Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories:

Gen, M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Team Ensemble & Shane Hollander, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Team Ensemble & Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Rose Landry, Svetlana Vetrova

Additional Tags:

Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Slow Burn, Unreliable Narrator Shane Hollander, POV Shane Hollander, Texting, Mutual Pining, Pining, Oblivious Shane Hollander, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Player Shane Hollander, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Player Ilya Rozanov, Anxious Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov is Obsessed With Shane Hollander, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-It of Sorts, Book 2: Heated Rivalry (Game Changers), Inspired by Heated Rivalry (TV), Not Actually Unrequited Love, Injury Recovery, Friends to Lovers, no beta we die like shanes ankles, NO AI fuck AI, Medical Inaccuracies, Shane Hollander Needs a Hug, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, i can and will make hollanov communicate, Feelings Realization, Sad Shane Hollander, Fluff, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Shane Hollander Has an Eating Disorder, Shane Hollander is Trying, Character Study, Shane Hollander is Obsessed With Ilya Rozanov, Miscommunication, Shane Hollander Is Bad at Feelings, Love Confessions, Getting Together, Anal Sex, Coming Out, Bottom Shane Hollander, Top Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander Calls Ilya Rozanov "Baby"

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of Shane & Ilya: Slightly Better Communicators (Maybe)

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-03 Updated: 2026-05-24 Words: 56,262 Chapters: 6/10

Ahead of Schedule

Summary

MONTREAL VOYAGEURS PASS ON HOLLANDER FOLLOWING FINALS INJURY
Despite being projected as at least a top-three pick, Shane Hollander slips to 57th overall after a Grade III ankle ligament tear sustained in the World Junior Hockey Championships earlier this year.

BOSTON BEARS SELECT ROZANOV FIRST OVERALL, HOLLANDER IN SECOND ROUND
Boston bets on two of juniors' most electric players; one a sure thing, one a gamble. The Bears have never minded those.

Shane Hollander did not get drafted to Montreal. He gets drafted to Boston, fifty-seventh overall, after #1 draft pick, Ilya Rozanov. He has a plan for that. The plan does not account for Ilya Rozanov being the way that Ilya Rozanov is.

Notes

DON'T FORGET TO TURN ON CREATORS STYLE FOR THE MESSAGES <333

Hi :)) First attempt at an ongoing series (for hr AHHHH). I've been formulating this canon divergence since I first read the book, I've always wondered how it would be like if they were on the same team from the get go. Obviously, I will still hit the necessary canon events but for some, I will complete make up my own shit because why not ;D Also I am not american nor have I lived in the states, all this to say that I did some research on Boston for neighbourhoods and shit (the same can be said about Shane's injury and the minimal hockey in the future updates).

YES. I know the implication that Shane will be a second round pick is INSANE (I am completely aware), just disregard the fact that any team with half a brain that isn't Montreal or Boston will absolutely choose Shane Hollander even if he's injured but what's fan fiction without some make believe? Also please let me know if I got any of the drafting thingy wrong, I spent WAYY too much time on reddit but essentially coming out understanding like 20% of how NHL drafting works.

This might be a long ass fic too, I still don't have the rest done (drafted 3 chapters so far, 6 outlined), and the word count keeps increasing on my docs, I genuinely think I live inside Shane's head now or he lives in mine? Same difference.

As always, english is not my first language (thankfully) so if theres any mistakes trust that I do not care

Chapter 1: 2010 [Drafts &amp; Dates]

Chapter Notes

The bathroom tiles are cold through Shane’s favourite socks. 

Why the fuck did he wear his favourite sock today of all days?

Shane has been sitting on the floor for eleven minutes. He knows because he's been staring at the clock on his phone, watching the numbers change with a kind of dull, dissociated focus that he'll probably be embarrassed about later. 11:04. 11:05. 11:06. The draft is in four hours and he's sitting on the bathroom floor of a Marriott in Los Angeles, and his right ankle is wrapped in a compression bandage that's slightly too tight, and he cannot make himself stand up.

The thing is, he's fine. He keeps saying this to people, his parents, his agent, the team doctors, I'm fine, I'm fine, the timeline looks good, I’m healing extremely well and beyond the projected time. I'm fine. And in the way that actually matters, in the numbers-and-tendons-and-scar-tissue way, he mostly is. Grade III syndesmotic tear. High ankle sprain on the severe end, ligaments stretched where they shouldn't be stretched, a small avulsion fracture at the tip of the fibula that the team doctor described as incidental and that Shane subsequently googled at 2 AM and deeply regretted googling at 2 AM. It happened around 5 months ago in Game 7 of the World Junior Hockey Championships Finals, eleven seconds into the second period, when a Russian defenseman caught his skate wrong along the boards and Shane's entire body went one direction and his ankle went another, and he'd known immediately, not from the pain, which was enormous, but from the sound, this wet, fibrous crack that he felt more in his teeth than his ears, that something had gone genuinely wrong.

He'd finished the shift.

He wants to make sure that's on record somewhere: he finished the shift. He made it back to the bench under his own power and he did not make a sound and then he sat there for whoever knows how long while his ankle swelled inside his skate until the trainer finally noticed him listing slightly to one side and made him take the skate off. Shane had looked at the ankle and then looked away very quickly. Fuck, it was bad. His parents were up in the stands. He didn't want them to see his face, he had never been good at concealing his emotions, always wearing his resting bitch face and reacting way too animated when needed.

They won, if that was any consolation. 4-2, his linemates picking up the slack in the minutes he was out, and Shane had put one in on a bad ankle with his teeth clenched so hard his jaw still aches when he thinks about it just before the trainer had forbade him from returning to the ice or else he would cart Shane off the rink altogether. Hearing that, Shane immediately scratched his leg, self soothing. The last thing he wanted was to not be present when, not if, when his team wins, here at home. 

They won, and he'd stood, well stood is generous, he was leaning heavily on his poor teammate, on the ice with his teammates and the trophy overhead and his right leg barely holding his weight, and he'd thought: this was worth it, this was all worth it, this is fine, I am so fine.

The problem is that Montreal didn't think it was fine.

That's the part Shane cannot say out loud to his parents, or his agent, or anyone really. It is one thing to tell people he's fine. It is a completely different and much more impossible thing to say: I know they're not going to pick me. I can see it happening and I cannot stop it and I don't know what to do with my hands.

His agent, Gerald, called three days ago. Gerald has a voice like a late-night radio host, all smooth cadence and careful pauses, which usually makes his news easier to absorb and sometimes makes it much worse.

"Shane." Pause. "I want to give you a heads up before the draft, because I don't want you going in there without context."

"Okay," Shane said.

"Montreal's been in contact. Their medical team has concerns about the recovery timeline. The ankle, combined with how close we are to draft day and training camp is closer than we think, they're worried about guaranteeing you're at full capacity for the start of training camp and of the season."

"I'll be at full capacity," Shane said. "My doctor said I only need to keep the bandage until the end of the week, and by then I can go back to training, although light at first but they were confident I can skate and train like normal by the end of the month.” 

"I know that. I told them that."

"So—"

"Shane." Another pause. Gerald's pauses are doing a lot of work in this conversation. "I know you’ve been working towards this for years. And I hate to be the one to tell you this, believe me, but I think they're going to pass. I don't think they're going to pick you where they projected. I wanted you to know before it happens."

He'd sat with that for a while. He's been sitting with it for three days, which is probably why he's now on the bathroom floor with cold tiles through his socks and four hours until the draft.

The honest truth, the one he cannot say, is that this was supposed to be the thing. Not just any NHL draft, but this one, and not just any team, but that one. His mother’s favourite team growing up was Montreal, even though they were all from Ottawa, her mom grew up watching Montreal games with her dad, a tradition she carried on when Shane was old enough to watch and understand hockey. He grew up watching the Voyageurs on a TV in his parents' living room, Yuna Hollander sitting on the couch with her coffee and her running commentary and her absolute conviction that Montreal were, empirically, the greatest franchise in professional hockey. He learned the sport in the shadow of that conviction. He built his entire hockey brain around that love, around the idea that someday he was going to get good enough to make it mean something, to walk into that city as a Montreal Voyageur and make his mother watch him play from the seats she'd watch with him from as a kid, and it was going to be perfect. It was supposed to be perfect. He'd been working toward perfect his entire life.

He breathes carefully through his nose. The exhale makes a sound that he doesn't particularly like.

The ankle doesn't even hurt that badly right now. It aches, a dull background percussion that he's mostly learned to ignore, and it's stiff in the mornings, and he still can't push off his right edge with full force, but it doesn't hurt. He's ahead of schedule. His physiotherapist said ahead of schedule and smiled at him and Shane had felt something in his chest unknot a fraction. He is going to be fine. He is fine. He is sitting on the bathroom floor because the tiles are cold and steady and he needed somewhere to be that wasn't the hotel room where his parents are carefully not looking at each other, where his dad has been rereading the same ESPN article for forty minutes, where his mother is doing the thing she does when she's trying not to cry, which is organising objects by size on the hotel room desk, which she has now done twice.

He stands up. His ankle protests mildly.

Shane rinses his face with cold water and looks at himself in the mirror for a moment, and then stops doing that because looking at himself in mirrors does not currently feel productive.

He goes back into the hotel room. His parents look up at him and do their faces, his mother's face that says I have things to say but I am choosing not to say them and his dad's face that says I am trying to read your face to determine how you are and Shane makes the face that he has perfected over years of hockey, the one that means I'm fine, let it go.

"Are you hungry?" his mother says. "We could order something."

"Uh, sure," Shane says.

They order room service. Shane eats about less than half of what arrives. His mother eats all of hers and then steals his dad’s fruit, which is a thing she does when she's pretending she's not worried, because performing normalcy requires performance. His dad tells the same story about being nervous before his own draft that he's told four times this week, and Shane listens the same way he's listened the four previous times, which is to say with genuine affection and a small amount of wanting to climb out the window.

Then they go to the draft.

The venue is at the hotel ballrooms, prospects scattered around. Networking and talking to each other. Shane has been to events like this, well not an NHL draft day, nothing will ever compare to this, whether that’s a good thing or not, Shane is yet to know. He never liked how big and loud this side of hockey was, the lights and the staging and the enormous screens and the tables of team representatives and the banners, it’s all too much. On a regular day, he wouldn’t even consider going but this isn’t a regular day. He reminds himself that nothing is set in stone, not yet. That doesn’t help in the slightest bit, and when it happened, the thing that happens in Shane's chest when he walks in places as such, it’s a mixture of breathtaking awe and at the same time, the kind of terror that makes your hands feel like it will melt off of your arms and somehow it makes you more aware of your hands, aware how sweaty and shaky it is.

He's wearing a suit. This is notable because Shane's relationship with formal clothing is historically fraught, if he could, he would only wear athletic wear, but he and his mother had gone to a tailor in Ottawa last November, before the WJHC, before the ankle, before the draft, before everything, and the suit is dark navy and it fits him correctly, and when he'd put it on this morning his mother had looked at him with an expression he couldn't quite interpret and said, quietly, You look like a hockey player, Shane, and he'd had to look at the ceiling for a second.

They find their seats in the banquet. Shane is hyperaware of his ankle as they navigate the rows, the compression bandage is under his dress pants, invisible, and he walks normally, or as close to normally as he can manage, because the last thing he needs is a photo of him limping into the draft. He sits down between his parents and surveys the room.

There are other draft prospects scattered through the crowd, most of them with families, most of them wearing suits of varying success. He clocks a few he recognises, Smith from Edmonton, Beaumont from Montreal, and then, several rows over and slightly ahead, he clocks Ilya Rozanov.

Rozanov doesn't look nervous. Shane would like to see with his own eyes that Rozanov looks nervous, but he doesn't, he looks like he's somewhere that he expected to be, which is probably because he is. Number one overall pick, the clearest story of the draft season, a Russian center with ridiculous hands and a highlight reel that Shane has studied more than he will admit and in ways he cannot entirely account for. 

He's sitting with an older man, maybe a coach, or a handler, or his dad, Shane doesn't know his family situation, and he's got his arms crossed and he's scanning the room with the easy confidence of someone who already knows how this is going to go.

Shane looks away.

The thing about Ilya Rozanov is that Shane has met him and talked to him exactly once (and played twice), for the first time two years ago, at the World Junior Hockey Championships, in Regina. Team Canada versus Russia, the kind of game that means something on paper even when you're seventeen, and Shane and Rozanov had ended up in a made up rivalry as two of the most talked about prospects. They had faced off each other, not uttering a single word but the aura was talking enough. As the game progressed, Shane had been furious, high on adrenaline and competition, they were lagging behind, and Rozanov, fucking Ilya Rozanov, in his all cocky persona, had looked at him from the penalty box and grinned, not meanly, just with genuine delight, like this was the most fun he'd been having all week, and when he had checked Shane into the boards, he had the time and energy and said, in accented but totally comprehensible English, "You are fast. I did not expect." And then skated away like he had skates instead of feet with the way he moved in full speed effortlessly. Play had resumed and they hadn't spoken again. Until Shane introduced himself in a back alley way. It could have been worse, but it solidified Shane’s position that Ilya Rozanov is indeed a cocky asshole, with amazing stick handling and an even amazing speed on the ice.

He turns his attention to the stage as the commissioner steps up to the podium, and his hands, folded in his lap, are very still.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

"With the first overall pick in the 2010 NHL Draft," says the commissioner, "the Boston Bears select—"

And there it is. Ilya Rozanov, the projected first draft pick, is the first draft pick.

The applause starts before the name is fully out of the commissioner's mouth, and Rozanov stands, and Shane watches him make his way down to the stage, and feels something complicated unfurl in his chest.

The thing about watching Rozanov walk across that floor, head up, that same loose-limbed confidence, smiling now at the commissioner who's reaching out to shake his hand, is that Shane's first feeling is not the one he'll admit to later. His first feeling, immediate and hot and completely unwelcome, is envy.

Not of Rozanov specifically. Shane doesn't know Rozanov. He knows his stats and his highlights and the way he skated in the WJHC, knows the way he looked in the penalty box with that infuriating grin, but he doesn't know him. The envy isn't personal. It's about the stage, the handshake, the Bears jersey they're draping over Rozanov's suited shoulders, the cameras, all of it. That was supposed to be Shane. Not Boston, fuck no, but Montreal, a different stage, a different name, but the specific gravity of that moment, that was supposed to be Shane's.

He sits very still and watches Rozanov pose for photos smugly, and he thinks: I was going to be there. I was going to be exactly there. I had a plan.

The plan was: get into the WJHC finals (done), win the WJHC after losing to Russia the year before (done), get drafted first overall to Montreal (not done, not going to be done, will never be done), spend his rookie contract by proving himself in the NHL, become the player his mother always thought he would be. Clean. Achievable. A fucking Role Model. He has been building toward this plan since he was six years old, since the first time Yuna Hollander sat him in front of the TV and said watch this, watch how he moves, and Shane had watched, and had thought: I can do that. I want to do that. I will do that.

He did not account for his ankle going sideways before the draft. Literally, anatomically sideways.

Eventually, the envy cools into something uglier. He's aware of it happening, the pivot from that should be me to why wasn't that me, what did I do wrong, what's wrong with me, and he has enough self-awareness to clock it even as it happens, but awareness doesn't make it easier to sit with. The ankle. It always comes back to the fucking ankle. One play, eleven seconds, a defenseman he couldn't see coming on his blind side because he was already committed to his play, and all that work, all the early mornings and the tape work and the film sessions and the days where he skated until his legs stopped feeling like legs, compressed down to one bad second of timing.

He didn't get hurt on purpose. He knows this. It doesn't help the way he thinks it should.

The second pick goes. The third. Shane watches the board and counts down the names with a sensation that starts as focused and gradually becomes something with more edges to it. He's watching Montreal's table out of the corner of his eye without meaning to, not hope, exactly, he's past hope, Gerald made that clear, but unable to stop himself from watching anyway, the way you can't stop pressing a bruise or picking on your zit.

Montreal picks fifth overall. A defenseman from Kamloops. Shane looks at his hands.

His mother puts her hand over his, briefly, and then removes it.

He counts the picks. There's a rhythm to it, a terrible rhythm, the commissioner's voice, the applause, the player standing, crossing the floor, the handshake, the jersey, the photos. Over and over. 

Shane sits through it and keeps his face still and thinks about nothing specific and everything simultaneously, thoughts cycling the way they do when he can't turn them off: all the 5 AM practices, all the protein shakes he drank that he pretended to not hate, all the miles on the ice in the Ottawa winter when his breath came out in visible clouds, the six-year-old version of himself watching the Voyageurs with total uncomplicated faith that this was where he was headed, that there was a straight line between there and here. 

The board shows pick forty-seven. Then fifty. Then fifty-four.

He is not going to get drafted. 

The certainty arrives quietly, without announcement, and once it's there he can't unthink it. Gerald said second round. It is the second fucking round. And Gerald had said Boston has expressed interest. But Gerald also said Montreal, and look how that went, and the board is at fifty-four and fifty-five and —

"With the fifty-seventh pick in the 2010 NHL Draft," says the commissioner, "the Boston Bears select Shane Hollander, center, from Ottawa."

Shane stands up.

He doesn't remember deciding to stand up, but his body does it, and then he's walking, and his ankle is fine, it's fine, and his parents are behind him somewhere and the lights are very bright, and he gets to the stage and shakes the commissioner's hand, and someone, a Bears representative, smiling, warm, drapes a Boston jersey over his shoulders, and the cameras flash, and Shane smiles.

He's good at smiling when he needs to.

He stands there in the lights and holds the jersey and smiles at the cameras and thinks, from a very calm and quiet place inside himself: fifty-seventh. Second round. Two rounds and fifty-six names after Rozanov. Sure. Okay.

Okay.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

His parents take him to dinner after. A place his dad found on Yelp, which is a thing his dad does everywhere they go, pulling up Yelp on his phone with the solemn thoroughness of someone consulting ancient texts. The food is good. Shane eats more of it than he did at lunch.

His mother talks about Boston, what she knows of it, the history, the sports culture, the architecture, the seafood. She is very carefully not talking about Montreal, which means she is talking about everything else, which is how Shane knows she is performing normalcy hard enough to pull a muscle. His dad asks the server about the local sports teams with genuine interest because his dad is constitutionally incapable of not being interested in local sports. Shane loves them both so much it makes his chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with the ankle.

"Boston's a great city," his dad says, refilling Shane's water glass in that unconscious way he does. "Passionate fans. They know their hockey."

"Mm," says Shane.

"And the Bears," his dad continues, with the carefully calibrated enthusiasm of a man who has spent the whole day mentally revising his talking points. "They're rebuilding something there. The roster's young. You could really —"

"David," says his mother.

"I'm just saying."

"You're saying a lot," she says, which coming from Yuna Hollander is a complete sentence.

Shane looks at his water glass. "It's fine," he says. "It's good. It's all good, Boston is good."

His mother looks at him for a moment with those dark eyes that have always seen through him more efficiently than anyone has a right to, and says, "How's the ankle?"

"Fine," he says. "Feels fine."

She nods, once, in a way that means I believe you and also I am writing something down internally for later.

He sleeps in the hotel that night with the Boston jersey with his name and number folded on the chair by the window, and he lies on his back and looks at the ceiling and thinks, carefully and deliberately, about what comes next. Not tonight, not the dinner or the draft or the look on his mother's face, but next. Moving to a new city, a new country. Training camp. The roster. The season. He's a Boston Bear. That's not nothing. Gerald said they took him because they believe in the recovery timeline, because they're willing to back the projection over the injury, because they think he's worth the gamble.

He is going to be worth the gamble.

He is going to go to Boston and he is going to work harder than anyone in that training camp and he is going to prove that fifty-seventh was a mistake in the other direction, that they should have taken him higher, that Montreal is going to spend the next several years watching him and thinking about the choice they made and feeling the specific, precise regret of having let something go before you understood its value.
He turns this plan over in his mind until it solidifies.

Then he goes to sleep.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

His parents drive him.

He told them not to. He made a reasoned argument for why he should fly alone, the ankle, the sitting, it'll be fine, I don't need a whole production, and they listened to his argument with the focused attention of people who have already decided what they're going to do, and then his dad said, "We'll take the Subaru," and that was that.

So they drive. Ottawa to Boston, roughly seven hours with the border crossing, his dad handling the wheel and his mother in the passenger seat with a thermos of green tea she orders online and a crossword puzzle that she does in pen. Shane is in the back with his ankle elevated on his overnight bag and a Gatorade he's been nursing since they left, and the drive is actually fine. Comfortable. The familiarity of his parents' presence in this arrangement, his dad's playlist of classic rock that he's been refining since approximately 1987, his mother occasionally reading crossword clues aloud when she gets stuck. Shane looks out the window at the highway and feels, for the first time in several weeks, something close to settling.

"Six letters," says his mother. "Tenacity."

"Grit," says his dad.

"That's four."

"Resolve."

"That's seven."

"Fervor."

"Oh," she says, and writes it in.

They stop for lunch in Vermont, at a diner with checkered floors and a laminated menu the size of a tabloid, and his dad orders a Reuben, and his mother orders a salad and then steals half the Reuben, and Shane has chicken and rice, which the server brings without comment, and it's fine, it's good, he's used to the food thing by now, the slight social overhead of ordering differently, the way it makes people notice, the defensive reflex of explaining himself before anyone can question it. His mother has never once questioned it. His dad tried once, in the early years of the diet, and received a lecture from Yuna about athletic nutrition that was so comprehensive he hasn't brought it up since.

They cross into Massachusetts in the late afternoon and his mother puts down her crossword and looks out the window with a complicated expression.

"Boston," she says.

"Yep," says his dad.

A pause. Then: "Shane."

"Yeah."

"You know that, wherever you play, we're —" She stops. Starts again. "You're going to be wonderful there. I want you to know that I think you're going to be wonderful there."

Shane looks at the back of her head. His mother doesn't do speeches. When she has something emotional to say she packs it into as few words as possible and deploys them with great precision, like a surgeon with a single instrument. You're going to be wonderful there from Yuna Hollander is equivalent to about four hundred words from anyone else.

"Thanks, Mom," he says.

"I'm not finished," she says. "I also want you to think about, you know, after your rookie contract—"

"Mom."

"Just think about it. Three years isn't so long. If you're extraordinary, and you will be, there are options—"

"I'm not going to Montreal," Shane says.

The silence in the car changes texture slightly.

"I didn't say Montreal," his mother says.

"You were going to."

Another pause. Then, carefully "I was going to say options. Plural. There are multiple teams."

"Sure," Shane says.

She turns to look at him then, just briefly, over her shoulder. She has his eyes, or he has hers. dark and very direct and not particularly easy to lie to. "You're angry," she says.

"I'm not angry."

"Okay."

She turns back to the window. Shane looks out his own window at the highway signs accumulating, Boston: 23 miles, and thinks about how to explain something he's not entirely sure he can articulate. That it's not anger, exactly. That it's something more specific and less comfortable than anger, a kind of private injury that he doesn't have clean language for. That Montreal is his mother's city and he wanted to give it to her, and the wanting of that, the achingly earnest wanting of being able to give her something, is the thing he can least afford to examine right now.

"I'm going to be good," he says. "In Boston. I'm going to be really good."

"I know," she says.

"That's the plan."

"I know, Shane."

His dad, with characteristic timing, says, "There's a really well-reviewed clam chowder place on the waterfront."

Shane loves his dad so much.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

His apartment is a three-bedroom in West End, fourth floor of a building with good enough security, an actual working elevator, and a view of the city and a courtyard depending which window you're looking out of. The Bears' housing coordinator had sent him a list of options; he'd picked this one because it was in a close enough distance to TD Garden and had two spare bedrooms he could put a home gym in, or failing that, store his hockey equipment without it smelling up the living spaces, and the other into a sensible guest room from when his parents come to visit.

His parents stayed for three days. They build his IKEA furniture, a project his dad approaches with the methodical confidence of a man who has built seventeen pieces of IKEA furniture and the steadily diminishing confidence of a man who has actually looked at the instruction diagrams. His mother organises the kitchen with her signature Yuna Hollander efficiency, labeling things in her neat handwriting, establishing a logic to the cabinet arrangement that Shane will probably follow without question for as long as he lives in this apartment. She also brings four tupperwares of food from home, pre-made, labeled, stacked in the freezer in a color-coded system that makes Shane want to cry a little bit, though not in a bad way.

The three days feel like a week and also like nothing at all. His parents move through his new apartment with the comfortable familiarity of people who belong wherever Shane is, and he follows them and unpacks boxes and eats takeout on the floor when there's nowhere to sit yet, and it's good, it's really good. He doesn't think about the draft. He doesn't think about Montreal. He shows his dad the TD Garden from a street corner some blocks away, and his dad says huh, it's bigger than I thought with his head tilted back, and Shane feels, standing there on a Boston sidewalk with his father beside him, something that might be the early shape of this is mine now.

Then his parents leave, and he's alone.

He explores. This is his coping mechanism, when things are uncomfortable or unfamiliar, he moves through them physically, maps them with his feet. He walks the neighborhood in the early mornings, his ankle in the lightweight brace, a pace that isn't quite a jog but isn't a stroll either, the particular rhythm of someone working back toward something. The West End has a texture he wasn't expecting, the brownstones, the tree-lined streets, the coffee shops that are open at 6 AM because this is the kind of neighborhood where people are up early. He finds a bakery. He finds a pharmacy. He finds a park with a path around it that is exactly 1.5 km that he knows because he walks it four times the first morning and then looks it up when he gets back.

Two weeks out from training camp, his physiotherapist, a wonderful woman named Diane who has the calm, businesslike manner of someone who has seen a lot of athletes and is impressed by none of their pain thresholds, signs him off for light skating. 

Light skating, she says, which means not speed drills, not edge work, not anything you're currently thinking of doing. She knows him well enough by now to specify.

He skates anyway. Not the things she told him not to, he's not an idiot, he's not going to blow his timeline before camp, but the other things, the slow purposeful laps, the wide gentle turns, the feeling of an edge under him again after months of ice-free existence. The Bears practice facility lets him use the secondary ice in off-hours. He goes at 6:30 AM and has the rink to himself and skates until his ankle tells him to stop, and the first morning it tells him to stop after about forty minutes, and the second morning it's fifty, and the third it's an hour and fifteen, and something starts to unclench in his chest.

He can do this. The ankle is going to be fine. He can do this.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Training camp starts on a Tuesday in September.

Shane is there forty-five minutes early. He is aware that this is excessive. He does it anyway, because he doesn't know where anything is really and he doesn't want to have to ask anyone where anything is, and it's better to figure out the locker rooms and the equipment room and the training areas in empty space than in the chaos of everyone arriving at once.

The cubby assigned to him has his name on it, nameplates already up: HOLLANDER in clean block letters, and seeing it there does something to him that he chooses not to think about at the moment. He changes into his practice gear and tapes his stick in the bench, the way he always does, his ritual, same sequence every time, and thinks about nothing except the sequence of it.

The other players arrive gradually. Shane has done his homework, he knows the roster, he knows the names, he's watched films, but films don't tell you what a room feels like, what the atmosphere and culture will be like. There's a certain specific social ecosystem to a hockey locker room, hierarchies and inside jokes and established dynamics, and Shane has never been particularly natural at reading those quickly. He's good at hockey. He is less good at the part where you walk into a room of people you don't know and become one of them.

He sits at his stall and reads the room without being obvious about it, a skill he's been practicing since primary school. The veterans have a different quality of ease; they know where they are, they own the space in a way that takes time to earn. The other rookies have varying flavors of anxiety. A kid called Ashworth from Florida is talking very loudly about something that happened at preseason orientation, performing confidence at a volume that makes Shane suspect he's as nervous as everyone else. A Finnish defenseman whose name Shane hasn't caught yet is sitting very quietly with his hands between his knees and staring at his skates.

And then Ilya Rozanov walks in.

Shane is not, don’t get it twisted, he wasn't waiting for this. He's been not-waiting for it for forty-five minutes, which is also not a thing he's going to think about. But Rozanov walks in with his equipment bag and that walk of his, this particular gait that occupies space differently than most people, and he stops just inside the door and surveys the room with the same unhurried confidence Shane clocked at the draft.

Their eyes meet for approximately one second.

Rozanov's expression doesn't change, exactly, but something in it does, a slight brightening, something that might be recognition. He continues to his stall, which is two down from Shane's. He unpacks unmethodically, seriously Shane had to physically pry his eyes away before he could do something stupid like take over for Rozanov. He doesn’t, so Shane returns his attention to his own stall and spends a minute of intense focus on making sure his stick is leaning at the correct angle against the wall.

Practice, when it happens, is a lot.

Shane is good. He knows he's good; false modesty is a waste of everyone's time. Though he would never, ever verbalise this thought. He thinks he’s good, but saying it to another living soul is an experience Shane will never wish to happen upon him. But there is being good and then there is this, this crucible of professional-level competition at speed, and the ankle is fine, it's fine, it holds, Diane is going to be very pleased with him, but his brain is doing ten things at once, reading the ice and the new systems and the new line combinations and the way Coach LeClaire runs a practice, and by the end of it he is exhausted in the way that has nothing to do with physical fatigue.

He also cannot stop watching Rozanov skate.

He doesn't want to watch Rozanov skate. This is not a choice he makes. But Rozanov is on the second line and Shane is on the third and their paths cross repeatedly during practice, and every time they do, Shane's eyes find him like a compass finding north, which is irritating, because he came here to compete with Rozanov and you cannot compete with someone your eyes are constantly involuntarily following around the ice.

In his defense, Rozanov is exceptional. Shane already knew this from the films, but film is one thing and watching it live is another, especially when you are playing with him instead of against him. He's fast in a way that looks effortless, that deceptive stride where the speed doesn't seem to require as much work as it does, and his hands are every bit as good as advertised, and there's an anticipatory intelligence to his game that Shane, somewhat unwillingly, recognises. Rozanov reads the ice the way Shane reads the ice. He knows where the puck is going to be before it's there.

This is the most frustrating thing about him.

