Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warnings:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Hayden Pike, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais, Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s)

Additional Tags:

Contracts, Domestic Fluff, Living Together, (Temporarily), Angst, Rivals to Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Pining While Fucking, Cats, Fantasizing, Racism, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Hazing, First Time, Loss of Virginity, Rimming, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, so much maladaptive daydreaming, Discussions of Hockey Culture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-10-18 Words: 52,378 Chapters: 8/8

wouldn't it be nice

Summary

The seven days after RFA Shane Hollander signed an offer sheet from Boston were the longest of Ilya's life. They were also some of the best.

Notes

hi friends! i'm back! the hockey realism will continue until morale improves!

speaking of, while i think the mechanics of offer sheets are worked into the fic pretty clearly, just in case, here's a quick summary of how they work in the NHL:

when a player is a Restricted Free Agent (generally after their ELC, before they turn 27), teams have the opportunity to send then an offer sheet, which is basically a contract offer from a team that isn't the one that owns their rights. so in this example, Montreal owns Shane's rights, but they haven't signed him yet, so Boston sent an offer sheet. the player can sign it (or not), and then the original team (in this case, Montreal) has 7 days to match or decline to match. if they match, they sign the player to that exact contract that was proposed. if they decline, the other team signs the player and gives up compensation based on a scale that depends on how much money was offered. the compensation is always draft picks; the better the offer, the higher and more valuable the draft picks.

this particular offer sheet was based on the offer sheet signed by Shea Weber in the summer of 2012, from the Flyers. Nashville, Weber's draft team, wound up matching. Weber eventually wound up as captain for Montreal, so i thought it a fitting comparison.

that's about it! again, i hope this is all clear in the fic, but also i don't mind explaining hockey things because i'm a nerd, haha.

in any case, i hope you enjoy this fic! the title is from The Beach Boys (and i highly recommend queuing it up for the last chapter; just trust me) and the epigraph is from one of my favorite literary marriage proposals of all time. it is also, notably, one that is turned down. :)

oh and the GM's names are just random hockey names!!! a friend pointed out their significance and i'm very sorry but i don't know those other men lol.

enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Chapter 1: Prologue

The club’s bar had only a few scattered members around when Fitzy stepped inside, wiping sweat from under his visor with the back of his forearm. It was a nice day for late June, clear and sunny without any of the typical humidity Hingham Bay liked to roll in on the South Shore. It was a perfect day to hit the links, no matter what Steve said about them having better things to do.

Steve stepped up beside him and rolled his eyes when Fitzy ordered them two Hendricks on the rocks; he sipped it without comment. Fitzy looked at his disgruntled face, his black transition glasses gone clear inside so he could see the fingerprints on them, and finally decided to give him a break.

“One more hole,” Fitzy said. The look of relief on Steve’s face was dramatic and hilarious.

“Good. Look, Eddie—” He always refused to call him Fitzy, no matter how many times Fitzy told him to or that everyone else in the organization called him that. “—I get that you’re looking at a lot of options right now, but there’s only so much waiting these other teams can do. There are a lot of moving parts, you know?”

Fitzy snorted and looked at his gin instead of Steve’s uptight face. He thought through a few responses and how mean he wanted to be; he could remind Steve that he was the Boston Raiders’ General Manager and Steve was only one of the Assistants; he could tell Steve that he should be grateful that Fitzy had invited him out here instead of the other assistant, Randy, who was his best buddy and godfather to one of his kids; he could repeat, for the umpteenth time, that this was Fitzy’s sixth season with Boston, his fourth as GM, and he knew what the fuck he was doing better than some never-played accounting nerd still polishing the shine off his Harvard MBA.

That last one was definitely unfair, and he really needed to stop harping on it. Steve was an ownership hire, handed to Fitzy to “get some brains in the organization”, as Team President Kenny Fredricks—aka the owner’s son—had told him. Fitzy didn’t take it personally, mostly. For his part, Steve was good with the numbers, he ran Providence like the fucking Navy, and he’d helped Fitzy amass a truly impressive amount of cap space heading into free agency by advising him against some stupid loyalty extensions and helping him ship out undeniably dead weight.

The cap space was great, and Fitzy felt like a kid with a hundred about to be let loose in a candy store. It had left them with a giant hole at center that Rozanov, as good as he was, couldn’t fill on his own, but that was what free agency was for. No one was going to outbid them in free agency. Beyond that, there were at least half a dozen trade options; they had an impressive war chest of picks and prospects to spend. They would be fine.

That hole at center was what was giving Steve agita about golfing in the hectic week between the draft and free agency. Never mind that Fitzy had spent their fourth hole on the phone with Smithy down in Nashville, an old buddy from his playing days, the newest GM in the league, and an excellent potential trading partner. Plenty of deals could be made on the green. Steve would have to learn that someday; might as well start now.

“I do my best thinking out there, Stevie,” Fitzy said, winking at him over his glass. “It’s an essential part of the process. We’ll be fine.”

Steve made a face, the way he always did when Fitzy called him Stevie. That was why Fitzy did it. “I know, you said that, but the Nashville deal alone—”

“Smithy is a buddy. He’ll wait as long as I tell him to wait. Don’t worry about it.”

“See, you keep saying that, but I don’t think—”

“Shh,” Fitzy said, looking up at the TV above the bar. It had ESPN on, which was normally a skip during the summer, but lucky them, they’d caught the 20 minutes a day they deigned to devote to hockey. “Hey bud, can you turn it up?”

The bartender turned it up. The other few country club guys inside gave them dirty looks, but Fitzy ignored them to listen to ESPN’s hockey expert panel, which was three guys who didn’t know a puck from an acorn and a Canadian TSN guy calling in to school them.

“—and I really just think that, the fact that Montreal has let it get to this point is a real black mark on GM Alain Deslauriers’ reputation, regardless of what happens next,” said the Canadian. The caption called him Kelly McGriff and he had a whiff of the Maritimes to his accent that Toronto hadn’t ground out of him yet. Good for him, thought Fitzy, formerly a St. John’s boy.

“Right, right,” said a panel member, nodding. “You know, you don’t play hardball with Asian Tom Brady.”

The rest of the panel laughed; Fitzy muttered, “Oh fuck off,” because if there was a Tom Brady equivalent in the MLH, or if there one day would be, it would be a Russian Tom Brady and he played for the Boston Raiders. Fucking idiots.

Steve, finally distracted enough from his woes to pay attention to the panel, cringed hard. “What does being Asian have to do with it?”

“Oh, Stevie,” Fitzy said with a sigh, because this was a good lesson for Steve, even though it wasn’t nice to talk about. “None of this is even happening if the kid’s not Asian. Listen.”

McGriff was stumbling through a half-protest, defending Montreal a little bit—“Of course it has nothing to do with his heritage, you know, and he’s Canadian more than anything, he’s had his big national team moments to prove it and he’ll surely captain Canada to gold in Sochi!”—but then driving it back to his original point, which was that Deslauriers was an idiot. Fitzy agreed there, at least. “But here you have a relatively new GM, who started just a few years ago, and his first month on the job, he’s handed the absolute gift of a player of Shane Hollander’s caliber left on the board by Boston—”

“And I’d do it again,” Fitzy said loudly, hooting out laughter and clinking his glass with Steve’s. Steve made another face—he’d never said it, but he’d have drafted Hollander first overall, no question, which was why Fitzy was the GM and Steve wasn’t—but dutifully clinked and sipped.

“So, you know, to squander that gift by apparently lowballing Hollander—it should never have gotten to this point,” McGriff said, stirred up and passionate.

“Now, wait a minute here, Kelly,” one of the panelists said. He was a former football player and, Fitzy could only assume, the first living diagnosis of CTE. “To play devil’s advocate—Hollander hasn’t actually won anything yet. No rings, no trophies—”

“He won the Calder and two scoring races,” McGriff interrupted. “He’s 22 years old; that is outstanding at his age. I think his numbers speak for themselves. If this contract dispute goes to player-elected arbitration—which is what all signs are pointing to right now—then Montreal is going to get laughed out of the room. His comparables are deadly. They do not want this fight to go that far. I think everyone else in Montreal, the players, the fans, everyone, are all asking the same question: why?”

“Because Deslauriers thought he could browbeat the good little Canadian kid into taking a discount out of the goodness of his heart, and his agent told him to go fuck himself,” Fitzy said. “Now he’s on an ego trip and cutting off his nose to spite his asshole face. Oh, and the Asian thing.” He found himself getting as worked up as McGriff was; the incompetence really was infuriating. Good for Fitzy, of course, because fuck Montreal, he hoped Hollander took them to the cleaners, but also such a staggering display of bad GMing that Fitzy was embarrassed to share a profession with the idiot.

“Do you really think—” Steve started, probably about the Asian thing again, but Fitzy shushed him quickly and zeroed in on McGriff’s next words.

“And even before they get to arbitration, you know, it’s a long shot, of course, but there is the possibility of an offer sheet. Would Hollander sign one? Probably not, but I will tell you right now that some GMs out there are thinking about trying it anyway. And 29 GMs out of 30 will tell you that they know Hollander’s worth and they’d know better than to mess around with him, I can guarantee that. There’s gotta be a GM with cap space to spend, a hole at center, and just the right amount of nerve to—”

And Fitzy stopped listening and started thinking.

“Oh no,” Steve said as he watched Fitzy’s face. “No, Eddie, whatever you’re thinking—”

“I’ve got an idea, Stevie,” Fitzy said. “A wonderful, awful idea.”

Chapter 2: Day One

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be—and whenever I look up, there will be you.
—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

Day One – 5 July, 2013

Ilya was taking his sixth turn at the photobooth when his phone started buzzing in his pocket.

He ignored it for now, focusing on pulling his silliest faces. He was wearing a curly, bright red wig smushed down over his own curls, leaning into Carrie, Hammy’s brand new wife, and letting her white feather boa tickle his cheek. The rest of the bridesmaids surrounded them, squished in as tight as could be, except for Andrea, who he thought was probably still crying in the bathroom after her fight with Janine. Ilya had brought her a few crab cakes before, apologized for giving her and Janine the wrong impression about which of them he was going home with—neither—and patted her shoulder while she ate the crab cakes. Janine was beaming with all her teeth a few spots away from Ilya, so it had turned out as well as it could, he thought.

The photobooth camera flashed at them in quick succession and Ilya pulled as many dumb faces as he could. “Ilya!” Carrie cried out, pointing at his crossed eyes and stuck out tongue in the latest snap; the next one caught her with her arm covering Janine’s eyes as a result. “You look demonic!”

“No, no,” Ilya said, pressing their cheeks together and making her laugh. “I am angel! You know this!”

“Demon,” Carrie repeated, but she tossed her head back in laughter, her eyes bright and sparkling. She looked incandescently happy, a delirious, dreamy wedding happiness. Ilya gave her a quick side-hug, winked at a third bridesmaid with silky dark hair, and stepped out of the booth.

It was a beautiful day on the Cape; the venue that Hammy and Carrie had chosen was right on the water, which glittered with afternoon light. Ilya had bitched about an early Friday wedding when Hammy told him he needed to stay stateside long enough for it, but he’d RSVP’d quickly; it wasn’t like he wanted to go back to Russia. Hammy, the hometown boy from Weymouth, was a good excuse to stick around Boston a little longer, and Ilya was content to drink mimosas and pretend Sunday’s plane ticket to Moscow didn’t exist.

His phone kept buzzing and Ilya kept ignoring it because he knew it was probably Alexei, Papa, or both alternating. They could save up their yelling for a few more days. Hammy’s grandmother, Florence, who Ilya had already thoroughly charmed when they met at the buffet, passed him by and said, “Nice hair, young man!” which made Ilya beam and remember he was still wearing the stupid red wig.

Ilya reached up to take it off and put it back on the prop table outside the booth but stopped when Marly stepped up and grabbed his arm, shaking it a little. He had his phone out and his breath smelled like orange juice.

“Bro, look at your fucking phone. What the fuck is happening? Did you know about this?”

Knowing Marly, whatever Ilya was supposed to know could’ve been anything from World War III starting up or a stupid dog video that had gone viral. Ilya pulled his phone out and idly noticed an odd, tense chatter breaking out over the hockey players in attendance, also looking at their phones and talking to each other.

Ilya looked at his own phone. Someone besides Marly called out, “Roz, what the fuck?” and someone else was saying, “Dude, is this real? Are we getting Hollander?” but all of that fell away as soon as Ilya opened his text thread with Svetlana, which contained nothing but a link to a tweet that said The Raiders have sent a 5x$12M offer sheet to RFA Shane Hollander. Hollander has signed it; Montreal has 7 days to match.

He checked the tweet and recognized the name as Kelly McGriff, a TSN reporter that once complimented Ilya’s English after a late game out in Edmonton; Ilya was exhausted, dropping words, powering through, and McGriff told him he’d done well. Ilya closed the tweet, then reopened it from Sveta’s link. He checked the name, identified the checkmark, made sure it wasn’t McGruff or McGraff or some other parody account, and read it back one more time.

“Is real?” Ilya asked, no one in particular. Players had begun gathering around him now, like he knew anything more than they did, like he wasn’t just as genuinely fucking shocked. Probably he was more shocked than them; probably, though they couldn’t possibly know it, this meant something different to him than it did to them.

“Yeah,” said Sebsy, drawing up and sticking his phone under Ilya’s nose; Ilya knocked it away. “CBC is confirming it. Fuck, man, this is crazy.”

“Fitzy really didn’t say anything to you?” Marly asked, frowning deeply. When Ilya looked up to give him a blank look, Marly shrugged. “I mean, I’d have thought he’d run it by you, with the rivalry and all—”

“Oh fuck off, that’s Shane Hollander,” Sebsy broke in. “You get a chance to get Shane Hollander on your team and you do it, no matter what anybody says. I don’t care if Hollander fucked your sister—”

“Brother,” Hammy muttered with a low chuckle, which quieted at Ilya’s immediate and instinctive glare.

“—whatever, and no offense Roz, but you go for that any day of the week. Fuck, this is so crazy,” Sebsy finished, hopping in place a little. His excitement was starting to catch on, Ilya could see; the other guys were starting to vibrate with it a little, breaking into chatter that went too low or fast for Ilya to register. “This is Fitzy swinging for the fences. Let’s fucking go!”

That got a few cheers going, reverberating throughout the wedding. Ilya let it all pass over him, still in something like shock. Soon only Marly remained close at his side, still frowning.

“You okay, man?”

Ilya scrubbed a hand over his face and let out a breath. He needed a cigarette; he needed 20 more mimosas. He needed to go and fuck Andrea, actually, even though he’d sworn to keep out of the drama. He needed to throw his phone into the harbor; it was buzzing now with Svetlana’s eager, excited commentary and her far too raunchy ideas on how to welcome Hollander to Boston. He needed to get the fuck out of here, probably, so he could go and process this and maybe have a meltdown about it.

His heart pounded in his chest, and the thrilled little twist in his stomach that he’d come to associate with playing against Hollander, talking to or about Hollander, looking at Hollander, or sucking Hollander’s dick had started up. Hollander had been putting him off for a while since they’d last hooked up at All Stars, about two years ago now, but that twist had never really faded or died out; it seemed to get twistier every day.

“I am okay,” Ilya said, lied. He looked down at his phone one more time because he really couldn’t believe it. Okay, maybe he could believe Fitzy would do something like this, and everyone knew the Hollander situation was tense in Montreal. Ilya had sent him a bunch of barely answered texts about it, teasing and wheedling, desperately curious about what was going on but unable to outright ask and show how much he cared.

No, that all tracked, at least in theory. The one part of this that Ilya kept coming back to, though, the piece he could hardly believe, had to reread several times as that thrilled stomach twist grew within him, was—

“Hollander signed it?” Ilya said to no one in particular.

Ilya didn’t wind up getting drunk, or fucking Andrea, or anyone, in the end—he’d driven his relatively new McLaren out to Cape Cod and didn’t actively want to drive it into the canal. If it was going to happen, he’d rather have left it up to fate than alcohol.

He took himself back to Boston like a good little boy, the radio switched on because he wasn’t ready to listen to Russian music just yet; there would be enough of that after this weekend. He didn’t hit much traffic until he reached the city, typical, because everyone else was heading out to the Cape instead of away from it, but this city would wage an eternal war on drivers all day, night, weekday and weekend, didn’t matter when. Ilya dealt with it the way he always did—he told the first person who cut him off to eat his asshole, cursed in Russian at the next few, and leaned on his horn for what turned out to be a church van full of nuns.

“Great,” Ilya yelled to his empty car, fed up. “Now I am going to hell.”

The nuns didn’t outwardly curse him or anything, though Ilya suspected they didn’t need to; he remained stuck in Boston traffic, so technically hell was already here. They did look at him oddly as he finally passed the van, which was how Ilya realized he was still wearing the fucking curly red photobooth wig. He took it off and flung it into the passenger seat, rubbing his hands over his face until the light changed and the van had the nerve to beep at him.

Ilya made it home to his penthouse a jangly mess of nerves, restless and annoyed. He shed his nice wedding suit in pieces through his foyer, living room, bathroom, and then kitchen until he was shivering in the cranked up central air in his boxer briefs, scratching his stomach as he opened the fridge. His phone called to him like a wretched siren from the black marble island, buzzing intermittently as he fished out one of his prepped meals. He had exactly enough meals to last through breakfast on Sunday, before he had to leave, and the responsible thing to do, like cutting himself off to drive and leaving Carrie’s bridesmaids alone, was to finish it out before he left.

He dumped the food in the microwave, set it to warm, and, with a muttered curse, picked up his phone.

There were no new messages from Jane.

That wasn’t a surprise, exactly; Ilya was sure that Hollander had better things to do and think about on a day like today than texting the rival he’d hooked up with twice. Maybe, he thought a little viciously, some sort of warning shot or signal that he was signing an offer sheet with his team would’ve been appropriate, appreciated, but this was a pretty unique situation; maybe it wasn’t appropriate. Ilya didn’t know another pair of fuck rivals to ask what the norm was. Probably there wasn’t a norm.

Still, it might’ve been polite. It might’ve felt less like getting knocked over the head by a brick on Cape fucking Cod. Maybe a text right then, just a simple Have you heard? or a We should talk or even just a Hey would’ve made Ilya feel less like he was going to explode.

He tried to stuff down the great breadth of feeling within him with lukewarm butternut squash ravioli, which tasted neither buttery nor nutty to him. Stupid English. Ilya shoved the ravioli in his mouth in heaped forkfuls, pausing only to spear some steak slices and eat those, too. He finished the whole thing standing at the kitchen island, scrolling his phone and intermittently glaring at it and staring at it still in some disbelief.

A video started autoplaying on Twitter, and though Ilya cursed at it, he kept watching. It was a clip from that McGriff’s TSN show, where he was discussing the offer sheet—billed “the biggest news in hockey in years”—with a few of his colleagues. One of them was French and spitting mad; Ilya ignored him and focused in on McGriff.

“And obviously, this is a monumental move from the Hollander camp, sending shockwaves through the hockey world—”

“Obviously,” Ilya snarled in English, trying to mimic his accent.

“—but I think this is the direct result of GM Alain Deslauriers playing with fire; now he’s getting burned. We are talking about the best player in the league—”

“Second best, fuck you,” Ilya said automatically.

“—who knows his worth; his agent knows his worth; his team knows his worth, even if they won’t admit it. The whole league knows his worth. This is a player taking drastic measures to secure his future, and a GM who let it get to this point.”

“You have to feel a little sorry for Deslauriers,” said the French guy, of course; Ilya rolled his eyes. “He was in a tough position, you know, and he doesn’t want to get pushed around by that little—”

“That’s Shane Hollander,” McGriff interrupted, his round face suddenly very severe. The French guy waved at him.

“Yes, of course, but you know—and not just Hollander, you know, that lady agent of his—”

“Guillaume—”

“—no one likes to hear it from—”

“Deslauriers is in a tougher position today than he was yesterday, all his own fault,” McGriff said firmly. Ilya thought he could hear a producer say something offscreen, and the French guy pouted a little, face all sour. “Now, we know how these situations usually shake out—Montreal will match, I’m sure of that. Any other result would be disastrous for the Metros. But now you’ve got a badly fractured relationship, to the point where the player was willing to sign an offer sheet from their biggest rivals, to play with his biggest rival—and let me tell you, this was not the only offer sheet that came across Farah Jalali’s desk—”

Ilya closed the video at that, breathing hard. He dumped what was left on the meal prep plate in the trash—some disgusting cauliflower—and then went to dump the plate in the sink to sit until he could be bothered to rinse it and put it in the dishwasher. He went to his freezer, took out a bottle of vodka, started pouring—and then paused and went back to the sink.

He rinsed the plate, thinking of Shane Hollander folding his clothes before they hooked up for the first time. He rinsed it thinking of Hollander standing at this same sink and rinsing another plate, hip-checking Ilya out of the way, grinning into his collar when he got hip-checked back, and harder.

Hollander would’ve eaten the cauliflower. It was a thought that hit him right in the chest, strange and undoubtedly insane. Ilya put the plate in the dishwasher and slammed it all the way closed, even though it wasn’t full. He had another insane thought, a psychotic hallucination probably, of Hollander bitching at him to be careful not to break the dishwasher door.

“I could just buy another one,” Ilya would say, just to keep Hollander bitching at him.

Ilya resumed pouring out vodka in desperate glugs. He went through one glass, two, then realized this was inefficient and took the frosty bottle over to the couch in front of the TV. He got under a throw blanket—heavy wool and boring beige that he got at West Elm, and he wondered if Hollander would like it before he made himself chase the horrendous thought away with vodka—and put on the TV, determined to lose himself in the most boring thing he could find. Maybe something that would put him to sleep, get these spiraling, ridiculous thoughts to quiet.

He hesitated to switch on to ESPN, but of course they weren’t talking about hockey; there was a Jordan documentary running. Ilya left that on, sprawled his legs out on the couch. He had a flash of a thought, like a ghost, of Hollander sitting on the other side of the couch, leaning over to watch this for real. Would something like this interest him? Was he a documentary guy? Did he care about basketball at all? Ilya had no idea, and it bothered him, in that moment, that he had no idea; he couldn’t even color in his own absurd fantasies correctly.

Which was just all the more reason he shouldn’t have been having those fantasies. They made no sense. Ilya chewed at his fingernail as the documentary narrator droned on around him, thinking—if Hollander was to come to Boston, would they even be friends? Of course they would, Ilya answered himself, at least as far as teammates were friends. They had a few things in common besides enjoying sucking dicks, too. They would get along.

“I know the top guys clash sometimes, two big egos on a team,” Marly had told him, putting on his earnest big brother hat for a little while as the wedding reception died down in the buzz of the offer sheet news. “But I don’t think you’d have to worry about that, Roz. We’d all have your back. I’m sure this isn’t about you at all, you know; you’re doing an amazing job here—”

“I know,” Ilya had finally interrupted, scowling. The earnest big brother hat was at its most tolerable when alcohol was involved. Since Ilya had cut himself off, it was just insufferable. Ilya already had a big brother, and he didn’t really care for the experience. “This is not insult to me, Marly. I am not insulted.”

“Good,” Marly said, but because the stupid hat was still on, he eventually added, “I mean, it’s just that you seem pretty shocked—”

“Because is crazy! Hollander comes to Boston—what the fuck?”

“But you’re not like, mad or anything, right? The money thing—yeah, it’s more than you make, but that’s how offer sheets work, it’s not about who’s better. You know how Fitzy likes to shoot first and ask questions later. And I really think you could work it out with Hollander, put the rivalry aside, make some peace, maybe. Katie always says Hollander was a good guy.”

Katie—Marly’s on-again, off-again, who was not on enough to score a plus one invite to this wedding—had been Hollander’s billet sister in Kingston, a fact she told everyone she met in the first five minutes of meeting them, as far as Ilya could tell. He’d pumped her extensively for information, of course, so he didn’t mind her bragging, but she’d never told him anything all too interesting. It didn’t seem like she knew him much, no matter what she claimed.

Teenage Hollander had been as arrogant as any other junior hockey player, even if he was a little more polite about it than the average star; the only real difference was that he barely paid any attention to all the girls that were after him because he was too focused on hockey. Marly had said, “Hockey, sure,” with a snort, and Katie grinned back conspiratorially, and Ilya cut off that line of talk by saying they were being fucking boring and then asking what Hollander’s favorite foods were. In a chill, normal way, he thought. He told them he wanted to know his enemy; it was a Russian thing.

“I know Hollander is good guy,” Ilya said. He also knew Hollander could be mean, cursed like a sailor, that he was still pretty arrogant and that was completely fucking earned. He knew Hollander really liked sucking cock, that he’d liked it when Ilya played with his asshole even though he wouldn’t admit it. And yeah, Hollander was a good guy.

“Who knows?” Marly told him, patting Ilya on the back because he still thought he was consoling him and not that Ilya was losing his mind at the thought of having Hollander in his city, on his team, maybe—maybe—in his apartment. “Maybe you guys will be great together.”

“Maybe,” Ilya said with a grimacing smile.

“And anyway, what’s the saying? Don’t borrow grief from the future? You know Montreal will probably match, anyway. That’s usually how this shit ends.”

“I know,” Ilya said, and then he started making his excuses and getting ready to leave so he could melt down in peace. He didn’t want to be consoled, or to think about how this would end. He didn’t want to think about the possibilities of playing with Shane Hollander, of having him close, easy access.

The thought of Hollander coming to Boston made Ilya feel like a dog about to catch the car, and the danger of it lit up his blood the way it had only lit up twice before, in Toronto and Nashville.

He imagined that same feeling in Boston. He imagined it still as he began to doze off in front of the Jordan documentary, his feet stretched out to hit nothing but cushion. Ilya jolted awake when cushion felt like thigh, when the shape of a few pillows arranged themselves into something Hollander-shaped, soft and comfortable, here in Ilya’s space. Ilya scrubbed his hand over his eyes, turned the TV off, and migrated to his bed instead.

It was pathetically early, but Ilya had nothing else to do but think thoughts he shouldn’t be thinking. He got in bed, put the vodka bottle on his nightstand, gave it a goodnight pat, and snuggled down. He lasted about two minutes before he sighed and picked up his phone.

He opened the Jane thread again. Stared at it, unsure if he was willing a text to appear or gathering up the words for his own to send. He typed a few different things, all too embarrassing, too revealing, too needy, and even when he did type something that fit the tone he’d established in his chase, it took forever to send it.

In the end, Ilya sighed again and hit send on a message that said Will you let me fuck you if you come to Boston? He put his phone down and turned over to sleep on his side, facing away from it. He listened and felt for the vibration anyway, tucking his hands together and under his face so he wouldn’t use them to check it, forcing his eyes closed.

He fell asleep before long and woke up twice in the night and the very early morning. The first time, he woke up out of a dream that Hollander was sleeping on his side on front of him; they were lying hips to ass, Ilya’s arms tucked around Hollander’s waist, Hollander’s socked feet rubbing against Ilya’s bare shins. He had to blink a few times in the dark before the sleek tufts of Hollander’s hair, the bulky lines of his shoulders and long slope of his back disappeared from view. He checked his phone, cursed at it, and went back to sleep.

When Ilya woke up again, the sky was petal pink, the morning slow and creeping. Ilya couldn’t remember what he’d dreamed of, couldn’t remember for a moment any of what had happened at the wedding, the new reality he was living in: a reality in which Shane Hollander had signed an offer sheet that could feasibly put him on Ilya’s team. When that reality did rush back in, there was nothing for Ilya to do but flip over again and check his phone, which miraculously, devastatingly, had a new message from Jane.

Fuck off Hollander had sent him. Nothing else. Ilya grinned hard, glad he was alone and too sleepy to be embarrassed, and fell asleep one more time clutching his phone to his chest.

Chapter 3: Day Two

Chapter Notes

Please pretend Air Canada has direct flights to Ottawa from Boston. I know they don’t but I cannot imagine Ilya Rozanov flying Porter, I just can’t.

Day Two – 6 July, 2013

There was a lump under the covers when Ilya next woke up. He blinked a few times, cursing the sun streaming in—what was the point of blackout curtains if he always forgot to close them?—and then noticed the lump and jumped.

The lump let out a giggle. Then it let hot breath ghost over a suspiciously damp part of Ilya’s briefs, specifically the front part, in the crotch region. Before Ilya could say “What the fuck?” or “Who’s there?” or anything normal, the lump licked his hard-on through cotton, then opened its mouth wider and sucked on it.

And then everything made sense in that perfect dream logic because Ilya knew that mouth, awake or asleep. It suckled at him with muffled little huffs, a moan or two that had Ilya biting at the thickest meat of his hand, muffling a moan of his own.

He shouldn’t have bothered. The lump, which in this dream could only be Shane, lifted his mouth enough to chuckle out, “I heard that.” He spoke fluent Russian, of course.

“You heard nothing,” Ilya said, also in Russian.

“Oh yeah? What about—” Shane cut himself off with a thoughtful hum; relatedly, Ilya’s briefs were now tugged down far enough that his dick was out. Ilya knew what was coming, he braced for it, but it still happened—he moaned as Shane slid his mouth down his dick, a warm, sweaty palm cupping where he wasn’t ambitious enough to reach.

Shane’s mouth was hot, wet heaven; above his own moaning and the slick sounds coming from underneath the covers, Ilya thought he heard angels singing. He could feel Shane’s smile around his dick, awkward and unbearably hot, and he could picture the smug look on his stupid, beautiful face, flushed pink, the points of his hair stuck to his temples, his freckles only lovely smudges in the dark space of the covers.

“Fuck,” Ilya said, trying not to rock up. Shane hummed, bobbed his head up, paused to give him little licks like he couldn’t help himself, and pulled off.

“What was that?”

“Shut up.”

“Was that ‘good morning, Shane’? Maybe ‘thank you for sucking my dick for breakfast, Shane’?”

“I hate you. Shut your stupid face, Shane.”

“I don’t think that’s what you really want,” Shane said, and then he took Ilya in again, deeper this time, his hot, tight throat squeezed around the head of his dick for one breathless, boundlessly sexy moment.

He kept at it that way, deep-throating Ilya with an easy confidence that made Ilya’s stomach twist with pleasure and danger and ill-directed jealousy. When had he gotten so good at that? Who taught him? These thoughts, dark and flaring and impossibly hot, had Ilya hurtling quickly towards his orgasm, breathlessly fast, no more hiding his moans.

But then, in that scattered way of dreams, what Ilya really wanted was to see Shane. It was not enough to know it was him, to listen to him and feel his infuriating dicksucking prowess; he wanted what he could imagine in his sight. He wanted those freckles in the annoying sunlight, that scrunched nose and the plump, gleaming lips bared to his gaze.

“Come up here,” Ilya said. Shane hummed a dissent and kept sucking him; he was just a shape this way, still a lump under the covers, bobbing up and down. “Shane,” Ilya whined, and the denial only heightened his arousal, ushered him quicker towards coming, until there was no choice but to reach down and rip the covers away just as he—

And then Ilya woke up, for real this time, and he cursed out the streaming sunlight and the empty bedroom, the lump-less covers. He was alone in his apartment, just as he’d been when he fell asleep the night before, just as he usually was in this apartment.

Ilya moaned loudly because there was no one to hear him. He turned over and ground his stupid boner into his sheets a little, not with any pleasurable intent but to let it feel some of the humiliation the rest of him felt. “What the fuck is wrong with you,” he asked himself, face shoved into his pillow, forehead pressing into the phone he’d fallen asleep with.

He was relieved, when he sat up to go pee and throw some clothes on, that the phone was dead so he couldn’t look at it. Of course that was too easily remedied by putting it on charge when he went out to the kitchen, reached for his breakfast meal prep, looked at the microwaved eggs and potatoes that never remembered being crispy and the water from the peppers pooled at the bottom of the bowl, and threw it out. Ilya picked up his phone then to use Postmates for Dunkin, which felt right on his last full day in Boston.

