy ache that said something more than just a hard day’s work, and he slumped back in his stall and let them splay lazily into the aisle, uncaring of anyone else’s need for space. Kuch could pay more attention if he didn’t want to trip over them again.

He zoned out in the back of the cab with Ilyusha and Kirya on the way to lunch, seriously considering propositioning one of the waitstaff. He had been half-hard all morning, and he’d locked himself in the handicap stall after practice and jerked off frantically, his lip tugged between his teeth, trying hard not to make a sound.

Ilyusha eyed him across the table at lunch, like Zhenya was made of sheer silk and his every thought was on display. Zhenya felt pinned. He was playing well enough so far, but they had changed his wingers twice now, and maybe it was a sign that he still wasn’t quite right. There was no chance of him getting there without getting himself sorted out. Going through heat alone would only turn him into a scattered mess, and with a game the following afternoon, he was running out of time.

They took the long way back to the hotel afterward, walking along side streets in the pedestrian zone to let their meal wear off. Zhenya was debating how to bring it up to Kuch, who seemed like his only discreet and potentially willing option at this point, when his phone started ringing in his coat pocket.

“Hello?” he answered, without looking at the caller ID. No one called him except his agent or his mother, and either would be disappointed in him for screening his calls.

But it wasn’t his mother or Genya at all. “Hey—Geno?” Sid asked, on the other end of the line. It sounded like he was somewhere busy, trying to shout a little over the background noise.

“Sid?” Zhenya asked. He could see Ilyusha looking at him suspiciously out of the corner of his eye and he slowed down, dropping back to lag behind a little. “Why you call?”

“Did it start yet?” Sid asked. “I’m in Vienna trying to rent a car right now—hey.” He spoke aside to someone, too quick for Zhenya to understand. “Where are you guys staying? I can be there soon, like—maybe a couple of hours.”

Zhenya’s heart pounded in his chest. “You in Austria?” He wasn’t even sure how Sid had gotten there so quickly in the first place. It was at least most of a day’s flight from North America, probably longer on short notice.

“Yeah, I’m—“ Sid said, “I was, uh, already in the area, so I thought—“ He paused for another beat to speak again, low and kind. Zhenya’s fluttering heartbeat was all he could hear, and he tried without success to tamp down on it. “I’d be a pretty bad friend if I didn’t come to the rescue, eh?”

Rescue. God. “I’m not need rescue.” He didn’t tell Sid that his other friends hadn’t blinked at all before they told Zhenya no. “Not distress. I’m adult, can handle. I’m fine.”

In truth, he liked thinking about Sid wanting to rescue him, as cheesy as it was. But no chance in hell was he telling Sid that.

“I can go back to Canada then, I guess,” Sid said, clearly calling Zhenya’s bluff, like he knew that Zhenya was already slicking up uncomfortably in his pants. “Haven’t signed off on this rental yet, and my parents did want me to come back and visit soon, so—“ He let the silence hang between them infuriatingly long, until Zhenya tipped his head back and groaned.

“Fine, okay,” Zhenya said, nearly tripping over an uneven patch of cobblestones and drawing Kirya’s attention. He didn’t have time to argue about this in public—he knew how Sid could go on and on, neither of them ever willing to give in.

He gave Sid the details for the hotel, and quickly hurried him off the phone. They could hash things out later, when Zhenya wasn’t standing like a sore thumb in the middle of Staré Mesto, chubbing up and wearing his team uniform and smelling so close to heat.

“Everything okay?” Ilyusha asked as Zhenya fell back into step, elbowing him lightly in the ribs and looking him up and down, clearly aware of Zhenya’s unwanted erection.

“I’m fine,” Zhenya lied. He didn’t want to talk about it, and Ilyusha would find out soon enough. There was probably about zero chance that he could keep Sid’s presence a secret, not with his teammates all around him, certainly not during Worlds, where any sighting of Sid in the vicinity would incite fannish excitement.

He lay in the bath instead of taking his usual nap, because he knew there was no chance he could get to sleep now. Sid was coming to Slovakia, ostensibly because he thought Zhenya needed him to, even though Zhenya had hardly asked. Well, okay, fine. He had asked..

Zhenya was going to have to face him, in the actual flesh, after the disastrous events of that last dinner at Zhenya’s house. And Zhenya hadn’t thought that his heat was tuned to any particular person, but it sure seemed like it now. He’d felt itchy in the morning, and for the last few days, all the usual signs and signals, a slow ramping up toward the main event. But his body knew that Sid was coming, somehow, and his slow building heat had rapidly fallen off a cliff once he’d gotten back to the hotel and shut himself behind the bathroom door. He was rock hard in the water, and wet from more than just the bath, uncomfortably flushed even where he was exposed to the air. He hadn’t felt this urgent in a long time, maybe since the season before last, the first time Sid had ever fucked him, bent over the arm of his couch for a solid forty-eight hours.

He rinsed the soap from his hair and let himself sink down into the familiar trappings of his heat, blood boiling inside his body. The water ran cold after a while, but he could barely feel it. Somewhere on the counter his phone buzzed, once and then again. He would probably have to let the guys know that he wasn’t coming to dinner, or maybe he could just pretend he slept through it—it wouldn’t be the first time.

When Sid called him again, Zhenya was starfishing naked on top of the sheets, ostensibly drying off from his bath, but mostly jerking himself off, his hand loosely wrapped around the base of his dick, his mind a little numb.

“You’re at the hotel, right?” Sid asked when Zhenya picked up, without even so much as a kind hello. “You wanna meet me in the lobby? I ate a little on the plane, but—“

“You come my room,” Zhenya said, and rolled over onto his stomach to press his dick against the mattress. “I’m—don’t want put pants, okay?”

“Oh—well,” Sid said, reading between the lines of what Zhenya wouldn’t say, “yeah, for sure.”

Zhenya gave him the room number and hung up and rubbed against the bed a little longer, feeling the rough scrape of the sheets grow more damp as he slicked up. It felt like it took an entire geologic age for the knock on his door to come, and when it did, he dragged himself out of bed, tossed his towel towards the open bathroom door, and tried to take one long deep breath.

Sid looked the same as always on the other side of the door, his hair half matted down from sleeping on the plane, his nose freckled from the sun. He had a roller bag propped up against the entryway wall, and Zhenya grabbed it and stepped aside to hurry him in.

“Hey—“ Sid said, typing out something on his phone and then pocketing it and looking at Zhenya finally, his eyes going wide as they slid along the full naked length of Zhenya’s body, his hard dick and the shining slick on his thighs and everything else. “Wow, you weren’t kidding about—“

Zhenya kicked the door shut with more force than he meant to, and put his hand on Sid’s neck and his shirt collar and tugged him forward, into Zhenya’s orbit. Sid smelled so fucking good this close up, the familiar tang of his sweat, the stupid sweet smell of him that Zhenya loved and missed so much. “We say hello later, okay? I need—“

“Yeah, okay,” Sid said. He muscled his arms out of his backpack and jacket, letting them drop to the floor, and put his warm hands on Zhenya’s ribs, digging his short nails into Zhenya’s back until he could feel them sting. Zhenya breathed in and out, looking down at him, wanting to kiss him, maybe, but that wasn't something they did. Zhenya didn’t need to get any ideas.

“You wanna do it right here?” Sid asked, pressing his nose against the sweaty curve of Zhenya’s neck, breathing in the smell of him as if the whole room didn’t already stink of it. His damp mouth tickled Zhenya’s skin and he shivered. “Looks like you need it pretty bad.” His hand slid down Zhenya’s side to his ass, grabbing it in rough handfuls, dipping his fingers into the slick crease. Zhenya felt like he might melt straight into the carpet if Sid kept this up, slowly groping and exploring, like they had all the time in the world.

He tugged at the hem of Sid’s shirt to urge him along. “C’mon.”

“Any team stuff tonight?” Sid asked, like Zhenya wanted to talk at all. He had two fingers firmly tucked into the crease of Zhenya’s ass now, pressing roughly against his slick hole but not in, a terrible tease that Zhenya wanted to get moving along with immediately.

“Shut up, c’mon,” Zhenya complained, squirming in Sid’s arms. “Why I even tell you I’m heat, you so slow.”

Sid laughed at him, clearly amused by how far gone he was, his usual impatience dialed up to eleven. Zhenya wasn’t amused at all. He’d been going slowly under for close to a week now, and he’d been hard all day and he just wanted to—

But Sid slid down to the floor between his knees, still dressed, forearm pinning Zhenya to the wall. He wrapped a hand around the base of Zhenya’s sore, leaking dick and pulled it forward and licked the mess from the head of it like it was nothing at all. Zhenya thunked his head back against the wall and groaned, any remaining pockets of irritation seeping out through his ears.

“This what you wanted?” Sid asked, and Zhenya could barely even look at him: his wolfish grin, his shirt collar a little wet where Zhenya was dripping onto him. Fuck.

“Sid—“ He was closer than he had thought. Sid took him into his mouth, warm and wet, all the way until his nose was pressed against Zhenya’s groin, his eyelashes fat, black smears against his cheeks. Zhenya couldn’t believe he had ever considered letting anyone else get him through this stupid heat.

It barely took a minute of Sid sucking him before Zhenya was coming down his throat, an embarrassingly short record. But he would need to go again, at least one or two more times today. Maybe they could order room service, because Zhenya wasn’t sure he could be trusted to leave the hotel without going to his knees for Sid in an alley somewhere, in front of God and everyone.

He slid weak-limbed to the floor, leaving a long smear of slick on the wallpaper. “Woah, c’mon—“ Sid said, hooking an arm around Zhenya’s waist to haul him back up to his feet. He leaned heavily into Sid’s side.

“Wow, you’re burning up,” Sid said, like it was unexpected, leading Zhenya over and depositing him on his back on the bed, patting him on the hip, and going off into the washroom for a minute. Zhenya lay there staring at the ceiling, his dick still tight-skinned and half hard, legs hanging off the bed. The tap cut on and off and back on again.

When Sid came out of the bathroom, he had stripped down to just his pants, and his face was pink and wet from sink water, his hair damp at the front. He looked good—the bruise on his shoulder from Clutterbuck’s hit had faded away, the skin a little golden now from a few weeks’ sun. He was soft around the middle like he’d been taking it easy. He smiled at Zhenya and grabbed at his knee. “You wanna go again?”

Zhenya swallowed around the lump in his throat and nodded, and Sid pressed him until he scooted further onto the bed, and stripped off his pants unceremoniously and crawled on top of Zhenya, holding him down. “How you want it?” Sid asked, looking down at him with dark eyes, his eyebrows raised, like he liked to watch Zhenya go out of his mind.

“Don’t care, just fuck me,” Zhenya said, grabbing at him, feeling out of his mind, splaying his legs out until Sid was tucked between them, the thick shape of him heavy on Zhenya’s hips in a way that Zhenya had sorely missed.

