Chapter Text
The man in the grocery store was the most beautiful thing Ilya had ever seen.
He’d first seen him in the snack aisle when he’d been there looking for sukhariki, which of course he had not found. He had, however, found the man.
The man was standing in front of a shelf stacked with chips, and staring at them as though everything in his life depended on which packet he selected. He hadn’t even looked up when Ilya had passed behind him in the narrow aisle, which Ilya supposed was a good thing because he was staring at the man in a way that he was not particularly proud of, a kind of slack-jawed reverence that had no place on the face of a grown man, especially not in the middle of a snack aisle while looking at a stranger.
It wasn’t Ilya’s fault, though. He didn’t quite understand why the entire grocery store hadn’t ground to a halt to watch the man stare at the chips.
He was about the same height as Ilya, but smaller – more compact, although still muscular in his shorts and t-shirt. He was dressed as though he was leaving the gym, but his clothes looked clean and his hair was dry and styled. He immediately thought of Svetlana’s recent rant about how American women dressed.
“They are always wearing their gym clothes! Everywhere! Gym clothes are for the gym, Ilya. Leggings for exercise, dresses for dancing, jeans for the rest. Why is it always leggings for everything in this country?”
Ilya wondered what Svetlana would make of this man’s choice of grocery store attire, and grinned as he recalled their most recent conversation on their way home at 3am last Sunday.
“We didn’t come all this way for you to not fuck pretty men.” Svetlana had been drunk, leaning on his shoulder in the back of the cab. She had spent half the evening pointedly looking at the man who had been leaning on the bar, gazing openly at Ilya. He had certainly been very pretty. Ilya had remained seated at their table, pretending not to see him.
Ilya had rolled his eyes. “We came all this way for me to play hockey, Sveta.”
Svetlana had shrugged, snuggling closer to his side and closing her eyes. Ilya knew she would fall asleep before they reached his apartment, which meant he would have to half drag her out of the cab when they arrived. “You could play hockey and fuck women in Russia, Ilyusha. Here you can be all the way happy.”
“I am happy.” He was.
“Too happy, perhaps.” Her voice was barely above a mumble now. “Maybe I don’t fuck you anymore and then your dick will be sad and it will make you find a pretty man to fuck instead.”
Ilya hoped their cab driver didn’t speak Russian.
Ilya was fairly certain that Svetlana would not be complaining about this beautiful man’s outfit if she was here. She would be too busy delightedly jabbing Ilya in the ribs and attempting to push him in the man’s direction. Ilya was very pleased that Svetlana was not here, because while he was not being shoved in the beautiful man’s direction he could stand here and stare at him. The man had dark hair that flopped into his eyes, and he had… freckles. This should not be important. Many, many people had freckles. These were the different kind. The kind you wanted to count, and kiss, and pray to.
Eventually, giving up on the sukhariki and grabbing something very disappointing-looking called Nonni’s, Ilya was forced to leave the snack aisle, and leave the beautiful man where he’d found him, staring intently at chips. He glanced back over his shoulder as he rounded the corner, hoping the man would look up at the movement. He didn’t.
Ilya had never been jealous of a grocery store shelf before.
Later, with his cart loaded, he was about to head to the checkout when his phone vibrated in his pocket. It was Marleau, one of the men that would be his teammate when his first season started.
“We’re watching the game at mine later. Come. Bring snacks.”
Ilya was surprised to feel a slight lift in his chest. He wouldn’t have said he wanted to watch the playoff final with this group of loud American strangers, but Svetlana was working tonight and the idea of going home to watch it in his empty apartment felt like something he hadn’t even known he’d been dreading.
“OK.”
When he returned to the snack aisle, he was shocked to find that the beautiful man was exactly here he’d left him.
He’d been looking for the man the entire way around the grocery store, of course. Eyes scanning every aisle, gaze jumping up every time he noticed movement. He’d slowed his pace several times, not willing to admit to himself that he was trying to give the man a chance to catch up. He’d told himself that the man had only been holding a basket, that he’d probably chosen his chips and left.
But here he was.
This time Ilya had a reason to stand a lot closer to the man, and so he did. Now that he was closer he saw that the look on the man’s face was not concentration, but concern. He was surveying the chips as though one packet contained a bomb, and it was the beautiful man’s job to instinctively divine which one before the entire grocery store exploded.