After practice, in the locker room, Rozanov is in the middle of a story about something involving a car and a navigation system and what Shane gathers is a diner somewhere outside Boston, and three or four of the other guys are laughing. Shane changes out of his gear and listens to this from two stalls over without looking up, and thinks: he makes it look easy. The room thing. He walked in here and within six hours he's making people laugh in the locker room. Shane doesn't know whether to be annoyed by this or not.

He's still deciding when Rozanov appears beside him, because apparently Rozanov does not wait for decisions to be made.

"Hollander," he says.

Shane looks up. Rozanov is standing there in his practice undershirt, hair pushed back and damp, he looks… stupid.

"Yeah," says Shane, ignoring the way Rozanov’s breathing is way too close to him.

"I saw," Rozanov says, with the slight formal quality his English gets sometimes, like he's being careful with word choice, "you have a schedule. In your phone. I saw it when you were checking time after skating drills."

Shane stares at him. "I—what?"

"It was very detailed," Rozanov says. "Color-coded, yes?"

"I—sorry, you were looking at my phone?"

"Was not on purpose." Rozanov's expression is perfectly neutral in a way that Shane suspects means he's being lied to. "These things happen. Can I see Excel sheet?"

Shane's first instinct is to tell him no and to say so with some firmness. What happens instead, involuntarily, is that he laughs. It just, comes out. Because it's such a strange thing to say, can I see Excel sheet, with his fucking deadpan delivery, and the color-coded schedule really is an Excel sheet, Shane made it at 11 PM weeks ago, and something about being seen like that is so unexpected that his defenses just misfire.

Rozanov's expression shifts. He looks pleased in a way he doesn't seem to be trying to hide.

"Come join for coffee sometime," he says. "Or tea, if you prefer." This lands almost like an afterthought but doesn't feel like one.

Shane looks at him for a second. His first instinct, the one that lives deep in the part of his brain that runs on pure self-protective reflex, says no thank you, I came here to compete, I didn't come here to make friends with the number one draft pick. But his second instinct says something less coherent and more inconvenient, which is roughly I can't actually think of a reason not to. He keeps calling Rozanov Rozanov in his head, he realises. Everyone else has become nicknames by now, Marly and Connie and the Finnish defenseman whose last name is Eskola but prefers to be called Kola, but Rozanov is still Rozanov, held at a particularly careful distance.

"Maybe," Shane says, which is not the same as no, and they both know it.

"I will take maybe," says Rozanov, and goes back to his stall, and Shane spends the rest of the locker room time staring at his skates and thinking about what just happened, which is: nothing. Nothing happened. He laughed at a joke. He said maybe to coffee. These are normal human things that don't require further analysis.

He analyses them anyway, on the drive back to his apartment, in the exhausting way his brain does things that don't require analysis.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The first few weeks of camp are like this: long days on the ice, longer days in his head. He learns the systems. He earns LeClaire's trust in increments, a good cycle here, a defensive read there, the accumulated small currency of proving himself reliable. His ankle holds. He can feel it getting stronger daily, the return of the full push he couldn't access for weeks, the edge work coming back like a language he'd temporarily forgotten. By the end of the second week he's doing things in practice that he couldn't do at the draft, and he catches LeClaire watching him with a particular evaluative attention that he allows himself one small moment of satisfaction about.

He and Rozanov circle each other. This is the word for it, circle, they are not in each other's orbit in any intentional way, and yet they keep ending up proximate. The same corner of the weight room. Adjacent spots in the lunch queue at the facility. Shane's bench at the end of a particularly brutal skating drill, where Rozanov sits down next to him uninvited with a Gatorade and says nothing, just drinks it, and somehow this non-conversation is not uncomfortable.

It's the non-discomfort that gets to him. Shane is not good at new people. He's fine at the performance of being good at new people, he can hold a conversation, he can do the small talk, he can be present in a group without visibly drowning in the social logistics of it, but it costs him something, always, this small expenditure of energy that accumulates. With Rozanov, there's no expenditure. He can't explain it. He doesn't like that he can't explain it.

Twelve days into camp, on a Friday afternoon, Rozanov appears in the hallway outside the locker room where Shane is doing his post-practice tape job and says, "Tomorrow there is no practice."

"I know," Shane says.

"Do you have plans?"

Shane looks up at him. Rozanov is leaning against the wall with his arms crossed in the way he stands when he's waiting for something, and his expression has that quality it gets sometimes, surface casual, something underneath it paying closer attention.
Shane does not have plans. Shane's plans for his first free day in Boston consist of going to the farmer's market he found on Google Maps and then probably coming back to the apartment and watching film and rearranging the home gym layout he's been thinking about. These are excellent plans. They are his plans.

"Not really," he says.

"Good," says Rozanov. "I'll pick you up at ten."

"I didn't—"

"Text me your address." As soon as he said it, he’s on his heels, ready to leave.

“Wait, Roz—”

“What?”

“I, um, I don’t have your number.”

Rozanov smiles at him as he makes his way back to where Shane is. Shane didn’t know why he stopped him, he didn’t want to spend his free day with Rozanov of all people. He should have let him leave, without any means of communication, therefore, this hang out that Shane doesn’t want to happen, can’t happen. 

So why the fuck did he stop Rozanov?

“Phone,” He looked at Shane. When Shane just stared at him, he tried again. “You have phone, yes? Give.”

And give he did. Shane watched Rozanov or no, Ilya (the asshole named himself Ilya with a smiley face) and texted himself: hello number 1 draft pick is me shane hollander number whatever draft pick i dont remember not important

It’s not funny, not really. But Shane still laughed, and Rozanov looked at him like he had won the Stanley Cup, his grin seemingly bigger than his ego.

And he's gone, back into the locker room, and Shane is standing in the hallway with tape on his hands and no clear idea of how that happened.

He texts the address.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

He tells himself, four separate times in the morning, that this is a normal thing. Two teammates hanging out on a day off. There's nothing to read into it. People do this. He does this, he has done this, with teammates, in juniors, and it's normal and fine and he is going to stop rechecking his phone to see if there are new messages, because there are no new messages, Rozanov said ten o'clock and it is 9:47 and everything is fine.

He is ready at 9:55 and makes himself wait until 9:59 to go downstairs, which is a completely normal thing to do.

Rozanov is already parked outside in a car that Shane immediately identifies as his death bed, something too low in the ground, probably European. He's in the driver's seat with sunglasses on and something playing quietly on the radio and he doesn't wave, just nods once when Shane approaches, like Shane's arrival was a foregone conclusion.

"Where are we going?" Shane asks, getting in.

"Coffee first," says Rozanov.

"I already had coffee."

"Okay. Coffee for me, something else for you," says Rozanov, and pulls out of the space with the confident ease of someone who has either completely mastered Boston driving or has no idea how bad Boston driving is going to get and hasn't been there yet. Shane puts on his seatbelt.

The coffee place is not Starbucks. It's a small independent shop about eight blocks from TD Garden, tucked between a dry cleaner and what appears to be a very small art gallery, with a hand-lettered sign and the particular smell of a place that takes itself seriously. Shane notices that Rozanov navigates directly to it without looking anything up, which means he's been here before.

"How did you find this?" Shane asks, while they wait for their drinks.

"Because Starbucks," Rozanov says, "spelled my name five different ways. None of them right."

"That seems—"

"Ilf," Rozanov says. "One person wrote Ilf. I do not know where f comes from. My name does not have an f. ILF."

Shane starts laughing. He can't help it, it's the delivery, the controlled outrage of it, the way Rozanov's hands illustrate the absent f with a kind of betrayed precision. Rozanov watches him laugh with something that might be satisfaction.

"So then," Rozanov continues, not stopping, "they write Ilya but with y and a switched, so Ilya is now Iyla, which is not a name, this is nothing—"

"That's the worst one—"

"And the third time they write Eel," Rozanov says. "Like the fish. Do I look like fucking fish? Am too hot to be sushi material.”

"Oh my God, stop," Shane says, pressing a hand to his face, laughing so hard his face must be beet red.

"I did not stop going there," Rozanov says. "I wanted to see how bad it could get. The fifth time they wrote Earl. I am not a tea, sorry I don’t drink that shit."

Shane is laughing hard enough that the barista gives him a look. He gets it together while their drinks are being made, chai latte for Shane, which Rozanov ordered without asking, maybe he noticed that Shane’s eye keeps drifting to it on the menu but could not decide fast enough to order it, and a large iced americano for Rozanov with what the barista understands to be an amount of white chocolate sauce that Shane privately considers alarming, and they take their cups to a small table by the window.

“How did you know I liked Chai?”

Rozanov shrugs. “You always get chai at the cafe in the arena."

"You remembered my order," Shane says.

“Am not just pretty face, Hollander. I pay attention to my teammates, is good quality to have, yes?”

"I—yeah." Shane wraps his hands around the cup. He doesn’t fully know which statement he was agreeing to, maybe all of it. But he can’t help but think that it's strange to be noticed like that, in that low-stakes way. It's not a big thing. "Thanks."

Rozanov shrugs, like it's nothing, and tips his head toward the window. "Tell me what you think of Boston so far. Honestly."

Shane considers the question. "It's bigger than I expected," he says. "More vertical. And it's louder than Ottawa."

"Everything is louder than Ottawa," says Rozanov.

"How much of Ottawa have you seen?"

"None. But this seems like safe assumption."

Shane makes a sound that is approximately a laugh and isn't going to commit to being more than that.

They stay at the coffee shop for over an hour. This surprises him, he'd set himself a vague internal limit of thirty to forty minutes, enough to be polite, enough to satisfy whatever obligation his maybe had created, and then they'd go their separate ways. Instead he's still there at 11:15, and Rozanov is telling him about the apartment the Bears set him up in (enormous, unfurnished, in the Seaport District: "It echoes," Rozanov says, with great seriousness. "I say one thing and it comes back to me three times. I feel like I'm in cave.") and Shane is telling him about the farmer's market, he'd mentioned it incidentally, unplanned, and Rozanov looks interested in the farmer's market, genuinely interested, in a way that makes Shane circle back to things he assumed about Rozanov that are already proving unreliable.

He'd thought Rozanov would want to party. This is the thing about number-one picks, about guys with that much natural talent and that much attention, they have a lifestyle that goes with it, and Shane had assumed Rozanov's lifestyle from a careful distance in the first weeks of camp: yes, he went out, yes there was a group of them, yes there was at minimum one night Shane was fairly certain involved a bar in Cambridge. But he'd also come to practice the next morning without evidence of it, clear-eyed and prepared, and Shane had revised his assumptions slightly, and then revised them further over the course of this coffee shop hour, because Rozanov is funny. Not performed-funny, not the locker room performance he can do when he wants to, but actually funny in a way that requires intelligence and specificity, and he's interested in things, and he has the particular quality of attention of someone who is listening rather than waiting to speak. Shane does not give this quality to many people.

He gives it to Rozanov right now, without meaning to.

They go to brunch. This is Rozanov's suggestion, and Shane starts to give his usual disclaimer: I should mention, my diet is kind of specific, I don't want to make it difficult, but Rozanov says, "I know a place," and the place he knows is a small restaurant in the West End, actually two blocks from Shane's apartment, that has an entire section of the menu that is athlete-friendly in the way Shane needs. Shane looks at the menu and then looks at Rozanov.

"How did you know about my diet?" he asks.

Rozanov picks up his water glass. "You don't go to the team lunches or dinners."

"I—" Shane pauses. "I didn't think anyone noticed."

"I noticed," Rozanov says, simply.

Shane looks at the menu again to give his face a moment to do whatever it's doing. He has a complicated relationship with the food thing, it's not something he advertises, it's not something he's entirely comfortable explaining, because most people's response to it falls into one of two camps: either they dismiss it (you're young, you can eat whatever, stop being so rigid) or they make it a bigger deal than it needs to be (oh wow, that's really intense, is that even healthy). Neither is useful. He's figured out over years how to navigate around it, to decline invites and eat before and manage the social overhead of it, but it costs him something every time, this small accumulation of feeling like his needs make him difficult.

"Does it bother you?" he asks Rozanov. "Like, is it annoying, the diet thing?"

Rozanov looks at him with an expression that takes a moment to parse. "Why would it bother me?"

"Most people think it's—"

"Most people are idiots about food," Rozanov says. He doesn't say it harshly, just factually, in the way he says things that he's already decided are true. "You know what works for your body. This is not complicated."

Shane looks at his menu. His chest does something.

"My line mates in juniors used to give me shit about it," he says, before he decides whether to say this.

"They’re stupid and untalented, they’re not in the NHL, yes?" Rozanov says. 

“No, I don’t think any of them got drafted.”

Rozanov smirks. “See, am right. Listen to me, not them.” Then, picking up his own menu,

"What's good here?"

Shane points to the grain bowl. “I’m getting this one.” Rozanov studies it.

"Can I try yours? I will get grain bowl too." Rozanov asks.

"You—yeah, sure."

Rozanov orders a different flavour of the grain bowl. He also orders a separate plate of eggs and a side of toast because he is a large hockey player and one grain bowl is not going to cut it, but he ordered the grain bowl, and when it arrives he tries it, along with a spoonful of Shane’s, with the particular expression of someone calibrating in real-time and then says, with sincerity, "Oh, is good. I thought it would taste like effort."

"It tastes like effort," Shane says.

"It does a little," Rozanov agrees. "But also like lemon and—"

"Tahini."

"Tahini." He tries the word. "Okay. This is acceptable." 

He eats. They eat. The conversation covers hockey and Boston geography and Rozanov's ongoing navigation system situation and at some point Shane starts talking about the practice systems and Rozanov engages with genuine technical interest, and they talk about hockey, like actually talk about it, not just the social surface of it but the real material, the reads and the decisions and the things they see on the ice and Shane doesn't do this. He doesn't do this with people his age. Usually when he starts talking about hockey in a specific way he can see the other person's eyes glaze with polite tolerance, but Rozanov argues with him about a particular breakout structure that LeClaire runs, and it's not the argument itself that matters, it's the quality of attention.

It's 2 PM when they leave.

"Video games," Rozanov says, on the sidewalk.

"What?"

"My apartment. I have a PS3. Just got in mail."

"I—" Shane looks at him. At the certainty of him, standing on the sidewalk in the September Boston sun, like there's an obvious next chapter to this and he's just naming it. "I should probably—"

"You don't have plans," Rozanov says. "You said."

Shane did say that. He said it at 9:59 AM and it was true then and it is still true now, which means he has no argument, which means he ends up in Rozanov's car again, heading to the Seaport.

The apartment does echo. Shane stands in the entryway and hears himself, faintly, and Rozanov says, "See," with a kind of vindicated satisfaction, and Shane says, "Have you looked into furniture," and Rozanov says he has but he hasn't made any decisions, which turns out to be a topic with more substance than Shane anticipated, because Rozanov's process for furniture is apparently to sit with choices for extended periods of time before committing, which is actually a more thoughtful approach than Shane expected.

They play video games for four hours.

Shane doesn't lose gracefully. This is one of his less presentable qualities, he doesn't lose gracefully at anything, hockey or board games or apparently PS3 racing games against a Russian center with suspiciously good reflexes. He loses the first race and demands an immediate rematch. He loses the rematch and demands another. Rozanov wins four in a row before Shane wins one, and the satisfaction of winning one is disproportionate and fully felt, and Rozanov says, "There it is," at Shane's expression, and Shane says, "Shut up," and they go again.

At some point, somewhere between 6 and 7 PM, they look up and realise neither of them has eaten dinner.

"We should eat," Rozanov says.

"Yeah," Shane says.

Neither of them moves. The game is paused on the screen. Shane is sitting on the floor with his back against Rozanov's couch, actual furniture, a good couch, one of the few things that's already been acquired, and Rozanov is on the couch, and the apartment is starting to get dark at the edges of the room.

And it’s good. It's good. It is a very specific and unguarded kind of good that he's not sure he's felt before, or not like this, not with a person he's known for an accumulation of less than two months. There's something about the evening, the loose unstructured ease of it, the way neither of them has been performing anything, that feels like finding something without having looked for it.

"It's getting late, I should go," Shane says, without moving.

"Probably," says Rozanov.

A pause.

Shane stands up. His ankle is fine, he'd forgotten about it entirely, which he takes as a data point. He gets his jacket and Rozanov calls him a cab, and they stand in the echoing apartment entryway while they wait, and Rozanov says, "You're faster on the right edge than you were in the first week. Whatever your physio is doing."

"Oh," says Shane. "Thanks. She'll be pleased to hear that."

"Also, your backhand is improving. LeClaire hasn't noticed yet but he will."

Shane looks at him. "You've been watching my backhand?"

"I watch everyone," Rozanov says as he shrugs, like it’s not a big deal, which is probably true and also not entirely an answer.

The cab notification comes through. Shane pockets his phone.

"See you," he says.

"Yes," says Rozanov.

In the cab, on the way back to his apartment, Shane sits with his jacket in his lap and looks out the window at the Boston streets, lit amber under the streetlights, and feels something moving in his chest that he doesn't immediately have a name for. It's not happy, exactly, though it contains happiness. It's larger than happy. It's the feeling of a day that went differently than he planned and better than he planned, and the specific, slightly vertiginous awareness of someone new having appeared in the landscape of his life.

He puts his face in his jacket briefly.

He thinks: he paid for everything. He didn't ask, he just did. He said I invited you. He tried the grain bowl. He noticed my backhand.

He thinks: this is probably just teammates. Two rookies in a new city, it's practical, it's normal.

He thinks about their conversations, about Rozanov's hands illustrating the absent f from Ilf, about the way the apartment echoes, about four hours of video games without either of them suggesting stopping.

He thinks: oh no.

He goes to bed.

He lies there with the ceiling above him and the Boston sounds coming through the window, different sounds than Ottawa, lower frequency, the city's different rhythm, and thinks, one more time, about the day, and specifically about the part of his brain that is currently calling it something that he is firmly telling it not to call it, because it is not, it was not, it was two teammates having a day off.

Rozanov paid for everything because it was his idea. He found a restaurant that worked with Shane's diet without being asked. He remembered the chai latte. He sat on the floor with Shane for four hours and made him laugh until his face hurt.

Shane stares at the ceiling.

It felt like a date.

His face is extremely warm. He puts both hands over it.

He tells himself very firmly that Rozanov definitely did not think it was a date, that Rozanov is a sociable person in a new city who wanted company, that the I invited you was just etiquette, that none of this means anything specific, that his entire reading of the day is being distorted by his, by whatever this is, this feeling he's been not-examining since approximately the first week of training camp.

He moves his hands. He looks at the ceiling again.

He picks up his phone and texts:

Shane is smiling at his phone in a way that he cannot make himself stop. He texts back a normal number of words and puts the phone down and puts it face-down and then picks it up and puts it face-up again and then stares at the ceiling.

He opens his notes app. He types:

Am I reading too into this? I've never felt this happy before. I think you might be someone that will either make me the happiest or break my heart into pieces. I find myself not caring though, I just want to get to know you more and be with you more.

He closes the note without sending it anywhere.

He closes his eyes.

Outside, Boston moves through its night with the indifferent continuity of a city that doesn't know anything new has just started. Shane lies in the dark and breathes carefully through his nose, and thinks about a day that went differently than planned, and does not sleep for a while.

Chapter End Notes

Cry :') I love Shane and his brain #neuroticprincess

thanks for reading! maybe an update tomorrow or later depending on whether I decide to sleep or not.

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Chapter 2: 2010 [Season starts]

Chapter Summary

Hockey ensues. In between intense games, there's an ever more intense internal battle between Shane Hollander's heart and mind.

Chapter Notes

DONT FORGET TO TURN ON CREATORS STYLE FOR THE MESSAGES (its scrollable!!!)

So... it hasn't been a day. I couldn't/didn't sleep because once I started editing this chapter's draft and coding the messages, I just felt like a madman, so here we are. Made myself a bit sad with how sad Shane is with his "unrequited feelings" but then I remembered that I'm not Shane and therefore I know the truth :P

PSA to no one but me because I like holding myself accountable by airing out my business publicly: There will be a coming out scene, yes. Because it's important to me personally that even though it's "obvious" or "we could tell", the relief you get from saying it out loud is something else and I am determined to give that to my good friend Shane Hollander.

The thing about having a crush on your teammate is that it doesn't go away if you ignore it hard enough.

Shane tries this. He tries it systematically, the way he approaches problems that require correction: identify, address, move on. He identifies the crush in mid-September, four days after the not-date situation. He addresses it by deciding, with great firmness, that it is not something he can afford and therefore not something he is going to have. Then he waits for it to move on.

It doesn't move on.

The problem is Ilya. Ilya, because somewhere in the weeks since the coffee shop his brain started doing the first-name thing without being instructed to, the problem is that Ilya keeps being the way he is, which turns out to be a significant obstacle to not having feelings about him. He keeps doing things like sitting next to Shane at the lunch table and talking about whatever is in his head; could be hockey, could be the documentary about great white sharks he watched at 1 AM, could be a detailed complaint about American bread which he considers categorically inferior to Russian bread, and Shane listens and argues back and laughs, and the crush sits there in his chest being warm and completely immune to willpower.

They text constantly. Shane notices this, it’s hard to ignore considering he physically feels his face heating up whenever his phone lights up with a text from Ilya. It goes like this: a message from Ilya, then Shane's response, then Ilya's response, late into evenings that were supposed to be film study and sleep. The conversations are about nothing: about practice, about a restaurant Ilya found, about another great white shark documentary which leads to a tangential conversation about apex predators that somehow takes forty minutes, and they are also about everything, a slow but sure accumulation of knowing someone.

Ilya goes out some weekends. Shane knows this because Ilya mentions it, not in a way that's meant to be informative but in the incidental way of someone who isn't managing what he tells you. He goes with some of the older players, sometimes with Nikolov, the other Russian on the roster, and Shane absolutely does not think about what going out means in any specific sense, because that is not information he wants in his head. He fails at this with complete consistency.

He tells himself: this is a friendship. He's making a friend. He doesn't make friends easily, this is a thing he knows about himself, the way new people require a careful expenditure of trust that he gives out slowly, in increments and this is someone he trusts, already, faster than makes sense. That's it. A friendship. That's all this is. He is going to be very mature about the rest of it and not think about it, and it is definitely going to work this time.

Preseason games are a gauntlet and Shane loves them.

This is the thing about Shane on the ice: everything that is difficult off it, the social navigation, the way too careful management of himself, the overhead of being someone who feels too much about too many things, simply ceases to exist.

On the ice he is clean. His brain operates the way it was built to, reading the play, the angles, the bodies, finding the gaps before they open. He's always been like this, from the first time he understood what skating was really for. His hockey brain and his regular brain are different entities, and his hockey brain has no complicated feelings about Ilya Rozanov, which is a significant relief.

He has a good preseason. He earns this, he works for it by grinding the way he always works, more hours than required, more film than assigned, and the ankle is at full strength by the second game and he stops thinking about it entirely by the third. LeClaire puts him on the third line and then tries him on the second in the fourth game, and Shane does enough that there's a conversation, he can see it happening around him without being part of it, about where exactly he belongs on this roster.

He assists on two preseason goals. He has one of his own in the sixth game, a deflection from the slot that he knows is going in before it goes in, and he doesn't celebrate it overtly, just nods once and skates back for the faceoff, which LeClaire later tells him, in a tone that suggests both critique and approval, was mature.

Ilya scores five goals in the preseason. Shane watches each one with a mixture of emotions he's getting quite practiced at managing.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Two weeks before the first regular season game.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

He wears a jacket. It's a nice restaurant. He has the fish and Ilya has the steak and they split an appetizer that was Ilya's idea, something with burrata that Shane has already decided he's going to add to the foods-that-work list, and Ilya talks about growing up in Moscow, a little, in the careful incremental way he does it, not as an offering but as a door left briefly open, and Shane knows by now not to push the door, just to take what's offered and hold it without pressing.

"My father," Ilya says, at some point, pushing food around his plate in a way that means he's choosing words, "did not think this was a career I could do."

"Hockey?"

"He thought—" A pause. "He thought many things. That it was for other people, not me. That I was wasting time. That I am too lazy. That I should—" He makes a gesture that encompasses several unsaid things. "He’s wrong."

"Yeah," Shane says.

"He’s usually wrong," Ilya says, mildly, and takes a drink of water.

Shane thinks about asking more and decides against it. What he knows of Ilya's family is pieces, assembled quietly over weeks: the mother who died when Ilya was twelve, a detail so heavy that Shane still can't think about it without something twisting in his chest; the brother who is, in Ilya's phrasing, an entitled problem; the father who was apparently also, in a different way, also a problem. He doesn't push. He files it carefully in the part of his mind that he's starting to think of, without any intention of saying so, as things about Ilya.

"Did your father come to games?" Shane asks.

"Sometimes. When he wasn't—" Another gesture. "He came to some."
Shane nods.

Ilya looks at him. "And yours?"

"Every single one," Shane says. "Since I was six. Now that I’m older though, not as much but he tries, they both do. They have a spreadsheet."

Ilya's expression shifts into something warmer. "A spreadsheet."

"Scoring records, assist records, ice time, penalty minutes.”

"Your father and my father are very different men," Ilya says.

"Yeah," says Shane. "I know."

He means it as a plain observation and it comes out like something more than that, something with more weight, and Ilya looks at him for a moment with an expression that Shane cannot entirely read and then nods, once, and goes back to his steak. Under the table, their feet are approximately six inches apart. Shane is aware of this in a way he has absolutely no useful response to.

Three days before the home opener, Shane's phone lights up.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

He immediately messages Ilya: My parents are coming to our game. Do you want to come over for dinner after?

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The morning of the game, Shane wakes up at 5 AM and does not go back to sleep.

He lies there and runs through systems in his head. He's done this before every game since he was fourteen: the mental film, the reads, the specific plays that LeClaire likes to run off the opening faceoff. He does it twice and then gets up and makes tea and sits at his kitchen table in the dark and does the same thing he's been doing since he was eight years old, which is want it. There is something very clean about wanting something this much. It clarifies everything else.

Ilya picks him up at eleven. This was not planned, Shane had planned to drive his car so his parents could use it to go to his place after the game, but Ilya texted at 10:45 saying im outside and Shane had put on his jacket and gone downstairs. They drive to the arena without saying much, which is a comfortable nothing. Shane watches Boston pass outside the window. The streets are busy for a Saturday. He can see Bears flags on a couple of the bars they pass.

In the locker room, he does his ritual tape job and his ritual stall arrangement and his ritual equipment check, and some of the veterans are loud and some are quiet, and the rookies cluster in the middle register between performance and genuine nerves. Shane finds a spot in his head that is very quiet and stays there.

LeClaire gives a short talk that Shane absorbs without effort. Then they're on the ice.

The Ottawa Centaurs are their first game. This is either significant or it isn't. Shane grew up in Ottawa, Ottawa is his city in the way that Boston isn't yet, and playing them first feels like a conversation that he's the only one having. He's aware this is probably not a healthy way to frame it. He frames it this way anyway.

The game is, well, a game. A real one, actual NHL speed, and Shane had thought he was prepared for the step up and he was mostly right, but mostly is doing a lot of work in that sentence in the first five minutes when the Ottawa centers are at a tempo that requires a recalibration. He recalibrates. This is something he's always been able to do, faster than feels possible, the adjustment that comes from years of having to be in the right place when the play happens.

In the second period, with the score at 3-1 Bears, Shane cycles to the half wall, reads the defenseman cheating up, and feeds the puck back to Carmy at the top of the circle, and Carmy puts it in, and it's an assist, clean and simple and his, and he doesn't celebrate it, just does the nod and the skate back, but somewhere in the private and internal part of his brain there is a very loud noise that he contains successfully.

Ilya scores twice. Shane watches both goals from the bench. The first is a tap-in off a rebound, opportunistic and efficient. The second is genuinely gorgeous; a fake to the backhand that pulls the goalie completely out of position, then a forehand roof shot that clips the top bar on the way in. The arena loses its mind. Shane, on the bench, tells his face very firmly to stay neutral.

His face does not entirely comply. It was, undeniably, hot.

Boston wins 5-2. The locker room is good, winning locker rooms have that atmosphere that Shane loves, the particular noise of relief and satisfaction mixed together, and the veterans are generous with the rookies in the way that good teams are after a win. Shane showers and changes and tries to ignore the post-game buzzing in his chest that has no exact name, just feels like yes, like more, like this is why.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

His parents are already at his apartment when they arrive, the house smells like home as they walk in. Shane clocked the way Ilya was smiling from ear to ear. His parents are both in the kitchen, his mom emerged first, bringing a giant pan of freshly baked garlic bread. Ilya immediately asked if she needed any help. Yuna dismissed him with a look that made Ilya sit down and not try to help anymore. Shane chuckled, whispering: “I guess I forgot to tell you that my mom is me but way more intense when it comes to routines.”

As soon as the table was set, no thanks to Shane and Ilya, Yuna and David sat in front of the two boys who stopped their whisper-shouting about nothing in particular.

As if he could feel her eyes, Shane is now looking at his mother's face, and it seems to be doing something.

Shane sees it happen: the recalibration, the rapid assessment, the way her expression moves through several things in about two seconds before settling into warmth. He doesn't know what she saw in those two seconds. He doesn't especially want to know.

"Mom, Dad," he says, "this is Ilya."

Ilya extends his hand to his father first, the formality of it, the instinctive social reading, and says, "Mr. Hollander, nice to meet you," and then to his mother with the same ease, "Mrs. Hollander."

"Yuna," his mother says, taking his hand.

They settle. His dad is asking Ilya about the drive from the arena, whether there was traffic, the kind of comfortable conversation that his dad is excellent at, and Ilya is answering him, and Shane fixes his seating position and watches this and thinks: okay. Okay, so this is happening.
"You played well tonight," his mother says, to Ilya.

Ilya looks up. "Thank you. Shane played well also."

His mother looks at Shane with an expression that contains at least three things. "He did," she says.

"The second goal," his dad says, to Ilya, with a forward lean that means he's about to get into it. "The fake, were you reading the goalie's paddle position or were you working off the defenseman's weight shift?"

Ilya's expression sharpens with interest. "Both," he says. "But mostly the goalie. His paddle goes early when you look right. I looked right first."