He chased that depressing thought away to seek out crazier ones, looking at Twitter again. The Hollander news was continuing to rage through the hockey world, with more varying media quotes on day two, though Ilya could see through a quick scroll that the consensus was still that both GMs involved were lunatics in good and bad ways, respectively. Fans seemed to share this sentiment; there was a pretty robust #FireDeslauriers hashtag going, and someone had photoshopped Fitzy’s face on the rap battle meme that usually had Obama on it. Ilya liked it from his burner.

There was still some grumpiness in the French media, too, though Ilya couldn’t understand anything firsthand. Someone posted translated radio spots of said grumpiness, and he read those to rage-bait himself: $12M per yr makes Hollander the highest-paid player in the league. Does he think he has earned that? And no UFA yrs; this is player greed read one that made Ilya’s blood pressure start to tick up. I am surprised at Hollander, that he would put Montreal in this position. He’s not who we thought he was, and I think we feel betrayal.

“So dramatic,” Ilya told the tweets, though he wasn’t surprised to see so much of the local media carrying water for Montreal’s management; Boston similarly venerated Fitzy. At least the fans weren’t having it; if the tweets were dramatic, the fan responses were rabid, and Ilya amused himself with them for a while until his doorbell rang and he went to buzz up his food.

He regretted ignoring the rest of his texts when he opened his apartment door to find Marly standing there instead of his Postmate, grinning widely at him.

“What do you want?” Ilya asked, trying to block the door with his body. Marly shoulder-checked him easily out of the way and shoved his way inside.

“You weren’t answering your phone and I thought I’d see if you wanted to get brunch. It’s a nice day out, man,” Marly said, all good cheer and bravado, ignoring that Ilya was exploding him with his mind. Because he was Marly and still thought Ilya was as dumb as he was, he began over-explaining immediately. “Plus, you know, you really seemed upset about the whole Hollander thing—”

“I’m not upset,” Ilya said. There was no amount of explaining he could do to make Marly understand his feelings about the whole Hollander thing. He didn’t understand them himself. There was something wrong with him, clearly, because he was thinking about getting brunch with Hollander and Marly. He wondered if Hollander liked brunch; he guessed, without any basis for it, that Hollander was an eggs benedict person. Ilya was a steak and eggs guy but sometimes he asked for a side of Hollandaise sauce to put on his steak. Did Hollander like Hollandaise sauce because—

“Yeah, totally, not upset at all,” Marly said, knocking him out of his lunatic thought spiral by clapping him on the back. “Come on, bud. Let’s get brunch.”

Ilya’s Postmate arrived in answer, and as he buzzed him up he told Marly, “I order Dunks. You can have if you shut the fuck up about Hollander and make your own coffee.”

Marly pretended to think about it, but by the time the food was upstairs it was deemed an okay compromise and they sat at the counter to stuff their faces with breakfast sandwiches, Ilya’s fancy, dust-covered espresso machine burbling away. Ilya tried, valiantly, not to imagine Hollander on his other side, feet swinging on the stool, bumping into Ilya’s calf, giving him a secret grin over his own croissant sandwich. He tried to concentrate on Marly instead, who in between spraying soggy croissant crumbs everywhere, was struggling to find something to talk about.

“You excited to get home?” Marly asked with approximately ten little hash browns in his mouth at once. Then he cringed, because even he could figure out the answer to that question. “I mean—”

“I’m so excited,” Ilya said. “Never so excited in my life. Cannot wait. That is me, you know, Mr. Excitement, Mr. Moscow, Mr. Summer—”

“All right, all right, I got it, you idiot. Leave me alone.”

“You shove your way into my house—”

“Fuck me for being worried about you, eh?” Marly said.

“You don’t have to worry, Marly, I already tell you this,” Ilya told him. Next to him, the hallucination of Hollander kicked him in the calf on purpose. Ilya unwrapped another sausage, egg and cheese croissant in response.

Marly studied him so hard and for so long that Ilya was beginning to grow concerned that he could see Hollander, too, and was maybe wondering what the fuck he was doing here. Ilya had the same question. He grabbed at his phone, still charging, and tried to subtly Google the symptoms of a psychotic break, but stopped when Marly cleared his throat.

“Can I ask you something?” Marly asked.

Ilya frowned at him. “No.”

“Too bad. I’m gonna anyway.”

“I am your captain, Marly. You should do what I say.”

“And you should blow me, Roz. Ugh, I mean—okay, that’s kind of related.”

“What?” Ilya barked, finally giving Marly his attention.

“No, it’s like—okay. Do you actually hate Hollander?” As per usual, he didn’t give Ilya time to answer or refuse to answer; he started over-explaining again. “Because, you know—we all know that shit isn’t real. Like, you’ve been here long enough that you get that, right? I don’t know how it goes over in Russia, but no one actually hates each other over here except for the real dirtbags who try to hurt people. And we know Hollander’s not that type.”

“Marly,” Ilya said, pained, and still wondering where the subject of blow jobs was going to come in. “What the fuck are you talking about? No, I do not hate Hollander. Who could hate Hollander? Is like hating little kitten, or baby duckling, or—”

“Well, you do hate that one duck that yelled at you when we were taking pics by the lagoon at the Garden—”

“You mean duck that attacked me? Yes, I hate, is sworn enemy, but is totally different. That is a blood oath of vengeance.”

“It literally just quacked at you a bit because you got too close to the babies. We told you to be careful, and you screamed like a little girl—” Marly was cracking up remembering it, slapping his own thigh in glee. Ilya gulped at his coffee to hide his own grin.

“I did not scream! Was Russian war cry, I am telling her is my territory, not to mess, and to warn babies too.”

“Yeah, sure, Roz. Whatever you say.” Marly continued laughing long enough that Ilya thought, maybe, they had dodged whatever fuckass point Marly had wanted to get to about the blow jobs, but he couldn’t be that lucky. Marly cleared his throat again. “Okay, so, follow-up question—”

“Fuck’s sake.”

“Is it because, you know, people say Hollander is—you know?”

Ilya didn’t have the faintest idea. “What? Words, come on Marly.”

“Because it might not even be true? It’s just something people say because he never picks up chicks, and he’s kind of—but even if he is, I know how Russia is about that stuff, so if that’s the issue—”

“What?” Ilya asked, impossibly frustrated, unsure if Marly was even speaking English at that point.

“You know,” Marly said, also frustrated, like Ilya was the one speaking in fucking code. “Come on, man, you know what I’m talking about. I didn’t think you were religious, but I guess you wear that cross, and I know from Sarge it’s a big deal in the Orthodox Church, like, a big no-no—I guess it’s like that for Catholics, too, but I don’t really care, as long as you don’t shove it in my face, you know? But Hollander doesn’t seem like the type to do that anyway, so—yeah. Is that the issue?”

Marly finally shut the fuck up. Ilya sat there, the barest hints of an idea of whatever the fuck Marly meant starting to form in his brain, but he cast about for any other possibilities, refusing for that to be it. He begged his brain to come up with something else, because it couldn’t possibly be that, he couldn’t have this fucking conversation the day before he had to go back to Russia.

“Marly,” Ilya said slowly, when Marly just waited him out, and his brain refused to offer up any other possibilities. “You are asking me if I’m upset that Hollander is gay?”

“Well, yeah,” Marly said with a shrug.

“Hollander is not gay,” Ilya said. He tried not to wince; he was pretty sure Hollander was gay, at least a little, but he was also sure Hollander hadn’t admitted that, or believed that, and that was a part of this chase he had Ilya on. And that was Hollander’s business, anyway. In Russia, you didn’t fucking talk about stuff like this, not even in code; he hated that it was being discussed in his kitchen, just like he hated it anytime someone brought it up in their locker room or on the ice or just fucking hanging out. Why was it a thing that everyone thought they knew when it was nothing anyone could confirm?

“I mean, right, of course, but—he probably is. But also whatever, I’m fine with it, so—”

“Marleau, Hollander is not gay. Stop fucking saying this. Is not your business.”

“Yeah, but I’m not trying to—”

“Stop. Enough. I am going to say this one time more, and only this time. Okay? Listen.” He waited for Marly to nod. “I am not upset about Hollander, for this reason—which is not real reason—or any other. I’m not mad or sad or—”

Ilya had to pause and work very hard not to let his voice break on his next words. He thought of the dreams, the hallucinations; he thought of Hollander’s toes against his calf. He thought of his empty apartment and slamming the dishwasher door too hard and Jane becoming Shane and—

“I think,” Ilya said, swallowing hard. “I think it could be very good, if Hollander came here.”

It hurt just as much to say it as it did to live with it in him, because it was true, and Ilya wanted it so badly that he thought he might be sick.

It was easy and necessary to get rid of Marly after that disastrous admission. Ilya didn’t even have to explain anymore; once the food was gone and Marly realized that what had Ilya rattled was wanting something he was terrified he couldn’t have, he was content to have done his fuckass big brother duties.

“Who knows?” he said in the same tone of voice he’d used when they made the playoffs this year, all that why not us? hope thick and sweet between them as Ilya ushered him out. “Montreal has fucked a ton of shit up this summer. Maybe they’ll fuck this up, too, and let him walk.”

He sounded like he believed it, too, just like he’d believed, when they made the playoffs, that they could win the Cup. Being a professional athlete meant being brave enough to hope for that kind of thing every time you played the game, swallowing down the fear of losing just long enough to try. It was not the same as having Hollander, of course, and Marly didn’t even know the half of it, no matter what he thought he knew, but he could understand the wanting, at least.

“Maybe,” Ilya said. “Bye, Marly.”

“See ya, Roz. Have a good summer back home.”

Ilya closed the door on Marly and that ridiculous notion and took a deep breath when he was alone again. There were loads of things he should be doing, errands to tick off, stuff to pack, Svetlana to at least acknowledge before she showed up here, too; she wouldn’t be as easy to chase off as Marly had been. Ilya looked at his phone, still charging on the counter, full of shit he could be scrolling, checking, doing—maybe Montreal had matched the offer sheet already. Maybe it was all over.

Panic seized him at the thought, and he seized his phone in turn. A quick glance at Twitter told him that hadn’t happened, that this would last up to five more days. He closed out of Twitter intending to text Svetlana, to tick off at least that errand, but his fingers opened the Jane thread mostly without his consent, and he realized this was what he needed: to restore his equilibrium.

You sign offer sheet so we can fuck in Boston? Ilya sent. He wanted another fuck off. He wanted Hollander to reject him, to tell him how nuts he was, that it wasn’t going to happen and even if it did, that didn’t mean anything for them—there was nothing of them to mean anything for, anyway.

Ilya was not, in any way, shape or form, prepared for his phone to light up with Jane’s name.

“Fuck!” he said, and dropped the phone with a clatter. It kept buzzing, reverberating through the marble, twitching a little with the call, and his hands made more movements against his will and picked it back up frantically. He accepted the call and put the phone to his ear quickly but cautiously, like it might be a timed bomb.

Before he could say anything, like “Hello?” or “Hollander?” or “Why are you calling me?”, Hollander’s voice erupted through the speaker.

“Am I fucking crazy?” Hollander asked. The words shook, trembly and forceful, and Ilya was taken aback not just by their intensity but also their resonance—had he not been asking himself the same question for the past 20 hours? “No, really, am I just—have I completely lost my mind?”

“Hollander, what—”

“I’m fucking serious, Rozanov. Did I ruin my entire fucking life yesterday? Is that what—do you really think—oh my god, I can’t believe I did this.” Hollander was speaking in a loud, high rush, the words blurring together. It confused Ilya’s otherwise sharp inner translator and also sounded familiar; he spoke on instinct as soon as he realized what was happening.

“Hollander, you are having panic attack again?”

“Yeah, I fucking am,” Hollander yelled. His voice broke and kept trembling; Ilya winced and felt his own panic soar a moment, ready to meet Hollander’s until he willed it down and kept his own voice level.

“Is okay, yes? Nothing is decided yet, and you know how these things end—Montreal will match—”

“What if they don’t?” Hollander asked, frantic. Before Ilya could even conceive of his own hurt at that, and then feel adequately disgusted with himself for feeling hurt, Hollander kept going. “Oh god, but what if they do? Fuck, Rozanov, this is so fucked up. I can’t stand this.”

None of that made very much sense to Ilya, but he decided that didn’t matter. “We don’t know what will happen,” Ilya told him, as firmly as he could, even though it was mostly a lie. They did know, really; Marly was right. Montreal would match. Still, though—“So is no good to panic about it, okay? Just calm down and breathe.”

“You calm down and breathe,” Hollander said, and then he paused. Ilya pressed his lips together to fend off a wide grin, then remembered there was no one here to see it and let it stretch across his mouth. It widened further when he heard Hollander taking deep puffs of breath, listening so well.

“See?” Ilya said, after a few puffs. “I am right. Is okay, Hollander.”

“Fuck you,” Hollander said, a little squeaky now. He cleared his throat. “You were wrong,” he added, and Ilya rolled his eyes.

“No, clearly I am right; I am always right.”

“Not about—what you texted.” There was a long, deep breath after that, and then Hollander’s voice again, stronger and firmer. “I didn’t sign the offer sheet for—for that.”

Ilya grimaced, then hated himself for it. He tilted his voice up to tease. “No? I think this is lie.”

“No you don’t—it wasn’t about that. It was about the money.”

“Hm. No, I don’t believe this.”

“Rozanov, it was the highest offer, that was the only reason—”

“You are still terrible liar, you know?”

“I am not lying—I picked the highest offer because fuck Montreal!” Hollander yelled again for that last bit, and both the volume and the sentiment caught Ilya by surprise.

“Uh—I think you steal my line, Hollander.”

“No, it’s not—okay, it’s not fuck Montreal, exactly. Not the whole team, or the whole—it’s just Deslauriers. That’s why.” Hollander sighed, and Ilya could picture his angry, grumpy face descending into something more forlorn. He did not like the picture at all.

“No, is good, you are learning—yes, fuck Montreal, fuck Metros, you come to Boston so we can—”

“We’re not doing anything if I come to Boston,” Hollander said, and again before it could land long enough to sting, he added, “I mean—probably we shouldn’t—but maybe—no, look, this isn’t about that at all, okay? I swear it. That’s not why. It really was to stick it to Deslauriers. His opening offer was—fuck. I can’t get it out of my head.”

“What was it?” Ilya asked, somewhat more urgently than he’d intended. He’d known, of course, that the camps had been going back and forth for a while, but no numbers had ever leaked, which was odd in these situations. He’d been trying not to think of it because none of it really sat right; his own contract negotiation had been ridiculously easy in comparison.

They’d gotten the salary right immediately—Fitzy had seemed as eager as Ilya and his agent were to make him the highest paid forward in the league, like as a vanity thing, which Ilya was obviously on board for—but had quibbled just a bit on term. Ilya wanted four years to bet on himself and the rising cap; Fitzy wanted at least six, if not the full eight. They settled on five, which Fitzy pretended to grumble about, but it all happened very quickly and very neatly, and the signing bonus had resulted in his new McLaren and a fat enough wire transfer home to shut Alexei up for a while.

Something about it not being easy for Hollander was unsettling. They were mostly equals—Hollander had his Calder and scoring titles, Ilya had his Rocket and one more playoff run than him—and while Ilya knew he had an edge, he didn’t think it was that big of one to warrant this whole production. He hadn’t wanted to examine why it felt so shitty to him, so he’d mostly ignored it, until now. Now, it felt imperative that he knew, in the same way he wanted to know if Hollander liked basketball or drank his coffee with anything in it.

So of course Hollander said, “I’m not telling you that, no.”

Ilya sighed heavily and looked up at his ceiling. “Why not?” he said, trying not to sound as petulant as he felt.

“Because it’s—it fucking sucks, okay? It’s like—okay, have you ever been bullied?”

Thoughts of Papa and Alexei flashed through his mind in an instant, and Ilya shushed them mentally. He sniffed and said, “Ah, no,” and hoped Hollander could hear the smirk he’d forced on through the phone.

“Of course not,” Hollander sighed, so it probably worked. “Well, one of the worst things when you’re getting bullied is, you know, telling other people what they said. Because then not only did you have to hear it, but now your—your parents or the teacher or whoever have to hear what people said about you. It makes it all way more embarrassing. So no, I’m not going to fucking tell you what Deslauriers thinks of me. Fuck that.”

That sense of wrongness squirmed in Ilya’s stomach until it felt something like anger. He wanted to push, the way he always did, make Hollander tell him, but not out of his usual one-upmanship; he wanted to be angrier.

It took him a few breaths and a hard swallow not to argue or turn his anger on Hollander, who certainly didn’t deserve it; he saved his cursing for Russian before he said, “Fuck him, Hollander. You will come to Boston.”

Ilya wanted it so fucking badly. He had admitted this already, but on the phone with Hollander, knowing he was even angrier at Montreal, that they were sharing this, made the want burn that much brighter in him. It broke away from some of the embarrassment of wanting it, overwhelmed that part of him that kept saying that it was a stupid thing to want, for all the wrong reasons.

“You know that’s probably not going to happen,” Hollander said. His voice was bitter and unhappy, which was both gratifying and painful because Ilya just wanted to fix it. He couldn’t find it in him to be embarrassed about that instinct, either. “I mean, I don’t even know if I want it to. I love this team. I’m a good fucking captain. I just—I want to get paid what I’m worth.”

He said it like it was such a monumental, unreasonable demand, as if it weren’t coming from the mouth of the second-best player in the league. Ilya cursed in Russian again.

“And you should! You will, now, so—is not so crazy to do this. I think Deslauriers made you do this.”

“It was still crazy,” Hollander said, though he laughed a little and that felt like a win. “I feel like I just blew up my entire life.”

His next laugh sounded shaky, maybe a bit manic, and Ilya frowned. “Where are you?” he asked, because if Hollander was talking to him he was probably somewhere alone, and he probably shouldn’t have been. “With your parents?”

“Uh—no,” Hollander said. He did that shaky laugh again. “Um, I got in a fight with my mom? So I’m in Montreal.”

“Alone?” Ilya said, to be sure. His frown deepened.

“Yeah. I mean, my teammates probably all fucking hate me now—”

“They don’t,” Ilya cut in. His hand was doing that thing where it acted without permission again, reaching not for his phone this time—he clutched that to his ear, of course, because Hollander was in it—but his laptop, closed on the island a little ways down. He opened it and logged in one-handed, not yet ready to admit what he was thinking of doing. “It’s hockey, Hollander, it’s just business; they know. It’s okay. They text you, call you?”

“Um, maybe? I kind of—when the news broke, I set my phone so that the only texts or calls that could come through were from my agent, so. I’m afraid to look.”

“You should look, you will feel better,” Ilya said, a bit absentmindedly; he jabbed at his laptop keyboard with renewed force and purpose. He hoped he didn’t sound like he was grinning like a maniac, but he was, because Hollander had just given him a precious gift, an admittance that was on par with the craziest parts of Ilya’s own psychotic break about all of this. “You looked at me.”

“What?”

“I mean, you set phone for no texts or calls from anyone but your agent—and me. You get my texts.” Hollander had answered his texts. Ilya would be doing backflips about that if it didn’t mean letting go of his phone.

“Oh, I—that was a mistake, obviously, I—”

“No, I do not think so,” Ilya said. He no longer cared if Hollander could hear the grin; it couldn’t be contained. He beamed at his laptop, and Expedia.com. “I think I made you feel better.”

“No! No, you didn’t, you—you pissed me off!” Hollander said. Ilya could see his scrunched, mad face in his head. He could see the freckles bunched up on his nose. He paused typing to bite at his own hand, like he’d done in the dream, but this time to stifle a helpless, humiliating giggle that simply could not happen.

“Is same thing, I think,” Ilya managed, and he laughed when Hollander spluttered more protests.

“You’re—no, you’re wrong, you—it’s not—and you were wrong before, too—”

“Hm. Still bad liar, Hollander.”

“Fuck off, I’m not! I just called to tell you you were wrong!” Hollander angry-breathed at him for a moment, then said, “And I did that, so—I’m gonna hang up now.”

“No, Hollander, don’t hang up,” Ilya said, as a token protest. He didn’t actually mind that much when Hollander just hung up in answer. He dropped his phone carelessly on the island and switched to using two hands to try and book the next available flight to Montreal.

There were a few immediate impediments to this. One was that there weren’t a ton of direct flights to Montreal with availability today; there was one Air Canada flight leaving in 40 minutes, which gave Ilya pause, but then he remembered he lived in a simmering hell-city gnarled with traffic that would sink into the Atlantic before it let him get to the airport that fast, so it was a no-go. Another Air Canada flight left in a few hours, but it literally sold out while he was trying to check out, and no amount of cursing at it could bring it back.

Ilya looked at a flight on something called Porter, which he didn’t believe was a real airline until he Googled it, and then he eliminated that as an option when people on Reddit warned him he might be tapped to fly the plane under certain circumstances. This sent him to look at connecting flights; he despaired at four hour, utterly pointless layovers in Toronto or Ottawa and tried calling Air Canada instead. When Air Canada refused to kick someone off the direct flight that sold out on him, even though he offered increasingly obscene amounts of money for it, he sighed wearily and let the employee book him on a direct flight to Ottawa, resolving to drive from there.

“You are very strict and loyal employee,” Ilya told Rochelle, the Air Canada rep. “You have integrity; I like this. I will say on customer survey that you cannot be corrupted.”

“Thank you?”

“You make your country proud.” Ilya had the thought that Hollander would like her.

That left him with a flight in a little over two hours, which was plenty of time to quickly pack and overcome his other impediment: Ilya did not know where Shane Hollander lived. He didn’t know Montreal beyond the Ritz Carlton on Sherbrooke where they always stayed, the area right around the Bell Centre, a few strip clubs on Sainte-Catherine, and some restaurants and clubs on Saint-Laurent, but even if those areas did house one Hollander, it wasn’t like he could aimlessly wander them, yelling out his name. He really couldn’t picture Hollander living above a strip club.

Ilya stood in his bedroom, shoving things in a backpack and pondering this. Hollander probably wouldn’t give up his address too easily; he’d been putting Ilya off on that for months and months, and he had no reason to change his mind, especially now that he was all defensive about the texts getting through. As he pondered, he wandered out to the kitchen to shove some snacks for the plane on top of his clothes and stopped as he passed the fridge.

On the fridge, there was a Christmas card stuck beneath a magnet shaped like a lobster wearing a Raiders jersey. The Christmas card featured Katie, Marly and Katie’s hideous little white dog, crusty and perpetually terrified. Her name was Arabella, she had a little Santa hat perched precariously on top of her head, and Ilya was in love with her. But that was beside the point; it was the card itself that had Ilya reaching for his phone again, too determined to think too deeply about the social implications of calling his bro’s on-again, off-again while they were off.

“Babe?” Katie answered, sounding curious. She called all of Marly’s teammates ‘babe’. Ilya imagined her once calling Hollander ‘babe’ and felt both an enormous bubble of glee and a rush of unhinged jealousy at the thought. “Did you mean to call me?”

“Hello, Katie!” Ilya said brightly. “How are you? How is my beautiful niece Arabella?”

All of the skepticism rushed from Katie’s voice instantly, and she spent the next five minutes detailing how Arabella had gone to the groomer today and only peed on one employee, which was apparently a new record. “She’s napping on the balcony now,” Katie told him, and Ilya could perfectly picture her splayed in the sun, tongue lolled out, looking quite dead. His chest ached with love.

Eventually, Katie seemed charmed enough for Ilya to circle around to the reason for his call. “You know, Katie, I am looking at your beautiful Christmas card—”

“You still have that out?” Katie asked. “Babe! It’s July!”

“Yes, yes, but it is so beautiful, how could I put it away?” he told her. It was also the first Christmas card he’d ever gotten, though he didn’t say that. “But I am looking now, and I am thinking—Katie, do you send Christmas card to Shane Hollander?”

“Of course,” Katie said. “He was my billet brother, you know.” Of course he knew. Everyone in New England and Ontario knew. “His mom sends me Christmas cards, too.”

“Ah. So you send to his mom? Not to him in Montreal?”

“No, I send it to him; his mom suggested that, actually, because I don’t think he gets a lot of cards there otherwise, and she thought it would make him feel more grown-up. Why do you want to know?”

Ilya bit his hand one more time over how adorable that was, and how badly he wanted to give Hollander shit for it. He cleared his throat, a little strangled, and said, “I want Montreal address, please. I will send Hollander something as maybe new captain, you know?”

“Oh yeah! I heard about the offer sheet; that’s wild, babe. But do you really think he’s going to come here? Surely Montreal will match.”

Why couldn’t Marly be attracted to women who knew nothing about hockey? Ilya pinched the bridge of his nose in annoyance and schooled his tone. “Oh, maybe, but I hear—you know, I still want to make him welcome. Just in case. Want him to know that is okay, even if we are rivals. You know?”

“Oh Roz, sweetie, you are such a doll.”

“Shh, tell no one! I have reputation, you know.”

“I know, babe, I know. I won’t say a word. Okay; I’ll get you the address. You’re the sweetest.”

“So are you,” Ilya said, honest that time. And then, on an honesty roll: “Cliff is idiot, you know.”

Katie laughed in delight. “He really, really is. Here you go!”

Ilya wrote the address she read off down, doing backflips in his mind again, and thanked her profusely. “Give Arabella kisses from me,” he told her seriously, and waited on the phone with her while she jogged out on the balcony and gave her dog multiple loud smooches by the phone.

Prize in hand, Ilya hung up, changed, picked up his backpack, and called for a car. He went out through his building’s parking garage, stopping by the McLaren to pop open the passenger door and grab the stupid red wig, thinking that Hollander would appreciate a disguise. Sunglasses on, wig shoved in the backpack, car service rolling up, Ilya didn’t really stop to think too much about what he was doing, only that it felt utterly and completely right to do it.

Ilya walked up to the empty Enterprise counter and said, “Hello, I would like sexiest car you have,” and watched as the man at the desk blinked at him behind his glasses for a few moments.

“Okay,” the man said eventually, slowly; he tapped a bit at his computer, and then said, “Um, I’m actually not sure which cars I would classify as sexy, but we have—”

“Wait!” Ilya said, realizing something; he was supposed to be incognito. He had the sunglasses on and a nondescript snapback, but he’d brought the wig for a reason. Flying down the 417 in a Porsche—or whatever the Ottawa equivalent of a Porsche was, Ilya thought, glancing up at the buzzing fluorescent light about to blink out above them and the stain on the counter guy’s black tie—was not being very discreet. “No, not sexy. Boring car instead. Maybe, um—” He shuddered to consider it, but realized it was probably the move. “You have Kia?”

The counter guy brightened with relief. “Yes! We have a lot of Kias. Midsize, hatchback, you name it. Pick your poison!”

Ilya shuddered again, because poison was the right word, but dolefully picked. That was how he found himself cruising down the 417 in a silver Kia Optima about 20 minutes later, having his very first regrets of this entire endeavor.

He lasted only a few minutes before pulling off to stop at a Tim Hortons, where he acquired the biggest Iced Capp they had and all but chugged it. It was nowhere near as good as Dunkin, but the amount of sugar and caffeine in it made it feel like the closest thing to street legal cocaine as he could get at the moment, so he grinned and bore it like a champ. He turned the radio on, blasted the AC, and sang along to Get Lucky.

By the next time he stopped, Ilya had heard Get Lucky so many times he was now imagining the Daft Punk guys in their stupid helmets at every kilometer marker, right in front of his Kia Optima, primed for being run over. He changed stations but couldn’t escape it and turned off again once he crossed into Quebec, spotting stupid French signs for a rest area that promised to put him out of his misery for a bit.

There, he peed and stopped at a PFK, again rolling his eyes at the French, but he bought himself a poutine covered in fried chicken and demolished it, imagining Marly’s disgust if he knew what he was doing. The first time he’d ever had poutine was at a PFK, to Marly’s intense despair, and he’d had better versions since, of course, but there was something nostalgic about it now. He wondered if Hollander had ever tried it or if he’d be just as appalled as Marly.

Thinking of Hollander, Ilya stopped one more time and got a six-pack of ginger ale, because it was a preference he knew, everyone knew, and because his mother would haunt him into an early grave if he showed up at someone’s house uninvited and without some sort of gift. He shoved the six-pack in his backpack.

Refreshed and reinvigorated, Ilya got back on the road and continued to Montreal. He rolled in from the west, over the bridge—not the pretty one, the boring one—and hit the city by early dusk, relieved and determined to never do that drive from Ottawa to Montreal again. The Kia’s GPS took him to a treelined street in a neighborhood called Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, which he’d never heard of before, leading him down a few townhouses with neat, brick staircases beside large bay windows. It looked like a street from a postcard, and not at all what he’d imagined when he’d pictured where Hollander would live—he’d imagined a condo in a luxury building like Ilya’s, not an actual house.

He double and triple-checked the address, confirmed it, and street-parked the Kia a few houses down from the one in question, perched atop a red brick staircase. There was a dark Land Rover in the driveway that made Ilya roll his eyes on instinct. He braced himself, took off his hat to fit the red wig on, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and wondered, not for the first time in the last 48 hours, if he had completely lost his mind.

The answer was probably, yes. Ilya got out of the horrible Kia anyway.

He loped his way up the stairs and rang the doorbell next to the front door, which was blue. Ilya chuckled, imagining that Hollander had chosen this place for the Metros colors. He stopped chuckling when he thought of what Hollander was going through with the Metros and wondered if he would ever come around to black and gold instead.

Silence met Ilya’s repeated doorbell rings, and movement through the slotted blinds in the front set of white bay windows caught his eye. He peered in, squinting, until he could make out the shape of a large couch in a living room, and in front of that couch, sitting on the floor, was Hollander, his head turned slightly towards the door. He had his arms wrapped around his knees, and even though Ilya rang the bell again, he eventually dropped his head down onto them, too.

So Ilya started spamming the bell nonstop.

“Go away, Hayd!” Hollander yelled, but he still had his face in his knees, so it was muffled and mumbled. Ilya pretended not to hear it and started adding persistent knocks to his doorbell routine. He tried to knock out the melody of Get Lucky, then gave up halfway through and just started pounding on the door.

“Go away!” Hollander called again, picking his head up this time. Ilya did not go away. He leaned on the bell like it was his horn and he was behind a church van full of nuns, fully prepared to go to hell for this, as long Hollander brought him there.

It took forever—god, there was no one as stubborn as Hollander, except maybe Ilya—but Hollander finally got up. Instead of looking out the window like Ilya expected—he’d been prepared to wave—he went right to the door and wrenched it open. Ilya almost hit him in the face, mid-knock.

“I already told you, Hayden, I don’t want—oh!” Hollander said. His eyes widened in alarm as he realized that Ilya was not, god forbid, Hayden Pike. “I’m sorry, who—Rozanov?”

Though there was something appalled in Hollander’s voice when he said Ilya’s name, Ilya couldn’t really care; he was incredibly thrilled that Hollander, if only for a moment, hadn’t recognized him in the wig. He grinned at him and lifted up his sunglasses to wink.

“Yes, is me. Hello, Hollander.”

“What the fuck did you do to your hair?” Hollander asked, strangled. Ilya bit his lip to keep laughter at bay.

“Is wig, dummy,” he said, and lifted that too so that his dark blond curls showed. Hollander stared hard at them, then put his hand over his chest and let out a big breath, as if in relief. Ilya was delighted.

Hollander schooled his features quickly, his hand dropping to tuck his thumb in one pocket; the other hand now had a death grip on the blue door, though Ilya eyed it and thought he could break it if he had to.

“Don’t worry,” Ilya told him. “I am still sexy as ever, yes? Hair all there?”

“Fuck off, just—what the fuck are you doing here?”

Ilya shrugged, sucking his teeth. “You say you are alone, you freak out—”

“I’m not freaking out,” Hollander said; he sounded very freaked out.

“—so I think, ‘Ilya, you are good at distraction, you can go to Montreal—’”

“On what planet is that a rational thought for you to have, just—just going to Montreal in the middle of summer? Aren’t you supposed to be in Russia right now?”

Ilya very purposefully avoided thinking about the ticket he’d changed to a week later and the perfunctory text he’d sent Alexei to let him know something had come up. He hadn’t bothered to read his answers and instead followed Hollander’s example to only let texts from Svetlana and Jane come through. It had been very peaceful.