He stuck his face in Zhenya’s neck again, his nose pressing under Zhenya’s jaw, and bit down a little, just a tease, not the deep claim mark that Zhenya wanted. He nipped Zhenya’s jaw and said, “Turn over.”

Zhenya did as he was told, untangling himself and rolling over onto his belly, pressing his ass up a little, the way he knew Sid liked. “Jesus, you’re wet,” Sid said, putting his hands on Zhenya’s ass where he was sweaty and wet with slick, a whole fucking mess of it. He kissed Zhenya’s tailbone and pressed himself against Zhenya’s back, fully covering him, nipping at his neck and smelling his hair.

Zhenya wanted him to get on with it. “Yes, I’m ready—c’mon.” He wrapped his own hand around his swollen dick, jerking himself, being loud and obnoxious about it, pressing himself back against Sid, who was hard in his underwear against Zhenya’s ass.

“So impatient,” Sid said, laughing, but he tugged himself out of his briefs and pressed inside at last, all the way in. He breathed thick and audible through his teeth when he was fully seated, a sound that Zhenya had come to understand meant he was closer than he wanted to be and trying to back off a bit.

Zhenya smiled to himself, squeezing the base of his dick and pressing his cheek into the mattress. Sid moved again after a moment, fucking Zhenya in long, slow thrusts, deep the way Zhenya liked them. He plastered himself again to Zhenya’s back, the both of them sweaty and slippery. Every thrust and hitch of Sid’s breath was driving Zhenya out of his mind. He was glad that Sid couldn’t see his face, and the embarrassing flush all over it. It was bad enough to feel his hands gripping Zhenya’s hips possessively as he tugged Zhenya onto his dick, his mouth on Zhenya’s spine.

It took Zhenya longer to build to a climax this time, but not by much. Sid knocked his hand from his dick after a few minutes, and took Zhenya in his own tight grip and pulled another orgasm from him. “Yeah, that’s good,” he said, as Zhenya shook under him and came all over the bed and collapsed into the mess of it, letting Sid ride out his own pleasure, thrusting unevenly into Zhenya until he came.

He put a hand at the base of his dick and pulled out and rolled away after, and Zhenya tried not to be disappointed that Sid hadn’t knotted him, but they didn’t always, and probably would before his heat was over.

“Hey,” Sid said, when Zhenya resumed his normal breathing and rolled over to look at him. “Nice to see you, how are you?” He was leaning up on one bent arm, smiling at Zhenya liked he thought he was very funny and very cute, which he was, but Zhenya would never tell him.

“Tired,” Zhenya said, and threw his arm over his eyes and groaned dramatically. He’d left the curtains open, and he regretted it now.

“You want me to tuck you in?” Sid asked, amused.

“Hmm, yes—“ Zhenya said. His heat had cooled down for the moment, a low distant hum. He was sure it would burn through him again in a few hours, but for now he didn’t want to think about anything and he didn’t want to look at Sid’s face and he just wanted to sleep. “Clean me up, tuck me, let’s sleep.”

“Okay,” Sid said, and climbed off the bed and went to grab a clean hand towel, which he tossed on Zhenya’s stomach where he was lying haphazardly across the bed. Zhenya sat up and blotted at himself half-heartedly and dumped the towel onto the floor. They could clean up later.

“Move, c’mon,” Sid said, tugging the blankets out from under Zhenya’s ass and draping them back over him. Zhenya held his breath a little when Sid climbed into bed after him, but he was wearing his underwear again, and he stayed on top of the covers, sitting up against the pillows with his e-reader in his lap, a perfectly friendly distance away.

Zhenya curled on his side with his back to Sid, his body buzzing like a live wire, afraid that he might say something dumb, like asking Sid to get under the covers and nap away the evening with him. They had passed out together plenty of times, but Zhenya had never been the one to initiate it. He felt afraid to say anything now that he knew how he felt, like the tone of his question would betray his innermost thoughts.

“Have a good nap,” Sid said, into the silence.

When Zhenya blinked awake later, it was growing dark outside, orange strips of light filtering in through the blinds. His heat was making him sweat up a storm, sticky all the way down to his feet, and he rolled over and tossed the blankets off. The bed was cool on the other side, where Sid had been when Zhenya had fallen asleep.

He went into the washroom to wash his hands and rub cold water on his neck, and by the time he came back into the room, Sid was coming through the door again with a plastic shopping bag overflowing in his grip, looking good enough to eat.

“Oh, you’re awake,” Sid said, when he noticed Zhenya lingering near the washroom door, leaning against the frame. “I didn’t mean to be out so long.” He dumped the bag on the desk and immediately began taking things out. “I got you some stuff, like—juice and stuff, some crackers—uh—I hope they’re actually good because I couldn’t read any of the labels. I think this is chocolate or something?” He held up a small, wrapped bar that was definitely licorice and not chocolate at all. Zhenya came to inspect the rest, sifting through the pile, opening one of the sports drinks and downing half of it in one go.

“Thanks, Sid,” Zhenya said, wiping his mouth off with the back of his hand. He didn’t want to think about how it made him feel, that Sid had gone out to get things for him, knowing full well about the secret stash Zhenya kept at his house back in Pittsburgh, full of plenty of nonsense that he only let himself have during heat.

Sid laughed a small, nervous laugh and scratched the back of his neck as he sat down in the desk chair to tuck into some giant granola bar with way too many seeds. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m serious,” Zhenya said. “You on vacation, but you come help me—” Sid’s intentions were completely opaque to him, but he was grateful anyway. He put a hand on Sid’s shoulder over his t-shirt, suddenly painfully aware of how naked he still was, and how desperately he needed to get fucked again. Maybe Zhenya could convince Sid to knot him this time, if he was really nice about it.

“I’d be a jerk if I didn’t, right?” Sid ran a hand up Zhenya’s bare thigh and settled it in the crease of his hip. “Couldn’t let just anyone handle you.”

“Mmm, okay,” Zhenya looked down at Sid’s hand on him, and reached forward to snap off a piece of Sid’s granola bar and shove it in his own mouth. “You handle.” He didn’t want to talk about the possibility of Sid being jealous of—whoever. The nebulous specter of Zhenya’s teammates who could take him through his heat instead. Down that road lay madness and far too many of Zhenya’s ten thousand feelings. He wanted to get fucked again, and eat his weight in room service pancakes and go to sleep and wake up tomorrow with all of this over and done with. Calm enough to play.

He drew his gaze up to Sid’s. “You think you go again?”

Sid looked at him for a long moment, big thumb stroking Zhenya’s sweaty skin. He scratched his fingernails down and then back up against the grain of Zhenya’s leg hair in a way that made him tingle. There was definitely going to be a slick spot on the table when he stood up. “You think I can’t?” Sid asked.

Zhenya pulled Sid from his seat and stripped him of his shirt, arms tugged above his head, granola bar loose in his grip. He loved to watch Sid’s body be revealed, every pale, thick inch of it: his weird farmer’s tan, the funny mole on his hip. Sid smiled and shoved the granola bar into his mouth in one huge bite and was decidedly unhelpful as he let Zhenya pull his pants and briefs down, tripping a little when they got to his ankles, pawing at Zhenya’s bare sides.

Zhenya’s heat-addled brain couldn’t think about anything except their two bodies. He pushed Sid back on the bed and climbed on top, both of them naked, Zhenya’s slick gliding the way as they rocked together.

“Jesus, Geno,” Sid said, when Zhenya slid Sid’s dick between his cheeks, rubbing it ruthlessly against his own hole, blanketing Sid’s body with his own, his favorite way to get off. “I thought when I called you were like—just nearing heat, not—”

Warmth swooped through Zhenya’s whole body as he ground down again, his legs tingling, his mouth wet and open against Sid’s jaw. “I don’t know,” he said, and burrowed further into Sid’s neck, the heat flooding his face now. “You make me.”

“Oh,” Sid said, dumb, and then put a hand on Zhenya’s ass and lifted him a little, maneuvering. “Can you—“

Zhenya held himself away for a second, long enough that Sid could tilt his dick up and slip inside, pressing in and in until he bottomed out. Zhenya felt like he was going out of his mind. There was no way that he hadn’t been in heat this morning, with how he felt now. His body had never responded to anyone as much as it responded to Sid and it infuriated him because nothing would ever come of it.

“Knot me,” he whispered, wet into Sid’s ear. Sid’s hands tightened their grip on his ass. Zhenya’s dick felt raw rubbing against the smooth skin of Sid’s abdomen.

Sid hesitated long enough that Zhenya thought he might say no. But what was the hold up? When Zhenya was a child, he had been taught that knotting was something you saved for a bond, as most children were, but Zhenya was notoriously bad at following the rules. And anyway, it felt good: the overwhelming fullness of it, being locked together for longer than was probably comfortable.

It has certainly surprised him the first time that Sid had offered it to him. Zhenya hadn’t ever heard him brag about it in the locker room, even though Zhenya knew Sid had hooked up with plenty of omegas over the years, sneaking them up to his hotel room on the road. And maybe he had naively thought that it had meant something, then, but nothing between them had changed at all.

Sid breathed out, long and slow, the soft sound of it whistling in Zhenya’s ear. “Okay,” he said, and slid a hand around to touch Zhenya’s hole where they were joined together, making Zhenya twitch. “Yeah, okay.”

Sid’s hands held tight on his hips, then, pressing Zhenya’s pelvis into him so that Zhenya was helpless to do anything but grind against him, sliding his dick around on Sid’s belly while Sid scrunched his eyes shut and his knot grew slowly in Zhenya’s ass.

“So big,” Zhenya teased, smirking a little against Sid’s neck.

Sid reared one hand back and smacked Zhenya’s ass firmly on one cheek, the wet sound echoing through the room. “I’ll show you big,” he laughed.

He wasn’t lying. His knot felt like it was splitting Zhenya in two, the intense pleasure-pain of it so much that Zhenya wanted his own face to melt off. Zhenya knew that all he would need to do to get Sid to come inside now would be to squeeze him just right.

“Get me off.” He climbed up onto his hands, holding them against Sid’s chest and pinching his nipples for good measure, just to hear him squawk. Sid’s eyes slit open and went straight to where Zhenya wanted them: the thick, heavy shape of Zhenya’s dick sliding around in a mess of precome, dripping into Sid’s bellybutton.

“Sure,” Sid said, his chest expanding into a big deep breath under Zhenya’s hands, looking a little doped up as he pulled a hand from Zhenya’s asscheek and slid it around Zhenya’s leaking cock. Zhenya shuddered. “You sore?”

