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A few days later, Pietr found Harper standing in the kitchen, eyes closed. More like leaning really. Knuckles white against the edge of the counter. A water bottle was half full in front of her, cap still lying beside it. She jerked upward at the sound of his approach. Apparently, a mistake, as she caught the counter edge again.
“Are you okay?” He paused at the edge of the counter, watching her for a moment. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine.” She waved him off. “I felt lightheaded all of a sudden.”
“Sudden? How long?”
“I don’t know. This time, just before you came in.”
“This time?” He repeated. “How long has this been happening?”
“It’s not a big deal. It’s probably low blood pressure. Moving too fast when I’m not sitting at my desk. I just need to make sure I get up and take more breaks. That’s all.”
“Harper...”
“What?”
“Is it just that?”
“Yes.”
Something in his gut told him not to let it go, but he knew pushing wasn’t going to get results. He continued circling around the kitchen island to wrap an arm around her shoulders. He released her again after a brief kiss hello.
“It’s Tuesday,” he declared. “How was the stream?”
“Good. Isaac says hi.”
“How sweet of him to remember he has a boyfriend, when he spends far more time with you.” He grinned, kissing her again before moving to the fridge. “I am dying of hunger. What do you want for dinner? I cook. You go sit.”
“Pietr, I can make dinner,” Harper scoffed. “Chicken Stir-Fry.”
“I can make that.”
“No, you can’t.”
“I can too.” He started pulling out ingredients from the fridge.
“Okay, okay, you do not need cherry tomatoes for stir fry.” She stopped him. “Compromise. We can cook together?”
“That is a tolerable idea.” He affirmed. He handed her the pack of chicken, scallions, and some peppers before returning the tomatoes to the fridge. “What else do I need?”
“How about I take the stuff out. You start the rice. Make double. I’ll make fried rice tomorrow.”
Pietr got up from the fridge, moving over to one of the cupboards. He kept an eye on Harper as she squatted to pull out a few more ingredients. She carried the haul over to the prep counter.
“Stop staring at me,” she requested. “I am fine.”
“You’re not fine,” he sighed. “Yes, it could be low blood pressure, like you say. Happens a lot. But could be a lot of things. You start with lightheaded, dizzy feeling, and then suddenly you are blacking out. I don’t want to come home and find you on the floor one day. Especially if I am not home when it happens. You could be there for ages.”
“I’m not blacking out.”
“But you could.”
“If I was blacking out, I would tell you. Right now, I’m a little unsteady. I probably need to eat something. I should have stopped reading earlier so dinner was done when you got home.”
“You don’t have to have dinner for me when I get home, baby,” he chided. “You are not my little fifties American Housewife. While you would look fucking adorable in one of those polka-dot dresses, you don’t own one and you would hate every minute of wearing it.”
Harper bit her bottom lip between her teeth, pulling her phone out of her pocket. “You have off on Thursday, don’t you?”
“Da. I will probably still go train in the morning, but I’m all yours the rest of the day. What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go get a marriage license.”
“Eh, what?” He blinked at her, surprised.
“It’s a twenty-four-hour waiting period. We get the license on Thursday. We have sixty days to use it. We could schedule the courthouse the same day we pick it up, probably. That’s what Tanner and McKinley did, right? Or they do first-come-first serve, but we could be sitting there literally all day.”
“Are we inviting people? Didn’t you get mad that Tanner didn’t give us the heads up a little sooner?”
“This would be for us,” Harper said. “Just in case.”
“I would have to tell HR,” Pietr said. “To get you on my insurance and everything.”
“That’s fine.”
“You are serious?”
“Yes.”
“Because I made comment about looking cute in a polka-dot dress?”
“Because I’m tired of only being your fiancé.”
“I see.” Pietr smiled. He closed the lid on the rice cooker and tapped the White Rice button. He scooped her up into his arms again. “I don’t care what your designation is. I love you regardless.” He kissed her softly. “If that is what you want to do, then we will do it.” He tilted her chin upward to look into her face. “Are we going to tell our families? Friends?”