He shrugged again. “It was easy trip for me. On my way.”

“On your way where?”

“So many questions, Hollander—are you going to let me in to distract you or interrogate me on front steps forever?” Ilya went to shove past that arm on the door, cursing inwardly when he couldn’t break the hold—it was so annoying and hot that Hollander was so fucking strong. Hollander stood his ground and glared. “Is this Canadian manners? So nice and polite, don’t even let me come in—”

“What are you doing here?” Hollander asked, quietly and seriously. Ilya leveled him with his own very serious look, frowning gravely.

“I am here to distract you,” Ilya said, very quietly and seriously. Hollander’s face scrunched up in annoyance, which meant this was already a resounding success.

“How?” Hollander asked through gritted teeth. When Ilya just stared at his lips for a moment, then gave him a slow look up and down his body—he was wearing a white t-shirt, thin enough for nipple outlines, and loose gym shorts, bare feet, god, it was a very good look—before meeting his eyes again. He watched his meaning flare in those eyes, brown and golden in the dusky sunlight, darkening a little; it meant a complete and total victory, even before Hollander grimaced and then hissed out, “Get in here.”

Ilya didn’t backflip inside, but it was a close thing.

Hollander allowed Ilya into the mudroom and said, “Shoes,” when Ilya took a few too many steps. Ilya rolled his eyes but toed his sneakers off, kicking them towards a wooden shoe rack and then stomping forward in his socks. He looked around, eyeing the living room just through a large archway on the left, beautiful old molding above it. The walls were painted a sedate cream color and everything within the big front room was in various neutral browns and whites on shiny light hardwood, except for a giant area rug with splashes of blues. Ilya concluded that Shane would love the beige West Elm throw blanket, and also that this didn’t look like the house of any bachelor hockey player he’d ever seen.

“This is your grandma’s house?” Ilya asked, eyeing a Tiffany lamp with pale white roses on it. “Can I meet Grandma Hollander?” It was a joke; Hollander had said he was alone, but it also sent a scared thrill racing through him. He wouldn’t mind meeting Hollander’s grandma, which was probably the craziest thought he’d had through all of this.

“What? No! This is my house!” Hollander said. “My grandma isn’t—you’re not meeting my grandma!”

Ilya fixed on an exaggerated frown and nodded. “Okay, too bad. I think she would love me.”

“She would not. She would—leave my house alone!”

“You picked this out?” Ilya asked, pointing to a stone statuette in the shape of two red cardinals grooming each other on an end table. Hollander scowled.

“Look, I’m renting this place from my dad’s aunt, okay, she moved to Florida and she was going to sell but she—the timing just made sense,” he said. “My mom thought it would be better for me to live here than downtown, but she left my dad to get most of the decorations and he’s—”

“A 75-year-old woman?”

“—really into birds,” Hollander spat out. Then he pointed accusingly at the cardinals. “Which makes it really weird that he got that statue because he should know that those are two male cardinals, so—so I don’t know why he got that.”

Ilya looked at the statue with a new appreciation and took a minute to wonder whether or not Hollander’s parents knew something about their son’s sexuality that maybe their son wouldn’t admit yet. He patted the heads of the two gay cardinals and said, “Okay. Makes sense. Is nice place.”

“I’m moving soon, anyway, and looking into investment properties too, so it doesn’t really—I’ll just hire a designer for the new place,” Hollander said. He was flushed, which Ilya always enjoyed, staring down at his toes against the hardwood.

“Maybe new place will be in Boston,” Ilya said, very casually, like he didn’t care either way. He was thinking about his place, though, imagining Hollander attacking it armed with a designer. Ilya’s didn’t have a design so much as it was just a place where his stuff lived, but he would let Hollander change that.

Hollander looked vaguely nauseous at Ilya’s words, though, and Ilya cursed himself—he was supposed to be distracting. “Yeah,” Hollander said, faintly. “Maybe. Um—”

Ilya stepped up close to him. Their eyes were near and level, drawn as if magnets, and when Hollander tried to look away nervously, Ilya grabbed his chin to stop it.

“Hi,” Ilya said, low and sweet.

“Hi,” Hollander said. Then he chuckled, rough. “I can’t fucking believe you’re here.”

“Believe it, baby.”

“Don’t call me baby,” Hollander told him, but he blushed to the roots of his hair.

Ilya ran his thumb gently over Hollander’s chin; he let his fingers press into his jaw. This close, the freckles demanded all the attention, summer-dark and far too enticing, but Ilya was good at denying himself his truly favorite things and instead looked over the lovely line of Hollander’s perfect nose, the flutter of his dark lashes as he fought to keep his eyes open. It was a fight he seemed poised to lose, listing a little into Ilya’s touch, just begging for Ilya to lean in and press a firm, wet kiss to his lips.

Hollander let out a tiny moan into the kiss, which made Ilya smile against his mouth. He got away with pressing a little kiss into the corner of his mouth, drifting it over his freckles—sue him, they were right there—before Hollander let out a kind of squeak and jerked away.

“Um,” he said gravely, clearing his throat. He backed up and crossed his arms over his chest. “D’you—can I get you something to drink?”

Ilya stared at him. “You are serious?”

“You—just—I don’t have much, but—let me show you the kitchen?” Hollander said, wincing. The pleading note in his voice made Ilya roll his eyes but it also made him comply, huffing out a noisy sigh before shuffling off after Hollander down a long hallway, past a wooden staircase and a little table with a bowl of fake fruit on it. The bowl had blue and white birds on it; Ilya couldn’t help smiling at it and wondering if those birds were gay, too.

The kitchen opened up big and white, with a patterned border surrounding the tops of the walls that featured apples and leaves. Hollander caught Ilya looking and smiling and said, “Shut up, there wasn’t—I didn’t want to change anything too much in case she took the house back. But now it’s probably going to sell—”

“No, you cannot sell this,” Ilya said, running his hand over the dusty pink countertop, knocking against it—Hollander scowled at his hand and started mumbling, “It’s laminate, I hate it—”

“House is so cute, Hollander, I love it,” Ilya interrupted. He was a little surprised to find he meant it. The kitchen had another archway on one side, opening up to a formal dining room with—yes, that was a bird-patterned lace runner over the table. Ilya loved it. Hollander would definitely have to bring that to Boston, along with the gay cardinals.

He had a sudden vision, not of his Back Bay place, but of a house in Brookline, a big colonial with blue shutters in Chestnut Hill, like the one Hammy just bought for him and Carrie to live in. Carrie had shown him pictures at the engagement party: the big yard in the back with space for a swing set, the spot where they’d put a fence up so their dog could run around safely, stuff called wainscotting and shiplap and the media room, which she said would be great for blanket forts. “Blanket forts?” Ilya had asked, and she Googled it for him; he made a blanket fort the next time he hung out with the other single guys to smoke and watch Fast and Furious 6. It was great.

The gay cardinals, Ilya decided, belonged in a house like that, and so did Shane Hollander. And then he shook the thought away like a buzzing fly, annoyed with it and with himself for having it.

“I’m not here for much longer,” Hollander said, grumbly and embarrassed, though he paled a little at his own implications. He busied himself with the fridge, yanking it open and peering in. It was emptier than Ilya’s, which made sense, since—“I wasn’t supposed to be here,” Hollander told him with an embarrassed sort of shuffle. “So I don’t really have food in. I have, um, a Moosehead that I think is 6 months old—”

“So specific,” Ilya said, leaning against the counter. “Where did you get this baby beer?”

“Hayden brought it over to celebrate when Jackie had their twins, who are 6 months old now,” Hollander said, missing that that was a rhetorical joke. Ilya made sure his back stayed turned to grin fondly at him. “Um, and I have a bit of cucumber-ginger juice I made in the machine that’s—yeah, that needs to be thrown out, sorry. And I have water?”

Hollander looked back at Ilya, anxiously, like he was anxious about being struck down by the gods of Canadian politeness for not having a full tea service on hand to welcome his unexpected visitor. Ilya made sure his grin was gone and raised his eyebrows. “Wow. This is shameful, how you treat guest. You will be deported for this, yes? They take your citizenship?”

“Shut up,” Hollander said immediately, his anxiety fleeing for indignation in a moment. “You just show up here, completely unannounced—”

“No, don’t worry,” Ilya said, holding his palm up in a shushing motion. He swung his backpack around and plopped it onto the pink countertop, unzipping it. “I am perfect guest, I plan for this, here—” He pulled the pack of ginger ale out and presented it with a proud grin and a fancy flourish. “See? I know you like.”

Hollander stared at him, eyes darting between his face and the ginger ale in genuine surprise. “You know I like ginger ale?” he finally asked, faint.

Ilya rolled his eyes. “Whole world knows you like ginger ale, Hollander. Is not CIA secret.”

“Oh. I didn’t think you—you really pay attention to that stuff?”

“Know your enemy,” Ilya said in his fake serious voice, and then he winked. “I also know you like me to put tips of my fingers in your—”

“Okay!” Hollander said loudly, grabbing the ginger ale from Ilya and putting it in the fridge. Then he took a can out and stared at it. “You want one?”

“Water is fine, Hollander,” Ilya told him. “You drink, is for you.”

“For me? Oh. Thank you.” Hollander shut the fridge, still clutching the can, got a glass out of a white wooden cabinet, opened the can and poured it in. He added ice at the fridge, went to take a drink, then abruptly put it down again without drinking because—“Oh! Your water!”

“Relax,” Ilya said, laughing a little as Hollander actually spun in place for a minute, frantic. “I can get.” He went to the same cabinet Hollander had opened, helped himself to a glass, helped himself to water and ice, and then went back to leaning against the counter, all while Hollander stared at him like he was a wild animal poised to maul him.

Ilya sipped his water and waited him out. Hollander took an absent sip of ginger ale and decided to look at a spot above Ilya’s head instead of his eyes. He frowned. “Why are you still wearing that thing?”

“What?” Ilya asked, pulling the wig up again. “You don’t like my disguise?”

“You look like a clown,” Hollander told him. “Where did you even get it?”

“Hammy’s wedding, in the photobooth. I forget I still have it and wear it home. Everyone look at me weird, but I think it looks good.” He dropped it on the counter and ran a hand through his own curls, messy and a little flat from the wig. He noticed Hollander taking sidelong glances and then stubbornly look down at his ginger ale, so he shook the curls out a little extra, tossed his head back.

“Whatever,” Hollander grumbled, taking such a desperate gulp of ginger ale that Ilya winced, imagining the carbonation burning. They stood there for one awkward moment until, just as Ilya planned to get the kissing going again, and for longer this time, Hollander suddenly gasped. “Wait.”

Ilya sighed. “Waiting.”

“How do you know where I live?” Hollander asked. There was a thread of real panic in his voice that Ilya found both a little dramatic and was making him wonder if this had been a real mistake; had he come here because he genuinely thought his presence would be good for Hollander, or just because he couldn’t stand the thought of him alone and panicking? Why had he thought that he’d be the right person to help Hollander out of a panic?

Then Hollander, his voice shaking slightly, asked, “Did you contact one of my teammates?” and Ilya got the fear a little better. He still couldn’t help teasing, though.

“Yes, yes, I call up teammate—Wilson, yes, he used to be captain and gave you his C last year, I thought he would be best—and I say ‘hi, hello Clay Wilson, this is Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander sucked my dick, I need’—”

“Oh my god, shut up,” Hollander said, reaching out and giving Ilya a shove; his voice was steadier, though. Ilya cackled as he collided with the counter and used the momentum to lean again, sipping casually at his water. “You did not do that!”

“Swear to god, Hollander, Wilson can tell you himself, we can call right now—”

“I’m serious! How did you find it?”

“Katie told me,” Ilya conceded. It did nothing to clear up the affronted confusion on Hollander’s face, though. He frowned at Ilya, eyebrows furrowing.

“Who’s Katie?”

Ilya laughed for a moment, then realized it was in earnest; of course it was. “Katie Riley? She moved to Boston for marketing job—” And to follow Marly, of course, her white whale from Kingston. “—and she is Marly’s girlfriend sometimes. We are friends.”

“Riley?” Hollander repeated. “That was my—”

“Billet family, yes, she was your billet sister?” When Hollander continued to look relatively blank, Ilya looked behind him, hoping—yes, there it was, on the fridge. “She send you Christmas card right there?”

“What?” Hollander asked, but then he turned around and plucked the card off his fridge. His magnet, Ilya noticed, was a Montreal bagel. “Oh, wow, um—yeah, I don’t really remember her, but it’s a small world, eh?”

Ilya fought down a laugh and, with a completely straight face and on a pure hunch, said, “Yes, am friends with Katie and her older brother—”

“Jake,” Hollander said unhesitatingly, and then he reddened, glaring at Ilya. “That just came to me. I remember now.”

“I’m sure,” Ilya said, with an exaggerated nod. Hollander shoved him again. Ilya, grinning, put his water down and shoved him back, and then it was only another moment of shoving and their hands between them before Ilya had Hollander pressed up against the fridge, faces far too close, one hand at his hip and the other holding Hollander’s wrist down, the glass of ginger ale dripping condensation down on his hand. They hadn’t spilled any and Ilya was proud of that, because he knew Hollander would make a fuss.

“You will let me distract you now?” Ilya whispered. “Or you think too much about Jake Riley?”

“Fuck you,” Hollander said. He wriggled against Ilya, but not in any true attempt to break free; they both knew he could do that in a second. It was fucking hot. He had his free hand gripping Ilya’s t-shirt tight, fingers pressed into his pec. He squeezed him there, hard. “I’m not thinking about Jake Riley. Not like—that.”

“Oh? So you just think about me?”

Hollander swallowed. His eyes had gone a bit shiny, big and dangerous; they hit Ilya right in a soft spot of himself that he normally tried to forget existed. “No,” he said, but it was soft, a little shaky, and it was a complete no-brainer for Ilya to answer it with a kiss.

With the kiss came that usual surreality, the scared thrill all amped up with disbelief—Ilya was kissing Shane Hollander. He was dipping his tongue in Hollander’s mouth, firm and searching, and Hollander moaned into it and let him, and Ilya didn’t have enough hands to pinch himself with because he was holding Hollander so tightly.

There was an added layer to this—Ilya was kissing Shane Hollander in Montreal, in his beautiful old house, inside his kitchen lit orange by the late summer sunset. He was kissing him and there was a chance, if not a great chance, that he would get to kiss him like this in Boston in the near future, in Ilya’s own apartment, which was not as beautiful or old as this place but could contain as much bird décor as Hollander wanted.

“You have bedroom here?” Ilya asked between long, wet kisses, the words slow and sweet between them. “Or there is wolf in it, dressed like grandma?”

“Shut up,” Hollander said. He ruined his point by kissing Ilya until they were both a little breathless, and then letting his forehead drop against Ilya’s while they breathed for a minute. “It’s upstairs,” he said eventually, and he finally put down the ginger ale glass and twisted until it was him holding Ilya’s wrist, now. Both their hands were wet. “Come on.”

He tugged Ilya back out into the hallway and then up a long wooden staircase, thumping up quickly. Ilya watched his ass bunch up his shorts and could look at little else until they were at the doorway of the presumed bedroom, where Hollander froze in place.

“Just—wait here a sec,” he said, pushing Ilya back and rushing into the bedroom without him. Ilya didn’t wait even half a sec, shoving his way in and ignoring Hollander’s squawked, “No, fuck off!” because he was certain he was about to see that dildo out somewhere. Maybe that was how Hollander planned to get through waiting for the offer sheet outcome; thankfully, Ilya was here to offer him alternate solutions.

To his massive disappointment, there was no dildo, but Hollander was pulling a patchwork granny quilt off the bed and trying to shove it under the bed, cursing up a storm when he realized Ilya was staring openly at it. Ilya couldn’t help himself—he burst out laughing, hurrying forward to grab the quilt out of Hollander’s hands and shaking his head.

“No, no—I love it. I want to fuck you on it.”

“No,” Hollander said, trying to pull it back. “First of all, we’re not doing that—”

“Why not?”

“—and second of all, my actual grandma made this quilt, so no, even if we were, we can’t—”

“Look!” Ilya said, pointing to a patch, delighted again. “Two gay cardinals! Is made for us.”

“Stop it. They’re not—she didn’t know birds like my dad does, it doesn’t—it’s a common mistake!”

Ilya laughed, bigger and brighter than he’d intended. He couldn’t regret it, though, because Hollander stopped fucking with the quilt and looking all disgruntled and just kind of looked at Ilya, his eyes big again. God, they were weapons of mass destruction; Ilya caught on them like a fish on a hook, his insides wriggling, fully ready and willing to dry-drown in Hollander’s devastating gaze.

Hollander studied him back, nodded, and then pulled back the lighter summer blanket on the bed. There were neat, cream sheets beneath and they crumpled as Hollander moved to kneel on the bed, his weight dipping the mattress. He held his hand out, nodding at the space next to him, and said, “Come on. Distract me,” and reeled Ilya in with zero resistance.

After that, it was easy to forget where they were; it always was with Hollander. They could have been on the planet Mars for all Ilya knew or cared. They lay in bed, facing each other like a married couple, kissing until Hollander’s patience snapped and he clambered over Ilya to rub their hard-ons together. There was something immensely satisfying about that, Hollander as hard as Ilya, equal in everything but especially this. It made Ilya shiver with heat, lost in fucking kisses like a virgin—but it wasn’t just that. It was Hollander above him, his hair mussed from Ilya’s fingers, lips swollen and wet, those fucking eyes blown and needy.

Everything made sense with Hollander on top of him. The day and a half Ilya had spent losing his mind—that was worth it as they fumbled each other’s clothes off, getting naked with a practiced speed picked up on their last two quick encounters. Getting a flight to fucking Ottawa, driving a horrible car to Montreal, wearing a clown wig—of course he did all of that to wind up here. What else could he do? It didn’t seem crazy, here, or unreasonable or anything—those were simply steps he had to take to wind up right here, where he belonged, with beautiful Shane Hollander rocking atop him without clothes on.

Hollander leaned over to yank open an ancient-looking bedside drawer, cursing softly when it stuck. Ilya reached to help, with an inkling of what he was after, and their combined strength and eagerness pulled the entire drawer out and tossed it to the floor.

“Fuck,” Hollander said, laughing breathlessly. Ilya laughed, too, and leaned up to kiss the spot where Hollander’s freckles were bunched up across his nose. This prompted Hollander to kiss him on the mouth again, hard enough to tingle, and then he broke away and said, “Mm, wait, I gotta—you’re distracting me!”

“Is why I come here,” Ilya said. He cupped Hollander’s cheek in his hand, unable to help himself because Hollander pouted at him.

“No, not that, I need—” Hollander ducked under Ilya’s arm and leaned over the bed, legs draped across Ilya’s lap. It gave him a spectacular, heart-stopping view of Hollander’s ass, perfect and soft and tempting. Ilya’s hands cupped over it like he wasn’t even in control of them, squeezing and groaning like an idiot, hissing when Hollander wriggled beneath his touch and pressed his thighs against Ilya’s hard dick.

“Got it!” Hollander said triumphantly, and he sat up with lube in his hand. He settled back in his spot straddling Ilya, but Ilya refused to let go of his ass, keeping his stubborn handfuls. Hollander didn’t complain, just squirted lube into his palm and used it to take them both in his big hand.

They groaned together, and Ilya tightened his hands. He let his fingers dip into Hollander’s crease, danced them deeper in, and felt Hollander shudder. “Yes, that’s good, right sweetheart?” he told Hollander in Russian, his voice low and thick, and still Hollander didn’t complain, head tipped back, groaning out. “I know you like,” Ilya added in English, forcing a smirk back onto his face when Hollander dropped his chin down to give him a little glare.

Hollander’s revenge was to stroke their dicks harder, slick and tight. It stole Ilya’s breath and words for a moment, wiped the smirk away in one fell swoop. He somehow found the wherewithal to use his grip on Hollander’s ass to make him move, thrusting to meet him, and they both fucked Hollander’s hand that way, all words but fuck and oh god and various Russian swears lost to them.

Ilya, to his eventual embarrassment, started coming first, spurting into Hollander’s firm fist. Hollander kept moving, letting Ilya squeeze his ass so hard he thought there might be fingerprints—the thought of them, of seeing them later, made Ilya’s dick go off a little more. Hollander jerked him through it, gasping, eyes slid closed until his stomach muscles seized and he started coming, too. He made his usual punched-out, whimpery noises, the ones Ilya wished he could have playing on headphones 24 hours a day, and made a bigger mess of his hand, Ilya’s lap, his lower belly.

He slumped, breathing hard, and it was nothing to tip him down, still holding him by the ass. Ilya took his weight and took his mouth, kissing him through the last of his rough breaths, pulling him up his body and pressing down until Hollander went limp, sprawled over him, making Ilya feel breathlessly and ridiculously lucky.

“Good distraction?” Ilya asked eventually, when their breathing had slowed down and their kisses got lazier and softer. Hollander laughed, a broken little sound, and shifted down enough that he could prop his chin on Ilya’s chest and look up at him. Ilya looked back, willing to go cross-eyed if he had to, and drank in Hollander’s smile.

“Yeah,” Hollander said, all soft and content. It made every kilometer Ilya had traveled that day completely and utterly worth it.

Chapter 4: Day Three

Day Three – 7 July, 2013

Ilya woke up to an empty bed.

This was not so strange; but for the few times Sveta crashed at his place or when CC used to climb into the wrong bed when he and Ilya were rookie road roomies, waking up in an empty bed was the norm for him. He wasn’t in the habit of letting just anyone stay over and he liked to sleep sprawled out anyway, dead center of a big, plush—but not too plush—mattress. It was his preference, really.

But when Ilya remembered whose bed he was in, he couldn’t help feeling disappointed.

He shook that off insistently once he’d blinked fully awake and rubbed the little sleeps out of his eyes. Hollander was an early riser; who was surprised? They hadn’t even stayed up too late last night. Ilya had convinced Hollander to order them pizza, since there was nothing in the house to eat, and Hollander conceded to order from a place called Pizza Pizza, which Ilya assumed had to be good because of the name. It was not, but that was okay because pizza was pizza, really, and it fueled them up for blowjobs on the couch and then some very wet and soapy thrusting in the shower.

Hollander’s ensuite had an actual clawfoot tub, the kind Carrie would’ve gone apeshit for, with an added-on rainfall shower setup that looked like it came from an entirely different century than the tub, which it probably did. It was set against enough of the wall for Ilya to press Hollander against it, though, to make sure the head of his dick caught against his rim just a tiny bit on a few of his thrusts, a tease and a promise, Hollander’s moans echoing around the seafoam tiles.

Ilya went back into that ensuite to scrub some of his frustration away. He left the door open to pee and wash his face, avoiding looking at himself in the mirror for too long and seeing his pouting face.

Instead, he found himself looking back at the bed, where Hollander’s side was still a little rumpled, though the cream sheet and part of the light blanket had been pulled up as neat as he could get it with Ilya still in bed. He liked that thought, Hollander moving around him, Ilya stubbornly stuck in as fundamental a part of his life as making his bed. When he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he was grinning a little, so he splashed more water on his face in punishment.

He made his way downstairs, fully prepared for cold leftover pizza for breakfast and trying to plan how he could convince Hollander to get on board with that, too. He followed the scent of coffee into the kitchen, where an elaborate five-piece coffee setup was spread out on the pink counter. Sunlight streamed in through the big back windows, and the shuddering shadows of leaves danced across Hollander’s white tee, where he was pushing down on the plunger of a French press like he was operating a steam engine. To double Ilya’s delight at this image, there were a few discarded pizza crusts on a plate near Hollander’s elbow.

Hollander had a Bluetooth piece in, and he turned to look at Ilya and pointed to it when they made eye contact. Ilya’s delight dipped and something cold replaced it, especially when he peeked at Hollander’s phone and saw the contact name read Farah – Agent.

Was this it, then? Had Montreal already matched? Ilya reached for his own phone and realized he’d left it upstairs—Hollander had put it on charge for him, on a little multi-plug charging dock he had on his bedside table. So Ilya resigned himself to waiting for coffee and eavesdropping to figure out what the news was; he grabbed cold pizza from the fridge in the meantime.

“Mmhm,” Hollander said, his voice a little dull. When he saw Ilya take a bite of the pizza, he made a face at him and then pointed at the microwave set above the stove. “Right, that’s fair. It’s really okay.”

Hollander’s face said it really wasn’t okay, though that could have been because Ilya had just taken a huge bite of cold pizza in front of him and was chewing it slowly, like a camel. Hollander turned away from him, rolling his eyes, as he listened to whatever he was claiming to feel okay about.

“Right,” he said. Ilya cursed the Bluetooth because he couldn’t hear a word of what the agent was saying. “Yeah, I mean, I get it—I’m the one who—”

The agent cut him off; Ilya inched close enough for better eavesdropping and to peep at Hollander’s face, his tightened lips. “Yeah,” he said, dull again. “I know. You know I agree. I just—it still seems crazy, you know?”

Ilya chomped on pizza and wondered what was crazy. Montreal’s first offer? That it took three days to match the offer sheet? That Boston had made any offer at all? There were a lot of crazy things at play here; somehow, Ilya being in Hollander’s kitchen no longer seemed like the craziest when he thought about all that.

Hollander closed his eyes and stopped working on his fancy hand-cranked coffee project to pinch the bridge of his nose. Ilya thought about taking over for him but had absolutely no idea how to operate any of the appliances Hollander had out except maybe the kitchen scale, which he’d never used to measure food. He had a plaintive thought that he missed Dunks and wondered how far they were from the nearest Tim Hortons; an Iced Capp straight to the dome wouldn’t be unwelcome right now.

“I haven’t, uh, I haven’t talked to her since I left Ottawa,” Hollander said, frowning hard. “I’m sorry she—she shouldn’t be bothering you. Next time we talk, I’ll remind her about professional boundaries—no, Farah, it’s not all right, we’ve had to talk about this before. I’m an adult and this is your job, not hers.”

Ilya had no idea who he could be talking about until he remembered that Hollander had said he’d had a fight with his mother. He tried to tamp down on his instinctive annoyance, the little bit of judgement that always bubbled up when he heard about things like that. People were allowed to fight with their mothers, Ilya reminded himself, even if Ilya couldn’t fight with his anymore.

“I know,” Hollander was saying. He went back to the coffee process and pulled the plunger up, which Ilya thought meant it was done. He grabbed two mugs from hooks on the wall—one of them had a terrifying, red-eyed bird on it that Ilya hated on sight, and the other had a moose; he took the moose—and tried to grab the pitcher to pour. But Hollander waved him off and shook his head, then pointed to his watch—wait.

He waited, though the smell of the coffee was making his mouth water. Hollander listened to his agent for a minute, then said, “Yeah, um, thanks for checking in, and I guess just let me know if anything changes.”

That sounded promising; Ilya felt cheered right up. Montreal hadn’t matched yet if things could still change. There was still a chance—slim, the barest hint of a possibility—that they wouldn’t, and Hollander could show Ilya how to make coffee like a homesteader in his Boston kitchen.

“Yeah, I—I just wanted to know—” Hollander cast a nervous look at Ilya, then lowered his voice a little. Ilya scooted closer to hear. “Is it technically okay if, like, I talked to someone connected to Boston? Not management, but someone more, ah, like on the team? Or who just knows someone on the team?” Hollander asked. He looked away pointedly from Ilya’s curious frown.

Farah responded, probably to ask Hollander what the fuck he was talking about. Ilya looked forward to the answer.

It came in the next moment, Hollander still stumbling slightly. “It’s just—would something like that be considered tampering?”

Ilya rolled his eyes. He reached for the coffee pitcher again, because surely—but Hollander batted his hand off with a glare. Not done he mouthed while Farah probably delivered the verbal equivalent of an eye roll.

“Right, I guess it’s—so, um, my billet sister from junior, Kiley—”

“Katie,” Ilya whispered, pressing down on a snort of laughter. Hollander just glared at him, put his finger to his lips.

“—she’s dating Cliff Marleau, you know, who’s on the Raiders—”

“They are broken up now,” Ilya said helpfully. Hollander glared harder and started to move away, then jerked back to put himself between the coffee and Ilya when Ilya went for it again.

“—yeah, she reached out, and I just wanted to make sure that talking to her is okay—or, you know, maybe Marleau, at some point—”

Hollander broke off for his agent to presumably tell him that talking to players on a team he’d signed an offer sheet for was not tampering; it wasn’t like they could convince him to sign the offer sheet again. Not even doing hand stuff, blowing each other, or fucking Hollander’s thighs could be considered tampering. They were totally fine here. Hollander nodded, accepting that confirmation with actual relief; his shoulders slumped and he said, “Okay, that’s good. Thanks, Farah.”

Ilya hated how endearing he was, he really did, especially while he was keeping the coffee in jail. He withstood the Canadian length of a polite goodbye like a saint, waited until Hollander finally hung up and took off his Bluetooth piece with a loud sigh, and said, “Kiley?”

“Shut up,” Hollander said immediately.

“You think her name is Kiley Riley?”

“Leave me alone, oh my god. I’m not good with names!”

“Who has that name, Hollander? You think her parents are this cruel? Even her father—”

“Brian,” Hollander said, and Ilya barked out a laugh, high and bright; he hadn’t even meant to do that one. “Shut up!” Hollander said again, his face going beet-red. “It’s not funny! Stop it!”

Ilya couldn’t stop it for a bit, especially since Hollander gave him little incentive: his face looked increasingly more like the face of an angry kitten, grumpy and pinched and hissy. It was so fucking cute. He calmed himself down enough to say, “I will stop if you give coffee,” and Hollander let out an actual, almost-hiss, which was enough to set him off again.

“It’s not done yet,” Hollander said; his voice shook a little, like he was trying not to laugh, which was really Ilya’s ultimate goal here. It helped him calm down again. Hollander checked his watch and said, fussily, “Just a minute more; it needs time to settle, and then I have to scoop the bits off the top—”

“Hollander, this is terrible,” Ilya said with a groan. “When’s your birthday?” Like he didn’t know from Katie. “I will buy you real coffeemaker, machine does this all for you—”

“I have like, five, don’t do that,” Hollander said, and he opened a cabinet that seemed to contain the entire stock of Breville’s coffee-making line. Ilya cursed at the same espresso machine he never used in his apartment. “I like doing it this way, okay. This is going to be the best coffee you’ve ever tasted, just trust me.”

Unfortunately, it was indeed the best coffee Ilya had ever tasted, and it was difficult to keep a handle on this fact as Hollander babbled about high quality, fair trade beans, his state-of-the-art grinder, pH levels and humidity and all sorts of stuff Ilya could barely follow but listened to devoutly because, well. Hollander was lit up and animated in a way he only was when Ilya was getting a rise out of him in and out of bed.

“I’m sorry there’s no milk or cream,” he told Ilya for the third time. Ilya just shrugged, stirring in a tiny bit more raw sugar—Ilya thought sugar was always raw, but what did he know compared to the fucking mad coffee scientist of Montreal?—and taking another sip. He closed his eyes and barely, just barely, avoided moaning.

When he opened his eyes, Hollander had such a beautiful smile on his face that Ilya’s knees nearly buckled. He had to blink a few times and then force on a scowl when Hollander said, “You really like it.”

“Is okay,” Ilya said automatically. He sipped more, fingers tight around the handle of his moose mug. “Could use some cream and is too much work, but—”

“But it’s delicious,” Hollander said, like it was decided, and of course it was. He took his own sip, shutting his eyes as well and sighing out. Ilya wanted to know if he drank it black only because there was no milk or cream or if he was a purist; it was probably the second thing, but he really wanted to know.

They stood there for a little while, drinking their coffee in the morning sunlight. The back windows looked out on a small porch and a large, fenced in garden full of flowers, shrubs and—when Ilya strained to look while trying not to be obvious—a little patch of tomatoes. He wanted to ask about them so badly, and was just fitting the English together to sound the least amount of concerned about it, when Hollander set his horrifying vampire bird mug down and said, “Okay, I have bad news.”

