Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Jessica | Shane Hollander's Ex-Girlfriend

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Original Children of Shane Hollander, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Jessica | Shane Hollander's Ex-Girlfriend, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais, Hayden Pike, Svetlana Vetrova, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Scott Hunter (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Parent Shane Hollander, Teen Pregnancy, Light Angst, Anxious Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov is Obsessed With Shane Hollander, Implied In-Universe Existence of Sidney Crosby, No Smut, Homophobia, Racism, Kid Fic, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fuck AI

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-21 Completed: 2026-10-16 Words: 94,010 Chapters: 9/9

Almost There and Nowhere Near It

Summary

It's 2006 and Shane Hollander, in a gay panic, hooks up with his girlfriend Jessica. The consequences of that night – well. It might be the stupidest thing he's ever done. But also, maybe, sort of the best.

Like hell is he going to let it affect his hockey.

Or: Teen dad Shane learns to love his kid. Ilya helps.

Notes

Completed as of 10/16/26!

Thank you so much for being here. WOW. I truly am unbelievably grateful for the response this has gotten.

Thank you to SweetPea_InSummer for the incredible cover art.

This work advances my Ilya-listens-to-classical-music agenda. If you would like to follow along with the pieces mentioned, here is a playlist.

The prompt I gave myself was "Heated Rivalry but make it Gilmore Girls," as in, give Shane a kiddo while he's still a kiddo himself, and they sort of have to both grow up and figure out life together, and their relationship is parent/child but also friend; and it ultimately shapes the way Shane understands himself, his identity, his relationship with Ilya, and his relationship with hockey. (I guess that makes Ilya the Luke in this scenario, which sort of works bc they are both terrible communicators and Down Bad.) I've inhaled a *lot* of single dad Shane fic on this site and I adore all of it but I really didn't want this to be saccharine; our boy is ANXIOUS and Bad At Knowing When He Loves Someone. Things are going to be tough before they're better. This is not at all inspired by Gilmore Girls other than the teen parenthood premise and the eventual dynamic between Shane and his kiddo, but GG fans will find some easter eggs along the way.

If you're here from Strawberries, and you like angsty kidfic that's also a character study, I think (hope!) you will like this too?

This is TV canon only, with a few small nods to the books, mainly in nomenclature (like Ruby and Jade instead of Emma; Stanley Cup instead of MLH Cup; etc.)

Please note that this is tagged and rated accurately. There is no smut. Regarding the homophobia and racism tags, specific CW’s are listed in the individual chapter notes.

Thank you so much for reading <3

Edit 10/18/26: Added the Fuck AI tag to make things abundantly clear. I didn't think it was necessary but I understand the times we are in.

Chapter 1: In omnia paratus

Chapter Notes

CW: Homophobia/F-slur, anti-Asian racism, brief mention of infant death (in a Shane anxiety spiral way, nothing actually happens), mention of abortion, religious conservatism & controlling family members

Note there's no Ilya in Ch. 1 but please don't panic, he's up next!

It’s fine. He’s fine. Everything’s fine.

Puck drops. Shane wins the face-off, passes behind him to Lambert who dekes and passes back to Shane, evading a London D-man. 

It’s fine because it has to be. Because the instant he lets things not be fine, he’ll feel it again, the world around him shrinking to a point, black-hole levels of explosive panic on the precipice of big-bang, steeping pulsating congealing in his chest in a way that had him Googling heart attack symptoms and can you get heart attack age 15?

So – yeah. Everything’s fine. His new team is fine. The Ottawa Centennials have had a less impressive season than the Kingston Fortresses, but he can fix that. He’s Shane Hollander. He can get them to the OHL finals and then the Memorial Cup. He has to.

A lot depends on him now.

Pass to Stephenson; Stephenson shoots; London goalie blocks. Fucking hell.

It’s fine. It’s fine!

He doesn’t wear the A anymore. That was something he’d ceded in the trade. Traded in the middle of his first season like a failure, like a fraud, when he’d had to get special dispensation to even be drafted at fifteen in the first place, because he was Exceptional; and Kingston had trusted him, had lauded him – fifteen years old and first-line centre, alternate captain, the Future of Hockey. Now he’s on the second line on a second-rate team. His mom had called it a “worthwhile sacrifice,” but he thinks it’s more like penance.

It’s fine. He’ll fix this. He can fix this.

The captain is Bruce Lipinsky. He’s three years older than Shane, from Oshawa, and huge. Six-foot-three, at least. And mean – a slimy sort of mean that sits unpleasantly on a teenager’s tongue, chirps that might be hate crimes if they were uttered anyplace else but the ice. Not that the Fortresses had exactly been a let’s-hold-hands-and-share-our-feelings type of team, but at least the slurs had been kept to enough of a minimum that Shane had learned to shake them off the way he shrugs out of his shoulder pads after practice, just a part of his routine.

Lipinsky shoves Shane’s shoulder roughly as he joins the bench at the line change. “What’d I tell you about letting pussy-ass Stephenson have the puck?”

“He’s my left wing.”

“He’s a dumbass faggot who can’t shoot for shit.”

Shane counts to three. Breathes out. Breathes in. It’s fine. “He’s my left wing,” is all he says.

Lipinsky makes a noise that Shane imagines an elephant seal might make, just an ugly, guttural growl.

The London Lances win in a shutout, 2-0. On Ottawa’s own home ice. Fucking embarassing.

“It’s fine,” Jessica assures him. It’s their shared mantra. Everything’s fine. She finds him in a back hallway of the rink, flickering grey fluorescent lights, after he’s showered and changed and thunked his forehead on the cold metal of his locker and stood there, eyes closed, breathing, trying to still the cosmic singularity on the verge of detonating somewhere behind his ribcage.

“I’m tired,” he says, and he’s not even sure if he means from today, the game, the ache in his shoulder from a check against the boards, or if he means the other thing.

She nods grimly. “Me, too.” The other thing, then. “And I have to pee.”

“You always have to pee.”

“And whose fault would that be?”

It’s a running joke. It’s both their faults and no one’s fault and his fault entirely (corrupter of the innocent, evil) and her fault exclusively (slut-whore, reckless). It’s the fault of a condom that broke and a sex ed curriculum that hadn’t filled in all the blanks and a shirtless poster of Tampa’s new Scandinavian goalie that had sent Shane, panicked, hurtling into a frantic hookup with his girlfriend while her parents were out, on a night neither of them can take back. 

She told him on a Wednesday in early September. He’d already started packing for Kingston, a modest suitcase which he imagined would fit snugly under the bed at his billet. He’d already heard from his billet hosts, an older couple whose son had played for the Fortresses before taking the university route instead of going pro. 

This was all Step One of Phase Two of a sacred, preordained trajectory that he’d been on since the first time his dad ever laced up his skates and held his hands on the lake behind their cottage at Christmas, a trajectory that would end tidily twenty to twenty-five years from now in Phase Five – Hall of Fame Induction – at which point he would be retired and probably already married to an amorphously pretty lady with an amorphously cute child and an amorphously well-behaved dog.

And then—

“I’m pregnant.”

They were lying on his twin-sized bed, feet at opposite ends, knees curled in opposing directions like quotation marks. He could feel her gaze on him, head turned against the quilt his grandma had made when he was born, while he stared straight up at the popcorn ceiling, a staticky expanse of pulsing white.

“What?” he said. As if he hadn’t heard her, or hadn’t understood. Which, like. If only.

And Jessica didn’t repeat herself because she knew him, she really did. They’d known each other forever. She was one of those people he really couldn’t remember ever not knowing – not that they had been close, before, nor even really friends; but she was omnipresent in the peripheral orbit of his scholastic life, if only because her last name was Holmes and so they were perpetually lined up next to each other alphabetically for fire drills and class graduations, ever since kindergarten.

When they got to high school, they weren’t in any of the same classes anymore, because Jessica was smart. Like, smart-smart. She was taking advanced everything while Shane struggled his way through the bare necessities. It’s not that he was stupid or anything, but hockey was the whole point. There wasn’t time to study between practice and training and travel for tournaments; and it’s not like he’d need a diploma to succeed in his inevitable MLH career (Phase Three).

He kind of hated that he was a dumb jock, a stereotype. He liked to read, anyway. And so when she’d dropped into the seat next to him in the back of the auditorium while some guest speaker warned their Grade 9 class not to drink and drive, he’d barely looked up from the Gordie Howe biography hidden in his lap. Silently, she pulled her own book out of her backpack – a novel with a dragon on the cover – and began to read beside him, exchanging a quick, laughing smile when they both scrambled to act like they were paying attention as the Vice Principal walked past.

And, like. Of course he’d asked her out. God forbid a teenage boy have a platonic friendship with a pretty girl who likes to read. And he really likes Jessica. He does. She’s funny and sarcastic and talks about physics and precalculus the way he talks about hockey, entirely obsessed. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t like the social currency afforded to him by holding her hand in the hallway, approving glances offering relief from the usual standoffish chill and whispers of hey isn’t that the hockey robot kid.

So what if, sometimes, he kisses Jessica while wondering what it would be like to kiss the right-wing on his U16 team who has a scruffy, adolescent beard that Shane thinks might scratch pleasantly against his skin?

So what if that night in Jessica’s bedroom had been awkward and unmemorable, but for the gripping panic that swerved through aortic valves and capillaries at each flashing memory of Tampa’s goalie’s glistening pecs?

By the time Jessica’s words really washed over him like high tide, like drowning, like the air had turned to saltwater, lungs gasping helplessly for oxygen, he thought, maybe, he should say the other thing out loud, the other awful thing, so they could lie there drowning in awfulness together.

Because the amorphous wife and kid and dog weren’t amorphous anymore. Sure, it was a good few years before any of it was supposed to happen (Phase Four), but if this was the endgame anyway, then surely he should have felt—well, not okay about it, obviously, but maybe less like the world was cataclysmically ending.

Less like something inarticulable and uncharted was being stolen away from him.

“I’m gay.” He didn’t even couch it with an I think. What would be the point?

A beat of silence.

“What?” she mocked.

“Shut up.” He laughed, a delirious thing. He finally turned his head to face her. They were upside-down to each other, her dark reddish curls splayed wildly across the bedding in apparent defiance of gravity.

She stuck her tongue out at him and squeezed her eyes shut and crinkled her nose, and he laughed again, because he couldn’t help it. Because Jessica always makes him laugh. She’s funny, and he likes her.

He clings to that, in the seismic, bone-tiring months that follow. A small, tremulous orb of gladness he can reach for when the black hole of terror threatens to swallow everything else: if it had to happen at all, at least it happened with his best friend.

---------------

Shane makes a list.

The only way Ottawa will get through to the OHL championship at this point in the season is if they win every single one of their remaining games. And in order to win every game, he needs a better team. And in order to get a better team, he needs to accomplish four things, in no particular order:

1. Convince coach to move him to first line
2. Help Stephenson figure out how to fucking score a goal
3. Convince coach to start the backup goalie instead of the pad-wearing embodiment of nepotism currently in-net who may as well be a slice of Swiss cheese for all the good he does
4. Take over the captaincy from Lipinsky

He decides to start with Stephenson, because that’s the easiest one. Stephenson is fast, smart, skinny and small enough to evade defense. Stephenson’s problem is that he broadcasts his shots with his hips, specifically on his left side. A goalie with myopia and a one-loonie salary could figure him out. The fact that Coach Larsen hasn’t called him out on it all season is – concerning.

When Stephenson manages to score top-shelf against a stymied goalie from Kitchener, Shane joins the celly and sets his sights on his next to-do.

---------------

Three days before he was supposed to leave for training camp in Kingston, Shane and his parents, and Jessica and her parents, sat on opposite sides of the Hollanders’ dining room table. Shane felt a bit like he was a businessman flanked by powerful attorneys, or something. 

Jessica looked like she would rather be working on an oil rig than sitting where she sat, listening to this awful conversation unfold around them, about them, while they sat in dismal silence and listened to their futures be weighed and considered and tossed about like produce at a farmers’ market.

Telling his parents had been—well. He imagines it had gone better than when Jessica talked to hers. But still. His mom’s face had creased in ways he’d never seen before, origami folds of anger-sadness-mortification as she closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose and breathed a deep, abysmal breath. Then:

“All your hard work, Shane. Everything we’ve sacrificed. How could you be so careless?”

His dad had put a steady hand to his mom’s neck then, and looked up at Shane with a chillingly reasonable expression. “Is Jessica alright?”

“She’s fine.” Everything’s fine. It was all they had.

Jessica, in fact, was not fine. Her parents were very different from Shane’s. He’d known this abstractly; he’d met them exactly twice, and both interactions had been tinged by an awkwardness Shane could only attribute to himself. But it turns out, maybe, they were actually something quietly terrible. Politeness that tasted like acid, words of greeting with a serrated edge. Shane couldn’t say exactly how he knew that they were racist – they didn’t say anything. They didn’t curl their lips and sneer at him and his mom the way his U10 coach had, before a closed-door meeting between Yuna, the league manager, and the threat of a lawsuit had led to the coach being hastily and quietly replaced.

But here – no sneers. No slurs. They just looked at him, sheepish and mortified as he was to be The Boy Who Impregnated Their Daughter. They had every right to be angry at him, obviously. But the look in their eye was something different, something squinting and hollow and strained. And he just knew.

The table between them may as well have been the ice at Scotiabank Place for how far apart they felt, and the chill in the air. It’s the table Shane grew up at – French homework, jigsaw puzzles, Christmas dinner, rounds of gin rummy so competitive his dad had banned it outright one summer.

A dizzying thought grasped at his stomach biliously: his kid will sit at this same table, probably. His kid. A deranged, absurd vision flashed in his mind: a baby seated across from him at this very table, naked but for a diaper, holding a fanned hand of cards and slapping one down, declaring in a tiny baby voice, “Gin!”

He closed his eyes tightly, shadow and light moving across his eyelids in bloodred silhouette.

The words cutting through the air around them couldn’t exactly be called a conversation. More like a negotiation. It started with an opening offer from Jessica’s dad. He was a grey-haired man with thin wire glasses and military posture.

“They’ll get married.”

“Absolutely not,” his mom countered. “They’re fifteen. They’re not getting married.”

(Shane would marry her, if she wanted him to. He would. He’d told her as much.

“I don’t want to marry you, Shane,” she had responded in a very kind and lightly teasing way, and he had tried not to let it show how relieved he felt. “I’m holding out for a Jonas Brother.”

“Which one?”

“I’m not picky.”)

His mom had prepared a binder of Options. Marriage wasn’t in there, but a lot of other stuff was. Brochures about adoption. Brochures about completely safe, non-invasive medical interventions. Printouts about Canadian law and minors and parental consent. Documents about custody agreements and guardianship. A list of vetted abortion providers, family lawyers, obstetricians, adoption agencies, therapists, babysitters, social workers, and at least one life coach.

One by one, the options narrowed.

The brochure on abortion prodded her parents into a red-faced fury. Mrs. Holmes clutched at the silver cross that hung around her neck and quoted something archaic and biblical with an air of distant, teeth-clenched authority.

(Jessica had brought up abortion on the day she told Shane. The Wednesday afternoon they’d spent lying on top of Shane’s bed while the weight of things hovered direly between them. She didn’t need her parents’ consent to do it. She’d considered it, researched it, turned it over in her mind like a smooth stone that might hold answers.

“I don’t agree with my parents, I guess, but I believe in the same stuff. Like God. You know?”

Shane hadn’t really known what to say about God. So instead he’d said, “I think you should do whatever you want to do.”)

On adoption, Mrs. Holmes bristled. “I will not be having a stranger raise my grandchild.” She looked at Jessica then, with a sour expression smirking on her lips. “Jessica will leave school and raise the child. It’s only right.” But said not like it was a logical step; rather, like it was a punishment.

“She can’t quit school,” Shane objected loudly and immediately, surprising himself. Jessica met his eyes with a warning, but he ignored her. “She’s top of our class. She’s going to graduate and go to U of T and study rocket science, or something. She’s so smart. She’s not, like, some teen mom dropout.”

“She is a teen mom dropout, young man,” said Mr. Holmes in his gruff and calculated voice. “You made her one.”

Shane deflated, sinking into his chair, wishing he could become furniture.

Mrs. Holmes looked sharply at his mom, lips pursed. “What about your son? Can’t he get a job, be a provider?”

“My son will be pursuing his hockey career. Nothing changes.”

What a thing to say when literally everything was changing. Shane nearly laughed.

His mom flipped to a page in the binder marked by a neon yellow sticky note, a cheerful little beacon jutting out from this three-ring tome of Options each of which represented a future-state Shane felt decreasingly in control of. A collection of parallel worlds, a multiverse, hole-punched and alphabetized by Yuna Hollander.

“My husband and I will raise the child,” he heard his mom say, distantly. It took him a moment to understand, only processing the words when Jessica met his eyes sharply in surprise.

His mom was still talking. It was the steady voice she used when she watched game tape with him, breaking down the opposing team’s plays. “Shane will be present in the child’s life, but his primary role will be to support financially once he begins his professional hockey career. Jessica can be as involved as she would like, but regardless, she will continue her studies.”

Shane looked across at Jessica, at her wide eyes which were shocked and wary, yes, but also – relieved. Then he looked at his mom beside him, the firm set of her jaw, a dead-set determination he knew well because he had grown up enveloped in it, the fierce loving urgency of a mother who would move mountains.

Mr. and Mrs. Holmes exchanged a weighty glance. “Isn’t your son about to move to Kingston?”

“He will begin the season in Kingston but will transfer to Ottawa at the January trade deadline.”

This twisted something unpleasant and boiling in Shane’s gut. It was a plan that made sense, and he hated that it did. The Ottawa fucking Centennials. A consequence of his actions.

“So,” his mom said, shutting the binder primly and setting her hands flat across the cover, “No abortion. No adoption. No one is getting married. No one is dropping out of school. No one is quitting hockey. Are we done here?”

There was no handshake to end the negotiation. Just a terse nod from Mr. Holmes, while Mrs. Holmes gathered her cardigan and purse from where they hung on the back of the chair. His mom showed them out.

Shane sat shell-shocked, sunken into his seat. His dad reached over and touched his arm gently. Shane looked up at him.

His dad opened his mouth to say something, then didn’t. He squeezed Shane’s arm, stood, and walked away.

---------------

Shane makes a spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel.

Goals against average. Save percentage. Shots against, goals against, losses, wins.

Jessica helps, crowded next to him at the desktop computer in his dad’s study. She’s good at math.

He prints out the spreadsheet and drops it on Coach Larsen’s desk. “Start Walshe in goal on Friday. He has a better record against Brampton.” He has no right to talk to Coach this way, assertive and uninvited; he’s battling every instinct to apologize repeatedly while backing out of the office like it’s a parking space and he’s a plain-coloured compact vehicle, unassuming and unimportant.

Then he adds the other thing. The thing that’s not a lie, exactly, but not a truth. “Besides. Tremblay is favouring his right side.”

Tremblay is favouring his right side, but he’s not injured. He got a garish tattoo of a skeleton riding a motorcycle on his left bicep for his eighteenth birthday last week. He’ll be fine by Friday. But Coach doesn’t need to know that. And Tremblay is a dick.

Shane leaves the office before Coach gets in a word edgewise.

Walshe tends goal on Friday. Ottawa beats Brampton 3-0, their first shutout of the season.

Two things happen after that. Coach starts Tremblay and Walshe on a tandem. And, Shane is made Alternate Captain.

The list grows shorter.

---------------

Shane was quietly traded to the Ottawa Centennials in the second week of January; in exchange, the Fortresses received two mediocre defensemen. 

He packed his suitcase and thanked his billet hosts, who seemed baffled by this course of events. He loaded his suitcase and gear bag into the trunk of his mom’s car and met her polite questions with monosyllabic responses until she shrunk away from asking for the rest of the two-hour drive.

He didn’t say goodbye to his team.

Jessica was at his parents’ house when they pulled into the driveway. He found her in the kitchen picking out edge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with his dad.

He hadn’t seen her since September.

They’d been texting, obviously. She would drop a string of mundane anecdotes like mr. costello curved the midterm bc everyone did so bad or jennifer has mono LOL can’t believe she called *me* a slut mixed in with something completely devastatingly real like appointment went well, dr says its the size of an avocado and what should we name it?

She stood as he stepped into the kitchen and smiled brightly like she was glad to see him, which was a surprise because why would she be, when he had pretty much ruined her life? She wrapped him in a hug and the shape of her was alien and awful, an architecture of unfamiliar curves pressing into his side. 

He poured a glass of water, gripping the cup until he feared the flimsy plastic might collapse in his hands when he noticed the black-and-white scan mounted on the fridge with a magnet from Banff National Park, casual, like it belonged there (it didn’t), next to a grocery list and a coupon for Chinese takeout. 

Size of an avocado. What should we name it? Word association ping-ponged wildly through his fucked-up brain. We should name our child Guacamole. Guacamole Hollander.

He abandoned the water glass on the counter and joined Jessica and his dad at the table, sorting through puzzle pieces: blue for sky, green for grass, red for the antique car in the foreground. His dad offered a small smile, which he did his best to return. They passed the afternoon like this, quietly, almost peacefully, until Jessica had to go back home.

A lot had changed and nothing had changed while he was in Kingston.

Jessica had turned sixteen and gotten her G1 license, but her parents refused to let her use their car or really do anything that would grant her any increasing iota of autonomy, so Shane’s dad had offered to teach her and drive around town with her, whenever she wanted. This had led to the odd pair discovering each other’s nerdy side, a shared, sincere and unbridled enjoyment of sudoku puzzles and CBC documentaries, which had led to Jessica and David Hollander becoming, for lack of a better word, friends.

Shane’s mom had begun laying the groundwork to quit her job at the communications firm where she had been for literal decades, having clawed her way up from intern to VP. Learning this nauseated Shane, a little, an unmoored and throat-clenching seasickness; that she would sacrifice her career for his, all because he was a stupid gay idiot who had managed to effectuate human life from a pathetic recipe of panic, shame, and horniness. She had filed to incorporate her own small business to manage Shane’s hockey contracts and business opportunities, and maybe take on one or two other CHL clients to keep things afloat. This would allow her to work from home while raising her kid’s kid.

Insanity.

His parents made him sign up for a class at the community centre called What To Expect 101. Jessica joined him. They were the only teens in the class, earning stares of judgement and pity from the happy glowing couples seated around the Feelings Circle at the start of each session.

The class actually wasn’t so bad. Jessica snorted with laughter when they were handed a one-eyed doll wearing a diaper filled with little plastic turds. They named the doll Guacamole Anne and informed the teacher of this with rock-solid, heartfelt sincerity, so that the teacher was forced to use the name in the roleplaying exercise in front of the whole class.

They learned infant CPR. This was something that hadn’t occurred to Shane, that there might be a situation where his child would be choking, windpipe blocked, lips turning blue, and he would need to save its life or else it might die before his very eyes. This kicked the gears in his brain’s panic factory into new throes of productivity. He spent three consecutive nights sleeplessly watching YouTube videos of stoic news anchors reporting on babies that had died in all sorts of terrible ways. Choking. Drowning. Measles. Dog attack.

It was Jessica who stilled his brain, finally, by reminding him that his parents would mainly be in a position to save the baby’s life if it came down to it, and didn’t he trust them? And yeah, he did. He really, really did.

His new team was exactly what he’d expected. One of the weaker teams in the OHL, though not the worst. (Erie was the worst.) Lipinsky was a bully. Coach Larsen was inept. His second line was alright; Stephenson had potential and Lambert was reliable. The starting goalie was abysmal.

The team knew about the pregnancy. He didn’t tell them, but Jessica came to games sometimes with his parents, and there was no point in lying about it. Some of them slapped him on the back, lewdly impressed, like he was some slick lothario. Lambert just asked politely when the due date was.

“It’s fine,” he told Jessica, and his parents, and his former winger from Kingston who was nice enough to text him now and then.

And he played like that – fine, just fine – sometimes scoring, sometimes not, as if the puck shared with him this grim sense of resignation, of a future already decided – until they lost to London.

They shouldn’t have lost to London. Shane could outplay London in his sleep.

“It’s fine,” Jessica greeted him in that back hallway of the rink, her pretty eyes, her strange round shape, lit up unearthly and wan under the busted light that flickered grey at odd and dizzying intervals.

It wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. Jessica was a pariah at school, his mom was abandoning a job she loved, the guest room down the hall from his bedroom was being painted a mossy shade of green that his dad had proudly found on discount at the hardware store (“Perfect for the nursery, right, Shane?”), and he was second-line centre on the fucking Ottawa Centennials.

He felt like he had no control over any of it, like his entire life had been packed into cardboard boxes by movers he never hired, and stuffed into the back of a U-Haul at the top of a hill with the accelerator jammed down action-movie style. And the hill was endless, bottomless, and the contents of his life would just continue careening forward at F1 speeds all while he was folded into one of the boxes, body crumpled small, insignificant, useless and scared.