“No,” Zhenya lied, even though he definitely was. But the relief was sharper than the pain, as Sid watched intently where Zhenya’s dick slid through his fist. Nothing about this was chill or calming. Zhenya wanted to play tomorrow but he couldn’t imagine that his heat would subside, not with Sid here to rile him up—the way he smelled, the way he kept looking at Zhenya through the heavy curtain of his eyelashes, that same look that had always made Zhenya wonder.

Zhenya closed his eyes and let himself bubble over, wading through the pleasure until he spilled up Sid’s chest, squeezing sharply around Sid’s knot and grinding down mindlessly until Sid smacked a wet hand back against his hip and groaned, spilling deep in Zhenya’s ass, on and on and on.

“Fuck,” Sid said after, breath heavy, “that was—“

Zhenya didn’t want to open his eyes to look at him, afraid of what he might see or do—something stupid, probably.

They passed out at some point with Sid’s knot still lodged inside Zhenya’s body, because it took him longer to go soft than Zhenya could ever truly wait for. Zhenya slept like the dead until his stomach awoke him in the morning, grumbling loudly just after sunrise. Sid was curled on his side and snoring lightly just a few inches away, their legs tangled together in a sticky mess.

Zhenya fumbled for his phone on the side table to check the time, but it was somewhere clear across the room. He groaned and burrowed further into the bed, feeling his heat still lingering near the surface of his skin, surely a sign that it would last at least the rest of the day. Was it even morning? Well, maybe not.

But Sid didn’t seem fazed at all when Zhenya nudged him awake. He stretched his arms over his head and scrubbed a hand over his face and blew his morning breath across Zhenya’s nose when he spoke. “Morning.”

“Hey,” Zhenya said, and tossed the blankets off to show Sid his hard dick, already wet at the tip. Perhaps he’d been having a very nice dream, though he couldn’t remember it. Sid grinned at him and rolled him over into the mess of the blankets, shoving Zhenya around until he had one leg hitched up over Sid’s hip, and fucked him like that until Zhenya came and left a huge wet mess all over the bed.

Zhenya assumed that Sid would get up afterward and go shower, but he only rolled off a little, their bodies still stuck together all along their sides, and snuggled up under Zhenya’s arm and fiddled around on his phone for a few minutes like that. Zhenya lay uncomfortably still, certain that he wasn’t breathing. The come on his stomach was cooling and crusting over; he was hungrier than he’d been in a long time. None of it even registered when he was trying very hard not to press into Sid’s body, or worse—to tilt his face to the side and kiss Sid’s sweaty cheek.

“Um, Sid—“ Zhenya said, once it went on so long that Zhenya wanted to rip his eyes out. “Have to pee.” He didn’t, really, but it was the only way he could think of to successfully exit the situation without making things weird.

In the washroom, he turned the sink on and sat on the closed toilet lid and put his face in his hands, breathing into his cupped palms. He felt like he’d been in a daze since Sid had called him yesterday. Zhenya had listened to his reasons and still had no idea what he was doing here, interrupting his vacation to hole up in Zhenya’s hotel room for a few days, and then what? Presumably he would go back to whatever he had been doing, or back home, off to spend his summer the way he always did. It seemed like a terribly inconvenient day-trip just to be a good friend.

“You want something to eat?” Sid asked, when Zhenya emerged. He was still distressingly naked, lying on top of the covers with his feet crossed at the ankle and reading the hotel’s room-service packet like it was a particularly engrossing novel.

“Pancakes,” Zhenya said, as he went over to his suitcase and tugged on a pair of basketball shorts. They would be easy enough to tug back off when the time came. “Sausage, maybe little fruit, if you want.”

Sid settled on making Zhenya order one of pretty much everything, the weirdest assortment of breakfast foods that Zhenya had seen in a while. He answered the door for the staff in his shorts and gave them a monstrous tip for their troubles. There was way too much food—good lord—Zhenya was going to send a Venmo request to Sid for this as soon as he sat down.

Zhenya claimed an entire plate of pancakes for himself, smothering them in syrup that he definitely wasn’t supposed to have, and throwing a few strawberries on top to pretend he was eating healthy. Surely the team’s fitness staff could forgive him for bulking a little during heat, when he really needed the energy.

Ilyusha sent him a series of texts while he was lazing in the desk chair moaning about his full stomach and watching Sid pull apart a croissant. you’re late again the first one said, and then, i’m not telling coach not to scratch you today.

tell him i’m sick. i’m still in heat.

you tell him God, Ilyusha was a pain in Zhenya’s ass.

“Who are you texting over there?” Sid asked, mouth half full of food, and Zhenya turned his phone over on the desk and went over to where Sid was lounging on top of the comforter and climbed into his lap, ready to take full advantage of the rest of his heat while he was still able. Ilyusha could do his dirty work for him; he was the captain after all.

“No one,” Zhenya said, skimming his hands over Sid’s sides. “Just team.” There was a smear of jam still lingering in the corner of his mouth, and against his better judgement, Zhenya reached up and swiped it away, leaking embarrassingly all over Sid’s thighs as he watched Sid’s lips drop slowly open. Fuck.

“Pretty intense heat this time,” Sid said, readjusting Zhenya a little on his lap, scooting back until he was propped up against the headboard, hands cupped around Zhenya’s hips. Under his ass, Sid’s dick was taking very blatant interest, growing fat and warm against him. “Go again?”

“Yeah,” Zhenya said, and looked down to watch Sid’s stomach quiver as he inhaled, deep sucking breaths. “Go again.”

His heat lasted all that day and into the early morning hours, when Sid bent him over the edge of the bed and draped his thick, warm body all over Zhenya’s back and fingered him within an inch of his life, long past the point where he could get it up without wincing.

Zhenya felt his heat drain out of him, like the last slivers of air gassing out of a balloon, and he sagged to the bed, spent and sore. His dick was a little numb and more than a little sticky. Sid’s chest was sweaty where it stuck to him.

Sid fumbled his way to his feet and hopped on the bed next to Zhenya’s side, falling back into the bedspread with a heavy thump. “I’m way too old for this,” he said, laughing.

“Your idea,” Zhenya muttered into the sheets, still drooling shamelessly into the cotton. His whole body felt like a numb raisin. He was a useless lump; practically pickled.

“Fair point,” Sid said, and Zhenya felt him roll off the bed again and heard him walk to the washroom. He heard the tap cut on, and Sid whistling low and off-key.

Zhenya wondered, unwanted, when Sid would leave. Maybe the next day, or maybe he would stay to watch one game at least, to make it more worthwhile that he had come. Who knew what plans he had lined up for the rest of the summer. The sooner the better, probably, so Zhenya could get busy with getting over his unfortunate crush.

When Sid came out of the bathroom, Zhenya was already all the way tucked in, settled on his side with his arm tucked under him, lazily drifting into some much needed sleep.

“Geno?” Sid asked, his voice quiet in the dark room. Zhenya peeked one eye open to see him hovering awkwardly by the side of the bed, his bare chest reflecting the ambient light pouring in through the curtains. “You mind if I?”

Zhenya watched him gesture toward the bed, and Zhenya, and the empty space behind him, where the sheets were still warm from their bodies. It wasn’t as if there was somewhere else for him to sleep, unless he was planning to do it in the desk chair or on the floor. Whoever was in charge of booking these rooms certainly hadn’t given Zhenya a luxury suite.

At Zhenya’s shrug of approval, Sid climbed into the bed behind him, under one blanket and then the other, tossing them around until his feet stuck out. Zhenya expected him to roll to face the window, but instead he was unbearably close, and his hair smelled like hand soap, and was cool and damp near the back of Zhenya’s turned head.

Zhenya swallowed a thick lump into his throat. He had a million questions, too many to name. He closed his eyes very tight and felt himself shiver from the cold for the first time in a week. Without his heat boiling inside him, he felt empty, and all that empty space was filled up with thoughts, endless wondering about Sid’s intentions.

He was a good friend, Zhenya decided. Zhenya would be thankful, in the end, that he had come, even if it made his heart all stirred up, so much that he thought he might not be able to sort it out again.

But he would deal with that when the time came; the summer before them was long.

“Good night,” Sid said, into the silence, still shifting back and forth, trying to settle into his preferred spot on the bed. His breath tickled the back of Zhenya’s neck.

“Night,” Zhenya replied, and wrapped his arms tighter around himself and held very still and tried to fall asleep.

But the following day came and Zhenya’s heat was well and truly over, gone in a flash the way it always was, and Sid didn’t say anything at all about leaving, not when Zhenya woke up, or when he got out of the shower and was wandering around the room in his towel, asking Sid about his plans for the day.

“Maybe I’ll take a lap around,” Sid said, futzing with the strap on his watch. “I heard you can rent bikes nearby, check out what’s out there.” Well, Zhenya thought, maybe Sid wanted to see the sights before he left—the highlight reel. Bratislava was a beautiful and historic city, Sid-friendly in every way.

Zhenya went to practice and a mandated team workout and had a meeting with the coaching staff that was way too long, to go over the results of the previous day’s game. He got locked into a conversation with Vorobiev about his heat cycle that he tried very hard to wiggle out of. He’d missed one preliminary game, it was fine, yes, he’d be fine. He was very sorry. It wouldn’t happen again, even though there was no way he could control that.

The only remaining vestiges of his heat were his legs, slow and sore as he rode the bike pitifully on the easiest level. When he got off the ice after practice, he felt like someone had bowled him over with a truck, exactly the same as he always felt coming back from injury, now. Getting old was no joke.

There was a tender spot low on his neck where Sid had set his teeth perhaps a little more forcefully than usual, the skin raised and faintly pink. He scratched at it a little in the locker room, marring the shape of it until he felt confident that no one would notice.

“Nice hickey,” Ilyusha said, low and amused from his own stall, quiet enough that no one else would hear. Then he smirked. “I remember how you like it rough.”

Zhenya wouldn’t dignify him with a response; instead he balled his sock tape up and threw it, hitting a surprised Ilyusha square in the nose. Never had he been more thankful to have decent aim.

He thought perhaps he would make it out of the building without any further incident, when Kuzya came over and invited him to dinner. Zhenya shrugged him off. “Why the fuck would I eat dinner with you? No,” he said, stuffing his scissors back under his stall and shaking out his wet hair.

“Someone’s hormonal,” Kuzya said as he walked out of the room, which meant that Sanya had definitely told him that Zhenya was in heat. Good lord. Well, Zhenya was awful about keeping it under wraps. It wasn’t as if his status was a secret, really, he just hated to make a big deal of it. He wasn’t just an omega, and he didn’t want his team to think of him that way. Enough idiotic vulgar chirps had been lobbed his way to last a lifetime.