That sent a jolt through Ilya, and he wondered how he’d completely misheard that phone call. “Montreal match already?”

“What? No, they’re still—wait. You think that would be bad news?” Hollander looked equal parts baffled and gleeful. He was red again, which Ilya could barely appreciate over his own embarrassment.

“Well, I hear you are okay hockey player—guy from TSN says so, so—”

“You really want me to come to Boston?” Hollander asked. His voice was high and airy with legitimate wonder, which was somewhat reassuring; maybe Ilya wasn’t as fucking obvious as he thought he was.

“You sign offer sheet; you want to come to Boston too,” Ilya said, tossing it back at him. “I am just here for emotional support. Dick support, also.”

“Stop it, don’t say—ugh. You’re such a clown.” Hollander took another drink of his coffee and shook his head. “No, that’s not—the bad news is that I think we have to go to the grocery store. I can’t keep eating like this.” He gestured at the pizza crusts and pulled a disgusted face.

Ilya let a dramatic silence follow that proclamation, and then started filling it with, “Oh no, is tragedy. Terrible, terrible, Hollander, what will we do about this?”

“Shut up. It’s annoying, but—Marie-Louise, my housekeeper, is on vacation for the next few weeks because, you know, I’m not supposed to be here, so we only have the cleaner coming, and she never really does the grocery shopping and I don’t want to ask her because it’s technically not her job and that would be messed up—”

“Hollander, relax. We are not going to war, yes? Just to grocery store. Is okay.”

“I might get recognized,” Hollander said, a little miserable. Ilya didn’t really want to accept that.

“So? This never happened to you before?”

“Not after I signed an offer sheet with a rival fucking team, no.”

“Ah. You think they will throw tomatoes at you?”

“I mean, maybe?” Hollander said, looking down at his coffee. He sounded like he genuinely believed it could happen, which made Ilya a little angry at the Montreal Metros. It also made him want to laugh; both of these were feelings he had to tamp down on.

“Relax; it is Deslauriers that everyone wants to throw tomatoes. Everyone says he is idiot, angry at him—I think they are angrier every day Montreal does not match. Maybe, yes, one fan or two is crazy and think is your fault, but no, the fans love you—I will be in more danger from tomatoes, I think.”

Hollander pressed his lips into a little smile at that. “I think I would pay money to see people throw tomatoes at Deslauriers. Or at you, actually.”

Ilya gasped in fake offense. “Rude! I can take my dick support and go, you know.”

“You can,” Hollander agreed, but he shook his head. “You won’t, though. You came all this way.” Ilya relished the little bit of confidence he could hear there, the teasing lilt—Hollander didn’t always find his footing in this little dynamic between them, and it was always the best when he did. Ilya lived for those moments of him flirting back, even when he didn’t realize that was what he was doing.

“Well, I will leave if you starve me to death, so—let’s go to grocery store,” Ilya said, as if he wouldn’t be perfectly and insistently happy to live on takeout for the rest of his time here, however long that was. He didn’t have a plan for that, exactly. He was trying to avoid thinking of one.

“All right,” Hollander said. He seemed cheerier, which made Ilya proud. “Let me put out some food and change, and then we can walk up to Provigo, it’s just up a few streets on the avenue.”

“Put out food? I thought we didn’t have food?”

“We don’t, I mean—just come on.”

Hollander waved him out onto the little back porch, where there was a short, covered garbage can with a scooper hanging on the side of it. Next to that was a little cabinet set, which contained a number of ceramic bowls and cans that Ilya couldn’t get close enough to identify before Hollander had grabbed one along with two bowls and then shut the cabinet. He opened the garbage can, hummed and said, “Hm, we’re pretty low, remind me to grab some at the store; this stuff is good for snacking,” and then scooped up some pellets to drop into one of the ceramic bowls.

It was cat food, Ilya realized with slow-dawning delight. He watched as Hollander stepped into well-worn slides and led the way down the stairs into the garden. Tucked up beneath the porch was what could only be described as a cat castle, a multi-story shelter with plush platforms and a wire running behind it to an extension cord that led into the basement, suggesting it was heated. Of course it was heated.

Hollander set the bowls down on a rubber mat to the left of the lower entrance to the castle, where there was already a stainless-steel water fountain burbling away. Hollander checked the water level and refilled it with a nearby hose, then told Ilya, who was watching all of this like it was his favorite ever TV show, “Don’t worry, the fountain has a filter.”

“Thank god,” Ilya said, clutching his chest. “I was so worried.”

“Shut up.”

“Where is king of this castle, hm? You did not tell me you had a cat. Why does he live outside?”

“It’s a queen of the castle,” Hollander told him with a sniff, crouching down in front of the mat. “And you’ll meet her in a sec, I’m sure—my aunt told me she’s feral, so she can’t live inside, but we all kind of take care of her in the neighborhood. She can’t resist this stuff, though,” Hollander said, waving the can of food at him.

Ilya was absolutely certain that no one was taking care of this cat quite like Hollander, but he bit down on that assumption because he felt like he might explode from it. Hollander opened the can, listened for something, and grinned; no sooner had he started dumping the contents of the can into the empty ceramic bowl than a black cat darted in from seemingly nowhere, startlingly fast for her size—she was, Ilya noted with another suppressed wave of glee, perfectly fat.

“There you are,” Hollander said as the cat ran up to him and began rubbing herself against his crouched legs. Hollander rubbed her back, stroking down her clean, shiny coat. She wore no collar and she had a chunk missing from her left ear, but her eyes were clear and every other bit of her looked like no street cat Ilya had ever seen. She looked like a spoiled housecat, pampered and adored, and as Hollander gave her vigorous scratches and pets, it occurred to Ilya that that’s exactly what she was in all but residence.

“This is Blackberry,” Hollander told Ilya with a smile, scratching behind her ears. “She’s pretty chill for a feral cat, just don’t try to get between her and the food. She loves salmon.” To demonstrate, Blackberry leaned down to start eating the wet food, though she paused and gave Hollander a warning look when he stopped petting her.

“Blackberry,” Ilya repeated. “Like the phone?”

“No, like the berry—my aunt named her, okay? There’s no way she knows what a Blackberry phone is. I think it suits her, though.”

“Shane,” Ilya said, and it was startling for them both—Ilya almost wanted to take it back, correct himself, but as he watched this strange, beautiful man who played the best hockey Ilya had ever seen and moaned like a porn star in bed petting the supposedly feral cat he treated like royalty, he really couldn’t help it. This was Shane, something in his brain and heart told him, no matter how he tried to resist it. He couldn’t be anyone else; the ice felt so far away here.

“Ilya?” Shane asked, tilting his head to the side. His hair seemed like the same color and texture of Blackberry’s fur. Ilya thought he might be going into cardiac arrest for a moment and he had to thump his chest once to right himself.

In the end it was only love, he realized, which was probably worse.

“This is not feral cat. Feral means something different in English? Not, ah—” He tried the Russian word for feral that he knew, which only earned him a few blinks and a frown.

“Feral means, um, like wild? Dangerous? They’re supposed to live outside,” Shane said, gesturing towards Blackberry. She paused in wolfing down salmon pate to bonk her head into Shane’s palm, demanding more pets and proving Ilya’s point.

“Yes, is same—but this is not her. Blackberry is not feral. She is your cat.”

“No, my aunt said—”

“Shane, she is fat,” Ilya said, pointing. “She has, hm, chip? Like Katie get for her dog? So you can find her?”

Shane was tellingly silent for a moment, before nodding. “Yeah. Just so if she ever gets hurt or needs help somewhere, people know to contact me for her! That doesn’t make her mine, though. She’s not a housecat.”

“Has she ever tried to run into house?” Ilya asked, though he already knew the answer. Shane’s silence confirmed. “Yes, is what I thought.”

“But my aunt said—”

“She is in Florida, she doesn’t know—and is your house, you said.” He thought of something else and decided to go in for the kill, for Blackberry’s sake. “And you said you will move—will you bring her with you?”

As Ilya had expected, Shane’s entire face dropped. It was fairly devastating, actually; his big, sad eyes made Ilya want to drop to his knees and ask for a job carrying the cat around on a cushion, following Shane wherever he went.

“I—but she’s not supposed to—”

“Shane,” Ilya said. He crouched down next to Shane and Blackberry, who had finished her salmon feast and was now pressed up against Shane’s shins, giving herself a thorough bath and licking her lips. She gave Ilya a slightly wary look when he reached a hand out, but he was patient and let her take a few sniffs. Then she licked him, like she’d decided he needed to get in on this bath, too. Within seconds Blackberry was bonking against his palm and—to Ilya’s utter joy—actually purring between them.

Ilya didn’t add anything to that sentence. He just looked at Shane, who was looking between them, biting his bottom lip. He narrowed his eyes as Ilya gave Blackberry some hard pets, cooing at her in Russian, before he sighed and slumped a little.

“Okay. Maybe you’re right. I’ll order some stuff tonight and we’ll see how she likes being inside tomorrow. Marie-Louise puts out food when I’m not here, anyway, so she probably won’t mind. Maybe I can get a catflap for the back door, you know, in case she wants to be outside still.” Shane still looked uncertain, but he was smiling, too, bright enough that Ilya took the victory as-is instead of repeating Svetlana’s rant against outdoor cats, which she’d delivered after being accused of stealing her neighbor’s cat, Pringle, and needing Ilya to smooth things over.

They gave Blackberry a few more pets, then left her to curl up in her castle—she was nearly too large to fit in the lower entrance, so Ilya made a mental note to remind Shane to go bigger on her indoor cat furniture.

“I can’t believe this,” Shane said as they headed up to his bedroom to change to go out. Ilya grabbed his phone, too, fully charged for the first time in months thanks to Shane, but ignored it to peek at Shane changing out of sleep sweats and into errand sweats. “You’re here for a single day and I’ve eaten pizza for two meals, including breakfast, and adopted a cat.”

“I think cat adopted you,” Ilya said, fixing his face into a mask of innocence. “Is not my fault.”

“It’s absolutely your fault! I never even thought—do I have time for a cat?”

“Do you have time to feed her and get her fancy water fountain—with filter—and buy her cat castle—”

“It’s a condo, Rozanov, not a castle.”

“Ilya,” Ilya corrected. The embarrassment hit again, enough that he was no longer as tempted to look at Shane as he had been, but when he dared to peek, Shane just looked a little confused, eyebrows drawn, non-sleep t-shirt in his hands. Ilya waited in such anticipation that he didn’t even ogle Shane’s tits that much, even if the hunch of Shane’s shoulders made them look all pushed together and squeezable.

“Ilya,” Shane repeated thoughtfully. “So, we’re doing that now? Pizza, a cat, first names?”

“Yes,” Ilya said, trying very hard to sound sure of himself. “I think yes. We have pizza, we have sleepover, we have Amish coffee, we have cat—I think we are friends now, so we use first names.”

“Friends,” Shane said, but not doubtful enough to dash Ilya’s hopes. “I guess so. Hayden and I use first names so—that tracks. But if we—I mean, if Montreal doesn’t match—”

“Then you are Hollzy in the room,” Ilya said, putting on his best Canadian accent for the nickname and making a face to go with it. Shane immediately threw his shirt over his face and started tugging it on, so Ilya knew he was hiding a smile. “And I am Roz. Or Captain. But when I fuck you—”

“That’s not happening!”

“—you are Shane. I am Ilya. Or Captain,” he repeated with a smirk and a wink, getting the scowl he wanted from Shane once his head poked through the neck of his shirt. “Or da—”

“No!” Shane shouted, rushing over to shove Ilya. Ilya cracked out a laugh, stumbling in his own going out sweats, and they batted at each other until Ilya grabbed Shane’s hands and held his wrists together, preening when Shane couldn’t break the hold right away.

“I will let you go if you will call me—” Shane broke the hold right then, of course, and put Ilya on his ass, but they were both laughing so hard that Shane joined him on the floor soon enough.

“Just for that,” Shane said, a little breathless. “You’re wearing the wig to Provigo.”

“Ah yes. My disguise. I will do this. We can take my horrible rental car, too, for best disguise. It is—” Ilya paused and shuddered for dramatic effect. “—a Kia.”

Shane did not appear suitably appalled; he gave Ilya’s head a hard pat, stood up, and even helped him to his feet, too. “I don’t see what’s so horrible about that—but it doesn’t matter,” he added hastily. “Provigo is a quick walk away. No need for a car.”

He led him downstairs, leaving no room for argument. Ilya saluted at his back and marched after him dutifully.

Ilya grabbed the wig, fit it on, and then followed Shane into the mudroom, where Shane grabbed a bottle of bug spray off the little table in there and spritzed all of his visible skin. “Here,” he said, holding it out to Ilya.

Ilya waved it off as he put on his shoes. “I don’t need this.”

“Uh, yeah you do. It’s mosquito season and those fuckers are no joke around here.”

“Is middle of the day in middle of a city, Shane. And mosquitoes do not bite Russians, they know not to do this.”

Shane’s eyes danced with amusement, but he put the spray back down. It smelled astringent and chemical, covering the scent of Shane’s fancy teakwood soap, and Ilya didn’t like it.

“All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though,” Shane told him as he turned to shoving folded reusable bags in his pockets. He sounded delighted by the thought of eventually saying ‘I told you so’, and Ilya swore then and there to never reveal any mosquito bites, which he wasn’t going to get anyway.

And then they were off, walking up Shane’s sun-dappled street. It was cool and breezy for summer, with a hint of humidity in the air that promised rain later on, but for now the sun shone through sparse clouds and warmed Ilya’s face. That surreality sank in, just a little bit—he was walking with Shane in the daytime, side-by-side, like any normal set of friends or—god forbid—a couple. It was so strange. The strangest thing wasn’t even wearing a clown wig, though it was gratifying to know that that was probably what was getting second looks and not the fact of the two of them walking together.

Shane had seemed to decide that, too, because he didn’t seem as jumpy as he had been at All-Stars. He looked around a few times on his street, and Ilya could imagine his eyes shifty and paranoid behind his sunglasses, but he relaxed once he didn’t see any neighbors around and proceeded on what was a nice walk to the grocery store.

Ilya had never been to any grocery stores in Montreal—he was more of a Pharmaprix guy when he was on the road here, because the name change made him laugh at Quebec and they had a better variety of condoms than Jean Coutu—but Provigo reminded him a little of Trader Joe’s. When he said so to Shane, he shook his head as he secured them a cart.

“No, that’s more like Loblaw’s.”

“You have been to Trader Joe’s?” Ilya asked, though in that moment he could very well picture Shane losing his mind in there over fair-trade beans, getting flirted with to an inch of his life by the overly friendly cashiers and never picking up on it. He stomped down an irrational flare of jealousy at the thought.

“Once, when we were in Michigan for a game in junior,” Shane said. “My dad really wanted the tote.”

Ilya snorted. “Of course he did.” He was also relieved; junior meant teenage Shane, who probably wasn’t hit on by one of those shameless flirts, and not with his parents there. Probably. Still, he vowed to always accompany Shane to any Boston TJ’s, just in case someone got daring enough and Shane realized the love of his life worked ringing up dark chocolate peanut butter cups and frozen chicken tikka masala.

“Shut up. It was fine—small, though, and everyone was so—pushy.” Shane frowned in disapproval. Ilya grinned, his imagination shifting; he could easily picture Shane white-knuckling one of those little carts and gritting out a stubborn “Sorry,” every time someone bumped him in one of the tiny aisles or elbowed him out of the way to get at the last plumcots.

“Yes, is Americans—you weak Canadians don’t understand, it’s eat or we eat you in Trader Joe’s. For tough guys.”

“To buy groceries? Come on. There’s no reason to push people.” As if to show off, Shane waited patiently as an elderly woman slowly perused a pile of peaches, checking for ripeness, then scooted in once she moved on and began attacking the same pile.

“Reason is if they are slow,” Ilya said, and when Shane took far too long checking the peaches, he pushed him, of course.

“Fuck off,” Shane said, not even looking up to elbow Ilya back.

Shane proceeded to spend what felt like 30 years inspecting every kind of produce in the store and loading it all into the cart. “We are two people,” Ilya said as Shane piled more carrots than all the rabbits in Quebec could eat into his mountain of fruits and vegetables.

“No, these are mostly for the juicer,” Shane said. He added a dozen oranges, limes, and lemons, and Ilya wondered if they were preparing for a month at sea, but he couldn’t remember the word for scurvy in English, so he kept the joke to himself.

“Juicer? Like—” Ilya lowered his voice to a mock whisper. “—drugs? These fruits are your PEDs? Of course, and now I know secret. Is just like Space Jam.”

“No,” Shane hissed, looking around like the head of the IOC might be one aisle over. “Juicer like juice. Fruit and vegetable juices! I make them in a machine.”

“Like the coffee? Ugh, Shane, you know you can just buy juice in bottle—look! Right over there!” He pointed to an array of fruit juices on a refrigerated shelf. “See, they have cran-apple, cran-grape, cran-pear, every kind of cran. You are in luck.”

“No thank you. It’s more fun in the juicer. Thanks for reminding me to grab cranberries, though.” Shane thus added cranberries to the cart. Ilya, in a fit of defiance, added blackberries, “So we can drink your cat.”

“Don’t be gross, Ilya,” Shane said, almost absentmindedly. It sent a jolt of joy through Ilya, not unlike Iced Capp-induced euphoria.

They finally moved on from the produce section just as Ilya was wondering how they were going to fit anything else in the cart. There was a brief holdup in the bakery aisle, when they bickered about whole wheat bread (Shane) versus any other kind (Ilya) until Ilya was distracted by a cardboard display of hot dog buns that read Provigo Metros Go! and had Shane’s face on it. “Look,” he said, pointing at Shane’s serious little freckled face, like he was staring down any prospective hot dog bun buyers over the faceoff dot. “You endorse buns for hot dog and they are not whole wheat! Hypocrite!”

“I don’t—I didn’t know what they were going to put on the display! They change it all the time! It’s not an endorsement!” Shane’s voice grew progressively more shouty, and Ilya sniggered as his volume drew the attention of grocery stocker, who cleared his throat. “Sorry,” Shane said, horrified, and his horror only grew when the stocker looked between him and the bun display a few times, and then went pale.

“Oh, my god, you’re—”

“Sorry again!” Shane all but shouted. He grabbed two loaves of bread—whole wheat and, to Ilya’s triumph, rye—threw them in the cart, and started powerwalking with it out of the aisle. Ilya tipped his clown wig at the worker and wandered after him.

They made their way through the store like this, stopping to squabble and inspect things. Ilya loaded the bottom tray of the cart with cans of Coke and ginger ale, then complained when Shane added more chicken breasts than Ilya thought there were chickens on Earth into the cart.

“How we will carry all this back?” Ilya asked.

“You think the chicken will be too heavy? Not all the pop down there? And you were talking about weak Canadians—clearly the Russians are weak if they can’t carry a few grocery bags down two streets.”

“Russians are not weak! You will see, I will carry all the bags—and faster than you,” Ilya said, happy as always to knowingly take Shane’s bait.

“Nope, not happening—I’ll carry all the bags, and I’ll totally beat you home.” And if Ilya needed a minute to imagine them both calling the bird townhouse home, well, Shane got distracted loading up on plain Greek yogurt anyway.

Of course, the challenge meant they first wrestled a bit trying to grab more bags than the other, and then ran out of the store like they’d robbed it. They almost got stuck trying to get through the automatic doors too early; Shane pushed Ilya with his bag of weaponized carrots and freed himself to take off first, ignoring Ilya calling him a dirty rotten cheat in Russian.

Then it was a race down from the avenue, laughing and shouting at each other as they kept pace, changed positions, and kicked and shoved when they could. Ilya had the thought that this was a terrible way to stay discreet and under-the-radar, but nobody actually stopped them or seemed to recognize Shane, so maybe it wasn’t. He was impressed that the wig stayed on.

The race kept on until Shane said, “Wait, do you have the eggs?” and Ilya realized that it was completely possible that the eggs were in one of his bags and were probably smashed right now. He paused, halfway down Shane’s street, and Shane made as if to stop, too—and then he took off faster, calling, “Ha! I’ve got them cushioned with the bread!”

It ended in a Shane win, and no amount of complaining or yelling would get Shane to admit to a dirty win. “They don’t ask how, they ask how many,” Shane told him, beaming, completely out of breath. His arms flexed with all the bags in his hands and his shirt stuck to his chest a little bit with sweat. Ilya wanted to lick him.

Ilya refrained, like a saint. Instead he started dragging bags into the kitchen, pausing only to roll his eyes very hard and toe off his sneakers when Shane said, “Hey, shoes!” He left them in a trail in the hallway and grinned when he could hear Shane grumbling and kicking them out of his way.

In the kitchen, they spread the bags out and assessed the damage. “Okay,” Shane said, his hands on his hips. “Maybe we bought too much.”

“No, is not true,” Ilya said. “We have whole army to feed here, they are camped out in garden like is siege of Leningrad. This is good.”

“Fuck off. I don’t grocery shop that much, okay? Marie-Louise usually does it. Sometimes I pop in for something but I’m not good at—” He waved vaguely around himself, the kitchen, and the vast quantity of bags. “—all this.” Ilya took this to mean life, and he nodded gravely. He wasn’t exactly great at life, either.

“Is okay. Better to have too much food than not enough, yes? Don’t worry; me and Blackberry will eat it all,” Ilya told Shane, hefting up the bag of dry food to refill the garbage can. Shane watched him for a moment, a small smile on his face, before he sighed and went back to the groceries.

They unpacked things pretty quickly. More complicated was putting things away; Ilya just guessed, but he wanted to be helpful, and Shane let him put things in the wrong places a few times before he started just following him around and moving things. It wasn’t very efficient, but it led to some laughter, pinching, elbowing. Ilya let Shane get close up behind him and leaned his ass back into his crotch, which was excellent; he could feel Shane’s face get warm against the back of his neck. He reached up on his tiptoes to put away cereal in a high cabinet Shane pointed him to, and felt Shane’s eyes hot on the spot where his t-shirt rode up. Ilya preened, strutted, showed off by hefting around the heaviest things.

“I like this guy,” he said, holding up a jar of peanut butter with a picture of a teddy bear on it. “Is myshka, little bear. He’s cute. We do not have this bear in Boston.”

“His name is Smoothy,” Shane said, smiling at the jar. “His—brother? Business partner?—is named Crunchy. I had a stuffy that looked like him when I was a kid. My parents probably still have it in Ottawa, actually.”

“You must bring him to Boston,” Ilya said immediately. He saw Shane’s face twist and added, “If you come to be on team, or just for next game. Either way I want to see this Crunchy.”

“Sure,” Shane told him with a chuckle. He looked a little more relaxed. “I’ll ask my, um, my mom.”

Another landmine; Ilya wondered if Shane was having trouble ever imagining talking to his mother again. It couldn’t have been that bad a fight, could it? There was that annoying part of him that wanted to ask, needle him about it. It was the dead mother instinct more than anything, Ilya was sure; he was equally sure Shane would just tell him to fuck off.

He was thinking about saying something anyway when Shane said, “Nuts!”

“We put them away already,” Ilya said, pointing at the pantry, where there now lived a squirrel’s dream hoard.

“No, I forgot—ugh. You’re going to laugh,” Shane muttered.

Ilya grinned. “Yes, probably. What did you forgot?”

Shane pouted in such a devastating way that it was almost difficult to laugh. “I forgot to pick up more, um, lube. The bottle upstairs is a little low.”

Now that was no laughing matter. Ilya put down the boxes of whole grain pasta he was arranging and stood at attention. “I will go,” he declared. “Where is nearest Pharmaprix? I will take the terrible Kia if I must.”

“There’s one on Monkland, it’s walkable, but Jean Coutu is closer,” Shane said.

“Pharmaprix is better.”

“Why do you have opinions on the superior Quebec pharmacy chains?” Shane asked, looking genuinely baffled. Ilya just raised his eyebrows and smirked until, slowly, Shane got it. “Oh, fuck you, forget I asked. Yeah, go where you want.”

“Condoms, too?” Ilya asked, even though he had packed plenty of condoms. He just wanted Shane to blush.

Shane delivered. “No, we don’t need those.”

“Ah. You have already stocked up?”

“No, I—just go already! And wear the fucking clown wig!”

“Of course,” Ilya said, picking up the wig like it was a battle helm. He turned to go and paused when Shane cleared his throat.

“Just—here,” Shane said, and he picked up the keys he’d tossed on the counter when they ran in and tossed them to Ilya this time. Ilya caught them, his heart pounding a little. “You can let yourself back in so you don’t have to spam the bell again.”

“Yes, good, I will do this,” Ilya said. “After I make 50 copies.”

“No, you won’t.”

“You’re right, 50 copies won’t be enough. I need to make them for everyone in Boston—”

“Ilya!” Shane yelled. Ilya cackled and let the joy of his first name on Shane’s lips usher him back out into the sunshine.

He wasn’t upset about being outside again. Shane’s neighborhood, now that he took a moment to look around at it without Shane calling all his attention, was really nice, and though it had seemed incongruous with what he knew of most young hockey players, Ilya decided it fit Shane, like the bird townhouse did. There were trees and shops along the main avenue, a Second Cup and a Starbucks across the street from each other—Café Starbucks made him chuckle a bit—and a tea shop that smelled incredible when Ilya passed it. There were restaurants, an ice cream shop, and the bagel chain that Ilya’s French teammates always swore was the best one. He stopped and bought six all-dressed without really thinking much of it, cramming one bare and fresh in his mouth as he walked and leaving the rest in the paper bag. It was good.

Ilya wandered by an SAQ and couldn’t pass that by, either; he strongly suspected that Shane had no alcohol in the house besides that one Pike baby beer, which couldn’t stand. He bought the best vodka they had, still sneering at it, and resolved to introduce Shane to a Moscow Mule subbed with ginger ale.

He passed the Jean Coutu, sneering at that, too, and then finally reached the Pharmaprix. Ilya hefted his vodka and bagels to rub his hands together eagerly. He loved Canadian pharmacies; in Moscow people would almost confuse them for department stores because they had so much extra junk besides drugs. Ilya, of course, loved junk. On the way to the lube alone he found a little hand fan with a bear on it, not as cute as the peanut butter bears but still excellent, and then a beach towel with a sun that had flexing biceps and sunglasses on. Sun’s out, guns out! said the sun’s speech bubble. Ilya flung it over his shoulder without a second thought.

Then he found the biggest bottle of lube they had available and grabbed that, more of a tub, grunting exaggeratedly when he lifted it because there was a passing older lady side-eyeing him about it. Under her judgmental gaze, he also grabbed a huge box of condoms and winked at her. The lady huffed and speed-walked out of the aisle.

He had to buy a bag at the checkout counter, which was only annoying until the lady showed him some of the tote options: there was one with a cherry red sports car on it. Ilya bought it immediately and put all of his shopping in it. He swung it happily on the walk back and imagined himself walking a dog up the avenue like this, sent out on errands for Shane, maybe not having to wear a clown wig. He’d stop at the bank, maybe at the bakery and pick up surprise pastries. Shane would grumble about them but he’d let Ilya feed him a—what was his favorite pastry?

The question stopped the fantasy, which was good because it was fucking stupid anyway. They were 22 years old, Ilya told himself sternly. They were young, hot, rich and single. These weren’t the types of fantasies he should be having.

And he let himself into Shane’s house with the key Shane gave him; he called, “Shane, I’m home!” as he toed off his shoes. He watched Shane come out of the kitchen, where all the groceries had been put away, and he was wiping his hands on a kitchen towel because, “I just washed all the fruit! What kind of juice do you want to try first?”

“Beet juice,” Ilya said, because he knew Shane hadn’t gotten beets; he didn’t like how they looked at Provigo.

Shane ignored him and grabbed the Pharmaprix tote to look into it. “Okay, good lube choice—”

“Yes, I know what lube you like.”

“—and I said we don’t need condoms—”

“Is always good to be prepared.”

“—oh cool, bagels! The sesame ones are better but these will be good for lunch, we can make sandwiches.” And Shane smiled at him, a smile that said Ilya had done a good job with the errands. He led Ilya into the kitchen to make sandwiches for lunch.

Sesame, Ilya noted to remember. He decided the fantasy wasn’t all that terrible.

Chapter 5: Day Four

Day Four – 8 July, 2013

Ilya’s dream that night kept the fantasy going. He came home from errands and Shane kissed him in greeting in the bird townhouse. They went into another room and they were in Ilya’s Boston apartment, his big open kitchen; he lifted Shane up onto the marble island and kissed him there, too, then cooked them a meal from a fridge stuffed full of groceries. They served the meal back in the bird townhouse’s dining room, eating on the lace runner, sitting on the same side of the table. They ate one-handed so they could hold hands, which even dream Ilya found disgusting. Dream Shane agreed, and yet they kept it up. Then they went out into the garden, but it wasn’t the townhouse garden; it was a big, expansive backyard, and Ilya knew it was Brookline. Blackberry lounged in a catio that was built to look like a castle; dream Ilya knew he’d helped Shane build it. In the distance, Ilya heard a dog barking, and he peered out eagerly, looking for it.

He woke up before he saw the dog.

It was still early, too early even for Shane. Ilya looked at him sleeping next to him and smirked a little to think of how he’d tired him out last night; he’d fucked Shane’s mouth, the most aggressively he’d ever dared before, and Shane fucking loved it. He came without Ilya touching him, which also happened to be the hottest thing Ilya had ever seen, and meant Shane deserved at least one more orgasm, so he’d set about making that happen and it had been a late night.

The smirk slowly turned into a smile the longer Ilya watched Shane, snoring softly in the very pale morning. He was curled on his side, one arm under one of his pillows, his knee tucked against Ilya’s hip under the covers. It was chilly last night—Shane predicted it was going to rain soon and Ilya accused him of being a weather guy; did he have a trick knee? Did he lick his finger and check the wind? Ilya licked his finger for him, just in case, while Shane giggled and shoved at him—and so Shane had sighed and pulled the granny quilt over them, telling Ilya to shut the fuck up. Ilya snuggled in and shut the fuck up, mostly.

Shane’s face was still but for the gentle flare of his nostrils—Ilya was so happy he snored—and his eyelashes twitching and fluttering. Ilya wondered what he was dreaming about. They’d spent the rest of yesterday eating through their groceries, working out in Shane’s basement gym, sitting on a plaid loveseat in the little glass sunroom on Shane’s second floor and ordering things for Blackberry on his laptop. Ilya got him to try a Moscow Mule, and he liked it with extra lime. Shane got Ilya to try cran-carrot juice, which sounded disgusting and was, but Shane was so excited to show off the juicer that Ilya drank the whole horrible glass.

They filled multiple carts for Blackberry, to the point where Shane wondered how everything was going to fit in this house. “Yes, because you live in birdhouse,” Ilya said; he pointed out the trees surrounding the glass walls of the sunroom, the second pair of gay cardinals on a coffee table.

“It’s not a birdhouse. It’s a normal house!” Shane kicked his thigh; Ilya grabbed his bare foot and held it, squeezed. He knew, by then, that he would live in a birdhouse with Shane, or a shack or a sandcastle or—

“Wait. I’m going to have to take her to Ottawa, too. Do you think she’ll be okay going back and forth?”

“She lives in yard; she will probably walk to Ottawa if you tell her there is food. Oh,” Ilya said, with a realization. “Get her harness and leash and you can walk her around, like dog. This way she gets to be outside still but is safe for her. Good exercise, too, since she is—”

“Stop calling my cat fat,” Shane said. It was so fond, and he’d called her his cat. Ilya beamed at him, then started laughing as Shane Googled do people walk their cats like a dog?

“I see this in Boston all the time,” Ilya told him, only exaggerating a little. “We can take her to the Garden—”

“Like the arena?” Shane, of course, looked excited about that. Ilya rolled his eyes.

“No, the Public Garden. Dogs have to stay on leash there so is safe for her. There are evil ducks—I have enemy, but don’t worry, I will protect Blackberry from her.”

