“Anyway,” Shane said, “I just needed to tell someone about it. So thanks.”
“No problem.”
“Good luck tonight, okay?”
“Sure. You too.”
“I love you.”
Ilya’s heart felt like lead. “I love you too.”
“Last time we met,” Dr. Galina Molchalina said, in Russian, “you told me quite a bit about your mother. Would you like to talk about your father today?”
“No,” Ilya said, without hesitation. Then, “I’m glad he’s dead.”
If Galina was shocked by this statement, her face didn’t show it. “He died a few years ago, right?”
“Yes. I’d been expecting it. He had Alzheimer’s, and had been deteriorating quickly. My brother pretended it wasn’t happening.”
“Are you and your brother close?”
Ilya barked out a surprised laugh at that. “Andrei? No. Not at all. I haven’t talked to him since I went home for the funeral. He’s a clone of Dad.”
Galina leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, waiting. Ilya sighed. He supposed hedidneed to talk about his goddamned father.
“Dad was a cop. Very highly decorated, very proud. He climbed the ranks all the way to an important job at the Ministry. He was about fifty when I was born. Andrei is four years older than me. And my mother was still only in her twenties when I was born, so.”
“Quite an age gap between your parents.”
“Yes.” Ilya hated to imagine what circumstances made his young, beautiful mother have to marry a joyless old man and bear his children. “My father hated her, I think. He always thought she was cheating on him, or planning to leave him. I wish she could have left.”
He didn’t want to get into some of his darker memories of his father terrorizing his mom, and Galina must have sensed it. She asked, “Was your father proud of your hockey career?”
“Not really. He was a big KHL fan. He thought the Russian league was superior to the NHL, and did not want me going to America. He never followed my NHL career too closely, but he was always interested when I played for Team Russia in any tournament. If Russia won gold, he was proud of me. Anything less was an embarrassment.”
“That must have been very hard,” she said, and Ilya wondered if she was thinking of the disastrous Sochi Olympics.
“My mother loved watching me play, when I was little. I liked playing for her. After she died, hockey became an escape for me. It got me away from home, and it was a way to get out some of my anger, I guess.” He smiled. “And I was very good at it.”
Galina smiled back. “It’s good that you had that. Were there other things you did to escape at that time?”
Well. Yes. And Ilya supposed there was no reason to be shy about it. Not here.
“Sex,” he said bluntly. “When I was old enough, sex was the other thing I did to keep my mind and body busy.Sex and Hockeycould be the title of my autobiography. I’m not complicated.” He stretched his arm along the back of the couch, trying to show how relaxed and uncomplicated he was. It probably wasn’t convincing.
“May I ask when ‘old enough’ was?” she said.
“Fourteen, I think. Something like that.” He hesitated a moment, wondering if he was ready to reveal this, then decided to just go for it. “It was girls only, at first. Then boys too. Not as many, but some.”
Again, her face didn’t show any surprise. She jotted something on the notepad she balanced on her lap, then glanced back up. “That would have been risky, especially in Russia,” she said.
“I think that was part of what I liked about it.”
“Those desires didn’t scare you?”
Ilya considered the question before answering. “No. They never did. It just seemed like an opportunity for more sex.” It was the truth; maybe if he hadn’t been attracted to girls first, he would have been scared, but being attracted to men as well had always made him feel...evolved.
She scribbled more notes while Ilya watched.