But there was one thing he could control. One thing he knew how to do well; one thing, maybe, he hadn’t fucked up beyond repair. The one place that should have felt like home, like destiny in a good way, like fulfillment and purpose and light, until he’d let himself flounder in self-pity and missed passes and It’s Fine.

Not anymore. He was Shane Hollander, and he was the Future of Hockey.

That night, he went home and made the list.

---------------

An opportunity presents itself to check off the remaining two items on the list, though to accomplish this, Shane must do something that is, perhaps, cruel.

Lipinsky is injured. Not seriously, not enough for Coach to scratch him, but enough that Shane notices where he’s protecting his right side and lying through his teeth to the team PT.

“You’re hurt,” he comments in the locker room, changing quickly, facing away from Lipinsky. Their stalls are next to each other now that Shane wears the A.

“I’m not,” Lipinsky mutters.

“Was it Sudbury? D-man checked you pretty hard.”

“Go eat a dog, Hollander.”

Shane flinches; but. He’s heard much worse in this locker room. So he breathes through it and digs his heels in.

There’s a line he shouldn’t cross. He does anyway.

“Just making sure you’re not being, like, some pansy faggot, playing soft,” Shane says, jaw so tight it aches. The words taste like pennies and wood mulch.

Lipinsky slams his locker shut and looms over Shane, breathing hard, eyes alight. For a split second, Shane can see the punch Lipinsky is ready to land, the balled fist, the subtle drawback. And then Coach Larsen arrives to debrief practice.

At their next game against Guelph, Lipinsky plays aggressively, uncontrolled and barbaric. The resulting tear in his shoulder is enough to take him out for the rest of the season.

---------------

Centennials name Hollander interim captain; lose Lipinsky to injury

CHL.ca  |  March 7, 2007

Ottawa, ON—Ottawa Centennials Head Coach Carl Larsen met with the team ahead of practice on Tuesday afternoon to announce an interim captain for the remainder of the 2006-07 season.

Playing in his first full OHL season, Shane Hollander was drafted first-round by the Kingston Fortresses on Exceptional Status before a mid-season trade to the Centennials, citing personal reasons. The Ottawa native was named Alternate Captain in February and serves as interim Captain for the remainder of the season while Captain Bruce Lipinsky recovers from a labral tear requiring surgery.

“Shane Hollander has been integral to the Centennials’ contention for the upcoming OHL Playoffs,” said Larsen. “His hockey IQ is off the charts and his proactive leadership style has already resulted in the Centennials’ best season in franchise history.”

“This is a huge honour,” said Hollander. “I promise I’ll give it my all.”

Lipinsky is expected to return in 2007-08 following rehabilitation.

---------------

They sweep the OHL Playoffs. Shane plays some of the best hockey of his entire life.

He comes home from the road bruised and exhausted. He sleeps in his bedroom under the quilt his grandma made when he was born, the quilt where he and Jessica had lain staring at the ceiling and then at each other in a tenuous combination of delirium and dread, uttering two truths that would change them.

The nursery is green; a crib is assembled. His dad loses the Allen wrench and buys a replacement at Canadian Tire.

Jessica passes her finals. She even sets the curve in Mr. Costello’s class. Obviously.

His mom’s coworkers throw her a farewell party with cake and balloons and gift bags of corporate whatnot; she definitely doesn’t shed a tear or two as she walks out of the sleek glass building for the last time, this place where she had risen to heights through ambition and sharp-edged competence.

Shane turns sixteen. Jessica gets him a soft comfy neck pillow for road trips, decorated with tiny anthropomorphic avocados. His parents give him a new gear bag to replace the one with the fraying handle. It’s nice. It’s useful.

There’s a night when Shane is reading in his room, and his dad raps softly on the door. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

His dad stands there at the threshold, this silent steady man who has bandaged scraped knees and patiently explained math homework and devised an oatmeal cooktime precise to the second because it’s an exact texture on the precipice of mushy that Shane will tolerate with peanut butter and protein powder on gamedays; before stepping inside and sitting stiffly on the edge of Shane’s bed. He smooths the quilt beside him while Shane closes his book, one of the dragon ones that Jessica recommended.

“So,” his dad says with a disbelieving sort of exhale. “You’re about to be a dad.”

“I guess so.” The word dad paces like a nocturnal predator in the pit of his stomach, clawed and sharp-toothed and meant to be feared.

“I just want to make sure you’re taking this seriously, Shane.”

“I am,” he replies, too quickly, and shrinks back from the angularity of his own voice. “Sorry. I am, I promise.”

“No, it’s—I know you’re taking it seriously, Shane. I know you’re taking it responsibly. I’m just not sure you understand what’s about to happen. What it means.”

Shane inspects the edge of the quilt, where green and blue squares meet a trim white border. What’s about to happen means so many things. An end and a beginning. A fear, a transformation, an inevitability. He picks at a loose thread and thinks of his grandma, who died when he was six. She always smelled like peppermint.

His dad shifts closer and watches where Shane’s hand makes anxious work of the thread until it’s frayed. That’s one thing about his dad; he never expects what Shane can’t offer, never forces eye contact when it’s not freely given, never inserts probing questions into considered silence.

Instead, he reaches a hand over Shane’s and grips it firmly, groundingly, until his thumb untenses and the string releases from between his fingers.

“You’re going to love that kid, Shane,” his dad tells him, hand still holding his. “You’re going to have so much love in you, you’re not going to know what to do with it.”

Shane swallows, shakes his head; he’s not sure what he’s objecting to besides the prevailing incorrectness of the entirety of the last eight months. He doesn’t realize he’s crying until his dad’s arms are around him, warm and there, and now he’s wracked with sobs that shudder in his stomach, in his shoulders, while his dad’s face is pressed into the back of his hair.

---------------

The Centennials fly to Vancouver for the Memorial Cup. His mom flies with him so she can rub elbows with MLH scouts. They face the Medicine Hat Bobcats, Sherbrooke Firebirds, and Vancouver Cyclops in a round-robin tournament.

In the end, it’s Ottawa versus Vancouver. The game stays tied 2-2 into the third period. And then, with four minutes left, a Vancouver winger scores on a lucky rebound off a goalpost and that’s it. Ottawa has lost.

Shane has lost.

He’d gotten them so close. He’d checked off his list one by one and frenziedly engineered a history-making season for a team that had spent years settled into habitual mediocrity. To come so far, to climb and claw, only to fail.

He lingers in the shower, water too hot, scalding. Changes numbly into his sweatshirt and jeans; and finds his mom among the other consoling families in a multipurpose room near the players’ exit.

“Shane, sweetie,” she says, and it’s not a comforting tone at all. “Do you have all your things? I’ve booked us on the redeye.”

“Huh?”

“Jessica’s at the hospital, Shane. She’s having the baby.”

A cup loss and the vast, impending, lifelong fallout of his own stupidity. This is actually the worst night of his life.

His mom, somehow, manages to sleep on the five-hour flight. Shane is dimly aware of some movie playing on screens overhead while he scratches and scrapes the cuticles of his thumbs raw.

When they land, while a slow parade of tired passengers shuffles through the aisle, stowed bags lowered with careless heed for elbows and heads, his mom switches her cellphone back on; it dings with missed messages. “It’s your dad,” she explains. “Oh. Shane.” She grabs his wrist and presses gently with her thumb, as if she’s trying to remind him of something.

“What?”

She gives him a watery smile. “It’s a girl.”

(“I don’t want to know the gender,” Jessica told Shane, after an appointment where the doctor had asked. “Makes it kind of real, doesn’t it?”

Such a rare admission from her, who has worn these months coolly, almost confidently; who has laughed off hallway insults and conspired with Shane on a list of increasingly goofy name ideas, all while maintaining straight A’s and learning how to drive and pacifying the worst incarnations of her parents’ indignation.)

Well. It’s real now. It’s real. Because the gauzy ambiguity of the baby and the child and it now has a new shape – daughter – a pink-coloured word, out of step with his harsh icy world, locker rooms, chirps, high-sticks. He doesn’t know what to do with this word. It tastes like raw cinnamon and sounds like shattered glass.

As soon as they’re out of the jet bridge, he bolts for the nearest washroom and empties his stomach of the Tim Horton’s bagel his mom had force-fed him in the Vancouver terminal.  

They take a taxi to the hospital because his dad is with Jessica, and so he has his duffel and his gear bag on his shoulders as he steps into her room, and it occurs to him that between his sticks and skates and uniform and favourite sweatshirt and Jessica and his parents and his apparent daughter, every earthly thing he has ever particularly cared about is inside these four walls.

He sets his bags down near the door and his dad is immediately pulling him into a hug with strong, reassuring arms. “Congratulations,” he says.

“Um. Thanks.” It hurts because he knows his dad means it, all too earnestly; congratulations like he has achieved something, when in fact this very night he has spectacularly failed at the one thing he was supposed to be good at.

His dad squeezes his shoulders the way he used to before Timbits games, a century ago, it feels like. “Come see,” he beckons, and guides Shane over to Jessica’s bedside.

Her parents stand on the other side of the bed; Mr. Holmes, tight-lipped and sombre; Mrs. Holmes waging a losing battle with her own facial expression, an uncharacteristic softness winning out.

Jessica is drenched in sweat and smiling feebly and holding a small blanket-wrapped thing.

“You look like you’re the one who just played a cup game,” he tells her.

She crinkles her nose and sticks out her tongue. “You want to hold her?”

“Not particularly.” It’s out of his mouth before he can filter the thought, and it comes out kind of joking the way he and Jessica always are, but it’s true, at the core of him.

He doesn’t want to feel the weight of her.

He has a fleeting, panicked vision not of dropping her, but of throwing her to the ground.

“Well, you’re taking her. My arm’s falling asleep.” And now she’s passing him this soft, fragile, wriggling thing and it’s in his arms and thank goodness his parents made him take that stupid fucking class because he knows what to do even though he’s pretty sure he left his brain somewhere in British Columbia.

“Oh, Shane,” his mom coos over his shoulder. “She’s beautiful.”

He snorts out a laugh because it is, objectively, untrue. This is an ugly baby, wrinkled like a sharpei dog, mottled furious pink like some rotten exotic fruit, with a steep, square-shaped forehead and a shock of dark fuzz across it forming a lopsided unibrow.

“She looks like E.T.,” he observes, because it’s the first coherent thought that floats to the surface of the liquified ooze where his brain used to be.

Jessica laughs, an honest and exhausted sound, then remembers that she should be insulted and scowls. “No she doesn’t,” she objects.

“She kind of does.” He transfers the baby back to her carefully, feeling at once relieved and useless to be empty-handed. “The forehead, right? And her eyes are kind of far apart—”

“Oh my god, you’re right,” Jessica complains. “We could name her Elliott?”

“Or Reese, like Reese’s Pieces.”

“I don’t hate that.”

Behind him, his mom tuts. “You’re not naming your daughter after a candy, Shane.”

And then Shane remembers, because sometimes he’s not totally useless—“Wait. I have this.” He strides over to his duffel bag on the ground by the door and unzips the outside pocket, where there’s a worn, folded sheet of paper.

He’d printed it out ages ago, from a website called TopBabyNames.ca, using his billet hosts’ noisy home printer in Kingston. He’d highlighted some names, underlined some, crossed out others. He’d never shared this with Jessica; it had felt like conceding that all of this was happening more tangibly than he had been ready to admit.

She unfolds the paper with one hand and gives him a sideways look, at once teasing and trusting, and pauses when she gets to the middle of the page. “Well, it has to be this one, right?”

He looks at where she’s pointing, then down at the baby, uncertain what Jessica sees that makes her think this name is the name, the one that fits. “Why?”

She smiles tiredly at the baby in her arms, and shrugs. “It’s a hockey name.”

Later, Mr. and Mrs. Holmes go home and his mom and dad go in search of lukewarm coffee from a vending machine, and Shane sits in a big chair at the edge of the room holding his daughter while Jessica sleeps. His daughter his daughter his daughter. He forces himself to think it over and over again until it stops sounding so fucking wrong.

He doesn’t feel what his dad said he’d feel, love bursting out the seams of him.

Maybe something is wrong with him, with the part of him that’s supposed to love like that.

Maybe he is a hockey robot.

What he feels borders on neutral – which at least is better than the abject terror that has shaped the last few months, even the last few hours.

He feels a sense of responsibility, of gravitas, housed in a glass orb nestled in the coils of his intestines, fragile; if he breathes too hard, it might break.

And, oddly, miraculously: relief. A cool breeze; a hard-fought win in overtime. Ultimately, he will have very little to do with his daughter’s care and keeping, because his parents will be raising her, because that’s the plan his mom had devised in a three-ring binder. Because he is patently unqualified and, in all honestly, unwilling, for any other plan to take shape. 

Everything’s fine. It is, sort of. Hockey is the whole point – the plan, the path forward. He can take the Memorial Cup next year, he knows it. If he works hard, which he will, he can make it onto the junior national roster and play in the Prospect Cup. Maybe not next season, but definitely by Regina in ’08. He has the whole summer ahead to train and bulk up and hopefully get his G1 license and also figure out how the fuck to be a dad.

Her eyes are brown, like his.

She’s so fucking small.

Her name is Sidney.

---------------

When Shane was six, his grandma died, his dad’s mom; and her cat Pistache came to live with them.

Pistache was an ancient tabby with a limp in his hind leg, a wonky left ear, and an anguished whine at mealtimes. Shane was scared of him. Shane was also mildly allergic.

And somehow, eventually, Shane got used to having him around. The stuffy nose and puffiness in his eyes faded a bit – not gone, just less bothersome. Now and again Shane would even venture a cautious pet across the creature’s back or a gentle scritch at the nape of his neck, yielding purrs and head-butts. Exactly once, Yuna found Shane and Pistache curled up together in bed, both snoring soundly.

Eventually his Aunt Rita came and whisked Pistache away to her apartment in Mississauga; and that was that.

Shane knows it’s wrong, factually if not morally, to compare his infant daughter to an elderly cat he had known and partially feared for a period of eight weeks in his childhood. And yet.

It’s like the easing of an allergy, getting used to her. The sounds, the smells, the plaintive helpless look of her, become less prickly and more background. Routine. Crying becomes nighttime ambience and morning alarm clock. There is structure to her existence, not unlike his own during season: feeding, sleeping, shitting; storybooks that rhyme and one annoying TV show about a monkey named Bruno.

Jessica comes over most days that first summer. Sometimes she spends the night. She pumps breast milk (which manages to confirm for Shane, if he wasn't sure before, that he really, definitely, does not like breasts); and she sits on the floor of the nursery cross-legged beside Shane and Sidney, and the three of them cooperate on a silent, sisyphean assembly line, stacking colourful plastic blocks into a tower that is almost immediately knocked over and reconstructed.

“They’re babies with a baby,” he overhears his mom say to his dad, one afternoon. And her voice is empty of the crisp, pointed edges that had become soundtrack to every mealtime and car ride and phone call home in the lead-up to all of this. Instead, she just sounds – sad.

Here are the things Shane knows for sure:

He cares about Sidney’s well-being. He does not want her to be hurt or sick. He hates when she cries.

He supposes he feels this way, really, about any baby. He’d be a psychopath if he didn’t, right? But if he were ever presented with some twisted trolley problem where he had to choose between his baby and some random baby off the street, he knows who he’d save.

So. That’s something.

Also, this: He likes talking to her.

It’s stupid, really. She can’t understand him. She’s a literal baby.

But he could swear she listens to him, really listens, with wide, intent eyes and academic focus that reminds him, alarmingly, of himself in the rink. He never talks to her in front of his parents, because the whole thing is embarrassing. But at night, sometimes, he lowers himself onto the floor of the nursery and looks at the shadow of her through the bars of the crib, and tells her things.

She’s the second person in the world who hears him test those words he’d first uttered to Jessica on a Wednesday in September; a pair of sour, unwanted syllables that stick to the back of his teeth like chewing gum that’s lost its flavour.

“Maybe I’m wrong, anyway,” he wonders. “And even if I am—you know. It’s not like I can tell anyone or, like. Do anything.” He thinks back to his mom’s words in September when he’d told his parents about Jessica. How could you be so careless?

Sidney just blinks back at him unhelpfully.

When Lipinsky gets sent to London during the June trade window amid an uncertain post-op recovery, Shane tells Sidney about the scrabbling wad of guilt trapped in his throat, the manipulation he’d orchestrated with a psychological incisiveness he hadn’t known he possessed. Even if it was Lipinsky’s own hubris that had led to his downfall, it was Shane who had pulled the pin and handed the guy a live grenade.

“I hated saying those things,” he tells her. “I won’t say shit like that again. I promise.” He pauses, assesses what he just said. “Sorry, stuff, not shit. Shit. Sorry.”

Finally, there’s this:

In July, he flies to Calgary for development camp with the junior national team. He flies with Stephenson, who was also invited; while his mom and dad stay behind with Sidney. He’s only gone for five days. He doesn’t miss her; he doesn’t have time. He’s razor-focused on the game, the burn in his legs, the cold air in his lungs. Puck, stick, skates, net: familiar and beloved and his. Hockey is the whole point.

He doesn’t miss her; he doesn’t.

But when he gets back home, he knows he feels glad to see her.

And that, really, is something.

---------------

The season starts, and Jessica goes back to school, and the plan concocted a year earlier, during a dining room negotiation as tense as a face-off, is set into motion. Shane spends the last week of September in Barrie, Brampton, and Kingston; in October, he’s on the road in Kitchener, Sarnia, London, and Belleville. He returns from a November road trip in Sault Ste. Marie late at night, after a grueling loss and an eight-hour bus ride, muscle-tired with eyelids heavy from reviewing tape the whole trip back on Coach Larsen’s dusty laptop. His mom is still awake in the dimly lit living room when he gets home, holding Sidney tucked to her chest, singing softly and swaying.

He sets his bags in the hallway and watches the scene, puzzled, some buried detail nagging in his brain like an itch.

Oh.

“She’s bigger,” he observes.

He’s been gone nine days.

His mom meets his eyes with a knowing look, a little pained, a little smug. “They grow up fast, Shane,” she says.

Wordlessly, she strides over to Shane and transfers Sidney into his arms, and it’s still fucking weird, holding a living breathing person and being expected to pretend that this is normal. She looks sleepy; he knows this because he has gotten used to the faces she makes in the predictable arc of her day. Sleepy looks like this: face crinkled up, blinking eyes, a relaxed frown weighing down the corners of her lips.

“Same,” he tells her.

He settles her into the crib and sits down in his spot on the floor, and tells her about the horrible game. The pass he’d missed from Lambert; and an awful shot on goal that had ricocheted uselessly out of the crease without the goalie needing to lift a finger. Just an off day, he knows, but he feels like the core of him is broken.

He hates failing. He hates losing.

He hates himself, a little. Just a little; just enough.

“Thanks for listening,” he whispers. He’s pretty sure she’s asleep, but he thinks that’s a weird way to end their one-sided conversation, so he stands and looks into the crib, at the rise and fall of her breathing, the slope of her shape, small but not as small as she used to be, and adds a curt “Good night,” before trudging the slow, tired few steps to his own room, and closing the door.

---------------

He’s an alternate for the national team that year. He flies out to Calgary in December for the International Prospect Cup but doesn’t make it out of selection camp. He’s weirdly okay with that.

Maybe it’s because the season is going well, though he doesn’t dare say that out loud. The Centennials are certain to make it to the OHL Playoffs, at least. And he can taste the nearness of the Memorial Cup, so close last time, just beyond his grasp.

He wants it this year. He wants it more than anything. He wants it with a sparking hunger that sears through him every time his blades hit the ice. 

He wants to come home at the end of the season and tell Sidney that he’d done it, that he’d won it all. Whether despite her, or for her, he’s not sure.

---------------

“Guess what.”

Jessica often starts their phone calls like this. Not once has Shane guessed correctly. “What?”

“You have to guess.”

“Um. Sidney sat up again?” He still isn’t sure what the big deal is about sitting up, but his parents and Jessica had all freaked out when it happened the first time.

“Well, yeah. But no. That’s not it.”

“Just tell me?”

He can hear her grinning through the airwaves from his hotel room in Niagara. “I passed my G2 road test.”

“No shit. Really?”

“Mm-hmm. And my parents are letting me use their car, finally.”

“That’s great.” He hopes he sounds appropriately enthused. He’s really tired.

“Hey. Can I ask you something?” There’s a clicking sound, soft in the background; he can picture her lying on top of her brightly floral bedspread, surrounded by textbooks and spiral-bound loose leaf, fidgeting with the eraser end of a mechanical pencil.

“Yeah. Of course.”

There’s a rustling as she sits up and leans forward. “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Don’t you miss her? I mean, I miss her the whole time I’m at school, and that’s only, like, six hours. You go away for days.”

“Oh.” He’s not sure what to say that won’t make him sound like a horrible person. Because the truth is that he doesn’t really think about her at all while he’s on the road.

Well, no. That’s not exactly true. He thinks about her in the same way he thinks about all the rhythms of his life; she’s just a piece of things, now, an implicit part of what home means when the bus drops the team off back at the rink after consecutive games in Oshawa and Owen Sound, and his dad’s grey Honda Civic is there in the parking lot to pick him up, and his dad opens the trunk and helps him load in his gear bag and says something like, “Ready to get home?” Before, that used to mean returning to his mom’s intensity and his dad’s stolidness and his bedroom filled with trophies and medals and books and the quilt his grandma made when he was born. (Had Pistache known that she’d made it, when he’d slept there, croissant-shaped and snoring? Had he watched her sew it, blues and greens, steady hands, from a warm sunlit spot in her small little home?)

Now, going home also means Sidney; another square in the tiring and familiar patchwork fabric of the everyday.

But he doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he says, “I don’t know. I guess I’m just mostly focused on hockey.” That’s not a lie, anyway. He pauses, hesitates, then asks – because he’s curious; because it’s something missing from him, something broken in him like a software malfunction – “What’s it feel like, for you? Missing her.”

“It’s like—I don’t know. Like there’s a string, between us.”

“A string?”

“Yeah. Like I’m on one end of the string and she’s on the other, and all day I’m sitting in class and I can just feel her, like, pulling tight on the other end. And I just can’t wait to get to your house after and see her and hold her.”

“That sounds hard.” 

“Yeah,” she exhales. “It is.” He hears the whoosh of fabric and thinks maybe she’s slid off her bed and onto the floor, knees tucked to her chest. “Your dad says he has a friend at the Canadian Space Agency who can get me an internship this summer. In Longueuil.”

“Jess, that’s perfect for you.”

“I know. And I want to do it. It’s just—”

“The string?”

“The string.” She sighs. “Am I a bad mom, if I do the internship? I’d be gone for, like, two whole months.”

“No. No way. The whole point is, like, my parents are raising her, right? And you’ll go to university eventually, so maybe this is a good practice run.”

“Maybe.”

Shane is feeling wide awake now. He remembers what his mom said when he’d first told his parents – everything we sacrificed. He remembers her coming home from her job for the last time with a cardboard box of everything that had once occupied her desk in a corner office. All so he can make it to the MLH and Jessica can become a rocket scientist and nothing would stand in their way. “Take the internship. Longueuil is only, what, two hours?”

“Two and a half.”

“Easy. I’ll be home in the summer. I’ll have my G2 by then. I’ll take her to visit you.”

“You can’t drive in Quebec on your G2. Just Ontario.” She laughs. “Besides, there’s no way you’re passing the road test.”

“Hey,” he objects.

“You’re a terrible driver, Shane. You’re scared to change lanes.”

“Yeah, because it’s fucking scary.” He rolls his eyes and hopes she can tell that he did. “Fine. Whatever. My parents will drive. Just—do the internship.”

“Okay,” Jessica says. “Okay, yeah. I want to do it.”

“Okay. Good.”

They’re silent for a while. He hears the scratch of pencil on paper and thinks she’s resumed the homework she’d abandoned for their call.

“Jess?” he says.

“Still here.”

“You said—before. You said she sat up again?” It’s not a big deal; he doesn’t understand. But he wants to understand.

Jessica smiles into the phone, and tells him all about it.

---------------

His parents and Jessica and Sidney, tucked snugly into her carseat, drive ninety minutes to Kingston to see him in the Memorial Cup final. His mom has somehow procured a Centennials onesie, which manages to make Shane feel something unnamed and tenuous, seeing the tiny logo on her chest as if she’s proud of him, which is ridiculous, because she’s a literal baby.

The Centennials barely scraped out of the round-robin, taking down the Gatineau Torches in overtime; a defenseman named Boizieau made things very difficult and kept the score 1-1 right up until the end.

Now they face the Spokane Explorers. Stephenson and Lambert are on first line with him and Walshe is starting in goal. The forward line for Spokane are aggressive and fast but Stephenson is smarter and faster, and Shane is faster than all of them, and Stephenson dekes and passes and now Shane has the puck on the breakaway, net swishes, horn sounds, and now it’s two minutes left in the third and the Centennials are up 4-2, and now it’s just a matter of defense while the clock ticks down and then.