“You have an enemy who is a duck?” And Ilya explained about the attack, and how bravely he’d fought, while Shane tossed his head back and kicked his feet against Ilya’s leg and laughed.

Ilya closed his eyes and concentrated on the place on his hip where Shane’s bare knee touched him. He wanted to live in both moments at once, both points of contact, Shane so relaxed next to him—safe. He’d known they worked in bed, knew he could tease out that spark of attraction that Shane had been determined to deny them, but he didn’t know, for sure, that it could be like this too. It was something of a revelation that Ilya was capable of this. It was a good surprise.

He refused to move off his back and wake Shane, but he couldn’t help reaching up with one hand to scratch at his other forearm, where no less than five fucking mosquito bites had taken up residence. Ilya was furious about it, but he was determined not to complain, or even acknowledge their existence where Shane could—

“Are you scratching?” Shane, the absolute psychopath, sighed out next to him, half asleep.

“No,” Ilya said, way too loud, then added, “Shh, go back to sleep, is too early.”

“Mm,” Shane said, and Ilya thought he was back asleep, until he said, “If you’re itchy—”

“Shh, no, I am not.”

“—there’s an itch cream in the medicine cabinet—”

“I do not need cream. I have no bites that itch.” Ilya locked his arms together across his chest and over the covers, rigid and insistent.

Shane sighed again, murmured something unintelligible, and shifted a little closer. His knee dug into Ilya’s side. Slowly, gently—Ilya glanced over and Shane’s eyes were barely open; he moved and looked a bit like a sloth—Shane reached out from under the granny quilt and ran his fingertips over Ilya’s nearest arm. The touch was featherlight, searching, a little clumsy—it made goosebumps rise around the mosquito bites, and also made them itchier. Ilya had to grit his teeth against the urge to scratch more.

“Shane,” Ilya said, hushed in the dark. “Stop. You tickle me.”

“M’not,” Shane mumbled, still touching his arm. His fingernails danced over the bites just a little bit, unsatisfying little scrapes, and it was torture. “I can feel them, you know.”

“You feel nothing.”

“S’okay. I won’t say—”

“Is nothing to say!”

“—I told you so.” Shane paused and yawned. “Even though I did.”

“Go back to sleep.” Ilya reached his own hand out then and used it to cover Shane’s eyes, making exaggerated snoring sounds until Shane laughed against his palm and shook him off.

“Okay, okay. Night, Ilya.”

“Night, Shane.”

They were quiet, then. Ilya closed his eyes but still found sleep out of his grasping reach. He thought about Shane’s phone, charging on the bedside station next to Ilya’s. How many hours until his agent woke up? Until the Montreal front office woke up? Maybe they’d been up all night, as they should have been, agonizing over their choice, punishing themselves for making it this fucking complicated. There was nothing complicated about choosing Shane Hollander.

An irrational part of him wanted to check, just in case, for any calls from Farah. He listened for Shane’s breathing to even out. It was soft, but Ilya wouldn’t move until he heard snores. He waited, his own breathing careful.

But instead of snores, he eventually heard Shane whisper, “What kinda juice do you want with breakfast?”

“Shane,” Ilya groaned, scrubbing his hands over his face.

“What? I’m thinking…cran-mango. Tart and sweet, no need to add any more sugar ‘cause of the mango. What d’you think?”

“I think you need to go back to sleep or I will have you for breakfast,” Ilya said. He was joking, but the thought made heat ripple through him anyway.

He felt Shane shift next to him. “Oh?” Shane whispered. His voice was low and interested, god, just that little hint of horniness had the heat in Ilya flaring immediately. His cock had already decided to start thickening in his boxers. Another glance at Shane showed he was having the same thoughts—Ilya had never actually met anyone who could show off an actual boner purely with their eyes, but Shane Hollander could.

“Yes,” Ilya said, looking into those eager eyes. “Oh. So, behave.” He did not want Shane to behave. And by the little smile curling over Shane’s lips, the wakeful brightness in his gaze, he didn’t want to behave either.

Shane let out a big, exaggerated yawn accompanied by a long stretch. Most of it was beneath the covers but Ilya watched anyway, caught on Shane’s languid movements under the quilt, hearing the whisper of his skin against the sheets and feeling the weight of him shift around on the mattress. Ilya reached without thinking, flicking the lamp on hurriedly—he needed to see—and then pulling the quilt down to reveal bare skin, moving it slowly. Shane had time, then, to grab Ilya’s arm in his hands, still blinking sleepily at him, eyes dark and wide.

Then he scratched at Ilya’s arm, hitting most of the bites, and Ilya groaned like he’d been punched. It kind of did feel like his dick was punching him, fattening and straightening up to tent his underwear. Shane’s smile was small and satisfied, impossibly smug like a happy little frog, and so Ilya had no choice but to rip the quilt the rest of the way off and roll over on top of him.

“Oof,” Shane said; he sounded thrilled. “Hi,” he added; he was still scratching Ilya’s arm, light but firm.

“Hi.”

“I’m not going to scratch too much; if the bites scab over, they could scar, and we really should put some—”

Ilya interrupted him with a firm, wet kiss, covering Shane’s mouth entirely with his. He kissed him deeply and consumingly, like his goal truly was to eat Shane, and in that moment he felt like he could, like he could just eat him up right there in bed. Shane met him with his typical eagerness, moaning and shifting into the kiss, never as still as the too-early morning felt around them.

The quilt was kicked all the way down the bed and Ilya decided to follow it, slowly kissing his way down Shane’s body. Shane writhed beneath him, making breathy little moans and answering Ilya’s kisses with every bit of his body.

His nipples pebbled under Ilya’s lips, sweetly offering themselves up for bites that Ilya gladly indulged in. His stomach muscles rippled beneath Ilya’s teeth, danced to meet his tongue. His bellybutton winked open for Ilya to nip at; his neat pubic hair tickled Ilya’s chin and fluttered beneath his breaths. Shane repeated things like “Oh god, fuck, Ilya,” but he barely needed to; his responsiveness was all in his movements, in the insistent ways he kept Ilya’s mouth on him, chasing Ilya even though Ilya was already caught.

Ilya kept going, relishing the punched-out moan of complaint when he bypassed Shane’s straining dick. He paused for only a moment, as if reconsidering—he even licked at the wet spot forming at the front of Shane’s boxer briefs, savoring both the taste and the relieved sigh Shane gave him—but then he moved down again, kissing at Shane’s thighs, running his teeth over the most tender inner spots and nipping at them so Shane had bites, too.

“Fuck,” Shane said, and his hands went down, grasping. Ilya ducked his head like a bull and let Shane grab his hair, but that’s all he allowed—when Shane tried to direct his face back to his dick, Ilya held fast, shook his head in Shane’s grasp, and started tugging down his underwear.

It caught, damp and sticky, at Shane’s dick, and the drag of the fabric made Shane tilt his head back into the pillows and mumble out, “God, please.” Ilya tossed the briefs to the end of the bed a split second before he thought of sucking on them, and if Shane weren’t gripping his hair so tight, he might’ve gone back for them.

Instead, he let Shane guide his head a little, the way he’d guided Shane’s last night. Ilya let his mouth hang open, like Shane’s mouth had, shiny with drool before he’d even put his lips to the tip of Ilya’s dick. Ilya had made him kiss it, first, had smeared his precome around to make Shane’s lips even shinier. He’d waited for Shane to balk, to get too embarrassed, to tell Ilya to fuck off—but he never did. He was so good for Ilya like this, always ready and willing.

His goodness deserved to be rewarded, Ilya knew, and he let Shane’s dick bump into his cheek. Shane strained to see, to put Ilya in the right position, and Ilya didn’t help one bit—he waited until Shane had almost lined up, when he was just in the perfect spot to take him in his mouth—

And then Ilya wrapped Shane’s hips and thighs up in his arms and bent him upward.

His hair pulled from Shane’s fingers with a stinging tug, but it was worth it for the noise Shane made when Ilya spread his cheeks with one hand and licked greedily at his hole. “Oh, fuck,” Shane said, tossing his head back again, his stomach muscles quivering hard.

Ilya hummed in response and licked at him. He’d just had his fingers here only hours earlier in their shower, ostensibly to clean out all the lube he’d used to finger him the first time but really just to get them back inside. He was starting to think that his preferred home was not Boston, Montreal, certainly not Moscow—it was Shane Hollander’s asshole. Ilya let his saliva pool at the entrance, prodded his tongue inside, felt Shane’s heel thud at the back of his shoulder, and thought: home sweet home.

He took to eating Shane out like a man starved, messy and wet and noisy about it. Heat blotted up and down Shane’s thighs, splotched in pink around little red bites, and Ilya could feel it before he pulled back enough to see it. He smacked his lips when he did, loud and obnoxious, and Shane whined and covered his face with his hands, but he didn’t push Ilya away. Rather, he nudged at him with his foot again, urging him on.

Ilya took only another selfish, indulgent moment to look at Shane’s hole, brown and shiny and making slow, small blinks at him as Shane panted a little. Then he got back to it, mouth and tongue working voraciously, spearing Shane deeper and more insistently this time, to ratchet up his moans.

Shane’s hips began to rock, and it took Ilya a glance upwards to realize he wasn’t stroking himself—his dick remained hard and wet against his stomach, positively dripping, but untouched; there was, Ilya realized with delight, some of his precome in Ilya’s own hair—but rather grinding his ass into Ilya’s mouth, his weight on his shoulders, thighs flexing beautifully. Something about the desperate strength in that made Ilya groan and hump at the bed a little, distracted by his own searing arousal.

Not for long, though. Shane kicked him for that and ground harder, demanding in his movements even as he pleaded in his moans: “Fuck, Ilya, come on, please—”

“Please what?” Ilya mumbled against Shane’s hole. His fingers were starting to strain from holding him open, but he got to admire his progress again; it wasn’t quite closing as tight as it had been, back to the openness of last night’s fingerfuck. Ilya was so proud he didn’t care if his fingers cramped forever or if his tongue fell off. He gave Shane’s hole another firm, approving kiss.

He was not expecting Shane to actually beg with any specificity; he never did. His begging was always reduced to fuck’s and vague please’s, Ilya’s name—and now it was Ilya, not Rozanov, so pretty in Shane’s mouth. No one really called him Ilya all too often. He was usually Roz or Rozy or Rozanov or Ilyusha, Ilyukha, or babe; he was Ilya Rozanov most often. Ilya was strange to hear when he first started playing in North America, too formal or too informal depending on who said it, but from Shane, somehow, it was exactly, perfectly right.

So he wasn’t surprised, only distracted and maybe besotted, when Shane only said, “Please, Ilya, just—” and broke off in a moan when Ilya licked a stripe up his crease, tasted his soap and the sweat of his desire.

“What? What do you want?” Ilya teased, because he fucking loved teasing, not because he thought Shane would answer.

But Shane, beautiful Shane, surprised him as always. “Please, just—eat me out,” he said, almost in a whisper. It broke in his mouth a bit, tapered off into a whimper, and yet Ilya felt as if he’d shouted it right in his ear, maybe slapped him across the face about it, too.

“Say again,” Ilya said, English clumsy and ugly in his mouth.

Shane flushed, scrunched his nose and all, but still said, “Eat me out,” in a tone that was somehow both desperate and commanding.

There was nothing Ilya could do but as commanded. He dove back in with a fervor that surprised them both a little; Shane jolted and Ilya felt like an animal, sniffing and lipping between Shane’s legs like a beast. He ate him roughly, working him open on his tongue with the same surety and intent that he’d once used his fingers.

Shane squeezed his thighs so tight around Ilya’s head that he saw spots for a minute, and maybe God. When he was released, barely, he had to worm a hand down between the bed and his dick to make sure he hadn’t come. No, Ilya was still hard and aching, but it wouldn’t be long, so he drove his tongue in deeper and reached up instead.

He’d barely brushed his palm over the head of Shane’s dick before Shane went off, crying out, back bowing into more weight on his shoulders and his ass shoved so completely over Ilya’s face that it was hard to breathe.

Ilya realized he would happily die like this, that there could be no better way to go, and was lost in that thought until Shane dropped and then grabbed at his hair again. He yanked Ilya up his body, as hard and fast as Ilya had kissed his way down slow and gentle, and he kissed him hard on the mouth, panting into it more than anything. Ilya’s lips stung and there was still barely any air, but he kissed back with everything in him and only pulled away when Shane shoved a hand down his underwear and grabbed at his dick.

Like Shane, Ilya came the instant he was touched, grunting it out into Shane’s mouth and jerking his hips into his hold. He collapsed over Shane when he couldn’t hold himself up anymore, vision blurry and lungs burning, and let Shane kiss his sweaty hair and work him through the last of his orgasm.

When Ilya could breathe and see again, he noticed that the sun was coming up, and the light through the curtains made Shane all glowy and hazy. “Beautiful,” he wheezed out, and repeated it in English to make Shane blush and pull him in, stroking through his hair.

The morning rose around them and soon they rose into it, showering again and heading downstairs, where the coffee and the juicer lived. Ilya let Shane pour him cran-mango juice and admitted to liking it. He even let him put some itch cream on his mosquito bites, though he said they were spider bites, actually, he could tell the difference.

And it was a while before either of them thought to check Shane’s phone, which had no word from Farah. Ilya watched Shane lock his phone and felt bad about being so relieved when Shane looked just a little devastated; he pulled him close and thought about how badly he wanted this every day, all day, always, and thought about how that might destroy Shane a little, too.

“Can I have more juice?” Ilya asked, because those thoughts weren’t resolvable, but Shane lit up, pleased like Ilya was still eating him out.

They spent much of that day setting up Blackberry’s new things as they were delivered and then coaxing her inside. Well, Shane used that word; Ilya didn’t have the greatest command of its meaning in English, but he didn’t think Blackberry needed much coaxing. She looked between Shane and the open backdoor, gave Ilya a look that he interpreted as look at this idiot, and darted inside with that incredible speed. When Shane only followed her in, when he closed the door after Ilya with Blackberry on the same side of it, she mrowed once, loudly, then started rubbing herself frantically all over Shane’s legs.

“See?” Ilya said, very smug and happy over being proven right. “This is her house, Shane. Is where she belongs.”

Shane didn’t even argue with him or complain, just crouched down and pet Blackberry in return, a soft smile on his face. “Yeah,” he said, and Ilya let them have their moment before he introduced Blackberry to the cat dancer he’d picked out; it had a dangling mutant fish with feathers on the end of it, and Blackberry was entranced.

The three of them eventually wound up on the couch. Shane had made a very weak protest about not letting her on the future; Ilya laughed out loud at him, and Blackberry made a noise that might as well have been a cat laugh as she stretched luxuriously and then curled up right next to Shane’s side.

Ilya claimed the remote and said, “Get him, Blackberry, attack,” when Shane tried to wrestle him for it. He flipped through channels, stopping on TSN when his good friend Kelly McGriff popped up. They were talking about Day Four of The Hollander Situation, and when Ilya went to change it, Shane made a little noise of protest. He was petting Blackberry, staring at the screen. Ilya left it on.

McGriff was midsentence. “—said it before, but the longer this drags on, the more you have to think of the damage done to this relationship.”

The other panelist was nodding. “It’s true. And you have to wonder—how long can this go before the relationship is damaged beyond repair?”

“That’s exactly right, Kenny. If I’m Shane Hollander, and I just threw down this gauntlet—you know, look at what I’m worth, Boston wants me, other teams probably want me but Boston, your biggest rival, wants me to the tune of 12 million dollars a year—and he’s asking Montreal, how much do you want me? And Montreal, you know, they’re not answering the way Hollander would like.” Ilya looked at Shane carefully, who refused to look away from the screen. His eyes were intense.

Boston wants you, Ilya thought at him desperately. Boston wants you so much. He could see it, then—throwing balled-up tape at Shane in the locker room, jumping into the back of his boring intermission interviews, slinging an arm around his shoulder, shaking him and pressing his face into his sweaty, spiky helmet hair—

“I still don’t think we live in a world where Montreal doesn’t match,” Kenny the panelist and Ilya’s second-greatest enemy—after the duck—said. McGriff, the traitor, nodded along. “I think they match and it’s a no-brainer. But I just can’t wrap my head around why they’re making Hollander squirm like this. You just don’t see this with other players of Hollander’s caliber.”

“Right,” said McGriff. “Look at Rozanov.”

“Exactly, Kelly. And I think, at some point, you have to ask the question—is there something we don’t know about Hollander, some red flag or warning sign, that Montreal—”

Ilya changed the channel. Golf, the worst sport in the world, promptly appeared on the screen and Ilya sneered at it until Shane said, “Hey, I was watching that.”

“Now we are watching this,” Ilya said firmly. “Is my favorite.”

“You like golf?”

“Yes, of course. And I know you like golf—otherwise you play longer in playoffs—”

“Fuck off,” Shane said, but he laughed, and Ilya hoped it chased away whatever that evil fuck Kenny was going to suggest about Shane. He left the golf on—Shane was watching it now, anyway, and looked to be paying actual attention, so Ilya figured if anything it would bore Shane’s brain into submission. And if it couldn’t, well—Ilya had brought the big tub of lube down from the bedroom and put it pointedly on the coffee table, just in case.

Before that, the golf might put Ilya to sleep, which wouldn’t be the worst thing; they’d had a late night and early morning. Maybe he could slump enough to the side where he could get his head in Shane’s lap. Maybe Shane would pet his hair like he was petting Blackberry—and fuck, the cat was in the way. Why did Ilya suggest the cat come inside? He’d lap-blocked himself.

He was contemplating this, his eyelids drooping, when he heard something strange coming from down the hall. It was a screeching noise, slow and intermittent, and he listened carefully, gravely concerned that a bird had somehow gotten in—until he heard what sounded like soft, low cursing, first in English and then in French.

Ilya stood up. Shane snapped his attention away from the golf and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Stay here with Blackberry,” Ilya said, ears straining—more screeching, longer this time, and more soft talking, human and not bird. Ilya could handle humans. “I need to go check—”

“Fuck!” came a voice, too loud—loud enough for Shane to hear and stand up, too.

“Is that—”

The screech came again, and Ilya knew it was the kitchen window. “Stay here,” he said again, starting to march down the hall. He cursed when Shane ignored him, hurrying along right on his heels, and they both turned into the kitchen together just as the talking got louder.

“—well if you know so much better, why don’t you do it—”

“Câlisse, Hayds, I am not getting caught climbing through a window in this neighborhood, are you fucking crazy, they will kill me—”

The talking stopped abruptly when Ilya and Shane emerged fully; Ilya lowered the arm he’d put in front of Shane and sighed. Hayden Pike had one leg and half his torso through Shane’s kitchen window, the screen pushed all the way up. Behind him, JJ Dagenais stood on Shane’s little back porch, arms over his chest, watching Pike with a deeply judgmental look on his face. Ilya mirrored him, completely unimpressed.

Beside him, Shane went rigid and said, “Oh, fuck.”

“Fuck!” Pike repeated, though he was looking at Ilya. His eyes were wide, and with half his stupid body popping out of the window, he looked like a meerkat. “What the fuck are you doing here, Rozanov?”

“What are you doing here?” Ilya shot back. “And why do you climb through window like burglar?”

“I’m not—I was just—”

“Capitaine,” Dagenais said, rapping on the windowpane. “Can you let us in the door, please? This idiot will break his neck.”

“I—yeah, I guess,” Shane said, throwing his hands up helplessly. Pike protested, saying he could make it through the window, but then he knocked over the little basket of onions and garlic that Shane left on the windowsill and Dagenais yanked him back.

They were let in through the backdoor. As it opened, Blackberry padded in with an air of smugness, chin in the air, showing off that she had already been on the other side of the door and hadn’t even had to climb through a window. Dagenais jumped at the sight of her and crossed himself, which made Ilya snort out a laugh, and Pike gaped.

“Is that—Blackberry? What’s she doing inside?”

“She, uh, she lives inside now,” Shane said. He closed the backdoor with a hard snap and then just kind of looked around at everyone, shoulders hunched, radiating discomfort. “Look, it doesn’t matter. What the fuck are you two doing here?”

“You did not answer your phone for days,” Dagenais said. “Hayds called your mother—”

“Hayden, what the fuck.”

“—and she said you were here, and you will not answer her calls, either, so—”

“Yeah, for a reason,” Shane said. He put his hands behind the back of his neck and began to pace a little. Ilya had a sudden and nearly unshakeable urge to grab him and hold him still, and then to just hold him, arms around his shaking limbs, hands spread across his chest and belly. His fingers clenched to think of it, and he made himself stay still and let Shane handle it in his Shane way.

“And how the fuck did you get into my yard?” he asked next, frantic. Ilya supposed those were easier logistics to grapple with than the other massive problems in the room. Elephants, Marly would call them, for some reason.

Dagenais still looked unapologetic. Where Pike had still not taken his eyes off Ilya, as if he needed to track him like a wild animal, Dagenais stayed zeroed in on Shane, watching him with an intensity and stubbornness that Ilya found familiar. It was how Ilya himself watched Shane, usually. He wasn’t sure he liked it on someone else.

“We hopped a few fences,” Dagenais said, rolling his eyes. “It was this genius idea—” He whacked at the back of Pike’s head, ruffling a light brown cowlick and breaking his one-sided staring contest with Ilya so he could whack him back. “—I said we should just spam your bell until you open, but no, we have to risk charges instead.”

“Spam the bell is good plan,” Ilya said, to literally everyone else’s surprise. He gave Dagenais a firm nod, raising his chin like Blackberry. “Is what I did, and it worked. Shane let me in.”

“Shane,” Dagenais repeated, narrowing his eyes.

Pike reacted more dramatically. He pointed at Ilya and yelped, “I knew it! I knew you had something to do with this whole thing—”

“Hayden,” Shane said with a groan, moving his hands to his front to then drop his face into them. “It’s not—”

“No, Shane, I knew it. I knew you’d never sign that thing on your own. What did he do? Does he have something on you? Whatever it is, we can handle it, okay, we can go to your mom—”

“For fuck’s sake,” Shane said. He dropped into a crouch, a panicky ball on the floor, and Ilya moved without meaning to. He stopped himself just before actually reaching out, Dagenais’ dark eyes pinning him, and he blew out a frustrated breath and contained himself. He was somewhat relieved when Blackberry reached Shane instead, butting up against his arms until he dropped his hands and, with a shaky, wet laugh, gave her a pet. “Hayden,” he said as Blackberry pressed up against his legs, glaring at the rest of the room like a protective lion. She was right where Ilya wanted to be, really. “I didn’t sign the offer sheet because of—I mean, not entirely because—we’re just—he’s—”

“We are friends,” Ilya said, unable to stand it any longer. “I know, so crazy, but is true. I did not know about offer sheet until it goes on Twitter, and then I come here to make sure my friend, Shane Hollander, is okay. I spam bell until he lets me in.”

“Seriously?” Pike said. Dagenais kept looking between them, but he shrugged eventually and seemed to accept the story, which really wasn’t that ridiculous when you weren’t being a ridiculous drama queen like Pike. Ilya couldn’t really relate until literally four days ago, but most guys had friends on other teams.

Hollander and Dagenais had gone to Lake Tahoe last summer with the goalie who played for the Hammerheads and his friend, another goalie prospect for the Monarchs, all because he knew them from junior; Ilya knew this from Instagram stalking he wouldn’t admit to under oath. Miami was basically Little Moscow in the offseason, teeming with Russian hockey players, and Ilya had been invited to hang by five different guys he knew from the national team and barely knew otherwise; he’d never been able to take them up on it, but he probably would if he could. This was not so strange in the wider context of their sport, and Dagenais at least seemed to get that.

Pike looked like he was in denial, though.

“Of all people, why would he—no. I don’t believe it. Shane, this guy’s an asshole,” Pike said, like a fucking dork.

Shane snorted. “Hayd, we’re hockey players. We’re all assholes.”

“He’s a worse asshole, then. King Asshole.”

“Aww,” Ilya said. “Is honor to be your king, Pike.”

“Shut up. That’s not—”

“Can we move on from this?” Shane said tiredly. He was still on the floor, but at least dealing with Pike’s theatrics seemed to have calmed him a little. “Can you guys just—just get whatever you need to say over with and be done? Go ahead, yell at me, call me a traitor, I don’t—”

“What?” Pike said, looking appalled. Dagenais also looked confused. This was good because Ilya was very ready to throw punches if either of them said that shit to Shane. He assumed Blackberry was ready, too.

“Traitor?” Dagenais asked, and then he presumably repeated it in French. “What are you talking about?”

Shane blinked up at them; now he was the confused one. “I mean—aren’t you here to yell at me about the offer sheet?”

“No!” Dagenais said, while Pike made a noise like Shane had just shot him. “You think we would do all this, jump into your garden—”

“If you stepped on Marie-Louise’s tomatoes, I’m going to be really mad,” Shane said, frowning hard. “She makes a really good sauce once they’re all ready and—”

“Tabernak! I know this! We did not touch the tomatoes!” Dagenais told him. “For fuck’s sake, Shane, we are your friends! We worry about you!”

“No one is yelling,” Pike said; they were yelling a little bit, in Ilya’s opinion, though their hearts at least seemed to be in the right place.

“You’re not mad?” Shane asked from the floor.

“Of course we are, but not at you.” Pike threw his hands up then and marched over, reaching down. “Can you please get up from the floor? Jesus Christ.”

He grabbed at Shane, and Ilya twitched to intervene, but Shane let himself be grabbed and even listed into Pike’s hold a little, and then Ilya twitched with something more like jealousy. Blackberry darted away when Pike moved into her space, because she was very intelligent, and that made him feel a little better, especially when she ran to Ilya and sat on his feet.

Pike hugged like a Muppet, all long, flaily limbs and tight squeezes around Shane, who simply burrowed into it with a resigned sort of sigh. Dagenais lasted half a second before he joined, too, and then they were a clump of Montreal Metros clinging to each other in Shane’s kitchen, murmuring a little argument between them that Ilya thought was Shane making sure they really weren’t mad at him.

“Even Boston?” he heard, in Shane’s small, muffled voice.

“Even hell,” Pike whispered back, the idiot.

“Even Winnipeg,” Dagenais added, and they all stood there and shuddered; Dagenais crossed himself again, and Ilya had the odd urge to do the same.

Instead, he cleared his throat and said, “Okay, okay, this is getting pretty gay, so—”

“Fuck off, Rozanov!” Pike snarled, but Shane laughed, so Ilya literally could not care less.

Soon they were pulling drinks out of the fridge—Pike turned faintly green when Ilya offered him the cran-carrot juice, but Shane looked on so hopefully he said yes to it, much to Ilya’s delight—and they migrated into the living room and sprawled out on the couch together. They talked about the offer sheet stuff much less carefully than Ilya and Shane had so far, but Shane seemed to appreciate it, confronting the situation grimly.

“I mean, yeah. It’s Day Four and there’s been nothing. I don’t know.”

“They’ll match,” Pike said, confident and loud, because he really wanted Ilya to hate him.

“I think so too, but—who knows,” Shane said. He gave Ilya a little look, searching, but Ilya made sure his face gave away nothing.

“Montreal is stupid,” Ilya said with a shrug. “Stupid to even be in this situation, so. Maybe not.”

To his surprise, Dagenais nodded. “I hate to say this, but you’re right, Rozanov. They give me a hard time last year, too, we almost went to arbitration. We reached the deal at the final minute because ownership called Deslauriers to yell, but—he is tough, you know. All ego, so stubborn.”

“Yeah,” Shane said darkly.

Pike shook his head. “I don’t understand; he was easy as fuck on my deal. To be fair, I wanted term over dollars for the girls, but he and my agent worked it all out over a steak dinner. So what the fuck happened with you guys?”

Ilya hated this, too, but he agreed with Pike. He didn’t get the looks Shane and Dagenais gave each other, or Dagenais’ dark chuckle, Shane’s tight little frown. He wanted to press, as determined as ever to understand Shane, but to no one’s surprise, Shane was eager to move on.

“Well, whatever happens, at least I’m going to get the money I deserve,” Shane said. Pike and Dagenais both hooted and raised their respective glasses of juice and vodka, and Ilya joined them in raising his own.

“Yes, highest paid player in the league. Overpaid, obviously, since you are not the best,” Ilya said, and he grinned hard when Shane kicked at him. Blackberry, a very heavy weight over Ilya’s lap, gave a grumpy mrow at the movement, and Pike and Dagenais transitioned into booing him.

“And I guess it wouldn’t be horrible going to Boston,” Shane said. “Even though I’d have to play with this clown.”

“Yes, your good friend, Ilya Rozanov,” Dagenais said in a weird sort of voice. He raised his foot up onto Shane’s coffee table as Pike started complaining again. Shane went back at Pike, but Dagenais looked right at Ilya—and nudged the giant tub of lube he’d left out on the fucking coffee table, very pointedly.

Ilya froze. As Pike and Shane bickered, he and Dagenais stared each other down. It felt like they were on the ice, like Dagenais was just daring Ilya to try to cross his blue line and get behind him for a shot. His eyes, narrowed again, were very cool, challenging, and far too knowing.

He wasn’t sure what to do. He couldn’t shoulder-check his way around Dagenais here, though his body tensed up as if it wanted to. Part of him wanted Shane to notice, to jump in and set the course for how this explanation should go—it was his friend, after all—but a bigger part was glad he was spared this, knew that Shane wasn’t ready to confront this part of things. If he was being honest, neither was Ilya.

So Ilya kept staring Dagenais down, not willing to back up and cycle the puck to a safer option, but not willing to charge forward, either. He did the conversational equivalent of stickhandling, waiting him out, until Pike’s loud voice finally took the discussion over again.

“But how would that even work?” he asked, scrunching his face up in thought—though maybe that was the sip of horrible juice he’d just taken. “Like, do you do rock-paper-scissors for first line minutes or what?”

“Of course not,” Ilya said, only breaking Dagenais’ gaze when Dagenais looked away first. “I am 1C, of course, so—”

“Or you go on my wing,” Shane cut in hotly. Then he grimaced. “Ugh, no, Fitzgerald said he wants center depth—”

“Yes, exactly; you are my depth.”

“Keep dreaming, bud. I think we probably just get equal ice time, mostly. I bet Coach will want me out for more d-zone draws, because I’m better on faceoffs—”

“Because you cheat,” Ilya said, holding up his wrists as if they alone could demonstrate the many whacks and nicks Shane’s creative stickwork had given him over the years. They didn’t, of course, but everyone knew what he meant.

Shane just shrugged at him, unrepentant; it was really hot. “If you’re not cheating at faceoffs, you’re not winning ‘em. Sucks to suck.”

Dagenais laughed, bright and rich. “That’s my Cap!”

“Not for long,” Ilya muttered, singsong, but he shut his mouth when Dagenais kicked the lube again.

“Do you think you should take more d-zone draws, though?” Pike asked, frowning a little. “I know you and Theriault have gone back and forth about that a bit. I’m not saying you’re not defensively responsible, obviously—and definitely better than fucking Rozanov—”

“Yes, of course, lazy Russian allergic to backcheck,” Ilya said with an exaggerated yawn.

“If the skate fits—”

“Stop,” Shane said, though he was frowning thoughtfully at Ilya, not Pike. “You’re not lazy. And you’re a great backchecker. Who said you’re lazy?”

“Pike,” Ilya said, pointing, to distract from the way his throat tightened up and that he wanted to gaze at Shane like he was an angel or something.

“And you’re better off the rush than me,” Shane said, ignoring him but still thoughtful. “I’m better down low—” He also ignored Dagenais’ snort; so did Ilya, desperately. “—and on the forecheck, so—I guess we should talk to Coach. I mean, if Montreal doesn’t match.”

“Right,” Ilya said, way, way too excited at the thought. He imagined he and Shane in Coach Reilly’s office, crowded in together and arguing, always with the end result that they would play on the same team, in the same colors, working towards the same goal. It was like a dream. “But you can PK, I do not want this.”

“Fuck off, of course I’ll PK. I had six shorties last year,” Shane said. He looked excited, too.

“I had two,” Pike put in.

“No one cares,” Ilya told him.

