Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Inspired by Heated Rivalry (TV), Post-Episode: s01e04 Rose (Heated Rivalry), Book 2: Heated Rivalry (Game Changers), Pre-Relationship, Mutual Pining, Love Confessions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Getting Back Together, Past Shane Hollander/Rose Landry, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov Needs A Hug, POV Third Person, POV Ilya Rozanov, Jealous Ilya Rozanov, NO AI fuck AI, no beta we die like ilyas dad, Post-Scene: Ilya Rozanov Makes Tuna Melts in Episode: s01e04 Rose, Tuna meltdown aftermath but they were better at communicating by like 10 percent, Yearning Ilya Rozanov, Miscommunication, Idiots in Love, Getting Together, Drunk Confession, Fix-It of Sorts, Sad Ilya Rozanov, Super Light Angst

Language:

English

Series:

Part 3 of Shane & Ilya: Slightly Better Communicators (Maybe)

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-27 Words: 5,183 Chapters: 1/1

Another shot of vodka, can't stop looking at the door

Summary

"What are you doing here?"

Ilya looks at him. Shane has not moved from the doorway. He has one hand still on the frame.

"I don't know," Ilya says, which is the truest thing he has said in months.

Shane makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh. "That's not—" He stops. Runs a hand over his face. "You can't be here, Ilya."

The name. Again. Said almost like an accident.

"Why are you here?" he asks instead of responding to that.

Shane goes still.

"This isn't your place," Ilya says. Carefully. "I mean, you don’t live here. You live somewhere else, a real one, nicer, bigger, or I don’t know because I have never been to it. So why are you in the fuck building at four in the morning?"

Shane's jaw tightens. For a second Ilya thinks he won't answer, that he will turn and go back inside and this will be just another door between them and then Shane says, low and bitten-off: "I come here sometimes."

"Why?"

"You know why."

 

Or, After Shane leaves Ilya in Boston, Ilya becomes a mess and Shane thinks he's ruined everything. They both seek each other silently until they cross paths again. Eventually, someone has to say something.

Notes

Hi! This has been in my docs since December and I was procrastinating finishing Ch 7 of my current ongoing fic so I fucked around in my docs and found this finished but unedited fic (I genuinely forgot about her lmaoo). I'm a sucker for tuna meltdown, love confessions, and I love making Shane and Ilya better communicators (or whatever qualifies as communicators for their standard at least). So here's my contribution to the probably hundreds of tuna meltdown fics. Also I’m mixing show and book canon because why not :D

Title is from Need You Now by Lady A (altered whiskey to vodka because DUH)

Anyway, English is not my first language (thankfully) so if there's any mistakes trust that I do not care.

It's been days.

Dishes still in the sink.

Unopened cans of fucking ginger ale everywhere.

In the refrigerator. In the garage. And in the fucking pantry.

And his shirt and pants.

Frozen in time. A reflection of Ilya's state of mind. He still moves around and goes to practice. He does his duties, restricted and rehearsed smiles, doing his captainly job. Chirps and continues to be an asshole on the ice, but to anyone who knows him, will see that he's putting on a show. But to the rest of the world, nothing had changed.

But not to Ilya. Everything has changed; he changed. He used to be the only constant thing in Ilya's crazy life. Ilya could count on him to be the same, be unchanging, be boring.

At home, Ilya doesn't dare to move anything. Moulding his life around what was left of what could have been. Spending what felt like hours staring into anything that had been touched by him. It's crazy how something as small as a fucking plate could cause Ilya to break down. For days, he left everything as is, afraid to cause any more change.

It's been weeks.

Ilya thought he would be fine by now. He should be, he wants to be, he needs to be. It had been foolish of him to have suggested such a deranged idea. Of course, it was right to blow up on his fucking face. To think that he would want Ilya beyond the physical act of fucking, that Ilya was more than a warm mouth or a tool used to get fucked. Ilya should have known better. Nothing good ever comes from wanting something you shouldn't. He got too cocky, he supposed. He shouldn't have assumed, shouldn't have taken his actions to heart.