They’ve fucking done it.

It’s the best fucking feeling. Winning the whole damn thing; lifting the ostentatious silver cup over his head and grinning in a way he can’t stop because, yeah, he’s fucking earned it. Shane feels like he’s made of helium, like he’s skating weightlessly, like the entire past year of weird and horrible and not-so-horrible has all condensated into something indelible and worthwhile that he can pluck from the air and keep in his pocket.

He meets his family in another bland multipurpose room in the back of the rink, just like the one where, a year ago, he’d felt defeated and exhausted and terrified. Jessica holds Sidney in one arm and pulls Shane into a hug with the other, and it occurs to Shane that he’s never hugged his daughter before, not really.

He kisses her on the forehead, which is also something he’s never done before, and it’s a little awkward but it feels right for the moment. And he looks at her brown eyes which are his, and which watch him in that quiet studious way that lets him know she’s listening when he talks to her in the dark of the nursery at night.

“Happy birthday, Sid,” he says. “I got you a trophy.”

Chapter End Notes

• Sassy early 2000s STEM girl with a religious upbringing? Yeah, Jessica is an Inheritance Cycle girlie. I don't make the rules.

• Let it be known that author's personal views are vehemently pro-abortion, but we're here for the plot, so.

• I have tagged this work Implied In-Universe Existence of Sidney Crosby and by golly am I going to imply his existence. Sidney Crosby would have only just finished his second season with Pittsburgh in 2007, and even though he was of course already famous by then, he hadn't yet achieved his legend status of today and it would have been very weird to name a child after him at that point. That said, I do believe a teenage Shane would have idolized him, and Jessica would have known that, and these two are literal children trying to name a child. It just feels right 😌

Chapter 2: Wait for what you want to appear, then pounce

Chapter Notes

Shane freezes in the foyer, gear bag half hoisted.

Fucking unfair. To go from babbling bilingual nonsense for eighteen months to dada like zero to sixty in a linguistic Ferrari. And to choose now, this exact moment, to look him square in the eye and say it, when he has one foot out the door on his way to the airport, for a flight that will take him two-thousand six-hundred and nine kilometres away.

“Shane,” his dad intones gently from where he holds Sidney to his chest.

“I know. I heard,” he says tightly. He meets his dad’s eyes, which are shining, which is so fucking unfair. “Bye, Dad. Bye, Sid.” He hesitates, then quickly kisses the top of her head, which isn’t something he ever really does, mainly just to appease his dad who is looking at him like the moment requires some ceremony. Then he bolts out the door to where his mom has already started the car.

He doesn’t mention it to her. Probably his dad will tell her later.

He doesn’t really have time to process it. He spends the flight studying game tape of the Russian team, a blurry smudge of raw talent wearing number eighty-one captured on shaky handheld. They land and then it’s selection camp; then practice; then tournament play. He attends every game he isn’t a part of, absorbing, preparing. He takes handwritten notes in a little spiral notebook while his mom rattles off her own commentary, periodically punctuated by inane updates from home read out loud off her phone. “Oh, your dad says Sidney likes the green beans.”

He watches Russia decimate Sweden from a seat high up in the crowd; number eighty-one is still a blur, still talented, but now in high-definition. Crystalline edges and peregrine speed and ferocious instinct that has Shane flipping futilely through a rolodex of unnameable feelings, a soaring, ambitious jealousy; he’s hunched forward, elbows pressing into his legs, cold metal aglet of his sweatshirt drawstring clasped copper-tasting between his teeth.

There’s a break between morning practice and Canada v. Czech Republic, a scheduling quirk that has resulted in unoccupied ice while a United Nations of listless teenage athletes loiters in the stands, checking their phones, playing card games, gossiping in a dozen languages. Shane is relieved to be playing with Boiziau this time and not against him; but the guy is an exhausting geyser of energy which seems to fuel, specifically, his eyebrows, arched in an exaggerated choreography as he regales a growing cluster of Canadians with half-baked rumours about QMJHL trades and cheating girlfriends and goalie melodrama.

“Is it true what they say, Hollander? You knocked up your girl?”

He hates the way people talk about this. As if Jessica was some conquest and Sidney is some sort of dishy secret. Knocked up – what does that even mean? How can a tactless phrase like that encompass an entire saga of stupidity and shame and terror and the squirming warm shape of her and dada uttered like nothing, thoughtless as a sneeze, on his way out the door?

“I have a kid, yeah,” he confirms.

“Dope,” someone says. Marleau; Halifax; nineteen; drafted over the summer to Boston’s farm team in Providence. “Ballsy Hollzy.”

He really hopes that doesn’t stick.

Shane wants exactly three things: fresh air, absolute quiet, and to untangle the knot that’s been tightening in his throat since he left for his flight. He slips away while Boiziau is saying something about a Charlottetown winger who got arrested for a drunken altercation at Tim Horton’s; grabs his jacket and toque from his locker; and tells his mom he’ll be outside. She nods, barely looking away from her conversation with a suit Shane vaguely remembers being introduced to as someone from the federation.

There’s a loading dock behind the rink, grey banks of dirty shoveled snow buttressing sodden asphalt and a rusting dumpster. The silence in Regina is a real silence, thick and weighted; no white noise, no whir of passing cars. Shane lets the silence wrap warm and welcome around him while he leans his back against the corrugated wall and slides slowly down until he’s crouched with his knees to his chest, watching his breath take shape in the cold.

It’s like. He knows it means nothing. She’s a baby forming hapless syllables the same way a chimpanzee seated on a piano bench might accidentally produce something that sounds close to music.

Mama has already happened. That happened months ago, after Jessica was back from her internship, bright and changed, a glittering confidence to her. Really it was something more like mamamamama, a nonsense sound, but Jessica had been ecstatic.

“Mama,” she had cooed back. “That’s right. That’s me.”

And that was weird, Shane thought. Because this whole time, Jessica had been Jessica. But now, she had another name.

And Shane – doesn’t want another name.

He doesn’t want to be subsumed by a title, an identity, he didn’t choose and hasn’t earned. There’s a difference between being a dad, factual, logical, guy-who-begat-child; and being Dad. Proper noun. David Hollander, hands over his teaching him how to hold a hockey stick, checking his math homework, making sure Shane always has a quiet place to retreat to when the world becomes too loud.

He’s not even eighteen yet.

All his life, he’s been called an old soul on report cards and promoted to teams with kids sometimes twice his age. For as long as he can remember, he has wanted to be older, to speed up the process of becoming, to reach the draft and the MLH and the rest of his life. Phases One through Five, carefully plotted, squarely envisioned. But now, it’s like.

He’s still a kid, is the truth of it. He has no business being someone’s Dad.

Not that he has much of a choice.

So he’ll wear it like the captain’s C, a responsibility, maybe even a privilege, even though it feels wrong. Probably he’ll get used to it, eventually.

The doors that lead to the service hallway in the rear of the rink clatter open, and Shane hears the scrunch of packed snow. He doesn’t look up as a pair of dark boots walks past and a figure leans against the wall beside him, maybe a metre away. 

The click of a lighter. A spark.

Shane stands, brushing imaginary dirt off his knees. So much for alonetime. “I’m not sure you’re supposed to smoke here,” he says.

A wisp of smoke snakes through the frigid air, bitter-smelling and defiant. “Okay.”

And for all the beauty in his skating, Shane is not prepared to actually set eyes on the guy’s face. It literally knocks the wind out of him, an oh-fuck sort of feeling, because what the hell is he supposed to do with the flutter in his chest and the rush of wind in his ears and the small glass marble of truth that rolls around the hollow grooves of his stomach, cold to the touch, known only to Jessica and to a baby who can’t begin to understand it any better than he can?

“Ilya Rozanov?” he says when he recovers his ability to speak.

“Yes.” Rozanov’s voice is low, impudent and tinged with smoke. “And you are—what. Having nervous breakdown?”

“No,” Shane defends reflexively, which makes him sound petulant, which he instantly regrets. “I’m just—getting some air.” He holds out a hand, which might be shaking, just a little, but it’s winter in Saskatchewan, so that’s to be expected. “Shane Hollander.”

Rozanov takes his hand without breaking eye contact. Shakes it firmly; sarcastically, somehow, with the cigarette hanging precariously from the side of his mouth like a diver on a precipice.

“You’re an awesome player to watch,” Shane says. It’s a stupid thing to say.

Rozanov regards him with an inscrutable look, intense grey eyes, the fleeting ghost of a grin – amused? Smug? – playing at the corner of his lips. “Yes,” he says again.

Shane finds himself huffing out a laugh. He doesn’t know what to do with his body; his arms suddenly feel too long, somehow, like they belong to an orangutan. He settles for leaning back against the wall behind them, hands in his pockets. They stand in silence for a moment, tendrils of breath and smoke curling between them that vanish almost as quickly as they appear.

Shane’s ears are too hot under his toque, and he’s glad they’re covered because he’s positive they’ve turned a patriotic shade of Team Canada red. “Anyways. I should go – they’re waiting for me,” he lies. “But, um, good luck in the tournament.” He holds out his hand a second time.

Rozanov looks like he might either laugh out loud, or issue a devastating chirp that Shane might never recover from.

Neither thing happens. They shake hands.

Shane is already halfway back to the big double-doors of the service entrance when Rozanov responds.

“You will not be so nice when we beat you.”

Canada beats Czech Republic, 3-1, bringing them closer to the final.

That night, Shane lies awake and wishes Sidney were here, so he could tell her about the way his heart felt in his chest when Ilya Rozanov looked at him through a cloud of ego and cigarette smoke. 

---------------

Right before the final, his dad texts him a picture of Sidney, a marshmallow-puff of layers in a tiny purple toque knitted by Mrs. Holmes (who has mostly come around to the whole thing). His dad has captioned the photo: Good luck Dada!

It’s a stab wound and a jolt of lightning. Fucking unfair.

He turns off his phone and laces up his skates.

The game is beautiful and brutal in equal measure. Boiziau is a fucking excellent defenseman, but he may as well be made of Jell-O the way Rozanov practically skates through him. Meanwhile, Russia’s defense is a fucking brick wall.

Shane has watched Rozanov skate, studied him like a scientist in a lab, memorized his tendencies, his stats, the way his wrist shot quirks left ever so slightly. But sharing the ice with him is something else entirely. It’s the two of them, the puck, the solid expanse beneath them; and everyone else is just there, like extras on set.

It’s thrilling. It’s infuriating.

The loss seeps into his pores, icy and viscous, and he means to avoid meeting Rozanov’s eye in the handshake line, but he can’t help it.

“See you at the draft.” It’s somewhere between earnest and taunting.

The flight back to Ottawa is miserable. He doesn’t need to watch tape to replay every moment in slow-motion behind his eyelids, every barely-there opening he’d missed, every sprint after the puck matched by Rozanov in speed and intensity.

The cupid’s bow of Rozanov’s lips, the faintest hint of a smile. Steely eyes and that fucking Okay in his stupid fucking accent.

Sidney is asleep when they get home, but he sits on the floor anyway and listens to the shallow pattern of her breaths.

---------------

Jessica is accepted everywhere she applied: UBC, U of T, UCalgary, U de M, McGill. She gives uOttawa serious consideration, but.

“You’ve had your heart set on Toronto since, like, forever,” Shane reminds her.

“I know.”

“The string?”

“The string.” Jessica sighs. “They have this telescope – it’s the only one like it in Canada. And your dad’s friend, Dr. Bazzi? She says she has a friend who can probably get me into the exoplanets lab as a first-year.”

“That’s badass.”

“Yeah, I know.” 

“Maybe the string’s long enough,” Shane suggests, shifting the phone to his other ear. “And there’s always VIA Rail.”

Jessica snorts. “Remember Grade 6? Mr. Boudreau’s class?”

“Oh my god, the Toronto trip. The train fucking got stuck—”

“We were in the middle of nowhere for, like, five hours—”

“At least the train people felt bad for us and gave us snacks.”

She exhales wistfully. “Kinda feels like yesterday, eh?”

It does, really. Now look at them.

“Go to U of T,” he says firmly. “Be an astronaut, or whatever.”

“Win a Stanley Cup,” she quips back. “Or whatever.”

“Yeah. I’m planning on it.”

Jessica hums a smug little sound. “Good,” she says.

It’s nice, picturing their futures like this, away from the mire. Like maybe they can actually become something in the world.

And it occurs to him that one day, Sidney will become something, too.

---------------

The Holmeses sit with the Hollanders at Jessica’s commencement, Sidney snug in Mrs. Holmes’ lap. The woman has given up all pretense and openly adores her granddaughter, if the onslaught of miniature knitwear delivered monthly to the Hollanders’ household is any indication. Mr. Holmes, meanwhile, has never once held her, and mostly regards her with the same look Shane imagines the guy would give a stray dog.

Today, though, he concedes to letting Sidney fiddle with the shiny silver buckle on his wristwatch. It’s a small thing that feels like a wartime detente. Jessica can’t stop grinning.

Naturally, she’s valedictorian. She carries Sidney across the stage to receive her diploma, and Shane thinks, not for the first time, that she’s probably the smartest, bravest person he knows.

They take pictures after the ceremony. Shane stands beside Jessica in a freshly steamed button-down shirt, Sidney between them grasping clumsily at the mortarboard tassel. It’s cute. It’s almost normal.

Jessica looks so, so happy.

She’s eighteen now and the number sits proudly on her shoulders like a feather boa, unabashed and freeing. She’s dyed streaks of turquoise in her hair and gotten her ears pierced, and wears tiny sparkling emerald studs, which is Sidney’s birthstone, that Shane gave her as a graduation present. She’ll be spending another summer at the CSA before moving into a dormitory suite in downtown Toronto that she’ll share with a theatre major named Isabel and a business major named Kavita who rows crew. She spends evenings at the Hollanders’ dining room table reviewing academic calendars with Yuna, ensuring every bank holiday and reading break and not-too-busy weekend will be spent with Sidney at her side.

Shane passes his online coursework and receives a diploma in the mail, an unimpressive piece of cardstock representing an unimpressive array of mostly adequate grades; but still, his mom frames it in the living room like she’s proud of him, which feels dubious given everything he’s managed to screw up. The diploma hangs next to the graduation photo with Jessica and another one from last year, of him holding Sidney in one arm and the Memorial Cup in the other.

Ottawa makes it to the cup tournament again but loses in a hard-fought semi-final against the Kelowna Serpents. It’s an honourable loss, even if it leaves Shane with a hollowed-out feeling that he tells Sidney about after the trip home from Rimouski. He finds her asleep in the moss-green nursery where his dad has converted the crib into a low-lying bed with padded railing. Yesterday was her second birthday.

He doesn’t usually wake her when he gets home late, but decides to tonight. He kneels on the floor and taps her shoulder softly.

“Hey,” he whispers as she blinks awake. “Happy birthday.”

“Birthday,” she repeats in her small, bright voice. She knows a lot of words but uses them sparingly, favouring English but sometimes stumbling, seemingly unaware, into florid spurts of mostly comprehensible French.

Her first steps had come on teetering legs while he was on the road in Sudbury, just before the Prospect Cup. Now, she runs, a limbs-flailing sort of thing, fearless of falling. He thinks this bodes well for when she inevitably gets on the ice.

It took a while, but the unibrow has cleared up. Her hair is a feathery reddish-brown, and the tentative springtime sun has scattered a passel of freckles beneath her eyes and across the slope of her nose. Shane can see them even in the dark of the room, illuminated by a nightlight in the shape of a butterfly. 

He tells her about the loss, about the two goals he scored even though the Kelowna goalie was basically impermeable the whole of the game. About Kelowna scoring in overtime and the clenching frustration in his chest even as he told his teammates that they should be proud of the way they played, because they had played really fucking well, all the way to the end.

“Okay. Good night, Sid,” he says finally, and stands to leave.

“’Night,” she echoes confidently.

She’s like, a real person now. It’s fucking weird as hell.

---------------

Jessica pulls Shane into his bedroom the day before she leaves for her second summer in Longueuil. They sit cross-legged, facing each other on the quilt his grandma made. She looks at him seriously, but with a little squint to her eyes, like she’s trying not to laugh.

She takes a deep breath. “It’s not you, it’s me.”

“Huh?”

She clasps his hand gently between both of hers. “We’ll always have the memories of the time we shared.”

“What are you talking about?”

Her nose crinkles. “I’m breaking up with you, Shane.”

“Oh.” He hadn’t thought—well. They hadn’t kissed or anything since all of this started; since I’m pregnant and I’m gay had collided in the airspace over this same bed, a sailor’s knot of magnificent horrors. “Were we—together, still?”

She shrugs. “I mean, we weren’t not together.”

And that’s fair, honestly. Jessica is bedrock in the geology of his life; at some point, maybe, girlfriend had become best friend or confidant or co-parent, but those words don’t really encompass the whole of what he feels for her, which is something hard to name but easy to lean against, firm and constant. “I guess we never really talked about it.”

“It’s normal, you know. Breaking up before university.”

“Normal?”

“The distance,” she sighs dramatically. “And what if I meet someone in Toronto?”

“Do you want to?”

“Yeah,” she confirms with a solemn nod. She holds out a pinky. “Promise me something.”

He hooks his pinky around hers. “What am I promising, exactly?”

“That we’ll both meet dashingly hot men this year and fall terribly in love.”

Shane nearly chokes; he sputters, coughing. “Jess. I—nope. No.”

But she has his pinky in a deathgrip with her own, and now she’s giving their joined hands a firm shake in contractual agreement. “Too late. You promised.”

---------------

Before the draft, there’s the combine. Shane flies to Buffalo and shakes a lot of hands and gives careful, practiced responses crafted like carpentry, sanded smooth and soulless with ultra-fine grit.

“I understand you’re a family man,” says the scout from Montreal. “Do you find it distracts you from the game?”

“Not at all,” he replies. “Hockey gets my complete and total focus.”

“You were quite young when your child was born out of wedlock,” observes the scout from Columbus, and Shane wonders if this guy is a time-traveller from before women were allowed to vote. “Can we be sure you won’t be party to another scandal in the future?”

“You can be sure,” Shane affirms. “Hockey gets my complete and total focus.”

His mom had warned him to expect questions like this. Sidney is an open secret at this point, a presence at home games, watching from the stands in a knit toque and team colours, the tip of her nose pink from the cold. Still, the questions grate on him, impersonal and curious for the wrong reasons. He feels like he’s wearing an itchy wool sweater that’s too tight around his neck.

“You’d be a great fit for the Cens,” says the scout from Ottawa. “Hometown team. Close to your family.”

And yeah, Shane has thought about it. Not that there’s a ton of autonomy when it comes to the draft, but if he and his agent really worked at it, he could deter Boston, Montreal, and Columbus and live with the humiliation of going fourth overall, staying in Ottawa, keeping close to his parents and Sidney.

But: Nothing changes, his mom had said over her three-ring binder that afternoon, resolute in that immovable way of hers.

And: hockey is the whole point.

Probably it makes him a bad person, or something. But he knows in the architecture of his bones, the way he can feel a play before a lane even opens, that he’s going to be great one day.

Not now, not yet. But, one day.

So he just nods at the Ottawa scout.

“I love my family,” he says blandly, “but hockey gets my complete and total focus.”

Between interviews and fitness tests and medical exams, he glances around the convention space, telling himself he’s looking for his mom and not for a head of blonde curls, a smirk, a pair of intense grey eyes that maybe know too much about him, somehow.

He tells himself it’s not hopeful anticipation flickering in his chest; it’s just nerves, adrenaline. 

Anyway, Ilya Rozanov is nowhere to be found.

---------------

They meet again in Los Angeles, of course, and at this point Shane is acutely aware that Ilya Rozanov is going to be a huge fucking problem.

Jesus; Shane feels like he’s an addict, or a creep, or maybe both. He can’t stop staring. From the atrium to the balcony above: the sharp shape of his shoulders, the shadow of his glare. From his seat in the auditorium, mouth sour with the taste of second-best, watching Rozanov shake hands with Boston’s GM and accept the black and gold jersey with an ostentatious wink and a knavish grin. And now on the floor of this dingy hotel gym, fluorescent lights, a mirror projecting their twinned image into a parallel world.

More. Rozanov hadn’t even said the word out loud, really, just implied it with the shape of his jaw and the sound of his breath. And Shane had listened, had obeyed, before passing the water bottle back between them with a brush of fingertips that pierced through him like static.

Shane wants to tear at the waistband of Rozanov’s gym shorts and press his thumbs into the topography of his hips. He wants to burrow his face in the scalene slope of Rozanov’s neck and breathe the smell of him and taste the salt of his sweat.

Shane wants to vomit. Shane wants to kiss him. Shane wants to animorph into a gecko lizard and scurry away. Shane wants— 

Shane wants.

And what a fucking useless feeling that is. He is the Future of Hockey. He’s a Montreal Metro, now. He’s someone’s Dad, for fuck’s sake. He has a kid at home and an MLH contract in the works and a life planned out in phases that don’t include anything as careless, as reckless, as wanting.

---------------

It’s good, maybe, in the end, that Shane didn’t go first in the draft. The analysts all seem to agree that his style of play is really Too Cerebral for Boston. Montreal is a Much Better Fit, they say in their suits and neckties behind a desk flanked by too many screens, these men who’ve never met him but speak as though they have. Theriault is a coach who values Strategy and Collaboration, they say; and Hollander, who led the CHL last season in both goals and assists, is a Strategic, Collaborative player.

Besides:

“You’ll be so close to Sidney,” his mom says, settling into the seat next to him at LAX with a coffee in one hand and herbal tea in the other. She hands him the tea, and he grasps it between his palms, thumbs fiddling with the little paper tag on the tea bag. The cinnamony smell of it is faint in the stale air of the terminal.

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess.”

“Well, anyway, I’m thrilled you’ll be a Metro. I might have had to disown you if you became a Raider.”

He forces a laugh.

They land in Ottawa in the afternoon after a brief layover in Montreal. His dad picks them up with Sidney in tow. Shane slides into the back beside her carseat and lets her tug aimlessly at the sleeve of his shirt with her small, curious hands.

He has one season left in juniors and he’s not about to let second-best be his swan song. He’ll take the Memorial Cup again this year; he will. And he’ll lead Canada to a win at Prospects. He’ll show Ilya fucking Rozanov, and the entire concept of Russia while he’s at it, what second-best is capable of.

--------------

It’s weird, the first fall without Jessica.

They’re both in Ottawa for Thanksgiving in October, and his mom treats the occasion like it’s a royal banquet. Jessica is testing out vegetarianism, so the turkey is accompanied by grilled tofu and glazed eggplant and roasted sweet potatoes, the Japanese kind that are golden-yellow and melt to the touch. She sits next to Sidney, cutting the food into small bites, pointing at every dish and naming it in English and in French while Sid echoes dutifully and samples from her plate. She likes the eggplant; she hates the tofu.

And then, literally the next day, Shane is back on the road for consecutive games in Niagara, Erie, and Brampton, and Jessica is back in Toronto buried in first-year math requirements that apparently are specially designed to weed out the weak. 

Shane misses her. They text, but not as much as before.

There’s a string of home games in early December, and Shane feels like he’s forgotten how to function when his day doesn’t involve multiple hours on a bus. It’s the most time he’s spent with Sidney in a while. On a day off between facing Brampton and Belleville, he helps her into her coat and ties her boots and takes her to the National Gallery, just the two of them. It’s a quiet thing to do. She gawks at the giant spider out front and pauses, intrigued, at a gauzy Monet, warm sunset colours.

He’s glad the Prospect Cup will be in Ottawa this year. Mainly because he doesn’t have to travel or stay in a stuffy hotel; he can just focus on the tournament, on captaining his team, on sending Russia crying home to Moscow.

It is nice, though, he thinks, that Sid can come to the games. Jessica will be there, too, home on holiday break. His parents, of course. He’ll have a village cheering for him when he takes home the gold.

He’s pretty lucky, really.

--------------

There was a record store in Moscow, close to the rink, that Mama would visit on days when the weight of her was light. She would bring Ilya, and Lyosha, too; and they would careen through the aisles making mischief, de-alphabetizing the CD displays and finding the most scantily clad women posed on album covers to ogle at like contraband. Meanwhile, Mama would make her way to the back of the store where classical records on vintage vinyl were kept in a special case. She would admire them like artworks in a museum, run her fingers gently, reverently, across the edges of the fraying cardboard sleeves. She would pick one out of the case, turn it over, read through the tracks, consider which orchestra and which conductor, then return it to its place, dissatisfied with some detail; before moving on to the next. When she finally made her selection, Ilya could be sure it would be on steady rotation in the house for days, maybe weeks; until whenever the next sad day came, and music became an unbearable thing.