“Okay, but you have like, two good wingers on the team, maybe three,” Dagenais said. “Who gets stuck with that joke Lafferty, hm?”

“Well, Hollander made good winger of Pike—”

“Knock it off, I’m good without Shane! Shane, tell him!”

“—but I am best, so, I can handle Laffy Taffy,” Ilya said. He flexed his bicep to be a dick; it made Shane laugh again.

He also fully expected Shane to argue with him, especially with the grin he had on, bright and eager, but then Shane said, “I remember him from the Memorial Cup; he got his stick stuck in his blade, broke it, and almost stabbed the linesman with it when he tried to help him off. So yeah, okay, you can have Taffy; that’s all you.”

“What! No, Shane, I do not want—”

“You just said—”

And the day passed like that, the four of them shouting over each other about hockey, golf on the TV, Blackberry the cat snoozing in their midst. Ilya could not have imagined he’d have so much fun off the ice with Metros that weren’t Shane, but Pike was a joy to rile up and Dagenais was quick, funny and a little vicious. And Shane bloomed under their combined attention, relaxed and comfortable, and most of all, relieved, so Ilya couldn’t begrudge their presence at all. Their visit took a weight off Shane’s shoulders that Ilya hadn’t been able to help bear, and for that he was grateful.

He tried to remember his gratitude when Shane insisted that Pike show him that Marie-Louise’s tomatoes were unharmed and they went out into the garden together, leaving Ilya behind with Dagenais and Blackberry. Ilya pet her and pretended to be extremely engrossed in the golf—how the fuck was it still on? Did this sport ever end? He could swear one of the golfers was going gray and wrinkly before his eyes—while Dagenais stared at the side of his head.

Eventually, he cleared his throat. Ilya continued to ignore him. Dagenais sighed and sat up a little.

“Look, man—”

“Shh. I am watching.”

Somehow, Dagenais came up with the remote and turned the TV off completely. Ilya scowled and turned his gaze on Blackberry instead, trying to tell her with his eyes that she should attack Dagenais immediately. She didn’t get it, but that was okay. They could work on their communication.

“I’m not even that surprised, you know,” Dagenais said, leaning over in his seat and tenting his hands in front of him. “I know Shane’s not just, you know, dickmatized—”

“My god,” Ilya said in Russian, clenching his fingers in Blackberry’s soft fur and laughing roughly.

“—like it’s the money too. But this—” Dagenais gestured toward the lube tub. “—it makes more sense than you being friends, you know?”

“Really?” Ilya asked. “Because I am so horrible?”

“No, I don’t fucking know you. But you’re not the kind of friend Shane usually makes. And if you are fucking with him—”

“It’s not with him,” Ilya said with a smirk, which probably didn’t help. Dagenais’ lip curled a little, but he just shook his head.

“If you are fucking with him—I will fucking kill you. Here, Boston, wherever—you will be swallowing all your teeth when I’m done. You understand me?”

“Fuck off. I am here, yes? Got here before you. I did not have to climb through window—”

“Hayden’s an idiot,” Dagenais snapped. “I am not. Whatever this is—I don’t care. But if you fuck my friend up—”

“Fine,” Ilya said. He made a fluttery gesture with his non-petting hand, bowing a little in his seat. “You make threat, good for you. You get good friend score. I will not hurt him.” He lost the sarcasm, a little, in that last bit, his voice breaking against his will.

Dagenais studied him a little longer, then finally looked away. He poked at the lube and laughed. “No, not with this much lube.”

“Fuck off.”

“I am not surprised about Shane either,” Dagenais said. “I think some of us in the room already know, or at least think—”

“You know nothing,” Ilya snarled, sitting all the way up now, too. Dagenais’ eyes widened, but he didn’t back down. “Shane is not anything until he says he is. If people in the room say this, you tell them to stop. If he is your friend, you protect him.”

Dagenais’ face twisted. “You don’t tell me how to handle my room or my friend.”

“If you already know, you don’t say this,” Ilya said, insistent; this was important. “You let Shane say it. You let Shane—I will tell him you know, soon, and you will talk about it, but you only know about me. Swear this, JJ.”

The first name broke through, at least—that was always a bullet in their world. Dagenais frowned hard, but eventually nodded. “Yeah, okay. Whatever Shane needs.”

“Yes,” Ilya said, nodding back. “Okay. Put the fucking golf back on.”

“Why don’t you put your fucking bucket of lube away, yeah? Hayden will eventually notice it’s there, you know, if Shane doesn’t choke him with the tomato vines and bury him in the garden first.”

“He got the tomatoes?” Ilya asked, picking up the lube tub and sticking it behind the nearest armchair.

“He got one, kicked it right off the vine—it went straight across the yard and splat against the fence. Fucking crazy. He can’t shoot a puck that hard; he should be playing soccer!”

Ilya laughed, picturing that, and they were laughing together when Shane and Pike came back in, Shane with his scrunched and annoyed face on, Pike looking like a guilty puppy.

“What’s so funny?” Shane asked, but he was starting to smile at them, and Ilya knew he’d have a thousand more awkward conversations like that to make that happen again and again.

Chapter 6: Day Five

Day Five – 9 July, 2013

“So that’s all he said?” Shane asked, like he couldn’t believe it. Maybe that was because it technically wasn’t true; Ilya had not told him what Dagenais said about already thinking that Shane was gay, but he’d told him everything else.

“Yes,” Ilya lied, and Shane just nodded like that was that. It was a bit of a relief, actually; Alexei, for example, always fucking knew when Ilya was lying his face off. But Shane barely needed convincing, and Ilya appreciated that and felt guilty about it. And maybe, possibly, a little wistful—he really wanted Shane to know him as well as Alexei did, while also terrified of the thought.

They were outside in Shane’s garden, trying to harness train Blackberry. Blackberry fucking hated it. She was flopped over on Shane’s grass, licking her crotch indolently while sometimes giving Shane and Ilya absolutely scathing looks. Ilya adored her, and Shane was trying ridiculously hard to stay stern.

“I guess that’s—good,” Shane said with a sigh. “I mean, not that he wants to knock all your teeth in, but that he’s not like—disgusted or upset or anything. And he won’t tell anyone,” Shane added firmly, looking at Ilya directly to reassure him. “He would never.”

“Yes, I know he is loyal to you,” Ilya said. He really hadn’t been worried about that. “Is okay. I think, maybe, is okay if some teammates know, especially if you come to Boston. Will be easier and tougher to hide at the same time.” He was thinking of Marly, who was an idiot but not actually too brain damaged. He was also thinking of Marly being okay with it as long as it wasn’t shoved in his face, and quickly tried to think of something else.

“Yeah,” Shane said, mouth going tight. “You’re right. Like, hiding in plain sight, but the guys who know us well—fuck. I should really tell Hayden too, right? It’s only fair.”

Ilya winced. “Maybe tell him somewhere private, yes? Locked door, soundproof? He is very loud.”

“Well, yeah. Ugh. I never thought—and he was really okay with it?” Shane asked. It was the same voice he’d used in that hug yesterday, like he couldn’t believe Dagenais and Pike didn’t hate him for the offer sheet. Now he couldn’t believe they didn’t hate him for fucking Ilya Rozanov. Both, perhaps, might seem implausible for any random person involved, but Ilya really didn’t think anyone could hate Shane Hollander for any reason. He couldn’t imagine that.

“Really, Shane. He is your friend, would do anything for you. Of course he does not hate you.” Ilya shrugged. “Maybe he hates me instead, but is okay. Lots of people do.”

“Actually, that’s the funny part to me,” Shane said. “I don’t think JJ hates you. I think if he knew you, he would like you. You guys remind me a lot of each other.”

“What? How?”

“Big, loud, cocky, good at hockey, absolute demons to the officials—”

“Last season you told linesman you would get him coupon for Lasik eye surgery,” Ilya said, grinning to remember it. “40% off, good deal, you said. Whole thing on hot mic, they play it over and over on TSN. So who is demon?”

“I never said I wasn’t, and you fucking saw that offside he missed! The puck was a football field behind Parry and they let that goal stand! But you two are way worse, so don’t even start. And you’re both fun, you’re both kind of assholes, you’re both hot—”

“What?” Ilya yelped. Shane’s mouth twisted into a small, pleased smile, the little frog one again.

“Just like, objectively. Don’t let it go to your head.”

“You think Dagenais is hot too?” Ilya said. The fact that Shane thought Ilya was hot wasn’t really a shocker—the boner in the showers that time was kind of his first clue; what was a surprise was that he’d finally admitted it, really—but the Dagenais part kind of slapped him in the face. Of course, logically, Shane was attracted to other guys. So was Ilya. But to hear him say it—and to think of how close they were—and to know that Dagenais knew this secret about Shane, that he’d gotten some sort of confirmation of whatever he might have suspected about him already—that he’d been thinking of that—

“Of course JJ is hot,” Shane said, like Ilya was stupid. “I mean, look at him.”

“No thanks,” Ilya said. He was currently going over every expression and micro-expression Dagenais had made at Shane yesterday in his head, wondering if he’d missed some interest there beyond friendship. He was usually good at that sort of thing, but he’d been distracted, not thinking about it, focused on Shane, but now his brain was telling him that of course he’d missed some looks, that who could spend that much time with Shane Hollander and not look at him in some sort of way? It would be impossible. If Dagenais ever knew—if Shane ever hinted, suggested, even breathed about his own interest, well—

“Hey,” Shane said. That smile was still in his voice, even though Ilya was staring down at Blackberry. “Are you jealous?”

“No,” Ilya said immediately. He was now trying to figure out the best and most traceless way to send a pipe bomb to the Montreal Metros’ front office. If they were busy dealing with that, they wouldn’t think to match the offer sheet, and then Shane would go to Boston and all this would be solved.

“Are you sure? Because you sound kind of jealous.”

“I am not jealous. I have never been jealous in my whole life. Russians do not know meaning of this word, it is not in our language.” Maybe he could figure out a way to get Dagenais to visit the front office when the pipe bomb went off and kill two hares with one shot.

“You don’t have to be jealous, you know. You’re still the only one I’m, you know, doing this stuff with.”

That warmed something in Ilya’s stomach, and he had to work not to look so relieved; it was only dampened when Shane added, “If I did anything with JJ and the rest of the team found out, or god, management, we’d both be fucked. That would look so bad, for us especially. It would be hell. So really, you don’t have to worry—”

“Not worried,” Ilya muttered. Two pipe bombs, maybe. That would get his point across, he thought.

“Sure. Okay, well—I don’t think this is working,” Shane said, tugging on the leash clipped to Blackberry’s harness. She didn’t move an inch except to glare, and her affronted expression looked so much like Shane’s that Ilya had to shove his fist over a smile.

“I think harness is too small,” Ilya said, pointing. Getting it on her had been a challenge and he had the scratches to prove it—though she hadn’t raised a single claw to Shane, which Ilya approved of—and she kind of bulged out of it a little, though she could move in it and there was some space around her chest, Shane had made sure.

“Stop calling her fat, Ilya. She’s big-boned.”

That made absolutely no sense to Ilya, and he gave Shane a very unimpressed look. “She is not big-boned, she is cat. Small-boned. She is big fat.”

“That’s not—” But Shane shuddered into laughter, scrubbing at his face with his hand. “Okay, fine. Let’s go get a bigger harness, if you think that’s the problem. There’s a pet store in Westmount where I usually get her stuff.”

“Yes, let’s go,” Ilya said. Predictably, Blackberry didn’t move until they opened the kitchen door, and then she turned into the feline Usain Bolt, but once she was inside again she was chirpy and happy and graciously accepted treats from Ilya to get over the trauma of the harness.

And then they went out, which Ilya was pretty excited for. He always went a little stir crazy when he was in the house for too long, and he could tell Shane was the same way. For Ilya, that usually meant going out to bars and fucking people just to feel human and alive, and he had the feeling that Shane probably didn’t do that as much. Probably, he thought, as they squabbled a bit over which horrible car to take, the Land Rover or the Kia, Shane went out to do things like this. Ilya really didn’t mind doing Shane things, he had discovered.

He also won the car argument, which he only wanted so he could show Shane how he had suffered more than Jesus to come here. “This is a perfectly fine car,” Shane told him as soon as he was buckled into the passenger seat and Ilya was pulling out of his space, red clown wig affixed to his head.

“Of course you say that. You drive Jeep but more boring.”

“And my Land Rover is perfectly fine, too! You haven’t even seen me drive it, how do you know how boring it is?”

“I know,” Ilya said darkly. “Put store address into GPS, Passenger Princess.”

“Don’t call me that,” Shane shot back, though he obeyed Ilya anyway.

They weren’t far from Westmount, which Shane explained was actually its own city within Montreal. “Hayden and Jackie just bought a place here,” he told Ilya.

“Okay, so is terrible, yes?”

“No, it’s nice!”

“Hm. Cannot be so nice if they let Hayden Pike buy house here, but we will see.” Ilya drove dutifully where the GPS sent him, grinning and pretending to be unimpressed when Shane pointed out the park where he liked to run, the hardware store run by a man who thought of Shane as a son, and the neighborhood rec center he went to when his home gym got too lonely but he didn’t want to go into the rink.

“It’s all old people doing Tai Chi and yoga,” Shane told him, sounding fond. “I’ve been getting into it. Yoga is great.”

Ilya had to work pretty hard to pretend, and he tried to concentrate on driving. The reality was that he was soaking up every bit of this, cherishing every detail of Shane and making note of it. He was thinking about the old folks he saw exercising on the Common when he’d run past and could so easily imagine Shane moving with them in the early, cool mornings, gentle and beloved.

He also had to note, though he didn’t want to, how much Shane fucking loved this city. Every word was drenched in it like a strong perfume, overwhelming and unbidden.

Shane talked about the restaurant where a waitress tried to slip JJ her number when she handed him his plate, but the scrap of paper slipped into the food and wound up getting drenched with gravy and then almost entirely eaten. He showed off where Hayden, desperate to find a non-alcoholic way to connect with Shane when he was still a rookie, had taken him for afternoon tea, and everyone thought they were on a date. Apparently, Shane told him, this happened a lot to them around Montreal. Ilya made a murderous note about it and started thinking about the pipe bomb again.

And there were bar stories, too, memories where Shane had lingered here into the offseason and drank too much with his teammates. They mixed gin and Gatorade and got wasted at a movie theater, and Shane drunkenly teared up watching The Hunger Games. When they couldn’t find a taxi, Shane’s former captain had given him a piggyback ride to the nearest Metro station, which wound up being closed. They ended up crashing at a hotel just ten blocks from Shane’s house; Shane pointed it out as they passed it, and Ilya glowed with affection he couldn’t express.

“Marly cried his eyes out at Hunger Games,” Ilya said, which made Shane throw his head back to laugh. “And he was sober, so. But when the little girl died—”

“Rue,” Shane said, his hand to his chest. “I think we all cried at that.”

“Not me,” Ilya said. This was a lie, he’d definitely gotten misty, and this time, Shane knew it, because he argued with Ilya about it until they pulled up to the pet store and parked.

The young woman behind the front counter didn’t look up from her phone when they walked in. “Bonjour-hi!” she chirped.

“Bonjour,” Shane answered absently, already headed straight for the clothes and equipment aisle.

The girl looked up, then, clocked Shane, and answered, “Can I help you with anything?” in English.

“No thanks,” Shane told her, also in English, and disappeared into the aisle. Ilya frowned after him and followed, thinking of the ridiculous, exaggerated way Ontario-born Marly usually answered the signature bilingual greeting in French when they were here. They always answered him back in French.

Ilya itched to ask Shane about it, but Shane was already locked in on comparing harnesses. He had a frown on as he asked Ilya, “Do you think she’ll mind if the harness is for a dog?”

It was asked in such earnest that Ilya had to take a breath. His heart felt full. “No,” he said. “I think is okay.”

They wandered the pet store a bit, checking out the fish tanks and the lizards; Shane seemed particularly delighted by a gecko who followed his finger when he traced it against the glass. Ilya complained that there weren’t any puppies for him to play with, to distract himself from how much he wanted to kiss Shane on the mouth for playing with a stupid lizard.

“They do adoption drives sometimes; you’ll have to come back for the next one,” Shane said. Ilya thought about that, about being someone who came back into Shane’s life here like a regular, visiting friend, and wondered if that was how it would be if Montreal matched the offer sheet. He found he wanted it to be, though of course he wanted Shane to come to Boston more.

“Would you ever get a dog?” Shane asked him as they looked at clothes for pets, including a little clown wig that Ilya really wanted to get for Blackberry so they could match.

“I want, but—is harder than a cat,” Ilya said. “Dog misses me when I’m on the road, too much maybe. And when I leave in summers, would have to take it with me, maybe, or find someone to watch, and—” He shrugged. Neither option sounded good; Svetlana spent too much of the summer in Russia to be a good dog sitter, and she hated animals anyway. He didn’t want to dump a dog on one of his teammates or, more likely, their wives. But the thought of taking a dog back to Russia, about getting into it with Alexei while the dog was there and Alexei deciding to be cruel to the dog and not just Ilya, maybe kicking or hitting it—

Ilya’s MLH Cup prospects would probably go down pretty dramatically if he were to be convicted of fratricide, which was the only logical outcome of such a scenario. It was probably best to avoid it.

“So, a cat, then?” Shane asked. He had a sweater in his hands that would look horrible on Blackberry, bulky yellow plaid. Ilya wanted to see it on her so badly.

“Is same problem with going back to Russia,” Ilya said with another shrug. “But is okay. Katie has dog, you have cat, Carmy has guinea pig—”

“He has a what?” Shane asked, laughing. “Seriously?”

“Very serious. Is the stupidest thing you ever see, he ran out into backyard while we have barbecue. An evil bird swooped down and tried to take him, we had to get broom and chase—terrible pet. But he is still my friend. Idiot’s name is Buttons. Really he is for Carmy’s kids, but he loves it like third child. So dumb.”

“This is awesome. I kind of want to meet this Buttons Carmichael.”

“You will,” Ilya said, decided. Because Shane would go to all the barbecues once he was on the Raiders. He would eat grilled chicken and Monica Carmichael’s famous Mediterranean chickpea salad, which even Ilya could admit was delicious, and drink ginger ale and talk about hockey and weather with the guys. CC was kind of a weather guy, if weather guys could be dumb as bricks. Other guys would talk to Shane about golf, maybe, or other sports—Ilya knew now that Shane liked virtually every sport, could get into literally whatever was on the TV that was remotely competitive and find it interesting.

He would fit, Ilya’s brain had decided, because he belonged there, with Ilya.

Shane was a little quiet. “If Montreal doesn’t match,” he said. He no longer grimaced or sounded particularly frightened of that possibility, which made Ilya feel perhaps far too much hope.

“Right,” Ilya told him, clearing his throat. And then he pointed towards the bird section of the shop (which Ilya had been pointedly avoiding; he didn’t want to make any more enemies) because there was a birdfeeder there shaped like a little house with a blue door, and it reminded him of Shane’s house.

Shane was easily convinced to buy it, though he told Ilya, his voice lowered, “I used to have one when I first moved in but, um, Blackberry used to climb the tree and, well—”

“She ate the birds?” Ilya whispered, glee bubbling up in his chest. Shane grimaced, but nodded.

“Yeah. It was carnage.”

“Is why she get so fat?”

“She didn’t—she’s not fat! And it didn’t seem nice to keep it out there and keep luring them for her to just—you know, so—I gave it back to my dad.”

“But now bird killer is inside, so is safe for birds,” Ilya said with a firm, decisive nod. He started guiding Shane towards the checkout. He thought the birdfeeder would look good hanging out on his own balcony, too, and of course in the hypothetical house in hypothetical Brookline. It fit there like Shane would.

“Fine. Let’s go, then.”

They paid for the new harness, the birdfeeder, and a half dozen new cat toys Ilya insisted Blackberry absolutely needed. When the counter girl told them to have a nice day in English, Ilya responded in stone-faced, angry-sounding Russian, though he only said “Same to you too.” Shane elbowed him and called him a weirdo, but when they were outside he asked if Ilya wanted ice cream, so it felt to Ilya like he’d done something good if he was getting such a reward.

“This place only has soft serve vanilla—” Shane started as they walked down the block. Ilya interrupted with a long groan.

“Of course this is ice cream you like. Is there cone, or do we eat from lettuce cups?”

“—but you can get it dipped in any hard-shell flavor you want,” Shane finished with a look. “They have a ton of flavors, and they’ll put a bunch of toppings on the shell, too. And yes, there are cones, lettuce cups would be gross.”

Ilya perked up at that and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. Above them, the sky was gray and thick, which Shane said was the promised rain about to start any minute now. That meant more mosquitoes, apparently—he’d chastised Ilya for wearing shorts and forgoing the bug spray again, and Ilya had ignored him. Despite the weather and any potential bug bites, Ilya happily sat outside the shop with Shane, destroying a caramel-dipped ice cream cone smothered in M&Ms.

Shane seemed happy with his chocolate-dipped cup with almonds on it, and he told Ilya he didn’t like cones because he hated the sticky feeling of the ice cream melting onto his hand. Ilya, whose hand was covered in ice cream and M&Ms, could not relate, and he only regretted that they were outside because he thought, in the privacy of Shane’s house, he might be able to get him to lick his fingers clean.

They finished their ice cream and started walking back to the car. Even after these days together, sharing the space they had, this felt sweet and somewhat momentous. It felt, to Ilya’s shock, like a date, though he rushed the word from his mind immediately and tried to banish it from his vocabulary.

This was made somewhat difficult when, once they were back in the car, Shane said, “Hey, you know, if you get a dog, or a cat or whatever—”

“Guinea pig?” Ilya asked, starting up the terrible Kia.

“—yeah, whatever. You could leave it with me in the summers, you know? It’s a quicker flight than all the way to Moscow, and we could introduce them to Blackberry to make sure they get along.”

Ilya, perhaps for the first time in his life, kept his eyes singularly on the road and gripped the steering wheel very, very tight as he pulled away from the curb. “You mean if you come to Boston?”

“Yeah,” Shane said, which was thrilling enough, but then he added, “Or even if I—if I don’t. If Montreal matches. You could still come up for a few days, you know, with the—the dog or the cat or the fucking guinea pig, and we could hang out like this, and then you go home and I’d—I’d make sure the guinea pig was safe from birds, you know.”

“I know,” Ilya said. His throat felt tight.

“I wouldn’t mind. It’s been—it’s been good, right? These past few days?” Shane let out a long, slow breath, as if he’d just climbed a mountain. Ilya understood it perfectly. “Right?”

Ilya had to take a moment to reply, only to make sure his voice didn’t break when he spoke again. He could barely stand Shane’s nervous glances, like there was a possibility Ilya didn’t agree, as if he regretted coming here. As if he ever could.

“Right,” Ilya said.

“Right. So—so you should get a pet, and I’ll help in the summers. Whether I’m in Boston already, or you just come visit me—we can just plan that.” Shane still sounded nervous, but his voice firmed up as he spoke, like he was making a real plan in real time. Ilya finally looked at him and realized, a bit helplessly, that he’d follow whatever plan Shane wanted, and he nodded.

“Yes, okay. When I come back from Moscow, then yes. I will get dog.”

“Cool,” Shane said, and he smiled at Ilya. Ilya couldn’t help smiling back.

Shane’s smile didn’t drop until they passed a Tim Hortons and Ilya started pulling into the drive thru. “I need Iced Capp,” he told Shane, who flinched like Ilya had slapped him, his face twisting.

“What? Ew, Ilya—that’s toxic. And we have coffee at home! Do you know how much sugar is in that?”

“I don’t care! I like it.”

“We just had ice cream! You might as well stick your tongue in an actual sugar bowl, it’s the same effect.”

“That’s for later, dessert,” Ilya said, just to make Shane cringe again.

He ordered his Iced Capp, and Shane graciously shut his mouth so as not to slander his nation’s most famous coffee chain in earshot of the drive thru worker. Ilya asked him if he wanted any Timbits, and Shane just pressed his lips together and shook his head. So Ilya ordered a box of Timbits.

There was a cartoon version of Shane on the Timbits box, and Ilya all but doubled over laughing when he got it; Shane put his face in his hands. “You’re the fucking worst,” Shane told him, but Ilya could hear the laughter in his voice. He was getting worse and worse at hiding it from Ilya. Ilya took a picture of the cartoon Shane with his phone and promised to make it his lockscreen, and though Shane wrestled with him to grab his phone and delete the picture, Ilya managed to hold him off by saying he needed to drive and shoving his phone in his pocket.

Shane looked like he was seriously considering going for the phone in Ilya’s pocket anyway, and Ilya kind of wanted him to, safety be damned. Instead, he cheerfully offered Shane a Timbit, which he declined with a sullen, “No.”

When they parked on Shane’s street, the sky rumbled ominously, but Ilya still took his time undoing his seatbelt, munching on Timbits, sucking obnoxiously at his Iced Capp while Shane shook his head at him.

“You sure you don’t want?” Ilya asked, shaking the adorable little box with adorable little cartoon Shane on it, standing proud with a hockey stick in blue and red. He even had cartoon freckles. Ilya was never throwing this box away.

“I’m sure,” Shane said, and then he whispered, “Can I tell you a secret?”

Ilya dropped his hand from the driver’s door handle as if it had burned him and turned to face Shane fully. “Yes, of course.”

“Do you promise not to tell anyone, ever? Like, swear you’ll take it to your grave?”

“I swear, Shane,” Ilya said. He put the Timbits down to put his hand over his heart, though he was actually a little worried. Was Shane about to come out to him? Had they reached enough comfort with each other this week to get to that point? There was something exhilarating about that, that Shane felt safe enough with Ilya to do that, but he also couldn’t help thinking that Shane’s faith in him might be misplaced. He had no idea how to have a conversation like this.

Shane nodded, and looked like he was psyching himself up. Ilya leaned over a little and waited until Shane met his eyes, reluctantly.

“Okay. As long as you promise—”

“I do, Shane.” He wanted to reach out and cup Shane’s face in his hand, and he might have if they were in the house and he didn’t think he might get slapped doing it where someone could see them.

“Right. So—and you can’t tell anyone—”

“I said already—”

“I like Munchkins better than Timbits,” Shane told him all in a rush.

Ilya was quiet for a moment as his brain worked very hard to translate that. At first, he was certain he’d gotten it wrong. And then it did register, as did Shane’s grave face and the way he was biting his bottom lip a little, like he truly believed he’d just said something destructively treasonous—and, of course, he had.

So Ilya started laughing. This time he did double over, collapsed on the steering wheel. There were actual tears in his eyes, helped by the fact that he could hear Shane laughing, too, though he was also sputtering, “Stop it, hey, it’s not that funny!”

“Is funniest thing I ever heard,” Ilya said, breathless and weak from laughter. “Oh my god, Shane. Captain Canada—”

“Stop! It’s not—it’s not even that bad, okay, it’s not like I have Munchkins all the time, but—”

“—you are literally on the fucking box!” Ilya cried out, holding it up to show cartoon, freckled Shane. He burst out laughing again. “Oh, this is best day of my life.”

“Shut up, okay, just—the only halfway good one at Tim’s is the sour cream glazed, and it’s not that good—god, stop laughing—”

“I cannot!” Ilya wheezed. “Oh my god, you see, you must come to Boston, you are made for Dunks—” He broke off into laughter but also imagined a little cartoon Shane on the Dunkin Munchkins box. Freckled Shane in black and gold, and maybe there could be a little cartoon Ilya, too, wearing the same colors. It felt right, meant to be—how could there be any other outcome to all this, Ilya wondered, but Shane going to Boston?

At that moment, the sky opened up and rain start falling down in sheets, splattering the closed sunroof and fogging up the windshield. Shane said, “Damn it, I shouldn’t have said anything, now we’re going to be stuck in—” and then cut himself off abruptly as a buzzing sounded through the car.

The remnants of Ilya’s laughter cut off, too, dying in his chest. He stared at Shane’s phone, though he didn’t need to; he knew that there was only one person it could be, only one other person Shane was taking calls from—

“It’s Farah,” Shane said, his voice flat with what Ilya now understood to be anxiety. He stared at his phone, too, clenching it tight in his hand.

Ilya wanted to grab the phone and throw it out the window, into the rain. He wanted to block Farah’s number. He seriously considered starting the Kia up again and just hitting the gas, driving west forever until Shane was too far away from Montreal to consider playing for the Metros. They could start a new life in Alaska, Ilya thought, and then he realized they couldn’t do that because they couldn’t leave Blackberry behind.

And so there was nothing for Shane to do except take a breath and answer his phone. Ilya sat, still and aching, as Shane croaked out, “Uh, hey, Farah. What’s up?”

Farah spoke, but Ilya didn’t try to make it out this time. He didn’t want to know. He tried not to watch, either, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Shane slump a little in his seat and he didn’t know what that meant. Was it relief? What was he relieved about?

“Okay,” Shane said, giving absolutely no indication either way. He stared straight ahead at the windshield, blurred over with raindrops because Ilya had shut the car off before it started raining. “Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s—I get it.” He made a face, then, and squeezed the upper bridge of his nose between his fingers, and added, “Actually, no, I fucking don’t get it, but—sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s whatever.”

Farah spoke again; whatever she was saying, her tone was urgent. Shane gave her mumbled answers, like he was merely proving he was listening, but he seemed checked out until he heard something that made him say, “Jesus Christ—I’m really sorry. I’ll tell her to stop, I swear.”

A pause, and Shane ducked his head. “I know. I will, eventually, I just—yeah. I know. Okay. Thanks for the heads up, Farah.” He ended the call and dropped his phone into his lap, running his fingers through his hair.

Ilya was afraid to ask. He was drumming up the courage, his heart pounding, when Shane said, “No change. Farah touched based with Montreal a little while ago to take the temperature and they’re still looking at their options, apparently.”

“Fuck them,” Ilya said immediately. He felt faint with relief and his heart beat faster, a helpless bird just as afraid of him as he was of it. “I hope they don’t match, Shane. You deserve better.”

“You really want—you want me to play with you?” Shane asked, his voice shaky. “You want me in Boston?”

“Yes,” Ilya told him, before he could think any better of it; before he could protect himself from it. It was as painful to admit to Shane as it had been to admit to Marly—actually, no, it was much more painful to admit to Shane, more terrifying. It was pure fantasy, then, not something he believed in, full of holes and things he didn’t know, couldn’t know. Now it felt so much more real, something they were really close to. It had been the broadest outline of a want he’d spent these past days filling in and now it burst through his mind in bright, vivid color, a future they could really, really live.

And while he was being brave, Ilya swallowed hard and forced out, “What do you want?” It was the first time he’d asked, outright. He had no true idea what Shane’s answer would be, but in the moment he really, really wanted to know.

Shane had signed the offer sheet. That had to mean—

“I don’t know,” Shane said. He sounded utterly heartbroken, and Ilya tried to understand, tried to hear anything but his own hurt rushing through his ears. It was nearly impossible. “I—every time I think I do, I feel like I’m rooting for something, I get mad again, or I get sad, or—fucking, whatever. I can’t control it, you know? The whole thing is literally in Deslauriers’ hands. My entire fucking life is in that fuck’s hands, and I can’t—I don’t know how to want things I can’t control.”

It wasn’t anything surprising. Ilya made himself nod, unclenched his hands from the steering wheel; they’d started to hurt from how hard he was holding it. He didn’t even remember grabbing it.

“Okay,” he said, with a slow nod. “Is okay. We should—”

“I’m just really fucking glad you’re here,” Shane told him. And there was relief, shining in Shane’s wide eyes, staring into Ilya’s. It seemed to pour into Ilya, soothing some of the ache of the want that Shane was right about—there was nothing either of them could do about the offer sheet. The outcome would happen and they would deal with it, for better or worse. Probably for worse.

“Me too,” Ilya said. And then, “Come on, let’s go,” because he needed to kiss Shane, and that needed to happen inside, and sprinting through the downpour was worth it for that.