"Huh," says his dad. "I wondered about that from the angle."

Shane watches his father and Ilya Rozanov discuss NHL goaltending tendencies over the fresh basket of bread (seriously, how much carbs can they eat in one sitting?) and feels something in his chest that is warm and unruly and entirely outside his control. This is what he'd hoped for and also what he'd feared, the combination of I wanted this and I didn't account for how much this would matter.

His mother, in front of him, says quietly, "He's good with people."

"Yeah," Shane says.

"He's very easy to talk to," she says, still quietly.

"Mom—"

"I'm just saying."

"Stop saying it then."

Dinner is three hours. This is not an exaggeration, three hours, the kind of dinner that starts as a meal and becomes a conversation that happens to involve food, and Ilya holds the table the way he holds a locker room, without apparent effort, and his father laughs more than Shane has seen him laugh at a dinner in recent memory, and even his mother; his mother who evaluates hockey players with the scientific rigor of someone who has been watching the sport for thirty years, his mother is talking to Ilya about line chemistry with the engagement she gives only to conversations she's finding worth her time.

At some point his dad disappears to the bathroom and his mother says, to Ilya, in a careful tone that Shane recognises as his mother deploying her version of indirection, "Do you have family in Boston?"

"Ah, no," Ilya says. "My family is in Russia." A slight pause. "Most of them."

"That must be hard," his mother says. "The holidays especially."

"I am used to it," Ilya says. "We never really celebrated holidays as a family growing up."

Yuna nods once, with a sad look in her face that she’s trying really hard to school. "Well," she says, "you're welcome at ours. When you can't get back." She says it plainly, no performance about it, the way she says things she means.
Shane goes completely still.

Ilya looks at her for a moment. "Thank you," he says. Also plain. Also meaning it.

His dad comes back. The conversation moves. Shane picks up his fork and puts food in his mouth and chews it and does not look at his mother, who he is fairly certain is aware of the effect of what she just said and is choosing not to comment on it. This is one of many reasons Yuna Hollander is the most terrifying person he knows.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

After dinner, they say good night, walking Ilya to the door, he’s shaking hands again with his parents, his mother holding his hand a moment longer than a handshake, saying something low that Shane doesn't catch and then Ilya is walking towards the elevator and Shane watches him go, and his mother is beside him, and she says nothing, which is worse than if she'd said something.

He walks his parents back to their hotel because it's near his apartment and the night is clear, the fall air good after the day he had.

"He's not what I expected," his dad says.

"What did you expect?" Shane asks.

"I don't know. More flash, maybe? He's quiet. When he's listening."

"He's a good listener," Shane says.

His dad nods. His mother, walking on Shane's other side with her hands in her pockets, says, "How long have you known him?"

"Since training camp. So like two months or so."

"And you talk to him every day."

It's not a question, so Shane doesn't make it one. "Yeah."

"What do you talk about?"

"I don't know. Stuff. Hockey. What he had for dinner. Whatever." Shane puts his hands in his pockets. "He's easy to talk to."

"That's what I said," his mother says.

"Yeah, well. You were right."

They're quiet for a moment. The street is quieter now. Shane watches the sidewalk.

"His mother died," he says. He doesn't know why he says it right now except that it's been present in his head all evening, that small piece of information that sits differently than other information. "When he was twelve. He doesn't talk about it much."

His parents are quiet.

"His father is not good," Shane says. "And his brother is—" He makes a gesture only Ilya would recognise. "He doesn't really have family, like, close family."

"Shane," his mother says.

"What?"

"You care about him." Not a question.

He's very careful not to look at her. "He's my teammate. I care about all my—"

"Shane."

He stops walking. They stop too. He looks at his shoes for a moment.

"I'm fine," he says.

"I know you're fine," she says. "You're always fine."

He hears what she means. He chooses not to respond to what she means.

"He should come for Christmas," she says.

Shane's heart does something dangerous. He turns to look at her.

"He's got less than a week," she continues, practical and matter-of-fact, which is how she delivers things she's already decided. "He can't get back to Russia at that time. It doesn't make sense for him to stay alone in that apartment—"

"How do you know he will be alo—"

"Shane." She tilts her head. "Does he have plans?"

He thinks about Ilya's apartment. He thinks about Ilya saying it echoes. He thinks about the frozen lake near his childhood home, the particular quality of winter light in Ottawa, the way the lake goes perfectly still on cold mornings and holds the sky. He thinks about his mother's kitchen and his dad's Christmas playlist that is the same every year and the wooden Advent calendar his mother brings out every December first that has been in their family his entire life. He thinks about all of that, and then he thinks about Ilya in it, and his chest makes a sound, internally, that he does not have language for.

"He has a friend here," Shane says. His voice comes out level. He's proud of this. "Svetlana. I think he might be spending the holidays with her."

His mother looks at him for a moment. She knows Svetlana is a lie, or if she doesn't know it, she knows something is off, because Yuna Hollander has the most efficient bullshit radar of anyone he's ever met. She doesn't call him on it.

"If that changes," she says.

"Sure," he says.

They walk the rest of the way to the hotel. His dad squeezes his shoulder before they go in, the wordless version of something his dad does instead of making things explicit, and Shane squeezes back. He walks back home.

His apartment is dark when he gets in. He turns on one lamp and sits on the couch in his jacket and holds his phone and thinks about the evening, which was good. Really good. His parents liked Ilya. Ilya was easy with them, easy in a way that Shane knows people aren't always easy with his parents, because his parents require a genuine engagement that not everyone is willing to give. Ilya had given it without being asked.
He thinks about his mother's face, watching him talk about Ilya in the street.

He thinks about Ilya at Christmas, in his childhood home, eating his mother's food at the kitchen table.

He stops thinking about that. He needs to stop.

He picks up his phone and messages the one person he can't stop thinking about.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

Shane smiles at his phone. He tells himself not to smile at his phone. He smiles at his phone anyway.

He goes to his room. He showers and changes. He lies in bed with the city sounds coming through the window and he thinks about Ilya and the way he'd looked at Shane's mother when she said you're welcome at ours, the way something in his expression had gone very briefly quiet and then come back.

He opens his notes app:

My parents want you to come to Christmas with us. I'm so scared by how much I want you there, in my childhood home, sleeping in my childhood room, eating at my childhood dinner table.
I think I like you, Ilya.
I'm sorry, I'm trying really hard not to, I know you also value our friendship, it's not your fault we're in two completely different places.

He closes the app. He puts his phone face-down on the nightstand.

He looks at the ceiling.

Boston moves outside, indifferent and continuous, the way cities do, and Shane lies in the dark and breathes and tries, again, with every available resource, not to want what he wants.

It doesn't work.

It hasn't worked once.

Chapter End Notes

thanks for reading!

chapter 3 might take a while longer, there's so much texting to code

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Chapter 3: 2010 [Happy Holidays from the Hollanders &amp; Ilya]

Chapter Summary

A look into the last few months of Hollander and Rozanov being Shane and Ilya.

After a few days of holiday bliss, feelings will be realised and admitted, to who? Who knows.

Chapter Notes

DONT FORGET TO TURN ON CREATORS STYLE FOR THE MESSAGES (its scrollable!!!)

Hello!! For today's menu: a healthy serving of fluff with a side of denial of feelings (not in the way that you might expect). This was so insane to write, my single ass is too single for sweet shit like this but anything for my good friends Shane Hollander & Ilya Rozanov.

Thanks for all the nice comments, it's really keeping me motivated especially with the shit ton of coding I did for this chapter (my own fault, obviously). But I hope you enjoy this :)

[Just a note: I finally have the tentative final chapter count up, I’m like 80% sure that I will stick to just 8 chapters but we’ll see.]

The thing about Ilya is that he texts the way he talks, which is to say: constantly, about everything, with disregard for social convention that comes from being someone who has never needed social convention because he can simply exist with people until they accommodate him.

Shane has been accommodating him since September, willingly.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Ilya picks him up at 6 AM on December 23rd, which is earlier than Shane expected and exactly on time for what Shane scheduled, and Shane is standing outside his building with his bag when the car pulls up because he has been standing there for eleven minutes. He would not tell Ilya this, but Ilya probably already knows.

It's a different car this time, not a rental (Shane asked). The car Ilya apparently bought two weeks ago is a sensible Mercedes SUV that in no way matches Shane's image of how Ilya Rozanov would select a vehicle. He'd said something about this when Ilya looked at him with his knowing eye as soon as Shane settled in the passenger seat and said: "We will drive for a long time. I want a comfortable car for us." Which was so straightforwardly practical that Shane had no response.

The Mercedes is very comfortable. Shane notices this within thirty seconds of getting in, the heated seats and the good sound system, the way it insulates against the December outside.

"You're on time," Ilya says.

"I'm always on time."

"You’re always early and then waiting and pretending you are on time."

Shane puts his seatbelt on as he rolls his eyes. "Fuck off. Let's just go."

Ilya pulls away from the curb. The city is quiet at 6 AM, Boston still wrapped in the early dark, and the Christmas lights on some of the storefronts catch in the wet road. Shane watches them pass and thinks about the drive ahead, seven hours, roughly, depending on the border and feels something warm and slightly terrifying in his chest.

They've spent a lot of time together. Three months of near-daily contact: impromptu and planned lunches and dinners, video games at Ilya’s that seem to always distort time, the Breaking Bad nights (and whatever show Ilya is hyperfixating on during that day or week), and the morning skates where they stay an extra thirty minutes working on whatever thing Ilya has decided needs working on. But seven hours in a car is a different story. There's nowhere to redirect in a car. You're just… there, with the other person, with nothing between you except the road and whatever you decide to say or not say.

Shane is not worried about this. He is completely not worried about this. He has been not worried about it since approximately 2 AM.

"Music or no music?" Ilya asks.

"Either is fine."

"Radio or—"

"Ilya."

"Yes?”

"Just pick what you like, you care more about music than I do. I’m fine with whatever you choose."

Ilya connects to the AUX. Something starts playing, something Eastern European that Shane doesn't recognise, melodic and not intrusive, good for driving. Shane settles back in his seat.

They drive. For the first half hour they don't say much, just the comfortable nothingness of early morning and moving through space. Shane watches Massachusetts unspool outside the window, the highway banking through the dark, and at some point the sky starts to lighten at the edges, deep blue going gray changing to the particular pink and yellow of a winter sunrise, and he watches it.

"Beautiful," Ilya says, meaning the sky.

"Yeah, it is," Shane says.

More silence. Comfortable still.

"So," Ilya says, at some point. "Car games."

Shane turns to look at him. "What?"

"Car games. You must know them. Road trips, only child, parents—"

"What does being an only child have to do with knowing car games?"

"You are restless in the car, you keep fidgeting. I’m sure your parents tried things to distract you."

"Huh, am I that obvious?"

Ilya glances at him, briefly, the quick lateral look he does. "Hm, I think so, yes. For me, at least."

Shane opens his mouth and then closes it. Not knowing how to make his voice not sound like he’s about to either start crying or screaming.

"Okay, so, car games." Ilya says, taking pity at his lack of words.

Shane does know car games. This is objectively embarrassing information but also simply true, he has a long list of them, inherited from the many Ottawa-to-anywhere drives of his childhood, his parents' particular method of keeping an only child from going insane in the back seat. He rotates through them now without being asked to: Twenty Questions first, which Ilya plays with the same focused competitiveness he applies to everything, arriving at the Eiffel Tower in eight questions and looking deeply satisfied about it; then the alphabet game, which devolves almost immediately because Ilya's version of the alphabet game apparently involves finding letters in any language, which Shane rules inadmissible, which Ilya disputes with several minutes of principled argument about the arbitrary cultural bias of English-only rules; then a game where you build a story one sentence at a time, which turns into something involving a bear, a stolen ambulance, and a diplomatic incident in Luxembourg that is so deeply stupid that Shane is laughing hard enough that his eyes water, which makes Ilya look over at him with that expression Shane keeps not examining.

"You have a good laugh," Ilya says.

Shane wipes his eyes. "Shut up. You're annoying."

"The bear needed the ambulance."

"The bear did not need the ambulance."

"He had a condition."

"You invented the condition in sentence three."

"I was establishing a backstory. This is good storytelling."

"It's chaos," Shane says. "You created chaos and then justified it."

"This is also good storytelling." Ilya is smiling. Shane can see it in his peripheral vision and tries very hard not to look directly at it. "You're a good, funny storyteller, Hollander. When you let yourself go."

"I let myself go," Shane says, somewhat defensively, which is not fully true and they both know it.

Ilya makes a sound that might be agreement or might be something else.

They stop in Vermont for gas and food, a diner off the highway that is either a genuine institution or a very convincing replica of one, with a Christmas wreath on the door and the server who calls them both hon and brings coffee without being asked. Shane drinks his coffee black. Ilya drinks his with milk and a fuck ton of sugar, which Shane looks at without commenting. They eat breakfast, eggs and a singular piece of toast for Shane, eggs and toast and approximately the rest of the menu for Ilya, who eats like someone who genuinely enjoys the act of eating, which Shane finds inexplicably endearing and they sit in the booth across from each other and it's 9 AM and they have four more hours of driving ahead and Shane cannot think of anywhere else he'd particularly want to be.

"Tell me about Ottawa," Ilya says.

"What about it?"

"Your Ottawa. Not the city. The one you grew up in."

Shane considers the question. "It's colder than Boston," he says. "Way colder. We used to get these winters where it would go below minus thirty and school would get cancelled, and my dad would pull out the old skates and we'd go to the lake—" He stops.

"Which lake?"

"There's one about five minutes from my parents' house. It's small. We'd skate on it every winter when it froze hard enough. My dad has this ritual of checking the ice thickness with a drill—"

"He drills the ice?"

"To check the depth. It has to be at least four inches for skating. He's very precise about it."

"Of course he is," Ilya says, warmly.

"He taught me to skate on that lake," Shane says. "Before hockey. I was four. He put me in skates and I fell down about forty times and he picked me up every time and we stayed until my mom came out and told us it was too dark."

Ilya is quiet for a moment. He's looking at Shane with the expression he gets when he's taking something in rather than responding to it.

"We can skate on it," Shane says. "While we're there. If you want."

"Yes," Ilya says, immediately.

"The ice should be good by now. Thick enough."

"Yes," Ilya says again. "I want to."

Shane picks up his coffee. His hands are warm around the cup. Outside the diner window, Vermont is white and grey and cold, and the road beyond the parking lot is empty in both directions, and it's December 23rd, and Ilya is going to skate on the lake with him where he learned to stand up on blades when he was four years old, and Shane is not going to think too hard about what that feels like because if he thinks too hard about it he will say something inadvisable.

"What about you," he says instead. "Your—" He pauses. This is the door he's learned to open carefully. "What were winters like for you growing?”

Ilya picks up his coffee. His thumb traces the edge of the mug. "Cold," he says. "Very cold. Not the same cold as here, different. It gets you. You learn to get used to it."

"Did you skate, too?"

"Yes, my mother skated, she was so graceful. Taught me from young age." A slight smile. "My mother took me when the house was too much, which is almost always. There was a rink two streets from our house. She would bundle me up until I couldn't lower my arms and take me to the rink and hold my hands while I went around." He pauses. "She could have been a professional skater, if it wasn’t for my father."

Shane is quiet, taking in the melancholy look that Ilya is showing.

"After she died," Ilya continues, levelly, the way he says these things, a nonchalant delivery that somehow makes it harder to hear, "I kept going. To the rink. By myself mostly. My brother too, sometimes, before he discovered drugs." He lifts one shoulder. "It was the one place where it was quiet."

"Yeah," Shane says.

"You understand this."

"Yeah," Shane says again. "I do, in some way. Maybe different from you but I do.”

Ilya looks at him across the table. The diner has a Christmas song playing low from a speaker somewhere, the instrumental version of something Shane can't quite identify, and their coffees are going cold, and Ilya is looking at him with an expression that Shane cannot decode, something steady and warm and direct, the kind of direct that makes the back of Shane's neck prickle.

"I'm glad you invited me," Ilya says.

"I'm glad you came," Shane says.

Another moment. Shane looks at his coffee.

"Alright," he says. "We should go."

"Yes," says Ilya, not moving, looking directly at Shane.

"Ilya."

"Right." He stands, unhurried, and puts cash on the table before Shane can reach for his wallet. "Let's go."

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

They cross into Ontario just before noon, and something shifts in Shane's chest at the familiar highway signs, the particular topography of this province in winter, the way he knows this landscape in his body, the way you know the layout of a childhood home in the dark.

"You look different," Ilya says.

"What?"

"When we crossed the border. Your shoulders went down."

Shane hadn't noticed. He considers this. "It's home," he says, simply.

"Hm, yes. Home does that," Ilya says.

Shane glances at him. Ilya's eyes are on the road. His hands are easy on the wheel, the same loose confidence he carries everywhere, and his profile is so breathtaking that Shane has to look back at the road.

"Turn here," he says.

They talk about hockey for an hour, the second-half schedule, the line combinations LeClaire has been rotating, a specific breakout play that both of them have thoughts about that turns into a sustained and genuinely engaging argument where neither of them fully concedes but Shane notes approximately three of Ilya's points filing themselves away in the part of his brain that will think about them on the ice later. Ilya does this deliberately sometimes, floats an idea in conversation and then watches it appear in Shane's game and Shane pretends he doesn't notice this happening and Ilya pretends not to notice that Shane pretends, and this is one of many things between them that exist in the space neither of them is willing to put a name on.

Then Ilya says, out of nowhere: "What is your favorite Christmas memory?"

Shane blinks. "That's a sudden question."

"We're almost there. I want to know."

Shane thinks about it. "There's this Advent calendar," he says. "My mom's had it since before I was born. It's wooden, my grandfather made it. Twenty-four little drawers, and she puts something in each one. Usually small things, candy or a note or a little toy. She's done it every December since she was a kid." He pauses. "She did it for me when I was little. And then I grew up but she still does it. Every year."

He expects Ilya to say something, a joke maybe, a gentle deflection, the easy banter. Instead Ilya is quiet for a moment.

"Your mom, she’s a remarkable person, yes?" he says.

"She is," Shane says. "She really is."

"She still has the calendar?"

"On the mantel. She puts it up December first. She'll have started without us.”

"Yes, we’ve missed twenty-two days."

"Well, we're not there so there’s no one else to fill them for," Shane says, and then hears how that sounds, and looks out the window. "I mean, she usually just fills it for me—"

"Shane," says Ilya, quietly.

"Yeah."

"It's okay."

Shane exhales. "Yeah, okay."

The GPS says seven minutes. Shane watches the streets get familiar, the turn onto his parents' road, the shape of the neighbourhood that hasn't changed in his entire life, the corner where he used to wait for the school bus, the Jones’ house with the same crazy light display they've had since 2001. He directs Ilya through the last few turns and then there it is, the house, lights on the windows and the front walk shoveled and a wreath on the door and his dad's car in the driveway, and Shane's whole body does the thing bodies do when you've been away from somewhere for long enough.

"This is it?" Ilya says.

"This is it."

Ilya pulls into the driveway and stops the car and they sit there for a moment, looking at the house. The front curtain moves slightly, his mother checking, and then the front door opens and David Hollander is on the porch in a Christmas sweater that is genuinely appalling, waving with both arms.

"That sweater," Ilya says.

"Yup," says Shane, popping the P.

"It has reindeer."

"I know."

"They're playing hockey." Ilya says, amused.

"The reindeers are playing hockey, yes. He gets a new one every year. It's a gift from my mom."

Ilya looks at him, and Shane looks back, and they're both smiling, and it's so easy, this thing between them, it's so easy it almost doesn't feel like anything except completely right, and Shane's chest does the thing it does around Ilya that he is running out of ways to explain away.

"Come on," he says. "They're going to think something's wrong."

They get out of the car.

His parents receive Ilya the way they receive most things his mother has already decided she approves of; with warmth and genuine acceptance. The guest room has fresh sheets. The fridge has food. David's handshake goes long and turns into a brief shoulder-squeeze, which means his dad likes him, and Yuna's greeting is a look-and-then-hug, which for Yuna Hollander is practically a declaration.
Ilya gives David the vodka.

David looks at it. He turns it over. He looks up at Ilya. "This is," he says, "very good vodka."

"Hm yes, you know your vodka. I asked my friend to get it from Russia." Ilya says.

“Ilya, you didn’t have to do that.” Shane looks at him with wide eyes. “Is that what Svetlana gave you as soon as she arrived the other day?”

“Yes, I told her is important she gives it to me as soon as she lands.”

“You’re impossible,” Shane scoffs, but his somewhat fond tone gives him away.

"Well, thank you, son. We will enjoy this over the next few days." David says as he holds the bottle like he's been handed something fragile and precious. His mother is watching this with the expression she gets when events are proceeding in a manner she anticipated and finds satisfying.

Ilya gives Yuna the wine. She looks at it, and there's a moment, a brief moment where her expression changes into something that Shane cannot recall ever seeing her aim at someone outside the family. She turns it over, reads the label, looks up at Ilya.

"How," she says.

"Shane said you were particular," Ilya says. "I asked around."

"Shane said particular?"

"He said picky. I translated."

His mother looks at Shane. Shane looks at the ceiling, at anywhere but his mother.

"Come in," she says, to Ilya. "I need someone with real opinions for the cookie dough."

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The house rearranges itself around Ilya with a suddenness that should be surprising and somehow isn't.

By the evening of the 23rd, Ilya is in the kitchen with his mother, and they are making Japanese cheesecake, one of his mother's specialties, and Ilya is following her instructions with the focused attention he brings to things he actually wants to learn, asking questions, adjusting, tasting the batter when she offers and giving a genuine response. His mother explains why she uses a specific technique or ingredient, and Ilya is nodding, and it's so easy. It's all so easy. Shane stands in the kitchen doorway and watches them and feels something that is too large and complicated to look at directly.

"You're hovering," his mother says, without turning around.

"I'm not hovering."

"Go help your father with the gingerbread."

His father, in the living room, has deployed the annual gingerbread house kit with the seriousness it deserves. He looks up when Shane comes in. "The icing is giving me trouble," he says. "The structural integrity—"

"It's decorative, Dad. It doesn't need structural integrity."

"It needs to stand up."

"It's gingerbread."

Ilya appears in the doorway a few minutes later, having been apparently dismissed from the kitchen once the batter was ready. He looks at the gingerbread situation on the coffee table, all the pieces laid out, the icing, David Hollander's expression of focused concern and sits down on the floor next to David without being invited.

"The problem," Ilya says, studying the assembly, "is that you are using the icing as main support before it sets."

David looks at him. "Yes," he says.

"You need to hold pieces in place until the icing is hard. Then it will stand."

"For how long?"

"Three minutes, maybe four. Depending on the room temperature."

David looks at Shane. Shane shrugs. David looks back at Ilya. "You know a lot about gingerbread architecture."

"My mother—" A slight pause. "We built them when I was young. She was very precise about the structural elements."

"A woman after my own heart," David says. He hands Ilya a wall piece. "Hold this."

They hold the walls of the gingerbread house together, David and Ilya, counting quietly, and Shane sits on the couch above them and watches his father and Ilya Rozanov build a gingerbread house on the living room floor while the Christmas tree throws light across them both, and something in his chest makes a sound like a key turning in a lock.

He is so tremendously, hopelessly screwed.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The first night, they are supposed to go to bed at a reasonable hour. This is what Shane intends. He has been very clear with himself about this: his parents' house, reasonable hour, separate rooms, and this intention lasts until approximately 11 PM when Ilya challenges him to Mario Kart on the old Nintendo game console that his parents still have in the living room for reasons that have never been fully explained, and Shane says yes without thinking, because he always says yes to Ilya without thinking, and two hours and one carton of eggnog later they are both on the living room floor with blankets Shane has retrieved from the closet and the Nintendo remote has been put down in favor of doing nothing at all, just lying there talking about nothing in particular.

"This eggnog," Ilya says, reading the carton. "There is no alcohol in it."

"No."

"It would be better with alcohol."

"You are not putting vodka in my parents' eggnog on Christmas Eve Eve."

"Christmas Eve Eve is not a real thing."

"It is in my family."

Ilya looks at him with a look that could be seen as fond and a little incredulous, a look that makes Shane want to look away. "Your family has many specific traditions."

"Most families do."

"Mine did not," Ilya says. "After my mother—" He shrugs, one of those small compact shrugs. "My father was not a celebration person."

Shane is quiet.

"But I like them," Ilya says. "Traditions. I understand the appeal."

"What would yours be," Shane asks. "If you had them. What would you pick?"

Ilya considers this. He's on his back, looking at the Christmas tree, and the lights make moving colours across his face. Shane is not watching his face. Shane is looking at the wall beside him.

"Food," Ilya says. "Something you only eat at that time. So the taste means something."

"My mom does that. She makes her Japanese cheesecake only at Christmas."

"I figured. The way she talked about it gave it away."

"You were paying attention."

"I'm always paying attention," Ilya says, in a tone that is perfectly neutral and somehow not neutral at all, and Shane becomes aware that they are close, on the floor together under a blanket with maybe eighteen inches between them, in a way he's been not-noting for the past two hours.

"What else," Shane says. His voice is even. He's proud of this.

"The coming back," Ilya says. "Going somewhere. Even just coming back to the same place, every year. Knowing it will be there."

Shane thinks about what Ilya's apartment echoes with. He thinks about what it means to go somewhere every year and know it will be the same.

"You can always come here," he says.

He says it before he thinks about it. It just comes out, easy and warm and completely unguarded, and as soon as it does he's aware of how it sounds, how much it contains, and he should probably take it back, add with the team schedule permitting or I mean, if you have nowhere else or obviously only if you want to.

"Okay," says Ilya.

Shane looks at Ilya, before finding the floor so much more interesting.

"Yeah?" he says.

"Yes, it sounds very nice." says Ilya, simply, like there's no discussion to have.

Neither of them says anything else for a while. The Christmas tree cycles through its lighting, and the house is quiet the way houses are at 1 AM, and Shane is aware of Ilya's proximity with his whole body in a way that would normally send him back into his own head at speed, except that he's tired and warm and full of eggnog and the evening has been so good, so unguardedly good, that he can't quite work up the usual defensive machinery.

He falls asleep sometime after that. He doesn't mean to. He just goes.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

He wakes up to pale grey light through the living room windows and the sound of his mother in the kitchen, the particular rhythm of her early morning movements: the kettle, the cabinet, the specific creak of the third floorboard from the door that has always done that. He's under a shared blanket on the living room floor and the Christmas tree is off and Ilya is asleep beside him, barely a few inches away, on his stomach with one arm above his head and his face turned toward Shane’s own.

Shane looks at him for a moment. He allows himself just a moment.

Ilya looks peaceful. The face he makes when he's asleep is very different from the face he makes when he's awake, which sounds obvious but means something specific here, the way all the surfaces of him relax into something younger, something less constructed, and Shane thinks: I wonder if you even know how beautiful you look right now. I wonder if anyone else has seen you like this.

He stops thinking that immediately and gets up very carefully and goes to put the kettle back on before his mother can ask him any questions about the living room floor situation.

She doesn't ask any questions. She hands him a mug of tea and gives him a look that contains several questions in compressed form and then goes back to making breakfast.

The 24th is a good day. Shane will think about it later, in the car, driving back, in replay mode in his brain when something has been important enough to want to keep and it will have a particular texture, the 24th, warm and specific and slightly unreal the way the best days sometimes go.

In the morning, his mother and Ilya make cookies. This is not a thing Shane expected, he expected Ilya to be politely present in the kitchen, helpful in a general way but what actually happens is that Ilya and his mother develop a collaborative dynamic within approximately twenty minutes that Shane can only describe as formidable. They have the same approach to cooking, some shared instinct for precision, and his mother keeps saying things and Ilya keeps finishing them, not because he's performing agreement but because they actually have the same thought, and his mother is pleased by this in the way she's pleased when someone exceeds her assessment of them.

"You know your way around the kitchen," she says, accusingly.

"I had to learn, after my mother passed, but she taught me before." Ilya says. He's rolling cookie dough.

"Shane cannot cook," Yuna says.

"Mom—"

"You can heat things. This is different."

"I can make eggs—"

"Scrambled eggs," she says to Ilya, "is the extent of it. I don't know where I went wrong."

"I was too busy practicing—"

"You were too busy avoiding the kitchen," she says. "He has always avoided the kitchen."

Ilya is smiling at the cookie dough. Shane glares at the side of his face.

"Do not worry, Yuna. I will teach him," Ilya says, casually, like this is a plan he's already made, like it's an obvious and foregone conclusion.

"Will you," says his mother.

"He learns fast. He just needs to be shown once."

Shane opens his mouth and closes it. His mother looks at him with an expression that he is completely unable to read, which means she is thinking several things she has no intention of saying.

"Good," she says, and goes back to the oven.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

In the afternoon, his dad takes Ilya to the garage to see the car he's been restoring for four years, which Shane has heard about exhaustively and cannot believe Ilya is going to find interesting. Forty minutes later they're both still in the garage, his dad talking about an engine or something, Ilya apparently asking follow-up questions. Shane gives up trying to understand this and goes to sit on the porch with a mug of tea.

It's cold. The right kind of cold, the Ottawa dry cold that he grew up in, that doesn't feel like punishment but like clarity. The lake is visible from the back of the property, he can see the edge of it through the bare trees, the flat white of ice that's been frozen for weeks. He thinks about tomorrow. He thinks about skating on the lake with Ilya.

The back door opens. Ilya drops into the porch chair beside him with his own mug, his mother's doing, Yuna Hollander has been pressing hot beverages on Ilya with the persistent warmth she aims at people she's decided to take in and they sit there for a few minutes in the cold, not talking.

"Your father," Ilya says.

"Yeah?"

"He is a very happy man."

Shane looks at him. "What do you mean?"

"He is content, I think." Ilya holds his mug. "With his life. With what he has." He pauses. "I have not known many men like that."

Shane thinks about the men Ilya has known. He thinks about the apartment with no present father in it when Ilya was twelve, about the brother, about everything he knows and doesn't know about where Ilya came from.

"Yeah," he says. "He is. He's happy, they both are. My parents."