It was absolutely ridiculous of Ilya to want more of him. It was idiotic of him to want more of his smile, such a sight, especially when it's genuine. Ilya first saw it about a year into their secret sexual rendezvous. Ilya had just gotten to his hotel room, and they had just finished a game. Ilya won, and he wanted to celebrate, so he bought him a gift. A laced skimpy pair of underwear, Ilya bought it as a joke; he thought that, at the very least, he would see him scoff at Ilya. As soon as he opened the box, Ilya could have sworn he saw the light. He was beaming, smiling from ear to ear. He threw the underwear to Ilya while struggling to keep himself from falling off the bed because he was laughing so hard. Ilya felt a strange feeling in his chest that day; he couldn't put a name on it. All Ilya knew was that he wanted more of it; he wanted to see him like that, completely unguarded, and genuinely himself. He knew that he would do whatever it took to make it happen, that he wanted to be the one, the only one, to cause that smile.

Now, all he can think about is his stupid smile. Back then, he would give up everything to see it forever. But now, he wants nothing but to forget it. Forget the way it makes him feel, the way his heart beats a fuck ton because of it. Everywhere he looks, he sees him. Parading his new girl. Ilya knew he was being ridiculous; he was known for fucking other people, too. But he never did; this whole thing isn't him. Or maybe Ilya didn't know him as well as he thought. He'd been wrong before; maybe he shouldn't assume he knew him at all anymore.

Ilya needs a drink. Not that any amount of alcohol would be enough, but he would take anything to help numb the pain. He should have stopped this thing years ago, back when he didn't feel as deep. Back when the most he would have felt was regret, and not this gut-wrenching ache. Surprisingly, though, he doesn't regret it. He will never regret loving him. Ilya loved him, loves him, so fucking much. He can say that now, he can admit it, to himself at least. Nothing else would explain why he was feeling like he does now.

Instead, he's outside Shane's hookup building in Montreal. He didn't know how he got here. Boston had just played a game against Ottawa earlier; they won, miraculously, no thanks to Ilya. He was still playing like shit, unlike himself. It's been going on for far too long that his teammates have started to notice, not that any of them would say anything to Ilya, they know better, but Ilya could feel that they want to, want to ask and want to know. But they could never know, never know the reason why Ilya feels like a hollow piece of a man, barely living, barely functioning.

He's at the stairwell, staring at the door. He's been here a few times over the last few months, spending an ungodly hour just staring at a fucking door. He doesn't know what he wants to happen; would he be here? If he were, would he be alone? Surely not, he would take her to his real place, she isn't Ilya. She isn't some secret he needs to hide, an embarrassment, a threat to his way of life.

As Ilya's getting up to leave, he hears the door open.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The dream is always the same.

Shane, in Ilya's kitchen in Boston, wearing the oversized Montreal shirt that he'd left behind, the one Ilya has since moved to the back of his closet because he cannot look at it and cannot throw it away, a fact that embarrasses him in a deep and private way. In the dream, Shane is laughing at something Ilya said, and it's the real laugh, the one Ilya had to work so hard to earn. The one that creases his eyes and makes his whole face do something complicated and soft.

In the dream, Ilya says something like, stay.

Shane actually stays.

Ilya wakes up in his dark hotel room in Montreal. The away game had put him here, driving in his rental car from Ottawa, one more night in a city that smells like everything he's been trying to outrun. His phone says 3:47 AM. He lies in the hotel room and stares at the ceiling for a while, and he thinks about the ginger ale still in his fridge in Boston. He'd bought a twelve-pack because he knows it’s all Shane drinks, he mentioned the specific brand once and offhandedly, so Ilya had filed the information away like a fucking archivist. Like it was something he was planning to use.

And he had used it. He'd set the can on the kitchen counter like an offering that afternoon, after a particularly warm cuddle session and an amazing fuck, like he had any right to make gestures like that. Like he'd earned it.

He hadn't. Clearly.

He should go back to sleep. Instead, he sits up, runs a hand through his hair, and reaches for the bottle on the nightstand. He'd picked it up after the game. His teammates had gone out; Ilya had declined, because his teammates go out and talk and Ilya is in no state to perform right now, not off the ice, not tonight.

He drinks.

He thinks about the way Shane had said his name.

Not Rozanov. Not Roz, or asshole, or the other things that substitute for tenderness between the two of them. His name. The real one. Ilya. Said in that low, wrecked voice, mid—

He drinks more.

The problem is that Ilya is, by most accounts, extremely good at not feeling things. He has been doing it since he was fourteen years old and his father in Moscow told him that his feelings were a liability on the ice. He had taken that as a general life principle and had applied it aggressively, across all categories. He fucked people and did not catch feelings. He won championships and felt the high for forty-eight hours and moved on. He could leave any room and not look back.

And then he had gone and fallen completely in love with Shane Hollander, who he has known since they were seventeen, who has been his rival and his secret and his only real constant for six years, and now he is sitting in a hotel room in Montreal at four in the morning drunk enough to feel everything and not drunk enough to make it stop.