Chapter 7: Day Six

Chapter Notes

Day Six – 10 July, 2013

The rain lasted into the next day, ebbing and flowing in force but leaving a consistent blanket of water over the city. Shane led Ilya into the upstairs sunroom at midmorning when the harder rain surged in again, and they sat on the loveseat together and listened to drops trickle through tree leaves and tap hard at the glass. Blackberry chirped at them and then curled up in the near armchair, grateful that the rain kept more harness training away. Shane lit a lamp, swished a blanket over them both, pulled some hockey autobiography out of nowhere, and squinted at it for a little while until Ilya, scrolling mindlessly on his phone, called him out.

“You need glasses.”

“No,” Shane said immediately, though he pinched at the bridge of his nose again and flung the book down like it was hurting him—because, Ilya surmised, it was. “I’m fine. I’m just a bad reader.”

“Yes, because you need glasses to read,” Ilya said, very reasonably. Shane glared at him. “Is not a big deal. I think you would look very cute with glasses.”

“I don’t want to look cute,” Shane said, close to whining. Now that he’d given up on reading, he shifted restlessly, moving across the loveseat. There really wasn’t much space for him to go and for how long it took Ilya to realize what he was doing, he might’ve been subtle—but no, Ilya just couldn’t quite believe it until it was happening, and Shane was shoving over on the loveseat until there was no room between them. He flopped over onto Ilya’s side and Ilya’s arm moved around him instinctively, holding him tight.

“I’m a hockey player,” Shane informed him. His hair was all fluffed up from the blanket and his nose was scrunched and he was in Ilya’s arms. The rest of the world lay beyond a curtain of rain, and as far as Ilya was concerned, they were the only two people on Earth. And Shane Hollander was cute.

“Too bad,” Ilya said. “You are cute hockey player. They exist.”

“Yeah? Name one.”

“Shane Hollander.” Shane laughed and Ilya felt it run through him. Shane was warm where he was flopped over, and the skin of his upper arm was soft when Ilya stroked at it, cautious but still instinctive. Shane let him do it, relaxed into it, and looked out at the rain through the trees. He started petting over Ilya’s arm, too, where it was slung around him, which was especially nice because Ilya had no less than five new mosquito bites on it, not even counting the massacre that had happened on his legs. Shane had noticed him scratching again last night and laughed at him, called it an unforced error, and told him, “Dude, just use the fucking bug spray.”

He also rubbed the itch cream on Ilya’s legs, then sucked him off like that was all part of the process.

“I missed these,” Shane mumbled in the sunroom, quiet in the rain. He pet at Ilya’s arm, like he’d done when he was half-asleep a few nights ago. Ilya wondered if a nap was in their very near future and wouldn’t complain. He was warm and comfortable, exactly where he wanted to be.

He could stay here, Ilya thought, and he realized that here meant Montreal. His thoughts spun out into one of those persistent fantasies again, except this time there was blue and red instead of black and gold, and he spoke terrible, broken French to reporters who loved him anyway. They took Blackberry on walks around the park where they went on runs together; they updated the bird townhouse, maybe, so it was a little more them, but they kept the gay cardinals. They ate ice cream dipped in all sorts of flavors and they smuggled Munchkins in over the border. They saved Trader Joe’s for rare trips to Vermont, the better to protect Shane’s virtue.

It was ridiculous, of course. Ilya was signed with Boston for five more years, and he’d never been in a position where an offer sheet was even an option; he never would be. But lying there with Shane on top of him, the rain falling softly around them, where the world was quiet and warm, Ilya knew then that he would’ve signed an offer sheet that put him in Montreal. If one was presented to him tomorrow, he’d sign it without question.

GM Fitzy would probably shoot his own dick off before he ever traded Ilya on purpose. He knew that too. So this was pure fantasy, but it still felt sure and good to know about himself. Scary, too, but it was something he could hold between them, safe in its impossibility.

Ilya wanted to lie in these thoughts, drift off to sleep in them; he thought Shane was already close to sleep, his breathing slow and even. And maybe they would’ve just stayed there, napped, not gotten up until they got hungry or Blackberry screamed for attention, and maybe that would’ve been okay.

That didn’t happen, though. What happened was that, downstairs, Shane’s front door opened. Two people entered the bird townhouse, shaking out umbrellas in the mudroom and slipping off rainboots. And then one of the people called up, “Shane? Are you here? I saw your car!” and Shane sat up so fast and hard that he knocked the top of his head into Ilya’s chin.

“Fuck!” Shane said, hand flying up to his head. Ilya repeated the sentiment in Russian, rubbing at his chin, but he barely had time to whine about it because Shane was scrambling off the loveseat and pacing around.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, already breathless with panic. “That’s my mom. My parents are here. Ilya! My parents came!”

“I heard you,” Ilya groaned. “You need to get better security, Shane. At least they come through door and not window.”

“They have a key, but I didn’t think—oh god, what do we do? They’re here!”

“They are downstairs,” Ilya said, slowly and gently. “Is okay. I stay up here, hide in bedroom, you go downstairs and talk to them—”

“I don’t want to talk to them,” Shane said, his hands going into his hair to grab at those messy tufts Ilya had just moments ago found so cute. He wanted to pull Shane’s hands away, but he also didn’t want to touch Shane and upset him more.

“They are your parents,” Ilya told him. “They probably worry. I know you fight with your mother—”

“I told her we could talk when all of this was over.” Shane flinched as one of his parents called up again—his father, this time, gentler and calling him ‘buddy’, saying they just wanted to check on him. “We come in peace!” he called up, and Shane put his face in his hands. “When Montreal matched or—or not. Of course she didn’t listen. She’s been harassing Farah, too. Fuck. This is all so fucked.”

Ilya really could not agree. This was the dead mother deficit acting up, he was certain, with a touch of the horrible father deficit, too—the Hollanders seemed like loving, concerned parents who just wanted to take care of their son. Shane’s freakout didn’t make sense to him.

He had enough social grace to know that wouldn’t be helpful, though. So he tried to be comforting instead, hoping he didn’t seem as awkward about it as he felt.

“Is okay, Shane, is just your family. You fight, you make up, you fight again—I think they know is a hard time for you right now.”

“My mom doesn’t get it,” Shane said immediately. Ilya didn’t entirely believe that, but he kept his expression neutral. “She thinks—she wants—”

“Shane!” came the voice up the stairs, sharp and firm. There was a whisper, too, some hushed chastisement; that was Shane’s father, then, trying to reel his mother in. This was already so much better than Ilya’s family would’ve been that it was really difficult to find sympathy. “Are you here? We’ll be in the kitchen, whenever you’d like to join us!” Shane’s mother called up; though the words made it sound like it was up to Shane, the tone offered little in the way of choice. Shane had to go downstairs.

“Just go,” Ilya said as Shane groaned again and shut his eyes. He got up and risked putting his hands on Shane’s shoulders, cupping and rubbing at them; he still felt warm from when he’d been snuggled on top of Ilya, and Ilya could only wish they were back there, could only hope they would get back there. “I will stay in bedroom, close door—”

“No,” Shane said, and Ilya had to bite down on his lip to keep from snapping at him. But then Shane added, “No, I mean—you should come with me.”

That made very little sense to Ilya—and he did not want to get into the middle of a mother-son brawl, not when he wasn’t sure he could even side with Shane—and he conveyed that with a very unimpressed look.

Shane sighed and said, “Maybe if she’s mad about you, she’ll leave me alone about the offer sheet,” and then it made more sense. So Ilya was to be the sacrificial lamb. It was disappointing, but at least it was a role he was used to.

“Okay,” he said slowly. He did imagine his presence would only make the potential offer sheet conversation worse, but maybe Shane wanted to blame it on him. Ilya could handle that.

“Really?” Shane asked, his voice faint with relief. Ilya just nodded and squeezed his shoulders.

“Come on. Let’s go.”

He let Shane lead the way, down the stairs and through the hallway into the kitchen. Without sunlight filling it, there was only the ceiling light to brighten it up, and it seemed like a far less cheery room, very foreboding. It didn’t feel like the place where Ilya heckled Shane about juice or watched him hand-crank his coffee.

Still, they marched in, where Shane’s parents were using the least complicated Breville machine Shane owned to make coffee.

“Hey,” said Shane as he walked in first. His parents looked up from their respective tasks—his mother pouring water into the tank, his father collecting two mugs, one of which was the moose mug that Ilya liked—with greetings on their lips, and then they both saw Ilya and froze, mouths dropped open.

“Hey,” Ilya echoed from behind Shane, with a little wave. He tried to move in front of Shane, to be in better yelling at range—wasn’t that the point of being a sacrificial lamb?—but Shane stayed planted where he was in front of Ilya, and elbowed him gently to keep him still.

Shane’s father was the first to break the silence. “Hey, buddy,” he said, and then he nodded at Ilya. “Uh, hello. I don’t think we’ve met before; I’m David.”

Ilya nodded back. “Hello, David. I am Ilya.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Ilya.”

“Yes, you too.”

“What the hell is this, Shane?” Shane’s mother cut in, putting the water pitcher down just before the coffee machine tank overflowed. Silently, David Hollander took over the coffee making, winking at them quickly behind his wife’s back, setting the coffee to brew and then grabbing two more mugs off the wall.

Shane’s mother stepped forward with her arms crossed over her chest. “What is he doing here?”

“Don’t be rude, Mom, come on,” Shane said; Ilya was a little surprised but tried not to show it. “Ilya’s here because—”

“Is he the reason you did this?”

Ilya started nodding, ready to absorb the rest of her wrath, but he stopped, shocked, when Shane said, “No. I already told you why I did this, you just didn’t listen.”

“You cannot seriously expect me to believe you care about money that much, Shane. I’ve been handling your finances for years now, and we both know you’re doing very well. Are you—is this seriously—what is this?” Shane’s mother threw her hands up in Ilya’s direction, her eyes flashing with anger.

“Yuna,” David said. Ilya could practically feel Shane’s temper rising to match his mother’s. “We said we weren’t coming here to fight, okay, so why don’t we—”

“That was before Shane showed up here with Ilya Rozanov,” Yuna said, hands on her hips now. She seemed determined to hit every disappointed mother pose she could, and Ilya tried not to shrink before her.

Instead, he said, “Hi,” and gave another wave.

“I didn’t show up here,” Shane said. “This is my house. And Ilya was here before you, so—you’re the ones who just showed up here! I told you I wanted space, I wanted to wait this thing out and then talk to you, but you didn’t listen! Again!”

“You have been ignoring my calls—”

“Because I said—”

“—and it’s been six days and Montreal hasn’t—”

“—which is not my fault, I acted well within my rights, they’re the ones who—”

“—you seem to have zero consideration for the reputation we’ve helped you build, the relationship with Montreal we’ve cultivated—”

“—because maybe I’m owed some fucking consideration first!” Shane shouted, making them all jump, including Ilya. David stopped fiddling with the coffee machine and came to stand next to Yuna, eyes rapt on his son. His hands twitched at his sides, which made Ilya tense up, and he moved to get between them when David stepped forward—but David just side-stepped him and pulled Shane into a hug. The hug put Shane in a position for Ilya to see there were tears in his eyes, before he sniffed and buried his face in his father’s neck.

“I’m sorry for yelling,” Shane croaked, sniffing again. “I just—”

“Hey, it’s all right,” David said, rubbing Shane’s back. “You’re okay.”

“I’m not. But—but I will be if I can win this. I think that’s the only way I’ll be okay.”

“Shane,” Yuna said, though some of the anger was drained from her voice; she sounded tired, instead. “I just think—”

“I know, Mom. I know how you wanted me to do this. Just—don’t make waves, don’t push the envelope, don’t be difficult. Be humble and gracious and—and it’s not just me, right? It’s everyone who looks like me, too.”

Ilya, who had been trying to figure out what the fuck waves and envelopes had anything to do with this, went very still. His first thought, which he would be ashamed of later, was that Shane meant people who were beautiful. And then he looked at Shane, and looked at Yuna, whose eyes had gone teary and tortured and—

And he was an idiot, Ilya decided. He’d been an idiot this whole time.

Shane pulled out of his father’s embrace slightly, gave a firm sniff, and looked at his mother.

“If I don’t stand up for myself, if I don’t win this,” he said. “Then yeah, everyone who looks like me will know there’s no chance. No matter how good you are, even if you’re the best player in the league—” Shane shot a look at Ilya, who promptly shut his mouth, fully aware this was not the time. “—as long as you’re not white, you’re worth less. And I’m sorry, Mom, but fuck that.”

Yuna closed her eyes for a moment. And then she was across the room in an instant, hugging Shane, too, and telling him, “You’re right. I’m sorry, you’re—fuck that. Fuck them, if they don’t—if those assholes—”

David rejoined the hug. Ilya stood there, watching the Hollanders hold each other, until David peeked out from the huddle and gestured at Ilya.

“No, is okay,” Ilya said, because he couldn’t imagine anything more awkward. He did not know two out of three of these people. But David clucked, grabbed Ilya’s wrist, and pulled him in, so he awkwardly stretched his arms out to hug as many Hollanders as he could, concentrating on Shane—he would’ve liked to hug Shane anyway, he thought. He felt like Pike, far too Muppet-like, and stood there hugging this family he didn’t really know all that well. He thought about how he had basically zero practice in family hugs and hoped this was the right way to do it.

Eventually, Yuna Hollander saved him by looking up, realizing Ilya Rozanov partially held her in a very loose embrace, and jumped away a little. Ilya nodded because that was fair enough. She cleared her throat, wiped at her teary face, and said, “Okay. It’s okay, Shane. I’m sorry. But—you’re going to have to explain this,” and she gestured at Ilya again, clearly asking why the fuck Ilya Rozanov had just hugged her.

Shane moved out of the hug and looked at his mother dead on again. Though his words were soft and still a little wet, he looked just as determined as he had a moment ago, and said, “Mom, you have to stop talking to Ilya like that. He’s a person, and he’s—he’s been here with me through this whole thing. Introduce yourself like a normal human being.”

“Easy, Shane,” David said, and Ilya wondered how many fights like this he’d been in the middle of. He remembered being in the middle of many fights between Alexei and Papa, his duty as the nominal favorite son—which was sort of like being his father’s favorite canker sore, maybe—trying to broker some semblance of peace. Peace was, of course, a relative term in their house; it meant retreating to separate corners after shouting, banging things, berating each other, then icing each other out. There was no forgiveness—that was weakness—only the passage of time, pretending to have short memories until the next fight started.

Peace for the Hollanders, though, meant Yuna taking a deep, grounding breath and looking at Ilya. She was all Shane in that moment, twitchy and annoyed, her smile a little icy, nearly identical to Shane in their draft photo; she may as well have been holding up two fingers.

“Hello, Rozanov,” Yuna said.

“Ilya,” Shane said. Ilya wondered if he was a secret genius, if he’d known bringing Ilya down here would mean this—getting his mother to lose ground for the sake of politeness.

Yuna sighed deeply, then said, “Ilya. I’m Yuna Hollander. It’s—it’s good to meet you.”

Ilya beamed at her, and from the corner of his eye, he could see Shane smiling, too.

Peace eventually meant sitting down around the kitchen table with mugs of coffee in hand. Shane passed Ilya his moose mug, complained that the coffee wouldn’t be as good as his, and poured creamer in his own devil bird mug. Ilya helped himself to raw sugar and took careful sips, but realized Shane was right—it wasn’t as good as Shane’s coffee. He realized, with some despair, that it was possible he would never again drink coffee as good as Shane’s.

Shane watched him carefully, and at first Ilya thought he was looking for signs of discomfort or worry about sticking around Shane’s parents—but no, he realized, he was trying to gauge how Ilya liked the coffee, the fucking dork. Ilya took a long, enthusiastic gulp, smacked his lips and said, “This is best coffee I have had ever.”

“You liar,” Shane said immediately, and he kicked Ilya under the table. Ilya kicked him back, of course. Shane tried to pinch him in the ribs and Ilya dodged it, slapped his hand away, dangerously jostling his moose mug—until Yuna Hollander cleared her throat loudly and pierced them with a look over the top of her coffee mug—which had, naturally, a beaver on it. David, unabashedly smiling at them, sipped from a mug with an orca whale on it. Ilya sat primly, then, with a polite, angelic smile, ignoring Shane’s grouchy muttering, and enjoyed being part of a matched set.

“So,” Yuna said eventually. Shane stopped sulking and instead looked to go on high alert again, stiff and wary. Ilya bumped his leg against Shane’s, not a kick, just a tap, and kept it there, until he felt Shane’s leg slowly relax against his. He took an accomplished sip of coffee. “May we ask—”

“No,” Shane said, like a brat. Ilya had to hide a smile in his mug and noticed David doing the same across the table.

“You don’t even know what I want to ask about!” Yuna said.

“I can guess.”

“Shane,” David said, still smiling. “I think your mother and I are just rightfully curious about Ilya here. You have to admit this seems—sudden.”

Shane, who had initially wanted his parents to yell at him about Ilya, froze up a bit. Ilya knew all about freezing up in front of your parents, though the situations couldn’t be more different, and tried to channel his inner Alexei, ugh, for the first time in recent memory. Alexei was completely incapable of shutting his mouth in front of their father, or in general.

“We are friends,” Ilya said, comforting himself with the party line, though he was well aware he was speaking to two people with at least five times the mental capacity of Hayden Pike, with no guarantees they would buy this. At least there wasn’t any lube in sight. “I see about offer sheet, check to see if Shane is okay or freaking out or what, because it seems so crazy. He seems a little, ah—”

“I was fine,” Shane cut in. He crossed his arms over his chest. Ilya tried not to beam at him, and forced himself to keep going.

“—little bit freaked out, maybe, so I said hey Shane, maybe I come visit before I go to Moscow? And Shane says okay. So I come.” That seemed like a very nice, parent-friendly version of events. David seemed endeared by it, at least, nodding in appreciation.

Yuna knew he was full of shit, though, that was clear. “I see. Shane, Hayden mentioned you weren’t taking his calls—”

“Hayden’s a rat; why do you guys talk to each other?” Shane said with a groan.

“Because he’s a nice young man!” Ilya choked a little on his coffee and immediately drew Yuna’s eye. “Oh? Do you disagree, Roza—”

“Ilya,” Shane said. Ilya wanted to tell him to stop defending him, that it was okay—he had absolutely zero expectations of leaving this conversation with a fan named Yuna Hollander. But he was also very inwardly pleased that Shane was defending him. It made him feel warm and cared for, which was so odd that, like most of his feelings for Shane, he didn’t really know what to do with it.

So he ignored it and powered ahead. “No, no, Pike is—is nice. Family man, yes? Though he is tomato killer, I hear.”

“Oh, god, we don’t have to get into that,” Shane said, putting his face in his hands.

“Did something happen to Marie-Louise’s tomatoes?” David asked, as gravely concerned as Shane had been. The bird townhouse made so much sense now, having met him.

“They’re mostly okay, but Hayden’s not allowed any of her sauce this year.”

“Wow. That’s a harsh punishment,” David said.

“Is deserved,” Ilya said firmly.

“I just don’t think I can understand why you wouldn’t talk to Hayden, but you were willing to talk to—Ilya,” Yuna forced out, grasping for control of the conversation again with what seemed like a well-practiced hand. “Hayden is your best friend.”

“Hayden is on the Metros,” Shane said, his shoulders hunched. “I thought he’d be, you know, mad at me about the offer sheet.” He gave his mother a pointed look, so everyone heard the unspoken like you were. Yuna managed to look slightly chastised, but only for a moment.

“Still, I can’t quite wrap my head around this—friendship.” Yeah, Yuna knew they were both full of shit. Ilya still tried, though he felt it might be a lost cause.

“Okay, but I think, you know, maybe Shane is new teammate, wants to hear from maybe new captain,” Ilya said. Yuna made a face when he said ‘captain’ and Ilya tamped down on a smirk. “Maybe better to see new teammate than old teammate you are maybe leaving, right?” he directed at Shane, trying to help him along.

Shane nodded, catching Ilya’s life preserver. “Yeah, exactly. I figured if anyone, Ilya wouldn’t be mad at me. I know he’s an asshole, but he texted me that, um, it would be so cool to play together—” That was not what Ilya texted, but he kept a firm hold on his smirk. “—so I thought it would be good of him to come. Um, to come here.” Shane had slowly turned red over the course of this explanation. He looked so fucking guilty—he looked like his parents had walked in on them fucking, like they had incontrovertible proof that this was something wrong. Yuna’s interrogation wasn’t helping, but once again Ilya had to wonder what Shane’s parents believed they knew about Shane that would leap to the less obvious conclusion than a simple cross-team friendship.

Dagenais thought the fucking made more sense, too. At a certain point, Ilya should maybe examine why no one could believe that he and Shane could possibly be friends; it was a little insulting. And it was unfair because they were friends, now, even if they were also having sex. He felt oddly protective of that fact, and would go on arguing for it if he had to.

The Hollanders clearly weren’t satisfied with this explanation, anyway. Yuna still looked like she was on the warpath a bit and Ilya knew she was protective, too. David was zeroed in on Shane, though, as Ilya realized he had been almost the entire time they were there.

Slowly, carefully, David said, “Shane, you know, you can tell us anything. If there’s something more to this visit with Ilya, we would—”

“There’s not,” Shane said shortly, stiffening up again.

“But if there was more to it,” Yuna said, picking up her husband’s lead. “You know that we would love you no matter what. I can’t say I understand your choice in partner—”

“He’s not my partner!” Shane barked out. And then, probably ruining it: “And stop talking about him like that!”

“Is okay, Shane,” Ilya murmured, reaching to pat at Shane’s hand. Shane ripped his hand away and Ilya ignored his responding hurt. Shane was practically vibrating out of his skin.

“I’m sorry,” Yuna said. She looked at both of them until Ilya nodded, and then she looked right at Shane. “That was out of line. We’ll accept any of your choices, whoever makes you happy, no matter their—their team or their gender—”

“Mom, stop.”

“—really, in this case, the team is a greater concern than the gender—”

“I’m not gay!” Shane said through gritted teeth. The Hollanders looked taken aback a moment, then recovered and tried for soothing again. Ilya felt danger building, though, could sense Shane heading for either an outburst or a shutdown or both, and it was eerily reminiscent of the worst Alexei and Papa fights. He wanted to intervene, wanted the Hollanders to stop talking for the same reason he told Dagenais to shut his mouth about Shane’s sexuality.

But they kept going; Alexei and Papa never knew when to leave each other alone, either.

“We’re just saying,” David said, so, so gentle; Ilya was certain it was making things worse. He had to bite his tongue to keep from telling him to shut his mouth, too. “If you were—”

“Well, I’m not.”

“—it would be completely okay. Really.”

“We just want you to be happy, honey,” Yuna said, also gentle. “We’re here to support you in whatever you need. That means we support Ilya, too, and whatever your relationship with him is.”

She seemed proud of herself for that, and Ilya felt good about it, too, for a moment—it was a nice sentiment, if forced out and probably fake. But he didn’t feel too good, not with how it clearly upset Shane, who took a hard, slightly wet breath next to him.

“Shane,” Ilya started, not quite knowing what he was going to say, but just knowing he had to say something. He wasn’t fast enough, though.

“I’m not gay,” Shane repeated. And then, the devastating clincher: “I can’t—I—I can’t be gay!”

It landed like a blow across the Hollanders’ faces; Ilya could practically hear their hearts breaking, in tune with the sound of his own.

“Oh, Shane,” Yuna said, face creased around her worry. She reached across the table for Shane’s hand, trembling on it, and Shane whipped it away then, too. “Honey, no. Of course you can.”

“It’s not a matter of can or can’t, buddy,” David said. “It’s sort of a yes or no, and if it’s yes—”

“It can’t be yes, okay? It can’t be—I can’t have this—this other thing, this other reason people like Deslauriers can say the shit they say to me,” Shane said, shaking his head desperately. That put both Ilya and Yuna on high, protective alert—what did that fucker say—but David eased past it quickly, gentle as ever.

“I know, I know, but—even if you are, it’s not a legitimate reason for people to say—say whatever—”

“Which we will be returning to,” Yuna said incisively. Ilya agreed, but only until it set Shane off breaking their hearts again.

“No, I’m not—I can’t do this, okay? I can’t—if I’m gay, then everything people have always said about me is right,” Shane spit out. It sounded painful, which was nothing on how much it hurt to hear. Ilya tensed up, like he could fight someone in the room about it, but of course there was no one. He tried to relax, tried to turn towards Shane and just be there, channeling David Hollander as best he could.

“No, Shane—”

“Yes! Yes, all the—the dildos in my stall, the glitter in my gear, every time they stole my jock because I—I didn’t need it, I’m obviously the girl, what use have I got for—and when they held me down and made me suck—made me do—do that to a banana—all of it’s validated. They’re all right. So no, Mom, Dad, you might be okay with it but it’s not okay in the world we live in. So it can’t be true.”

Shane squeezed his eyes shut and took shaky breaths, then, slumping into his crossed arms. It was probably good he couldn’t see the looks of absolute horror and murder flashed across the other faces around the table.

Ilya felt like he’d been kicked in the chest. He thought of everything he’d heard about Shane Hollander, about the arithmetic everyone had done about his lack of girlfriends and hookups and what that added up to. He thought about every time he’d shut it down, how he’d never brought it up to Shane, protecting him as if he—what? Didn’t know? Could possibly have missed it? As if the worst of their sport hadn’t spent a lifetime rubbing his face in it, punishing him for it. They did things like that to kids they didn’t suspect of being gay; of course it all hit Shane more like accusations.

He realized that for all that he’d spent these last days learning Shane, his quirks and preferences and day-to-day life, he still hadn’t really known him until these moments.

Ilya tentatively put his hand on Shane’s back, feeling it shake beneath his touch, but it felt like a small victory not to be shrugged off. Ilya rubbed at it, still a little lost—he could tell the Hollanders were too, both with tears in their eyes.

Yuna was the first to recover. “Shane,” she said, in one of the scariest voices Ilya had ever heard—he suddenly longed for her to do a verbal round with Papa, because he suspected that Papa would get his shit rocked. “I need names, now, for the banana thing—”

Ilya managed to mouth me too at her, but he scrambled to shake his head in agreement when Shane picked his face up to bark out, “No. Way to miss the point, Mom. It was just junior.”

“It was not just anything, it was—it was assault!”

“Stop it. I’m not doing this. I don’t—I don’t want to talk about this anymore, okay? I’m embarrassed enough—” Have you ever been bullied? Shane had asked him, just days ago; it felt like years. One of the worst things when you’re getting bullied is telling other people what they said.

“Okay,” Ilya said, firm and resolute. “Is okay, Shane. Talk is over. I say this as maybe your new captain—”

“Fuck off,” Shane said with a sniff, but he was looking at Ilya and looked slightly less devastated. He looked relieved.

“No, no, is my decision. I say we talk about, hm—coffee. I want better coffee. You want to make? Or maybe we make juice—have not had new juice in over 14 hours, I think I am withdrawing, you know, like addict—”

“You’re such a dick,” Shane told him, but he gave another brave sniff, that heartbreaking look of relief, and said, “Can we make apple-carrot juice?”

That sounded disgusting. It was perfect. “Yes, of course, let’s do it—you will hold back my hair when I puke, yes?”

Shane shoved him, got shoved back, and almost looked like he was about to laugh—until he seemed to remember his parents and gulped nervously in their direction. “Do you guys want some juice?” he asked.

Yuna looked like the answer was no, like she wanted to keep this going; Ilya tried to give her his own bravest warning look, something to convey don’t you dare. He didn’t give a fuck if she hated him for it. But David got there first, speaking loudly when Yuna opened her mouth.

“I think we’d love that,” David said, and he nudged Yuna, who eventually, barely, forced out a shaky, “Yes. Fine.”

And so they got up to peel carrots and core apples. Ilya seeded some conversation about the juicer and eventually got Shane talking about it. His parents had probably heard it all, but David stood at his assigned cutting board and nodded along, fancy apple corer working enthusiastically. Ilya took peeling just as seriously—until he nicked himself and decided to stage a dramatic scene about it, telling Shane that he was dying, he would bleed out on this kitchen floor, never having tasted apple-carrot juice, until Shane finally laughed and stemmed the little cut with a paper towel.

“I’ll get a Band-Aid,” Yuna said, not quite comfortable in this strange peace; she’d been alternating between staring out the back window and sipping her coffee, her face tight.

Shane drooped a little when he looked at her, then took a big breath, squared his shoulders, and said, “I’ll show you where they are.”

They disappeared down the hall and Ilya tried not to worry. He clamped the paper towel around his finger, which had stopped bleeding, and watched them go.

“It’s okay,” David told him, which meant Ilya hadn’t been successful in stuffing down his worry, at least not enough to keep it off his face. “They have to talk some things out a bit. There are certain things Yuna just can’t leave alone, and Shane knows how to manage that. He’ll be fine.”

There was nothing for Ilya to say but, “Okay.” He couldn’t charge after them, as much as he wanted to. He listened carefully because something in him felt like he had to intervene, somehow, but then he felt David’s eyes on him and realized he might have a situation of his own to manage in this kitchen.

Ilya had never met anyone’s parents like this. That was boyfriend stuff, so it didn’t apply to him. He’d gotten a weird little shiver when Yuna called him Shane’s partner, sure, but that didn’t mean anything—they weren’t anything like that. And certainly there was no blueprint for how to talk to your rival cum fuckbuddy’s father like this; had anyone else in the history of the world ever been in this situation? Ilya felt like the answer was no.

Still, though, David was so nice and not scary, and he seemed curious about Ilya, open and kind. It was nothing Ilya was used to, but he found himself a bit greedy for it. So he thought about literally the only thing he knew about David and used it.

“I like the birds,” he told him, pointing at a hanging suncatcher on the window with colorful, etched out hummingbirds on it. David followed his finger and smiled.

“Oh, really? Yuna thought it was so silly, but I just—you know, we wanted Shane to live with a family here in Montreal, but he was worried that he was too famous for that and might cause problems for them. Yuna didn’t want him living alone downtown and he didn’t want her to move with him, so—this place was the compromise.”

“Is a nice house; I like it,” Ilya said honestly. “Feels like, ah, homey. Like grandmother’s house.”

“Yeah, it does! Which I know Shane wasn’t thrilled about, but—the neighbors are good, they leave him alone, the garden is nice, and the birds—well, when Shane was a kid, before he got too busy with hockey, I used to take him birding with me,” David told him, his voice lowered conspiratorially. Ilya felt a little thrill, the same thing he felt anytime he learned new Hollander lore, and this one felt particularly satisfying.

“Birding?” Ilya asked, because that didn’t really translate, but he was eager to know.

“Right, of course—birdwatching, rather. Looking for different birds to identify by sight, song, and so on. He loved it; he called birds ‘tweet-tweets’, and he’d point to just about anything that looked like a bird or lived in a tree. Got excited about a lot of squirrels, but that was okay. And he was so good at being quiet when he needed to be, too, and he was so—so gentle about it,” David said. His voice broke a little, and Ilya could understand that; his throat felt unexpectedly tight, too.

“I think it calmed him down a bit. He was pretty active as a kid, and then of course there was—there was hockey,” David continued, clearing his throat. “So much hockey. Birding was just for the two of us to be calm and quiet in nature, and to learn things—god, he loved learning things when he was that age. So I thought—when he moved in here, alone, and he was so young, too young, I—I wanted him to be surrounded by things that made him feel calm, and quiet, and gentle. I thought he might need that.”

This was where Shane had run to when he’d fought with his mother. It was where he hoarded coffee machines, filled his fridge with all the foods and juices he loved, sat in his birdhouse sunroom and listened to the rain. It was where he fiercely protected his housekeeper’s tomatoes and treated a cat, who he believed to be feral, like royalty. Ilya looked around at the pink countertops and the apple-leaf borders on the walls and breathed in the smells of fruit, veggies, and coffee.

“I think yes, he has that here,” Ilya said. “And I think it helps him. You are a good father.”