And so it is that when Shane Hollander’s beautiful fucking brown eyes meet his own to face off in the third period of the Prospect Cup final – a rematch he’s been awaiting with equal parts eagerness and dread, like a mouse in a lab that might be rewarded with cheese or an electric shock on some unpredictable schedule decided by science or by God – and the puck drops and immediately, almost magnetically, tucks neatly into the cradle of Hollander’s stick and he’s off, fast, faster than fast, and his skating is crisp and agile, maybe even joyful, all skill and speed and scathing, sanguine edges; so it is, that Ilya thinks of Tchaikovsky.

There’s an oboe solo in the third movement of the fourth symphony. He knows it by heart, like he knows the instruments’ names and timbres and words like pizzicato and vibrato, because his Mama taught him. It’s this bright, precise, cheery little melody, somehow both silly and militaristic, that starts off with a sustained, shimmering note in a high octave. Inexplicably and illogically, Hollander is that note: zinging, singing, singeing across the ice, a brushstroke of red and black.

In the moment before the loss comes crashing onto his shoulders like a ceiling caved in, his father’s inevitable phone call, the grim silence of the locker room, the mantle of personal shame that he’ll wear willingly because it’s what he deserves – in that split-second of a moment, lungs burning, legs taut, a gratifying hurt that means a game well-played, he allows himself to indulge in the precarious thought, that was really fucking fun.

They’re in Ottawa which is a concrete slab of a town, drab and grey, museums and government buildings cloaked in snow and boredom. Shane Hollander is from this place.

He wonders if there is a record store here. He wonders what kind of music Shane Hollander likes. Probably something boring, like free jazz, or whale sounds.

Hollander has broken away from the celly with his team and skated up to the boards where, presumably, his family has gathered. There’s an older, greying man and a woman with straight dark hair and a girl, Hollander’s girlfriend, probably, who has a pretty smile and is holding a little kid wearing a little Team Canada toque.

Huh.

And then the girl is passing the kid into Hollander’s arms and he’s holding this kid like it’s natural, like it’s nothing, smiling and talking fast, breathless from the game, while the kid taps at his helmet and grasps at the fabric of his jersey. Hollander doesn’t seem bothered by this.

Huh.

And then Andropov, who knows Hollander from Metros development camp over the summer, because they’ll be teammates in the fall, skates up beside Ilya and nudges into his side. “Weird, right? I thought it was just a rumour, at camp. But the guy really does have a kid.”

“Yeah,” Ilya says, still watching the small, smiling family across the ice. “Weird.”

He had thought—it was foolish, he knew that. But, in the gym in L.A., the early hours of the morning, restless with jetlag and exhilaration and the omnipresent, limitless disappointment of his father, he had let his fingers brush against Shane Hollander’s, had let the electric current of want jolt from his fingertips and into the hollow of his ribcage, had taken in the strong thighs, the tense shoulders, the fucking freckles, and had thought, maybe. Maybe.

Everything Ilya knew about Shane Hollander painted a picture of Canada’s golden boy, unimpeachable on the ice and off. So it’s a surprise, this.

Shane Hollander is, maybe, not as boring as Ilya had thought. 

Bummer that the guy has a girlfriend.

Still, that won’t stop him from lying on top of the deflated duvet in his hotel room after hanging up from an awful call that will once again prove his father to be an avant-garde innovator in the field of creative insults; plugging his headphones into his iPod; pressing play on the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth at blaring volume; and touching his cock until he comes to the thought of brown eyes and freckles, and blazing-fast hockey, and a foreign kind of fatherhood that sees a child held in strong gentle arms, smiled-at and loved.

--------------

It’s when Shane holds the Memorial Cup over his head for the second time, two-thousand three-hundred and sixty-three kilometres away from where Sidney sleeps on the eve of her third birthday, that it dawns on him, how much is about to change.

He hasn’t felt like this since—well, since Jessica was pregnant and unknowns loomed like shadow-figures in a waking nightmare. He’s not scared, not like he was then, anyway. It’s a good-scared, he thinks, hushed and anticipatory, like he’s on the edge of getting everything he’s ever wanted but to get it, he first has to dive off a cliff.

He’s already picked out an apartment in the Plateau, a steel and marble and glass sort of place with a skyline view, and it even has a spare room that he’s asked the designer to do up in moss-green with a theme of insects and butterflies, because Sid loves sitting in the yard in Ottawa in the spring watching ladybugs crawl across her palms and plucking earthworms from the dirt with polite and inquisitive care.

It’s gross and he hates it, but she loves it, so there’s really not much else to do besides accept this thing about her and move on.

The room is just for when she visits. If she visits. His mom keeps asking him to sit down with her and make a schedule, but he’s been so focused on playoffs, and besides, he knows what his role is about to become. What it was always meant to be. Shane will be present in the child’s life, but his primary role will be to support financially once he begins his professional hockey career.

He’s replayed that conversation often, since day one, an alien-looking baby in his arms in a bleach-smelling hospital room. It’s what’s carried him through these years watching her grow between bus rides criss-crossing Ontario, an observer weaving in and out of her life the way the flashy red of ladybugs in the yard appears and disappears amid blades of grass.

He’d gotten used to living with her; and all the same, he’ll get used to living without her. That’s always been the plan. 

His rookie contract is a solid one, the bonuses tallying up better than Rozanov’s, remarkably, but it’s still only an ELC. That’s why he flew to Brandon with the team for the cup run while his dad stayed behind with Sid and his mom took a trip to New York to meet with the handful of brands who hadn’t flat-out rejected working with him. It turns out, an unproven MLH recruit with a teen pregnancy scandal wasn’t exactly spokesperson material.

Reebok didn’t go well, she texted that morning, but Nike looks promising. Also, she thinks there might be a way to spin things for Rolex.

He wants the brand stuff to work out. It’s what his mom is good at, strategic and undeterred. It will mean more money that he can use to repay his parents for Sid’s expenses, and while he’s at it, for the hockey lessons and equipment and new skates and flights and physical therapy and everything else he’s burdened them with ever since Timbits.

He’ll drink in this last, liminal summer. Jessica will be home with tales of the time a bird got trapped inside the streetcar, and the time she ate the spiciest soup of her life out of a stone pot in Koreatown, and the time she and Isabel and Kavita decided to swap classes for a day and she ended up improvising a monologue in Isabel’s theatre lab. They’ll take Sid to the park and sit in the grass with her hunting for roly-poly bugs and shiny beetles. Then he’ll do the CCM thing in July and go to training camp in August, and by the time pre-season starts, Sidney will be settled into pre-school, and she’ll barely even think of him, probably, so busy will she be with colouring pages and storytime in French and learning to use the small blunt plastic scissors that children are allowed to have.

He won’t think of her much, either, probably. For all the travel he’s experienced in juniors, the MLH schedule is something else entirely. So, he’ll visit Ottawa when he can, on rare days off. Probably his parents will bring her for home games, now and then. 

The plan moves forward. Hockey is the whole point.

He’ll miss talking to her at night.

He gets home from Brandon and nudges her door open gently and there’s the rhythm of her breathing, the mess of her hair, one small hand balled into a fist gripping the pillowcase. 

He steps inside, kneels next to her bed. Traces a careful finger down the bridge of her nose; she crinkles it on reflex. Such a Jessica thing. “Hey, Sid,” he whispers.

She hums a tired sound and opens her eyes slowly. “You win?”

He nods, and she flashes a small smile. She scoots over, making room, and even though he still feels the veneer of airport on him, he climbs in next to her and lets her press close into his side, and tells her about the game.

--------------

Shane sits cross-legged on his hotel bed, opposite Ilya Rozanov, and they are exchanging phone numbers like kids on the last day of summer camp, and all he can think is: how the fuck did I end up here?

The obvious answer is the showers, which—fuck. How fucking mortifying. Hot, but mortifying. Betrayed by his own dick. What the actual fuck.

But really it started before that: Was my idea. An orchestration, a manipulation. Shane knew he should be angry, but all he felt was the warmth of his ears flushing red.

Or, before that, even: You look pretty, humiliating and elating all at once so that he feared he might either fall flat on his face or break out in song like a character in a musical. And then they were doubled over laughing from playacting the charade of their rivalry, sticks clacking on the ice, intense glances, the serious crease of Rozanov’s brow, the whole thing so ridiculous it came pouring out of both of them in tumbling laughter that left him breathless, and he could not for the life of him remember the last time he’d laughed like that.

No. It started before that.

It started with the fucking raccoon.

Which, in that case, actually, started with the train ride. Toronto in July is hot, a dense, sticky heat, upper twenties, thick air pressing down in the TTC’s subterranean passageways. This whole CCM ordeal was arranged in Scarborough, a local rink rented out for the day and a stay at the Hyatt next door. But his mom had organized to meet Aunt Rita for breakfast downtown near Queen’s Park, some bougie diner Jessica recommended, and so she and Shane took the Line 2 west into the city.

Shane thinks his mom rather likes the subway. All morning, he couldn’t help but think that this was Yuna Hollander in her element: alert to the order of the stops, aware of the exits, swift to drop her tokens at the turnstile. She grew up on the Montreal Métro, he knows; he can picture her, almost, younger – his age, maybe – blue Metros jersey and long hair to her waist (as he’s seen in photos from her McGill days), green line to Atwater to catch a game at the Forum. She’s a city person, really. He thinks it’s where she got her sharp edges.

He spent the subway ride trying not to think too much about the Rozanov of it all. They were supposed to film separately, but at the last minute some creative exec at CCM had gotten the bright idea to shoot them together, the fresh-faced rivals of the MLH. 

Not-thinking about Rozanov went Mostly Well. Shane focused on thinking about other things: the schedule for training camp; whether Rozanov’s eyes are more grey or more blue (microsecond of a thought; doesn’t count); the frustrating prognosis of lactose intolerant that his nutritionist had levied last week while handing him a plant-forward dietary plan that would help with the cramping and nausea he’d always thought were just part of the deal with Being Alive. 

Aunt Rita, who was single and adventurous and loud and just about as opposite his dad as Shane could imagine, had recently been to Mexico City, and there had been a whole ordeal with delayed flights and a missing passport; Shane did his best to follow along while making the most of an omelette without cheese and not-thinking about Ilya Rozanov as hard as he could.

“And what about you lot?” Aunt Rita queried, leaning forward conspiratorially. “How’s my grand-niece?”

“Oh, she’s wonderful,” his mom responded before Shane had the chance. Not that Shane really knew what he would say anyway. She can draw a straight line. She climbs on the furniture. She likes bugs.

And then his mom started chit-chatting about Nike and how great it was to have a brand interested not just in Shane, but also in his family life, and how they’re planning a family-forward campaign for the London Olympics that will feature athletes who are parents, and looking ahead, Shane will be a great fit for their 2014 campaign when the time comes.

“Shane, are you listening?”

He snapped his attention away from the omelette and the little side salad it came with, curling leaves of arugula and balsamic-something and sesame seeds, for whatever reason. “What? Yeah.”

His mom raised her eyebrows. “Okay, so what did I just say?”

“Sneakers. I heard.”

“Okay, you have to be seen in your Nikes.”

“I know, Mom.”

“Because you cannot be in anything else.”

“Mom, I’m always wearing skates.”

“But in case you’re not. This is a lot of money, Shane. That means something – for your future. For Sidney’s future.” She paused, waiting for his eye contact to land. “You’re the youngest hockey player they’ve ever signed to a deal. And they’re not just looking the other way about your situation. They think it’s great you have a daughter – that you value family.”

“Yeah.” Shane nodded, trying to sound thankful. “That’s really lucky.”

“And, remember what else this means.”

“I remember.”

“A whole lot of kids are going to be looking up to you. Kids that don’t see themselves here a lot.”

“I get it, Mom.” He pushed around the arugula with his fork, watching the balsamic pool in damp brown rivulets dangerously close to the abutting omelette. “They shouldn’t, though. Look up to me.”

Aunt Rita chuckled as though he had just told a joke. “Well don’t say that, kid. I hear you’re quite the star.”

And then the conversation turned to hockey, and his shoulders fell back in relief because he could handle that. He could talk endlessly about hockey. As long as he stayed away from Boston, from Russians and rivals and grey eyes that maybe are actually blue.

(They were blue-grey, really, storm-coloured, and flecked with little specks of gold. He discovered this, later, laughing across from him, watching the way the blue-grey lit up iridescent when he smiled.

Shane had enough self-awareness to know that this – this; the confounding, hamster-on-a-wheel feeling of studying Ilya Rozanov’s eyes while thinking about his lips and his thighs and fingertips brushing as a water bottle passed between them – this is what’s known in common parlance as a crush. That’s a normal thing; a schoolyard sort of thing. Unserious and youthful. He’s allowed to have a crush; nothing wrong with that. Maybe it could even be fun, an indulgence, something he could gossip about with Jessica and carry around inside his chest like a trinket, frivolous and shiny proof that he’s a normal (gay) human person with normal (gay) human feelings.

As long as he doesn’t act on it; that would be a huge fucking problem.)

(He’s way past that problem, now.)

By the time his mom and Aunt Rita were arguing over the cheque, which was silly because he has a million-dollar contract and should probably be the one paying for their quiche and toast and coffee, Shane was back to furiously not-thinking about Rozanov, which meant he needed a topic to think about, which is how he found himself thinking about Sid and her weird interest in creepy-crawly things and where on earth did that come from? Definitely not from him or his parents. Maybe from Jessica insofar as it’s a scientific sort of interest, but he had once witnessed Jessica wilhelm-scream while clambering to stand on a chair because she thought she might have seen a cockroach out of the corner of her eye. So, probably not from her.

And as he and his mom strolled back toward the station, the sun bright, city-hot, sweat at his temples, that’s when he saw the raccoon.

It was in the window display of an Indigo, next to some books about Toronto history and a cardboard model of the CN Tower. He checked his watch and asked his mom if they had time for him to look for some hockey books. He browsed the sports section halfheartedly, grabbed something that seemed interesting about the Miracle on Ice, then passed through the kids’ section feeling like he was doing something illegal. Picked a plush raccoon out from a whole pile of them, and brought it to checkout.

His mom raised her eyebrows. “For Sid,” he explained weakly. “She likes—pests.”

Then the train ride back, you look pretty, blue-grey eyes with bits of gold, explosive laughter, was my idea, the look of Ilya Rozanov shrouded in shower steam, hair slicked back, water cascading on gleaming muscles, on gleaming everything—

He put on a suit. Maybe if he wore a suit like a serious person, like a person who’s a professional hockey player and a father and a brand ambassador for Nike, maybe then they could have a polite, amicable conversation in which they would agree not to do the thing they both clearly wanted to do, shake hands and walk away and never speak of this again.

His reflection in the mirror did not look like a serious person. It looked like a kid wearing a suit.

He changed. Sat in a chair in the corner in the dark. Turned the TV on. Turned it off. Switched on a lamp. Contemplated evaporating into a cloud of microparticles and whooshing away into the air vent.

The knock on the door startled him even though he had been obsessively checking his watch, which was one minute ahead of the bright red numbers on the radio clock next to the bed.

“I thought you might chicken out.”

“I’m not—I’m not a chicken,” Shane objected, but it felt like a lie seeing as his heart rate would probably have concerned any cardiologist. He pressed on, forcing his brain to cooperate, to make words form into a comprehensible sentence, even as Rozanov circled him, encroaching, inevitable. “But I think we should talk. Do you want to sit?”

“Not really.”

God, he was standing so close. Soap and cigarette smoke and something else, sharp and piney. Hands on his sides, thumbs against his ribs, guiding him back against the wall. “This is such a bad idea.”

“What is?” And then Rozanov’s face did something strange; the intensity cracked like a wave crashing into a boulder. He looked – concerned. “Is your girlfriend?”

Shane’s heart rate screeched to a halt, suspended in his throat. “What?”

Rozanov stepped back, dropping his hands to his sides. “I am not trying to, ah, be cheating with you. I am sorry, I thought maybe—”

“I don’t—I don’t have a girlfriend,” Shane managed. Fear and arousal took a backseat to bafflement. He searched Rozanov’s face as if there was some clue hidden like Morse code in the gold flecks of his eyes.

“Your baby mama, no?”

“Ew. What the fuck? No, don’t call her that.” Shane stepped away from the wall and immediately regretted it, feeling dizzy, unbalanced. “How do you even know about that?”

Rozanov tilted his head, the way he had in Regina, a proxy for a shrug. “There is rumour that you are teenage daddy.”

Shane felt the air punch out of him in what might have been a laugh if not for the delirious surge of horror coursing through him. “Ohmygod. That’s gross. Absolutely do not say that ever again.”

“Yes, this is rumour. You knock up your girlfriend and have baby in high school.” And he looked so earnest, so genuinely distraught at the prospect of being a homewrecker, and Shane really did not know what to do with that.

“Yeah,” he said cautiously. “Is that a problem?”

“No, no, not problem. Just—unexpected. I always thought you were golden boy of Canada. Mr. Perfect.”

Shane snorted. “Right.”

“So you do? Have baby?”

“I mean, she’s not, like, a baby. She’s three,” Shane corrected. “Sorry—who’s spreading this rumour?”

“Andropov,” he replied, and when Shane’s brow furrowed in anger, Rozanov laughed, the real thing, like on the ice before. “No—no, do not look like that. Andropov is puppy dog. Good teammate. Do not be mad at him.” He paused, assessing Shane with those blue-grey eyes. “Also, I saw you. Your family. At Prospect Cup.”

“Oh.” Oh. Shane had been high on the win, grinning like a maniac with Sidney in his arms. It hadn’t exactly been subtle. 

Rozanov stepped forward again, a tentative movement, so unlike him on the ice, the power, the control. “So you are not—?”

“She’s my ex?” Shane explained, and hated that it came out like a question. “We’re not together.”

And Rozanov was still looking at him like he might disintegrate, and there was too much space between them, really, the distance seeping into his skin like a toxin, when Rozanov’s lips were right fucking there, and Shane just couldn’t take that any more.

He launched himself forward.

It was a sparking, sparkling thing; everything it had never been with Jessica; his heart made of molten glass and his skin made of bees. Rozanov’s hand found his jaw, thumb gripping his chin, and the touch was so euphoric Shane thought he might be left with sear-marks of the whorls of Rozanov’s fingerprints.

Shane had always understood the language of his body, sometimes better than he understood English or French. He knew the shape of an ache on every muscle, how to tell when a limit had been pushed and a hurt crossed the line into injury. He knew the snug fit of each foot in his skates, the taut bulk of shoulder pads, the electric burn of speed in his legs and lungs, the winding tension and release of a goalmaking shot.

But this. This was new. This was like learning Mandarin, or Greek—well, no. Russian. Entirely unfamiliar, cryptic script and inscrutable syllables, yet so, so satisfying to speak and be understood. He felt like a book thrown open, pages rippling in a breeze, and Rozanov knew how to read every word of him, fluently.

A terrifying thing, really. To be known.

Panicked visions spiraled behind his eyelids in the moments after, when it was over and he laid back against the pillow: he conjured a form letter on league letterhead, all-caps Times New Roman stating that he was fired, effective immediately, for fraternizing in a Homosexual Manner with another player. His mom’s face, then, fun-house cartoonish, larger than life, how could you be so careless? Headlines plastered on magazines in the checkout queue at Loblaws, for Sid to see, for kids at her school to make fun of. Everything he had ever worked for, flushed down the toilet by his own stupid lack of self-control – again. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Rozanov pulled his shirt back onto his broad shoulders and gathered his jacket off the floor. And then—

“What’s this?”

Shane looked up to find Rozanov holding the stupid fucking raccoon.

“Put that down,” Shane said, too loudly, too harshly. “Sorry. It’s for my kid.”

Rozanov looked at the raccoon quizzically, a half-smile dawning that Shane feared might be the predecessor to a chirp. But, instead: “Tell me about her.”

“What?”

Rozanov looked at him plainly, like this was the most normal conversation in the world, Shane naked on the bed and Rozanov standing by the door with the taste of Shane still on his lips and a stuffed raccoon in his hands. “Your kid. What is she like?”

“I’m not—Ew. No. I’m not talking about my kid while I’m naked. Jesus.”

“So get dressed.” Rozanov tossed the raccoon at him unceremoniously and picked up the pile of Shane’s clothes. “Very convenient, you folded these.” He threw the clothes at Shane and they landed scattered across the bed.

And Shane – got dressed.

And now here they are, seated across from each other on the bed cross-legged, and it is so similar to the way he and Jessica hang out sometimes, just sitting, talking, an easy thing, and Shane really does not know what to make of this. His teammates ask if Sidney is a cockblock, the scouts ask if she’s a hindrance, but no one has ever once asked him before, what is she like? 

“So?” Rozanov prompts. His jacket is crumpled in his lap, arms bare and still very distracting. Shane wishes he’d at least fold his jacket.

“Why do you even want to know?”

“Because.” He does that fucking head-tilt again. “You make me curious.”

--------------

Shane tells Ilya Rozanov about his daughter.

About the gentle way she handles bugs. How she’ll try pretty much any food but make clear what she doesn’t like from facial expression alone. The little dance she does, totally unaware of her limbs, when his dad turns the radio on to classic rock.

“My parents take care of her mostly,” Shane explains, eyes on his hands which twist at the hem of his shirt. “I’m not like, really a dad to her very much.”

“Because hockey?”

“Mostly, yeah.” He nods. “The travel and everything. I’m also not, like, built for that. I kind of think I’m fucking it up, like, constantly.”

“But she is safe, yes? She is happy?”

Shane looks up now, finding blue-grey. “I guess so.”

“This is good, then,” Rozanov says, his voice even, careful. “You are good dad. A lot of children do not have this.” He pauses, looks away. “I did not.”

“Oh.” Shane feels as if Rozanov has just handed him one of those fancy pears wrapped in gold foil, fragrant and fragile. If he closes his hands around it, inspects it too closely, its flesh might bruise.

It's—well. No one has ever called him a good dad before. It’s definitely not true; he knows that in his bones, in the shape of his prolonged absences, in the stilted distance even when they’re in the same room. Still, the compliment zips through him anyway, warm.

Rozanov turns back and meets Shane’s eyes. “What is her name?”

“Sidney.”

A giddy grin spreads across his face, a small, honest laugh rising to the surface of him like ripples on a lake. “Hollander, you didn’t.”

“Shut up.” Shane grabs the pillow behind him and shoves it at Rozanov. “Her mom and I liked the name. It happens to be a hockey name.”

“Sure. And I happen to be best player in the league.”

“Second best,” Shane counters. “And we’re not even, like, in the league yet.”

Rozanov shoves the pillow back at Shane. “I had most goals in Prospect Cup.”

“Yeah, and I had the most assists. Because I know how to fucking pass.”

“She is competitive like you? Your daughter?”

“She’s three.”

“She skates?”

“Not yet.”

“Mm. She will skate and she will be fast like you, I think. And backhand will be weak. This is genetic trait.”

Now he’s batting Rozanov with the pillow like it’s a medieval weapon. “I do not have a weak backhand.”

And now Rozanov is laughing, that deep rumbling sound, forearms raised in defense. “Yes, weak backhand and beautiful freckles. She will inherit these things.”

Shane lowers the pillow abruptly. “What?”

Rozanov looks like he’s just dropped a china dish and watched it shatter, like he’s mad at himself and maybe a little bit scared of the consequences. It’s only a passing thing, a sharp angled look to him, before he recovers with a mock-serious intensity, a joke in his eyes. “Freckles. This is English word, yes? The spots from the sun?”

“Yeah,” Shane ventures carefully. “That’s the word.”

“She has these, then? Same as you?”

Shane nods, because language is failing him, because he thinks he might have hallucinated Ilya Rozanov calling his freckles beautiful.

“Hm.” Rozanov holds out his hand flat, waggling his fingers. “Give me your phone.”

“Why?”

Rozanov doesn’t respond, just raises his eyebrows impatiently.

“Fine.” Shane takes his phone from the nightstand and passes it across; watches Rozanov maneuver the menu and type something quickly. “What are you doing?”

Rozanov passes the phone back. “Now you have my number. Text me yours?” And now he’s standing and shrugging into his jacket, which has gotten all wrinkled, which Shane had predicted. “See you around, Hollander.” And without a look back, he’s out the door.

Shane sits there, dazed, phone in hand. He peers at the contact and huffs out a laugh. Lily.

The blank of the text message screen feels like a crossroads; see you around echoes ominous and jeering.

Whatever this night was – searingly confusing, elating, horrifying, affirming – can absolutely, positively, never happen again.

He closes the messaging app without texting, and falls back against the pillow, clutching the raccoon to his chest.

He will not be telling Sidney about this.

Chapter End Notes

• r.i.p. TTC tokens 🥲

• If you know the Tchaikovsky in question you know it is an unhinged choice here lol but I stand by it.

• The lactose intolerance is partly a setup for a joke that will pay off in Ch. 9, and partly an alternate interpretation of his diet that explores this as a true alternate universe where his friendship with Jessica influences his life in small day-to-day ways, including what he eats. That will become more clear in Ch. 4 but I just wanted to mention it since it first arises here and probably seems random lol.