"You're like them," Ilya says.

"I'm like my mom, mostly."

"No," Ilya says. "You have your mother's intensity. The precision. But you have your father's quality. The contentment. You could find it if you let yourself."

Shane looks at the lake. "I don't know if I'm very good at contentment. I always want more, need more."

"You're getting better," Ilya says.

Shane turns to look at him. Ilya is looking at the lake, the same direction Shane was looking, and his profile is very clear in the winter afternoon light, and he says this so simply, you're getting better, like it's a thing he's been watching and tracking, like he knows for sure.

"Since when?" Shane says.

Ilya glances at him. "Since September," he says. "Since the twenty-third of September."

Shane counts back. The 23rd of September is about a week after the coffee shop.

"Why September twenty-third?" he says, carefully.

Ilya is quiet for a moment. Then he smiles, and it's the small one, the one with more in it than the bigger version. "No reason," he says. "Just an observation."

He goes back inside. Shane stays on the porch a while longer with his mug and the cold and the lake, and thinks about Ilya counting from September, and the blanket on the living room floor, and his whole body feels like it's been lit from somewhere low and internal.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

On Christmas Eve, they make stockings.

This is one of the Hollander traditions that Shane has always felt slightly self-conscious about explaining to anyone because it sounds childish, outside the context of his parents' house but in the context of his parents' house it simply is, the same way the Advent calendar is and the cheesecake is, and Yuna bring out the materials with the matter-of-factness.

"This one is for you," she says to Ilya, and hands him a stocking; red felt, not matching the others but in the same key, with his name written on it in the looping handwriting that she'd put on Shane's when he was five.
Ilya goes very still.

It's brief, just a second, the stillness, and then he takes the stocking and turns it over in his hands and says, "When did you—"

"When Shane said that you were coming," she says.

Ilya is quiet for a moment longer. Shane watches him from across the room, watches his face do something controlled and careful and then lands somewhere that Shane has never quite seen on him before.

"Thank you," Ilya says.

"Of course," his mother says, which is what she says when she means obviously, don't thank me, this is what you do.

They fill the stockings with the trinkets his mother has procured: chocolate, small objects, wrapped things with notes on them, and Ilya does his own with the slightly careful expression of someone learning the grammar of a new tradition in real time, reading the room, trying to do it right. Shane gives him quiet direction when he needs it. Their hands overlap once over the ribbon, neither of them moving away immediately.

Shane hangs the stockings on the mantel next to the Advent calendar.

There are four of them.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Christmas morning arrives with the same way all past Christmas mornings come, early light and the smell of coffee and his mother's footsteps on the stairs, and Shane lies in his childhood bed and stares at the ceiling for a moment before he remembers that Ilya is in the guest room twelve feet down the hall, and then he stares at the ceiling for a slightly longer moment.

He'd made the rosé situation slightly worse than reported. His mother had declared that since Ilya was a guest and it was Christmas Eve, he should be in charge of the drinks, which was either a genuine gesture of welcome or his mother's revenge, it was sometimes hard to tell, and Ilya had taken this responsibility with the scary confidence of someone who has very clear ideas about what wine does well in what quantities. The rosé had been excellent. There had been quite a lot of it. There had also, at some point, been a suggestion about vodka that Shane should have vetoed and didn't, and by midnight they were all sitting around the dining room table playing cards with a cheerful abandon that his mother would, in the morning, describe as not my best judgment in a tone of voice suggesting she had no regrets.

Shane comes downstairs to find his mother at the kitchen table with both hands around a coffee mug.

"How are you feeling?" he asks.

"Excellent," she says, in the voice of someone who does not feel excellent.

"We should have eaten more before—"

"Yes," she says. "We should have."

His dad emerges from the living room with the stockings. "These are heavy," he says, with satisfaction. "The stockings are heavy."

Ilya comes downstairs twenty minutes later in joggers and a grey Bears pullover and his hair still disordered from sleep, and he stands in the kitchen doorway with slightly squinted eyes and says, "Good morning. Good, coffee," he says as Shane's mother hands him a mug wordlessly, and Ilya sits at the kitchen table and drinks it, and Shane watches this from the counter, Ilya in his parents' kitchen on Christmas morning in his rumpled pullover, his parents moving around him like he's always been there and feels the pang of wanting something you know you can’t have, and wanting it to stay anyway.

They do Christmas brunch instead of breakfast because none of them is ready for Christmas breakfast at 9 AM. His mother makes her French toast, which involves brioche and a very secretive ratio of egg to cream to vanilla that she will not disclose and no one has never been able to replicate. Ilya helps with the prep, which his mother accepts, and there's a moment where they're both at the counter and his mother is showing Ilya the ratio and Ilya is watching with actual attention and Shane has to look away because it's too much to look at directly.

After brunch, they open stockings. His mother had put something in Ilya's, the chocolate, a small pocket notebook in dark green that Shane clocks immediately as something she'd have to have gone out to get specially, and a note that Shane doesn't read but that makes Ilya sit with it in his hand for a long moment.

"What does it say?" Shane asks, later, quietly.

Ilya folds it. Tucks it into his pocket. "That I am welcome here," he says. "Whenever I want."

Shane looks at him. "Oh," he says.

"Yes," says Ilya.

They look at each other for a moment too long. Shane's dad says something from across the room about something Shane couldn’t really hear properly and the moment dissolves, and Shane is left with his heart doing its thing, useless and undisciplined, while Ilya crosses the room to his father.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The lake is everything.

They go in the afternoon, just the two of them, his parents settled by the fire with their own quiet plans, and carry their skates through the tree line to the frozen shore. His dad had checked the ice that morning with the drill, as protocol, and had reported adequate depth. The lake is still and white and the sky above it is pale grey that means more snow is coming, and it's cold enough that their breath comes out in visible clouds, and there is no one else anywhere nearby.

Shane laces his skates sitting on the log that has been on this shore since before he was born, and Ilya laces his skates beside him, and neither of them speaks much. It doesn't need much.

They go out together, and the ice is good, solid, with the slight textured surface of natural freezing, different from rink ice in a way that requires the first few strides to get used to. Shane has been calibrating on this ice for his entire life. He finds his edges without thinking and goes, and behind him he hears Ilya's skates, and then Ilya is beside him, matching his pace, and they skate.

They go around the edge of the lake in easy circuits, and the cold is the right kind, and their breath comes and goes in clouds, and they don't talk much for the first few minutes, just moving. Shane does a crossover turn and Ilya mirrors it on the opposite edge. Shane does a stop, the spray, the pivot, and looks back at Ilya, who is watching him with the skating-attention, the specific way Ilya looks at things on the ice, and then Ilya comes forward and does the same stop two feet in front of Shane, the spray from his blade catching the cold air.

"Figure skating," Ilya says.

"Shut up," Shane says.

"Your turns are exceptionally good."

"I know."

"The eight-year old in the costume was preparing you."

"Fuck off."

Ilya then skates backward, looking at Shane, easy and loose. "Come on. Show me what's good here."

Shane shows him what's good here. There's a section near the northern end where the ice is particularly smooth, where the wind doesn't reach as readily, and he takes Ilya there and they do speed drills between two points they designate with Shane's scarf and Ilya's toque, and Shane wins three and Ilya wins three and they don't resolve the tiebreak because neither of them is ready to go in.

At some point in the afternoon, they're standing in the middle of the lake, having stopped for no particular reason, and the snow has started, just light, the first few flakes of whatever the sky has been building toward, and Shane tips his head back and watches it fall.

"I used to stand like this when I was a kid," he says. "Try to catch them on my tongue."

"Not very hygienic of you, Hollander," Ilya says, laughing.

"Shut up, I was seven."

A pause. Then Ilya tips his head back too, and they stand there together in the middle of a frozen lake in the grey Ottawa afternoon with snow starting to fall, and it's something, it's a lot of something, it fills Shane's chest up so completely that he can't hold it all, and he thinks: if this is all I get, this afternoon, this one afternoon, I think I could live on it for a while.

He looks at Ilya. Ilya is still looking up, eyes closed now, snowflakes landing on his face, his eyelashes, and his expression is something Shane has never seen him wear in public, something fully open and undefended, and Shane watches him for too long and knows he's watching too long and can't make himself stop.

Ilya opens his eyes. They’re looking at each other now.

The snow comes down between them. Two feet of ice between them. Shane's heart is going at a pace Diane would find clinically interesting.

"Cold," Ilya says, quietly. Not moving.

"Mhm," Shane says, his voice gone, decidingly not from the cold.

"We should go in."

"Probably."

Neither of them moves for another long moment. Ilya's eyes are dark in the winter light, fixed on Shane with a steadiness that he doesn't quite know what to do with, and the snow is falling and the lake is silent in all directions, and Shane thinks: now would be the moment, if there were a moment, this would be the moment.

"Shane," his dad's voice, carrying from the tree line. "Your mother's started the duck."

The moment ends before it begins. Shane exhales.

"Coming," he calls back.

He looks at Ilya once more, and Ilya's expression has moved back to something more familiar, easier to read, a slight curve at the corner of his mouth.

"What?" Shane says.

"Race you back to shore." Ilya says as he skates, already leaving Shane behind.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The evening of the 25th is quiet in the way only Christmas evenings are, after the meal and the stockings and the day of it, the particular full-bellied peace of it. His parents go to bed early, which his mother announces with an expression Shane recognises as deliberate, and then it's just the two of them, Shane and Ilya, on the living room couch with the Christmas tree and the fire and no particular need to be anywhere.

They don't play video games this time. They just sit. Ilya reads something on his phone. Shane has a book that he's been working through for two weeks and rarely makes progress in, and he reads four pages and then loses the thread and holds the book and looks at the fire. The stocking with Ilya's name on it is on the mantel. Shane keeps looking at it and looking away.

"Thank you," Ilya says, at some point. He says it without looking up from his phone, which means he's been sitting on it.

"You don't have to thank me."

"Yes," A pause. "But, I want to."

Shane doesn't say anything.

"This was—" Ilya puts his phone down. He looks at the fire. "Good. This was very good."

"Yeah," Shane says. "It was."

"Your family." Ilya is quiet for a moment. "They are different from mine. Good different, they make it very easy to be here."

"They like you," Shane says. "A lot, actually. My mother doesn't cook with people she doesn't like."

"She's not subtle about it."

"No. She never has been."

Ilya smiles at the fire. Shane watches his face and thinks about the lake, the moment on the ice, the two feet between them and the snow falling and Ilya with his eyes closed.

"What are you thinking about," Ilya says, without turning.

Shane's heart skips. "Nothing in particular."

Ilya does turn then, and looks at him, and there's something in it, the directness of it, the shape of Ilya's attention when he's not deflecting anything that makes Shane's breath do something involuntary.

"Okay," Ilya says. Not believing him but not pushing.

They sit together in the fire light for another hour. At some point their shoulders are touching, the couch is large enough that this doesn't need to happen, and Shane registers this in a part of his brain that he keeps locked, and does nothing about it, and they stay like that until the fire burns down to embers and Ilya says I think I'm sleepy, and they go to bed.

Shane lies in his childhood room in the dark and stares at the ceiling and thinks about shoulders, and fire, and a frozen lake, and the note his mother wrote that Ilya put in his pocket.

He thinks: I dismissed the moment on the ice. I told myself it wasn't what it felt like.

He thinks about Ilya's face, eyes closed, snowflakes on his eyelashes.

He thinks: I don't know what he feels. I genuinely don't know.

He puts this thought away. Hard and fast.

He goes to sleep.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

They leave at 5 AM. The house is dark and his parents are asleep and Shane moves through the kitchen quietly, making travel mugs of coffee and consolidating their bags into the front hall, and Ilya emerges from the guest room at 4:50 already dressed, and Shane hands him a coffee and doesn't say anything about this.

His mother has left something on the kitchen table: a container of cheesecake, wrapped carefully, with a note on top. For the road. Shane shows Ilya. Ilya holds the container for a moment and doesn't say anything, and Shane doesn't push.

They load the car in the dark. The snow from yesterday has settled, and the street is quiet, and their breath comes out in white clouds in the cold. Shane writes a note for his parents and leaves it where his mother will find it, and then they go.

The drive back is different from the drive up. The drive up had the energy of going toward something; anticipatory, a little electric. The drive back has a different quality, the comfortable weight of something ending, and Shane sits in the passenger seat and watches Ottawa unspool behind them and feels the ache of leaving somewhere good.

Ilya drives. He'd been firm about this, you don't drive long stretches, your physio said, which is not actually what Diane said, Diane said no sudden braking or aggressive acceleration, but Shane had argued for twenty seconds and then stopped, because Ilya had already started the car, and also because part of him, if he's honest, was glad to sit with his coffee and watch the road.

They talk. Not constantly, there are long quiet stretches where the radio does something low and instrumental and they just move through the early morning dark but they talk. About the visit, in the loose way of people recapping something that was good. His dad's vodka consumption. The structural integrity of the gingerbread.

"Your father," Ilya says, "is better at skating than he tells people."

"He used to play in college," Shane says. "He didn’t pursue anything professional, but when I started playing, he was the one who used to take me to skate on the lake and he would tell me stories about his time playing hockey."

Ilya glances at him briefly.

"He used to come to every practice," Shane continues. "Every single one, from the beginning. He'd bring his coffee and his work files and sit in the stands and do both things." He's quiet for a moment. "I didn't know for years that it was unusual. I thought that's just what parents did."

"Not all parents," Ilya says, mildly.

"No. I know." Shane watches the highway. "I got lucky."

He says it plainly, without ceremony, because it's true and because Ilya knows enough about what another version looks like that the plainness of the statement says more than elaboration would. Ilya hums, a small sound. His hands are easy on the wheel.

"What was your favorite part," Shane asks. "Of the trip."

Ilya thinks about it. Shane watches him think, the slight pause, hint of consideration.

"The lake," Ilya says.

"Yeah?"

"The lake." A beat. "And the kitchen. Your mother teaching me the ratio for the French toast."

"She never taught me the ratio."

"Ah but she taught me," Ilya says, with smug satisfaction.

"Asshole," Shane shakes his head. "Seriously, why did she teach you?"

"Because I asked the right question."

"What was the right question?"

"I asked why she uses brioche instead of plain white bread." He pauses. "She said: because brioche is richer, and this is Christmas, and Christmas should be rich." He glances at Shane. "She's good with reasons."

Shane thinks about his mother in the kitchen explaining herself to Ilya Rozanov. The specificity of it. The particular generosity of being explained to.

"She is," he says.

They cross into the United States just after 9 AM. Vermont again, the same highway they'd driven up three days ago, but going the other direction now and in daylight, which makes it different, more colour, more definition, the bare trees stark against the white.

Shane opens the cheesecake container. "She made too much to eat," he says.

"No such thing."

"You want some?"

"Obviously."

Shane breaks off pieces and hands them across, and Ilya looks at him with his eyebrow raised.

“I’m not feeding you, Ilya. You have two hands.”

“Yes, two hands that I have to keep at the wheel at all times,”

“You’ve been driving with one hand, asshole.”

“You are so mean to me, Shane Hollander. I will tell Yuna you won’t give me her cheesecake.”

“God, you’re such a child.” Shane sighed, defeated. “If you bite my fingers, I swear to God I will eat the rest by myself.”

Ilya laughed but nodded.

Shane raised his hand towards Ilya’s face, carefully shoving the cheesecake to his mouth, mindful not to touch Ilya’s lips. And he does it again, and again. One after the other, Shane’s hand relaxes, no longer thinking about how soft Ilya’s lips feel against his fingers. He’s certainly not thinking about how this looks from the outside, how easy it all feels, the sheer domesticity it portrays.

As Shane eats his piece and thinks about the lake and the stocking and Ilya's face by the fire, and thinks: I know what this is. I have known for three months. I am done pretending I don't know.

He is not going to do anything about it. He wants to be clear with himself about this, he knows, and he is not going to do anything about it, because the space between I like him and he feels the same way is an abyss that Shane cannot assume he can cross, and he will not risk what they have for what he wants. He is too pragmatic for that. Or too afraid. These might be the same thing.

But he knows.

The tension on the lake, those two feet of ice, the snowflakes, Ilya's eyes, he'd told himself it was nothing, in the moment and the hours after, and sitting here now in the morning light he lets himself look at it directly for just a second, and what he sees is: I don't know. Which is different from definitely nothing. There had been something in the way Ilya looked at him, the steadiness of it, and there is something in the way Ilya plans his birthday several months out and constantly considers his diet and tried his best to find the wine his mother likes, and there is something in the blanket on the floor and you're getting better, since the twenty-third of September.

He puts it away. He locks it and turns the key the same way he’s been doing for months.

He is not going to assume. He is not going to act on nothing concrete. He is not going to blow up the best friendship he's ever had on a maybe.

He is, however, completely and irreversibly screwed, and he knows this, and he is almost at peace with it.

Almost.

 · · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Ilya drops him at the physiotherapy clinic at 1 PM, pulling up outside. He takes Shane's bag out of the trunk and hands it over.

They stand on the sidewalk. Boston is grey and cold in the post-Christmas lull, the streets quieter than usual, the leftover tinsel on the streetlights catching nothing in the flat winter light.

"Thank you for driving," Shane says.

"Thank you for the invitation," Ilya says.

A pause. The kind that could go several ways.

"I'll text you," Shane says.

"Yes, okay," Ilya says.

Another pause. Ilya has his hands in his jacket pockets and he's looking at Shane with that look, the steady one, the direct one, the one Shane has been taking note under inconclusive for three months, and Shane looks back, and there is a moment, the same shape as the lake moment, the same two feet of something between them.

"Hollander," Ilya says.

"Yeah."

A beat. Then Ilya smiles, the full one, the one with everything in it and says, "Go to your appointment. You're going to be late."

"Right," Shane says. "Yeah." He picks up his bag. "See you."

"See you," says Ilya.

Shane goes inside. He checks in at the desk and sits in the waiting room with his bag in his lap and watches Ilya's car pull away through the window, and thinks: you are so far gone it's embarrassing.

Diane calls him in. He follows her down the hallway and she asks how the ankle is doing and he says fine, it's fine, and she makes him do the assessment and then pronounces him ahead of schedule again, which is the same thing she's been saying for weeks, but she says it with slightly more conviction today.

"You seem good," she says. "Relaxed. Whatever you did for the holidays, do more of it."

Shane thinks about the lake. He thinks about Ilya's shoulder against his on the couch. He thinks about the two-foot gap on the ice and the snow between them and the thing he will not let himself assume.

"Yeah," he says. "I had a good Christmas."

He orders a cab to go home. The inside is dull, which feels strange after seven hours in Ilya's Mercedes, it feels smaller, less insulated against the outside. He sits at a red light and feels the quiet of the car and the quiet of the ending of the holiday, and the bittersweet weight of coming back to regular life after something that wasn't.

He thinks: I like him, a lot. I like him in a way I have never liked anyone. I am not going to do anything about it because he is my teammate and my best friend and the first person since my parents who has made me feel like being exactly who I am is enough, and I cannot risk losing that.

He thinks: I am never going to stop wanting more than that.

That night, from his apartment, he opens his phone:

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

Shane puts his phone down. He picks it up. He opens his notes app.

I had the best four days I can remember. I keep trying to find the part where it was too much or too fast or wrong in some way I can account for and I can't find it. You were just… there. In my parents' house, in my mother's kitchen, on my lake. You fit like you'd always been there.

I think I might be falling in love with you. Is that fast or stupid? Maybe, but I think I might have been for a while. Once I admitted to myself that I like you, it just felt right.

I'm not going to tell you, obviously. I know that. You have Svetlana and the going out and the girls, you have your life, and I am your teammate and I think your friend, and this thing I'm carrying is mine to carry, and I'm okay with that.

I'm totally okay with that.

(I'm working on being okay with that.)

He closes the notes app. He puts the phone face-down. He thinks about May. He thinks about Ilya planning his birthday. He thinks about I want it to be good for you and everything in between.

He thinks: you are completely and totally screwed, Shane Hollander, and you would not change a single thing.

Chapter End Notes

thanks for reading!

chapter 4 might not be for a while, I am very stuck with it, if I'm being honest. The angst is calling my name and I can't decide if its too early or just right lol

feedbacks/comments are appreciated <3

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Chapter 4: 2011 [All-Stars &amp; Rooftops]

Chapter Summary

It's their first All-Star Game, in a press conference, Shane gets asked a question that he has been dreading since Draft day. Then: a season on fire. A playoff run that ends too soon, and the NHL Awards in Las Vegas, where Shane wins the Rookie of the Year award and finds Ilya on a rooftop and gets closer to what might be the closest thing to the truth of things than he has in months.

Chapter Notes

DONT FORGET TO TURN ON CREATORS STYLE FOR THE MESSAGES (its scrollable!!!)

Hi! Small baby update today BUT I'm already working on chapter 5 because she's a big one (I want to get it up before mine and Shane's birthday because it might be a new low for me if I'll spend my birthday writing fics about gay hockey players but who knows... I might just do it regardless).

Also, the chapter count did increase (this may or may not happen again I need to be stopped).

Anyway, hope you like this one :)

The All-Star Game is in Nashville, and the thing about being named to the All-Star roster in your rookie year is that everyone wants to talk to you about it, which means a full day of press before the skills competition, which means sitting at a long table under lights in a conference room that smells like coffee and ambition while journalists rotate through questions and the communications staff sit at the edges of the room and monitor things with the watchful calm of people waiting for someone to say something inadvisable.

Shane has been media-trained since he was sixteen. This is not unusual, any franchise-level prospect goes through it at some point, the sessions where you learn how to answer the question that's being asked while also answering the question you want to be asked, how to give enough that the journalist feels satisfied while keeping the actually valuable things behind your teeth. He's good at it. He has always been good at it. He learned early that the safer you are in public, the more you get to keep for yourself.

He is sitting next to Ilya at the table, which is intentional, the league is ever eager to see the supposed rival-turned-teammates in any capacity; Hollander and Rozanov (instead of Hollander vs Rozanov). Ilya seated to his left, he has his arms crossed and the slightly bored expression he does at press obligations, the one that reads as arrogance to people who don't know him and that Shane now recognises as Ilya finding the whole enterprise of performing himself for an audience faintly tedious.

The first few questions are easy. Career highlights so far, thoughts on the Boston market, what the coaching staff has brought to their games. Shane answers the way he was trained, clean, considered to a healthy amount, honest enough to seem genuine, but vague enough to say nothing harmful.

Ilya answers the way he does everything, which is with a blunt edge that reads as cocky and is also technically more truthful than Shane's answers, and makes the journalists laugh in a way that slightly startles them because they weren't sure they were supposed to. When he got asked whether playing in North America has changed his style, he thinks about it for one second and says, "No," and then, with the ghost of a smile, "But I have changed it a little."

"Rozanov, Hollander, you were both drafted by Boston, you were projected as the two top prospects of your draft class, and you were being compared to each other before you even met. How has that dynamic played out now that you're actually teammates?"

Ilya glances at Shane, a fast lateral look, and then back at the journalist. "It plays out fine," he says. "Shane is very good. I am very good. We are on the same team. There is nothing difficult about this."

"And you, Hollander?"

"I’d have to agree with him," Shane says. "I think we push each other in the way that makes you better. When you're competing for ice time and line placement with someone at that level, you have to do everything in your power to raise everything. It's good for your game. I think that's.. that's what you want, in a team. People who make you better."

Ilya looks at him sideways. Then, to the journalist: "Hollander is being too nice, too Canadian. What he means is that is very annoying to have someone that amazing in your practice building every day and that he is grateful for the annoyance."

"Is that accurate?" the journalist asks Shane.

"More or less," Shane says, which gets another laugh.

"So no tension? Playing with someone who was supposed to be your direct competition?"

"No tension. I play with a lot of people who were supposed to be my competition," Shane says.

A brief smile from the press row. Moving on.

The questions continue. The skills competition, the Eastern conference, the second-half schedule. Shane answers steadily. Ilya answers with the minimum words required and occasionally less than that. It's going fine. It's routine. Shane has his hands flat on the table and his voice in the measured register that he can hold for hours and he's fine, he is completely fine, and then:

"Hollander, it's been seven months since the draft, and this seems like a good moment to address something that didn't really get talked about much at the time. Being passed over by Montreal. Falling to fifty-seventh after all the projections. You're clearly having a strong rookie season, but what was that experience like, and how are you processing it now?"

The room quiets slightly.

Shane knows this question. He has known this question was coming since June, since the moment he sat in the Marriott bathroom in Los Angeles and watched the clock and told himself he was fine and he has thought about his answer. He has thought a lot about it, internally, turning it over and looking at all the angles. He has his answer ready.

It is in his head right now. He can see it clearly.

He opens his mouth.

What happens is nothing, for approximately two seconds. Not the visible nothing that would be clocked by the cameras, his face is still doing the polished face, his face is fine but an internal nothing, a complete evacuation of the prepared answer from his memory, because the question landed differently than he thought it would, more directly, and underneath the landed question is every draft-day feeling he has spent seven months burying, and the bandaid he had put in place has been there until right now, this room, this table, the cameras, seven months of fine sitting on top of something that was never actually fine.

"What Hollander means to say," Ilya says, beside him, without any particular change in tone, like he's just completing a thought, "is that it's not a very interesting story."

Shane closes his mouth.

"Injuries happen," Ilya says. He's addressing the journalist directly, with the ease of someone who has decided he's speaking now and that this is what's happening. "Shane had a bad ankle and teams panicked. Teams panic about injuries more than they should. This is not new information about how the draft works." He pauses. "Shane is not the kind of person who sits with maybes. He would not be here at this table, at All-Stars if he was spending his time being upset about a thing that is already done." Another pause. "Also, the teams who passed on him are going to have a difficult time watching the next, I don’t know, maybe sixty years of his beautiful career. I think this is consequence enough."

A small, surprised laugh from the press row.

"Is that your professional assessment, Rozanov?"

"Is my factual assessment," Ilya says. "You should watch Shane Hollander. Everyone in this room should watch Shane Hollander. Is all I will say."

He sits back. Crosses his arms again. The bored expression returns like he never departed from it.

Shane looks at the table and then looks at the journalist and says, in a perfectly level voice: "What he said."

More laughter. The session moves on.

Afterward, in the hallway outside the conference room, Shane finds Ilya at the water station and says nothing for a moment, just stands beside him. Ilya pours a cup of water and hands it to him without being asked.

"You didn't have to do that," Shane says.

"I know."

"I had an answer."

"You had the beginning of a panic attack," Ilya says, pleasantly. "You were fine on the outside. Less fine on the inside."

Shane looks at him. "How do you—"

"Your left hand. You had it flat on the table. When you panic, you press it down." He shrugs. "I notice."

Shane says nothing.

Ilya glances at him, sideways, and there is something in it, in the directness, the I notice that does the thing it always does, the low-level disruption to Shane's equilibrium that he has accepted as a permanent condition of knowing Ilya.

"You mean it?" Shane says. "What you said. Not just—"

"I said it because is true," Ilya says. "Besides, when have I said things I don't mean?"

Shane thinks about this. He genuinely cannot come up with an example. "Fair point," he says

He is not looking at Shane now, looking down the corridor instead, but there's a weight to his words. "You are second best player on our roster, Shane. You have been since September. I know this because I play with you, and I pay close attention." He picks up his own cup of water. "Montreal looked at your ankle and decided you were a risk. They were making a financial argument. It had nothing to do with your ability." A beat. "You know this. You have always known this. You are allowed to also be angry about it."

Shane looks at the floor. His throat is doing something.

"I'm not angry," he says.

"I know you're not," Ilya says. "You should be, but you're not. This is one of the things I find—" He stops.

Shane looks up. Ilya has stopped mid-sentence, which he almost never does. His expression is a controlled one.

"One of the things you find what?" Shane says.

A beat. "Interesting," Ilya says, which is not what he was going to say.

Shane hears the space where the word landed and files it very carefully away in the part of his brain labeled do not touch.

"Thank you," he says. "For the press thing."

"It was nothing."

"It wasn't nothing."

Ilya looks at him now, and the look is steady and warm and direct in the way that has been dismantling Shane's composure at intervals for the past five months. "No," he says, after a moment. "It wasn't nothing."

They stand in the hallway, two feet apart, and the communications staff are moving past them with tablets and lanyards, and the venue hum is everywhere around them, and Shane is holding a paper cup of water and looking at Ilya and thinking: thank you for not saying what you were going to say, I don’t want to think about what I would have done or said if you hadn’t stopped yourself.

He doesn't say this. He drinks his water.

"Skills competition in a few hours," Ilya says.

"I know."

"I'm winning the accuracy event."

"You wish. You're not."

"We'll see."

Shane wins the accuracy event by two-tenths of a second. Ilya's expression for the following four hours could generously be described as dignified and less generously as catastrophically offended. Shane does not bring this up. He doesn't need to, the expression says enough, and he lets himself enjoy it, privately and completely, because this is the thing about being in whatever this is with Ilya: even the competitive parts of it feel like something good.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

After Christmas, something shifted.

Shane could construct a narrative for this; he has tried, in the privacy of his own head, to locate the cause and give it a name but the honest answer is that it's not one thing. It's the accumulation of the holiday, the three days at his parents' house, the note his mother wrote, the lake, and what Shane did when he got home: he decided to stop fighting what he knows. Not to act on it, he's still not going to act on it, that decision is as firm as it was in December but to stop spending his energy on the exhausting ordeal of pretending he doesn't feel what he feels.

He does feel it. He is falling in love with Ilya Rozanov. He has been for months.

The energy that gets freed up when you stop pretending something is genuinely remarkable. He hadn't known how much of himself was going into the pretending until he stopped, and what fills that space instead is: hockey. Pure, uncomplicated, ferocious hockey, the kind he played when he was sixteen and hadn't yet learned to be careful about wanting things.

He'd had twelve goals before Christmas. In January, he gets seven. In February, ten, and the analytics people start writing columns about his shooting percentage that Shane reads once and then puts down because they make him feel like a lab result.