Ilya could not remember ever initiating a conversation with a stranger in his life. Chirps on the ice didn’t count – the goal was to say his piece and skate away. If they had time to reply, that was a failure in delivery on his part. In Russia, the hockey world had been small and the women had approached him, so there had been very little need for him to start a conversation with literally anybody. Since arriving in America five weeks ago, Ilya had been pleased to learn how much he could achieve with nonverbal communication, saving him the need to force his brain and mouth to work together against the weight of unfamiliar English words. A raised eyebrow, a shrug, a crooked smile, or an impatient hand gesture could communicate more clearly, and certainly more quickly, than he could with a paragraph of stilted English through a thick accent. Which is why Ilya was deeply startled to realise that he was approaching the beautiful, concerned, freckled man and intending, unbelievably, to speak to him.
“Is problem just you, or also me?”
The man jumped, like in one of the videos Ilya had seen on his phone of a cat being frightened by a cucumber. One hand tightened on the handle of his shopping basket, the other jumped reflexively to his chest. His eyes widened, fixing on Ilya as though he was an intruder in his home, rather than one of six fellow shoppers in this brightly-lit snack aisle. A series of about eight things happened behind those eyes before they relaxed slightly, and Ilya would have paid a great deal of money to know what they were.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your face,” Ilya gestured to the man’s face, although this was probably unnecessary because despite his accent that much was understandable. “Is very concerned. Big trouble. I must know – is just you problem, or also me?”
The man appeared to be attempting to rearrange his beautiful face, and it was working, because now he looked less concerned and more confused. Ilya supposed that was fair, and also how his own face should probably look, because what the fuck was he doing.
“I’m sorry, I still don’t…”
“Perhaps chips is bomb. Or perhaps you work at government. Know something. We all will die? There is new virus? The aliens are coming?” He leaned forward slightly, which he distantly noted was an absolutely insane thing to do because he was already standing closer to this stranger than was reasonable in any context. “Should I return to Russia? I tell no-one if you tell me.”
The man’s face was still confused, but his eyes had softened and while nobody could describe what he was doing as smiling as such, his cheeks had rounded slightly in a way that shifted his freckles and now Ilya had to look at them all again. He was still staring at Ilya, but in a way that was more appraising than alarmed. Probably back to alarmed soon enough, Ilya conceded, given that he was acting like a maniac.
There was a period of silence, which was probably only a few seconds but was long enough to have Ilya scrambling for something else to say. He’d already spoken more words in English to this man than he had to all his new teammates combined since he arrived over a month ago, so he was finding the well alarmingly dry.
“No aliens,” the man said, right as Ilya was considering whether or not he could just wheel his cart away and pretend this never happened. “Or virus.” He paused, his face briefly becoming concerned again. “That I know of.”
Wonderful. Ilya had added a new concern to what was clearly an extensive pile for this poor worried, beautiful man. He scrambled for something to say that would perhaps confuse the man again, since his face had at least looked a little lighter a few moments ago. Unfortunately, his brain had gone entirely offline because this beautiful man had just spoken to him, and therefore it seemed to think that it had done its job and had now abandoned him entirely.
“Ah, good,” was all he managed.
“I wasn’t… I was just thinking,” the man said. Lucky for some, Ilya said pointedly to his smooth, blank brain.
“About… chips?” Ilya gestured to the shelf in front of them. “Looked like big thinking for chips.”
The man let out a sound. It wasn’t a laugh, in the same way that a twig isn’t a tree, but it was certainly in the family of sounds that are laugh related and Ilya’s chest swelled with pride that he had coaxed a joy-adjacent noise out of this extremely concerned man.
“No, not chips. It was…” the man looked confused again for a moment, then his face cleared. “I can’t even remember what I was thinking about, actually.”
This seemed unlikely to Ilya, who was quietly certain that he had never in his life looked as worried as this man had just been looking, and he was sure that he would remember any thoughts that put that kind of look on his face. Still, the man was talking to him, and accusing him of lying didn’t seem like a polite thing to do.
Fortunately the man saved him from the effort of finding yet another thing to say by adding
“Thanks for distracting me, I might have been standing here until the store closed. I do that sometimes. Get stuck, I mean. Thinking.”
The beautiful man’s cheeks flushed and Ilya needed to sit down. The blush spread to the tips of his ears, and Ilya noticed that he had two freckles on his left earlobe and also that his earlobes looked softer than anything should look on a grown man and he clenched his hands around the handle of his shopping cart before he reached out and took that earlobe between his finger and thumb and stroked it.
“Is not so bad problem,” Ilya replied, tearing his eyes away from the man’s earlobe that he was now imagining between his teeth. “I have opposite, maybe. Not think enough.” Well, definitely not thoughts worth having, anyway.
The man smiled, but it looked a little sad. “That is a problem I would really love to have sometimes.”