Chapter 3: Suddenly I realize what it feels like to be obsolete

Chapter Notes

CW: Homophobia/C-slur; medical situation (not too scary I promise)

Lil reminder that I'm working from TV canon here, not books (which I haven't read ahhh), so I'm pulling side-character names off the Game Changers wiki and completely inventing stuff about them. Also timeline might be sliiightly fudged here but I think it mostly works.

Training camp started in just about the most baffling way possible:

“What’s up, man? I’m Hayden Pike.”

Shane stared at the hand extended in front of him. A full fifteen seconds passed before he remembered how to use his limbs, reached out and shook it.

“Yeah. Hi, man.” Had Hayden forgotten and it would have been awkward now to bring it up? Should he just go with the flow, pretend they’d never met, hadn’t played on the same line for four months in Kingston before, you know, everything? He’d been shaking Hayden’s hand for discernably too long now; decided to roll with it. “I’m—Shane.”

“Yeah, I know,” Hayden said pointedly, with a sideways smile. “I just wasn’t sure if you remembered me. Seeing as you stopped texting me back.”

“Oh.” Oh shit, right. Hayden had been the only guy from the Fortresses, really, who’d made any attempt at keeping in touch, the occasional hows everything going? (it’s fine; everything’s fine) or saw ottawa beat brampton today, congrats (thanks man) and even, once, the morning of a home game against Kingston, wanna grab lunch and catch up? which had gone soundly ignored. “Sorry. I just—you know. Had a lot going on.” Jessica, Sidney. Yeah. A lot.

“That’s okay, bud,” Hayden said, stretching out the syllables brightly. “Just glad to be on the same team again. We’re gonna tear things up.”

“Yeah. Um, looking forward to it.”

Hayden is three years Shane’s senior, drafted out of Kingston, spent most of last season in Laval before being called up when Berkes got injured in February. So, not a rookie, but not part of the fabric of the team, yet; the veterans seemed to know him pretty well, though, nodding in a friendly way as they filed into the locker room; one of them asked him, “How’s the wife?” and Hayden replied, “Pregnant as fuck,” and Shane felt bad, a bit, because he hadn’t known that Hayden’s wife was pregnant. He hadn’t even known that Hayden got married.

It was McCann’s idea, the assistant coach, to put Shane and Hayden on a line together by the second week of scrimmages. Hayden left-wing, Wilson right. Playing with Hayden flowed back into Shane’s muscle memory the way a well-worn sweatshirt just fits, unfurling its creases. Boiziau was defending opposite them, which was really fucking annoying, but they still managed a goal apiece, which had McCann nodding in a self-satisfied, zen-like way from his perch behind the boards.

“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Hayden said in his best Bogart, which wasn’t very good at all, as they unlaced their skates after, breathless and elated. 

By the fourth week of camp, half the guys who had been noisily crowding the Brossard locker room had been sent back down to Laval or Trois-Rivières, and Theriault and McCann were testing out the final roster, and it was looking increasingly like Shane would be playing top-line centre, as a rookie, which was a real fucking honour.

And now it’s pre-season, lines are finalized, and Shane walks into the locker room the day of their first exhibition game; he’s third to arrive, after the captain, Gagnon, and the goalie, Mitty, who’s always early so he can do some sort of stretching ritual. The locker room at Centre Bell is bigger and nicer than the one in Brossard, and about a thousand times nicer than anything Shane was used to from juniors. Stripes of red and blue encircle the walls, and now – freshly, today – his name is engraved on a brass plate mounted at the top of his stall.

HOLLANDER. It makes things feel so real, so official; more than the glamour of draft day, more than signing his contract with a blue-ink pen, more than the suits on ESPN touting Shane as the saviour of Montreal’s chances at a Cup run this decade. Just, his name, etched immovably in metal – his father’s name; his daughter’s name – a name spoken with smokey, languid L’s in a hotel room in Toronto – a name that might, one day, hang in the arena rafters. A legacy.

Some of the guys hang pictures of their families in their stalls, Christmas-card portraits and beach vacations and first days of school. Shane thinks it would feel weird to have Sidney’s face watching him while he, like, changes and shit. So he brought a finger-painting she made, mostly brown where all the colours swirled together, nothing special, really, the edges of the paper curling and warped where the paint dried weird. He tears off a strip of grip tape and hangs it on the back panel of his stall, maybe a little crooked; untapes it and adjusts until it’s just right.

There. He’s on the Montreal Metros and his stall has his name on it and his kid’s artwork in it and it’s his stall, his corner of this nice, clean locker room in this looming, mythical rink in the heart of the city. This is real. The beginning of the rest of his life.

“Cool painting,” Hayden comments, mock-serious, shrugging into his jersey. “Very avant-garde.”

Shane laughs, because it’s obvious a kid made it, the ugly, muddy mess of it, the narrow tracks of paint left by her small, guileless fingers. “Yeah. Thanks. I know the artist.”

Gagnon is one of the older vets – thirty, Shane recalls – decent defenseman but speed and agility fraying at the edges. Probably he’ll be traded in the next year or so, and Boiziau will see more ice time.

“Listen up, cocksuckers,” Gagnon shouts, clapping his hands together. The noise of the room decrescendos to an impatient rustle. “I don’t care if it’s a fucking peewee bullshit exhibition game. We’re beating Ottawa to a fucking pulp today.”

Shane doesn’t find this particularly inspiring, because it does nothing to set forth any meaningful strategy for the game, but he joins the chorus of whoops and the thunderous tapping of sticks on the tiled floor and tries not to let it feel like the word cocksucker was pointed directly and specifically at him. They file onto the ice for warm-ups; Shane and Hayden run some passes, slow and lazy but still precise.

“That your family?” Hayden asks, jerking his chin toward the stands past Shane’s shoulder.

Shane turns around and, yeah. There’s his parents and Sidney, in matching Metros jerseys, and Sidney has on a small blue toque tucked over her ears and wispy hair, knitted with the number twenty-four, which honestly, fuck Mrs. Holmes for that, for the stupid twisting thing his heart does when he sees it.

It’s a surprise, their being here. They must have driven in just to surprise him.

He waves quickly, a small thing, and they wave back, and then Shane tucks the puck back into the cradle of his stick and shoots a wide arc toward Wilson across the ice, who misses it because he was paying absolutely zero attention, which is the main problem with Wilson.

Montreal soundly beats Ottawa in a 3-0 shutout, and Shane scores one goal and one assist, which even though it’s still pre-season and not the real thing, feels pretty fucking good.

Heading out so we’re not driving back in the dark, his dad texts as Shane peels out of his shoulder pads. Good game.

Thanks for being here, Shane texts back. He means it. He kind of wishes he could say hi, really quick, before they leave, but he’s half-dressed and sweaty and they have a long drive, and really, it was nice of them to come at all.

He takes the orange line home from Lucien-L’Allier, walks a few blocks to his building. The weather is cooling these days, a pleasant eighteen degrees as evening descends. He likes his neighbourhood, not too busy but not too quiet, alive in the way a neighbourhood should be: people on their way home from work, families, dogs, a dépanneur on the corner, leaves in the trees just starting to turn tinges of yellow and gold. His building is a modern box of metal and glass, inset in a row of older brick places with twisting staircases out front. There’s nothing loud about it, the simple lines, the plain facade, but still, it stands out sharply.

He heats up dinner, salmon, rice, broccoli, some sort of nice sauce with ginger and sesame. Eats while watching highlights from Boston’s game today against Florida. Everyone on the ice, both sides, seemed to be treating the game with the irreverent laissez-faire of a class of kids on the last day of school. Even so, Rozanov, on first line, scored one goal and two assists. Fuck him, honestly.

Shane still hasn’t texted. It eats at him, a little, the name Lily – a secret, a lie, a disguise – yet distinctly still there in his phone, pixels and bytes bearing weight. He could delete the contact; he should delete it. But he doesn’t.

They leave early for Minnesota tomorrow; he really should get some sleep. He rolls out his yoga mat for some easy stretches and deep breathing. Brushes his teeth. Showers, jerking off to the second assist, the way Rozanov had passed to Marleau almost without looking, so flippant and instinctual it felt basically sarcastic.

He passes by the empty guest room on the way to bed. He always makes sure the door stays open, so the air doesn’t go stale. It’s ready for her, for whenever.

He likes his neighbourhood; he does. Not too busy but not too quiet, except at night, when the quiet seeps in through the glass and metal and settles uneasily in an apartment that’s too big for him alone, really, empty room and all.

---------------

In another life, maybe, Shane would be a student at a university somewhere. McGill, maybe, like his parents; he likes to think he would have had better grades if he’d applied his tunnel-vision focus to schoolwork instead of the ice.

He’s not sure what he would be majoring in. His favourite class in school had been history. So, maybe that.

Would Sidney exist in that life? He’s not sure. The way he’d flung himself into Jessica’s bed, the fear, icy cold and gripping; had that all come from hockey, from locker room vitriol and the threat of a career over before it even started, from parents who had sacrificed and coaches whose expectations carved ever-deeper into him as talent and potential became something sharper? Or was there something just inveterate in him, an inevitable self-hatred roiling under the surface of his skin, whether a hockey player or a historian – always ready to push him over the brink into a performative panic that would change both their lives and create a third?

Shane thinks this as he wends through the long, narrow hallway of Jessica’s residence building, counting the numbered placards next to worn wooden doors with small doodled-on dry-erase boards and colourful decals half scraped-off, evidence of previous inhabitants. There’s a faint pulse of music thrumming from one of the rooms; laughter floating from another. A girl rushes past him, hair shower-damp, backpack half falling off her shoulders, muttering to herself about being late.

He can’t quite imagine living in a place like this. So many people on top of each other, intertwined in the intimate details of each other’s everyday: music taste, shampoo smell, private bouts of laughter. He feels like he’s invading something.

He’d hurried over after morning skate at Air Canada Centre, which he had taken a little too seriously because tonight is his MLH debut and like fuck is he going to waste a single minute on the ice. Most of the guys went back to the hotel after to chill or grab lunch, though Boiziau had convinced a small contingent to take a field trip to the top of the CN Tower.

“Hollzy, you coming with?”

“Can’t,” he’d replied, leaning over to tie his other shoe. Nikes. “Meeting up with a friend.”

“Oh, a friend?” There had been wolf-whistles then, and Shane let it happen, let the sound settle on his shoulders shrilly like a shield, like camouflage. Sure, why not; let them believe he was off to a random midday hookup with some hot local chick who pronounces Toronto without the second T. 

He knocks on the door to Jessica’s suite and is met by a short girl with pink-dyed hair in a messy bun and an oversized Metros tee down to her knees. “Holy shit.”

“Uh, hi. Is Jessica here?”

The girl’s eyes go wide. “Hey Jess?” she calls, way too loudly, still staring straight ahead at Shane as he stands awkwardly in the doorway. “Is there a chance your ex is Shane fucking Hollander?”

Jessica peers around the corner then, unfazed. “Oh, hey Shane. Just let me get my bag. Wanna come in?”

The room’s apparent hockey-aware bouncer steps aside stiffly, sliding both hands down her face with desolate embarrassment as Shane strides into the common area, and he can’t quite figure why until he looks past the generic furniture and mess of clothes and books and uneaten bowl of cereal abandoned on a small round table, and sees – himself.

It’s a giant, glossy poster from the photo shoot the team had made him do at the start of training camp. No helmet, just his face, hair slicked back with sweat because they’d decided to photograph him right after the morning scrimmage, practiced blank expression staring back at him in a way he kind of hated but that one online commenter had called “smouldering”. 

Shane hasn’t even played a single official MLH game yet. He’s not famous-famous; there’s buzz, obviously, and the CCM ad running on ESPN during pre-season coverage, but. Like. To own this poster, you’d have to be a superfan, following him since juniors.

“Oh my god,” the pink-haired girl is muttering into her hands. This must be Isabel, the theatre major. “Jess. I’m going to fucking kill you.”

Jessica is standing on one foot, hand balanced on the small round table while she stubbornly pulls on a sneaker without untying it first, and Shane can tell, because he knows her, that she is trying her absolute fucking hardest not to lose her shit laughing.

“What?” So innocent-sounding; Shane stifles his own laugh. “I told you he plays hockey.”

“Yeah,” Isabel grumbles. “I thought you meant, like, varsity. Jesus Christ, Jess. I’ve known you a whole year. How did it not once come up that you have a whole entire baby with Shane Hollander?”

Jessica shrugs; turns her attention to Shane. “I kind of want to get off campus. You good with falafel?”

“Um. It was nice to meet you,” he tells Isabel, as Jessica whisks him into the hall. Only when they’ve bounded down two flights of stairs and out the door into the brisk, bright air do they double over laughing, the sound of it ricocheting in a weird little echo chamber between the shadows of tall stone buildings.

They hold hands on their way to the falafel place, because it’s a funny thing for them to do, and because he’s missed her, and because it’s a sunny blue-sky kind of day and it just feels right. “You’re treating,” she tells him at the counter, as if he wasn’t already planning on it, as if the pitas didn’t cost just a toonie apiece. They eat them out of foil packets sitting cross-legged in the grass at Queen’s Park, near a statue of a guy on a horse, surrounded by trees that have turned all shades of fiery orange and red.

“Have we ever hung out without Sid?” he wonders. “You know, since?”

Jessica shakes her head. “I don’t think so. Weird, right?”

“Yeah. Weird.” If she were here, she’d be pulling worms out of the ground, probably. Or jumping in the leaves that have piled around the trees, admiring the crunch of them under her boots, picking out different colours and shapes of them into a rustling bouquet.

Jessica’s falafel has exploded into a mess of hummus and tahini, pink spears of pickled turnip dangling precariously at the edge of the foil. She’s unbothered. “Okay. I must know,” she says between bites. “Have you made any progress?”

“On what?”

She grins waggishly. “Our promise.”

Shane’s already finished his falafel and folded the foil into a neat silver square. He looks at it, fiddles with the edges, catching them under his fingernails, creasing and flattening the corners.

This fidgeting silence, apparently, is answer enough. She gasps. “Holy crap, you have.”

“I mean, it isn’t—like. It wasn’t anything, really.” He turns his head away from Jessica, sets his eyes on the coppery sandstone walls of the legislative building. “Just—you know.”

“Just what?”

He exhales, says it as quickly as he can, so the words blur together. “Just mouth stuff.”

“Shane!”

He lies back into the grass and crosses his arms over his chest, like a mummy. She finishes her falafel in one chaotic bite and lies back beside him.

“Who? When?” she demands.

“I’m not telling you who,” Shane insists, staring up at the sky, cloudless, cotton-candy blue. “And, July.”

“This happened in July and you didn’t, like, immediately tell me?” She mimes stabbing a dagger into her heart. “You wound me, Shane.”

“What about you?” he asks, eager to change the subject. “Any progress? I know there was that guy last year—”

“Ugh, don’t remind me.” She flops her arms dramatically into the grass. “I don’t know. It’s hard, I guess. A lot of guys think I’m, like, easy, because I have a kid. And the ones who are polite about it are also sort of freaked out by it, I think.”

“You don’t have to tell them.”

“No, I know. But I love her. I’m not gonna, like, keep her a secret.” She turns her head toward him, and he meets her eyes there, through blades of grass and fallen leaves. “Did you tell your guy?”

“No. Well, he already knew. Hockey people know, mostly.”

“Oh, so he’s hockey people.”

“I’m not telling you who, Jess.”

“Was he hot?”

Shane laughs a clipped, sharp sound into the air. “Oh, yeah. Like, insanely.”

“Good. You deserve that.” She scrunches her nose. “How was he about it? About Sid?”

“I don’t know. Weirdly sweet, I guess.” He cringes as he says it, because the word sweet and the concept of Ilya Rozanov do not belong in a sentence together. “Like, he asked after her? I think he was being polite.”

It was more than that, though, wasn’t it? Polite, feigned interest doesn’t start with tell me about her and you make me curious; doesn’t end up seated, fully clothed and listening intently to some stupid, half-formed anecdote about the foods his kid likes or doesn’t like.

“He called me a good dad,” Shane recollects, almost to himself.

“This was a one-time thing?” Jessica asks.

“Yeah. I mean, it has to be.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“What?”

“Insanely hot guy who’s sweet about the kid and is also hockey people? That’s a unicorn, Shane. You need to lock that down.”

“Jess—”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. It’s—Jess. It’s literally not possible. This would end my career, if someone found out. Both our careers. I mean it.” It sounds almost trivial out loud, as if it’s just a career, and not his entire life’s work and single greatest purpose, a dream since before he could form complete sentences, a path built in monument to his parents’ sacrifice and hope and finances and wholehearted trust.

Hockey is the whole point.

He returns to his mummy pose, closes his eyes; the sun paints the inside of his eyelids red and white and pink. “Maybe when I retire, I’ll find someone. I don’t know.”

“That’s years away. Like, decades.”

“Yeah. I know.”

With sudden urgency, Jessica scrambles to her feet, brushing crumbs of pita bread from her jeans and shaking leaves loose from her hair. She holds a hand out to help him up. “Hey. Walk me to class.”

They cut through the park, past the Queen Victoria statue, and turn down College Street, busy with bikes and streetcars. Jess pauses in front of the Student Union building. “Make a stop with me, really quick?”

She leads him inside, sneakers squeaking on buffed floors, through a grey-furnished lobby smelling of coffee and something damp. Down a hall, and they’re at a small, glass-doored office decorated with a rainbow flag. Whoever occupies the office is out for lunch; the lights are off, the door locked. But outside, on a small low table next to the door, there’s a display of brochures and a plastic fishbowl filled with condoms.

Shane raises his eyebrows at her. “Jess, what are you doing?”

“Look. Just—” She makes an exasperated sound. “Look. Here.” She grabs something off the table and hands it to him; a small round button, bright rainbow stripes that feel like a threat, somehow, in the palm of his hand. Like it might burn him. 

“I can’t wear this, Jess. I can’t—I don’t—”

“I know, I know.” She reaches her hand around his, guides his fist closed over the button. “The world is so much bigger than hockey, Shane. You have to know that.”

He lowers his head, avoiding her gaze, and pockets the button. He’ll throw it out later, discreetly, in a public garbage can at least five blocks away from any rink or hotel where someone might see him do it.

“Where’s your class?”

“A couple blocks. Physics building.”

They walk slowly, hand in hand. She tells him about Stars and Planets – that’s the name of the class, and it sounds magnificent and profound, he thinks, but she says it’s mostly math. She tells him they just finished a unit on luminosity, a calculation of energy and distance and time.

(That’s what they are, isn’t it? Him and Jessica and Sid – a triangulation. Energy and distance and time.)

“See you tonight. I’ll find you after?” He’s gotten tickets for the game for Jess and her roommates. He’d offered one to Aunt Rita, but she’s on a cruise in the Baltics. 

She smiles – luminosity, he thinks – and kisses his cheek. “See you tonight.”

---------------

Shane sinks his first career goal into the net in the second period of his first-ever MLH game, and he thinks he might explode from the feeling.

Hayden and Wilson pile onto him in a celly, and even Gagnon gives him an approving nod from the bench. The goal tied them up with the Guardians, and Gagnon breaks the tie in the third period, and Mitty pulls off a heroic save starfishing in the net, and by the time the buzzer sounds they’ve won 2-1, holy shit.

It’s just one game, the first of eighty-something this season, the first season of twenty-something that lie ahead, hopefully more. A speck of stardust in an ever-expanding galaxy of hockey past and future. But it feels monumental. It feels cosmic.

A text from his dad is waiting for him when he gets back to the locker room. The video is grainy, slow to load when he presses play. There’s Sid, standing on the couch next to his mom, both of them throwing their arms into the air at the moment of his goal.

We’re so proud of you, the text says. He lets himself believe it.

He showers and dresses quickly, and heads for the rendezvous point he and Jessica had agreed upon earlier, the security booth at the back entrance of the rink. He thought he was quick enough to get out of there and evade the relentless demands to go out and celebrate, but now he hears footsteps behind him and a “Hollander, wait up!” and curses himself for taking an extra twelve seconds to watch the video his dad sent a second time.

It’s a whole crew of them, Boiziau and Comeau and Andropov and Wilson. They’re grinning, laughing roughly, play-checking each other into the walls of the hallway, and then at the end of the hall the door swings open and Jess is there with Isabel and Kavita and a fourth girl he doesn’t know who had taken Aunt Rita’s ticket.

“Shane!” Jessica is running toward him, throwing her arms around him, spinning him around beneath the bright fluorescent lights. “I’m so proud of you. Holy shit.”

“Is this your friend, Hollander?” Boiziau asks, eyebrows waggling.

“This is Jessica,” he introduces carefully. “She goes to U of T.”

“Oh, fuck,” Comeau exclaims. “You’re the baby mama.”

“The one and only,” she replies brightly. 

Shane does not like the approving look he gets from Comeau in that moment.

“This is perfect,” Wilson cuts in. “You know all the student spots. Where can we go that there’s hot college girls?”

And that’s how the Metros end up squeezed into the narrow booths of a dimly lit and pulsingly loud Irish pub on Spadina, even the older guys, the married guys, and it’s way less glamourous than the clubs in Montreal that they might usually end up at, the kind with velvet ropes and bottle service, but the guys are loving it because there are tons of girls here, and they’re nineteen and eager and impressed by the hockey of it all. 

Jessica gets up to grab another drink at the bar, and Comeau leans in toward Shane. “You’re not together, right?”

“Please don’t hit on my ex-girlfriend, Comeau.”

He holds up his hands in defense. “Off limits, I get it.” He leans closer. “I’m just saying. You really popped out a baby with her, and she didn’t make you tie the knot?”

“Um. No?”

“Fucking hell, Hollander.” Comeau slaps him on the back, which is awkward and obnoxious in the cramped booth. “I can’t decide if you fumbled that shit, or if you’re the luckiest motherfucker on the planet.”

Suddenly and acutely, Shane wishes Hayden were here. He would say something back to Comeau, something snappy and light but somehow tempering. Instead, he's back at the hotel on the phone with his wife. He calls her every night they're on the road. 

Shane makes his escape, finding a less-crowded spot against the wall by the washroom. Kavita is there. She’s tall, from India, dark hair cut in a wavy pixie. She had been in class when he’d come by the dorm earlier; he’s never met her before.

“Thanks for the ticket,” she tells him without turning her head. Her accent is soft, warm.

“Yeah. Of course.”

They watch the crowd for a while, the ritual of it, sometimes coy, sometimes brazen. Pointed eye contact; a too-loud laugh; a hand pressed into the small of a back. Isabel is practically in Boiziau’s lap at this point, and Shane wonders if he should warn her that the guy is an incorrigible gossip.

“You don’t see anyone you like?” Kavita asks after a while. She looks at him now, and he realizes there’s another question in her question, and his chest squeezes in panic because, like, had Jessica told her? No, she wouldn’t. So was he just that fucking obvious?

“Relax,” she assures. “Takes one to know one.”

“Oh.” He heaves a deep breath, lets it settle in his lungs and sink to his toes. Thinks he catches her meaning. That she’s safe. “You, too?”

She tilts her head side to side. “I had the biggest crush on her last year, you know.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?” And yeah, when you put it that way, it’s pretty obvious, because who wouldn’t have a crush on Jessica? (Well, besides him.) She’s the fucking best. 

Shane swallows. Blinks away blue-grey eyes, and rippling muscle; an infuriating halfway smile; weak backhand and beautiful freckles. “How’d you get over your crush?”

Kavita’s gaze finds Jessica, still in line at the bar, waving cartoonishly to get the attention of an overwhelmed bartender. She shrugs. “Took time. The summer helped. Now I’m dating a coxswain.”

When Jessica succeeds in her quest and finds her way back to the booth, Shane joins her. He listens to her flirt a little with Andropov, who’s nodding along wide-eyed to everything she says, and he’s a good guy, honestly – a puppy dog, Rozanov had called him. After, Shane walks her back to the dorm. The sky is dotted with pinprick stars, faint in the blur of city light. He wonders how many of them are dead and gone, exploded into supernovae, but their light still reaches them, across distance and time, so that Jessica may calculate their luminosity.

“Do you want Andropov’s number?” he asks.

“Who?”

“Dmitri.”

“Oh. No. But thanks for wingmanning.”

“Not your type?”

“Not really.” She pauses, considering. “Russian accent was fucking hot, though.”

Shane tilts his head back and laughs into the night, into the cosmos.

---------------

He doesn’t throw out the button. He tucks it into the little zipper pouch in his wallet, where he keeps pennies and dimes and forgotten-about chewing gum.

It will be safe there.

---------------

The first one is a model.

Shane hadn’t been aware that Boston was some sort of fashion capital; not like New York or L.A. But yeah, apparently, Boston has models, too, and they are long-legged and blonde and twig-shaped and draped over Rozanov at bars and clubs like second skin, all high cheekbones and pretty lashes.