There is a game in late January against Buffalo, at home, where Shane produces a hat trick, and the third goal is the kind of goal you remember not because it was technically difficult but because it came from a place of absolute certainty, a read that was complete before the play developed, and Shane goes to the net from the far circle and puts it in off the post with a backhand that he has been working on since Ilya told him about the weight shift in October. He doesn't celebrate it extravagantly. He doesn't need to. What he feels in that moment, the puck going in, the sound of the building, the clean accomplished fact of it, is enough.

In the locker room after, Ilya comes up beside him and says, without preamble, "Your backhand."

"Yeah," Shane says.

"Better."

"I know."

Ilya picks up his water bottle. He's still in his skates, hair damp, and he looks at Shane with the expression that has the thing in it, the warm looking-at thing, and says, "You're doing something different."

"You mean scoring more?"

"Not just scoring. You're more free, I think." He tilts his head slightly. "Something changed."

"Good thing or bad thing?" Shane asks, carefully.

Ilya looks at him. "Very good thing," he says.

Shane looks at his locker. His chest does what it does. "Yeah," he says. "I think so too."

They don't say anything else about it. They don't need to.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

LeClaire moves Shane to the second line in mid-February, him and a winger called Nash who has hands that are criminal and who has enough raw ability to make the combination work, and the move is covered by the sports media with the slightly breathless quality of coverage that has already decided what narrative it's telling. Hollander's breakout. The ankle injury the Voyageurs should regret. Boston's best gamble. Shane reads the headlines when they're sent to him by Gerald and then tries to un-read them, because the fastest way to stop performing well is to start thinking about performing well, and he knows this about himself with the clarity of long experience.

What he thinks about instead is the next game. What he thinks about is the systems, the reads, Nash's tendencies, where the ice opens up. He has always been good at narrowing his field of attention when he needs to, and what he needs right now is very narrow: skate, play, put the puck in the net, don't think about anything else.

He is very good at not thinking about Ilya during games. On the ice they are just players, teammates and competitors, and the part of his brain that runs on hockey has no complicated feelings. Off the ice, after games, it is considerably harder.

After games, Ilya is always there. This is not a metaphor, he is literally always there. Two stalls down, or in the hallway, or at the restaurant they end up at, or on the couch in Shane's apartment at some point in the evening. It has become, over these months, the shape of their life together, and Shane holds it with both hands even as he knows he shouldn't hold it too hard.

There is a February game in Montreal. Shane has known about it since the schedule was released in September, has been knowing about it with a low-grade awareness that sits differently from the awareness of other road games. He doesn't tell his parents, his mother would come, and that is too much, that is the narrative he doesn't want to perform and he doesn't say much about it in the locker room, where a few of the guys have already started cheerfully referring to it as Hollander’s revenge, which it is not, which he doesn't explain because the explanation would take longer than it's worth.

Ilya says nothing about it directly. He says nothing about it until the morning of the game, when he comes up beside Shane in the hotel breakfast line and says, very quietly, "You don't owe them anything."

Shane looks at him.

"Just play," Ilya says. "Like you've been playing. Don't give them more than that."

It is one of the better pieces of advice Shane has ever received. He tells himself, on the way to the arena, just play. He tells himself this during warmups in a building he dreamed about playing in for most of his life, looking up at the banner-hung rafters of the Bell Centre and feeling absolutely nothing that he can't manage. Just play.

He plays. He gets two goals, both in the second period, both of which the Montreal crowd gives the chilly polite applause of people who are watching something they find uncomfortable and are too dignified to boo. Shane does not look into the stands. He does not look for his mother's seat. He goes back to the bench after each one and drinks water and watches the play and thinks about the next shift.

Boston wins 4-1.

In the locker room, Connors says, loudly, "Hollzy, how does it feel to absolutely destroy the team that didn't want you," and Shane says, "Good," flatly, in a tone that closes the conversation, and Connors has known him long enough to let it close.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The Bears make the playoffs. This is not a certainty in January and becomes one by March, the standings resolving into something the organisation has been working toward, and the building when it happens, when the number is clinched on a Tuesday night in April against Tampa, makes a sound that Shane will remember for a long time, the sound of something earned.

They play Buffalo in the first round. It goes seven games. Shane has two goals and four assists and one particularly bad third period in Game 4 where he makes a defensive read that he knows is wrong as he's making it, that leads to a goal against, and he sits on the bench after and has a quiet and internal conversation with himself about the difference between a bad shift and a bad player that he has been having variations of his entire life.

Ilya, on the bench beside him, says nothing. He just sits there, knee pressed against Shane's knee, present and grounding. That is sometimes the whole of what you need: someone who knows you well enough to know that silence is the right offering.

They lose in seven. Shane does the locker room and the media obligations and the exit interview, and LeClaire tells him that he is proud of what he's watching Shane become, and Shane says thank you, and means it.

On the flight back to Boston, Ilya falls asleep in the window seat, head tipped toward the glass, and Shane sits beside him in the aisle and looks at him sleeping in the way he allows himself to look at Ilya sleeping and no other way, and thinks: we'll be back here. We're going to come back and go further, and I'll be there for it, and so will you. We'll do it together.

The thought is warm and unguarded and his.

He falls asleep too.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Shane finishes the season with forty-one goals. Most on the team by three. Gerald calls and says things about contract extensions and market value and a phrase Shane doesn't fully process about positioning for the summer, and Shane says thank you and yes and he'll read the documents. He hangs up and sits at his kitchen table and thinks, not about the contract or the positioning or the market value, but about next September, when the doors open again and the ice comes back and everything resumes.

He tries not to think about the Awards.

He mostly fails.

The coverage is loud. The Calder conversation is everywhere: sports columns, panel discussions, the aggressive confidence of analysts who have decided things months before they're decided, and Shane reads it when he can't avoid it and does not make decisions about how he feels based on it, which is a self-regulatory choice he has to make approximately twice a day.

Ilya is also a Calder nominee. This is also everywhere, and it is deserved. Ilya's season was by any measure remarkable, the kind of season that gets named later, and Shane watches the coverage of it with a mixture of things that characterises most of his feelings about Ilya: pride, and warmth, and the competitive friction underneath, and the thing he doesn't name.

"You're going to win the Calder," Shane tells him, on a May evening on Ilya's couch with the new couch and the walnut legs and the apartment that no longer echoes because it has furniture now, because Ilya made decisions.

"Maybe," Ilya says.

"Definitely."

"You sound confident about this."

"Your season was better than mine from a holistic standpoint. I scored more goals. Your impact on the team was broader."

Ilya looks at him. "You're making a statistical argument for why I should win the award over you."

"I'm making an honest argument."

"You want me to win," Ilya says.

Shane looks at the wall. "I want the right outcome," he says, which is true, and also is not the full truth, because the full truth is that he wants both things; he wants his own name called, and he wants Ilya's name called, and these two desires coexist without canceling each other out, which is the most Ilya-shaped problem Shane has.

"I want you to win the Calder," Ilya says, simply.

"You're not supposed to say that."

"I know what I'm supposed to say," Ilya says. "I am saying what I mean."

Shane looks at him. Ilya is looking back, and the expression has the thing in it, the warm direct thing, and Shane has been looking away from this expression all year and he is very tired of looking away.

They watch television. Their shoulders are touching. Shane does not move away, and Ilya does not move away, and it is warm in the apartment with the summer coming in through the window, and Shane thinks: September twenty-third. He said since September twenty-third. He thinks: me too.

He says nothing.

He goes home at midnight and lies in his bed and does not write in his notes app for once, just lies there and lets himself want things without defending against the wanting, which is new, which is uncomfortable, which is something he is trying.

He falls asleep like that.

It's fine. He's fine.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The NHL Awards are in Las Vegas, and Shane is there because he is a Calder finalist, and Ilya is there because he is up against Shane, and they are staying in the same hotel because the league books the finalists together, and this is either convenient or cruel depending on how you look at it.

Shane's view of it fluctuates.

They fly out together, the same flight, Ilya finding the same itinerary because of course he did and sit in adjacent seats and Shane reads film notes on his laptop while Ilya watches a movie on his phone without headphones until Shane wordlessly hands him the spare pair from his bag, because he always has a spare pair, because this is the kind of thing he knows now: that Ilya never has headphones and will always need them. Ilya puts them in and says nothing, which means thank you.

Las Vegas in June is ungodly. Shane steps off the plane into the heat, Ilya steps off behind him and puts his sunglasses on and looks around at the sky and the flat dry expanse of it all and says, "I like it," which is the only thing Ilya could possibly say about Las Vegas.

"Of course you do," Shane says.

"It's honest," Ilya says. "It knows what it is."

Shane looks at him. "Las Vegas knows what it is?"

"Yes. Most places pretend to be something they aren't. Las Vegas does not pretend."

Shane thinks about this for a second and then thinks: I can't actually argue with that, and gets into the car.

The hotel is enormous in the way Las Vegas hotels are enormous, aggressively so, as though size is an argument and their rooms are on the same floor, seven doors apart, which Shane knows because he walked the floor when he arrived, because he does this in every new space, maps it physically. Old habit.

He puts his suit out and orders room service and does not text Ilya, because the Awards are tomorrow and he needs to be contained, that's the word, contained and focused, not in the pleasant warm chaos of Ilya's orbit for one evening. He needs his head on straight. He watches some film, more out of habit than purpose since the season is over, and eats his dinner and reads for an hour and goes to bed at a reasonable time.

His phone lights up at 11:14 PM.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

The roof has a pool that glows pale blue in the dark, and the Las Vegas skyline is everywhere, and it is warm enough at this hour that Shane doesn't need his jacket. Ilya is already there when he arrives, sitting on a lounge chair near the edge of the rooftop with a beer and his phone down and his eyes on the city.

Shane sits in the chair beside him.

"It's loud even from here," Shane says.

"It's always loud," Ilya says. "It's made of noise."

Shane stretches his legs out. The pool throws light across the concrete and the sky above is orange with the light pollution, no stars visible, and the heat of the day is still in the air even now, pressing against the back of Shane's neck. He can feel Ilya beside him without looking, the warmth, the same way you feel a fire without looking directly at it.

"Nervous?" Ilya asks.

"About tomorrow?"

"Yes."

Shane considers the truthful answer. "A little," he says. "I know that's.. it doesn't matter whether I win. It's an award, it's not—"

"It's okay to care about it."

"I know it's okay."

"Do you?"

Shane looks at him. Ilya is still looking at the city, beer resting on his knee, face lit orange by the skyline. He says it matter-of-factly, the same way he says most things, without the implication that Shane is deficient for needing to hear it.

"You worked hard," Ilya says. "You had a remarkable season. You are allowed to want the thing that rewards this."

"What if I don't win?"

"Then you didn't win," Ilya says. "And you'll win something else later, something better. But I think you'll win."

"You're a Rookie of the Year finalist, too." Shane says. "You should be hoping you win."

"I don't need the Calder to know what kind of player I am," Ilya says. He glances at Shane, briefly. "Neither do you."

They're quiet for a moment. A sound comes up from the city below, something distant and electric, the hum of it.

"What do you need," Shane asks, "if not the award?"

Ilya is quiet long enough that Shane thinks he might not answer. Then: "I need people to play well against. I need the game to be difficult enough to be worth it." A pause. "I need—"

He stops. He turns his beer in his hand.

Shane waits.

"I need things to go the way I want them to," Ilya says, carefully, which is not what he was going to say, and they both know it, and neither of them pursues it.

"Okay," Shane says.

They stay on the roof for two hours. They don't go back to the things they didn't say; they talk about the season, the playoff run, the summer plans, Ilya going back to Russia, and that last part lands in Shane's chest with a dull thud that he absorbs without reacting to. Two months. Ilya will be in Russia for two months and then training camp starts and they'll be back in the rhythm of it, and that's fine, that's normal, it's two months.

Just two months.

At some point their chairs have moved closer together, or Shane has stopped noticing the distance between them, which is the same thing. Ilya's shoulder is near his shoulder and the air is warm and the city hums below them and Shane is aware of everything, every degree of proximity, in the way he's been aware all year.

"You should sleep," Ilya says, at 1 AM.

"You should sleep, too."

"I will."

"Big day," Shane says.

Ilya makes a sound. Then: "Shane."

"Yeah."

Ilya looks at him, turns to look at him directly, not the glance he usually does, a full look, and in the orange Las Vegas light his eyes are very dark and his expression is open in a way that it usually isn't in public, in a way Shane associates with late nights and the living room floor and the lake. Something in Shane's chest prepares itself for something, without knowing what.

"I'm glad we're on the same team," Ilya says.

It lands simply. It's a simple sentence. Shane looks at him and thinks about everything that's true that could follow it, all the weight of the year between them, and he thinks: me too. Me too in ways I can't tell you.

"Yeah," he says. "Me too."

They go back to their rooms. Shane lies in the Las Vegas dark, blackout curtains against the permanent neon, and stares at the ceiling and he does not think about what Ilya's expression looked like on the roof. He does not think about I need things to go the way I want them to. He does not think about proximity or warmth or two months apart or any of it.

He is extremely busy not thinking about it.

He goes to sleep eventually.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The ceremony is everything an awards ceremony is: overlong, well-produced, full of speeches and clips and the industry energy of people who work in a business that is both deeply serious and occasionally silly about itself. Shane sits at the Bears table in his navy suit, the same suit but different occasion, it fits well and he knows it fits well, and his stomach is a controlled situation and Ilya is two seats down with his legs crossed and the expression of a man who is comfortable in formal situations in a way that is both infuriating and, if Shane is being honest, compelling. Ilya is always compelling in a room. He doesn't perform it. He just takes up space in the way certain people do, and the room orients toward him without his having to do anything about it.

Shane has been watching this all year, the way rooms orient toward Ilya. He has been filing this observation alongside everything else he files about Ilya, in the part of his brain marked do not touch, which is getting too crowded.

Ilya catches him looking, briefly, and raises an eyebrow.

Shane looks at the stage.

The table around them is the Bears contingent, Nash on his side, Marlow at the far end, LeClaire at the head. The speeches before the Calder are good; Shane watches them with genuine attention because he is a person who pays attention to things, and because it keeps his hands from going into the habit of pressing flat on the table.

When the presenter begins the Calder introduction, Shane breathes in through his nose. He has his face arranged correctly, he knows it's arranged correctly, he checked in the hotel bathroom before they left. He is ready for either outcome. He has prepared for either outcome with the thoroughness of someone who does not leave emotional contingencies to chance.

The presenter reads the nominees. Marchetti, from Colorado, good player, deserving finalist. Chen, from Toronto, remarkable season for an eighteen-year-old, the kind of player who is going to matter for a long time. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, from the Boston Bears.

Shane Hollander, says the presenter.

There is the beat, one full second of a room holding its breath, the most overused phrase in sports commentary but true here, you can feel the held breath of it and then it hits with more clarity: Shane Hollander.

He stands. His body decides this without a vote. He is aware of the table edge he has to navigate and the other chairs and the fact that his legs are functioning normally, and then he's in the aisle and then he's walking and the sound is enormous, not the bone chilling sound of a goal at home but something warmer, more formal, the sustained applause of a room of people who respect what they're acknowledging.

He gets to the stage. He takes the trophy from the presenter.

Heavy. He knew it would be heavy and it is still surprising, the weight of it, this tangible object that represents.. what? A year? The ankle? The 5 AM practices in Ottawa, his breath in visible clouds over the public rink, the Russian defenseman's skate blade catching him wrong? His mother watching from a seat in the Bell Centre press box she used to imagine him playing in? All of it, maybe. All of it pressed into one object.

He doesn't cry. He is clear about this. His eyes do a thing that he manages, two blinks, controlled, and then he has the microphone and the room and his prepared speech, which he has written and rewritten because he knows how he gets when he's unprepared in emotional situations, the voice, the face, and he will not do that here.

"I want to thank my parents first," he says, and he does not look anywhere specific in the room because he knows if he looks at a camera that's being watched in Ottawa right now he will lose the thread of this. "My dad, who has a spreadsheet for every game I've ever played, and my mom, who taught me what hockey looks like when it means something." He pauses. "I want to thank the Boston Bears organisation for believing in a gamble. I want to thank my coaches and my teammates." He pauses again, briefly looking at where he knows Ilya is. "My team made this year extraordinary, from wins to losses, they welcomed me with open arms. And lastly, I'd especially like to thank everyone who made this year exactly as hard as it needed to be. I don't think I would have been this player without all of it."

He means the ankle. He means Montreal. He means fifty-seventh overall. He means every piece of it.

He looks at the room. He finds the Bears table, and he finds Ilya at it, and Ilya is watching him with an expression that Shane cannot fully parse from this distance, light and steady and something else, something too far away to name, and Shane looks at him for one second and then looks at the presenter because he has a live microphone and he trusts none of the things his face wants to do right now.

He gets offstage. He takes photographs. He answers questions for the media pool: what does this mean, how does it feel, what comes next and he says the right things, the trained things, and he holds the trophy and he smiles and somewhere in all of it he is aware, with a background hum, that Ilya is not where he was.

He goes back to the table.

Ilya's chair is empty.

Shane looks at it. He looks at Marlow, who shrugs. He then looks at Nash, who says, "Bathroom, I think," which is not convincing. He picks up his phone to see if Ilya messaged him. Nothing.

He holds his trophy. He waits out the remainder of the ceremony, talking to LeClaire and to Marchetti, who stops by to offer congratulations that are genuine, and to a woman from the hockey writers' association who wants a comment for the morning edition.

He is present for all of it but his head is several floors up.

The room starts to thin after they’re all herded to the reception. After an acceptable amount of time has passed, after he had socialised to the best of his abilities, accepting shots from vets who saw him alone at the bar, Shane says good night to his coach, who squeezes his shoulder and says well deserved, Hollander, and means it, and then he goes to the elevators and he goes upstairs.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The roof has the pool and the city and the warm June air, same as last night, and it is quiet up here in the way only rooftops are, lifted above the noise. Ilya is standing near the far edge with his hands in his pockets and his back to the door, looking at the city.
Shane crosses to him.

He stops a few feet back. Ilya doesn't turn around, but his shoulders change, the slight shift of knowing someone is there.

"Hey," Shane says.

Silence.

“You left early and you weren’t at the reception. Are you okay?”

“Fine.”

“Okay, do you want company?”

“No.”

Shane was taken aback. He knew he shouldn’t push, but a small voice is telling him to stop holding back. Ilya had told him that he’s allowed to be angry sometimes, but he isn’t angry, more like hurt.

"Seriously, Ilya? I won one stupid fucking award," Shane’s voice is loud and broken, "and you can't even show your face for the rest of the—"

"I know," Ilya says. He still doesn't turn around.

"What?"

"I know. I'm sorry."

Shane stops. The sorry is unexpected. Ilya doesn't apologise automatically, not the way some people do, reflexively, as something that is socially expected from you. When he says sorry he means the contents of the word. Shane's irritation evaporates.

"You don't have to be sorry," he says.

"I left," Ilya says. "Without—"

"It's fine."

"It's not, actually." Ilya turns around. His face is the controlled one, the surface-flat one, but his eyes are something else… tired, and something underneath the tired. "It’s not that you won and I lost, I knew that was going to happen, I wanted it to happen, remember? I was fine in there. And then my phone rang."

Shane waits.

Ilya's jaw shifts. "My father," he says.

"Oh," says Shane.

"I guess he's watching the awards," Ilya says, flatly. "He usually does not call me for anything good."

Shane says nothing. He knows enough about Ilya's father, the pieces, assembled carefully over months to know that a call from him is not a good thing. He does not know exactly how not good, because Ilya has never given him that in full, but the shape of it has been clear for a long time.

"He was—" Ilya stops. Work something over. "He said I embarrassed the family. That I lost to a Canadian—” He paused again. “No. I’m not gonna say the word he used but he was angry. He said that I should come home immediately and work on being better." His voice is level, the controlled-level, the one that costs something to maintain. "He used other words, too."

"Ilya—"

"He said I am pathetic." Ilya says it with the flat precision of quoting someone. "He said this directly."

The city hums below them. Shane takes two steps forward, and then another one, and he stops in front of Ilya, close enough to see the thing Ilya is doing with his face to hold the controlled-level expression, the effort of it and he does something before he can make a decision about whether to do it. He puts his arms around him. Just… that. His arms around Ilya's shoulders, pressing him in, Ilya who is slightly broader and slightly taller and completely, abruptly still under Shane's hands.

"He's wrong, Ilya." Shane says, into the side of his neck. "He's completely wrong. You had an exceptional season and you are an exceptional player and he is wrong."

Ilya is still very still.

"He's also a terrible, terrible person," Shane adds. "Based on available evidence and common sense."

A sound escapes Ilya, not quite a laugh, but in the direction of one. His hands have come up and they're at Shane's back, the lightest pressure, like he arrived there carefully.

"I know this," Ilya says. His voice has lost his controlled edge. He sounds tired in the way that has nothing to do with sleep. "I know he is wrong. I have known this for a long time."

"Doesn't make it easier to hear," Shane says.

"No," Ilya says. "It doesn't."

They stay like that. Shane's face is near Ilya's shoulder and Ilya's hands are on his back and the Las Vegas night is warm around them, and Shane is aware, that this is not a thing he does with teammates, or with anyone, that there is a line between friendship and something else and they are standing somewhere unusual relative to that line, and he finds that he cannot make himself move.

"I'm glad you're here," Ilya says, quietly.

"I'll always—" Shane starts, and stops.

"Yes?" Ilya says.

"I'll always be here, with you." Shane finishes. "You can always… if your dad calls, or anything like that. You can tell me."

Ilya pulls back, just slightly, enough to look at Shane, not enough to break contact. This close, in the dark, his face is very clear. The tiredness is still there, and the thing underneath it is still there, and something else now, something that Shane's brain registers and then cannot categorise.

"You would want to know," Ilya says. Not a question.

"Of course, Ilya." Shane says. "I always want to know."

Ilya is looking at him. He is looking at Shane the way he was looking at him last night on the roof, the full-look, nothing deflected, and Shane's hands are still on his shoulders and Ilya's hands are still at his back and the distance between them has collapsed to something without a name.

"Shane," Ilya says.

"Yeah."

"I need to—" He stops. Something crosses his face, a decision. "There is something I need to tell you."

"Okay," Shane says. His voice is steady. He doesn't know how.

"I have been thinking about this for—" Ilya pauses. "A long time. I know this is—" He seems to be looking for something. The careful choosing of his words, the way he does when he's saying something important and the English has to carry more than he trusts it to. "I know this is complicated. I know there are many reasons why it should not happen. But I—"
He stops.

"Ilya," Shane breathes.

Ilya is just looking at him. Shane’s head is going through a million different scenarios, a million ways to interpret Ilya’s words. He needs to know exactly what Ilya’s saying before he jumps into conclusion.

“Ilya, please, what are you talking about?”

Ilya whispered, barely there. "I need you."

Three words.

They land with the quiet certainty of something that was always going to happen, and Shane's brain goes completely static.
He heard them correctly. He heard them, he knows the difference between you the general and you the particular, the one that means something, and this one means something, and Shane's heart is somewhere north of where it usually lives and Ilya is looking at him, steady and completely exposed in a way Shane has never seen him, and —

"What," Shane says, almost breathless.

"You," Ilya says, a little louder this time. "I need you, Shane."

Shane looks at him for a moment that he will not be able to measure afterward. He registers: Ilya's hands on his back. The close distance. The Las Vegas sky behind him, orange and lightless. The lake. The couch. The blanket on the living room floor.

You. I need you.

He looks at Ilya.

Ilya looks back. Not moving. Waiting.

Oh, Shane thinks.

Oh.

Chapter End Notes

Heyyy… this was not my original plan (though this is more forgiving trust me) so I regret nothing. The next chapter may or may not be angsty. Just trust the process (it will get better… eventually. And as I said on the tags, I can and will make Shane and Ilya communicate better than canon and a lot earlier too).

Another small thing, it's weird for me to end the chapter without Shane's notes app rambles so as like a tiny little treat (something like an apology) for leaving this chapter on a cliffhanger, here's ME rambling:

For Shane’s birthday, Ilya cooked him a nice dinner (in his apartment because he claims that Shane’s kitchen is solely used for smoothies and microwaving) and used his new found love for baking to bake Shane a cake (the whole meal is of course diet friendly). He planned a whole day for them. He started by bringing the cake and balloons to Shane’s place first thing in the morning, surprising Shane after his morning run. Then after they ate brunch (that Ilya got from Shane’s favourite bakery in Ottawa, he had it sent overnight courtesy of Mama Hollander). Then he surprised him with a trip to see capybaras because Shane once mentioned that he’d always been fascinated by them but growing up he was always scared of going to the zoo, so Ilya found a capybara sanctuary and made a donation on Shane’s behalf. When Shane got home after what he deemed to be his best birthday yet, he cried so much from pure happiness and gratitude for Ilya. He also wrote a long ass note about that day on his “For: Ilya” notes file.

Oki, that’s it. As always, thanks for reading 🩷 Feedbacks/comments are always appreciated!

Chapter 5: 2011 [Leaving &amp; Realising]

Chapter Summary

Shane Hollander has royally fucked up. After a whirlwind of a summer away from Ilya, a cottage being built and feelings being ignored, he is forced to face his truth when he meets Rose Landry. And maybe along the way, he learns how to be braver, one step at a time.

Chapter Notes

DONT FORGET TO TURN ON CREATORS STYLE FOR THE MESSAGES (its scrollable!!!)

Hi!! Big chapter today, this was so hard to write for many reasons but I think it's in a good place (it's one of those things that will get worse before it gets better, but I didn't want to go the extremely toxic route but kind of dancing near it, IDK if I accomplished that properly but yeah).

Cried many times while writing, this is why you probably should not be projecting onto the characters that you write but oh well. Also I am so sorry to my good friend Ilya Rozanov but this can't be as bad as tuna meltdown, right?

Anyway, hope you like this one!! Enjoy :)

"You," Ilya says.

"I need you."

Shane stands there.

He heard it the first time. He knows he heard it. But the thing about Shane Hollander is that he has been constructing arguments against his own perception for so long that hearing something, even something clear, even something said with the quiet certainty that Ilya brings to things he has decided is not the same as believing it. He needs confirmation. He is the kind of person who checks twice and then checks again and then sits with the check.

"What do you mean," he says.

Ilya looks at him. The open expression is fully present now, and in the Las Vegas light there is nothing between them, no deflection. Just Ilya, looking at Shane, saying the thing he has apparently been trying to say since September.

"I think you know what I mean, Shane," Ilya says.

"I need you to say it clearly," Shane says. His voice is level. He genuinely does not know how.

Something moves through Ilya's expression; not irritation, not impatience, something closer to the particular steadiness of someone who has been waiting long enough that waiting one more moment is simply a continuation of the same thing. Then Ilya says, unhurried. "You. Shane. I need you."

Shane stands there and receives this.

You. Shane. I need you. Direct. He is being the opposite of usual careless self.

And then Ilya closes the distance between them, and kisses him.

Shane's brain does something he can't describe, the filing system going down, all the categories he has been maintaining for nine months: teammate, friend, rival, person I am not in love with, person I am not going to do this with, dissolving at the point of contact. It’s not a tentative kiss. It is the kiss of someone who has decided, who is not asking a question but answering one, and what Shane registers in the two seconds before his brain fully processes what is happening is: warmth, and the devastating accuracy of something real landing differently than you imagined it would, and the fact that Ilya is kissing him and it is exactly right.

He kisses back.

Then like a switch was flicked, he stopped abruptly.

He takes a step back. His hands come off Ilya's jacket, which he did not know they were on, and the air between them where Ilya was is cold by comparison, and his back finds the low wall at the roof's edge and he stands there and breathes.

"You don't mean this," Shane says.

Ilya goes still.

"You can't—" Shane stops. Starts again. He can hear what his voice is doing and he cannot fix it, which is terrifying. "You can't do this to me, Ilya."

"Do what, Shane?" Ilya says, carefully.

"You had a bad night. Your dad called and you needed.. you needed something and I was here and I get that but—"

"That’s not what this is."

"You don't—" Shane presses the back of his hand to his mouth for a second. He takes it away. "You don't know what you're asking of me. You don't know what it would do to me if I’m wrong about what I’m thinking this is. I can't—" He exhales. "I can’t just be something you reach for because it's two in the morning and you've had a terrible night and you just needed someone—"

"Shane." Ilya's voice is very quiet.

"No. Please. I can't, Ilya." Shane says. "I'm sorry. I can't."

He goes inside.

He walks to the elevator and he gets in and he presses the button and he stands there and watches the numbers change and thinks about nothing, the way you think about nothing when you are not capable of thinking about anything, when the thing that's happening is too large to process and you have to wait for your brain to catch up to the event.

He gets to his room. He lays at the edge of his hotel bed.

They kissed. Ilya said you, I need you and pulled him forward and kissed him and Shane kissed back.

He puts both hands over his face.

It felt real. It was real. He knows it was real. He knows the difference between the version that lives in his head and the version that just happened, and the version that just happened was better than the version in his head, which he did not think was possible.

He stood at the edge of the best thing that has ever almost happened to him and walked away from it.

He does this, he is aware of this, it is a known quality, the way Shane Hollander handles things that matter too much, which is to find the exit before the thing can be taken from him but knowing it doesn't help. He knows it and he did it anyway, same as always, same as every version of himself going back to high school and probably before.

He lies there and thinks about the last year. He thinks about every text, the furniture and the borscht and the birthday planning and one of my favorite things about you and since September. He thinks about the lake, snowflakes on Ilya's eyelashes. He thinks about Ilya's hands on his back on this rooftop not twenty minutes ago, the careful pressure of them.

He thinks about the fact that Ilya kissed him and it was certain and warm and completely, devastatingly right, and he walked away from it and said you can't do this to me.

The problem, the thing he keeps arriving at, from every angle, is that it could still be wrong. Not Ilya lying. He doesn't think Ilya was lying. But Ilya had a terrible night, his father called and said pathetic with deliberate precision, and Shane was there, warm and present, and maybe… maybe the feeling is real but the timing is his father's doing, the need to push back against something, and if Shane had accepted it and it turned out to be the bad-night version rather than the year-long version, if he had let himself have this and then lost it.

He cannot survive losing it.

