Oh, to be railed by a cocky Russian hockey player.
Heated Rivalry, the steamy sports romance novel Rachel Reid gifted horny readers back in 2019, is gaining a second life now with the release of the Canadian series of the same name. The show, made for streaming service Crave and currently available on HBO Max in the United States and Australia (get a VPN, Philippines), is making the rounds on the Internet for being one of the smuttiest fever dreams to hit our small screens.
In both the show and book, we follow hockey player extraordinaires Shane Hollander (a yummy Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (an equally yummy Connor Storrie), who meet at an international play-off while representing Canada and Russia, respectively. Shane and Ilya are locked in a very public feud as they face each other off on the ice; however (and this isn’t a spoiler because things move very quickly), the two also can’t stop sneaking away to fuck each other’s brains out.
The show’s only two episodes in as of writing, but fans have already taken to overloading the Internet with their favorite sexy screenshots and GIFs from the series, as well as endless posts and tweets speculating about what sexual hijinks our favorite hockey players will get up to next. But for more literary-minded fans who crave content beyond the show, please turn to Reid’s prose masterpiece (and the five other hockey sex-related books of her series, Game Changers).
I admit, perhaps “masterpiece” is too strong of a word; after all, as Reid herself once wrote, “I write sexually explicit queer romance novels about hockey players.” But that is all Heated Rivalry is and needs to be. The book moves just as quickly as the series, which is a godsend for readers just looking for a cozy night in reading smut in bed. The prologue opens with a hockey tournament, where it’s quickly established that A) Shane and Ilya are extraordinarily talented at hockey and B) they despise each other, wholeheartedly. But, just as you’re about to start worrying over hockey rules and lingo (of which, thankfully, there are few), the scene shifts to Shane making his way to a secret location to get himself pinned to the wall by Ilya. We are less than ten pages into the book at this point, by the way.
There is nothing subtle about Reid’s style of writing, which helps leave very little to the imagination. Naughty readers can look forward to straightforward scenes like the following, courtesy of Reid: “Rozanov fucked him hard with one strong hand pressing between his shoulder blades, pressing him down to the mattress. They were both loud.” For those who prefer a more auditory experience, I point you to the Audible version of this novel.