So, it starts with models. The first, second, and third ones are all models. The fourth one is a BU psych major who may as well be a model, and the fifth one, per the sports gossip blog Shane would never publicly admit to reading, is a sound masseuse. Whatever the fuck that means.

Rozanov gets papped, like, constantly. Shane wonders if it’s on purpose, some sort of media strategy, or even just an ego thing.

It’s whatever.

Then there’s the whole fifty goals situation.

He’s watched that video too many times to count. Is lie, liar told you that; shirtless, glistening; the damp curls of his hair; the fucking wink. It’s research, technically, for when he’s inevitably asked about it at the next presser. Shane watches it again over breakfast on a day off, before a roadie takes him to Pittsburgh, Tampa, and Buffalo. Finishes his oatmeal with peanut butter, rinses the bowl, and gets in his car for the drive to Ottawa.

It should be ninety minutes, but really it takes two hours because there’s construction on the highway. He spends the ride plotting his own fifty-goal campaign. No, fifty-one.

The door flings open as he pulls into his parents’ driveway and there’s Sid, a sunburst, sweater knit in vibrant pink and yellow – a Mrs. Holmes original – clutching the raccoon under one arm because, according to his dad, she never goes anywhere without it.

His mom leans against the doorway, arms crossed, watching them. 

“Hey, Sid,” he says as she reaches him at the bottom of the driveway.

“Hey, Dad.” She falls into step beside him; reaches up with the hand unoccupied by the raccoon. He takes it, small warm fingers, sticky with whatever she had for breakfast.

Days off go like this: the bland grey drive to Ottawa; her hand in his for the walk up to the house; a mug of tea ready for him on the kitchen counter. Sid and his dad retreat to the living room with the latest New Yorker, where he’ll show her the cartoons and explain about the financial crisis in Iceland. Shane brings his tea to the dining table and sits across from his mom with her file-folder of calendars and contracts.

“Rolex is a no-go, unfortunately. I think we’ll have a hard time with luxury brands – they tend to be more conservative.”

“Okay.”

“I have feelers out to some food and beverage folks in my network. Gatorade wants to set a meeting.”

“Okay. Cool.” Shane looks into the mug, the steam warm and fragrant. “Why can’t we just do more athletic stuff, like Nike?”

“You’re exclusive with Nike, Shane. You didn’t forget, right? You’ve been wearing your shoes?”

“Yeah, no. I didn’t forget. I’ve been wearing them.”

She flips through the pages in front of them. “Oh, here. I’ve prepared a statement about Rozanov.”

A sudden freezing terror descends like a guillotine, thrumming in Shane’s ears. He hears himself ask, “Rozanov?”

“He basically issued a challenge to you personally, with the fifty goals. What an asshole, right?” She passes him a sheet of paper printed with a block of text. “You have to respond.”

He takes the paper without reading it and lets the icy panic dissolve into his bloodstream, where it will whirl and eddy probably, terribly, for the rest of his life. “Oh, right. Sure.”

Lunch is leftover pasta e fagioli that his dad had made the night before, reheated in a simmering pot. The raccoon dines with them, seated at the edge of the table where it’s safe from wayward splashes of soup.

After lunch, on these days off, Shane lets Sidey pilot their time. Usually she wants to play in the yard, which Shane always appreciates because it means he’s still getting in some cardio, chasing her through the grass or tossing a ball or hunting for caterpillars or falling back into piles of leaves. Sometimes, she wants to watch hockey on TV. Now and then she asks to go someplace, the museum or the park or library, or Costco, where she likes to collect the little paper cups of free samples and try everything with carefully weighed deliberation.

Today, they watch YouTube videos of unlikely animal friendships on his mom’s laptop, balanced on the sofa between them. She laughs brightly at the cow and the duck, and it’s so easy to follow that sound into a rabbithole, to watch endless videos like this because he knows they will make her laugh.

Sometimes Shane stays for dinner. Sometimes he stays for bedtime. Today, he heads out around five, because his flight to Pittsburgh tomorrow is early as fuck, and he knows he’ll play like shit if he doesn’t get his eight hours.

The drive back to Montreal always feels longer than the drive out in the morning. He’s not sure why.

It really is quiet in his apartment at night.

---------------

It’s late in the third and they’re tied 3-3 and Theriault and McCann are arguing behind the bench and finally there’s a firm hand on Shane’s shoulder and he’s over the boards and skating out to centre ice.

Rozanov meets him there, predatorial, hunched, blue-grey eyes with specks of gold; the noise of the crowd thins to a buzzing silence. Shane feels the bottom of his stomach give way to a hollow, desperate feeling, all the things Rozanov stirs in him, a potion that might poison him or might give him wings: dread, ambition, longing; second-best rising like bile in his throat, an unacceptable indictment that Shane will spend the rest of his life proving wrong.

“Shane Hollander.” The slightest curve to the corner of his lips. “I am still waiting for your text.”

Shane meets his eyes, breathing through his nose, steady. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“She is watching, tonight? Will you disappoint her?”

The puck drops, Shane snaps it against his stick, pushes off across the ice, gaining speed, Rozanov close behind; now even faster, a blur, a breath; dekes around Connors, aims high, and the puck is in the net top-shelf and FUCK YES, all before he’s had time to wonder how the hell Ilya Rozanov knows him like this; knows the fear that lives in him, subcutaneous, in the shallows of his veins. That Sidney might grow up and see the whole of him.

And that’s the worst, best part, isn’t it? Kavita had said time would help. Time, energy, distance – a fucking impossible equation. There is no hockey for Shane without Ilya Rozanov; no second-best to shed from his skin without a first-best to soundly beat. They’ll chase one another in a tangled helix of face-offs until the end of time, or retirement; whichever comes first.

He’s interviewed by Radio-Canada after the game, responds in careful French, hyper-aware of the anglophone shape of his vowels. Boiziau is passing through the hall as the reporter asks Shane a question about Tiger Woods, as if golf has fuck-all to do with anything, and he meets Shane’s eyes when the reporter leaves and slaps him on the shoulder, just sort of knowing, and if he had to pinpoint it, Shane would say that’s the moment Boiziau became J.J.

Shane returns to the locker room, strips out of his compression shirt, takes his phone from where it’s tucked on the shelf above Sidney’s painting.

Jane: Good game

---------------

Shane is four-thousand four-hundred and ninety-one kilometres away from Sidney when it happens. They’ve lost to Los Angeles, 4-2, and he returns to the locker room and its grimy veneer of defeat, plane-tired and sore from a rough check, to find a string of missed calls from his mom.

He calls back quickly, still in his gear, chest tight with shaky, shallow breaths. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything’s fine, Shane,” his mom answers, which is how people begin phone calls when everything is not, in fact, fine. “Sidney is totally okay.”

“Mom. What happened?”

“She’s fine. Totally safe and fine. We’re at the hospital.”

Shane sinks onto the wooden bench next to his stall, clinging to totally safe and fine like the words are made of oxygen.

His mom is still talking. “It turns out she’s developed a peanut allergy. It’s a bit unusual, but it can happen at any age.”

“Peanut allergy?” he echoes thinly.

“Yes, there was an incident at her pre-school, but they had an EpiPen, and everything is fine.”

“An EpiPen?” Because all he can do is repeat after her steady voice, because all he can picture is a needle stabbing violently into Sidney’s leg, because he remembers that fucking CPR class with Guacamole Anne and words like asphyxiation and the way he’d let Jessica wash away irrational fears of irrational deaths, and how dumb was that? It turns out he should have been afraid of peanuts this entire time.

He can’t explain how, exactly, but this is a different flavour of panic than his brain’s usual recipe. This is a panic that lives outside his body; not a heart-in-his-throat feeling, but a heart scalpel-flayed and tossed into the air like bits of arterial confetti.

“Shane. Hear me, okay? She is safe and healthy and currently talking the nurse’s ear off about your game. She watched the whole thing – there’s a TV in her room here. They’re just keeping her for observation.”

“Observation. Yeah, okay.” Shane releases the breath he’s been holding, lets his shoulders fall back from where they’ve risen to his ears. The sounds of the locker room return to the surface of his hearing, hissing showers, zipping bags, halfhearted joking in Finnish and French. “Okay. Yeah. I should come, right? I can grab the redeye.”

“You can come, Shane, but it’s not necessary. Don’t you play in Atlanta tomorrow?”

“They can scratch me.”

“Shane.” And it’s that reasonable voice, her manager voice, so logical. So calm. “You play in Ottawa three days from now. It will be okay. Stay with your team and come here as scheduled, and we’ll show you how to use the EpiPen.”

Okay. She’s right, probably. That makes sense. “Did you call Jessica?”

“Of course, honey. She has an exam in the morning, then she’s taking the train in.”

“Okay. Good.” And it’s stupid, really, because she’s totally safe and fine, he knows this, trusts his mom to be reasoned and truthful, but still. He wants to make sure. “Can I talk to her?”

There’s movement, a muffled sound. His mom, distant: “Hey, Bug. It’s your dad.”

And then: “Hi, Dad.”

“Sid. Hi.” And it’s—fuck. It’s the best sound. “You’re alright?”

“Uh-huh.” She hums a little, like she’s considering. “I’m bored.”

He exhales a sound that’s almost a laugh. “You watched the game?”

“Wilson was offside.”

“Hm, yeah, he was.” She’s fine, clearly. Everything’s fine. “I’ll see you in a couple days, okay?”

“Okay.”

Hayden is back from the showers by the time Shane hangs up. “Everything good, bud?”

“Yeah. Yes. I guess so.” He rises from the bench and starts stripping off his gear.

He makes it through a shower, the bus, hotel check-in, a vegan pizza delivery that Hayden rolls his eyes at but eats half of anyway, and the first thirty-minutes of the Transformers sequel before he starts turning it over and sideways in his mind again. Everything’s fine; he’ll be there in a few days anyway. He doesn’t need to go; he shouldn’t go. He’s barely into his first season and he wants the captaincy one day, and captains don’t fuck off and miss a game just for—what? Peace of mind?

But then he’s telling Hayden “I’ll be right back” and sliding on his shoes and peeling into the hallway, into the tacky lobby decorated with a mural of the Hollywood Hills, to find Theriault and McCann huddled over some paperwork with a pair of beers. 

“I, um—”

“What is it, Hollander?” Theriault presses, impatient.

“I need to fly home. Family emergency.” And because that sounds fake, he tacks on, “My kid’s in the hospital,” but now he’s worried that sounds overdramatic, because she’s actually fine, really, so he adds, “I’ll just miss Atlanta. You’ll have me in Ottawa.”

“Jesus fuck, Hollander.” Theriault turns to McCann. “We’ll have to put Comeau on first line. Fuck.”

McCann, who is a lot less scary than Theriault, just nods at Shane. “Call front office, they’ll take care of it. Hope the kid’s alright.”

“I’ll call them, yeah. Thanks.”

He flies into Montreal and drives the rest of the way, which gives him a cumulative seven hours to come to several important conclusions.

First off, he’s going to buy Jessica a car. She shouldn’t have to deal with train schedules and delays and shit when there’s an emergency, and even when there’s not an emergency. Something practical; good in the snow; she can choose what kind, obviously. She’ll argue, say she doesn’t need it, but he’s determined, and he thinks he can make some very good points.

Secondly, he is going to cut peanuts out of his life completely. Even though he doesn’t live with her, and doesn’t even see her that much, it doesn’t seem worth the risk. He’s already mentally catalogued every offending item in his pantry and freezer and fridge – protein powder, granola bars, dairy-free ice cream, trail mix. Why the fuck does he own so many peanut-based foods? He thinks he might need to hire someone to deep-clean his kitchen, like really sanitize every surface and corner. Just in case.

When the flight attendant comes around with a packet of peanuts, he practically swats them out of her hand.

Okay, the third thing is: He’s going to have to make up for missing Atlanta, somehow. He needs to show Theriault that he can skip a game, take care of his family, and still be an asset to the team; future-captain material. Rozanov is leading in their scoring race so far, but only by two; Shane can catch him. He has to.

It’s early morning when he pulls up to his parents’ house; sunlight leaking lazily into a hazy brightening sky. Sid and his mom are still asleep, but his dad is awake and has already put on the kettle for tea, because Shane had texted he was on his way.

Something silent passes between them while the tea steeps, Shane staring into the abyss of his mug. He thinks about every time he was hurt or sick as a kid – the broken arm in Grade 4 from climbing a tree; the bruises and bloody noses and harsh falls on the ice. His dad, always there with a bandage, an ice pack, an unwavering calm.

“I’m glad you came,” his dad says simply, and goes back to reading the newspaper.

Shane finishes his tea, and now it’s a reasonable hour, and now he’s upstairs and in her moss-green room and she’s stirring awake, raccoon in her arms. She’s completely fine.

He wouldn’t describe it as a hug, when he gathers her close to him; more like, proof of life. He takes inventory: breaths, pulse, heartbeat, the solid shape of her. He breathes into the top of her hair and holds tight.

Two days later, Shane scores his first career hat trick.

---------------

Lily: You are ok?

Jane: Yeah. Why?

Lily: Absent for personal/family matter

Jane: Oh

Jane: Yeah I’m fine. Sidney had an allergic reaction

Lily: She is ok?

Jane: Yes she’s ok

Lily: 👍

---------------

Hayden’s twins are born in November. He’s out for home games against Buffalo and Edmonton, then back for practice before the team flies out to New Jersey. The locker room descends on him with back-slaps and “Congrats, man!” and a hearty “Welcome to the club” from Schneider, who has like five kids, none of whom seem to ever wear shoes.

“Jackie’s good?” Shane asks as they get changed.

“So good,” Hayden beams. “She’s a fucking goddess.” He steps back from his stall to admire where he’s taped up an oversaturated Polaroid of Jackie with two pink bundles in either arm. “Man. What a feeling, huh?”

Shane nods absently, because he can’t know what Hayden’s feeling, not really. Hayden and Jackie are building their family on purpose, by design, with a foundation of love and normalcy between them. Shane doesn’t have that; won’t ever have that, love, normalcy; he’s riding the coattails of his teenage screw-up, rainbow-striped pin hidden away in his wallet alongside specks of lint and all the small things he forgets are even there, drifting at the edges of Sidney’s life like a side character in a play about someone else. He doesn't even live with his kid. He’s not sure, really, what he has at all.

---------------

Shane wakes to the smell of snow on Christmas morning.

No, not exactly. He wakes to Sidney clambering into his bed. It’s early, still dark; his parents have brought Sid’s nightlight from home, and it casts a soft glow on her side of the room they share. The bed is a bit tall for her, and she has the blanket grasped in her fists while she executes some elaborate gymnastics to hoist her small legs the rest of the way.

He blinks himself awake enough at some point during this process to understand what is happening and grab her behind her shoulders, nudging her up and onto his pillow. “You okay?” he whispers.

“Cold,” she whispers back.

“Oh. Okay.” He lifts the covers. “Here.”

She crawls under and settles at his side, pressed close.

“It’s going to snow today,” he tells her. It’s the cold-crisp hush in the air that has a smell to it, wispy and ineffable. “I can tell.”

He’s not sure who drifts off first.

The second time he wakes on Christmas morning, it’s to the smell of pancakes. Sid is gone from the bed; he hears her down the hall, laughing.

He pulls on a sweatshirt and pads into the kitchen, where Sid sits on the counter with the raccoon in her lap, eating stray chocolate chips while his dad flips pancakes in a buttered skillet and his mom slices berries and bananas into a serving bowl.

It’s so much butter; he’ll regret this later.

They eat the pancakes and Sid makes a mess of the maple syrup and at some point his mom turns on the radio and there’s someone old-timey singing “Winter Wonderland” in a swinging alto. The sound of a car scrunching on the driveway, and Sid shoots out of her chair to press her face to the sunlit front window. “Mom’s here!”

Jessica had hesitated coming out to the cottage, because she usually spends Christmas at church with her parents, and fully skipping that ritual felt, to her, like breaking something fragile. Like stepping through a door she can’t return through.

She came anyway.

She scoops Sidney into her arms and starts singing along to the radio in a goofy voice, and Sid is laughing her head off, and Shane is pretty sure she’s right where she belongs.

There’s an artificial tree, the same one Shane grew up with, minimally decorated with tinsel and whatever ornaments his family had picked up over years of gift exchanges, yard sales, and childhood arts-and-crafts. He notices a new one, blue with a small yellow handprint, Sidney written in the patient, pristine handwriting of a pre-school teacher.

They unwrap presents as snow starts to fall outside, dampening the sunglow and casting the room in soft greyscale. For his mom, Shane found an elegant ceramic bowl at a shop in Saint-Henri; for his dad, an expensive infused olive oil from Marché Jean-Talon. He’s gotten Jessica another pair of earrings, dangling opalescent Saturn-planets encircled in thin gold rings. And for Sidney, nothing particularly impressive. He feels pretty inadequate about it, honestly, that he hadn’t known what to get her. So he just presents her with an amalgamation of objects picked up on roadies since the season started: a carved wooden orca from Vancouver; an I ❤ NY bucket hat; a book called 1,001 Bugs filled with vibrant close-up photos that he found in D.C., at the zoo gift shop, because J.J. had dragged everyone out to see the pandas.

His parents place a box on the floor between him and Sid, neatly wrapped, looking at each other with a conspiratorial expression.

“For Sid?” he asks.

They exchange a glance. “Technically,” his dad says finally. “But mostly for you.”

Shane unwraps the box carefully and sets the paper aside. Lifts the lid to find a pair of miniature ice skates.

“We thought you should be the one to teach her,” his mom explains.

“Oh.” He swallows, feeling suddenly nervous, like there’s a test he hasn’t studied for. He’s never taught anyone how to skate before. His body knows to skate like it knows to breathe; a native language spoken by sinew and muscle and bone. How to even explain it?

His parents came prepared, apparently; Sidney unboxes a helmet in bright lime green and one of Shane’s old Timbits jerseys, a touch too big, which his mom helps slip on over her winter jacket.

His dad has already checked the ice on the lake out back; it’s safe. Snowflakes float from the sky unhurried, landing on her eyelashes and the wispy bits of hair that sneak out from the helmet.

He laces her skates carefully, biting his lip in focus. “Not too tight, right? You’re okay?”

She nods forcefully, helmet bobbing forward; he moves to tighten the neck strap, just a little.

He holds her hand as she toddles onto the ice. Her grip is firm, anxious; steps uncertain.

“Hey. Don’t be afraid. Just, uh—yeah, like that. Just take normal steps. Bend your knees.”

He’s not very good at explaining, not with words. He holds both her hands and skates backwards, pulling her toward him, steadying her balance. They’re both silent, focused on the task; her face is scrunched in concentration, like Jessica’s face when she studies, eyes fixed on her feet.

“Don’t look at your feet – look at me. Look where you’re going.”

They carve a slow ellipse near the shore of the lake, hesitant and halting, then there’s a moment when it just clicks, her strides lengthen, her balance straightens, and he sees it in her, the change, the confidence, and he’s scared out of his mind but forces himself to release her hands from his and just watch her go.

She makes it pretty far, figures out from the innate language of her limbs that if she bends a little lower, extends her leg a little farther, she can go even faster. And now she’s really flying out there, cutting a haphazard diagonal toward where Jessica and his parents stand on the cabin deck, grinning wide and filming on their phones.

The fall is sudden, happens in a blink. “Oh, shit.” Shane is sprinting toward her; he is one of the fastest skaters in the league; but before he even reaches her, she’s up again, unbothered, skating toward him with only the slightest reticence, a self-imposed speed limit.

“You alright?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she asserts. “Can we have hot chocolate?”

Shane stays outside while hot chocolate is made, looking out at the lake, the curved slice of shoreline where his and Sidney's paths interconnect, etched into the ice. Their voices and laughter drift from the warm inside.

The door opens, and his dad hands him a mug. “Here. It's soymilk.”

“Thanks.”

He settles into the chair next to Shane, his own mug in hand, steam and the sugar-sweet smell curling into the air. “It’s a big feeling, isn't it? Passing something down.”

Shane takes a sip; too hot, sizzling on the roof of his mouth. “Yeah. I guess.”

His dad is looking at him with an expression Shane’s never seen before, something softly unsettled and open. “Best thing I ever taught you, you know.”

“Skating?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “Getting back up when you fall.”

Shane shrugs. “I didn’t teach her that. She just, like, did it.”

“I know.” He reaches an arm over to grab Shane’s shoulder, squeezes once, stands to go inside. “Some things are just, inherited.”

---------------

Jane: [Attachment: Video]

Jane: You were right. She’s fast.

Chapter End Notes

• Former Kingston winger Hayden is dedicated to MonkeysNPlaybills 🫶

• The Habs real-life season opener in 2010 was an away game at Toronto so I thought that was a perfect tie-in. In general, I'm vibing with timelines from the show, the Game Changers wiki, and mixing in the actual NHL season schedule.

Chapter 4: I wanna be good, life’s just not letting me

Chapter Notes

Ilya doesn’t remember learning to skate, which is a shame, because it was his Mama who had taught him.

He thinks he was two years old. He thinks she probably took him to the outdoor rink at the park near the grocery store. He skated there as he grew, before anyone ever put a stick in his hands, and he has fuzzy early memories of racing Lyosha while the crowd of the rink blurred to streaks around him. But he doesn’t remember the first time, doesn’t remember the feeling of her hands on his, can barely recall her voice some days. And there’s something magnificent and devastating in this void of memory, that the greatest gift she ever gave him is one he cannot recall ever receiving; as if he was born with it, born knowing the ice beneath him; a gift so engraved in his bones that it’s as if she never gave it to him at all.

“What would you have done,” he asks Svetlana, after they’ve fucked, curved next to each other in the familiar way of their bodies while she coils a lazy finger in the loose curls of his hair, “if you had gotten pregnant, when we used to mess around? When we were kids.”

“Hm, abortion,” she answers easily. “I do not want to be a mother.”

“Never?”

He hears the brush of her hair against the pillowcase as she shakes her head. “Never.”

“It could have happened though,” Ilya muses. “We weren’t very careful, then.”

“Maybe.”

“I think, if there had been a baby—I think there would be no hockey.” He looks up at her now. Her face has that look she gets, quietly amused and partially annoyed. 

“I think you are right.” She frowns. “Why are you asking? Did you knock up your music therapist?”

“Sound masseuse,” he corrects halfheartedly. “No. I am just thinking. Did you know Hollander has a little kid?”

“Obviously. It is on his Wikipedia page.”

Ilya snorts into the side of Sveta’s shirt. “You read his Wikipedia page?”

“Yes, of course. He doesn’t eat dairy, his mother is Japanese, and he is currently beating you in the scoring race.”

He sits up quickly, grabs a pillow and nudges it into her. “Blasphemy. You take that back.” And now they’re laughing, like they’re kids again, and he doesn’t tell her everything that isn’t on Hollander’s Wikipedia page: his pretty eyes, the freckles, the arch of his back, the throb of his cock. The way Hollander seems to close the physical distance between them each time they meet like it’s a matter of gravitational force, out of both of their hands; the first to launch into that searing kiss in Toronto, while Ilya had still been flailing in the dismal possibility that Hollander would not have him; then again, two weeks ago in Nashville, pouting and angry in the doorway, before they were suddenly pressed chest to chest, Hollander’s fingertips gripping Ilya’s face, tongue tracing the crests of his teeth, hungry and decisive.

Hollander lives his life in boxes, Ilya thinks. Hockey, fatherhood, and sucking dick – never the three shall meet. He has crafted neat little boundaries between and around these parts of him in the same way he folds his clothes before sex, compulsively straight-edged, careful, precise. It’s what makes Ilya feel dangerously privileged to bear witness to Hollander’s undoing, twice now – tonight would have been the third, if not for the weather – watching the control drain from Hollander’s dead-set eyes and rigid muscles, replaced with an unfettered want so beautiful Ilya finds himself bottling it in his memory and inspecting it on nights alone with vodka, his cock, and Tchaikovsky.

He has a little playlist now: Tchaikovsky’s Fourth is Hollander’s hockey; Mozart’s Twenty-Ninth is Hollander’s laugh. Kissing Hollander tastes like the sea-swelling refrain from Scheherazade; his cock in Hollander’s mouth, Mussorgsky’s Great Gate at Kyiv; Hollander’s cock in his own, Borodin’s second string quartet – Ilya licking up the taut tendons of Hollander’s pale inner thigh, eliciting a delicious shiver like vibrato on a cello’s lowest string. It’s silly, a joke with himself, really; that his mother’s record collection, long since thrown away – whenever it was Polina had cleared out the attic – lives on in the perverse, lonely, imaginative corners of Ilya’s brain. What would she think, if she knew?

What symphony would call to him tonight if he were fucking Hollander right now, in a probably-boring apartment in boring Montreal, quiet snowfall drifting beyond the windows while he’d work apart the sculpted, pliant ass with careful fingers?

Ilya has never been so angry at a weather report in his life.