He took the long way back to the hotel, winding around side streets. He got a few texts from Sid at an intersection and nearly got himself clipped by a bike messenger and hustled back up onto the sidewalk, shielding his hand over his phone’s screen to combat the sun’s glare.

when is practice over? Sid had sent him, along with want to get dinner?? bike ride really took it out of me and a photo of said bike, taken from above, Sid’s suntanned calves and stocky feet in frame.

practice done. where u?? Zhenya sent, and kept walking slowly in the vague direction of the hotel, aimlessly looking into shop windows, his phone loose in his hand. He had no idea how long Sid would stay, but as long as he was here, well, it couldn’t hurt to spend time together. Zhenya might be conflicted, but he could suck it up. Sid was still his friend.

He met Sid at some cafe just past the hotel. Sid was sitting out front on the sidewalk when Zhenya arrived, his cheeks pink from the sun, shirt damp under his arms from his day outside, presumably. He smelled good when Zhenya approached—better and more appealing than Zhenya wanted him to—and he smiled and climbed to his feet.

The inside was like some Parisian cafe, a style that was popular in Moscow as well, with small wooden chairs that made Zhenya feel like a giant, his knees knocking Sid’s under the tiny circular table.

They ordered dinner and drinks, and Zhenya told himself he would only have one singular glass of wine, because he didn’t need to play tomorrow with a hangover, and they were coming on easier and easier these days.

Sid spent most of the meal showing Zhenya photos on his phone like he was a parent crowing about his child, shot after shot of the river and the buildings in Old Town, each one made of the same neutral shade of stone.

“Such tourist,” Zhenya told him, grabbing a piece of oiled baguette from Sid’s plate and shoving it unceremoniously into his mouth.

“It’s a really cool city,” Sid said, smiling around the lip of his wine glass. “C’mon, you can’t tell me it’s not really cool to see all this old shit.”

“So cool,” Zhenya laughed, patting Sid’s shoulder consolingly. He was the most lame, exactly as excited about a river’s current as Zhenya’s uncle would be. Zhenya loved him anyway, despite his better judgement.

They lingered a long time, long enough that Zhenya had finished eating and was mostly trying not to look too hard at Sid’s face, his big nose, the still slightly crooked shape of his jaw. He and Sid had shared a thousand meals together, dinners at each other’s houses, lunches out on the road. But something felt—different. Maybe Zhenya was different. Sid had come all this way to fuck him through his heat and now he wasn’t leaving and wanted to, what? Be a spectator for the rest of the tournament he hadn’t wanted to come to in the first place?

When they got back to the hotel again, it was dusky and dark, and the street lamps reflected a dim orange along the sidewalk. Zhenya pulled his hat over his face and was thankful not to get stopped for a single autograph. People would figure out that Sid was here eventually; but Zhenya wasn’t ready yet. He didn’t want to share.

“Good stealth job, bud,” Sid laughed at him as they entered the elevator, and pressed the button for Zhenya’s floor and then another one a few floors below.

“Who’s eight?” Zhenya wanted to swan dive directly into bed and turn on the TV. He didn’t have time to dilly-dally.

“Oh, that’s me,” Sid said, pulling a keycard out of his pocket and wagging it around. “Figured you’d like your space back, you know—since your heat is over and all.”

Oh. Well, Zhenya couldn’t deny that it was for the best. There was no need to share a bed all night now that Zhenya’s heat was over, and Zhenya wouldn’t give any time to the thought that maybe he had wanted or assumed that Sid might perhaps stay. It would be easier to go back to their usual routines now: Sid and Zhenya, firmly friends and nothing more.

“Good,” Zhenya said, to mask any disappointment he was feeling. “You snore.”

“Me?” Sid asked, holding his keycard to his chest like a scandalized maiden. “Sure bud, whatever you say.” He laughed softly until the elevator dinged for his floor, the way he usually did when he was amused with himself and his own antics. Zhenya forced his lips into a curt frown.

“You gonna get me a ticket to the game tomorrow?” Sid asked, in the moment before he stepped through the opening doors.

“Huh?” Zhenya said, too busy with his task of focusing on showing exactly zero emotions. “Yeah, okay. Pick up with ticket guys.”

“Thanks,” Sid said, and smiled a genuine smile at Zhenya’s dumb expression, and disappeared with the closing doors and left Zhenya alone.

The game was in the afternoon, Zhenya’s favorite time to play, and he felt charged up and ready, confident that they could beat Austria, who frankly weren’t too formidable a foe. He spotted Sid in the stands near the end of the first period, mostly because he had purchased the tickets for him and knew where to look. He was sitting with Nesterov’s wife, who Zhenya figured was safe enough territory. She spoke enough English to make small talk, and, frankly, Sid could make friends with a brick wall.

Sid was wearing a deep purple t-shirt that showed off his arms, because for some reason he was never as cold as he should be. Zhenya had a quick moment of imagining Sid wearing his colors—wearing his jersey—decked out in red and white. His stomach clenched.

Zhenya still couldn’t score, which was frustrating, but they did beat Austria five to nothing, and Zhenya got a decent assist, which wasn’t awful in the grand scheme of things. The rookies were trying to organize some night out in the locker room, but Zhenya wasn’t swayed. They were scheduled to play again the very next day, and Zhenya was tired still, a lifelong annoyance of post-heat. He needed another nap.

They rode the team bus back to the hotel after the game, and Zhenya was surprised when he spotted Sid in the lobby, sitting near a potted plant with a water bottle tucked between his knees and reading on his e-reader.

He broke from the group and went over to tap Sid on the knee. “Hey.”

“Oh, hey,” Sid said, putting his e-reader into his backpack and zipping it shut and moving to stand. “I was waiting for you, figured maybe we could go check out some stuff. One of the ushers at the rink told me about this weird museum—“

Zhenya laughed. “Sid, I’m take nap now.” Sid was always so full of energy, way too much for Zhenya to take. “Game was very hard, very tired.” He closed his eyes and put a hand over his forehead for dramatic effect.

“Oh, well—“ Sid said, his smiling face going a little flat, clearly a bit disappointed. Zhenya winced. “Text me when you wake up, I guess?”

Zhenya felt a little bad about it, taking the elevator up to his room. He felt even worse about how a small, hidden part of him wanted to ask Sid to come upstairs and nap with him, but that wasn’t something they had ever done together when Zhenya wasn’t in heat, firmly outside the realm of their arrangement. It was for the best.

Sid picked dinner again that night, on recommendation from the valet. It wasn’t far from the hotel and they walked there together, only getting stopped once by a young woman who wanted their picture together. Zhenya obliged and tried not to smile too much, because he always loathed the way it looked on camera, faintly crooked and thick lipped. At the restaurant, there was a big, gleaming case of desserts near the register—pastries and fruit tarts and chunky cakes—and Zhenya knew he probably shouldn’t, but he couldn’t resist, especially not when Sid leaned over to peer inside and started making interested noises about the selection.

“You want?” Zhenya asked him, smirking down at him, knowing full well the answer.

It was getting a bit too chilly outside to walk around, so they went straight back to the hotel with their clamshells of cake cradled in their hands, sticking to the interior edges of the sidewalk to avoid the brisk wind.

“This is a nice city,” Sid said, as they stood aside to watch a few cars zip through a crosswalk. Zhenya clutched his hands around his own body. “I’m really glad I came.” He smiled at Zhenya askance, a small, genuine smile that Zhenya felt helpless to do anything but return.

“You wanna watch a movie or something?” Sid asked, when they were back at the hotel and waiting for the elevator to return to the ground floor.

Zhenya was still kind of tired, but it was easy to follow Sid up to his room with their dessert and toe off his shoes and starfish into Sid’s bed. Watching movies together on the road was firmly friendly territory. It was certainly better than lying around in his room alone and going to bed at nine o’clock like the grandfather he was rapidly becoming.

But Sid turned the television on and climbed up on the bed with him without preamble, popping the lid of his cake open and lying on his stomach eating it. “Jesus, this is good,” he said, and held a forkful out for Zhenya to eat. “You want some?”

Zhenya was still lying on his back, absolutely the wrong angle for eating, so he opened his mouth and let Sid shove the cake in and didn’t breathe as he closed his mouth around the tines of the fork. The cake was spicy and a little fruity, like sweet bread, but he could barely taste it through his nerves. Probably it would be better if the bed just swallowed him whole.

“Good,” he agreed, around his messy mouthful, when Sid wouldn’t stop looking at him expectantly, like he’d baked it himself and couldn’t proceed to enjoy it without Zhenya’s approval. Sid took a few more bites, moaning too loud about it like he always did when he ate. Whatever channel was playing was some weird travel channel, with a liberal use of handy-cam and too many close zooms on market stalls of food. It looked like they were somewhere in Southeast Asia, maybe, from what Zhenya could tell.

Sid finished eating and tucked his cake away and sat on the end of the bed to change the channel, his back muscles shifting under his t-shirt in a way that Zhenya didn’t want to dwell too long on. He had a sunburn blooming on the back of his neck.

Eventually, he found an English language channel playing some made-for-television movie, something with a plot so convoluted that Zhenya didn’t even try to follow it. He climbed to the foot of the bed and lay on his belly with his head pillowed on his arms and fell asleep after not too long and woke to Sid jabbing him in the shoulder with a sharp elbow, laughing at him.

“Geno,” he said. The screen was playing the credits, a long swath of unreadable text. Zhenya had a crick in his neck. “C’mon, bud, you’re out.”

Zhenya raised his head. At some point, Sid had changed into sleep shorts—and was sitting cross-legged on the bed next to Zhenya’s torso, his tablet open on his lap and his hair mussed, his calf warm against the back of Zhenya’s arm. “Mmm,” Zhenya groaned.

“You weren’t kidding about being tired,” Sid said.

“Why I kid?” Zhenya asked, and rubbed his hand over his dry eyes and sat up slowly, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Hanging out watching movies was one thing, but falling asleep together when Zhenya wasn’t even in heat anymore was decidedly ill-advised. Often times Zhenya’s life felt like two separate lives: the life he lived during his heat, needy and wanting in Sid’s bed, and the life he lived in the daytime, just a guy from the middle of fucking nowhere, getting older and living his dream. But the lines felt blurry now. “Movie is boring, not my fault I fall asleep.”

It seemed clear that Sid was ready for Zhenya to get the fuck out and let him go to bed. His side of the bed was turned down, he smelled a little minty, like he had recently brushed his teeth. Zhenya stood up on creaky legs and located his shoes and his takeout dessert.

“See you tomorrow, okay?” Zhenya said, patting his pockets for his phone. On the bed, Sid hadn’t moved from his seat, and when Zhenya looked up at him he was looking at Zhenya with a weird, indecipherable expression. Zhenya couldn’t look at him too long, lest he give in to his worst impulses and climb back onto the mattress and sink back into his dream. No matter how kind it was of Sid to come here, he was kind all the time—a good friend. Zhenya didn’t need to embarrass himself further by reaching for something that wasn’t there.

