The private version was beautiful and complicated. We had rules. Mik needed rules the way other people needed oxygen, so we made them together, sitting on my couch with takeout containers between us like we were negotiating a treaty.
Rule one: nothing at the facility. No touching, no looks, no lingering. At the rink, we were teammates and nothing else. This was Mik's rule and it was non-negotiable.
Rule two: we alternated apartments, but Mik's place was safer because it was in a building with a parking garage and no doorman. My building in Virginia-Highland had a lobby where neighbors said hello. Mik's building had an elevator that went straight to his floor without human interaction, which he had chosen for exactly that reason long before I was in the picture.
Rule three: no phones. Nothing in writing that could be screenshotted or forwarded or discovered. This was the hardest rule for me because I am a person who communicates through text the way fish communicate through water. But Mik was right. A text was evidence. Evidence was danger.
We broke rule three almost immediately. Not with anything incriminating. Just the small, stupid things that people send when they're thinking about someone and can't help it. Mik texted me a photo of a Dostoevsky quote at 6 AM. I texted him a picture of the sunrise from my morning run. He sent a single word, "beautiful," and I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out if he meant the sunrise or me and then decided it didn't matter because either way, Mikhail Volkov had called something beautiful, and the fact that beauty existed in his vocabulary was a revelation.
We did not break rules one or two. At the facility, Mik was flawless. He treated me exactly the way he treated every other teammate, which is to say he treated me with professional respect and approximately the same warmth as a filing cabinet. The performance was so convincing that I sometimes wondered if I'd hallucinated the whole thing, if the man who pressed his face into my neck at midnight and whispered things in Russian was actually a different person than the man who said "good shift" to me in the hallway with the emotional register of a GPS.
But then we'd get home, whichever home, and the mask would come off, and Mik would stand in my kitchen drinking tea and telling me about Katya's latest London application, and I would sit on the counter and watch him and think: this is the real one. This is who you are when nobody's looking. And I am the only person who gets to see it.
The intimacy that scared me was not the physical kind. It was the other kind. The kind that happened on the couch at 11 PM when we were both too tired for anything except existing near each other. Mik reading while I watched highlights on my laptop, his feet in my lap because I had put them there the first time and he had let them stay, and now it was a thing we did. The quiet domesticity of two men sharing space. Making dinner. Arguing about what to watch. Learning each other's rhythms.
He kept his toothbrush at my apartment. I noticed this on a Tuesday. A blue toothbrush in the cup next to my red one. He hadn't mentioned it. He had just left it there, and the casualness of it nearly broke me open, because Mikhail Volkov did not do anything casually. Every object in his life was deliberate. A toothbrush left behind was a declaration.
I did not mention the toothbrush. I bought a better brand of toothpaste.
Three weeks. Twenty-one days of this double life. And I was happy. I was so happy that it frightened me, because happiness built on a secret has an expiration date, and I could feel the clock ticking even when I couldn't hear it.
The problem was not the team. The team was oblivious, or at least performing obliviousness, which in hockey amounts to the same thing. Jonah knew something was up but had stopped asking, which was his way of giving me space while also communicating that the space was available whenever I needed to fill it with truth. Wes Chen had given Mik a nod in the locker room once that felt weighty, but Wes gave everything a weight that was hard to interpret.
The problem was not the media. The media was focused on our on-ice production, which was elite, and had no reason to look beyond it.
The problem was me.
I had been here before. Not with a man, but with the closet. Two years ago, before I came out, I spent six months dating women publicly while knowing that I was attracted to men, and the dissonance of it, the gap between who I was and who I appeared to be, had eaten me from the inside out. Coming out had been terrifying but it had also been a relief so profound that I cried in the shower for thirty minutes afterward. Not from sadness. From the sheer physical release of putting down aweight I'd been carrying so long I'd forgotten it wasn't part of my body.
I was carrying weight again. Not my own this time. Mik's.
Every time a reporter asked about my personal life and I deflected. Every time Jonah made a joke about setting me up with someone and I laughed along. Every time I walked past Mik in the hallway and treated him like furniture. Each one was a small lie, and the lies were accumulating, and I could feel the same dissonance building that had nearly destroyed me before.
I knew the rules. I had agreed to them. I understood why they existed and I respected Mik's fear because it was real and earned and rooted in a history that was far more brutal than anything I had experienced. My father's silence was painful. Mik's father's fists were something else entirely.
But understanding someone's fear and living inside it are different things, and I was starting to suffocate.
I didn't say anything. Not yet. The happiness was too new and too fragile, and I was terrified that if I applied pressure, the whole thing would shatter like ice under too much weight. So I swallowed the dissonance and smiled through the lies and came home to Mik's apartment where the single plates had been joined by a second set, which he had purchased without comment, and I pretended that the secret was sustainable.
It was not sustainable. I knew this. He probably knew it too.
But for three weeks, we pretended. And the pretending was so sweet that it almost tasted like the truth.
One night, late, in his apartment. We were on the couch. His head was on my chest and I was running my fingers through his hair, which was something I had discovered could put him to sleep in under ten minutes, like a cheat code for a man who had spent his adult life unable to rest.
"Cole," he said. Half asleep. My name in his mouth, low and accented. I would never get tired of it.
"Yeah?"
"This is good. What we have."
"It's good."
"I do not want to ruin it."
"You won't."
He was quiet for a long time. I thought he'd fallen asleep. Then, barely audible: "I am not used to good things lasting."