There’s a text from Jane waiting unanswered on his phone. Next time, I guess? That hopeful little question mark, the possibility it invites. Above it, the video from December: a snow-crested lake, a small bundled blur on skates. Too far away to see what she looks like, to see whether she’s smiling; whether she’s appreciating the gift her father has given her, the weight and wonder of it, so that she’ll remember it one day. The moment she learned to fly.

Without meaning to, Ilya assigns a soundtrack to the video. Vivaldi’s Winter, the second movement. A cliché, probably. His mother’s record had been performed on historical instruments, sweet singing violin accompanied by twinkling harpsichord. He’s always liked the sound of it.

“I wouldn’t know how to do it,” he tells Sveta, settling back against her shoulder, finger tracing abstract shapes across the bend of her knee. “If there had been a baby. I wouldn’t know how to be a father to it.”

She pats his shoulder, sportsmanlike, which makes him laugh through his nose, even though he’s feeling stupid and maudlin and wrung-out from sex and the wait at the airport and the disappointment and the cold. She clucks her tongue and presses a kiss to his forehead, and he knows she’s understood – she always does; always hears what he’s not saying. “You’re nothing like him. You know that, right?”

Ilya doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t know; can’t know, not for certain. Maybe cruelty is genetic. The worst things always are.

---------------

All-Star weekend went like this: Shane arrived in Nashville and immediately, irrationally hated it. 

There was a country singer crooning something about beer and pick-up trucks next to the baggage carousel and that just put a sour taste in Shane’s mouth about the whole city, because airports should be a place for getting from point A to point B, not an entertainment venue.

He’d suggested that his parents come and bring Sid, make a little vacation out of it, but the travel was a hassle and the timing didn’t work with his dad’s job and in the end they’d stayed in Ottawa to watch the whole affair on TV. And Shane didn’t mind, not really, even when he got to the hotel and found it overrun with minimally supervised children and gossipping WAGs, and the older guys, the family guys, slapped him on the back and asked where his kid was? And, like. Shane didn’t want her here, specifically, necessarily. Probably it was for the best that she not be exposed to the city of Nashville during her key developmental years. 

He changed, made his way to the opening reception, and that’s when he realized that the entire weekend was going to be about him. Him and Rozanov.

(Rozanov, who hadn’t texted him back.)

(Not that he’d expected the guy to respond. Not that Rozanov had even asked for an unsolicited update on Sidney’s skating skills. Rozanov was busy, Shane knew, getting photographed with an ever-shifting flotilla of Boston’s gangliest women. That must really take up a lot of his time.)

The weekend was disguised as Europe versus North America, but the pretense was a flimsy one. The entrance to the hotel ballroom was flanked by a giant cardboard cutout of their first faceoff in Montreal, so close-up that Shane wondered what kind of government-issued spy camera the photographer had access to.

They sat side by side through that awful press conference, obtuse questions that Shane answered as evenly and politely as he could, offering a reassuring tap against Rozanov’s foot under the table, because surely he was as miserable as Shane was, stuffed in a stiff suit too tight around his neck, sweating under the flashing lights and prying scrutiny.

Scott Hunter – which, by the way, holy shit, Shane was on a team with Scott Hunter – sat down next to him at the team dinner, some saloon-themed place where the waitstaff all wore cowboy hats and didn't card for alcohol. “You alright, rook?”

“Yeah, of course, yeah. It’s an honour to be here.”

Hunter shot him a look like, Are you sure? and so Shane took a swig of beer because, would a not-alright person do that? Satisfied, Hunter clapped him on the back and went to talk with one of the guys from Colorado.

It wasn’t until the skills competition the next day that Shane felt like himself again. Beating Ilya Rozanov just does that to him, surges through him in a fucked-up cocktail of adrenaline and arousal and self-assured glee. And then Rozanov blew a raspberry at him from across the bench, and Shane had the fleeting, absurd thought that Sidney would laugh at that if she were here, because she was always laughing whenever Jessica made silly noises or funny faces. And then, Rozanov dropped his fucking room number, right in front of Scott fucking Hunter, and beneath the prickling anger and mortification and fear – Shane felt a powerlessness brew in him, a fated inevitability like a moth drawn to flame. He knew he’d knock on Rozanov’s door that night, despite the silence and the women and the cardiac-arrest feeling in his chest from the knowledge that Scott Hunter would be right next door. 

And, okay, the women – maybe it was a good thing. Why was he even being so snitty about it? It was the perfect cover, and it basically guaranteed that whatever the fuck this thing was with Rozanov, it would stay very extremely casual, which was all it could ever be, given literally every single aspect of both their lives. So. Yeah.

A good thing.

By the time he stood outside room 1221, Shane had devised a gameplan. Because this thing, the Rozanov thing, the gay thing – Shane’s not fifteen and panicked and scared stupid anymore. This doesn’t have to be careless. He can be careful. He can be so careful that not an ounce of this part of his life bleeds into any other. He can fold this part of himself into a paper star, as small as he can make it, a thousand pristine creases so that it fits in the curve of his palm. He’ll unfurl it quietly and satisfactorily in hotel rooms three to five times per year – maybe more, if they both make it to post-season and eschew their teams’ respective sex bans – rinse and repeat until retirement, or until the other party plucks someone categorically beautiful and severely blonde from his claw-machine of women to marry and settle down with. Until then, his secret will be safe in the hands, and mouth, of Ilya Rozanov, whom Shane implicitly trusts, mainly because he has no other choice. 

So Shane knocked, with the knowledge that he would knock again the next time, and the time after that; that crossing this threshold meant crossing into a future intertwined with Rozanov’s. An inexorable nexus of sex and hockey, hockey and sex, compressed and pocket-sized to be stored away carefully when not in use.

He knew it was selfish, to want like this and to have. To take. A shameful thing, to be so greedy when every modicum of logic and self-preservation screamed at him to run away. It was greed that propelled him across the distance between the entryway and Rozanov who stood laughing – god, that laugh; greed that flung his fingers into the hard cut of Rozanov’s jaw as they kissed and kissed; greed that weighted his shoulders and brought him to his knees. And he was so selfish, so greedy, he would have taken more; would have taken everything, if not for the spectre of Scott Hunter on the other side of the wall. So he got dressed with the promise of next time ringing between them, aware of Rozanov watching him, tracking his movements as if through a sniper scope.

“What?” he demanded, straightening the hem of his shirt.

Rozanov smirked, narrowed his eyes; a challenge. “What was the allergy?”

“Huh?”

“Your Sidney had allergic reaction. What was it?”

And Shane could feel it, Rozanov’s fingernails clutching at the edges of the dividing line he’d erected, invisible and important, around the walls of this hotel room and every hypothetical hotel room yet to come. That was the challenge, the game, the smirk; and fuck if Shane Hollander wasn’t going to accept a challenge levied by Ilya Rozanov.

“Peanuts. She’s allergic to peanuts.”

Rozanov appeared to consider this genuinely. “Almonds are okay?”

“Yeah. Almonds are tree nuts, I think. They’re different.”

“This is good news. Best Russian candy is with almonds. Мишка косолапый.” He lolled his head back against the pillow, feigning devastation. “It would be terrible if she could never try it.”

“I’m not buying her Russian candy, Rozanov.”

“Oh, you cannot afford?”

“Fuck you, asshole. You know my contract’s better than yours.”

“No, no, you cannot afford – this is okay. I will bring some, to your boring house. Next time.” He popped the T’s in each word, a sizzling sound, a reminder, a threat – there would be a next time. Of course there would.

Shane rolled his eyes and gathered his sweatshirt into his arms. “Bye, Rozanov.”

He didn’t look back, but he could practically hear the smirk widening into a shit-eating grin; could sense the chirp as it launched like a homing missile:

“You know, Shane Hollander, I am very glad you are not allergic to nuts.”

---------------

Two weeks later, Shane finds next-time cloaked in snowstorm grey and a curt announcement from Theriault that the evening’s game is cancelled. It’s the kind of disappointment that feels almost like relief, the drop of his stomach, the release of held breath, because anticipation had been zinging through him electric and antsy all through practice and now it dissipates into the air like mist and leaves him oddly brain-tired. Hayden invites him to dinner in that earnest way he has, and Shane thinks, fuck it, and makes up some B.S. about being on a performance diet because that’s less embarrassing than saying that dairy makes him crampy and bloated and he’s mostly pescatarian because his ex-girlfriend’s pathos for animal welfare has been slowly wearing him down.

Shane likes Jackie. She’s no-nonsense and bluntly honest, but also approachable, and funny in a sarcastic, eyerolling sort of way that reminds him of Jessica. They’ve met in passing at team events, and he’s well familiar with the sound of her voice over speakerphone in hotel rooms, chiding Hayden for laundry-related infractions or cooing Goodnight Moon, her and Hayden alternating lines while the babies’ babbling in the background fades to sleep.

The twins are three months old, and the flailing helpless shape of them gives Shane a visceral flashback, like a wartime veteran; just how small Sidney had been once – small and like, barely sentient. And now she like, goes to pre-school and speaks two languages and gives colour commentary on his hockey games. What a fucking trip.

They’re identical, the twins, and it’s much too late into their evening together for Shane to ask which one’s which without sounding like an idiot. Jackie has one of them balanced in her arms, lightly bouncing, as she asks him about Nashville and he responds with some glaring omissions that make the unanswered text in his pocket suddenly bear the weight of a cinderblock. From  the playpen in the adjacent room, the other baby starts fussing, and Hayden has just gotten up to clear dishes, and Jackie’s hands are full, so Shane just goes and lifts her against his chest and rubs a hand across her back the way he’d learned to with Sidney all that first summer; and she quiets right away. Shane is like, sixty-seven percent sure this one is Ruby.

“Oh, wow, you’re really great with babies,” Hayden comments, rounding the corner of the kitchen. “Where’d you learn that trick?”

“Um. I don’t know – just used to do this with mine.”

“With your what?”

“With Sidney.”

“Sidney?” A puzzled look is encroaching on Hayden’s face, eyebrows creasing to angles like antennae trying to pick up an alien signal.

“Sidney,” Shane repeats, and because it seems to merit clarification, adds, “My daughter.”

Hayden steps fully into the room with an urgency Shane kind of wishes he would show more of on the ice. “Shane. What? What daughter?” 

“What—Hayden. What are you talking about?” He can sense the rift opening between them, a cavernous misunderstanding tearing at the fabric of the carpeted floor.

“You have a daughter?”

“Yes?” Shane confirms helplessly.

“How did I not know that?” Hayden whips his head behind him. “Babe, did you know about this?”

Jackie nods serenely. “Of course. WAGs know everything.”

“No. I refuse to feel like I’m the stupid one here.” He steps closer, crosses the rift, bears into Shane’s airspace with a confused aura of panic that the baby senses, wriggling, still in Shane’s arms. “Shane. Buddy. You have literally never mentioned that you have a kid.”

“I—Hayden. I definitely have.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Why did you think I left Kingston?”

“Coach just said it was a personal decision.”

“Yeah, it was. My girlfriend was pregnant.” Shane shuts his eyes because this conversation is actually making him dizzy. “You’ve literally seen her. She comes to home games sometimes, with my parents.”

“Oh, okay, forgive me if my first thought was sister or cousin and not, like, secret daughter of the most rule-following guy I’ve ever met.”

“She’s not a secret, Hayden. Basically everyone knows.”

“Yeah, then why didn’t I?” Hayden snaps. “Sorry. Sorry, Shane. I just, like—why didn’t you tell me?”

Shane takes a deep breath, which brings with it a floral whiff of Johnson & Johnson from Ruby’s head, or maybe Jade’s, against his shoulder, which is a gut-punch of olfactory memory that leaves him feeling shaky. “I thought you knew, Hayd. Really, I did.”

“You never talk about her,” Hayden says gently. “I come into the locker room every day and tell you what colour the twins’ shit was that morning. You have a whole-ass child and I didn’t even know her name.”

“Swear jar,” Jackie calls from the table.

And it hits Shane then, in the spot between his ribs, a hard knot of some unnameable thing between guilt and exhaustion, because Hayden is right. Shane doesn’t talk about her. Shane doesn’t have anything to talk about, really; he doesn’t know the quotidian arc of her life, doesn’t know what she ate for breakfast today, doesn’t know whether she picks out her own clothes or if his mom chooses for her. What is she learning in pre-school? What is her teacher’s name? When she gets home from school in the winter, does she play in the snow in the yard?

“She doesn’t live with me,” he tells Hayden slowly. “My parents take care of her. I see her, like, four days a month, usually.”

“Shit.” Hayden’s eyes are wide and kind. He nods a few times, taking things in; reaches out a hand and brushes the barely-there curls of Ruby-Jade’s hair. “That must be really hard.”

And Shane says the thing he hasn’t said before, hasn’t really even let himself think before. “It is, yeah. Sometimes.”

Jackie brings the twins up to bed and comes back and they sip wine and ginger ale, and Hayden asks about the scratch in Atlanta, which he’d assumed was because some distant, ancient relative had died of natural causes, since Shane was only gone for one game and didn’t seem outwardly devastated. And Shane tells him that yeah, actually, that was probably the most scared he’s ever been in his entire life.

Something strikes him suddenly, cartoonishly absurd, anvil meets coyote. He laughs before he can stop himself. “Hayden. The painting in my locker. Did you think I made it?”

Hayden blinks at him. “Well, yeah.”

“So you thought I fingerpaint, like, recreationally?”

Jackie cackles, setting down her wine glass and looking over at her husband with a chaotic fondness. “Hayden. Seriously?”

Hayden shrugs. “What? Mitty crochets, you fingerpaint, whatever. I just figured, you do you.”

Shane catches Jackie’s eye, and she’s barely holding it together, and now the two of them are laughing breathlessly while Hayden defends his assertion that fingerpainting is actually, probably, a really good hobby for stress relief; and Shane warms with the laughter, and is grateful for it.

After, Shane pulls up to his building in his quiet neighbourhood to find a plastic shopping bag hanging from the doorhandle, one of those ordinary white bags with a yellow smileyface that says Thank you! Merci! There’s no receipt stapled, no store name; this was clearly hand-delivered. What the fuck; his heart picks up speed. Is he famous enough to have a stalker? 

He stands there in the freezing cold on the rough salted concrete of his building’s front step and slowly unknots the twisted plastic ears of the bag like a bomb squad might cut a red wire. He peers inside.

It’s candy. Dozens of tiny oblong candies labelled in red Cyrillic, a trio of bears on the wrapper. 

What the actual fuck.

Shane brings the bag inside, drops it onto the counter, stares at it like the bears might suddenly crawl off from where they’re painted and start a parade through his kitchen.

He unrolls his yoga mat, does his evening stretches and breathing. Showers, jerks off – Almonds are okay? Best Russian candy. I will bring some, next time – fucking hell – brushes his teeth, changes into sweats. Eats one of the candies, which has chocolate and some crunchy flaky component and almonds ground into a sweet chewy paste, and it’s really fucking delicious, actually. Brushes his teeth a second time. Googles: Russian bear candy peanut cross-contamination safe for allergy?

In bed, in the still silent darkness of his apartment at night, heater turned up high, he jerks off again to the memory of finding Ilya Rozanov’s body across the distance between them, the magnetic pull, the fiery floating flying feeling of launching into the marble-cast shape of him and meeting his lips tongue teeth jaw breath. Of being lifted, legs hitched around strong thighs, carried like nothing and thrown into bed and touched by sure hands.

Fucking Nashville. Stupid fucking city.

---------------

Jane: [Attachment: Photo]

Jane: This you?

Lily: I promised I would bring didn’t I

Lily: Andropov dropped off for me from Russian market

Jane: wtf

Jane: you told Andropov???

Lily: relax I told him is harmless prank on my rival

Jane: ok…

Lily: Sidney likes?

Jane: I don’t know, I won’t see her for a couple weeks

Lily: Well they are for her Hollander not for you

Lily: Do not eat them all. I will know

Lily: 🐻🐻🐻

---------------

His next day off comes on the heels of a roadie out west, Edmonton and Calgary and Vancouver. He’s exhausted and his circadian rhythm is fucked from the time zones, but he drives out early to Ottawa with his skate bag in the trunk and the sack of candies on the passenger seat, and makes it in time to join them all for breakfast. Sunbutter has replaced peanut butter in his oatmeal; it’s really not so bad.

He bundles Sidney into her warmest coat and her number 24 toque, and takes her to the Rideau Canal. His dad has continued to teach her to skate since Christmas, bringing her to the same local rink where Shane first started Timbits. She’s surefooted now, struggles with turns, but can cut forward in a straight line hurtling toward Shane, crashing into his knees in what he thinks at first is an accident – he’ll need to help her work on her stops – but then he realizes it’s actually a hug, arms wrapped tight around his legs.

They share a BeaverTail, steaming hot; she gets powdered sugar on her nose. He snaps a photo and sends it to Jessica.

Back at the house, they work on a jigsaw puzzle, Shane and Sid and his mom and dad. Sid isn’t very helpful at this besides sorting the pieces by colour; she sings a little French song about the colours of the rainbow as she pushes the pieces into careful piles; something she learned at school, probably. It strikes Shane that he’s never heard her sing before.

Car keys in hand, Shane passes the bag of Russian candy to his mom. “It’s for Sid, from one of the guys,” he explains, not completely a lie. “He heard about the allergy. It’s almonds – it’s safe.”

“Alright,” his mom says. “That’s nice.”

“I guess, yeah.”

“You’ll remember to sign the Gatorade contract?”

“I’ll remember.”

She folds him into a quick hug, the bag of candy crinkling between them. “Drive safe, sweetie.”

“I will.”

Once again, Shane leaves.

---------------

In March, Jessica acquires a boyfriend named Anthony. He’s a third-year computer science major from Windsor. They met at a party hosted by Kavita’s coxswain’s roommate’s chem lab TA. He plays left-wing for the Varsity Blues.

“Jess. Really?”

“It’s not like it happened on purpose.” She sighs forlornly into the phone. “I know a lot about hockey because, you know, obviously. So we just, like, had a lot to talk about and we hit it off. I guess that’s your fault, technically.”

“My fault?” 

“He thinks it’s bomb that you’re my ex, by the way.”

“Bomb is a good thing?”

“Totally. He’s a fan. But not in a weird way, I promise.”

“He’s cool about Sidney?”

“Cool as a cucumber. I kind of want them to meet. Is that crazy?”

“No, not crazy,” Shane says, which is true, because crazy would be Sidney meeting the guy Shane has exchanged blowjobs with on two occasions, a thought which has crossed Shane’s mind in his horniest and most deranged hours.

“So,” Jessica prods sweetly. “Can you get us Guardians tickets?”

---------------

In the end, neither the Metros nor the Raiders make it to post-season, though they both get really fucking close, which has hockey people buzzing stupid-excited about the Rivalry and the Rebuild and the Future of the Franchise.

Shane’s first MLH season ends with a loss in overtime against Chicago at home. It wouldn’t have made a difference in the standings if they’d won, really, but Shane would have appreciated to go out on a high note. Still, he put up insane stats this season anyway, sixty-six goals to Rozanov’s sixty-seven. He’s sure he’d have bested Rozanov, or at least tied him, if he hadn’t missed that fucking game in Atlanta.

Or maybe he really is just second-best, after all.

There are team meetings and tape review and summer training plans to close things out, and a farewell barbecue at Schneider’s because he’s retiring. It’s a year earlier than he would’ve liked, but his knee won’t make it another season and everyone knows it. Schneider lives in a gaudy McMansion out in Westmount, kind of a fake tudor-looking place with a wrought iron fence, and it turns out “barbecue” actually means a catered array of smoked meats from a local steakhouse. Schneider’s horde of barefoot children bob and weave through the lawn with other teammates’ kids, Gagnon’s and Olsson’s and Taylor’s and Laine’s. Hayden and Jackie are there with a twin apiece strapped to their chests; Shane still can’t tell which is which.

“You should bring yours to one of these things,” Hayden says. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

“Yeah,” Shane says. “Maybe.”

Shane turns twenty in early May. There’s something that feels important about it, the swapping of digit 1 for digit 2; Shane can almost picture it in his head at midnight, like the old-fashioned ticker boards airports used to have where the numbers would flap and click and shift, ever-changing. It eases something in him, fills him with a small bit of fragile equilibrium. He’s officially no longer a teen dad; now he’s just, an adult dude in his twenties that has a kid and a hockey career.

Sidney turns four a couple weeks later, and it’s the first time he’s been around properly for her birthday. His dad bakes a cake with a blueberry filling, which Shane hadn’t been aware is Sidney’s favourite fruit. A few of Sid’s classmates are invited – Shane can’t keep track of their names; he’s fairly certain there’s both an Emma and an Émilie – but they’re running around in the grass, shrieking and giggling, and it’s such a normal way for a kid to be, so unlike anything Shane remembers from being that small, because even then, hockey had dominated his entire worldview. And he finds himself relieved in a way that unclenches from his chest and settles in the seabed of his churning thoughts, to see her like this, normal, happy, among friends her age. Relieved, really, that she’s not like him very much, or perhaps at all. 

Mrs. Holmes arrives with parcels of knitwear wrapped in colourful ribbon bows. Mr. Holmes isn’t there. “I think they might be getting divorced,” Jessica says, and Shane isn’t sure if it makes him a bad person that his first thought is, Good.

Jessica has brought Anthony to the birthday party. Anthony is short for a hockey player, stocky muscular build, tight curly hair and a conventionally nice face but for a thin scraggly moustache that does not suit him at all. He’s friendly, talkative; nerdy like Jess; sweet with Sid, in the earnest way people are when they haven’t spent much time around kids; and kind of awkward around Shane, which is fair.

His mom seems a bit puzzled that Jessica is dating someone who isn’t Shane. She’s mostly kept her mouth shut about it over the years, letting slip only an occasional, I don’t see why you broke up. You two are so great together. Nonetheless, she greets Anthony with a handshake and a complimentary observation about his team’s performance in the University Cup.

“He’s cute,” he tells Jessica when Anthony gets up for another slice of cake. “Maybe not the moustache.”

“I’m working on the moustache.” She flashes him a grin, her best kind with her nose crinkled and her eyes sparkling. Sidney smiles like that, too, when she’s happy in a way that sneaks up on her. “He’s good, though, right?”

“He’s good. I’m happy for you, Jess.”

She eyes him sideways, and he knows what she’s going to ask. “How’s your guy?”

“Saw him in January,” he confesses, because at this point Jessica knows all the truths of him. “I’ll probably see him again. Next season.”

She waggles her eyebrows. “So, it wasn’t a one-time thing?”

“No,” he says, looking out into the yard, the broad stripes of sun, green grass, cloudless sky ringing with children’s laughter. “It wasn’t.”

---------------

The Rookie of the Year award is made of resin that looks like crystal, and it’s heavy and cold-smooth with clean geometric edges that dig into his palm.

He doesn’t deserve it.

That’s the chorus that sings through him in screeching four-part harmony as he strides on stage to accept the thing and stumbles through a clipped speech and downs a shot of vodka that is definitely illegal for him to have, and finds his way to the rooftop for some fucking peace and quiet.

He doesn’t deserve it, and not even in a self-deprecating way. Numerically, he doesn’t deserve it. Hollander has matched him all season point for point, hat trick for hat trick. The only reason Ilya pulled ahead at all was that Hollander missed that single game. If not for Atlanta, he knows it would be Hollander on stage, holding the award close to his chest, thanking his family and his coaches in a speech he’d probably have prepared in both of his stupid languages.

Hollander played better hockey than him this season, and that is a fact.

He’s here tonight, of course; Canada’s Shane Hollander, with his parents and his pretty girlfriend – ex, whatever – and his kid, whom Ilya still hasn’t gotten a good look at, because the banquet room is crowded and dimly lit in a way that’s supposed to be fancy but really is just inconvenient. He’ll take Hollander’s word for it, about the freckles.

He’s sure Hollander is steaming where he sits eating tiny plates of useless food, perfect posture in his brand-new tuxedo, because that guy loves winning more than anyone Ilya has ever met. Even that first time in Toronto, eager and inexperienced, Hollander had been breathlessly competitive, taking what Ilya gave and giving it right back with redoubled effort.

So, Ilya won and Hollander lost. But Hollander is the one surrounded by family here, happy loving faces – his girlfriend’s – ex’s – reassuring squeeze of his elbow as Ilya’s name was called and Hollander’s wasn’t. His parents, proud and adoring and notably alive. His daughter, who’s too small to know the difference between winning and losing, who’s probably actually the real winner in all of this, to have a family like she does, a dad who misses a game to make sure she’s safe, grandparents who look after her, and no one ever telling her she’s not enough.

If Ilya’s father were here, there would be no congratulations or I’m proud of you or even a respectful nod. More likely, it would go something like: What a foolish award. Your team did not even advance to playoffs. America is making you soft, rewarding your failure.

