Chapter 2
When, in the space of about six months, they'd gone from secretly engaged to publicly out, married, and playing for the same team, Liam had done some freaking out that Fyodor would take it as an invitation to be wildly inappropriate all the time.
He'd done a lot of freaking out about a lot of things, actually, but since his husband had no shame and loved attention, that had been in the top five.
"You think I will embarrass you?" Fyodor had said when Liam brought it up, so, maybe he hadn't been the most tactful.
"You embarrass me in front of Kellen all the time."
Is
Kellen
When have I embarrassed you in front of someone who matters?"
Liam didn't answer right away, because, okay, Fyodor had a point.
He had technically embarrassed Liam in front of his parents plenty of times, but it was always by being disgustingly sappy and sweet, not by bragging about how fast he could make Liam come.
He even kept the PDA to holding hands and chaste kisses.
"Look.
Just don't, please, okay?"
"Sweetheart.
I would never."
And he hadn't.
The first time a reporter had asked Fyodor whether Liam's on-ice performance correlated to his in-bedroom performance, Fyodor had given him a stare so withering the entire room had gone silent before asking if he questioned all athletes about their private lives with their spouses or just the ones he liked mocking.
Faye the PR person had ended questions about half a second later, looking professionally furious, and none of the Titans had ever seen that reporter again.
Fyodor had been in the shower for over an hour, and Liam wasn't fretting about it.
He also wasn't fretting over the fact that Fyodor had taken Masha for a forty-five minute run soon after waking up without doing more than shouting
goodbye
as he headed out the door, or the fact that he'd woken up in the middle of the night to find Fyodor on the couch, staring at some spy movie from the 90s.
He was, however, putting together NestForm furniture about it.
Last time Kellen, Rina, and the kids had visited, he'd promised Pearl and Iris bunk beds, so this was a perfectly valid use of his time and energy.
"You know you can pay someone to come do that," said Fyodor from the doorway, and Liam had been so absorbed in sorting screws that he jumped.
Fyodor half-smiled.
"Sorry," he said, not sounding particularly sorry.
"I didn't hear you."
"Oh, really?"
Liam didn't say any of the first five things that came to mind.
Instead, he finally went with, "You have a good run?"
"Was fine," Fyodor said, shrugging.
For a long moment he looked over Liam's project, scattered around him on the floor, like he was trying to think of what to say.
"I saw a snake crossing the road."
"What kind?"
"Black.
It left before I could get a good look."
Another one of those silences, and Liam had to grind his teeth together to keep himself from asking
are you okay
or
what can I do
or any of the thousand inane questions practically begging to get out when Fyodor was like this: a little spacey, not quite
there
but always seeming like he was about to say something that didn't materialize, his usual sparkle dulled.
Liam would've given anything to fix it and knew he couldn't.
"I am going to go read by the pool, you are good up here?"
"I'm something," Liam said, glancing at his pile of NestForm parts.
"You want company?"
"Maybe in a while," Fyodor said, and then he was gone.
Liam rested his forehead on a box and tried to breathe deeply to settle his nerves, but the smell of cardboard didn't do shit.
The summer after Liam's first year in Ashwick, they'd gotten into a spectacular blowout fight their third day at the cabin.
He couldn't even remember what the fight had been about, only that he'd been furious and devastated and terrified that
time, it was unfixable.
After what felt like hours of shouting the only thing he could think of to do was grab the car keys and leave.
He'd thought about driving back to Ashwick and leaving Fyodor stranded there.
He remembered thinking that it would serve Fyodor right, even if he couldn't remember what for, but instead he drove around the countryside for an hour.
When he came home Fyodor was curled up on a deck lounger, hair damp, staring at the water.
"I'm sorry," he said, and sat next to Fyodor, on the edge of the chair, a question.
An olive branch.
"I came back."
"I knew you would," Fyodor said, and uncurled until there was a Liam-sized space next to him.
Liam went.
He nestled his head against Fyodor's shoulder and tangled their fingers together and still, somehow, didn't know what to say.
He knew he needed to give Fyodor a better apology.
He knew that they needed to talk and keep talking, that they'd fallen into their old patterns of bottling their feelings up until they exploded.
It wouldn't be easy, but what was?
"I shouldn't have left," he finally said.
"I think maybe it was good," Fyodor said slowly.
"You came back less mad."
"Yeah, but," Liam said, and didn't know the rest of the sentence.
Fyodor was right.
Shit.
"I don't know how to do this, Liam," Fyodor said, softly, and Liam froze, because what the fuck did
mean?
"Do what?" he finally asked.
"Be married," Fyodor said, voice still slow and soft and relaxed, somehow cutting through Liam's panic bells.
"Be married to
"Okay," Liam said, very sure he'd never breathed in his life.
"So we will have to figure it out together."
Liam tilted his head against Fyodor's shoulder and willed the panic bells away, and they were going to have to talk about leading with the
together
part in the future, but that was later.
"As long as it's together," he said, and squeezed Fyodor's fingers in his, and watched the sun lower toward the lake, and tried to organize his tornado of thoughts and feelings into something like order.
But mostly he was quietly grateful that they got to start from here, their fingers tangled together, Fyodor's breath ruffling Liam's hair, Liam idly twisting Fyodor's wedding ring.
They got to start from
, from Liam always coming back and Fyodor always knowing he would.
That first year of Ashwick and marriage had been... hard.
Going there felt like starting over: a new team, a new city, a new spouse, a new level of media attention.
He and Fyodor went from hardly seeing each other to being together
constantly,
from keeping each other a decade-long secret to being so suddenly, jarringly public that Liam felt flipped inside-out.
Suddenly he was a
hockey player, a
role model, a
professional athlete, and he wanted to do a good job at all those things because he knew exactly how much it mattered, and he also wished no one gave a fuck.
There were days he'd have given anything to go back to keeping Fyodor a secret, and he hated himself for feeling that way.
But there was hockey to play, and since it was more than just Thorndale who thought he'd fucked up on purpose in the playoffs, Liam had plenty to prove.
He put his head down and worked through it, game after game, and if things were tense with Fyodor or he was frustrated with the team or if he missed his old life and couldn't tell anyone because he was supposed to be so blissfully happy in his new one, he got through it.
He got through it all the way to a devastating flameout in the semifinals, and suddenly, there was no hockey to think about instead of his feelings.
Liam lasted forty-five minutes of slotting bed parts together and fucking around with an allen wrench while trying not to worry about Fyodor before abandoning the bunk beds and heading down.