He cannot lose Ilya and also have had him first. That is the exact shape of the thing he cannot do.

At 2:30 he gets up, puts on shoes without lacing them, and takes the elevator to Ilya’s floor. He stands in the corridor outside Ilya's room. The number on the door. He blinked and suddenly his hands were reaching over to knock but as soon as he saw his own hand, he suddenly jerked away, finally aware of the circumstance. He doesn’t knock, he just stands.

He stands there for four minutes.

He does not knock.

Then like the coward that he is, he leaves.

He goes back to his room and changes his flight and books the 7:15 to Boston and sets an alarm for 5:45, and he lies down without taking his shoes off, and he does not sleep.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

At 6:02 AM he is in the lobby with his carry-on and the Calder Trophy and his shoes finally laced. He does not go back to Ilya’s floor.

In the cab, his phone buzzes.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

That night in his bed, he does what he knows best. He writes to Ilya.

You kissed me. I kissed you back. And then I said you can't do this to me, and you said I'm not doing anything to you, as though being wanted by you is something being done to me, as though you are the problem here and not the nine months of me building walls and calling it pragmatism and then I walked away and went to an airport and got on a plane and sent you one text in the morning and that's where we are now.

I am going to explain to you, in this note that you will never read, exactly why I did that:

I don't know. I don't know why. I know all the reasons I told myself, the bad night, the fear of being wrong, the way I have built protection and called them caution but none of them feel like reasons right now. They feel like excuses for the thing I actually did, which is: you told me you needed me and I left.

You said I shouldn't have pushed. You apologised. That's the part I keep coming back to, that you apologised for telling the truth, that you said sorry for being brave enough to say the thing out loud when I have been absolutely incapable of doing the same thing for nine months.

I am terrified. I want to be honest about that, even here, even in a note that no one will ever read. I am genuinely, completely terrified, and not of you, I could not be afraid of you, that's not what this is but of being wrong. Of letting myself have this and finding out that the version of it in my head is bigger than the version that exists in real life. I have been wrong about the most important things before. I thought Montreal was certain. I thought the plan was certain. And then eleven seconds on a bad ankle and the plan was gone and I was fifty-seventh and I'm still not… I'm still reassembling what I thought the story was.

I cannot be wrong about you the way I was wrong about that. There is no recovering from it.

You were brave at the roof but I can’t yet. Not until I have figured out how to accept whatever you feel for me, because I’m not sure I can take it if we really are in two different places, in whatever shape that might mean. So I can’t be brave like you, yet.
I don't know how to be that person yet.

I am sorry. I know you can't hear it. I'll keep saying it here until I figure out how to say it to your face.

I hope you're okay. I hope Russia is okay. I hope your father leaves you alone for once.

I miss you already and you've been gone for six hours.

He closes the note. Willing for sleep to finally find him, secretly hoping this is all a nightmare that he will wake up from and that he hadn’t fucked up the best thing’s that had ever happened to him.

He knows it's wishful thinking.

He is fine. He will be fine.

He is lying to himself. He knows he is lying to himself. The lying is the only available option right now and he is going to use it until something better comes along.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The messages keep coming, spaced out, and he turns the phone face-down each time. Not because he doesn't want to read them, he wants to, badly, in the way you want things you've decided are bad for you but because he doesn't know what to say back, and sending nothing feels less dishonest than sending something that sounds like nothing is wrong when everything is wrong.

He reads the previews. He can't stop himself from reading the previews.

How are you doing? June 27th.

Are you okay? July 3rd.

I miss you. July 19th.

That last one sits in his chest for days. Ilya misses him, he misses Shane too. Ilya said it to him in a text that Shane is reading in preview form in a parking lot outside a Home Depot in Ottawa, because he is buying cabinet hardware with his mother for their kitchen renovation, and he has to put his phone in his pocket and go back inside and help choose between brushed nickel and matte black and talk to his mother about fucking windows, and he does all of this correctly and efficiently, and in the car on the way home he is so quiet that his mother says, without looking at him: "You can talk about it if you want."

"Nothing to talk about," he says.

She doesn't answer.

He spends most of the summer in Ottawa. This is not unusual, the plan has always been to go home in the off-season, his apartment in Boston still feels more like a base camp than a place that belongs to him, and Ottawa is his parents and the lake and the familiar weight of a city he knows but this year there is something else drawing him back. Something he has been thinking about since December, since the porch at his parents' house and the conversation with Ilya about coming back to the same place every year and knowing it will be there.

He wants a cottage.

He knows, somewhere he isn't fully examining yet, why he wants it right now and why it needs to be on the lake. He tells himself it's a smart investment. He tells himself he's been in the NHL and doing sponsorships for a year and it's time to put his money somewhere real. He tells himself a lot of things. The thing he doesn't tell himself, the one he files under do not touch: he is building something that can always be returned to because someone he loves told him in December that he needs a place like that, and Shane, who cannot say the thing out loud and cannot be in the same city and cannot do anything useful with what he feels, can do this. He can build something. He can make something real that is not a feeling, that does not require Ilya to confirm it, that will exist regardless of whether Shane ever manages to say any of the things he's been writing in the dark.

He starts the planning process in July. His parents' realtor knows the area. There's a property on the north side, half a kilometer from his parents’ summer cottage, three acres of mixed forest running down to the waterline, cleared on the lakeside, private with an old cabin that needs gutting and rebuilding rather than renovating. He looks at it twice before he puts in an offer.

He does not tell Ilya about the cottage. He does not tell Ilya much of anything, because he is not talking to Ilya, which is a situation he has created and which sits in his chest like a stone he carries everywhere.

He texts Ilya once more, in late July, when he has run out of reasons not to:

Shane: Hey. I know I've been quiet. Sorry about that. Hope Russia's treating you well.

He reads Ilya's response: It's fine. Russia is fine. Hope you’re fine. See you in September, and the three fines in a row, so unlike Ilya, tells him something he already knows but needs to be confirmed: Ilya has also given up on this conversation. Ilya is also just waiting for September, for the safety of the professional context, for the wall.

Shane reads it and puts his phone in the kitchen drawer and does not take it out for three hours.

He opens his notes app.

I know you've decided that you need to distance yourself for the friendship and you're protecting it. I know that's because of me.

I am so tired of being the reason things are careful between us.

I'm going to fix it. I know I keep saying that. I need to say it one more time before September so that it's on record somewhere: I'm going to fix it. I just need to figure out how first.

He closes the note.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

He goes back to Boston in late August. Training camp starts in September and he needs to be settled before it does, needs the gym, the ice time, and the routine of preparation that keeps his brain from eating itself. He drives back alone, which he fills with a podcast about urban planning that he got three episodes into in June and never finished, and the drive is fine, it is a drive, everything is fine.

He is in his apartment, unpacking, when a text comes in from Ilya.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

He sees Ilya on the first day of camp. This is inevitable: same rink, same locker room, same everything, and Shane has prepared for it with the thoroughness of someone who has spent two months thinking about how it's going to go.

It goes like this: Ilya walks in, and Shane looks up from his stall, and Ilya meets his eyes briefly and does a nod, the professional nod, the one that means I see you, we're fine, let's do this and then he goes to his stall two doors down and they do not speak until Shane says, in the hallway after practice, "Hey. Can we talk?"

"Okay," Ilya says.

"Last time, in Vegas," Shane says. "I handled it badly and I wanted to—"

"No," Ilya says.

Shane stops.

"It’s fine, you don’t have to explain, Hollander." Ilya says. His voice is pleasant. His face is pleasant. He looks like someone who has made a decision about how this conversation is going to go and has already executed on it. "It was a strange night. It’s done. Don't worry about it."

"Ilya—"

"Hollander." Something shifts in the pleasantness, just briefly, a flash of something that is not pleasant and then it's gone. "It's fine. We're good."

He picks up his bag.

“See you tomorrow," he says.

He walks away.

Shane stands in the hallway and watches him go and thinks: he's done. He's decided that the friendship is the line and he is protecting it. He can see the logic of it. He can see, from Ilya's side, what it looks like: Shane ran, said you can't do this to me, barely any communication inside those three months, and the conclusion you reach from those points is not a flattering one.

Ilya is protecting himself. Ilya is being smart.

Ilya, who is brave about most things and careful about the things that matter to him, has made a calculation: I pushed too hard. He ran. I will not make him run again.

It’s absolutely the correct response to Shane's behaviour.

It is also gutting.

He goes home and sits on his couch in the dark for about an hour without turning any lights on, and then he makes dinner and watches film and goes to bed, and in the morning he gets up and goes to practice and is fine.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The wall settles in over the following weeks. It is not dramatic, there is no confrontation, no declared distance, it’s just the slow accumulation of absences. Ilya doesn't come to find him after practice. Ilya doesn't text first. Ilya is generous and easy and present in the locker room, the same person he is with everyone, and Shane is included in the same way everyone is included, which is fine, which is completely fine, which is also the thing that makes it hard to sleep some nights. He is simply contained. He has drawn a line around himself and is making it known.

Shane waits. He gives it two weeks, because he is also cautious, also scared, also doing the thing they are both doing, waiting for the other person to close the gap while simultaneously widening it. He reaches out twice. Once after practice: a few of us are going to that Thai place on Tremont, you in?, to which Ilya says can't tonight without explanation, without a counter-offer, without the how about Thursday that would have arrived automatically last year. Then once on a text, later in the week, a Tuesday evening: Haven't seen you much lately. To which Ilya responds, after an hour: busy week. How's the ankle?

The ankle. Shane reads that twice. They have been on the same ice for days and Ilya is asking about the ankle he recovered from months ago.

So yes, he and Ilya are fine. He cannot say this enough or convincingly enough, to himself, in his head where the claim keeps coming back with its edges showing. At practice they are fine, the on-ice chemistry, if anything, has sharpened, both of them carrying a year of the other's tendencies in their skating brains, and there are moments during drills where Shane makes a play and Ilya is already where the play needs him to be, no communication required, and it is so seamless that it aches. Their hockey is untouched. The game between them still works. It is everything outside the rink that has the wall around it.

He stops reaching out.

He tells himself this is giving Ilya space. He tells himself this with great conviction for about four days and then he recognises it for what it is, which is doing the same thing Ilya is doing but calling it something more gracious, and neither of them is going to close the distance from opposite sides of the wall, and he knows this, and he does not know how to fix it, and so it continues.

He goes out.

This is the version of self-destruction available to him: not drinking too much, not doing anything genuinely harmful, just occupying himself with the social landscape he has been declining for a year. Ashworth and Nash do a Friday thing and he says yes, which surprises Nash enough that he asks twice. Shane goes. It’s loud and he’s faking being present and it works for about three hours, which is long enough, and then he goes home.

He is there for the second one when he sees Ilya.

Not with their group but across the bar, a different cluster with different energy. Ilya with his arm along the back of a booth, turned toward someone, and the someone is a woman with dark hair and she is laughing at something and Ilya is looking at her the way he looks at things he finds interesting. Shane watches this for approximately four seconds before he looks away.

He drinks his beer. He listens to Nash finish the story he was telling.

He goes home at eleven and lies on his couch without sleeping and thinks: he deserves that. He deserves easy and good and someone who doesn't run away from him. He thinks about the girl with the dark hair and the way Ilya looked at her and he tells himself, very firmly, that this is a good thing, that Ilya being happy is a good thing, and he even mostly believes it, and it still makes him feel like something is sitting on his chest.

He opens his notes app.

I saw you tonight. You were with someone and she was laughing and you looked easy with her, easy in the way you used to be easy with me, and I think the most honest thing I can tell you is that I am glad for you and I am also having the worst night I've had since June.

I know that's not fair to say. I know I don't get to have that feeling after what I did. I know exactly what I gave up and how and when.

I just miss you. I miss you so fucking much. I miss you in a way that doesn't feel like missing a teammate or a friend. I miss the Sunday evenings and the texts at eleven PM about whatever you’re watching, and us cooking even though I’m really no help in the kitchen. I miss the version of us that doesn't have this wall in it.

I miss my best friend. I miss you, Ilya.

I’m so sorry.

He closes the note.

He eventually sleeps.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Rose Landry is in Boston in October filming something Shane has a vague awareness of, a studio movie, something with a chase sequence that has closed off two streets near the waterfront for a week. He knows about her the way he knows about most things outside hockey: peripherally, from cultural osmosis. She's American. She's in things. She is, by most accounts, very good at being in things. He has seen the poster for the film currently making his commute slightly longer, her face enormous on a waterfront hoarding, and he has thought nothing about it.

He meets Rose Landry in October, in the way you meet most people you end up grateful for, which is by accident and at the wrong time of day.

She is at the coffee shop near TD Garden, his coffee shop, the one Ilya found first with its correctly spelled lattes, which he still goes to even though going to it has acquired a kind of secondary ache that he chooses to ignore and she slides into the seat across from him uninvited and puts a Bears cap on the table between them and says, "I think this is yours, you dropped it by the door."

He looks at her. She looks at him.

"Hi," she says.

"Hi," he says.

Rose Landry is a lot, in the sense of presence. She has the quality of someone who has been looked at their entire life. Strawberry blonde hair, paint on her wrist, and the frank, unhurried attention of someone who has nothing to perform.

"You're Shane Hollander," she says.

"Yes, you know who I am?" he says.

"Of course, I’m a fan."

"You are?"

"My dad loves hockey, and made us watch it growing up. Hockey is big in our household." she says. "We’re from Michigan but when you won the Calder he was pleased about that. He tolerates Boston because of you."

"Uh, thanks? I don’t really know what to say,"

"You’re not what I expected, Shane Hollander. Oh, I'm Rose, by the way."

"I know who you are," he says.

"Obviously," she says, slightly laughing before her eyes widened in panic. "I’m joking, by the way, in case that wasn’t clear."

Shane chuckled at that. "No, yeah. I got that."

She looks at him. "You look like someone who's trying to figure out how to end this conversation."

He blinks. "I wasn't—"

"It's okay," she says. "I'll make it easy. You're busy, I'll go." She stands, picks up her coffee. "Nice to meet you."

He thinks about letting her go. He thinks about the empty table and the coffee and the morning. He thinks about how he has been having a lot of mornings alone lately.

"You can stay," he says. "If you want."

She looks at him for a moment. Then she sits back down.

They have coffee four times in the first two weeks, which turns into going to a restaurant she found near his neighbourhood, which turns into a Sunday afternoon at his apartment with takeout containers and a comfortable nothing. It is easier than most things have been lately. She doesn't need anything from him, doesn't need him to be a hockey player or a public person or a version of himself shaped for a particular audience.

Shane realised as they hung out more that she is easy company. He had forgotten, in the year of Ilya at the center of everything, what it is to spend time with someone where the stakes feel manageable, where the evening is just an evening and not something he's going to go home and analyse for hours. With Rose, things are simply what they are. She is funny and frank and she talks about her work with the same attention that Shane talks about hockey, the technical pleasure of someone who genuinely loves what they do, and they fall into an easy rhythm.

It’s a random Wednesday afternoon three weeks into November. Rose has a day off from filming and Shane has a late practice the next morning, and they are in his apartment, this has become a thing, the afternoon hang outs when they can, takeout containers and a comfortable nothing and Rose is sitting cross-legged on his couch going through photos from the week's shoot on her phone while Shane reads. It is a good afternoon. It is the kind of afternoon he has not had in a while, the uncomplicated kind.

"Can I say something?" Rose says.

"Sure," he says, still focused on his book.

She looks at him with a direct look. "I can't believe the internet thinks we're dating," she says, "when you are absolutely setting off my gaydar right now."

Shane looks up from his book.

A beat of silence.

"You think I'm... gay?" he says.

Her expression does something rapid and alarmed. "Oh god," she says. "I'm so sorry, I completely assumed, I should not have, fuck, I didn't mean to—"

"No, I—" He puts the book down. He sits with the question, actually sits with it, in the way he has been not-sitting with it for a long time. He turns the word over and holds it against himself and sees how it lands. "I mean, I do like men," he says.

Rose is very still.

"I've never really thought about the label before," he says.

She looks at him carefully. "Okay," she says. "That's okay."

"Is it a thing that's obvious? That I—"

"No, not obvious. Don’t worry. I don’t know, I think it’s just the way you hold yourself sometimes. And you've never mentioned anyone you're seeing or interested in whenever I would bitch about my shitty ex-boyfriends." She pauses. "There's also the way you talk about—" She stops.

"About what?" he says.

"Someone," she says. "In passing. You've mentioned someone, several times, and you always change the subject almost immediately, like you remembered you were doing it."

Shane feels his face heat up. "I don't—"

"The Ottawa trip you keep referring to," Rose says. "The person who knows the right wine for your mother. The person who tried takes your crazy diet into account every time you go out to eat. The person who—"

"I don't do that," Shane says.

"Shane," Rose says, gently.

He looks at the coffee table.

"You don't have to tell me," she says. "You don't have to tell me anything. But I think you've been carrying something very heavy, and I think the label question might actually matter to you right now, and I'm your friend, so I'm asking." She waits. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Yeah," he says. He looks at the window. "There is someone," he says.

"Okay," she says.

"It's complicated. It's… I fucked up and it's been a mess for months and I—" He stops. He looks at his hands. "He told me he needed me and I left."

Rose is quiet for a moment. "He," she says.

"Yes, he," Shane confirms.

She nods slowly. "What do you mean you left? Like you left him mid-conversation or?"

"I got on a plane at seven in the morning. We were supposed to fly back together."

"Oh, Shane."

"I know," he says.

"Why?"

"Because what if I was wrong," he says, and then the whole thing starts coming out, not in order, not cleanly, but in the way things come out when they have been held too long, the shape of it if not all the details. The year of not-saying. The draft day and the ankle and the Montreal plan that fell apart. The accumulated months of knowing what he felt and deciding the safest option was to carry it alone. About Vegas and the rooftop and the kiss and the leaving.

Rose listens to all of it. She doesn't interrupt, doesn't jump to conclusions, just takes it in.

"When did you know?" she says. "That you liked him."

"I don't know exactly," Shane says. "There wasn't a singular moment. I didn't have a moment, you know. It was more like..." He looks for the word. "Accumulation. I kept finding out new things about him and every new thing made it worse."

"Worse," she repeats.

"Not worse like that. You know what I mean."

"I do," she says. "Keep going."

"He's good at paying attention," Shane says. "That's the thing I can't.. he notices things and he remembers them and he acts on them. He likes eating out, and every single time he invites me to eat out, the restaurant always has something for me to eat, no matter what. He started planning my birthday this time last year, my birthday is in May. He is so forward without being too much, sometimes I think he’s cheating, like he has a Guide to Shane book somewhere in his back pocket. He—" He stops.

Rose is looking at him with an expression he can't fully read. "Shane," she says.

"What?"

"You have got it bad."

"Yeah, I know," he says. "I'm aware."

"He does too. Like, genuinely, I would bet my new shitty movie contract. I mean the buying a new car alone—"

"I’m telling you he didn’t really buy it for me—"

"Only an insane person who is helpless in love would be doing that. What, you invited him and then a week later he coincidentally buys a new car that is, as you said, something he would never really buy. So you keep telling yourself whatever you want, babe. But I know you idiots are crazy about each other.”

"Shane. He said for a long time," she continues, when he didn’t say anything.

"Yes."

"And your read on that was: bad night, probably doesn't mean it."

"I—"

"Shane," she says. "Nobody says for a long time because they're having a bad night. A bad night is a bad night."

He looks at his hands.

"I know," he says. "I know it was real. I think I always knew it was real. I was just more afraid of being right than of being wrong."

She tilts her head. "Explain that."

He tries. He tries to find the right words for his fear: that being wrong about Ilya would be bad, yes, would be painful, but it would be the same pain he already knows, the pain of wanting something and not having it, manageable, survivable. But being right, letting himself have it, letting himself believe and then losing it, for any reason, would be something else entirely. Something he doesn't have a name for because he's never been on the other side of it.

"Being right means it can be taken away," he says. "Being wrong means I never had it."

Rose looks at him for a long time.

"That," she says, "is the most heartbreaking thing anyone has ever said to me, and I have filmed a lot of heartbreaking things."

"Is it stupid?" he says.

"No," she says. "It's very human. It's also not a strategy for anything, but it's not stupid." She pauses. "Is he—" She stops. She looks at him carefully. "You don't have to answer this. Is he.. does he know what he is? Like you're figuring it out?"

Shane is quiet for a moment. "I don't know," he says. "I genuinely don't know. He's…where he's from, it's complicated. What it means to be who he is, in Russia, with his father, with—" He stops. "I don't know what it looks like from inside his life. I know it's not the same as my life."

Rose nods. "That's a real complication," she says.

"I know."

"It doesn't mean—"

"I know," he says. "I know it doesn't mean anything is impossible. I just—" He rubs the back of his neck. "Even if I fix what I did wrong. Even if I say everything I should have said. There might be things outside both our control."

"There might be," Rose says. She doesn't soften it, which he appreciates. "That's true."

"And I'm scared of that too," he says. "A different kind of scared."

"Yeah," she says.

They sit with that for a while.

"Okay," Rose says. "I want to come back to something."

"Okay."

"You like men," she says.

"Yes."

"Just men, you think?"

He thinks about this honestly, turns it over, holds it against himself the same way he did the first time. "I think so," he says. "I've never… I've never felt anything like this for anyone who wasn't—" He stops. "Yeah. I think so."

"Gay," she says. Just the word. Handing it to him.

He tries it out. He says it in his head first, aimed at himself, then says it quietly out loud. "I’m gay."

"Yeah?" she says.

"Yes, I think so, probably," he says.

"How does it feel?"

He thinks about it. "Like something I've known for a long time that I finally have a word for," he says.

"That's usually how it goes," she says.

"Does it get less—" He gestures.

"Scary?" She tilts her head. "No. But the kind of scary changes. It gets more like yours. Less like something happening to you."

He nods.

"Now, the only thing left," she says, "is whether you're going to do something about your situation."

He looks at the table.

"I'm going to do something about it," he says, rather unconvincingly.

She gives him a look.

"I mean it," he says.

"I know it's complicated," she says. "I know there are real things in the way. I know you can't just walk up to him and—" She pauses. "But Shane. You have been in love with this person for over a year. At what point does the fear cost more than the thing you're scared of?"

He looks at the window.

"December," he says, quietly. "I'll tell my parents first. And then I'll figure out how to tell him."

Rose looks at him. "Your parents don't know?"

"I haven't told anyone except you," he says.

She is quiet for a moment, and the quiet has a warmth to it. "Well, you didn’t technically tell me, more like I told you," she says. "But, okay, December. I'll hold you to it."

"I know you will," he says.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The weeks between November and December are full in the way weeks are when you are working and living and carrying something you've finally named. Shane plays hockey, well but not his best, not the second-half-of-last-year version, but competently, the way you play when you're not quite inside it but you know the mechanics and he goes to practice and the gym, and he texts Rose, and he does not text Ilya.

He sees Ilya every day. He says good morning in the locker room and they talk about systems and line combinations and the particular defensive-zone issue LeClaire has been addressing in practice, and it’s professional. Correct. It is the voice of two people being careful with each other and both of them knowing it.

He sees Ilya, once in late November, in the same bar he saw him in September. Different girl this time: blonde, laughing loudly at something, and Ilya is leaning toward her with his elbow on the table, the easy posture of someone who is having a genuinely good time. He looks up, briefly, and meets Shane's eyes across the room for a half-second, and then looks back at the girl without any change in his expression.

Shane drinks his beer. He talks to Connors about something he will not remember afterward. When he goes home at eleven he sits on his couch and stares at the wall and thinks: good. Good, he's happy. He deserves that. You made sure he needed to look for it somewhere else, so be glad he found it.

He opens his notes app.

You were with someone again tonight. She was laughing. You looked like yourself. The real version, the easy one that I got all last year.

I want to tell you that I'm glad for you and mean it without anything else underneath it. I want to get there. I'm not there yet.

I'm going to fix it. After Christmas. I keep moving the date and this time I mean it. Hopefully.

I'm gay, I think. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. I think I've always known but I didn't need the word until you made the question urgent. I want to tell you that first. Before anything else. I want you to know that this is who I am and that the reason I know is you.

I'm going to tell my parents first. And then I'm going to tell you everything.

He closes the note. He goes to bed.

He lies in the dark and thinks about the girl's laugh carrying across the bar, and Ilya's easy posture, and the half-second their eyes met. He thinks about the wall and who built it first and whether walls that tall can be climbed.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

They are paparazzi'd on a Thursday in early December. He has been expecting it, Rose is extremely famous and his own fame has risen enough that the combination is interesting to people and when the photos appear on the Friday morning on two celebrity-adjacent sports accounts, he reads them with the same mild irritation he has for most press obligations.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

@roselandrycentral: OKAY WAIT. Shane Hollander and Rose Landry?? Are they actually dating or ???

@hockeyheads2011: rose landry is dating a hockey player? she's either really brave or hasn't seen the team bus

@puckheadbears: i don't know who rose landry is but she's with our boy hollander and honestly good for both of them

↳@roselandrycentral: @puckheadbears she is an ACTRESS and she is wonderful and frankly if they're dating I am mildly okay with it

@bostonsportsdaily: Hollander has been having a YEAR huh. First, the Calder trophy now Rose Landry. Someone's doing something right.

↳@bears_fan_account: @bostonsportsdaily rozanov was seen at McCarthy's bar three nights this week. unrelated probably

↳↳@marlymylove: @bears_fan_account totally unrelated why would that be related?

↳↳↳@bears_fan_account: @marlymylove no reason!! none at all!!

@roselandrycentral: Update: No statements from either camp. They're either in the soft launch phase or this is a media phantom and I've been played.

@hollzgoatz: can we talk about how hollzy looked at the Calder ceremony like he was trying not to look at someone. asking for a friend

↳@rororozanov: @hollzgoatz bestie I see you and I raise you: roz's postgame interviews have been weirdly short lately

↳↳@brad_hockey_man: @rororozanov @hollzgoatzyou two are unwell and I mean that as a compliment

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

She called him a few days later. He is on his couch doing nothing useful, which has become a more available activity lately, and he answers on the second ring.

"I want to ask you something," she says, without preamble.

"Okay," he says.

"The Ilya situation. You said you love him."

"Yes."

"And you don’t think he feels the same way as you do."

"Yeah, I don’t think so, maybe he likes me but I don’t think we’re on the same level." He stops. “He said he had been trying to tell me something, but probably not that he’s in love with me, too."

"Okay, bullshit, I’m calling it. But you're scared to go back and say what you should have said."

"Yes."

"Because you're worried he's moved on or—"

"Because what if I go back and I say everything and it was real and we try and then it falls apart," Shane says. "Because what if everything goes exactly right and then something outside either of us—" He stops. He has been trying to articulate this for months. "His life in Russia. His father. What it means to be who he is, from where he's from. Those aren't small things. I can't fix them. And even if everything between us is exactly what I think it is, there are things in the way that are real and big and I can't just—" He exhales. "I can't just say I love you and make all of that not matter."

"No," Rose says. "You can't."

"So."

"So," she says. "You might try and it might be very hard. And it might be worth it anyway." She pauses. "Or you don't try, and you spend the next fifteen years wondering."

He is quiet.

"Which one sounds worse?" she says.

He looks at his ceiling.

"The second one," he says.

"Exactly," she says.

"I just… I need to get my own house in order first," he says. "I need to say it out loud. To myself, to my parents. I need to be someone who knows what he is before he asks someone else to know it with him."

"That makes sense," she says.

"After December," he says.

"Okay, sure." she says. "I believe you this time."

"You didn't believe me the last time?"

"I believe you more this time," she says.

He makes a sound. It is almost a laugh.

"Okay," he says. "Thank you, Rose."

"Of course," she says. "Call me after you tell your parents."

"I will," he says.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

He tells them on Christmas Eve. Not because he planned it specifically for Christmas Eve, he had planned for Christmas Day, the morning, after presents but because Christmas Eve turns out to be the evening when his parents are sitting in the living room with the fire going and his mother has her tea and his dad has the vodka that Ilya brought last year and the house is the warmest it ever is and Shane looks at the two of them in the firelight and thinks: now. It's now.

"I need to tell you both something," he says.

His parents look up. His mother's tea stops midway to her mouth. His dad puts his vodka down. They have the quality, both of them, of people who have learned to receive announcements from their son, the attention they bring to I need to tell you something and they settle into it without drama.

Shane is standing by the mantle. The stockings are there. Four of them, same as last year, the fourth one with Ilya's name in his mother's handwriting, and he had noticed it when he arrived today and not said anything, because some things have a weight that you just carry alongside.

"I'm gay," he says.

The room is quiet.

His mother sets her tea down. Very carefully, the way she does things when she is making sure her hands are steady.

"Okay," his dad says.

Just that. Okay. David Hollander, who has been Shane's rock for twenty years without ever using that word or drawing attention to it, says okay in the same voice he says everything, and the simplicity of it makes something in Shane's chest break open sideways.

"Yeah?" Shane says, because he needs to hear it again, he needs confirmation, same as always, the same thing he's always needed.

"Yeah," his dad says. "Of course."

His mother stands up. She crosses the room and she puts her arms around Shane and holds on, and she doesn't say anything for a moment, just holds on, and Shane presses his face into her shoulder like he's eight years old and some part of him is, some part of him that has been carrying this since before he knew what it was.

"Mom," he says, his voice breaking.

"I know," she says. "I've got you."

He hadn't known he was going to cry. He had planned for this conversation, had planned it the same way he planned everything, and in all the versions he ran in his head he had been composed. He is not composed. His mother is holding him and his dad's hand is on his back and he is crying a little in the firelit living room of his childhood home on Christmas Eve, which is not what he planned.

"I'm sorry," he says.

"For what?" his mother says.

"I don't know. For not trying hard enough to not be this. I think I was just tired of everything else that I just accepted it, even without knowing the word for it. And I should have—" He pulls back slightly. His mother's hands are still on his arms, steadying. "I should have said this earlier. I've known for a while. Or suspected. Or—"

"You said it now," his mother says. "That's what matters. I love you so much, Shane. You hear me?"