He finishes the bottle.

He puts on his coat.

He doesn't examine this decision very carefully.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The building is the same as always.

That's the thing about the hookup building, and Ilya hates that he has a name for it in his head, hates what that implies about how much real estate Shane Hollander occupies in his mind, it is aggressively, insistently itself. A mid-rise in a perfectly acceptable neighbourhood. The kind of building that does not advertise what it is used for. Ilya has been here enough times that he knows the back entrance like the back of his hand. He knows when to text Shane that he was near, so that he would already be there, waiting for Ilya.

Unlike then, he couldn’t text Shane. Ilya hasn't walked in. He's been standing outside in the cold for twenty minutes like a man who has made several very poor decisions in a row and is now confronting their cumulative weight.

His phone has four percent battery. He should call a car. He should go back to the hotel. He should sleep and wake up and go back to Ottawa and play the last game of this road trip and fly home to Boston and throw away the ginger ale and move on with his life like a person who has some semblance of self-preservation instinct.

He didn’t know how he managed to open the door into the stairwell.

Rose Landry's face smiles at him from somewhere in the back of his skull. He had seen the photos, because of course he had, because the universe is specifically and personally cruel to Ilya Rozanov, splashed across every entertainment site and sports media feed in North America. Shane Hollander and actress Rose Landry, new couple? and there they were, outside some restaurant in Montreal, Shane in the plain dark jacket he wears when he thinks he's being incognito, Rose laughing at something, her hand on his arm.

Shane's expression in the photo had been careful. Ilya had looked at it for a long time, cataloguing the careful-ness, and then he had closed his phone and gone to practice and hit everything that moved.

Rose Landry is funny and sharp and hockey-literate and she is the kind of beautiful that looks comfortable in photographs, and she is absolutely not the reason Shane Hollander left Ilya's house with his shoes in his hand, making up a meeting that didn't exist.

But she is the reason Ilya knows, with a quiet certainty, that the day with the tuna melts was the last time he would ever have Shane like he wants to.

He'd called Shane's name.

He doesn't let himself think about the rest of it. Only that. The name. How it had slipped out of his mouth like something he'd been holding under his tongue for years and finally couldn't contain. How Shane hadn’t gone completely still and said it back, Ilya, in a voice that did not sound like anything Ilya had ever heard from him, and then everything had been fine for about four seconds, and then it had not been fine, and then Shane had been gone.

The cold is getting into his collar even though he’s been inside for what felt like forever. Ilya turns up his coat against it and thinks, not for the first time, that he has no fucking idea what he would say if Shane were actually here. What he would want from it. An apology? An explanation? He doesn't need Shane to explain himself; Ilya understands fear of this, he has been fluent in it for years.

He wants—

He hears the door open.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Shane is wearing a grey hoodie and sweats and he looks like he has also not been sleeping, which is the most privately satisfying and devastating thing Ilya has seen in months.

He stops when he sees Ilya. His expression does several things very quickly, surprise, something raw and unguarded, then the familiar ice of composure that he pulls down like a visor.

"Rozanov."

"Hollander."

A beat. The word sits in the air between them, stripped of everything. Just their names. Just that.

"It's four in the morning," Shane says.

"Yes."

Shane looks at him for a long moment. There's something measuring in it. Then, quietly: "You're drunk."

"A little," Ilya says, which is a lie, but not a very big one. He is past the sloppy stage and into the still, crystalline kind of drunk where everything feels very clear and very close.

"What are you doing here?"

Ilya looks at him. Shane has not moved from the doorway. He has one hand still on the frame, like he might need it for structural support, and Ilya looks up at his face and thinks, with exhausting clarity: I would do anything. I would do absolutely anything for this boring, infuriating, impossible person.

"I don't know," Ilya says, which is the truest thing he has said in months.

Shane makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh. "That's not—" He stops. Runs a hand over his face. "You can't be here, Ilya."

The name. Again. Said almost like an accident.

Something in Ilya's chest goes tight and then looser than it has been in months. "Why are you here?" he asks instead of responding to that.

Shane goes still.

"This isn't your place," Ilya says. Carefully. "I mean, you don’t live here. You live somewhere else, a real one, nicer, bigger, or I don’t know because I have never been to it. So why are you in the fuck building at four in the morning?"

Shane's jaw tightens. For a second Ilya thinks he won't answer, that he will turn and go back inside and this will be just another door between them and then Shane says, low and bitten-off: "I come here sometimes."