“Yeah, good night,” Sid said, as Zhenya left.

They won against the Czechs the next evening, which felt even better than Austria had, and Zhenya felt buzzed up in the locker room afterward, slapping Kirya with his damp towel for sassing him, just wrung out and happy, sitting back in his stall in his compression trunks and marinating in the feeling of growing success.

The talking heads always liked to whisper aside about their team—for having Zhenya and Sanya so prominently featured, two omega captains, though they were only assistants. Zhenya wanted to win every year to spite them, and he could feel it this year, the small seed of possibility. He wanted to believe.

They had a whole chunk of the day off the following day, with only a short skate in the late afternoon, and Ilyusha and Nesterov wanted to take full advantage. Zhenya got stuffed between them in the back of a cab, all of them on their way toward the river, to some bar that a friend of a friend had recommended. Zhenya hoped they had white wine.

He texted Sid from the cab. come out tonight!!

Zhenya turned to Ilyusha, who was typing back and forth in the team chat on his phone. “Sid’s going to meet us at the bar.”

“Oh, so he is here?” Ilyusha asked, as if he didn’t already know, and couldn’t scent another alpha from a thousand feet away. Surely he hadn’t missed it, or assumed that Zhenya had somehow gotten through his heat with ease all on his own. He hadn’t given himself that stupid hickey.

“He’s still here, yeah—“ Zhenya said, picking at a sore spot on his thumbnail. “For some reason. You know how he loves to play tourist.”

Ilyusha narrowed his eyes at Zhenya suspiciously. “No, I don’t know—please, enlighten me.”

“You know my wife said he was really fun,” Nesterov said, saving Zhenya’s bacon, “for a Canadian and all.”

“Oh, your wife is a fan now?” Ilyusha said, leaning fully over Zhenya’s lap, his phone dangling from his hand. Zhenya leaned back in his seat a little and let them bicker, tilting his head back to watch the orange-pink sky through the rear window as they passed.

Sid showed up at the bar when Zhenya was trying to order his second glass of wine, and Zhenya swung his hand over his own head to call Sid’s attention. “Sid!” he shouted over the noise. The bar was a long curved tunnel, and his voice echoed weird off the sloped ceiling.

A good quarter of the team had showed up: Sanya and Dima, Kirya with a few of the guys that Zhenya didn’t know so well—Andronov and Khafizulin. Sid knew a few of them, but he was in for quite the initiation.

“What drink you want?” Zhenya asked, when Sid reached the bar, sliding sideways between a group of women to get to Zhenya’s side. He wanted to get right to work on loosening Sid up.

Sid wanted to see a menu, apparently, and he flipped back and forth between a few pages before he settled on some rum that Zhenya had never heard of, on the rocks. “Starting out with the good stuff,” Sid said, and lifted his glass up to clink against Zhenya’s wine. Zhenya grinned unselfconsciously down at him, happy that Sid was here with him, even if not in exactly the manner that Zhenya had once hoped, in this place where Zhenya was having a nice time, and good hockey was being played.

But he didn’t need to worry at all. Sid slid in between Zhenya and Dima and started talking Dima’s ear off about something—some television show, maybe. Zhenya wasn’t really listening, the bar was much too loud to focus. He sat with his back against the cool brick of the wall and watched the pink and purple lights reflect, and looked out of the corner of his eye to see Ilyusha giving him a weird knowing look that he didn’t want and hadn’t asked for.

Someone corralled Zhenya into a round of shots. He was too weak not to give in. When Sid passed him his glass, he fumbled it and it sloshed a little into Zhenya’s lap.

“Oops,” Sid said, and grimaced apologetically, the way he always did when he was tipsy enough to be clumsy. Zhenya had witnessed him spill more than one beer on a teammate over the years, or end up with chili cheese sauce stuck to the back of his pants. He was an absolute hazard.

Zhenya clucked at him, and carefully bumped their shoulders together. “You so drunk,” he said, even though Sid was only mildly drunk at best, happy and gregarious and messy. He had always been a bit of a lightweight, but their days of getting truly sloppy were long past.

“No way,” Sid said, and laughed and tossed back his shot.

Even more of the drink dribbled down Zhenya’s chin when he tipped it back, distracted as he was watching Sid drink out of the corner of his eye. He had a bit of it shining on his lower lip, and Zhenya was perhaps too drunk for this, sitting here in this overheated bar with Sid’s leg flush against his, tall enough to see down the open neck of his shirt where it was unbuttoned a few buttons.

Zhenya pulled at the neck of his own shirt; he needed some air. He needed to keep Sid firmly in the same box he’d always been in inside Zhenya’s head, except it was increasingly hard to do just that, with Sid here with him, having fucked him so sweetly through the burn of his heat, and then just not going home, sticking to Zhenya like a burr. He didn’t want to keep sharing Zhenya’s bed, but he wanted Zhenya’s attention and his time, he wanted to cheer on Zhenya’s team.

All of it felt like one giant mixed signal, and it wasn’t easy to prevent himself from leaning into those moments when it felt like maybe instead of no. Zhenya’s hopes hadn’t entirely dulled. He was only a man.

It was worse when they left the bar, and wandered through the dark streets back home together, Sid tripping a little over broken pieces of sidewalk and falling into Zhenya’s side. Zhenya held his shoulders to steady him, the warm, thick shape of them in his hands. Lately, he had found himself trying not to touch too much, because every time it felt charged with unwanted feeling. Sid didn’t need Zhenya putting his hands all over him like it was just bros and thinking his lecherous thoughts.

But Sid kept looking at him as they walked, the same way he had when Zhenya had left his hotel room the other night, like he was studying Zhenya’s face and trying to crack a code.

Eventually Zhenya was fed up, feeling all flustered with Sid’s eyes on him. “I have thing on my face?” he asked, as they turned onto the road that led to the hotel. Zhenya could see it nearing up ahead.

“Huh?” Sid asked, and then shook himself, like he was breaking his thoughts from some spell. “No.” But he didn’t stop looking, and Zhenya felt hot all over about it, buzzed like he was from the wine.

“Hey, c’mere,” Sid said, backing up a little, into a nook between two storefronts. He smiled, leaning back against the stone there, looking awful and inviting and a little mischievous. Zhenya’s heart was beating so fast in his chest, echoing through his head.

“Sid, c’mon,” Zhenya said, stepping forward to tug Sid out of hiding, because whoever had told him this was time for jokes was wrong. Zhenya was drunk and he wanted to flop face first into his bed and snore for a while. “It’s late, I’m cold.”

But when he grabbed at Sid’s shirt, Sid caught his wrist and pulled him in, close enough that their feet bumped. It was smooth, Zhenya had to admit. Sid was still smiling that stupid smile, wicked. Zhenya hadn’t thought that Sid was that drunk, but maybe he was.

A hot surge went through Zhenya’s body like an exposed electrical wire, flashing around like he was in heat, but there was no way, not this soon. Sid’s hand was holding Zhenya’s wrist in a vise grip, and his other hand was weak on Zhenya’s neck, and they hadn’t kissed in a very long time, not since Zhenya was very young and very drunk, in the pool enclosure behind Mario Lemieux’s house, the week they won the Cup.

It was just a thing they didn’t do, a rule they had decided on when they had started this thing, to keep everything friendly and casual, but they were going to now. Sid’s hand curled around the back of Zhenya’s neck, and he smiled against Zhenya’s mouth when their lips touched, and he smelled a whole lot like rum, sweeter than the taste of cheap beer and pool water that Zhenya recalled from his youth.

Down the block somewhere, something clamored to the ground, and the sound of some kids chattering started getting closer. Zhenya broke away and shook himself and stepped back out from the shadows.

“Sid,” he said, when Sid had yet to move, still leaning against the wall, his shirt collar a little askew. Zhenya itched to go back and crowd in against him, stupidly, foolishly. But they had to get back.

They walked quickly to the hotel, Zhenya’s arms fidgeting at his sides, the silence between them palpable. When they arrived, a family was crowded into the elevator with them, speaking softly in Swedish and not paying them much mind. Even the cool metal of the elevator wall couldn’t calm Zhenya’s flush. He didn’t even realize that Sid had pressed the button for his own floor but not Zhenya’s until the door opened and the bell dinged and Zhenya walked out on autopilot.

“You wanna?” Sid asked, gesturing down the hall with his thumb. And Zhenya knew it was a bad idea, but he let the door close behind them anyway, distracted by the amused tilt to Sid’s mouth.

“Maybe I fall asleep watching movie again,” Zhenya teased. “So boring, Sid.”

“Sure.” Sid patted him on the shoulder, his hand curled around the round shape of it and lingering there for a minute. Zhenya could feel each and every place his fingers were touching like a burn, and he tried to push down the instinct inside of him that wanted Sid to manhandle him a little.

Sid released him and Zhenya padded on down the hall to Sid’s room, Sid following along behind. What was he even doing here? The air felt charged and Zhenya’s head was fuzzy. He should make some excuse and take the stairs back to his own room. Tell Sid he really had to pee. Anything.

After he unlocked the door, Sid let Zhenya walk past him into the room, and it looked the same, but Zhenya lingered in the entryway by the door to the washroom.

Zhenya heard the door click closed.

“Geno?” Sid said, and when Zhenya looked up, Sid was standing very close, like he had been outside, but this time it was Zhenya’s back to the wall, the trim digging into his back. He put his phone in his pocket and watched Sid’s eyes track the movement.

“You played great today,” Sid said, his hands sliding up under Zhenya’s shirt hem. Zhenya twitched. “Your skating, it’s like—“ Zhenya could hardly look at him, with his goofy lopsided grin taking up half of his face. “And that pass.”

The pads of Sid’s fingers brushed against Zhenya’s nipples under his shirt and Sid shuffled in closer, as close as they’d been in the alcove outside, Sid’s thick, bulky body all over him. “Not that great,” Zhenya deflected. He still hadn’t scored, which was what mattered in the end.

Sid put a hand on Zhenya’s neck and tilted his head down until it was the correct height for them to kiss. “It was,” he said.

Sid’s mouth was warm and wet and slow on Zhenya’s, thorough in a way that Zhenya couldn’t tell if it was from the booze or the late hour or just how Sid preferred to kiss. But it was good. His tongue was fat against Zhenya’s teeth, and warm. In the middle of everything, Zhenya wanted to ask him ‘why’ but he was too drunk to formulate the words, and besides, he didn’t want to break the spell.

For tonight, maybe it was like they were some other version of Sid and Zhenya, in some universe where Sid loved him, where they were bonded, partners on the ice and in life. Some wild fantasy, the kind that Zhenya dreamed about as a teenager, watching television programs with his mother before bed.