"Are you—" He looks at his dad, who is standing now too, who has moved to be closer. "Are you guys mad?"

"Shane," his dad says, with the expression he has when something is very simple to him that his son is making complicated. "You are our kid. That's it. No one’s mad at you, we can never be mad at you for being yourself. I love you, son. That's the whole thing."

Shane looks at him.

"Nothing changes," his dad says. "Except now you're not carrying it alone. That's a good thing."

His mother's hands tighten on his arms slightly. "How long," she says. "Have you been carrying it?"

"A while," he says. "As I said, I didn't.. I didn't have the word for a long time. And then—" He stops. "I made a friend this year. She asked me a question and I had to sit with it. And when I sat with it I knew."

"The actress? Rose Landry, right?" his mother says.

He blinks. "How did you—"

"You have to know we’ve seen the photos," she says. "I read the articles. The ones that implied you were together." She pauses. "I suspected they were wrong."

"We're friends," Shane says. "That's all."

"I know," she says. "I thought so." She is quiet for a moment. "Is there someone else?"

"You don't have to tell us," his dad says.

"I know." He stands there for a moment with the warmth of the fire on his face and his parents' presence around him and the stockings on the mantel. "There's someone, yes. There's someone. I don't know what's going to happen with it. I fucked up, so much. But—" He stops. "I love him. I know that."

His mother makes a sound. Not a word; just a sound, low and warm.

"Mom—"

"I'm not going to say anything," she says, quickly. "I'm not going to say I knew, because that's not what I know you need to hear right now, it's also not mine to say. I just—" She looks at him, and her eyes are bright, his mother who does not cry at most things. "I'm glad you told us. And I'm glad you have someone you feel that much about."

"It's complicated," he says. "His situation is—"

"I know," she says.

"You don't know specifically—"

"Shane." She looks at him with dark eyes. "I know enough. And what I know is that you love him. Everything else is something you figure out." She pauses. "Together, because he loves you back."

Shane looks at the fire.

"Does he?" his dad says. Gently.

"I don’t know, I hope so," Shane says. "He tried to tell me something. And I—" He stops. "I ran. I need to go back and not run this time."

His dad nods. He doesn't add anything, doesn't say well then do it or what are you waiting for or any of the reasonable responses, just nods, accepting the information, filing it in the place where he keeps the important things about his son.

"December," Shane says, quietly, to himself more than them.

"What?" his dad says.

"I told someone I would fix it in December." He looks at his parents. "I keep saying I'm going to and then not doing it. I've been… I've been a coward about it."

"You're telling us," his mother says. "That's not nothing."

"That's not the same thing," Shane says.

"No," she says. "But it's somewhere to start."

They stand there in the fireplace, the three of them, and his dad reaches out and squeezes his shoulder the way he has done Shane's entire life, the wordless weight of it, and Shane thinks: this is what steady feels like. This is the thing you can always come back to. He thinks: I want to give Ilya this. I want to be this for him the way my parents have been this for me.

He excuses himself eventually and goes upstairs to his childhood room and lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling and breathes.

Then he opens his notes app.

I told my parents tonight. I said the word out loud to the two people I love most in the world and they said okay and held on to me and nothing changed and I am lying here feeling like I put something down that I've been holding for years.

I want to call you. This is the first thing I thought, when my mother let go of me: I want to call Ilya. I want to hear his voice. I want to tell him what just happened because he is the only person I want to tell first.

I know what I am now. I'm gay. I said it out loud. I said it to Rose and I said it to my parents and I can say it in here where no one reads it, and it's mine. It belongs to me. And what I want, what I have wanted for over a year, what made the word necessary… is you.

I know your situation is not the same as mine. I know that. I know there are things I cannot fix and costs I cannot calculate because it is not my life. I am not asking you to be anything or do anything or change anything. I just need you to know that I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. I am not running this time.

The cottage is almost done. Stéphane sent photos last week. The lake view is exactly right. I built it because of what you said at Christmas, about coming back to the same place and knowing it will be there. I built it for you and I haven't been able to say that, and I'm saying it here because I need to say it somewhere before I say it to your face.

You deserve to know that someone built you a place to come back to. Even if you don't want to. Even if everything goes wrong and you tell me you feel nothing and I have to figure out how to be your teammate for the next fifteen years after that. You still deserve to know.

I love you. I have loved you since October of the first year and probably September and maybe since the penalty box in Regina when we were seventeen and you looked at me like I was something interesting.

It’s always been you, Ilya. It will always be you.

I'm going to say this to your face. When the season starts again.

Hopefully.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks for reading 🩷

For mine and Shane’s birthday tomorrow, while editing this chapter for errors, I will be playing a drinking game, for every “fine” I will be taking a shot lmaoo

Also Shane is extra unreliable as a narrator here for funsies :D I genuinely love writing it like this because as I’m writing I keep getting frustrated because I want to tell Shane how wrong he is.

As for the next chapter, it's going... rather slowly but it is going. Don't know when she'll be up but it's gonna be a different vibe from this chapter, for sure (if you know what I mean).

Feedbacks/comments are always appreciated!

Chapter 6: 2012 [Avoiding &amp; Fixing]

Chapter Summary

Rose and Christmas with his parents gave Shane the push to be braver, but being brave is only one part of the equation on how to fix things. Shane didn't take into account how stubborn Ilya Rozanov can be as Shane tries and fails to fix things between them. Then one night, Svetlana Vetrova decides she’s tired of her friends’ shit.

Chapter Notes

DONT FORGET TO TURN ON CREATORS STYLE FOR THE MESSAGES (its scrollable!!!)

HELLO!! So sorry this update took so long but I think the AO3 curse was testing me after my last update (Everything's all good now though).

Thank you for all the kudos & nice comments/feedbacks (I'm seeing most of them, everything is just hectic and busy), I really appreciate all of you!! <33

This chapter got away from me sooo much, I intended to write less than 10k words but I just kept adding and adding and now we're here! (also yes, the chapter count increased again... I'm sorry but I think this might be the final one.. maybe)

More thoughts about Shane and Ilya's behaviours and certain choices in this fic on the end notes.

I hope this was worth the wait — Ilya “post-cracking Shane” Rozanov

 

NOTE: Italicised dialogue is in Russian (Ilya and Svetlana)

He has a plan.

He makes the plan in Ottawa over Christmas, lying in his childhood bed on the 26th of December with the notes app open on his phone and the finalised version of everything he wants to say to Ilya, and the plan is: All-Stars. January. They'll both be there, they're both on the roster, which means he is going to go to Ottawa and he is going to find Ilya before or after the skills competition and he is going to say the thing.

He gets back to Boston in the first week of January and he is ready. He is more ready than he has been for anything since he stepped on the ice for his first NHL regular season game. He runs, he skates, he does the work, and he runs through what he wants to say in his head with the methodical thoroughness of a person who prepares for things, and by the third week of January he has it.

He texts Ilya the week before the All-Stars weekend.

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

Shane stares at this for a while.

Then he puts his phone face-down on the coffee table and lies on his back on his living room floor, and he breathes.

He goes to All-Stars with Marlow. He answers the press questions and does the skills competition and crush the game itself and is present and professional and fine, and the entire weekend he has the sensation of having packed for a trip and left the most important thing behind, and he comes back to Boston and runs on his treadmill for fifty minutes and does not write anything in the notes app because he doesn't have words for some stupid infection took it.

He texts Ilya:

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

Shane wanted to say I missed you but he was too much of a coward and he didn’t think it was the appropriate thing to say to Ilya, given their situation. The actual truth is he’s scared to know whether or not Ilya missed him too, his unkind mind tells him the latter is more likely to happen. So he takes the cowardly route, a route he’s all too familiar with at this point.

It also made sense that Ilya didn’t reply. Shane looks at their conversation for thirty seconds. But not a second more, any more and he might throw his phone to the wall or to his face. This is where they are now, have been for months.

He has to fix this, he wants to, he needs to. Fuck.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

He tries numerous times between February and March.

The first time, late January: he texts Ilya on a Sunday asking if he wants to grab food somewhere, the Thai place where they used to go, casual and no pressure. Ilya says he has plans with friends. Shane asks to play video games the following weekend. Ilya says he's too tired. Shane asks to hang out again a few days after that. Four hours pass. Then: Out of town, sorry.

Shane is parked in their practice rink’s parking structure because he decided to work out in there instead of his home gym when Ilya’s reply arrives and can see Ilya's car, in his designated parking spot.

He sits in his own car for a while. He thinks about what it means that Ilya is lying to him, not the why, which he understands, but Ilya is actively building up the wall even more, adding more and more bricks that Shane can’t help but think that he may never be able to kick through it. After some time, Shane then decided to leave, not risking running into Ilya inside, so he drove home instead, letting himself wallow in his sorrows at the comfort of his own apartment.

He does not write anything in the notes app that night. He has run out of ways to say I know what I did and I know why you're doing this and I need you to let me fix it.

The second attempt is in person, after a practice in early February. Shane catches Ilya in the hallway outside the weight room, because the hallway is the one place Ilya cannot invent a reason to be elsewhere, he literally has to pass through it, the layout of the building demands it and Shane plants himself where he knows Ilya would not be able to ignore him, and says, "Can we talk? When you have a minute."
Ilya looks at him. The professional expression is fully deployed: pleasant, present, and completely managed.

"Okay," he says. "But right now is a bit—"

"I know," Shane says. "No rush, just soon, maybe. I need to talk—”

"Okay, Hollander," he says again. "I will find you. Bye."

He does not find him. Not anytime that day, not the following week. Shane waits. He tells himself Ilya is processing, that this is fair and fine and he can be patient. Because he is, he is an incredibly patient person. But a patient person can only take so much waiting.

He texts Ilya about two weeks after their hallway conversation, Shane wrote four different versions of Still here when you’re ready to have that talk but ultimately settled with Still good for that conversation when you're ready. Ilya left him on read for three hours, he had counted. When he thought he would never get a reply, Ilya hits him with Yes just so busy but soon.

Soon arrives approximately the same time as I will find you. Never.

The third attempt is going to Ilya's building, he went on a Thursday evening in late February. He stood outside for a few minutes before he pressed the buzzer. Through the speaker: silence. Then: Ilya is not here. The intercom voice is soft and distorted and so clearly Ilya trying to fake an American accent but Shane knew better.

He stands on the sidewalk with his hand still on the buzzer panel and looks up at the building. Ilya’s bedroom light is on. Fuck it.

He buzzes again. "Ilya. Can we talk? Please."

A long pause.

"Not a good time. Go home, Hollander," intercom Ilya says, dropping his attempt at doing a pseudo American accent.

Shane's hand comes off the panel. He stands there for a moment on the February sidewalk, cold, with his hands in his jacket pockets, before deciding to let it go. He walks back to his car and drives home. He grabs a ginger ale from the fridge and then he sits on his kitchen floor with his back against the counter because the floor is the right surface for certain kinds of thinking, and he thinks about the lit window and Ilya’s attempt at faking a voice and the fact that Ilya knows Shane was out there and chose the easier version of not having a conversation. He does, however, forbid himself from thinking that Ilya told him to go home because he was with someone. Shane refuses to think about that possibility.

He understands. He does. He made Ilya protect himself. He is the reason the wall is this tall and this well-maintained and well made. Understanding it does not make the ache in heart feel less like it will kill him over time.

The fourth attempt: a note, on actual paper in his own handwriting, slid under Ilya's door on an evening when he knows Ilya is at a team dinner he skipped with a headache that is real but also convenient.

I have things I need to say to you. I'm not going anywhere this time. Whenever you're ready.

He doesn't know if Ilya reads it. He chooses to believe Ilya reads it and is sitting with it, because the alternative: swept into the recycling without a second look is not something he can afford to believe if he wants to keep functioning.

Ilya does not acknowledge the note. Not the next day at practice, not in the week following. It exists, as far as Shane can tell, in a limbo between sent and received.

The fifth attempt is at a team dinner in March. Shane arranges to be seated next to Ilya, which in the organised chaos of more than a dozen hockey players finding spots at three long tables requires a technique so transparent that Connors gives him a look from across the room that says I see what you're doing with great clarity. Shane ignores this. He sits down next to Ilya and he is here for two hours.

They talk. Ilya is genuinely engaging with him, in the way he always is when there's a table of people around them, the easy locker-room warmth that is real and also keeps everything at the right distance. They talk about the roadie schedule and a powerplay adjustment LeClaire is running and their Ottawa game that is coming up. They argue briefly with Marlow and Nash about whether the Centaurs defenseman they're about to face has a tell on his gap decisions, which Shane says he does and Ilya says is inconclusive, and it’s a good argument, the real kind, the one that used to happen all the time, and something in Shane's chest aches badly at how easy this still is between them, how the on-ice language has survived everything else.

At the end of the dinner, in the coatroom, Shane touches Ilya's arm.

"Hey," he says. "I need to talk to you. About what happened. About—"

"Shane—" Ilya's voice is low.

"I know this isn't the time," Shane says, quickly. "I know. I just need like an hour? Give me one hour. When you're ready."

Ilya looks at him. The crack again, the flash of the real thing, the thing that lives under the professional surface, a half-second where Shane can see what is actually there before it closes over.

"After the season, but after the Playoffs if we make it," Ilya says.

Shane blinks. "What?"

"You want to talk, yes?" Ilya pauses. He looks like he is choosing words with care.

"After, not now. The season is—"

"The season has nothing to do with—"

"It has everything to do with it," Ilya says. "I don't want to have a conversation that's going to—" He stops. He looks at the wall for what felt like an eternity. Then, he looks back at Shane. "After hockey, Shane. I promise."

He picks up his coat and then he’s gone.

Shane stands in the coatroom and understands: he's not saying no. He's saying not now. He understands why: the season, the timing, the not wanting to have a conversation that might affect their chances at making it to the playoffs. He understands it and he accepts it.

After the playoffs, he tells himself.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

They don't make the playoffs.

This is the sentence he has been refusing to construct since the third week of March, when the standings started doing what they were doing and the math became uncomfortable and LeClaire's jaw got the tight look it gets when he's doing math he doesn't like. It is not a surprise, ultimately the injuries have been compounding since February, more than a few players in and out of the lineup at various points, their first and second line at less than full strength for a few weeks. It’s not a surprise but it’s still terrible, the loss of the thing before you even got to fight for it.

Shane bruised two ribs in a game in late March. Not broken, the trainer made sure he understood the difference, as though the distinction was meant to be comfort, but bruised badly enough that he missed three games and came back on restricted minutes and played at maybe eighty-five percent for the last few weeks of the season.

He sits in the locker room for the last time for this season and does the thing he does with losses: he takes the full weight of it, lets it be as bad as it is, and then looks for what he contributed and what he could change. This is the productive version of the process. He knows the productive version. He also knows the other version, the one that doesn't stop at what I could change and keeps going until everything is his fault, and that is the version currently running.

Three games missed, it says. The restricted minutes. If you'd been fully healthy those last few weeks. If the issue with Ilya wasn't sitting in your chest like another bruised rib, if you'd fixed it before the start of the season or before the season went sideways instead of telling yourself you'd fix it after—

"It wasn't you," Nash says, from the next stall.

Shane looks up. "What?"

"Whatever your head is telling you right now," Nash says. "It wasn't you. Most of us are nursing an injury of some kind, have been for weeks. No team survives that."

"I know," Shane says.

"You don't look like you know, Hollzy."

"I know it.. In theory."

Nash considers this with the expression of someone who has opinions about the difference between knowing things in theory and actually knowing them, but who has decided this isn't the moment. "Okay," he says. "That’s something, at least."

Shane looks at his tape. He does know it. He knows the injury numbers, he knows the defensive zone coverage issues that were downstream of those numbers, he knows the shape of a season that ran out of bodies. He knows his own numbers were good in the games he played and that eighty-five percent of his game is still better than most teams' centers at full health.

He also knows that he has been carrying something all season that he shouldn't still be carrying, that the weight of the unsaid thing has taken up space in him that was supposed to be for hockey, and while he is not responsible for everyone else's injuries, he is responsible for that. He chose to keep carrying it. He chose to ignore it for months, since June and since the season started.

He looks across the room. Ilya is at his stall with a closed expression and he looks exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the season completely.

I did that too, Shane thinks. I put that on you.

He goes home. He does not text Ilya. He works out for an hour or two, he loses track of time and then when exhaustion finally catches up to him, he collapses on his gym floor and breathes carefully and thinks about what months of unfinished business weighs.

He texts Rose:

-begin of chat-

-end of chat-

He puts the phone down and gives himself the time to start processing the full weight of the season, the missed playoffs, the three games and the restricted minutes and the thing with Ilya that has been sitting in his chest like a second injury. He lets it be exactly as bad as it is.

He goes to bed defeated that night. A hot shower seemingly does not help ease both the physical and emotional pain he’s feeling.

Then at around 2 in the morning, his phone rings. A call from Svetlana.

"Shane." Sveta's voice, clipped and awake. "I'm outside your building."

He sits up. "Sveta? What the hell, it’s 2 AM."

"Yes, I know.” She pauses, grunting. “Fuck, Ilya. Stop moving, you’re so fucking heavy.” She says in hurried Russian. “Shane, I know what time it is, please, just fucking buzz us in. I have Ilya."

She comes through the door with Ilya's arm over her shoulder, which is an extraordinary feat given the significant height difference between them, and she is doing it with the expression of someone executing a task they decided on and are seeing through to completion. Ilya is upright in the cooperative way of someone very drunk who has decided to trust the person steering him. His top is stained, his jacket off, and he has been crying, that is the first thing Shane sees, before anything else, the dried tracks of it on his face, the red at the edges of his eyes.

Shane has never seen Ilya cry before. Even when he talked about his mother or father, he had never seen Ilya let himself cry.

He steps back to let them in. He does not say anything for a moment because he needs the moment.

"Sveta, what the hell happened?" he says, after taking a few deep breaths.

"He drank too much," Sveta says. She maneuvers them through the door with the authority of someone who has done this before, though Shane suspects not quite like this. "He saw a girl."

"A girl," He meant it to say it as a question but it came out more like a statement.

"In the club." She steers toward the couch. "Brown eyes. Freckles." She pauses, and she looks at Shane over Ilya's shoulder. "He kept telling me she reminded him of someone."

The bottom drops out of Shane's stomach. Something happens in Shane's chest that has no name in any language he knows.

A lump started to form in his throat, he tried his best to level his voice. "Who?"

"He didn't say a name right away," she says. "He didn't need to. I know what his Shane looks like before he even said that."

His Shane. Shane stands there and receives those two words.

Ilya reaches the couch and Sveta lowers him onto it, unhurried and practised. He sits back against the cushions and looks at the ceiling, too drunk to manage his face, and then he looks at Shane, and the serenity cracks a little.

"Hi, you," Ilya says.

"Hey," Shane whispers.

"I am fine," Ilya says, hiccuping, then he giggles. Shane wants to kiss him.

"No. You cried a lot," Sveta says.

"Shhh, Sveta, don’t tell him.” He says as he tries to take his finger and put it to Sveta’s mouth, in an attempt to make her quiet. “He can’t know, no one can. Also, I'm allowed to cry," Ilya says in Russian, albeit slurry, with great dignity.

"At a stranger," Sveta says.

"She had very nice eyes, beautiful eyes," Ilya says, smiling as he closes his own.

Within a few seconds he is asleep, or close enough. Sveta steps back and looks at Shane. The apartment is quiet except for Ilya's breathing and the city outside.

"Bedroom?" Sveta says.

"Yeah," Shane says. "He can have the bed."

"Good," she says. "He has back problems if he sleeps on a couch." A pause. "He would not tell you this himself."

"I know," Shane says. "I know about the back."

Getting Ilya to the bedroom takes both of them and several awkward turns, but Sveta has clearly navigated Ilya in worse states and she manages the logistics with the calm efficiency of someone who has done this one too many times. They get his shoes off. They get him horizontal. Shane pulls the blanket up and stands there for a moment looking at Ilya asleep in his bed, which is a lot of things at once, none of them simple.

He thinks: this is what it would look like. Waking up next to this every day. He thinks: you could have had this long ago. He thinks: you're going to have it now. You're going to fix it now.

Sveta walks to the doorway.

"Come," she says. "We need to talk."

She sits on his couch with her legs crossed and her shoes off, it seems she went back to the doorway to take it off, and Shane sits in the chair across from her, and she pours herself a glass of water from the pitcher on the coffee table she got from the kitchen and she looks at him.

"Tell me what happened," she says. "Between you two."

“What? Nothing happened—”

“Don’t start bullshiting me, Hollander. I think you’re forgetting I am friends with both of you idiots,”

"Fine,” he sighs, defeated. “It's complicated," he says.

"I know it's complicated. I've been watching it be complicated for so long, too long, Shane." She holds his gaze. "Just, tell me anyway."

So he tells her. He goes through it, not everything, he keeps the most private things, but the shape of it, the outline. The year of not-saying. Vegas, on the roof, you, I need you, the leaving. The summer and the silence. The start of the season and the wall. All of his attempts over the last 2 months that went nowhere.

Sveta listens. She does not interrupt. She drinks her water and she listens and she takes it in, and when he finishes she is quiet for a moment.

"You said you can't do this to me," she says.

"Yes."

"And then you left. While he was—" She stops. She makes a decision. "He was awake, you know?" she says. "That night. He texted me. He said he had told you and you had left. He said he thought he had been wrong about everything." She looks at Shane levelly. "He thought you were telling him that what he felt between you two wasn't real. That he had imagined it all. He was ashamed. That's the word he used. He said he was ashamed for pushing too hard.”

Shane looks at his hands. Guilt creeping in. "Fuck," he says, not knowing what else to say. He had no idea Ilya felt all of that.

"And then September," she says. "He came back and you tried to apologise."

"Yes, he said we were fine."

"He lied," Sveta says.

"I know he lied."

"He lied because he was scared," she says. "He pushed too hard and you ran, and his conclusion was that if he pushed again you would run again and this time you wouldn't come back. So he stopped pushing." She pauses. "He has been trying to protect the hockey between you two because he knows how important hockey is to you, and your friendship, or whatever is left of it. He decided that was better than nothing."

"It's not better than nothing," Shane says.

"I know that," Sveta says. "You know that. He knows it too, somewhere under his stubbornness, which is why he was in a club tonight crying at a girl who had your eyes and freckles." She sets her water glass down. "Shane. You know I love you and you are also my friend but you should have told him all of this long ago. You told me just now, you had so many chances to tell him."

"Because he wouldn't let me," Shane says. "He shut down every attempt."

"And you let him. Why?"

"I don’t know. I guess I didn't want to push harder than—" He stops. He hears himself. "I think I was scared that if I pushed too hard he would—"

"Run," Sveta says.

"Yes."

"So both of you idiots," she says, running a hand to her forehead. "were sitting on opposite sides of a wall, each of you afraid to push too hard because you thought the other one would run, and so neither of you was saying anything."

Shane looks at her.

"I'm not judging you," she says. "I'm telling you what I see." She pauses. "Now I'm going to ask you something and I need you to answer honestly."

"Okay."

"After everything you just told me, you didn’t say anything about what you felt for him.” She pauses, taking Shane’s hand. “You love him, yes?"

Shane does not hesitate. "Yes, I do."

She holds his gaze. "How long?"

"Since our rookie season," he says. "I don’t know when exactly. I've been… I know I've been a coward about it, I know I hurt him because of it. I'm not making excuses."

"Good," she says. "Because I don't have time for excuses."

Shane is quiet.

"Can I ask you something?" he says.

"Yes."

"How long has it been bad? For him."

Sveta is quiet for a moment. She is doing the thinking, what she is permitted to say and where the line is and what belongs to Ilya.

"He has been sad since June," she says. "It was worse while we were in Russia. I’m assuming you weren’t speaking to him,” She looked at him, waiting. All Shane could do was nod slowly. “He was defeated, in a way I have never seen before but also I recognised it, he has had lots of practise with hiding his sadness but I could see right through his shit." She pauses. "The last few months have been harder. He thought he was managing it. I was just watching him, I knew better than to meddle when he is not ready yet. But, tonight his walls started to collapse.”

Shane looks at the bedroom door.

"He really called her his Shane?" he asks quietly.

"Yes, he said it without thinking, I think." Sveta says. "He'd had a lot to drink. And then he realised what he said and he started crying harder, and I decided—" She makes a short gesture. "Enough. I have had enough. I have watched my best friend be sad for too long. I am tired of watching him be sad. The season is done, there is nothing left to protect, so now we are here."

"I'm glad you did," Shane says with a small smile.

"You should be." She looks at him steadily. "I will not tell you what is in his head. That is his to tell you. But I will tell you this: he trusts me with things he doesn't say out loud to just anyone else, and I would not be here at two in the morning if I did not believe that this was fixable." She pauses. "I already knew that you love him."

"You did?"

"Obviously. I am so smart, Shane. You know this.” They both laughed, Shane is so thankful for her, thankful that she knows when he needs a breather.

Eventually, the smile in their faces fell, both feeling the shift of what just landed in the room.

"I'm not telling you that to tell you it's easy or it will be easy," she says. "His life is complicated in ways yours isn't. Russia. His family. What it means to be who he is in the world he comes from. These are real things and I know you know this. I have a feeling that this might be another reason why you were scared and ran." She holds his gaze, not waiting for any kind of response, though the shift in Shane’s expression was enough to answer her non-question question. "But they are things you can do together. You cannot do anything from opposite sides of a wall and decide for each other when you should be doing it together."

Sveta then looks at his bedroom door.

"When he wakes up," she says, "he is going to want to leave. He is very good at wanting to leave when things feel too scary and too real. I know that you are the same too but, please, do not let him, not anymore."

"I won't, I swear." Shane says, firmly.

She holds his gaze. "You’re not going to run again?"

"No," he says.

"How do I know that?"

He thinks about how to answer this. He thinks about Ottawa and the coming out conversation in the firelit living room during Christmas. He thinks about the thing that changed when he finally said the word out loud.

"Because I know what I am now," he says. "I figured out that I'm gay. I figured that out last year. I told my parents at Christmas. And the reason the question became urgent, the reason I couldn't keep avoiding it, is him. He is the whole reason." He holds her gaze. "When you know what you are and you know what you want, running requires more energy than staying. I'm done running."

She looks at him for a long moment, the same reading-look she has been giving him all night. Then she nods, once, the verdict.

"Good," she says. "Guest room?"

"Second door on the left."

She stands. "I'll stay until I hear you talking in there," she says. "If you let him walk out in the morning without saying a word—"

"I won't, Sveta." They’re both smiling now.

"—I know people. I am Russian. You can’t hide from me," she says. "Both of you."

"I believe you," Shane says.

"You should." She pauses in the hallway. "Shane."

"Yeah."

"You both deserve to know the truth," she says. "Tell him and believe him when he tells you."

She goes to the guest room. The door closes.

Shane sits in the quiet of his apartment for a long time. He can hear Ilya breathing from the bedroom. He looks at the door and thinks about the girl with the freckles and his Shane and a plan that was supposed to happen at All-Stars in January, and then he pulls the armchair blanket around himself and sits there in the dark and waits.

He is not going anywhere.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Ilya wakes at around 7 AM.

Shane knows because he has been dozing since four with the light attention of someone whose brain has a task and won't fully release, and when he hears the shift of weight in the bedroom he is awake immediately, blanket still over his legs, apartment in the early grey light of an April morning.

Footsteps. The bathroom. A pause. Then the door opens and Ilya is standing at the end of the hallway in yesterday's clothes, his shirt wrinkled, clutching at his jacket, hair disordered from sleep and he sees Shane and stops.

They look at each other.

"Hi," Shane says.

Ilya does not say anything for a moment. His eyes move to the guest room door, closed. Then back to Shane.

"Sveta’s still here," Shane says.

Ilya nods. He looks at Shane for a brief moment. Shane watches his eyes shift to look at the apartment, at the chair Shane is in, at the blanket over Shane's legs, at Shane's face again, and the calculation is happening behind his eyes, Shane can see it, the same calculation he has been watching for months: I should leave. I can manage this if I leave now. I can get my shoes and go and we go back to being fine.

"Don't," Shane says softly.

Ilya looks at him.

"I know what you're thinking," Shane says. "I know you want to go. I need you to not do that."

Ilya is quiet. His jaw shifts.

"Please, Ilya." Shane says. "Can you sit down?"

The moment stretches. Shane watches Ilya make the decision, watches the thing that wants to run loose, narrowly, to something else, something that has been losing narrowly for months, and then Ilya crosses the room and sits on the couch.

He sits forward, elbows on his knees, not leaning back. Present but not committed. Shane takes that.

"I'm going to talk," Shane says. "And I need you to let me finish. Can you do that?"

Ilya looks at the table. "Yes," he says.

Shane takes a breath.

"You've been avoiding me since the season started," he says. "I know you know that I know. I'm not—" He stops. Starts again. "I'm not angry about it or anything like that. I understand why. I left you then at Vegas and I barely talked to you during the summer and when I tried to apologise you said we were fine, and your conclusion from those things was that the friendship and hockey was all you had left and you were going to protect it. I know that's what you were doing. I know it makes sense."
Ilya says nothing.

"I tried to reach out to you so many times," Shane says. "To get you to let me talk to you. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I stood outside your apartment building. So whenever you would tell me that you’re not home, I knew that you were.”

Something moves through Ilya's expression.

"I'm not saying that to make you feel guilty or anything," Shane says. "I'm saying it because I need you to understand that I have been trying. I have not been done with this. I’ve been trying every week since January and not being able to get to you, and by March I told myself I'd wait until after the playoffs, because you asked me to, and then we didn't make the playoffs, and you were out last night, and Sveta called." He looks at Ilya. "So here we are."

Shane took Ilya’s silence as a sign to continue.

"I need to tell you some things," Shane says. "And they're going to sound like a lot. But I've been carrying them for over a year and I need you to hear them."

Ilya is quiet but Shane saw how he nodded slightly.

"First of all, I'm gay," Shane says.

Ilya looks up.