“Part of me says we should let them believe our big wedding is the wedding,” she suggested. “We’ll know our real anniversary is months earlier. We won’t get to celebrate it together every year anyway if we do it this way. We should have the bigger ceremony and reception this summer, like we originally planned. But get the paperwork done now.”
“Marriage is delegated to paperwork. How romantic.”
“I, personally, don’t find anything romantic about marriage,” Harper replied. “I know that there are advantages to doing it. I don’t anticipate this changing a whole lot about our lives.”
“Does this mean that you will not be taking my name?” Pietr asked, curious. “Or hyphenating? We could both hyphenate. Or merge them together? Wyanov? Ivanatt?”
Harper laughed. “There’s something the NHL has probably never dealt with. A player name change. Would you really?”
“Da. I like the idea of having a name we share.” He kissed her again. Softer this time, He nudged her slightly, pushing her against the counter as it deepened. He inhaled sharply, wanting to savor it but his rumbling stomach disagreed.
“We can workshop it,” she said. “Wyanov isn’t terrible, but I don’t like Ivanatt. They’re both too much like fandom shipper names.”
He laughed, his head tipping back and his whole body shaking as he leaned into her. “That is true. Shit. Maybe it is bad idea then.”
“Are you going to help me prep some veggies?”
“Da. Whatever you need me to do.”
Harper tapped him on the arm to get him to move. He got out a cutting board and his favorite knife to start prep while she worked on cooking the chicken. After a while, the kitchen smelled fragrant. Pietr’s stomach was not at all placated with the smells. He was relieved when Harper told him to grab them drinks while she began to put together their plates.
“You spoil me.” He picked up his fork ready to dive in. “Is this Georgina approved?”
“I maybe added a little extra to the sweet and salty,” Harper admitted. She took the seat next to him. “But you deserve it.”
“You can help me burn off any extra calories caused later.” He gave her another little growl, leaning in to nip at her ear. She laughed, pushing him away.
“Eat first. Then we’ll see.”
“Okay. Can we talk about the wedding thing?”
“What about it?”
“We don’t have to get married at the clerk’s office,” he said. “I’m sure we could contact an officiant who is flexible. Could marry us right here in the apartment. Or, we could go to Central Park. I could get us into the Osprey Locker room. Very romantic,” he teased.
“Do you really think you could get the entire team to clear out of it for ten minutes?”
“I suppose not,” he acquiesced. “What about somewhere you like?”
“The Mounting Bison?”
“Where we met? I wonder if we could do it secret like...”
“We might have to tell Quinten and Ben at the very least. They could be witnesses.”
“That would really piss off Tanner.”
“Yeah. We might have to tell Tanner and McKinley too.”
“And Isaac. And Misha.”
“You’re right.”
“So much for it being secret then?”
“I don’t want anyone to think that we’re doing it for any reason other than that we love each other.”
“How about this,” Pietr suggested. “We get married, on paper, as soon as possible. No big ceremony. Just you and me, Tanner and McKinley, Bex and Tobey. We can ask Ben and Quinten if we can use the bar. Do you still have Darlene’s card?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We call her to take some photos. We find an officiant for,” he picked up his phone and looked at his calendar app, “December eighth?”
“You’re home?”
“We have game Friday, leave Saturday for games on Sunday and Monday, but yes, I am home for game on Wednesday. I can make sure that I am all yours Thursday again.”
“Okay.”
“Before hand, we ask our parents to have a virtual dinner with us. Maybe we do that thing where we all cook same thing, together over video chat.” He suggested. “We get married in the morning. We tell them what we have done that night. Then, I can inform the rest of the team. Deal with any of that paperwork that will need to be done. We make an official announcement, keeping the team in the loop this time. We still have a big reception at the resort this summer. Then, we don’t have to worry about when the season will end. We can stick with that weekend that we already started talking about, in July.”
“If we do the thing where we both change our name, are you going to make that official right away?” Harper asked, curious.