"Why?"

"You know why."

Ilya does not permit himself to react to that. He files it away. He looks at Shane and he files it away and he says, "Rose Landry," because apparently he has elected to do this, apparently this is the conversation they are having right now in a freezing stairwell in Montreal.

Something flickers across Shane's face. "We broke up. We’re not compatible, I guess."

Ilya waits.

"A few weeks ago. It's—it's not public yet, but." Shane shrugs, tight and uncomfortable. "It's done."

"Why?"

"Rozanov—"

"Why?" Ilya says again, harder.

"You know why," Shane says, and there it is again, that phrase, and Ilya is so tired, he is so fucking tired, he has been tired for months.

"Say it," Ilya says.

"Ilya." Warning in it now.

"Say it, please."

Shane looks at him for a long time. The cold is nothing; Ilya is made of cold, he grew up in cold, he could stand in this stairwell for a decade and not feel it. He watches Shane's face do its complicated thing, the working of the muscle in his jaw, the way his eyes go somewhere far away and then come back.

"Because she isn't you," Shane says, quiet and furious. "Because I tried and I couldn't and she — she actually figured it out, and she told me, and I still—" He stops. "Because it doesn't work if it's not you. Okay? Is that what you wanted to hear?"

Ilya's heart is doing something violent and structurally unsound.

"Why didn't you reach out," he says. "After. If you—why—"

"Because I didn't think I had the right to." Shane's voice is strange. Stripped down. "After the way I left. I didn't think you'd — I thought you were—" He makes a frustrated gesture. "You're you. You were probably fine. You're always fine."

Ilya stares at him.

"You thought I was fine."

"You seemed—"

"I have not slept properly in two months," Ilya says. The words come out very flat, very even. "I have been playing the worst hockey of my career. My teammates are scared to talk to me. I have a shit ton of ginger ale in my refrigerator in Boston that I bought for you that I cannot throw away and cannot look at." He pauses. "I am standing in the freezing cold at four in the morning because I cannot stop dreaming about you and I ran out of ways to not be here."

Shane has gone very still.

"You thought I was fine," Ilya says again.

"Ilya—"

"Don't." The anger that has been sitting at the bottom of everything for two months rises up now, and Ilya has been trying to keep it down because anger means he cares, anger means it matters, but fuck it, it does matter, it always mattered, he has been lying to himself and everyone else about how much it mattered and he is done. "Don't. Don't apologise, or whatever, just don't make it smaller than it is, I cannot do that right now."

Shane closes his mouth.

"I have been in love with you," Ilya says, and the words land in the cold air between them like something physical, like something he cannot take back, "for years. I don't know exactly when. It doesn't matter when. I know that I spent the whole of this year finding reasons to be in the same rooms as you and finding reasons to touch you and finding reasons to make you laugh because I wanted it so much it made me sick, and I know that day—" His voice does something unwanted. He steadies it. "That day in Boston was the best day I've had since I was twelve years old, and then you left, and I understood why, because I am also a coward, but I want you to know that I was not fine. I have not been fine. I am standing here at four in the morning and in love with you and I am asking you to let me in."

Silence.

The city breathes around them. Somewhere above, a window shutter knocks in the wind.

Shane says, "You're drunk."

"I know what I’m saying," Ilya says. "I have known what I was saying for years. I was just not saying it."

Shane looks at him. Really looks at him, the same way he had across the couch that day, that careful attentive way, like he's memorising something and Ilya holds very still under it.

"The ginger ale," Shane says.

"Yes."

"You kept it."

"I kept all of it," Ilya says. "I cannot get rid of it. I've tried."

Something breaks open in Shane's expression. It's brief, and then he's moving, stepping out of the doorway, and Ilya has a half-second to brace before Shane's hand finds the front of his coat and pulls him in.

"You're an idiot," Shane says, low, into his jaw. "You're such an idiot, you know that? Two months. I've been—two months."

"I know," Ilya says.

"I come here often," Shane says. The words are muffled now, pressed into Ilya's coat. "When I miss you. Which is—" A breath. "Which is a lot. It's a lot, okay."

"Hmm, I get it," Ilya says. He gets his arms around Shane, properly, the way he has wanted to since October, since forever, since probably much further back than that. Shane is solid and familiar and real under his hands and Ilya exhales for what feels like the first time in months.

"I'm gay," Shane says, into his shoulder. Like it's a confession. Like it's something he's been carrying. "Rose, she pointed it out and I already knew, I just—I was—"

"I know," Ilya says, softer now.

