We moved fast. His mouth on me, hot and demanding. My hands on him, gripping, pulling closer. I flipped him onto his back and he let me, and the surrender was not submission but trust, a man who had fought his whole life choosing to stop fighting in the one place where stopping was safe.
I prepped him quickly because we were both too keyed up for slow, and when I pushed inside him he wrapped his legs around my waist and pulled me deep and said "yes" in a voice that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of an ocean.
The pace was fast. Almost rough. His hands on my back, my shoulders, my ass, pulling me harder into him with every thrust.I braced myself on the mattress and gave him what he was asking for and his head fell back and his throat was exposed and I put my mouth there and felt his pulse hammering against my tongue.
"Harder," he said. "I want to feel this tomorrow."
I gave him harder. The headboard hit the wall and neither of us cared. He was loud now, louder than he'd ever been, and the sound of his voice filling the bedroom was its own kind of victory, because this was a man who had spent eleven years in silence and was done being quiet.
He reached between us and wrapped his hand around himself and stroked fast, matching my rhythm, and the sight of him touching himself while I was inside him was so overwhelming that I nearly lost it right there.
"Together," I managed.
"Yes."
It was fast and fierce and when it hit us it hit simultaneously. I felt him clench around me and heard him cry out and the sensation pulled me over the edge with him. The orgasm was violent and long and left me shaking, collapsed on top of him, both of us breathing like we'd just played overtime, which in a way we had.
We lay there. Sweating. Wrecked. His hand in my hair. My face against his chest. The room smelled like sex and sweat and the faintest trace of champagne from the locker room celebration, and I started laughing because the absurdity of this day, this impossible, perfect, world-changing day, finally caught up with me.
He laughed too. And we lay there laughing, naked and sticky and exhausted, and I thought: this is it. This is the whole thing. Not the goal or the kiss or the arena or the cameras. This. A man laughing in my bed because he is happy and free and mine.
"Cole."
"Yeah?"
"I love you."
In English. Clear and unaccented and deliberate. Not whispered against my skin or hidden in Russian or buried inside a joke about kitchen appliances. Said to my face, in the dark, in the language of the country where he had finally stopped surviving and started living.
"I love you too, Mik."
"I know."
"Did you just Han Solo me?"
"I have been waiting to use that since we watched the movie."
I pulled him closer and he came willingly and we fell asleep the way we always fell asleep now, tangled and warm and breathing in sync.
I pulled him closer and he came willingly and we fell asleep the way we always fell asleep now, tangled and warm and breathing in sync. Two men in a bed in Virginia-Highland with the championship banner still hanging in the arena downtown and the whole world about to find out what we already knew.
We were together. We were real.
And the ice, for once, had nothing to do with it.
MIK
Iwoke to 4,217 notifications.
This is not an exaggeration. I know because the number was displayed on my lock screen, a figure so absurd that my first thought was that my phone had malfunctioned. My second thought was that I had been traded. My third thought, which arrived with the full weight of a freight train, was the memory of a kiss on ice in front of eighteen thousand people and an unknown number of television cameras.
Cole was still asleep. It was 8:30 in the morning, which meant my body had overslept by nearly four hours, which was either a testament to the exhaustion of Game 7 overtime or evidence that my internal clock had finally surrendered to a lifestyle that no longer required predawn vigilance. His arm was across my chest and his face was pressed into my shoulder and he was breathing the slow, steady rhythm that I had memorized over months of sharing a bed with a man who fell asleep like it was a competitive sport.
I picked up my phone. I did not open the notifications. Instead I went to the source. I opened a browser and searched my own name.
The results were immediate and overwhelming.
The kiss was everywhere. Not just sports media. Everywhere. CNN. BBC. The front page of Reddit. A clip on Twitter with forty-seven million views and counting. The headline on ESPN's website read "Reapers' Volkov Scores OT Winner, Celebrates with Teammate Kiss." The subheadline: "Atlanta defenseman's on-ice moment goes viral."