“I could. Might take a little bit of time, but we get new sweaters next month, I think? I don’t know what the manufacturing is on those or anything.” Pietr put his phone down. “You like the idea of not keeping our names?”
“I don’t know. On one hand, I’m already publishing under a fake name that’s still Wyatt. I’ve been a Wyatt my whole life.”
“And I have been an Ivanov my whole life.”
“Is it important to you? That we share a name?”
Pietr thought that over while he ate. On one hand, since they had first broached the subject of marriage, he’d never expected her to change her name. On the other, there was a part of him that would like it. Make it feel official. Even if it was painfully heteronormative.
“Important to me,” he finally said, “no. Would I like it? Yes. I can’t say that it’s not for selfish reasons though. I like the idea of us sharing a name, whatever that name is. I don’t want you to do anything because I want it. I’m happy getting to be your husband.”
“Tanner and McKinley didn’t change or take each other’s names. Neither did Bex and Tobey, and they’ve been married for a decade now.”
“Most of the guys, if they are married, their wives took their names. A few exceptions. Helen hyphenated, for instance.”
“Wyanov or Ivanatt, huh?”
“We could drop extra letters. Wynov, no A. Ivatt. Very short. The letters don’t really match up for it to be equal.”
“I don’t care about that,” Harper rolled her eyes.
“While it is easier if we decide by Thursday, for the certificate, we don’t have to. Maybe we sleep on it. Keep talking about it. Test them out. See if we like one. And if we don’t, okay. We keep our names as they are.”
“Let’s consider it logically. Take the feelings out of it,” Harper suggested. “We both have professional lives where our names are well known. Changing those now might throw a bit of a wrench in things, and people are going to continue calling us by the old names anyway.”
“For a time,” he agreed. “People change their names all the time, for various reasons. We can change our names legally and still use our given names professionally.”
“It’s also a lot of work for both of us,” Harper pointed out. “Social Security, the DMV, our banks and credit cards, our insurances, doctors, agents...”
“Okay.” He reached over, squeezing her thigh. “I can feel the stress radiating off you, just thinking about it. We keep our names as they are. I’m okay with that.”
“We never came back to talking about a pre-nup.”
“Harper,” he let out a long sigh, “if something happens and we don’t want to be together anymore, I hope that we have enough love and respect left for each other that it will not be necessary. Maybe that is naïve. I marry you, promising to take care of you, and to let you take care of me, for as long as we live. I take that very seriously. I’m old. I didn’t get married to just anyone when I was young because I wanted it to be real.”
“Just anyone?”
“I did date, even if I didn’t sleep around,” he chided. “There were girls, mostly, who wanted to marry me. I was on a path to be a big hockey star. They wanted the life. The money. The fame by association. It was not appealing. While having the stability of a partner would have been nice, I don’t regret waiting until now. Until I found you.”
“You’re very sweet, Ivanov.”
He smiled, leaning into her. “Only when it comes to you.”
“That’s not true. You’re sweet with Isaac.”
“Oh. Yes, but I love Isaac too. You are still special. You’re my forever.”
Harper put a hand on top of his, still placed on her thigh, and laced their fingers. Pietr frowned as she gave an involuntary shudder.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Cold all of a sudden.” She squeezed his fingers.
“Stay here. I’ll go get your hoodie.”
“I’m fine.” She held tight to his fingers. “Seriously. Finish eating. Then we can spend some time together. Maybe I give you a sneak peek of the book?”
“Really? You always say no when I ask.
“You’ll like this one.”
“I like all of them.”
“This one is special. It still needs some polishing, but I think it turned out good. And, in case my editor and my publisher don’t agree, I want you to read the story I wanted to tell. Not the story they make me tell.”
“Okay. Can we read it together? You read it to me, maybe?”
“Ah jeez,” she flushed pink, “I guess? That’s embarrassing.”
“We can try. If you are an awful narrator, I will take your laptop and read it myself.”
Harper laughed again.