"You knew?"

"No. I mean—" Ilya presses his mouth to the side of his head, brief, clumsy. "I suspected. And it doesn't matter. Not for what I want to ask."

"What do you want to ask?"

Ilya pulls back enough to look at him. Shane's face is open in a way that it almost never is. "I'm asking to not pretend anymore. I'm asking for the staying, and the ginger ale, and the name. I'm asking to stop acting like this is something I should be able to stop wanting."

Shane looks at him for a long moment.

"This is a lot to unpack while you're drunk," Shane says, but there's something in his voice that Ilya recognises, the low-frequency thing, the same thing from that day, and Ilya's blood does what it always does in response.

"I am maybe forty percent drunk," Ilya says. "The rest is just—" He gestures, slightly helplessly. "This."

"This," Shane repeats. He sounds like he's trying not to smile, and Ilya has to look at the ceiling briefly to keep himself together. "Come with me."

"Inside?"

"No," Shane says, and something in the word is final, a door closing on something. "My apartment. My real apartment." He says it like it matters. Like there's a difference, and he wants to make sure Ilya understands the difference. "Come to my home."

Ilya looks at him.

"Okay," Ilya says.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Shane's apartment is twenty minutes away and Ilya hasn’t been in it, so he looks at it now. It's a good place. High ceilings, dark wood, shelves of books, real ones, Ilya notes, not decorative, and a kitchen that looks like it's actually been used. There's a throw blanket on the couch in Montreal blue. There is, on the counter by the coffee maker, a box of Coke.

Ilya stops.

Shane comes up beside him and follows his gaze. "Don't," Shane says, but he says it like he means the opposite.

"How long has that been there?"

A pause. "After I left your house."

Ilya looks at the box for a long moment. October. Before Rose. Before any of it. Just sitting there, a box of Coke, which Ilya knows Shane wouldn’t touch with an eight inch pole, on Shane Hollander's counter in his real apartment, the one that is not the hookup building, the one that means something.

"You're an idiot too," Ilya says.

"Yeah."

"We've been—" Ilya gestures. "We've wasted—"

"I know," Shane says, and he doesn't sound defensive about it. He sounds tired in the same way Ilya has been tired, and that shared tiredness is more intimate than most of what they've done together. "I know. I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry too," Ilya says, and means it, and means all the things underneath it.

They look at each other. The apartment is quiet around them, just the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of the city, and Ilya is drunk and exhausted and still in his coat, and Shane Hollander is standing in his kitchen looking at Ilya like he is something to hold onto, and Ilya thinks: oh. This is it. This is the thing I didn't have a name for.

"Take your coat off," Shane says.

Ilya takes his coat off.

Shane takes it from him, hangs it on the hook by the door. Small and domestic, the way that he had started to hope for, that day in Boston, when he had asked Shane to stay. He watches Shane's shoulders, the set of them, the way they carry tension even when he doesn't know he's doing it. The way they have loosened, slightly, since the stairwell.

"You should sleep," Shane says.

"I know."

"You're not going back to your hotel like this."

"Yeah, okay, whatever you say."

He crosses the kitchen and stands in front of Ilya and looks at him, and Ilya looks back, and for a moment neither of them moves, and it’s nothing like the first time or the hundredth time, not urgent, not wordless, not something they're both pretending not to feel. It's deliberate. It's a choice.

"Shane," Ilya says.

Shane exhales through his nose. "God," he says. "When you say it like that."

"Like what," Ilya says.

"Like you mean it."

"I always meant it," Ilya says. "When I said your name. I always—"

"I know," Shane says. "I know. I think I knew then." He reaches up and puts a hand on Ilya's jaw. Just that. The touch is light and careful and Ilya's entire body responds to it like it always does, like it has been responding since 2010, since before either of them had any idea what they were getting into. "I think that's why I ran."

"You’re not going to run again?" Ilya asks, softly, like he’s still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"No," Shane says. "I'm not going to, not anymore. And I also wouldn’t want to because I love you, too, Ilya. So fucking much."

He kisses him. Not a hungry kiss, not the kind they usually start with, this kiss is slow and deliberate and achingly careful, and Ilya gets his hands in Shane's hair and holds on.

It’s nothing like any other time.

It’s better.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Ilya wakes up to grey January light through Shane's curtains.

This is already different from every other morning. He is aware of this immediately, the way he is aware of his own pulse: Shane is beside him and has not left and the room is full of pale quiet light and neither of them is pretending this isn't happening.