He let Sid kiss him languidly for a while, and then manhandle him back to the bed, his hands so far up Zhenya’s shirt that Zhenya decided to just strip it off all together, pulling it over his head as their bodies toppled to the mattress. The bedsheets were all tangled in a heap, the way Sid always had them. No doubt kicked off in the middle of the night because he had gotten too sweaty.

“I like this,” Zhenya said, fingering the open vee of Sid’s shirt, popping one button and then another open and baring his chest. “Take off.”

“Like it so much you want it gone, eh?” Sid said, but he unbuttoned the rest and pulled it off all the same, tugging it down his arms and tossing it toward the sitting area somewhere. Zhenya didn’t care much where it had gone, especially not when he had plenty of Sid’s warm, pink skin to focus on, his necklace hanging in between the sweaty valleys of his shoulders and neck.

Zhenya wanted to fuck him just like this, face to face. He wanted to keep kissing him, that lush pink mouth and soft tongue. He was in way too deep and he didn’t care.

Sid planted a kiss on Zhenya’s chest, right where the wiry patch of hair was, and then he kissed his cheeks and his mouth, his hands tight in Zhenya’s hair, his sweaty chest pressing Zhenya down into the sheets. It was ludicrous to think that they hadn’t even accidentally kissed in all this time. Zhenya’s mouth had been everywhere—on Sid’s neck and his thigh, his cock.

But that was the rule they had decided upon. Sid would mouth at Zhenya’s neck but no farther and Zhenya would imagine Sid biting down hard, claiming him. And sometimes Zhenya would look down at his mouth and want. But he had never, not since they’d started fucking through Zhenya’s heats.

“You’re so—“ Sid said, and then cut himself off, distracted palming the firm shape of Zhenya’s erection in his jeans. Sid popped the button and pulled down the zipper and fished Zhenya out, easy enough when Zhenya wasn’t wearing any underwear. “I can’t believe you, oh my god.”

“It’s nice!” Zhenya protested because it was. Hockey players showered way too often and he was totally clean and wearing underwear all through his heat was bad enough as it was. If he wasn’t going to be slicking up all day and making a huge mess, he didn’t need to bother.

Sid laughed and tugged Zhenya’s pants all the way down his legs and off, and then spit on the tip of Zhenya’s dick and rubbed it down over the shaft, smirking down at his handiwork. “I’m sure it is.”

He stripped Zhenya’s dick with focus, alternating his gaze between the head popping through his fist and the no doubt dumb look on Zhenya’s face. Whenever Sid looked at him, he was smiling, that small smile with his lips pressed close together, like he was happy and perhaps a little shy about it. Zhenya felt his emotions uncoiling inside his chest each time.

He screwed his eyes shut and moaned when Sid’s fingers drifted lower, down past his balls to press at his hole a little, just stroking. All of it felt so natural, just the expected continuation of all the sex they’d had during his heat, when Sid had taken such care with him and wrung him out so well. But he wasn’t in heat now, he was just a normal guy who liked to be held down and maybe got a little slicker than most. And they didn’t do this.

But Sid also didn’t drop everything and come tend to him, and he didn’t stick around to sightsee and laze around the hotel while Zhenya went off to play hockey all day, like a boyfriend might. Nothing made sense, and Zhenya had been trying to not get his hopes up about it, but he couldn’t deny that the place all of these actions were pointing was maybe not just friends.

“You’re pretty wet,” Sid said, rubbing his fingers back and forth over Zhenya’s hole, his shy smile turning a little feline.

Did he think omegas just stopped being omegas once they weren’t in heat anymore? “Yes, it’s slick, Sid.”

One of Sid’s fingers slipped easily inside, tugging at the rim. “No, I know. I just mean, like—” he explained, and pressed another finger in, because he surely knew by now that Zhenya liked it to burn a little. “No one else got this wet unless they were in heat. I didn’t know.”

Zhenya could feel his cheeks burn at that, a little embarrassed at how much his body reacted to Sid, how unsubtle it was. “Well, I’m best omega, so—“ he deflected.

The fingers inside him slid easily back and forth, pressing up into his prostate and making Zhenya squirm. He lifted his ass and planted his feet firmly into the mattress, resettling with his hips a little higher, so the angle was just right. He felt sweaty all over his neck and chest.

“You wanna do it like this?” Sid asked, curling his fingers a little, his thumb smearing slick all over Zhenya’s balls.

“What, like finger me and I come?” He probably could come just from this. Sid was good with his hands, and Zhenya didn’t get them nearly enough, always desperate for Sid’s knot when he was in heat.

“No, like—“ Sid said, and picked up one of Zhenya’s legs a little, hooking his arm under it like he might put it over his shoulder. Oh.

Zhenya definitely wanted to do it like that, and he nodded, reaching out to pinch Sid’s side. “Take pants off,” he said. “Fuck me.”

Sid laughed. “Impatient.” But he made quick work of himself anyway. He loved to act like Zhenya’s requests were unreasonable and amusing, but he always obliged, because it was clear that Zhenya was, in fact, always right.

Zhenya watched him undress with half-lidded eyes, looking at Sid through the vee of his legs—standing at the foot of the bed looking back at Zhenya, unbuttoning the dumb button-fly on his pants one slow button at a time. He was wearing the same trunks he always wore, rucked up a little over the thick muscle of his thighs.

“You wet too,” Zhenya said, looking at the dark, damp spot on Sid’s underwear where he was leaking a little, and feeling smug about it. Sid just laughed and hooked his thumbs in the waistband and shucked them all the way off and climbed back onto the bed and over Zhenya, his dick all the way hard and hanging between his legs.

“You think you’re really funny,” Sid said, and ducked his head for a kiss, nipping at Zhenya’s lower lip, teasing Zhenya the way he did in the locker room, but kissing him like a lover would, slow and sweet, his tongue lazy in Zhenya’s mouth.

Zhenya ran his hands down Sid’s side until he started laughing into Zhenya’s mouth. “Am funny.” And Sid bit him once more for good measure, and sat back on his heels and pressed his wide hands around Zhenya’s hips, the way he had a million times before.

“Ready?” he asked, even though he knew the answer, and was already picking Zhenya’s legs up one at a time and pressing them back against his stomach, tugging his ass close and scooting in. He slid two fingers in and turned them a few times for good measure, like Zhenya needed it at all, and then positioned himself and pressed in all at once, concentrating with his lip caught between his teeth. It was very cute, as far as faces went, but Zhenya wouldn’t say so.

It felt a little different than it usually did, thicker, the stretch a little more present. Zhenya ached, and squirmed around until his ass was pressed to Sid’s sweaty thighs. He’d had sex plenty of times when he wasn’t in heat, but never with Sid, and all the feelings were just a bit foreign, like relearning an old song that had taken on some new meaning in the years since.

He wanted Sid to come closer, and he said so, pulling him down by the arm until he toppled onto Zhenya’s chest, Zhenya’s legs bracketing his body, his dick as deep as it could get. “Like this,” Zhenya said, feeling a little vulnerable about asking. But Sid just smiled at him and situated himself on his forearms and kissed Zhenya’s mouth. Zhenya felt like he was in perhaps a very drunk dream. Maybe he had fallen in the bathroom at the bar and hit his head and was hallucinating.

“I’m not gonna last long,” Sid mumbled, kissing at Zhenya’s cheek and his jaw, his skin sweaty and smelling mildly like long-worn-off cologne. “You feel really—“

He thrust slowly and carefully, pressing in and out, dragging sloppily across Zhenya’s prostate over and over. Drunkenness dulled Zhenya’s senses only a little, but he was thankful for it, else he would have already come embarrassingly between them, from the torturously slow thrusts and the friction of Sid’s belly against his swollen cock. “S’okay,” he reassured.

He put his hands on Sid’s warm, wet back and held them there, palms open, pressing him down as Sid moved and stopped and moved again. A part of him wanted this to go on forever. What fun was returning to his team and his national obligations, the daylight hours where he would wake up alone in his own hotel bed and laugh at Sid’s dumb jokes and not kiss him when he wanted and wonder, instead, what strange, incomprehensible things Sid was thinking and feeling and when he would say them aloud.

Just like he had said, it didn’t take Sid long to reach a hand between them to wrap around Zhenya’s cock, and thrust quickly and messily until he went quiet and still, dick pulsing a little in Zhenya’s ass. Zhenya was hanging over the edge, and he wiggled his own hand down to join Sid’s and thumbed over the head of his own dick.

“Shit, Geno—“ Sid whispered into his neck, a wet, heavy weight covering him. He squeezed the base of Zhenya’s dick a few times and licked at his jaw as Zhenya came.

In the aftermath, Zhenya wasn’t sure what to do. Sid seemed content to lay on top of him, boneless and tucked into his neck like a sleepy dog. But Zhenya felt suddenly sober, his damp face growing cool from the rotating ceiling fan. What were they doing? Should he try to fall asleep? Should he get up and get dressed and go back to his own room?

It felt like something had changed, but he didn’t know what and he didn’t want to talk about it now, certainly not drunk and exhausted, lying together in Sid’s bed sticky from come. He pressed on Sid’s heavy body until he could dislodge him. “Move,” Zhenya said. “You heavy.” And Sid rolled off to the side and sprawled out, leaning on one lazy arm.

“What’s up?” he asked, when Zhenya swung his legs over the side of the bed and got up on unsteady feet. Zhenya knew he looked a mess, come crusted on his stomach, his ass damp. He probably had a blooming bruise somewhere on his neck. Sid grabbed at his wrist and Zhenya looked back at him—his brow knit in confusion, one strong line through the center of it.

“Have to—“ Zhenya said, locating his clothes where they were strewn across the floor and pulling them on haphazardly. He grabbed his phone from the desk. “Meeting in morning, I forget, sorry.”

It was a lie, but Sid didn’t have to know that. His face fell for a moment. “I don’t mind if you crash here,” he said, trying to lure Zhenya back to the bed.

There was no way Zhenya would be able to do it. He already felt full to the brim with muddled feelings. Waking up to Sid snoring and drooling on Zhenya’s arm would only make them overflow, and maybe he would do some irreparable and stupid, like ask Sid to bond with him and never leave. “It’s fine, I’m sleep better myself.” He patted his pockets for his keycard and grabbed his shoes with one quick hand. “See you tomorrow.”

Zhenya took the elevator back to his own room, padding down the halls in quiet, socked feet. He keyed himself in and let the door clunk closed and sat down on the edge of his unmade bed, his face pressed into his hands.

“What the fuck,” he said, to the empty room. His heart was still beating double-time, his skin felt tight from dried sweat. He ran his hands over his face and up through his hair.

What the fuck.

“How’s Sid?” Ilyusha asked, skating up to Zhenya during practice and tapping him on the pads.

Zhenya had no idea how Sid was, or what he was doing. “Very funny,” Zhenya said, and skated away, off to the bench to pretend that he really needed to replace his stick.