“Aw, I don’t know about that. There’s a lot I can’t protect Shane from, and I think I’ve accepted that better than Yuna, but I still try to do what I can,” David said. And he continued coring and cutting up apples for his son to make juice with, happy to be given a task. Ilya blinked and thought of an odd future—standing in this kitchen years from now, cooking with David while Shane and Yuna argued over setting the dining room table. The house would smell of good food and warmth and, on the fridge, there were Christmas cards—from Katie and Marly and a bunch of teammates, new and old. And the old ones were all in Boston because Ilya wasn’t there anymore. He was here in Montreal, not for a visit, but because he called it home, he played for the Metros, Deslauriers’ body had been dropped into the St. Lawrence and Ilya was Shane’s—he was Shane’s—

“It’s good that you’ve been here too, Ilya,” David told him, jolting him out of the fantasy. “Whatever it means, and you don’t have to explain it to us, but I think you’ve been good for Shane. And I’m very glad that he hasn’t been alone.”

Ilya shrugged, trying not to flush. He hunched his shoulders up to his ears and looked down at the carrots. “I want to try too, you know? Is the same as you, there is only so much I can protect him from.” There was so much he hadn’t even known to protect Shane from; it made him a little sick.

“I know. But you’re a good, ah, friend. Thank you.”

“Do not say this. I am not—”

“I feel better about the possibility of Shane going to Boston, having met you,” David said, with a hint of steel in his voice that Ilya hadn’t thought he could do. It felt like a monumental declaration, a shocking amount of approval that Ilya surely hadn’t earned—this man did not know him.

But before he could argue, Shane and Yuna came back in. To Ilya’s delight, Blackberry was with them, trotting in alongside Shane’s feet. She chirped happily at the room and gave Ilya’s legs a rub in greeting.

Yuna was, of course, giving Shane an earful about letting her inside, but Shane was grinning, like he’d much rather be having this fight with her than any other. And David laughed once he realized why Blackberry was inside; he bent down to pet her, approval radiating off him. He looked between Shane and Ilya with something like pride, a smile creasing his whole face.

Shane cleaned Ilya’s tiny nothing of a cut, then put a Band-Aid on it. Ilya bit his tongue to keep from asking him to kiss it better, but Shane looked at him like he heard it anyway. And they stayed there with Blackberry and the Hollanders, the rain and the world shut away from this kitchen for now, and made juice.

The Hollanders stayed through dinner, and though Shane made reluctant noises about inviting them to stay overnight, purely to be polite, they laughed gently and declined. The rain had mostly died down by then and a few clouds had parted for the start of a sunset, painting the sky outside of the windows a pale purple-gray. Yuna and David seemed ready to drive off into it, though they each hugged Shane extra hard.

“You’ll call me as soon as you hear anything tomorrow, okay?” Yuna said fiercely, and Ilya pretended he didn’t know what she meant because it made his stomach turn. “Even if—even if it’s that 5 pm has passed, and they haven’t—Montreal has declined—”

“I know, Mom,” Shane said. “It’s all right. I’ll let you know either way.”

“You’d better.”

While David took his turn hugging Shane, Yuna turned to Ilya and shuffled him off a bit, lowering her voice. “Shane stopped eating bananas for about six months in 2006, when he was just starting in Kingston,” she whispered to Ilya. “I can get the names on that Frontenacs team and do some digging for possible suspects. Are you interested in my findings?”

“Yes,” Ilya said firmly, perhaps irrationally, but there was something a little crazy in her eyes that encouraged him. Maybe everyone who knew and loved Shane Hollander was allowed to be a little crazy about him. Maybe it was okay.

They exchanged numbers on this basis, and then Yuna shook his hand. “If he goes to Boston—” Yuna started, and Ilya cut her off to reassure her.

“I will look out for him, I promise.”

“What? No, my son can look out for himself. But if he goes to Boston, you’d better get comfortable on the wing, mister.” She smiled at whatever appalled look Ilya had on his face and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Don’t worry; maybe you’ll win another Rocket with Shane setting you up—if he doesn’t win his first.”

Ilya gaped after her as she and David left, until Shane bumped into him and asked what his mother said. “She is terrifying woman,” Ilya told him, which only pleased Shane; his grin widened when Ilya added, “You are just like her too.” It was a compliment, and Shane took it as one.

They wound up retreating back to the upstairs sunroom, watching the sunset on their loveseat, Blackberry in a content, snoozing ball beside Shane’s hip. Shane leaned into Ilya again, no hesitation this time, and in return Ilya didn’t hesitate to hold him, guiding his head against Ilya’s chest, squeezing his bicep. They stayed there, staring out through the glass, still rippled and foggy with rain, so that it felt like they were suspended in midair, floating through the trees outside, with nothing else touching them.

Eventually, Shane said, “I’m sorry you had to, um, hear most of that. And that my mom was so mean to you.”

“No, Shane, is okay—I am glad I hear,” Ilya said immediately. He felt his own guilt surge as he was reminded of all he hadn’t known, hadn’t even considered. “I did not know, ah, what the real issue was with Montreal. I thought Deslauriers was just idiot.”

“Oh, he is,” Shane told him. “But he’s a racist idiot, so. That’s been shitty.”

“What did he say to you?” Ilya couldn’t help but ask, though he didn’t expect an answer, thinking about the bullying again.

So he was surprised when, after a few silent, thinking moments, Shane said, “It wasn’t like, slurs or anything. That’s not how it works with people like him, you know? He just said, um, that I should be grateful that Montreal cares so much about diversity to make me the face of the franchise, to commit to me. And if I wouldn’t sign at a fair price, he had to wonder if that commitment went both ways.”

“That fucker,” Ilya said, clenching his jaw. “He thinks he can guilt you, but he is the one who should be grateful.”

“Well, I kind of—I maybe said something like, you know, we had different ideas of a fair price, considering fans buy tickets to see me, not him,” Shane said. “It was really stupid, and it probably tanked the whole thing, but I was just so mad. That was the last time I ever spoke to him directly; Farah took over negotiations pretty fast after that, and she didn’t give an inch.”

Ilya squeezed Shane tight against him, proud of him, knowing what it would’ve cost him to lose it like that. Yuna was right, of course—Shane could look out for himself, and he had his agent to help, too.

Even knowing that, Ilya still couldn’t stop his next words. “I hope he doesn’t match, and you get away from him,” he said. “I hope you come to Boston. Will be better for you.”

Shane shifted against him and hummed. He didn’t say no, which was good, but he did say, “I don’t know. Even if I leave Montreal, sometimes it’s like, six of one, half dozen of another.”

“I do not know this,” Ilya admitted.

“Sorry. It’s just—there are no perfect teams, you know? It’s kind of everywhere, the racist stuff and the—the other stuff,” Shane said. He hid his face more fully in Ilya’s chest, his voice dropping. “There’s no one place in hockey where I can get away from it all; that’s just a fantasy. Boston could be bad, too.”

Ilya’s instinct was to protest, to say Boston wasn’t bad, and if it was, he would make it good. But he stopped and thought more carefully about what Shane was saying, because of course he was right. The Boston locker room was like any other; their chirps dug deep because they could back them up with their scrappy, rough play, and it was just ingrained in the culture. And who knew what management was really like to guys who didn’t look like Ilya? There were no Black players on his team, no Asian players—Fitzy had sent an offer sheet to an incredible hockey player because he needed a center. There was no way to know how he felt about Shane, rumored to be gay, one of very few Asians in the MLH.

“Even if the guys are mostly good, there could be one or two shitty ones, or assholes in management, or a coach who thinks I know better than him and should know my place,” Shane said, echoing Ilya’s thoughts. “It’s—it’s guys who think they know about me, and they’re pretty loud about it, and—they were good guys in Kingston, you know? We had a good team. They respected me eventually—I was their captain later on. It was okay there. It was just—hockey.”

Ilya swallowed hard. He felt helpless, useless. Hockey had always been his escape, his salvation—it was his ticket out of his bleak life in Russia. He’d never thought of it like this before, and now he knew he would never stop, as long as Shane was in his life.

“But you love it,” Ilya said, his voice thick. Because he knew that, too, like he knew the Earth was round and Russia had cold winters.

Shane nodded, small movements tucked against Ilya’s chest. “Well, yeah. Of course I do. It’s everything to me. But it still sucks sometimes. And it’s not—all I can do is just try to make my way, be the best I can be, carve out space for myself. Stand up to true, shameless assholes like Deslauriers.”

“Yes,” Ilya said, smiling sadly into Shane’s hair. He kissed the crown of his head and said, “You are making envelopes.”

“That’s not really—sort of, yeah. It’s just—if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”

Ilya sat with that, idly stroking down Shane’s arm. It was a bit hopeless, though Shane imbued it with determination, that steel he’d heard in the voices of both of his parents. It was bravery, Ilya thought, even if it was a type Ilya wanted to rail against, to declare unfair.

“I want to fix it,” Ilya whispered, a confession. A weakness, his father would say; they all knew he couldn’t.

Shane was quiet for another few moments. And then, as the sun slid down beneath the horizon, and the night began to drape around them, dark and close, Shane whispered back, “In Boston, um. There will be you. So it would be a little easier to stand it, I think.”

He sat up a little, finally looking at Ilya—who was blinking rapidly, furious with his own stinging eyes, the rush of relief and gladness and pure, fierce love overwhelming him a moment. Shane reached up, brave, and stroked his fingers over Ilya’s face.

“You make things easier. Better, you know?”

Ilya didn’t know how. No one had ever told him that before. But he believed Shane, felt it in the kiss Shane leaned up to press to his lips, soft and lingering. Ilya threw all he could into the kiss, pouring everything he felt at once into it, until all of it felt easier to carry shared evenly between them.

The kiss only broke when they were breathless, when Shane gasped and said, “Let’s go to bed.”

And instead of saying that he’d go with Shane anywhere—to bed, to hell, to Boston, Montreal, anywhere in between—Ilya pressed another kiss to his tipped-up mouth and said, “Okay.”

They shed their clothes between the closed bedroom door, the lamp on, the covers turned down. Ilya watched Shane raptly, sensing his anxiety; he tried to reach out to pull him close again and reassure him, but Shane twitched out of reach and then picked up that stupid beach towel with the muscle-armed sun and spread it over the sheets.

“I was thinking,” Shane said, still enough to let Ilya grab him again. Ilya kissed him before he could speak again, indulgent and sweet, because he was all soft, golden skin in the low light, a little frowny and tense, eminently kissable. It was satisfying to feel him relax into the kiss, to feel his hands grab back at Ilya, gently scratching up and down his back even though there weren’t any mosquito bites there.

Shane pulled away eventually with a determined little grumble, though he looked considerably dreamier when he met Ilya’s eyes again. Ilya smiled at him.

“Let me talk,” he complained. Ilya just kissed him again.

“Hm—no.”

“You’ll want to hear this,” Shane said, and he resorted to pressing kisses along Ilya’s jaw, tipping his head back with fingers in his curls to kiss at his neck. Ilya’s eyes drifted closed and he let Shane have at it, not sure he wanted to hear anything besides Shane’s satisfied little noises as he got to kiss wherever he liked.

And then Shane said, “I think you should fuck me,” and Ilya’s eyes flipped open.

“What?”

“I mean, if you want to,” Shane rushed to add, because he was a crazy person.

Ilya stared at him, dumbfounded, and then, when he felt some of the anxiety return, he rolled his eyes. “Of course I want. I would be dead if I do not want. But do you want? I thought—” He’d thought, downstairs in the kitchen, that Shane didn’t want Ilya to fuck him because he didn’t want to cross what must have felt like too gay of a line. Ilya got it, in a sense; sex had never felt like that for him, and it wasn’t so tied up in identity, but he’d hooked up with people who felt the same way. He respected their boundaries and got off in whatever ways were available, because that was really what it was about to him.

But Shane was shaking his head. “I know. I get it, but—I do want. I want it so bad. And—and my mom said something, before.” He winced a little and Ilya winced with him. Naked and pressed against each other, standing at the foot of the bed, was a very weird time to think about Yuna Hollander. “Not that she meant doing this, I’m sure, but—”

“What did she say?”

“She told me that if I let other people, especially shitty people, dictate who I am or what I like or—or who I’m attracted to, then I’m letting them win anyway,” Shane said. Ilya almost rolled his eyes again, because of course that framework had gotten through to Shane. “And I don’t like that. I don’t want them to win.”

“Of course. You want to win.”

“Exactly. I still don’t know—I mean, maybe it’s dumb, but I still want to take some time to figure out—”

“Is not dumb,” Ilya insisted. “No one can tell you what you are, Shane. You are nothing until you say it, you believe it. Of course is okay to figure out. Is not like hockey; you cannot get too old.”

“Yeah,” Shane said. He had a relieved smile on his face, and then that determination, the Hollander steel, staring out at him across the faceoff dot. “Well, I know what I want right now. And what I want is for you to fuck me. For real, all the way, like—”

“Like my dick in your ass?” Ilya said, mostly to be an asshole, but also to be absolutely sure. Shane blushed, but his dark eyes got darker, his lips parted, and he nodded eagerly.

“Yeah. That.”

“Okay,” Ilya said. And then he held Shane by the hips and tossed him, laughing, onto the stupid towel on the bed.

They started out the way they normally did. Ilya crawled atop Shane and slid against him, hardening back up against Shane’s thickening length and kissing his swollen mouth again. Shane hummed into it, happy, but still pushed Ilya away slightly to say, “Okay, come on, we’ve done enough of that.”

“Never enough,” Ilya told him, with one more kiss to prove his point. Shane fell into it without protest. And he let Ilya kiss his neck, burrowing his face where his shoulder joined, daring to nip a little when Shane gasped and threw his head back.

He didn’t let Shane get impatient; he could feel his dick, wet and eager, sticky against his thigh. Ilya pushed his thigh between Shane’s legs to grind in and all but shook himself like a dog when Shane’s thighs opened to him, spreading easily and eagerly. He bit down on Shane’s shoulder, gentle but grounding, and felt his own dick jerk at the satisfied groan Shane made.

There were practicalities they had to pause for, grappling for that tub of lube—which was really impractical, Ilya realized now; it sunk hard into the mattress when they pulled it up and tipped too far when Ilya coated his fingers, making Shane jerk and yelp, “Hey, careful!”

“Is towel, Shane,” Ilya said, though he hurried to right it before it could spill further.

Shane grumbled a bit, which then turned into a punched-out, “Oh,” when Ilya got right to circling his hole with his fingers. This, too, was nothing new for them since they’d been here; Ilya was addicted to how much Shane loved being fingered, how wanton and needy he got. He lived for the breathy moans Shane made, how he got all worked up and sweaty just from this. He got lost in it a bit, petting Shane from the inside and making him thrash, forgetting that he was doing this for a purpose.

Ilya remembered when Shane jerked up particularly hard, Ilya’s index finger tight on his prostate, and said, “Fuck, fuck, I’m gonna come!”

“So come,” Ilya told him, once again to be an asshole.

“No,” Shane whined, wriggling into and away from Ilya’s touch. He panted a little, looking genuinely overwhelmed, and as Ilya indulged himself in a good, long look at Shane’s beloved hole, stretched around three wet fingers, he wondered if it would be so awful if Shane came first.

And then something small and square hit him in the face, and Ilya looked up in shock.

“Shane!” he crowed, laughing. “You throw condom at me? Fucking rude. What are your fuck manners?”

“Put it on,” Shane said, but he looked so fucking pleased with himself. Shane’s bossy tone always did it for Ilya; he had to subtly grip the base of his own dick as he pulled his fingers out of Shane and felt that beautiful hole cling to them. It was almost too much, and the sight of the condom didn’t help.

Ilya’s hands shook as he opened it and rolled the condom on, resisting the urge to pinch himself. This was real, he told himself, as he looked Shane over carefully, searching for anything but urging and eagerness. To be certain, he asked, “You are sure? Is okay?”

“Yes. More than okay! Come on, Ilya.”

“Okay, okay. I’m going.” Ilya started to line himself up, then looked up again. “Like this is okay?”

“Oh my fucking god, yes it is, come on—we can do it the other ways next, let’s go.”

Head full of next time, trembling with need and desire, Ilya lined up again and started to slowly push in. Shane’s open legs fit around him, welcoming him in; his hole, softened and eased, stretched around him. Ilya kept the pace slow, watching Shane’s face: his fluttering eyelashes, creased brow, the gap where his mouth tipped open.

“God,” Shane breathed out when Ilya bottomed out. “Fuck, that’s so—”

“Okay?” Ilya checked, strained though it was. Shane felt like a dream around him, like all of those fantasies he’d had about their life together coming true at once. He thought, with some regret, that this wouldn’t last very long, but then his dick twitched to think of next time.

“Fucking amazing,” Shane said, eyes closed. He opened them again after Ilya trembled against him a bit more, sweating and making himself wait—he fixed those heavy-lidded eyes on Ilya and said, “Better if you get moving, though.”

“Bossy, bossy,” Ilya said, but he obeyed without further protest, sliding out and in again at a slow pace.

He kept that pace, torturing himself a bit—Ilya was good at that—until Shane squeezed at his ribs with his knees and said, “C’mon, faster.” He rocked his hips into Ilya’s next, harder thrust, matching him the way he always did.

And spurred on by Shane Hollander as he ever was, Ilya went faster, harder, knowing in his gut that Shane was there with him. He fucked him until he knew he was in the danger zone, until his lower belly tightened and he genuinely feared going off too soon—he gripped Shane’s dick and jerked it desperately, frantically, until Shane groaned out, “Oh, Jesus Christ, I’m—”

He came before he could say it, breaking off into a long, wordless moan and spurting in Ilya’s hand. Ilya followed helplessly, unable to withstand the sight and feel of Shane coming apart around him. He grabbed Shane’s hand, leaned into him, fucked him one more time across the towel, and then slumped down onto him when he was spent.

“Fuck,” Ilya said, catching his breath.

“Fuck,” Shane agreed, his match again, and he wrapped his arms around Ilya and pulled him down against him. They panted together a while, sweat cooling, heartbeats slowing. Ilya felt like he could sleep for a hundred years, and run a marathon. He wanted to play and win a triple OT playoff game with Shane and he wanted to whisk him away to some kind of bunker where no one else in the world could ever reach them.

Ilya dragged his gaze over Shane’s flush, his wet, blissful eyes, his beautiful freckles, and wanted more than anything to keep him forever, no matter where forever might be.

Chapter End Notes

Shane quotes Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain here, not because I think he would, but because it fits and is beautiful; he uses part of the last line of the short story, which is:

"There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it."

Chapter 8: Day Seven

Chapter Notes

reminder: get the beach boys going...

Day Seven – 11 July, 2013
The Final Day

Ilya woke up relatively late the next morning. It was chilly in the bedroom; they’d opened the window at some point last night to “air it out”, Shane had giggled, fresh and pink-faced from a shower, sleepy and content from Ilya taking him twice. Ilya couldn’t stop looking at him, his slightly bowlegged walk and his toweled, damp hair in the bathrobe his tits kind of bulged out of. He was so beautiful. Ilya pulled him down into the bed, where he belonged, and kissed him goodnight five or ten or twenty times.

The bedroom now smelled like the last of yesterday’s rain, which had left sparkling evidence on the windowpanes overnight, glittering in the morning sun. Ilya looked at it for a few moments. He could feel Shane beside him, sitting up, his legs stretched out in front of him and pressed against Ilya’s ass. Ilya leaned into the warmth of him, dozed under the soft weight of the granny quilt, and then eventually sighed and rolled over to face Shane, still lying down.

“Good morning,” he said, looking up at Shane. He was leaning against the headboard, staring out at nothing until Ilya spoke; then he looked down and smiled, small and—and sad.

Shane had his phone in his hand.

Ilya’s stomach sank and his heart began to pound, but he ignored these things because Shane leaned down to kiss him. Shane tasted like toothpaste, and he was dressed in what looked like a going out t-shirt, laundry-fresh and unrumpled and Reebok logo proudly displayed. He’d slipped his legs under the covers, but he was otherwise ready for the day, and Ilya wondered how long he’d been up, if he’d had coffee already and fed Blackberry. He stopped wondering when he wondered why he had his phone in hand.

“Good morning,” Shane whispered, with one more kiss. He didn’t even complain about Ilya’s morning breath—yesterday morning he’d put his whole palm over Ilya’s mouth and used it to push his head away, telling him to brush his teeth, then crying out when Ilya had licked him.

Ilya didn’t want to think about what that could mean. He didn’t want to be awake, then, worry already gnawing at him. He shifted only to put his head in Shane’s inviting lap, cheek tucked over the quilt, his arm wrapped around Shane’s thighs from underneath. Shane’s hands immediately went to Ilya’s back, one into his hair, and stroked through sleep-matted curls. He was so gentle.

They were quiet for a few more moments. Blackberry must have been fed, or she’d be complaining at the door by now, though Ilya almost missed her voice. He wanted her to pop in, distract them, urge the morning into something sweeter and softer than what he feared it was about to be.

Shane cleared his throat. He kept stroking Ilya’s hair, but he said, “Will you—will you tell me what it would be like in Boston?”

Ilya refused to hope. He licked his lips, tasted how badly he did need to brush his teeth, and ignored that. He still had the little sleeps in his eyes. He closed them and pictured it, all of it, everything he’d been imagining for the past seven days, and started to talk.

“I have nice apartment,” he said. “Is in Back Bay. Good restaurants, close to Dunks—we get your favorite Munchkins every day, yes?”

Shane laughed softly, and said, “Shh. What else?”

“We carpool to practice, of course, many teammates do this. We take my car, never yours. People know we are roommates—” Ilya leaned on that word so it sounded as ridiculous as it felt; Shane hummed, getting it. “—so is okay. We—there is balcony at my apartment, so we can put birdfeeder. Nice big windows too, so Blackberry can watch them, but she can’t eat them, so they are safe.”

“That’s good,” Shane said. His voice broke a little.

Ilya continued determinedly on, refusing to let his own break. “We go to practice together, train together, live together, and no one thinks this is crazy that we are friends. We just are. We fuck, too, but no one—no one needs to know that unless we trust. And maybe there are few people we trust. Maybe not.”

He heard the click of Shane’s throat as he swallowed, the wobbly little movements of a nod. “Yeah. That would be—that would be so good.”

“And we win together,” Ilya said. He hissed a breath through his teeth, let out an impressed whistle. “Oh, Hollander, we win so much together. We are the best together. Of course I am little bit better, but—”

“Ilya,” Shane said. Ilya could hear how wet his eyes were, how tight his throat was. He knew what Shane was going to say.

“Shh, no, I am not done,” Ilya told him. He asked himself if he really wanted to do this, but in the moment he felt like he needed to—he wanted their future stretched out before them, pulled into this bed, laid out upon the granny quilt. “There is more.”

A quiet, wet breath. Then Shane said, “Okay. Tell me.”

“Eventually, we get house,” Ilya told him. “Big one, in Brookline, is like—all big, fancy, family houses, you know? Is nice.”

“Like Westmount,” Shane said.

“Yes, this is right. So, we get house—and maybe we keep apartment too, for one of us, for show, but—is our house, really. People we trust know. And we make big dinners there for our people. We have little garden because we take seeds from Marie-Louise’s tomatoes—”

“I think that might be illegal, actually. Or maybe just bringing the tomatoes themselves is bad? I’ll have to look this up later.”

“Shh. I don’t care, we smuggle them over the border, okay? And we have sauce recipe so we make her sauce too. Everyone is invited for sauce except for Pike.”

“That doesn’t sound very fair,” Shane told him, but there was a laugh in his voice. Ilya smiled into the quilt.

“Too bad, he is not trusted around tomatoes. And—and we have big yard, with fencing for our dog to run around. And he is best friends with Blackberry so she goes out on her harness—we get her the zipline thing we saw, clip her on it, you know? By now she loves harness, of course.” God, Ilya could almost smell the trees, feel the grass between his toes. He wanted it so badly he fucking ached with it.

“And we win,” Ilya whispered. “We win at hockey, win at life. Maybe is not perfect, because we can’t fix, or only little bit, but—we are happy, Shane. So happy.”

The quilt was a little damp beneath his cheek now, but Ilya ignored that. He ignored the shaky breaths Shane was taking, too, and what they meant. He kept his eyes closed until he felt Shane’s fingers tighten a little in his hair.

“Ilya,” Shane said. He sounded completely fucking devastated. “I have to—”

“Shh,” Ilya said one more time. “I know, Shane.”

“Farah called me an hour ago. There’s—I have to go down later to sign the contract, and they want to take pictures and do a big announcement, and—” Shane’s voice cracked into tears, then, so Ilya sat up and pulled him in, letting him cry quietly and heartbreakingly into his chest. He put his hand in Shane’s hair and scratched his scalp, soothed him with soft hums, and steadfastly ignored the wetness on his own face, the way his heart felt cracked in two.

Shane sniffed and mumbled, “Deslauriers got fired. Ownership stepped in like they did with JJ and—the President made the call, did the match. He told Farah that the team wants to apologize to me for taking this long, and they plan to hire from outside the organization to fix this. She said he joked that, um, clearly Boston has great minds working for them, so they might start there.”

Ilya managed an ugly, raspy laugh. “So they—they steal my Shane and now they steal my front office? I hate this team.” When he felt more tears come in answer to that, Ilya shushed him again and kissed the top of his head. “Is good, Shane. You win; Deslauriers is gone. I’m proud of you.”

“Yeah,” Shane said. Ilya kissed him again, smiled into his hair—that was the most Shane way to respond to that declaration. “I mean, I’m—I’m happy. This is what I wanted, I think.”

“I know,” Ilya said. Deep down, he had known that this was where Shane belonged, that winning this meant more than just where he happened to play hockey.

But still, it—“But I really wanted—” Shane started, and broke off, swallowing hard. “I really wanted to play with you. And I want—I want all that. I want it so bad, holy shit.”

Though Ilya couldn’t have imagined it, relief like he’d rarely felt before washed over him. It hurt, too, to know that they both wanted this, and that it was utterly, officially out of reach now. But it still felt good to know that Shane was here with him, that they were matched, again, as they always were.

“I want it too, Shane,” Ilya said. And they sat in bed and in the knowledge that they couldn’t have it, as the morning moved on around them.

The dissolved into more practicalities. No lube this time, but there was breakfast, coffee and juice, hanging out with Blackberry, getting dressed. Without much fanfare or discussion, Ilya slowly began packing his things. Shane watched him with newly wet eyes, but he didn’t argue or cry again. He asked if Ilya wanted to do a load of laundry and helped him book a flight back to Boston for later in the afternoon, direct from Trudeau. Ilya realized with grim resolve that he would make that rescheduled flight to Moscow, now. Might as well, he thought, hearing Shane’s voice again, about fixing it or not.

Ilya would leave for the airport in the terrible Kia Optima, which he’d confirmed he could drop off in Montreal. Shane would leave a little while later to sign his contract, hold a little presser, talk about how happy and proud and grateful he was to be a Montreal Metro. Ilya would watch it on the plane, would scroll all the happy Twitter reactions and the grave-dancing over Deslauriers; his team group chat would react to the news soon, and there would be disappointment and—unfortunately—some relief, too. Ilya knew his team. He would mute the group chat for the rest of the summer, which would spin on as it ever did.

When he was packed, he set out the clown wig for the drive, and Shane smiled at it. “It’s not fair, you know?” Shane said.

A lot of things weren’t fair; so many that Ilya had to ask, “What’s not fair?”

“You still look so good in this stupid thing,” Shane told him, rueful and fond. “How is that even possible?”

Ilya laughed, surprising them both. “I am just that sexy,” he told Shane. “Even in clown wig. Even in terrible Kia Optima.”

“There is nothing wrong with a Kia Optima! I’m gonna buy one just to spite you if you keep on with this.”

“Oh yes, will show me who is boss.” Ilya smiled ruefully, too. “You can afford more cars now, you know. Mr. Highest Paid.”

He expected Shane to tell him to shut up, but Shane just kept smiling, tipping his chin up like Blackberry in his smugness. “That’s right; I make more than you now, don’t I?”

“Yes, is true. So you should buy me new car.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because I fuck you good, yes?”

That earned him a giggling, “Shut up!” and a little shove, and it was almost like it wasn’t the last day, down to the last hour, even. That fact settled in only after, watching each other as the quiet fell again.

“Hey,” Shane said. “Do you want more coffee?”

So Shane made more coffee, as lovingly complex as always. “I’m sending you a French press,” Shane told him, which of course made Ilya laugh and go, “Okay, Sugar Daddy,” and earned himself another shove.

They took their coffees out onto the stairs of the little porch, squeezing in next to each other. Blackberry watched them from the kitchen side of the backdoor, tail swishing, clearly judging their choice to be outside voluntarily. The last of the rain had dried up into a lush, green back garden, swaying a little in the breeze, dappled and scenic. Ilya sipped the best coffee he’d ever had, leaned against Shane, looked out over the garden, and missed it all already.

After a few quiet moments, Shane gave a nervous sort of grunt and said, “Hey.” He wiped one sweaty hand on his knee; Ilya watched it and smiled.

He bumped Shane’s side. “Hey.”

“I was thinking.”

“You are always thinking, Shane. Is not surprise.”

“Shut up. Just let me—so, all that stuff you were saying, about—about living together, about the big house in Brookline, and—did you mean that?”

“Yes,” Ilya said unhesitatingly, perhaps bravely. It was all laid out, though; no sense in walking it back now. He couldn’t stitch his heart back onto the inside of his sleeve.

“Cool. So, I mean—my contract is up in five years.”

A tremulous, hopeful drum started to beat in Ilya’s chest, but he ignored it to say, “You are just signing it today and already you think about it ending?”

Shane ignored him, thankfully. “And yours is up in five years too, right?”

“Yes, you Google this?”

“I did,” Shane told him, so stubborn. “I wanted to be sure.”

“So what about it?”

“D’you remember last summer, when, ah, Rossi and Porter signed with Detroit because, you know, they were both from around there—well, Porter was from Dearborn, but you know—”

“Okay,” Ilya said. He was pretending he had no idea where Shane was going with this but of course he did. He was just afraid if he acknowledged it he’d do backflips or something. Fuck Shane on the stairs. Propose marriage, maybe—but maybe that was too close to what Shane was about to do, at least in hockey terms.

“Right, okay, so—they also said they’d always wanted to play together,” Shane said. He was so, so nervous, and maybe Ilya should stop pretending. “And I know that’s just something you say, but—everyone knows they actually meant it, that they’d planned it. So, maybe—”

“Maybe we can plan too?” Ilya asked. He was trying not to bounce in his seat, but Shane’s brilliant, beautiful responding smile was almost too much to bear.

“Well, yeah. Why not? I know five years is a long time but—and we can go anywhere,” Shane said, excited. He looked out at the garden, eyes wide and a little dreamy—imagining, Ilya realized, fantasizing, the same way Ilya has been. “We can make what you said happen in—in Brookline or Westmount or fucking—San Francisco or Vancouver, wherever the fuck, as long as we’re together. It doesn’t have to be a fantasy, you know, it can be something we work towards. Together.”

“Together,” Ilya echoed. It was like finding out Shane had let his texts through over anyone else’s. It was like having Shane’s first time all over again, and it being so comfortable and practiced because they were comfortable and practiced, now.

“It would be nice, right?” Shane asked, like there was any fucking question; Ilya was nodding before the words were completely out of his mouth. “So—what do you think?”

For the first time in a while, Ilya didn’t think. He just moved—kissed Shane hard, pressing him up against the stairway railing, pressing all he felt and believed in into, until he broke away and Shane was left looking dazed, blinking rapidly, his beloved frog smile slowly spreading across his face.

And still he was Shane, so he asked, “Is that a yes?”

Ilya laughed, big and bright. He picked up his moose mug and clinked it against Shane’s—it had a loon on it, David Hollander had told him. Birds flew overhead, basking in the summer, before they flew home for the winter, and Ilya decided he could live through that cycle five more times before all his dreams came true.

“Yes,” Ilya said. And they had a bit more time together before those five years started, so they sat and drank their coffee for a little while longer.

Chapter End Notes

and that's all! i hope you enjoyed it, and i would love to hear what anyone thinks. feel free to say hi on tumblr!