"I figured that out last year," Shane says. "I have a friend, Rose, she's an actress, and she asked me a question and then I knew. And the reason the question became urgent, the reason I couldn't keep avoiding it, is you." He holds Ilya's gaze. "I told my parents at Christmas. My mom held me and my dad said okay and went back to his vodka and the world didn't end." He pauses. "I'm telling you now because I want you to know that this is not confusion, this is not a phase, this is me knowing what I am. And what I am is gay. And the reason I finally had to know is you."

"In June," Shane says, "when you said you, I need you, I kissed you back and then I said you couldn't do that to me and I left. And I have been a mess. I have spent months trying to explain to myself why I did that, and the honest answer is: I was more afraid of being right than of being wrong." He stops. "If I was wrong, it would hurt. And I've been hurt before so I know how to survive that. But if I was right, if I let myself believe it, then it would hurt so much more when it inevitably gets taken away from me. And I have had the thing I was most certain about taken away before. Montreal, everything I built my life around up to the draft, gone because of some fucked up accident. You know that I managed to get over that, you were there, you were a big part of why and how I managed to do that. But I knew I couldn't get over you, no matter how hard I tried. Because you’re the most important thing in my life, it took me a while to understand and accept that too. That was such a scary thought that I didn’t want to entertain for such a long time. I couldn’t lose you, Ilya. So I told myself it wasn't real to keep it safe, to keep you safe." He exhales. "I know how that sounds. I am not making excuses. I know that I hurt you. I'm just telling you my truth."

Shane paused. Looking for Ilya’s eyes. When he met Shane's, he finally said the words he’s been itching to get out for so long.

"I love you, Ilya." It came out like a soft prayer, barely there but you can feel its weight.

"I’m so fucking in love with you. I think I have loved you since we started becoming friends, or maybe ever, since we first met," He swallows. "I thought that it was impossible that you felt anything for me other than friendship but then you kissed me and I should have said it then, on that rooftop but instead I ran away and hurt you and us in the process. I know that I had so many chances to say it but I didn't, and I'm sorry, so I'm saying it now."

He stops. He waits, he will wait forever for Ilya.

"Why should I believe you?" Ilya finally says.

It lands simply. No ill intent, just a question, stated, the way Ilya states things.

"You shouldn't," Shane says. "Based on my track record, you have every reason not to. I left. I avoided you for months. I said you couldn't do this to me when you were the bravest person on that rooftop. I stood outside your building in February and let you lie to me through the intercom and walked away." He holds Ilya's gaze. "I'm not asking you to believe me because I deserve it. I'm asking you to believe me because I'm telling you the truth, and I think some part of you knows that."

Ilya says nothing, just staring at him. But Shane knew that specific look on Ilya’s face.

"I know what you're going to say," Shane continues. "That you've heard me trying to get to this conversation for months. That the last time I had the chance I ran. That wanting to say something and actually saying it, and meaning it, and staying, those are different things." He exhales. "They are different things. I know that. The version of me who left in June was not this version. I have spent the past months since becoming this version."

Ilya’s looking at the wall. Avoiding Shane’s eyes. Shane can see the hardness of his jaw, he can see Ilya’s walls slowly breaking.

"Ilya," Shane whispers, pleading. For what, he doesn’t know exactly. He just needed Ilya to say something, anything.

"I read the note," Ilya finally says. “The one you left in my apartment."

Shane blinks. "You did? Really?" His voice breaking at the question.

"Yes, I read it," Ilya says, "and I had it in my pocket for four days." He rubs his hands in his jeans pocket, as if the note is still there. "I kept taking it out and looking at it. I have things I need to say to you. I'm not going anywhere this time." He pauses. "And then I took it out. I couldn’t look at it anymore."

"Why?" Shane says.

Ilya is quiet for a moment. "Because the last time I tried to tell you what I felt, you left," he says. "And even with the note, even knowing you were trying to get me to talk, I was not ready to let you say whatever you were going to say and have it be something other than what I needed it to be. I was protecting myself and whatever is left with us."

"I know," Shane says. "I know you were. I built the wall first and you maintained it. I understand—”

"No, Shane, you don’t understand, not fully," Ilya says. He looks up. His eyes are tired but present, all the way present, the nothing-between quality that Shane has been cut off from for sixteen months. "I was—" He stops. Finds a different way into it. "You matter to me more than hockey," he says. "More than any of it. And I did not want to lose you, not like that. I could not risk having the wrong conversation and losing the last of what we had. Even if what we had was wrong."

Shane looks at him.

"It was wrong," Shane says, gently. "The wall and the awkward tension. None of it was right."

"I know," Ilya says. "I knew then too."

"Then why—"

"Because wrong and you is still better than right and not you," Ilya says. He says it simply, directly, without apparent awareness of how large it is. He just says it and then looks at his hands again.
Shane absorbs this.

"You know, I built you a cottage," Shane says, finally verbalising it after months of trying to think of ways on how to say it.

Ilya's head comes up. His face looked puzzled, his forehead creasing. Again, Shane had the urge to kiss him.

"On the lake," Shane says. "In Ottawa. I started planning it during the summer, when you were in Russia and I was in Ottawa and I couldn't stop thinking about what you said at Christmas about coming back to the same place every year and knowing it will be there. I built it because I couldn't say what I felt to your face, so I built you something with my hands instead. Something that would be there when I finally figured out how to be honest to myself and with you."

Ilya is very still. More shellshocked than before.

"You built me a cottage," he says, quieter this time, like he couldn’t believe what he was saying.

"Well, I built us a cottage," Shane softly, and carefully he follows it up. "But only if you want it, I’m not like pressuring you or anything. I just thought you should finally know that you can have a place to come back to anytime."

Something breaks open in Ilya's expression, not suddenly or dramatically, but gradually, like a door that has been latched a long time finally being pushed through from the other side.

He stands up.

Shane's heart does something that is too large for his chest.

Ilya crosses the room. He stops directly in front of Shane, crouching down and looks at him with the full-look and Shane looks back.

"You were scared," Ilya says.

"Yes."

"And now?"

Shane holds his gaze. "I’m still so fucking scared but now I know that all of this was a choice I made," he says. "I chose it. I picked the version where I didn't have to believe it was real because the version where it was real and could be lost was too much for me to handle. And I chose it even when you were standing right there telling me I was wrong. And I have been living with that choice for months and I am done with it." He takes a breath. "I love you. I know what I am. I know what I want. I want you, and I am not going to keep making the wrong choice."

Ilya looks at him for a long moment. Then he says: "My situation is not simple."

"I know that, Ilya."

"Russia," Ilya says. "My father. My family. What it is to be—" He pauses, and something moves through his face that Shane recognises from the Christmas porch, from the Vegas rooftop, the weight of things that belong to his life that Shane is only allowed to see in pieces. "In Russia, what I am is not legal, but it is also my father's name. And they still need me, I cannot risk being outed, I would not be able to go home." He holds Shane's gaze. "I cannot promise you a simple version of this. It will not be easy, Shane."

"I'm not asking for something simple or easy," Shane says.

"I cannot promise that we can be—" Ilya stops. "Public. Not now. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever, in the way you might want."

"I'm not asking you to be anything you're not ready to be, I’m also not ready to be public either. Not for a long time." Shane says. "So I'm not asking you to solve any of it. I'm asking you to let me be here with you while we figure out how to be together." He pauses. "I know how hard it was to say what you said to me in Vegas. I know what you risked. I know and understand your situation, all of it, Ilya. And I know you've been carrying all of it in a way I haven't had to. I'm not going to make it worse by pushing you into something before you're ready."

Ilya is quiet.

"I just want you, Ilya." Shane says. "Whatever that looks like right now. Whatever you can give me, whatever is possible right now. We can figure out the rest as we go."

Ilya looks at him for a long, held moment.

"I think I have loved you," he says, quietly. "Since before I could know to call it that."

He says it slowly, the way he says things he has been keeping for a long time. "Since we first met, I think. Seventeen years old and you were furious during the game and you didn't look at me like I was anything to be afraid of and I thought: that one. I want to play against that one for the rest of my career. But also I think I thought even then that you were someone that I wanted to be with for as long as I’m allowed." He pauses. "And then we were drafted together and I thought it was a good thing. I get to have a chance to see you every day, to get to know you."

Shane cannot breathe correctly. He didn’t even know his hands were shaking until Ilya held it, grounding him, the way he knows will help Shane settle.

"I planned everything," Ilya says. "The coffee shop, from the first time, I found it before I asked you to come. I went a few times by myself to check the menu, the atmosphere, and whether you would be comfortable. I spent a few days looking for the right restaurant because I had been watching what you ate since training camp started and I wanted you to have somewhere you didn't have to explain yourself." He meets Shane's eyes. "All of it. From the beginning."

"I know," Shane says. "I saw it. I saw all of it. I just didn't let myself understand what it meant."

"I know you saw it," Ilya says. "That's why I kept going. Because I could see you receiving it, even when you were pretending you weren't, and I thought that if I am patient—" He stops. "I thought eventually you would get there. And then June happened."

"I'm sorry," Shane says.

"I know," Ilya says. "I know you're sorry. I’m sorry—"

"No, don’t apologise. You have nothing to apologise for, Ilya. I fucked it up because I was terrified," Shane says.

"Hmm, me too."

"Yeah?" Shane says.

"Yes," Ilya says. "I have loved you for long time and I lost you once already and I am here telling you again and I am—" He exhales. "Very frightened, yes."

"Don't be," Shane says. "I'm not going anywhere anymore. And this time I have a cottage on the lake to prove it."

Something happens to Ilya's expression, the small smile arriving, the one that has everything in it and it is the best thing Shane has seen in a long time. He wants to do everything in his power to make sure Ilya looks like that all the time.

"Oh yeah, you built me a cottage," Ilya says, grinning.

"No, I built us a cottage," Shane says, playfully rolling his eyes.

"Uh no, I think I remember you saying you built it for me, are you taking it back now?”

“Fine, yes. I built it for you, happy?”

“Very.” Ilya says smugly.

"Ilya," Shane says.

"Yes."

"Come here," Shane says.

And Ilya does. He closes the distance between them and looks at Shane from very close, and Shane puts his hands on his face like he did the first time they kissed but this time he is not going to let go.

"I love you, Ilya," Shane says confidently.

"I love you, too. So much." Ilya says and they’re both smiling like idiots now.

"Can you say it in Russian?" Shane says, eyes glistening with so much love.

"Ya tebya lyublyu," Ilya says, without looking away. "I have loved you since our first game together when you looked at me like you were going to spend the next ten years trying to beat me."

"Fifteen years," Shane says.

"Yes, at least," Ilya agrees.

Shane pulls him in and kisses him, and this time he is not going anywhere.

This is different from their first kiss. That kiss was just a few seconds and then gone, the shock of the real landing before Shane could process it, and it exists in his memory as something that happened to a different, more frightened version of himself. This is here, fully here, his hands on Ilya's jaw and Ilya's hands in his hair and the weight of everything behind it, every month and every note he wrote in the dark, compressed into this point of contact.

Ilya pulls back. He is close enough that Shane can count his eyelashes and he is looking at Shane.

"Hi," Ilya says.

"Hi," Shane says, and he’s so giddy.

“I missed you,”

“Me too, Ilya. I can’t believe I let myself walk away from this, from you.”

“Mhm but you are not walking away again, yes?”

Shane is caressing Ilya’s cheeks, wiping away the tear that’s falling from Ilya’s eyes. They’re both crying now, tears flowing freely as soon as they finally admitted the truth. “Yes, baby. I’m never leaving you again, never ever. And you can’t leave me either, you’re stuck with me now,” That got a small laugh from Ilya, he bumped his nose with Shane’s while smiling.

“Sounds so terrible, but I am nothing if not a big strong Russian so I guess I can endure,”

“Asshole,”

Ilya kisses him again. Slower this time, their tongues intertwining. Their soft touches amplified the sensation, sending shivers down their spines. They migrate to the bedroom.

There is nothing slow about the undressing. Shane gets Ilya's shirt half-unbuttoned before he gives up and pulls it over his head, which Ilya allows with the easy compliance. Ilya has Shane's shirt off in five seconds and his hands are already moving, warm and sure, and Shane works at Ilya's belt while Ilya works at his, and it is not graceful but it is real, the two of them hungry for each other, two years of it finally given somewhere to go.

"Fuck, sweetheart. Be careful, I’m not going anywhere," Ilya’s chuckling, but still working on removing Shane’s sweatpants.

"Shut up, just hurry," Shane says eagerly.

"So impatient, moya lyubov'," Ilya laughs, and kisses him again.

They get there. They get everything off eventually, and when they're finally done Shane takes one full look at Ilya, just a second, just standing there in the morning light coming through the bedroom window and Ilya lets him look, which is more intimate than anything else that's happened so far.

"You’re staring," Ilya says.

“Not my fault you look so fucking hot,” Shane says, smirking. He knows it will rile Ilya up, and he’s right.

“Fuck, Shane. I need you.”

Ilya puts a hand on Shane's chest and walks him backward to the bed.

Shane sits, and then Ilya is pushing him down, and then he is on his back with Ilya over him.

"Hi," Shane says, from the pillow.

Ilya looks down at him. Then he starts at Shane's jaw and goes from there.

He takes his time. Ilya taking his time, which means his mouth at Shane's throat, his collarbone, the center of his chest, unhurried, not building toward anything in particular but simply learning. Finding the things that make Shane's breath change and registering them. The spot below Shane's ear that gets an involuntary sound out of him. The inside of his wrist that makes him tighten his hand in Ilya's hair. The left side of his ribs that makes him twitch and grab the pillow.

"That," Shane says.

Ilya hums and comes back to it.

"Stop," Shane says. "That's, fuck stop, Ilya—"

"No," Ilya says.

"I'm serious—"

"You're not," Ilya says, and does it again, and Shane tips his head back.

"You're terrible," Shane says, laughing and looking at the ceiling.

"I'm learning you," Ilya says against his ribs, matter-of-fact.

"You don't have to be thorough about it—"

"I do," Ilya says. "I have been waiting two years for this. I'm going to be thorough."

Shane exhales. "Fine," he says. "Be thorough."

"Thank you," Ilya says, which makes Shane laugh in spite of himself, and Ilya looks up at the sound like it's something he's been wanting to collect.

He keeps going. Shane stops arguing.

By the time Ilya's mouth reaches his hip, Shane has lost track of how long they've been here and stopped caring. His hands are in Ilya's hair, not directing, just there, needing the contact and Ilya takes his time with the crease of his hip, the inside of his thigh, the places that make Shane's whole body go tight.

"Ilya," Shane says.

"Yes," Ilya says.

"I need you to—"

"Not yet," Ilya says.

"You don't even know what I was going to say."

"Yes I do," Ilya says. He looks up. His chin is resting on Shane's hip and his eyes are very dark and his expression is the patient, slightly smug one, and Shane wants to argue but cannot summon the argument.

"Fine," Shane says. "Keep going."

"I was going to," Ilya says.

He does. He continues kissing the inside of Shane’s thighs before he takes Shane in his mouth and Shane makes a sound he has never made before, low and rough and completely involuntary, and his hands tighten in Ilya's hair and his whole body tries to arch up, which Ilya manages with a hand flat on his hip, holding him down.

"Ilya," Shane says.

The hum around him is going to be the end of him.

He says other things. He stops caring about what he says, stops monitoring anything, because this is Ilya, and Ilya is good at this the way Ilya is good at everything he has decided to be good at, which is completely and without apparent effort, and Shane is being extremely vocal about all of it and he does not care.

"Fuck, keep going," Shane manages, at one point.

Ilya does it again.

"God," Shane says. "Fuck, Ilya, please—"

Ilya keeps. He is unhurried but not in a frustrating way, finding what works and staying with it, and Shane can feel it building, can feel where this is going, and he puts his hand on Ilya's shoulder.

"Ilya, stop," he says.

Ilya stops. He pulls back and looks up at Shane, brow slightly furrowed with concern. "Not good? Are you okay?"

"Yes," Shane exhales. "I mean it’s good, so good and I’m okay, I just—" He stops. He breathes. He is flushed and his voice is not entirely steady and Ilya is looking at him from there with the dark eyes and the patient expression and Shane is going to say this. He has wanted this for so long. He is going to say it. "I don't want to come yet," he says. "I want — I need you to fuck me."

Ilya stares at him.

It takes about two seconds. Shane watches it happen, the flicker of surprise and then the expression that comes after it, which is not surprise, which is warm and dark and considerably more intense than surprise.

"Shane," Ilya says.

"I know what I'm asking," Shane says. "I've thought about it for a long time. I want—"

"Are you sure? We don’t have to—" Ilya says.

"Yes," Shane says. "I'm sure. I'm completely sure."

Ilya holds his gaze for a moment. Then he moves back up Shane's body, slowly, and when he's level with him he looks at him very carefully, reading his face in the way he reads things he actually needs to understand.

"You've done this before," Ilya says. Not quite a question.

"No," Shane says.

Ilya is quiet.

"Does that change anything?" Shane says.

"No, of course not," Ilya says, immediately. "It means I go slowly." He pauses. "You have—"

"Side table," Shane says. "Right side."

Ilya reaches across him, and there is a slightly absurd few seconds of Shane watching Ilya check the side table with the methodical efficiency of someone taking inventory, and then Ilya looks back at him.

"You’re prepared," Ilya says.

"Fuck off," Shane rolls his eyes, with no real heat. "Are you gonna fuck me or not?"

Ilya makes the low warm sound that is almost a laugh, and then he kisses Shane once, slow and thorough, and pulls back to look at him. "I will," he says. "Tell me if anything is wrong."

"I will," Shane says.

"I mean it," Ilya says.

"I know you mean it," Shane says. "I trust you. Completely. I have always trusted you."

Something in Ilya's expression shifts. He presses his mouth briefly to Shane's jaw, then his cheek, then the corner of his mouth, and then he gets to work.

He is slow about it. Unhurried and careful and paying attention to Shane's face the whole time, which Shane is aware of even when he can't look back, even when his eyes are closed and his hands are gripping the pillow above his head.

"Okay?" Ilya says.

"Yes," Shane says. "Don't ask—"

"I'm going to keep asking," Ilya says.

"Fuck, Ilya—"

"Good answer," Ilya says.

Shane makes a sound that he would be embarrassed about in any other context and is not embarrassed about here. He is past embarrassment. He gave up embarrassment long ago.

"More," Shane says.

"Yes," Ilya says. Another press of his fingers, slow, and Shane exhales in a way that goes all the way to his feet.

"There," Shane says. "Right—"

Ilya just hums, and does it again, and Shane's whole body tightens and he says something that isn't quite words.

"Good?" Ilya says.

"Extremely good," Shane says. "Please don't stop."

"I won't," Ilya says. He leans down and presses his mouth to Shane's knee, the inside of his thigh, working back up. "Fuck, Shane, you're so—"

"What?" Shane says, looking down on Ilya.

"Beautiful," Ilya says, simply.

Shane looks at the ceiling and doesn't say anything about that because he can't. Instead, he says, “I’m ready, Ilya,”

"Now?" Ilya says.

"Now," Shane says. "Yes. Right now."

Ilya moves. He gets the condom on with the same focused efficiency he brings to everything, and then he's back over Shane, settled between his legs, and he looks at him, just looks at him, for a moment, the weight of what this is sitting between them.

"You still want?" Ilya asks after kissing him.

"Yes, I still want," Shane says. "So stop drawing it out,"

"I'm not drawing it out," Ilya says. "I'm looking at you."

"Ilya—"

"I'm looking at you," Ilya says again, patient, "because I have been waiting a very long time to see you like this. Give me a moment."

Shane closes his mouth. He gives him the moment.

Ilya leans down and kisses him; deep, slow, and thorough, and Shane's hands come up to his back, pulling him closer, and then Ilya presses forward, slow and careful, watching Shane's face the whole time.

Shane exhales against his mouth.

"Okay?" Ilya says.

"Yes, fuck," Shane says. "I'm okay. Keep going."

He keeps going. He stops when Shane needs him to and moves when Shane asks him to, and they are both adjusting, the learning of something new, and Ilya is patient in the same way he has always been patient, not passive, but present, paying attention, making adjustments.

"Okay," Shane says, when it is.

"Yeah?" Ilya says.

"Yeah," Shane says. "You can move."

Ilya moves.

It feels.. Otherworldly. Shane doesn't have other words for what it is. Full, and close, and warm, and real in a way that two years of wanting it couldn't account for. Ilya is slow at first, letting Shane adjust, and then Shane's hands tighten at his back and Shane says more, harder, faster and Ilya responds to that.

They keep kissing through it, which is the thing Shane didn't expect, the constancy of it, Ilya kissing him between movements and during them and at intervals, returning to his mouth like it's where he wants to be, where he needs to be, which apparently it is, and Shane kisses back, and they are both making lewd sounds, not just Shane, both of them, and knowing that Ilya is also undone by this, that it's not just Shane falling apart, does something in Shane's chest that is separate from everything else that's happening.

"Shane," Ilya says, against his mouth.

"Yeah," Shane says.

"I love you," Ilya says. He says it like it's simple, like it's just a fact, like it's something he has simply needed to say out loud and is saying.

"I love you," Shane says. Also simple. Also just true.

Ilya kisses him and keeps moving and Shane holds on.

After a while Ilya pulls back slightly and looks at Shane with dark eyes and flushed cheeks and an expression that Shane is going to be thinking about for a very long time.

"Turn over," Ilya says.

Shane turns over.

The pillow under his chest, his hands braced, and then Ilya is back, and this is different, this angle, and Shane makes an embarrassing sound immediately and buries his face in the pillow.

"Don't hide your beautiful face, moya lyubov'," Ilya says.

Shane turns his face to the side. "I'm not hiding," he says, slightly muffled.

"I want to hear you, Shane," Ilya growls, and he is moving, which makes the conversation both easier and significantly harder.

"Ilya," Shane moans.

"Yes," Ilya says.

"Don't stop," he says.

He doesn't stop. He gets a hand around Shane's hip, steadying, and Shane grips the headboard and stops trying to form sentences. The sounds he's making are not things he recognises as himself, except that they are, they're entirely himself, the version of himself that exists here where there's nothing to manage.

Ilya says his name. Then something in Russian, low and rough and completely wrecked, that Shane doesn't have the vocabulary for but understands anyway. His hand tightens at Shane's hip and he says "Shane" again and then he's gone, forehead pressed to the back of Shane's neck, both of them breathing.

Shane follows about ten seconds later, and it's the kind of ending that takes everything with it, and afterward he lies there with Ilya half on top of him.

They stay like that for a while.

The morning is full of gold through the window. Boston goes about its business outside. Shane looks at the window and feels, just feels.

"Fuck," Ilya says, eventually, into the pillow.

"Yeah, I know," Shane says, chuckling. Understanding exactly what Ilya meant. He turns his head to look at him. Ilya's face is half in the pillow, one eye visible, expression approximately peaceful. "Are you okay?"

"I am very okay, never been better," Ilya says.

"Good," Shane says. "Me too."

A pause.

"I need a shower, my stomach is gross and sticky," Shane scrunching his nose.

"Mm," Ilya says, then kisses Shane’s nose because he can now.

"Come with me," Shane says.

Ilya lifts his head. He looks at Shane. The expression shifts into something warmer, something that is almost the small smile but bigger. "Okay," he says.

The shower is hot and steam-fogged and smaller than ideal for two people, which turns out not to matter. They wash each other's hair with the focused, pleased attention of people doing something new that they intend to do many more times. Shane presses his mouth to the side of Ilya's neck and feels him exhale, and then he drops to his knees on the shower floor and Ilya's hand comes to his hair, and that is also something new they are doing for the first time and intend to do many more times.

Ilya's hand tightens in his hair when it's over, holding on for a moment, and Shane stays where he is with the hot water on his back and his hands at Ilya's hips.

"Up," Ilya says, eventually. His voice is wrecked.

Shane stands. Ilya wraps both arms around him and holds on and Shane puts his face against the side of his neck and stays there.

"Hi, baby," Shane whispered.

"I like that," Ilya sighs softly.

"I like you. I love you," Shane says, running his hands across Ilya’s back, feeling the scratches he made earlier.

"Yes," Ilya says, into his hair. "I love you too."

They stay like that until the water starts to cool, and then they get out and Shane finds towels and they dry off and get back into bed, which is the correct ending to a morning like this. Ilya pulls Shane in against his side and Shane goes willingly, which is a thing he is going to practice, going willingly, not managing the want of it.

"Say something in Russian," Shane says.

Ilya is quiet for a moment. Then he says something low and unhurried and warm.

"What does that mean," Shane says.

"It means—" Ilya pauses. "It means: I have been looking for you for a long time. I didn't know what you would look like until you showed up. But I knew it was you, that you were the one."

Shane looks at the ceiling.

"You've been holding that one," Shane says.

"Yes, now you know my secret," Ilya says, rubbing circles at Shane’s hips.

“What, that you love me?”

“Yes but not just that, now you know that I am a sap,”

Shane laughed. He reaches up to kiss Ilya. “I won’t tell and tease you too much as long as you promise you will never stop,”

“Oh so you are also a sap,” He kisses Shane again before taking both his hands into his mouth like he was announcing something important. “Everyone must know this, Shane Hollander is a sap. Gross, Hollander,” Ilya teases, dodging the pillow Shane is hitting him with.

They settle back to their position, cuddling. The silence that came after was good and comfortable. Shane turns his head to look at him. Ilya is looking at the ceiling, and his beautiful face is lit by the morning, and he has the expression that Shane has been knowing for two years, the open, warm thing and it is aimed at the ceiling and at nothing and at everything, and Shane looks at it and thinks: I get to see this. I'm allowed to see this. This is mine now.

"What are you thinking?" Ilya says, without turning.

"That I'm going to see that expression on your face every day," Shane says. "For as long as you'll let me."

Ilya turns to look at him. The expression adjusts to include something more direct, something aimed.

"That's a long time," Ilya says.

"Yeah? You will let me for a long time?" Shane says.

"Are you sure you want that?"

Shane scoffs. "I built you a cottage, Ilya."

Ilya makes the almost-laugh. "You did," he says.

"Of course, I'm sure. Never been more sure about anything in my life." Shane says.

"Okay," Ilya says. "Then I want that too."

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Sveta knocks on the bedroom door at nine.

"I'm leaving," she says, through it.

"Okay," Shane calls.

A pause. "Did you talk?"

"Yes," Ilya says.

Another pause. "Actually talk," she says, "or—"

"Actually," Ilya says. "Go away, Sveta."

"Good." In Russian she says something short and pointed that makes Ilya close his eyes briefly, but he’s smiling.

"What did she say?" Shane asks.

"She said it's about time," Ilya says, "and that we owe her the most expensive dinner in Boston, and that she loves us." He pauses. "In that order."

"She's right," Shane says.

"Don't tell her that."

"She already knows," Shane says.

Through the door: "I can hear you, asshole," A pause. "Shane."

"Yeah," Shane says.

"Take care of each other," she says.

"We will," Shane says.

A longer pause. Then, in Russian, something softer, something that is not instruction but affection.

"What was that one?" Shane asks.

"She said—" Ilya pauses. "She said she has been watching me love you since before I knew it was love. And she is glad it finally did something useful."

Shane looks at the ceiling.

"She watched you love me," he says.

"She is very observant," Ilya says.

"She's terrifying," Shane says.

"Yes," Ilya agrees. "I love her very much."

“Me too. Thank you, Sveta.”

She replies with I know, then they can hear her footsteps recede. The front door opens and closes. The apartment is quiet. They’re alone now.
Shane turns to look at Ilya, who is looking at him.

"So," Shane says.

"So," Ilya repeats.

"We're—" Shane considers the word. He has not used this word out loud yet. He is going to use it now. "We're together."

Ilya looks at him. "Yes," he says. "I believe that's the correct description."

"Boyfriends," Shane says.

"If you like that word," Ilya shrugged, trying to sound nonchalant.

"Do you?"

Ilya sighs, and actually considers. "Yes, I think so," he says. "I want to be your boyfriend, and I want you to be mine."

"I want, too." Shane says.

Ilya pulls him closer.

"The cottage," Shane says, into his shoulder.

"Can we go once it’s ready?" Ilya asks.

"It’s already done, we can go this summer,"

"Okay, I want to see the lake," Ilya says. "In the summer. I've only seen it in winter."

"It's different in summer," Shane says. "Warmer. The water's cold though."

"Hmm I don’t care if it will be cold," Ilya says. "I will swim anyway."

"Of course you will," Shane says.

"You will swim also," Ilya says.

"I might."

"You will," Ilya says. "I will make sure of it."

Shane thinks about summer on the lake, the light on the water, the dock, the cottage.

Outside, Boston does its morning. The season is over and the summer is coming and the lake in Ottawa is already so close they can feel it, and somewhere there is a cottage with a dock and millions of new memories to form, and it belongs to both of them, and everything is, finally, exactly right.

Shane puts his face against Ilya's shoulder and stays there.

Ilya's arm comes around him.

Neither of them is going anywhere.

Chapter End Notes

Russian translation (from Google):
Ya tebya lyublyu: I love you
Moya lyubov': My love

 

Thanks for reading 🩷

Yall the smut killed me (why it took so long to finish), I can't write it for shit, so if it was bad, please don't tell me. You can shit on any other part of my writing except that loll.

I thought it was important to note that both characters are extremely flawed and young at this point (it's only 2011-2012) and again, I want to stay as close to canon as possible even if I am making them better communicators a lot earlier, so please keep that in mind when reading. I love both Shane and Ilya but they're still immature YOUNG men who's learning to navigate complex relationships and feelings so they're bound to make mistakes and hurt each other (intentionally or otherwise). But they will be better now, can't promise that it will be smooth sailing from here but nothing too bad will happen PROMISE! And while I think Ilya deserved to crash out, I decided against him voicing that because he saw that Shane was being braver and honest and admitted to his mistakes and was open about his fears and feelings so it kind of mellowed out Ilya’s sort of angst about their situation. I just want to give them a kinder reconciliation, I don’t know if I made the right call (in general) but for now, I think I did.

Also we love Rose & Sveta #mygirlfriends 🩷

Clue for the next chapter is.... domestic fluff central 🏡🍃⛅️🏞️

Feedbacks/comments are always appreciated!