He’d woken up that morning still feeling flummoxed by the events the night before, and Sid’s weirdly brazen affection. Maybe Sid had been drunker than Zhenya had noticed, and it was all just some nonsense that Zhenya should forgive him for, just lingering feelings from heat. And besides, Sid wasn’t usually one to pussyfoot around with people. If he said they were friends—they were friends. Sometimes friends slept together; maybe Sid had decided that summertime wasn’t a time to stick strictly to the rules. Reading anything more into it was probably just foolish wishful thinking on Zhenya’s part.

But he couldn’t get it out of his head, the dumb, sweet way Sid had been looking at him. Zhenya had let himself soak it in the night before, but now all he wanted to do was find somewhere to hide his head, afraid to reveal any of his true feelings.

And he knew that Sid would be kind about it, he would smile pityingly and put his warm hand on Zhenya’s arm and tell him that he really did care about him, really. Zhenya had already dodged one bullet so far during this tournament; he didn’t need that kind of nonsense.

So he would pretend everything was okay, and he would let Sid drag him to dinner or the museum or whatever other nonsense he wanted to do. And he would laugh appropriately at the right places and by all accounts be the same good friend that he had always been, the same way it was when he and Sid first started all of this, back before Zhenya’s feelings sprouted like hearty weeds.

Before he went to sleep that night, he called and told the ticket office to set aside another ticket for Sid for the game against Italy, and he sent Sid a message about it—an olive branch for ignoring him all day, one that Sid would hopefully take.

Sid did in fact text him the next day like everything was fine: photos from the Slavín Memorial, because nothing could keep Sid from a war-related history exhibit for long, and a quick thanks for the tickets, a smiley face attached.

Zhenya tried not to dwell on it during the game, and he played well, though Italy wasn’t too terrifying a threat. When he scored late in the second, he threw his hands over his head and shouted, feeling joy and relief, the weight of his own pressure finally off of his shoulders. He could score another now, maybe many more. He caught Sid clapping raucously in the crowd after he returned to the bench, standing there in the same seat by Katya Nesterova, both of them smiling.

He slept well that night, like the dead, and let Sid drag him out of bed uncharacteristically early the next day for breakfast. Clearly someone had let Sid in on the fact that the coaches had given the team the full day today, because he showed up at Zhenya’s door at a quarter after nine, knocking loud enough that it woke Zhenya from his slumber.

“What you want,” Zhenya asked him, holding the door open just enough to speak through, because he had slept entirely naked and wasn’t going to let Sid see him, not when he was firmly trying to tiptoe back into the realm of just-friends safety unless directed otherwise. “I’m asleep.”

“You wanna get something to eat?” Sid asked. “I’m starving, let me in.”

It was way too early for this. Though Zhenya had been a little afraid that Sid had showed up to talk about the events of the other night, and breakfast was certainly a preferable alternative. “Give me five minute,” Zhenya said, and shut and latched the door and went to put on some clothes.

They stopped somewhere that had big steaming plates of fried egg and sausages, and ate mostly in silence for the first bit, until Zhenya had finished his entire first mug of tea and flagged down the waitress for another.

“You want to see the river?” Sid asked, mouth still half-full of egg as Zhenya paid and signed the bill.

“See river?” Zhenya teased, tongue stuffed between his teeth. “You live in Pittsburgh so many years, Sid. You know what river look like.” He reached over to filch an orange slice from Sid’s nearly empty plate.

“You know what I mean,” Sid said. “It’s nice out. We have all day. There’s a museum down there with a bunch of dinosaur replicas, I think—interactive exhibits, you know, kid stuff.” He was smirking; Zhenya wanted to kiss it right off his face and only just held himself back.

“Oh, you think I like kid stuff?” Zhenya asked, faking irritation, bombastic and a little loud, and he rose from his chair with panache and pushed Sid out the door, laughing the way he always did, like they were back home in Pittsburgh. Zhenya could get them back on solid ground if he tried hard enough. Just some friendly teasing between teammates. Their evening of rule-breaking had been nothing but a silly, boozy mistake. Nothing to see.

At the river, they walked lazily, trailing behind some omega woman with three children and a large dog that Zhenya tried to keep a respectable distance from. Sid had his sunglasses perched on top of his head and was squinting into the bright mid-morning sun.

“You have any cool plans this summer?” Sid asked him, the same thing he’d said to Zhenya before they’d left Pittsburgh in April, though Zhenya hadn’t had much to say then, besides the obvious upcoming date with Worlds.

Zhenya still didn’t have much set in stone. “Maybe,” he said, kicking at a few pebbles and sending them skittering across the walkway. “Friends ask me to go to lake with family, so maybe I do. And things to do in Moscow with team, if we win.”

“Yeah,” Sid said, “You guys throw a parade?”

“I mean.” Zhenya didn’t really want to talk about it, lest he jinx them entirely. They weren’t even out of the group stage; they hadn’t won anything yet. He looked ahead at all the people walking, the birds flitting from tree to tree, and then aside at Sid. “It’s no Stanley Cup parade.”

Sid laughed, soft and knowingly. They had both wanted to still be playing in Pittsburgh by now, tired and itchy from not shaving, getting ready to go deep into June.

“What about you?” Zhenya asked. “You leave soon? Go back to vacation I interrupt?” Zhenya held his breath while he waited for Sid to reply. Perhaps it would be easier for both of them if Sid left soon, back to his own side of the globe. But a small part of Zhenya did still want him there, had grown used to it, this new routine, and that was the worst part.

“Oh, well I was planning to stay here for a while, watch the knockout games, you know?” Sid said, shrugging one shoulder. They turned around a bend where there was a small path down to the slope of the water’s edge, and a few metal benches perched in the dirt. “It’s pretty fun, coming to the games and stuff, hanging out.”

“Oh, you like to root for Russian team?” Zhenya teased, his heart still beating a little fast, for how much he wanted it to be so. He sat down on one bench, sprawling out and basking in the heat of the sun.

“I’m rooting for Canada to make it out of the group stage,” Sid laughed, and sat down closer than was really necessary, close enough that their thighs touched, plenty of empty bench behind him. “So we can play you in the final.”

“We beat you of course,” Zhenya said, popping his sunglasses down over his eyes. “You not want to play, so—Canada not so scary.”

Sid tilted his head, a weird challenging glint in his eye, the way he looked at Zhenya across the face-off dot at practice, and had been looking at him for the better part of a week. “Oh yeah?” Zhenya had to look away from it and out over the grey-blue water. “Well maybe I’ll come to Moscow, then—see what the hubbub is with your victory parade.”

Zhenya froze, feeling hot and immobile. Come to Moscow? He kept looking out over the wide expanse of the river, following the current downstream, trying to wrap his head around it. His brain felt like it had whiplash from the confusing web of trying parse Sid’s intentions. He had, in no uncertain terms, said he wouldn’t come to Worlds this summer, even when Zhenya had made him dinner at the end of the season and worn his nicest shirt and tried to give Sid the opportunity to read Zhenya’s feelings from his actions. He was busy, he wanted some time off, he needed a vacation.

But here he was, interrupting his vacation to come fuck Zhenya outside of his heat and make nice with Zhenya’s team and break his own fucking rules and presume that he could just come to Zhenya’s home. But he wouldn’t say—

“Moscow?” Was all Zhenya could manage to ask him, his voice tight and a little strange.

“Well, I—“ Sid said, “Only if you want me to come.” And then fell back into the cavernous silence, seeming suddenly off-kilter. What had he expected Zhenya to say instead? Sid’s ‘no’ in April had felt pretty much like the final nail in Zhenya’s coffin of hopes that Sid had secretly been reciprocating his feelings, and Zhenya had spent the time since trying to forget about it, building himself a wall around his most tender thoughts.

Zhenya considered for a moment telling Sid that he didn’t want him to come, that he wanted him to go back to Germany or Austria or Jupiter or anywhere else, but it would be a lie. “Sid,” he said, watching a bird swoop low over the river and then ascend again. Behind them, someone selling sweets was being mobbed by a loud gaggle of children. “Why you still here?”

“I told you,” Sid said, and Zhenya could feel him shifting, turning fully toward him. “It’s nice here, I’ve never been.”

Zhenya was getting even more frustrated. He pushed a hand back through his hair, tugging on the roots a bit before he dropped it back down to his lap. “Place you vacation before nice, too, lots nice places.”

Sid’s brow was crumpled up when Zhenya finally dared to look at him straight on. He put his hand on the bridge of his nose and reset himself. Sid hated to argue, and Zhenya could see him internally calculating how to deflect. “If you don’t want me to be here I can—“

“Sid, c’mon,” Zhenya said, blowing out a long audible breath. He could feel himself about to boil over, his body as hot as it ever was in heat. “It’s—it’s too much for me okay? I’m glad you come to help with heat because I need, but everything so confusing for me. You show up and I’m not ready for it, and I can’t help, and then I think you go home but you still here and you kiss me, even though we never do. What I’m supposed to—“

“Sorry about that, I—“ Sid said, thumbing his hand over his chain. “I didn’t mean to be so—“

“You don’t mean to kiss? Don’t mean to take me to hotel? I know you say no, okay, know you don’t—” Zhenya asked, just charging fully forward, hyped up on the adrenaline of being angry at something, even though he wasn’t even sure what he was angry about. He was afraid, maybe—frustrated. He wished that they were inside where he could scream instead of whispering, out here in front of God and everyone.

“No, I mean,” Sid said, and rubbed a hand over his face and sucked on his lip for a moment and then continued, clearly tense, “I meant to like, take you out somewhere, okay? I thought we could—“

“You think we can—go on date?” Zhenya asked, feeling his stomach clench hearing himself say the words, thinking about how much he had wanted it to happen, back before he had left North America.

“Well, I mean.” Sid put a hand on Zhenya’s knee, and Zhenya only barely resisted flinching away from it. “I thought maybe we could try.”

“Why you don’t you want to come, then?” Zhenya asked. He felt entirely shaken up, like a soda about to overflow. “I ask you, Sid, I say please, come to Slovakia with me, we hang out a little, see each other on ice. I’m not ready to end season with you, Sid.”

“I didn’t realize it was such a big deal for you,” Sid said, after a long beat. “I figured maybe we could just, you know, next season or something. It’s not like we would even see each other that much, if I was playing.”

“I try to—” Zhenya ran a hand through his hair. “Why don’t you say anything? If you feel?”

“I didn’t know, I mean I hoped, a little, but I didn’t think you—”

It was infuriating to sit here and whisper like this. Zhenya wanted to cry out of frustration, but he knew he couldn’t get so worked up, out here in front of the world. “I say to you!” he said, ducked close to Sid, his voice cracking a little. “I say Sid, please come! I want, I try to show you how we can be more than just heat partner, you know? I make you dinner, wear nice shirt—”

“We eat dinner together all the time, G,” Sid said, which wasn’t entirely untrue. But Zhenya certainly didn’t ever go to such lengths. Eating sandwiches at a juice place near the rink wasn’t exactly any kind of romantic overture.