Ilya had once again made this poor man feel something worse than he was already feeling, and he decided that it was time to go. He imagined the man reflecting on this conversation later and remembering the time that a big, dumb hockey player had made him worry about a virus and feel sad about thinking too much when he was just minding his own business buying chips.
Which, Ilya noticed, neither of them had actually managed to do yet.
“What chips you get?”
Ilya was certain that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever said in his life, but then the sad look had gone from the beautiful man’s face so maybe it was actually the best thing he’d ever said. The freckled, still-flushed cheeks had lifted again in that not-quite-smile way, and Ilya was glad that the man had turned back to look at the chips so that Ilya couldn’t stand there and stare at his beautiful face like an idiot. He also wanted the man to turn back and face him so that Ilya could stand there and stare at his beauitiful face like an idiot.
“These.” The man grabbed a purple packet off the shelf and tossed them into the empty basket he was holding. “I don’t really eat, uh, a lot of chips, but I’m going to a friend’s to watch the game and these are his favourite.” He looked back up at Ilya, who needed to learn about six new English words for colours just to name the ones in the man’s eyes.
“We trust him?”
“Who, Hayden?”
“This chip friend, yes. I do not know these American chips.”
The man reached out, grabbed a second purple packet from the shelf, and leaned past Ilya to place them gently in his cart. “We can absolutely trust Hayden when it comes to snacks. Literally nothing else, but definitely snacks.”
Ilya couldn’t quite remember what breathing was. The man’s shoulder had brushed against his chest when he’d leaned into his cart, and his heart had stopped completely. The man smelled like Dove soap and mild stick deodorant but it was somehow the most intoxicating thing Ilya had ever smelled. He noticed that he wanted to lick the man’s armpit, but he decided to worry about that thought later.
“Perhaps I get two.” Ilya did not need two packets of the same chips, but he did need the man to lean close to him again. Actually, he was taking snacks to feed a hockey team, so maybe he did need two packets. Perhaps he needed six packets of the chips. Perhaps he needed a second cart for all of the chips that he needed. He definitely needed to think of something else to say, because now that they both had their chips the man would leave and this was an absolutely intolerable thought.
“He likes these ones too,” the man was saying, and he was reaching, reaching, for another packet on a higher shelf, and his t-shirt had lifted and there was a sliver of smooth skin above the waistband of his shorts and Ilya’s dick twitched like he was a fucking virgin and not, as Svetlana often called him lovingly, a massive fucking slut.
“This is big trust to the chip friend. I take these chips to very important place. If they don’t like chips, maybe they don’t like me.” Maybe if he yammered on about chips for long enough, his brain would come back online.
The beautiful man smiled properly for the first time and the odds of Ilya’s brain coming back online went from ‘low’ to ‘zero’. He might never have another coherent thought again. He decided that would be okay, because he could just think about the beautiful man smiling at him until he died and that would be fine.
“That’s an awfully big job for a packet of chips.”
The man was still smiling at him. Ilya nodded. He wouldn’t be talking anymore. He accepted that. Everything from here on would be even more humiliating than it already had been and there was nothing to be done about it.
Ilya was going to get very, very drunk in front of his new teammates.
“Maybe you need, like, an insurance policy?” The smile had turned shy.
Ilya stared at the beautiful man. To be fair he had already had been staring at the beautiful man, but he did it a bit differently. Maybe. He wasn’t really sure he could feel his face. “Mmm?” he managed.
“Oh, sorry. Umm. Someone to blame, like as backup. In case they hate the chips.”
Ilya nodded, or his head bobbed a bit, or maybe he stood perfectly still and it was the room was just kind of shifting around on him.
“I mean,” the man was blushing again, and Ilya was going to die. “I could give you my number, and I can tell them it was my fault.”
Ilya decided that he had completely lost the ability to understand English, because it sounded a lot like this incredibly beautiful man had just offered him his number. He would have become quite concerned that he’d had a stroke in the language area of his brain if the man hadn’t started digging in his pocket for his phone. Ilya hastened to retrieve his own, and told his shaking fingers that if they dropped his phone now he would allow one of his very large teammates to slam them in a door later. They behaved. They even managed to open a new contact, and hand his phone to the beautiful, freckled, chips insurance man.
“Shane,” he read aloud, when the man handed it back. He supposed the man already knew his own name, but it was new to him, and he needed to say it. He quickly typed his own name and number into the phone that the man, Shane, had handed to him.
“Hi, Ilya.” Another shy smile. Another five years off Ilya’s life.
He didn’t care if his teammates all got salmonella from the chips. He couldn’t wait to text Shane and tell him how much they fucking loved them.