drinking pink rabbits

"Coast?" A wobbly voice calls from behind some sparse shrubs.

"Clear!" He calls back after a cursory glance, and smiles when Svetlana pops up from where she was squatting, smoothing her skirt back into place and grinning like she's gotten away with something. Dutifully, he hands her back her purse and she digs around, thrusting at him the still half full bottle of champagne she stole from the bar, then a pack of gum, a small plastic case with a retainer, a different plastic case which holds three condoms, and a rolled up faux-leather something which turns out to be a pair of flats, before she makes a happy noise. Coconut pineapple alcohol sunscreen smell assaults him. Hand sanitizer. He juggles and holds out his hand and she squirts some on his palm.

"Why didn't you offer me this earlier?"

"Men don't wipe when they piss," Svetlana shrugs. "Why would I think you wanted it?"

"Yeah, well." Shane gulps from the bottle instead of continuing. Hiccups. Burps. Offers her the rest.

Her own deep chug comes with a sneeze. "Bubbles," she says, half smiling.

Shane didn't tell Ilya they were meeting up. Probably, he could have. Probably that would have fixed this. Probably, Ilya would have been happy.

But Ilya hasn't spoken to him in 13 days, because Shane asked him to stop sleeping with Svetlana. So maybe fuck Ilya, a little bit.

They didn't even mean to meet up. But she knows who he is, and he knows who she is, and her bonnet is on his nightstand, and her perfume was on his pillow, and Shane has no idea if she knows Ilya hasn't spoken to him in 13 days.

"How're your feet?" He asks instead, because they've talked about literally everything else tonight and it's enough to have him feeling warm a little protective of her. The Raider's front office had been dangling a promotion over her for 5 months and it went to some guy who doesn't know half what she does about hockey. The Metros would have won tonight, except their defense has been shit for months and only getting worse as some of the guys on the team struggle and fail to adapt to Shane being anything other than straight.

"Ugh, hand me those. Let's call a fucking uber, I'm done with drunk walking, I think."

"Split the fare?" Shane asks, juggling again her flats and purse and the bottle and his phone which buzzes sadly at him. He doesn’t sway when she leans her whole weight on him to wiggle her heels off, foot by foot, and is absurdly proud of the fact.

Svetlana gives him a dirty, offended look. "Come home with me. No one is going to say I don't have manners."

At the bar, she'd wrapped her arms around him and held him tight. Like an old friend. "My boyfriend-in-law! How are you?"