“Maybe, okay, but,” Zhenya replied, feeling the fight drain out of him a little, exhausted by going around and around.

“That was really you trying to, uh—trying to flirt with me?” Sid asked, and then narrowed his gaze. “You told me all about how you were going to, like, spend the summer ass up in your friend’s condo. I’m not sure that’s uh—”

“I’m scared, okay! I tell you because like, I’m mad you don’t want me, okay,” Zhenya said, feeling huffy about it, remembering how embarrassed he’d been, sitting at his own dining table burning over some dumplings and beer, tripping over his own words.

“Well I do,” Sid said, his hand on Zhenya’s knee tightening. “I do want you.”

The noise around them had quieted a little, and Zhenya craned his head around to see that they were mostly alone—only a few old women sitting on a rock on the grass a few meters down, paying them no mind. He put his hand lightly over Sid’s hand, feeling the remaining anger settle low, simmering away. “You want to kiss me again?” Zhenya asked, looking Sid directly in the eye, trying to make himself smile a small, tentative smile.

“Maybe,” Sid said, his face morphing into a crooked grin. “Probably not right here, though.” He nodded his head past Zhenya to the old women, who had gathered a few birds and were tossing them pieces of broken cracker.

“Oh, you don’t want old ladies see?” Zhenya joked, but inside his trepidation was being replaced again with a tentative hope. “Okay, yes.” He stood up, perhaps too quickly, and his sunglasses fell from his face and tumbled down the walkway a bit. “Not here.”

Sid bent to retrieve them, and stood up and smiled at Zhenya and tucked the glasses back into the neck of Zhenya’s shirt, brushing his fingers over the skin at the base of his neck, which was warm and a little sweaty from the sun. “Let’s go?”

Zhenya was practically vibrating on the walk back, and sweaty all over by the time they reached the door to his room.

“You’re a mess,” Sid laughed, as Zhenya fumbled the key card three times and then four before the door opened.

“I’m nervous,” Zhenya said, coming into the room and kicking his shoes off, stripping off his shirt and then pulling it right back on. He looked back at Sid, was giving him a tight, amused face, like he was trying very hard not to laugh. “What?”

“Come here, Jesus,” Sid said, walking forward to tug Zhenya’s shirt back into place, his hands lingering over Zhenya’s stomach, warm through the thin cotton. He was laughing softly. Zhenya felt a little like he was going out of his mind.

The hand on Zhenya’s stomach slid up to cup his chin, and Zhenya let Sid pull him down to the proper height. “You wanna?” Sid asked, and Zhenya nodded, his face still trapped in Sid’s grip.

They kissed for a few moments like that, until Zhenya sat down on the corner of the desk, hauling Sid in between his knees and getting his hands up Sid’s shirt like a greedy teenager. Sid had his tongue in Zhenya’s mouth, slow and lazy, and Zhenya could feel him growing hard but not urgent between them.

Sid calmed their kisses and pulled back, his mouth shiny from spit in the midday light. “I wanna try something,” he said, looking just as mischievous as he had on the bank of the river.

“What?” Zhenya asked, curious. Sid tugged him to the bed by the hem of his t-shirt, lazily splaying himself out, looking like an embarrassing wet dream Zhenya had once last winter. In the dream, Sid had been cunning and quick-tongued like he wasn’t ever in waking life, but here he smiled his gummy smile at Zhenya and gestured to him.

“Get naked, c’mon,” he said, and Zhenya swallowed his tongue and did as he was asked, watching Sid unzip his own pants and peel his shirt over his head.

“Lay behind me,” Sid said, when Zhenya had gotten all the way down to his socks, his dick nearly all the way hard just from the anticipation of whatever nonsense Sid had cooked up. Sid spooned up on his side and Zhenya slid in behind him.

“We taking nap? You tired?” Zhenya teased. They never did anything this way, most alphas didn’t—Zhenya wanted to roll Sid onto his back so he had access to his mouth and kiss his face and his neck and ride him into the bed, a familiar scene. But Sid had other ideas, and he reached back to tug Zhenya’s hip forward so they were pressed together from chest to knees, Zhenya’s dick snug against the crease of Sid’s ass. Did he want—

The back of Sid’s neck was flushed a deep cherry red, and Zhenya kissed the sweaty skin, familiar with the salty tang. “You want?” he asked, sliding his dick up and down between Sid’s cheeks. Zhenya had never with a man—no one had ever wanted it, and he had never tried to ask.

“Oh, I mean—we probably can’t right now, but—“ Sid replied, but his palm stayed put on Zhenya’s hip. “You could—stay still for a second, okay.”

Zhenya froze in place while Sid shifted a little, and situated himself and raised his leg up slightly, and tugged at Zhenya’s dick until it was pressed between his thighs, right up in the warm space against Sid’s balls. Zhenya thrust experimentally forward, dry and a little uncomfortable until the leaking wetness from his dick began to ease the way. It was weird and pretty delightful—Sid’s thighs were warm and thick and snug around him, and Sid kept squirming in his arms like he was really into it, which got Zhenya really into it. When Zhenya peered over the thick shape of Sid’s body, he could see Sid gripping his own cock in his fist.

“You do before?” Zhenya asked, sure now that Sid had.

“Yeah, I—“ Sid said, and let out a choked off moan. “I really like it.”

It was getting really slick now, and all Zhenya could focus on as he moved was the slick sound of his dick sliding through Sid’s legs and the tight tight squeeze like a vise and the salty smell of Sid’s sweat, the faint citrusy scent of his shampoo. It didn’t escape him that Sid probably didn’t do this very often, and inviting Zhenya to do it meant more than just—sex. He was, well—letting Zhenya in.

It didn’t take Zhenya long to come after that, thinking about all the times he’d let Sid rail him out of his mind and how much he’d grown to want more, like an embarrassing glowing light growing brighter inside his body. He grabbed on to Sid’s sweaty hip, his hand slipping, and thrust a few times and came with a sigh, listening to Sid jack his dick through his own release.
The minute that passed made his dick oversensitive and a little sore, and he lifted Sid’s hip and flopped onto his back, warm arm flung over his eyes.

“Did you really think there was no way I would want to—“ Sid said into the thick silence, and trailed off a little, and then, “Want to be with you?” Zhenya could feel Sid’s fingertips brushing the curve of his shoulder. His voice was close and quiet.

“You say no, you know,” Zhenya said, and uncovered his face and sat up a little, propping himself up on one arm. “And I think you understand what I’m ask and you just want be friends, only heats— ” He paused to consider his words. “So I think maybe feelings go away a little over summer and it’s fine, we friends.”

“Well, I don’t just want to be friends,“ Sid sat up, his skin pink and a little shiny from sweat. “I can’t believe you told me you were going to spend the summer fucking someone else and you still thought I would think—”“

“I want to make you, like—jealous,” Zhenya admitted.

Sid cleared his throat and looked down at the rumpled bedsheets, his eyelashes dark dusty fans against his cheeks. “Well, it uh—it worked,” he said, a little quiet, and Zhenya thought, maybe a little shy. “I was pretty jealous—packing my shit up in my garage the next day and I couldn't stop thinking, you know...“ He let himself trail off, looking up at Zhenya with a small, tentative smile.

“You think about me,” Zhenya said, and gathered a pillow up under his arm and tucked his face into it, his cheeks burning.

“Yeah, I do.” Sid put a hand on the side of Zhenya’s face, smoothing the hair over his ear. “And I kept thinking like, what if it was me. What if I—and then you kept texting me about your heat and I just thought—here’s my shot, you know? Why wait for next season?”

“Sid,” Zhenya said, putting a hand over Sid’s hand on his face, full up with complicated emotions, thankful he had nothing to do today but lie around in bed and eat and do his mandatory stretching routine later, sometime before bed. Practice and the team could wait until tomorrow. For today he could just care about this: this weird, new, terrifying thing.

They won against Latvia a few days later, and against Switzerland the following night. They had won, well—all of their games, and maybe Zhenya hadn’t been as productive as he might have liked, but he couldn’t care much now. He wanted them to win, but even if they didn’t, well—perhaps he had won something in his own small way.

“Ready for Sweden?” Kirya asked him, bumping shoulders with Zhenya in his stall after practice.

“Always ready,” Zhenya said, and ran a towel over his sweaty hair. He had to give far more interviews here, and he didn’t want to look entirely a fool.

“Fuck Sweden!” someone shouted from across the busy room. Zhenya threw his smelly towel in their general direction and hightailed it naked all the way to the change room.

After they beat Sweden, Zhenya looked up in the stands to see Sid on his feet, cheering for Zhenya in his trademark black hat and a brick-red v-neck. It wasn’t quite Zhenya’s colors, but close enough. Zhenya left the rink in a hurry after his shower and met Sid a few blocks from the hotel, because Sid wanted to go down to Novy Most and see the lights.

“You ready for the knockout round?” Sid asked him, as they walked along the edge of the bridge, partially illuminated by the orange glow of the lamps. In front of them, the bridge structure glowed like a UFO, rising high into the sky.

“Guess so,” Zhenya said. He watched and pointedly didn’t comment as Sid took a few blurry photos with his phone. “I think maybe we have chance to win, you know? Maybe not, but—“ He didn’t need to continue. Sid knew how much he wanted it. In that, they were the same.

“We’ll see,” Sid said, coming over to lean against the railing next to him, and smirking at him, sly. “Still might have to play Canada.”

Zhenya looked out over the deep black of the water, currents shining like an oil spill in the dark. “Maybe I let you come to Moscow, if we win,” he said. “See parade.”

“Oh yeah?” Sid said. His arm slid closer to Zhenya’s on the railing, his elbow bumping the sleeve of Zhenya’s jacket. “What if you don’t win?”

Zhenya thought about it—maybe it was bad luck to imagine himself losing. This tournament had been—well—eventful, to say the least, and he needed to keep his eye on the prize. But maybe. He looked at Sid’s face, half shadowed in the moonlight under the bill of his cap. Zhenya imagined them like this in his home—showing Sid his apartment and the shopkeeper who always gave him free candy when he went in to pick up beer and laundry soap, and his favorite cafe to go for tea. Maybe they would spend Zhenya’s midsummer heat together, sweaty and sunburnt in Zhenya’s king bed.

It was a good thought.

“Maybe I let you come anyway,” Zhenya said, and put his head on the lip of the railing and smiled at Sid, unselfconscious, feeling brave in the dark, where no one could see them or knew who they were.

“I’d like that,” Sid said.