Shane is awake already. He's on his back, staring at the ceiling, and when Ilya turns his head he looks over. Neither of them says anything for a moment.

"All-Stars is in three weeks," Shane says finally.

"Yes, I was not looking forward to it." Ilya says.

“Really? But you love All-Stars weekend,” Ilya looked at him with his brow raised, then it hit Shane, all he could say was Oh.

Ilya just nodded before asking why he brought up All-Stars.

"I was going to say something. To you. There."

Ilya looks at him. "You said it last night."

"Well yes, I did, not all of it," Shane says. "But last night, that was — I mean, you said it first, and I was thrown off but I was—" He stops. 

"You didn’t think last night was going to happen," Ilya says.

Shane nods. "Yes. My plan was All-Stars."

"Good timing then," Ilya says, jokingly. "Me showing up like crazy person."

"Yeah, you smelled like vodka," Shane says.

“I’m surprised you know what vodka smells like,”

“Fuck you, of course I do, you drink it all the time,”

Ilya chuckled. "Okay, maybe I smelled like vodka a little."

"A lot." But there's no heat in it. Shane turns his head fully to look at him. "Ilya, that day in Boston, you planned that? The ginger ale and the tuna melts and the staying,”

"Yes."

"Before you—before that day. You had already—"

"I wanted, I don’t know, more time? More you, I guess. I thought if I bought your favourite drink then maybe you would not hate staying. When I found out that we both had a free day before our game in Boston, I started thinking and planning." Ilya says. "I bought it and I put it in my refrigerator and I didn't want to make a big deal out of it."

Shane makes a sound that is not quite a laugh. "I'm so dumb," he says.

"We are both dumb," Ilya says, magnanimously. "In the same way. About the same thing."

"That's almost romantic."

"Don't push it, Hollander."

Shane smiles. That smile. The one that does the thing to Ilya's chest that Ilya first felt that hotel room in Toronto in 2010 and has never stopped feeling since. He doesn't look away from it.

"What happens now?" Shane asks.

Ilya thinks about it. "We figure it out," he says. "We stop pretending. It doesn't have to be—" He searches for the word. "Public. I mean, it can’t be, anyway. But it doesn't have to be anything we aren't ready for. But no more pretending and lying to ourselves."

Shane nods slowly. "No more of this." He glances around the room. "No more—whatever this has been. You deserve—" His jaw tightens. "You deserve more than what I've been giving you."

"So do you," Ilya says.

Shane looks at him for a moment, and Ilya can see him deciding whether to argue, and then he decides not to. Progress.

Shane shifts closer, and Ilya opens his arm without thinking about it, and Shane tucks himself in, not like something unfamiliar, not like something they are experimenting with, but like something they have always done and have just been too frightened to let themselves have. It fits with an ease that strikes Ilya as quietly devastating.

"Shane," Ilya says. Just to say it. Just to feel the way it sits in his mouth differently now, the way it has been altered by last night, by the stairwell, by the admission.

"Yeah," Shane says, into his shoulder.

“I love you, even if you are an idiot who would rather go to the fuck building because you missed me instead of talking to me,”

Shane laughs, his real one. “I love you, too, even if you are an idiot who basically did the same thing.”

“Hmm, sounds like we are so very compatible, not like some other couple I know,”

Even though he couldn’t see Shane’s face, Ilya could feel his eyes rolling. “Shut up, asshole. Don’t make me take it back,”

“Ah but you can’t anymore, you’re stuck with me forever now,” Ilya says as he tightens his arms around Shane.

“Oh no, so terrible. I’m forever stuck with my hot Russian boyfriend who loves me so much. Poor me,” Shane says as he laughs again before he feels Ilya shifting against him. Ilya is pinning him down now, looking at his face like he couldn’t believe what he just heard. “So I am boyfriend now? I like that,”

“Yes, and as my boyfriend you should have been kissing me like yesterday,”

They meet halfway, the kiss is warm and sweet and unhurried, not the kind of kiss that will lead anywhere but a kiss that means everything.

Outside, Montreal goes about its morning. In a few hours Ilya will need to go back to his hotel, collect his things, drive back to Ottawa, get on the bus, fly to whichever city he will play in next. In three weeks there's All-Stars, and after that a whole second half of a season to navigate, and after that, Ilya does not let himself think about what happens next. He is better at the present now than he used to be. He has Shane Hollander teaching him, by example and against his will, that the present is sometimes enough.