Summer in Moscow looms ahead. The city is nice in the summer, ice cream shops and outdoor markets, teenagers who skateboard and make trouble in the streets, babushkas who yell at them from the balconies of tall concrete apartment blocks.

He hates that he’s dreading it. Hates that going home means facing whatever unnamed thing is digging its claws into his father’s changing mind. There will be spiraling arguments with Alexei, assuming he’s sober enough to have them; and sad silent meals at which his sister-in-law and niece will not look him in the eye. Sveta will be in town for a few weeks, at least, before jetting off to one of her American friend’s bachelorette on the French Riviera. Maybe they can go to some clubs before she leaves, lose themselves in pulsating music and the close push of bodies and flashing lights. Maybe they’ll fuck a few times.

Fuck. He needs a cigarette.

His lighter catches and the smoke reaches his throat with hostile relief, right as the rooftop door swings open, and of course. Of course it’s Hollander’s voice, Hollander’s footsteps, the sharp shape of his shoulders in the fitted cut of his tux. He’s not alone; the pretty girl he calls his ex is with him, in a long green dress and heels that tap on the concrete; and the kid between them, holding one parent’s hand in each of hers.

They haven’t seen him. They’re on the other side of the overlook, silhouetted against the skyline, pointing out the bright neon lights and the fake Eiffel Tower. Without waiting for her to ask, Hollander lifts Sidney into his arms so she can see better, brushes hair out of her eyes where a breeze has swept it. So easy.

He watches them like they’re shadow puppets recounting a folktale as old as time. Mother, father, baby makes three. Nuclear and intrinsic and so fucking ordinary Ilya feels like an extraterrestrial visitor to earth, to have never known such an ordinary thing.

They turn to exit, and Ilya is still tucked out of sight on the roof’s opposite edge, exhaling languid tendrils of smoke, watching. Hollander holds the door and says, “Ladies first,” which is so stupid, and Ilya notices his foot catch against the doorjamb as he takes a step back. “I’ll be right down,” he calls, and shuts the door, and now he’s rounding the corner to where Ilya stands entirely caught off-guard.

“I thought I smelled smoke,” Hollander says. “You really shouldn’t smoke.”

“Haven’t you heard?” He takes a dramatic drag from the cigarette. “Tonight is my big night.”

“Congratulations, Rozanov.” Uttered reluctantly and with an eyeroll, yes; but honestly. Because at the heart of him, Hollander is so fucking kind. In that stupid grimy gym, had reassured Ilya that Boston was a good city, a good team, when the shadow of lazy from his father’s mouth had coloured the entire day of the draft with a sense of dread. In Nashville, had intercepted incomprehensible questions from a ravenous press pool, had let Ilya lead with humour and bravado while Hollander looked like a pedant.

It’s the evening’s proud refrain, a blaring choir in the very cells of Ilya’s skin. I don't deserve it. 

“It could have gone to either one of us,” Ilya offers. A concession. A truth.

“Yeah, well. It went to you.”

And now Hollander is just fucking standing there, draped in shifting auroras of pink and blue and gold, city lights. Ilya thinks of pigeon wings, of the way sunlight catches on iridescent purples and greens; beauty in a most unexpected place.

“What the fuck do you want, Hollander?”

“Nothing. We just came to see the view.”

He taps the cigarette against the bannister, imagines the ash drifting down down down. “Go back to your pretty little family, Hollander. I am sure they miss you. They do not see enough of you, do they?”

A low blow; he watches it land, the way his face turns in on itself, hurt, but only for a flash. Then he’s steeled and defiant, puffed up like a small animal trying to seem bigger. “I’ll see you next season, Rozanov.”

There’s a world where Ilya follows after him, grabs his arm, pulls him into an angry, crushing kiss. That’s what he wants to do, desperately, vibratingly; taste the weird hors d'oeuvres on Hollander’s tongue, breathe cigarette smoke into him like poison, like a claim, while Tchaikovsky’s Fifth blooms around them, the second movement, Hollander’s bright soaring oboe to Ilya’s melancholy French horn, intertwined.

In this world, though, he doesn’t. He just watches Hollander go.

---------------

Summer passes at the cottage where Shane spent every childhood summer growing up. There’s the big rock by the lake where he once fell and scraped his knee open and needed stitches; the hiking path in the woods on the opposite shore where he used to traipse after his parents complaining about the sun in his eyes; the small kitchen table where he learned to play gin rummy and ran with it, cutthroat and petulant.

God, he was such an annoying kid.

Sidney is a lot better. There are no minor injuries to report, and she actually enjoys the hikes, spying spiderwebs and dragonflies. She’s a bit young for the logic of gin rummy, but she figures out go-fish, and the five of them spend evenings playing best-of-seven and eating watermelon sliced cold from the fridge.

Jessica can only spend a couple weeks before she’s off to her internship. Anthony is working a summer job at a tech firm in Toronto. He’d asked her not to go to Longueuil, because of the distance. She broke up with him.

Shane drives into Ottawa twice a week to work out at a proper gym and get some ice time. He thinks, once he’s on a bigger contract and making real money in the league, he’ll buy some property out here. Build his own cottage, with a fully equipped gym and synthetic ice for running drills. Maybe a greenhouse for Sid with lots of interesting plants and insects; a home theatre, for them to watch movies and hockey and the animal videos she likes; a big kitchen, obviously; windows, tons of sunlight; a well, for fresh water; an EpiPen in every cabinet or drawer.

The night before Jessica leaves, his dad starts up a fire on the deck, and Jessica points out all the glowing things that look like stars but are actually planets. Sidney tucks into her side and gazes up at the wide endless sky, listening.

He comes into the kitchen for a glass of water before bed; finds his mom there, nursing a mug of tea, flipping through a binder of paperwork.

“Jessica is single again.”

“Mom.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Sure you are.” He turns on the tap.

“Well, it’s not like you’re seeing anybody.” She pauses, looks up at him curiously. “Are you?”

Shane shuts off the water and clutches the glass tightly. “No. Definitely not.”

---------------

Lily: Still mad about Vegas?

Jane: I’m not mad about anything!

Lily: 😉

---------------

Lily: Sidney has favourite animal?

Jane: wtf?

Lily: I am at zoo with my niece. Look at this fancy horse

Lily: [Attachment: Photo]

Jane: That’s a zebra

Lily: Yes exactly. Fancy horse

---------------

Lily: My mother was not around all the time for me and my brother

Jane: ?

Lily: But

Lily: I do not think a lot about those times she was not there for us

Lily: I remember always the good times

Lily: Sidney will remember this too. Not when you are gone away for hockey

Lily: She will remember only nice times together

Lily: I’m sorry about Vegas. I should not have said those things

---------------

Lily: Sidney is liking salty things? Chips?

Jane: Why?

Lily: I am buying Russian snacks to bring back to Boston

Lily: Does she like pickles?

Jane: I don’t think she’s ever had pickles

Lily: TRAVESTY

Jane: That’s a big word

Lily: You know what else is big? 🍆💦

---------------

Lily: I wanted to kiss you

Lily: On rooftop

Jane: Why didn’t you?

---------------

Gagnon gets traded in the offseason, and the Metros receive Jakob Koch, a promising D-man from Philly. They pick up a solid backup goalie in the draft, Patrice Drapeau, and they call up the offensive defenseman from Kelowna, Geoffrey Roy, who was drafted in Shane’s class and has been quietly developing into a secret weapon over in Laval. The way J.J. has improved over the last season, and with Miitka recovered from his shoulder thing, it’s actually looking like Montreal will have a functioning fucking defense this year. 

Laine, second-line winger who’s been alternate for three seasons, gets the C. And Shane gets the A.

It’s—whoa. It’s sewn onto his uniform, hand-stitched by the equipment guy; he runs his hands over the fabric where it’s raised, the careful taut loops of thread.

“Don’t fucking let us down, Hollander,” is all Theriault has to say.

“I won’t,” he promises. 

It’s as simple as that, really. He won’t let them down. Hockey is the whole point.

Andropov arrives at the first day of training camp with a crumpled shopping bag that he shoves unceremoniously into Shane’s arms. “I really don’t understand this prank,” he remarks. “It seems like he just is being nice to you.”

“Yeah,” Shane says, peering into the bag. Canisters of potato chips, cookies labelled in Cyrillic, pickle-flavoured things, like a Russian convenience store puked the contents of its shelves into the flimsy plastic. “I think that’s the prank.”

---------------

Sidney comes to stay with him in Montreal for the first time in late October. It works out that there’s a home game followed by a day off followed by an afternoon practice the day after, so they can pretty much have an entire day together, and two nights and most of a morning. His parents drive in for the game against Boston, which the Metros win because Rozanov scored in the first period and Shane was not about to let that stand, and then they go out for dinner with Hayden and Jackie and the twins at a medium-nice place that thinks they’re really doing something by serving crostini instead of regular bread. Hayden looks like a shaken can of soda about to burst, he’s smiling so wide.

“Dude. Your kid is fucking great,” he says while he and Shane wait at coat check.

“I’m glad you approve?”

“Not like that, man. I’m giving you a compliment.”

“I didn’t—I haven’t done anything. She’s great because of my parents, I guess. Or, like, it’s just how she is.”

Hayden rolls his eyes. “Okay, well, she looks like you, anyway.”

His parents come back to his apartment after dinner, hug Sidney goodbye, hand Shane her overnight bag and revisit detailed instructions about brushing teeth and screentime and bathtime and cutting crusts off sandwiches. 

His dad claps a firm hand on his shoulder. “You’re good?”

Shane nods, smiles through the buzzing nerves. “We’re good.”

“Good.” He stoops down and lifts Sid into his arms and squeezes. “We’ll miss you, Bug.”

“Miss you, too.” 

It’s more or less her bedtime by the time his parents leave. Shane rolls out his yoga mat. “Want to do stretches with me?” He teaches her child’s pose and cat-cow and mountain. They try tree pose and she loses her balance and tumbles onto the mat, laughing, and he lies down next to her and laughs with her, because her laugh is contagious like that. He turns his head against the mat to look at her, really look.

He’s never thought they look very much alike, not like Hayden said. There’s the obvious – the deep brown eyes, the shape of them, which he’d inherited from his mother. Maybe the straight slope of her nose. The freckles. But everything else is Jessica: the round shape of her face, her hair which has darkened in the last year from a sandy red-brown to Jess’ deep auburn. The nose crinkle; the dimple in her chin when she smiles big.

“Hey, do you think we look alike?” he asks.

She considers this very seriously, biting her lip. She reaches out a hand and grabs his nose with small fingers, as if checking that it is indeed attached. “Yes,” she proclaims judiciously. 

That’s that, then.

The bedroom that has sat silent and empty is lit-up with soft glowing lamps and her nightlight from home. The designer really did a nice job: framed scientific illustrations of exotic stick bugs and tropical butterflies; a sequined bedspread of jewel-coloured beetles. It’s right for a kid but not too young or goofy; she could grow here, if things were different.

They read from Alligator Pie and she laughs as he stumbles over the tongue-twister rhymes, and he tucks her and the raccoon in snugly, which has him feeling all sorts of weird, a sense-memory, because it’s exactly how his parents used to do when he was small. “Goodnight, Sid.”

“’Night, Dad.”

And, like. He knows it’s not actually any less quiet than usual. But somehow knowing she’s here, breathing softly, rustling under the covers, the small imperceptible noises that a small person makes when sleeping – his apartment warms with it. It’s nice.

---------------

Lily: What’s a girl to do on a lonely night in Montreal?

Jane: Entertain yourself Lily

Jane: Sid is staying over tonight. First time

Lily: this is big deal, yes?

Jane: Yeah

Jane: I’m kind of nervous actually

Lily: You plan to take her skydiving?

Jane: no?????

Lily: Ok so you are already doing good job 👍

---------------

Sidney starts Timbits.

He hadn’t known this was in the works until he receives a text from his dad. All suited up! And there she is, swallowed whole by her helmet and a red jersey with the Tim Horton’s logo and the number 19.

He’s kind of glad they didn’t try something stupid like giving her 24. She can have, like, her own identity this way. That seems important.

Her first game is in mid-November, while he’s on the road: Phoenix, Nashville, Buffalo. Her second game, he’s playing back-to-back at home, Columbus and Vancouver. He makes it in for a practice on a day off before they set out for New Jersey. And like, obviously he knows he’s Somewhat Famous and Very Good at Hockey. But it never occurred to him that he couldn’t show up at his own daughter’s hockey practice without causing a Whole Thing.

There’s a row of kids and parents lined up for him to sign their jerseys, and Sid’s coach is calling him onto the ice to like, help out for the day, and all he wants to do is sit in the back anonymously and watch. He’s positive if Sid were a year older and wiser, she’d be embarrassed out of her mind. But for now, she’s mostly just happy to see him.

He watches her score what is, apparently, her very first goal, and yeah maybe it’s just practice, and maybe the goalie is four years old and three feet tall and has the attention span of a potato, but fuck. He feels the same jolt of achievement as when he scores a goal himself, an exhilarating, heart-pumping sort of thing that actually takes his breath away for a moment.

It’s his dad who puts a name to the feeling when they get home from the rink and Sid is bragging about her goal and he notices the way Shane is probably visibly glowing, radioactive with the high-voltage sensation lodged in his chest. “Oh, Shane,” he says. “You must be so proud.”

---------------

Lily: Want to come while you’re in Boston?

Jane: Did you use Google translate?

Lily: No

Jane: What you wrote makes no sense

Lily: Oh yes it does. Read it again.

Jane: You’re gross

Jane: [Attachment: Photo]

Jane: She has a game tomorrow. I’ll miss it

Lily: WOW

Lily: I better look out

Lily: Now there are TWO Hollanders to worry about on the ice

---------------

“No one will know you, I swear.”

“How can you be sure?”

“It’s a theatre party. Everyone’s either gay and hates sports, or straight and also hates sports.”

Jessica lives off-campus now, a dubious three-bedroom – more like two and a den – close to Kensington Market. Kavita gets the den because apparently she spends more nights with her coxswain than at the place where she actually pays rent. Good for her.

Isabel is performing in Cymbeline tonight, which he’ll miss because of the game, but there’s a cast party afterwards at the stage manager’s loft apartment.

“Fine,” Shane relents, and tries to keep from smiling when Jessica grins triumphantly. They sit cross-legged facing each other, like they used to in Ottawa; her room here is small, decorated with star maps and fairy lights and pictures of Sid. “But I’m not staying long. We leave early tomorrow.”

“Yeah, whatever.” She leans forward and smacks his shoulder playfully. “Ugh, your first college party and it’s with a bunch of Shakespeare nerds. We’ll make the most of it, though.”

Things aren’t looking great for playoffs. Montreal isn’t to be counted out, but it’s hardly a sure thing. Shane is on track to beat his own record from last season, at least. Their defense is much, much stronger than last year, but second-line has been weak with Olsson out on IR and Comeau underperforming. Toronto wins, 3-2; both goals were Shane’s. 

He’s in a sour mood when he gets to the party. He can’t find Jessica. It’s crowded, loud; a speaker is blasting LMFAO and someone drunk is standing on a table reciting from Act I – “O lady, weep no more, lest I give cause to be suspected of more tenderness than doth become a man…”

Jess was right, at least; nobody knows him. No one even looks at him. It’s the most invisible he’s felt in a long time, and he lets himself absorb into the amoeba of people around him, fading into a daze of ordinariness. He imagines his limbs disappearing one by one like some cosmic artist has taken an eraser to him; imagines being so everyday and unimportant that journalists don’t chase him down half-dressed in the hallway to ask him how he feels about a loss like this so close to post-season.

There’s another body too-close to his, dancing, curving S-shaped around Shane, red Solo cup in hand. Close-cropped hair, nose ring, stage makeup, tight V-neck shirt. The music is loud and Shane is invisible here and no one is looking and the guy is so close, and then they’re kissing, only for a moment, maybe half of one wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle yeah, and he tastes like purple Kool-Aid and smells like marijuana and it wasn’t very good and okay but where the fuck is Jessica?

He finds her and Isabel in the kitchen, snorting laughing at something. “Hey, you okay?” he asks her. “I kind of want to get out of here.”

“What?” she yells over the music.

“I’m going to head out,” he yells back.

“Okay!” She folds him into a hug and pecks a kiss on his cheek. “I’m glad you came.”

He texts her like twelve times after he gets back to the hotel, until he receives a satisfactory Home safe 👍 in return. Hayden is already asleep. Shane showers quickly, jerking off to the year-old memory of a much better kiss.

---------------

Lily: Playoffs are fun. How come you aren’t here?

Jane: Fuck you, Lily

Lily: 😘

Jane: See you next year, asshole

Lily: Promise? I still want that asshole

Lily: And yes, is proper grammar

Jane: Like I said

Jane: See you next year

Chapter End Notes

Shane: "I'll be right back, I'm going to call Sid."
Hayden, probably: wow gee, Shane sure calls his friend in Pittsburgh super often, they must be best buds.

• I looove a Hayden Misunderstands Something trope. Had to sneak one in. If you reread the last chapter you'll notice Hayden is never actually there when Sidney comes up.

• The candy described is not actually safe if you have a peanut allergy. I've fictionalized that here for the plot. On the off-chance you reading this have a peanut allergy and get your candy recommendations from Hollanov fanfic, do not seek out this candy please.

• I learned after posting Ch. 3 that the emojis are anachronistic bc emoji keyboard wasn't widespread outside of Japan until 2011. Just pretend! All emojis I've used did exist as early as the 2010 Unicode release. That is why I did not use the eyeroll emoji (added in 2015) even though Shane was for sure rolling his eyes.

• I legit made Punnett squares for two generations of Hollanders and Holmeses to arrive at red-head Sidney. Remember Punnett squares?

Chapter 5: I think I’ve always had you in the back of my mind

Chapter Notes

CW: Homophobia including C-slur and mention of major homophobic violence/death in the context of Russian law/current events

Just a note on timeline - The last bit of Ch. 4 was sort of a speedrun of the 2011-12 season (the Mangetout montage!) so we're starting off here in 2012-13. So they are seeing each other one year later than in the book, but one year earlier than in the show. Since I'm working from TV canon, consider it that they are getting together earlier here than in canon!

Summer used to be Shane’s least-favourite time of year, a forced hiatus from hockey that felt like unearned punishment, sweat-hot weeks that always seemed to stretch on miserably void of purpose but for welcome bouts of on- and off-ice training. Summers are different now, though; a freeze-frame. Time with Sid, with Jessica; the blue lapping waters of the lake behind his parents’ cottage; strings of unbidden texts from Rozanov in Moscow, bored or silly or horny or in some sort of stewing mood.

His third season starts early with captains’ meetings. He leaves the cottage a week before his parents and Sid, drives into Brossard and nods along as Theriault and McCann and Laine talk down strategy and the training camp roster. By the end of camp, Comeau is sent down to Laval; Wilson moved to second line where he has better chemistry with Andropov, who’s moved up from third; Laine bumped to Shane’s right-wing; Miitka and Drapeau testing out a tandem; Roy and Boiziau paired up for the power play. 

Don’t fucking let us down had been Theriault’s sole directive when Shane had taken the A last season; yet another season that ended short of playoff run, while the Raiders made it all the way to game six of their first round. Shane’s blood stung with it, the loss, the disappointment. The logical part of him knows that rebuilds take time, that he can’t carry the team into playoffs on his own goals scored alone. Still, last season, he’d failed. He’d let them down – Theriault, himself. Everyone.

But, okay. The new year looms ahead, rose-coloured and untested. He can see the pieces interlocking, the potential, the gaps. The A on his chest means something. After their pre-season game in Ottawa, gathering Sidney into his arms before heading to the locker room, her hands finding the letter, tracing its stitching with a careful finger. 

Sidney being a whole-ass kindergartener is kind of, actually, objectively, insane. They grow up so fast had always just seemed like the sappy, sentimental thing Aunt Rita would say whenever she visited Ottawa to find Shane had advanced to some new level in hockey with a shiny medal or trophy to show for it. But, like. He gets it now. She has a uniform and a backpack and knows how to tie her own shoes, when it seems like exactly thirty seconds ago Shane was home from away games in juniors, talking pointlessly to the personalityless blob of her in the nursery at night.

She’s—god. He can’t quite describe it. He’s never met someone who has so many interests. He’s always been myopic, hockey occupying every fold of cortex and grey matter. Sidney is different. She’s a kaleidoscope, fractals ever-shifting; whenever Shane sees her between their weeks apart, he discovers new patterns, jewel-toned and bright.

There’s bugs, and hockey, and her grandparents’ rock albums that she sings along to with mostly made-up lyrics, and hula hoops, and the colour green but also purple, and fencing which she’d watched during the summer’s Olympics coverage and imitated in front of the TV with an imaginary épée, and collages made from cut-up old magazines, and The Magic Treehouse, and the stock market because she is being raised by David Hollander. And all of it lives in her peaceably, appreciated with calm, steady enthusiasm, like a library inside her, vast and quiet shelves of the things she loves lined up for her to graze her fingers over the spines and wonder at. Lately she’s been enjoying maps, for some reason; when Shane visits, she hands him a colourful almanac she’d picked out at Indigo, and they spend the afternoon pointing at the shapes of different countries and savouring faraway-sounding names like Azerbaijan and Suriname.

She points at Japan. “Baba’s family is from there,” she informs him.

“That’s right.”

“Did you ever go there?”

“No, I’ve never been.”

“We should go,” she says absently, already turning the page, attention shifting to Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya.

Shane thrills a little at the idea of travelling with her, of watching her world expand; holding her hand in crowded Tokyo streets, slurping ramen and sampling taiyaki, meeting his mom’s cousins whom he’s only ever spoken to on occasional birthdays over the phone, and being enfolded into the distant tangled branches of their family tree. He’s never really even thought that much about Japan, except for the ways the locker room always chilled around it. But it feels important, somehow, for Sidney to go there; to know this place. 

Maybe in the summer, he thinks. He’ll ask his mom about it.

---------------

Lily: 2886 Beacon

Jane: What’s that?

Lily: A place where you can get what you want…

Jane: What do I want?

Lily: [Attachment: Photo]

---------------

Shane read in a psychology book once, one of those pop-science things that uses sports metaphor to make a feeble point, that the word should is the most dangerous word in the English language. Something about how it’s laden with the expectations of the outside world, and by dispelling should from your vocabulary, you can unlock your truest potential, follow your heart, score on the breakaway, whatever.

Shane thinks of this when he makes a harried, red-faced excuse to Hayden and flees their hotel room. When he stands outside the backdoor of Rozanov’s townhouse and texts, Here. When he files inside, remarks something inane about the high ceilings, before being pulled into a kiss that short-circuits every part of his brain that doesn’t connect to a sensory neuron. When he trails Rozanov into the bedroom, molting layers of clothing behind him, empty shells like the cicada exoskeletons Sid sometimes finds on the winding leafy paths at the park; tumbles into bed, limbs tangled in limbs, teeth grazing skin, smell of sweat, breath in his ear; Rozanov’s voice, gentle, checking, always checking.

He’s made of magma; he’s a volcano, smouldering; he erupts, bereft of anything but feeling, flame-hot, rapturous; in the aftermath, cooling to obsidian, mirror-smooth, fragile and shining.

Shane gets fucked twice that fall, once in Boston and once in Montreal. It’s less of a should and more of a should not that echoes with the pulsing blood-rush in his ears, after. Should not do this; should not be this. But he does, and he is.

After the home game – a 5-4 loss that still simmers in Shane’s blood – after the sex, elation evaporating from his skin as his breathing slows and Rozanov dresses at the far end of the room, comes their predictable rhythm, the push-and-pull, the arced, elastic bend of tenuous limits. “How is your Sidney?” he asks; he always says it like that, your Sidney, and Shane never corrects him, even though it’s not quite true; even though she’s only his as far as genetics and the driving distance to Ottawa can carry them.

“She’s good. She started kindergarten.”

“Wow,” Ilya says, looking down, fastening his jeans, and somehow it doesn’t even sound sarcastic. “She likes school? She is good student?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. Or, she will be, probably. Her mom’s like that.” Shane unfolds his sweatpants where he’d set them on the bedside table and slides them on as he stands. “Come on. I’ll show you out.”

They make it into the hallway before Shane is crowded against the wall and Rozanov is kissing his lips, jaw, neck, arms bracketed around him. That’s when Rozanov’s hand flails against the door of Sidney’s room, slightly ajar, pushing it open and causing them both to lose their balance. Rozanov sways into Shane’s chest and laughs warm air into the shell of his ear. “What is this? Secret sex chamber?”

“Ew. Absolutely not.”

Rozanov smooths the knuckle of his thumb down the line of Shane’s jaw and pulls away, peering over Shane’s shoulder and into the empty room. “Ah. This is where your Sidney stays.”

“Yeah. Sometimes.”

Rozanov lingers in the doorway of Sidney’s room, even as Shane takes his wrist and tries to lead him down the hall. It’s dark, lit only by the hall light, a weird, frozen museum housing some of the only evidence that Shane even has a kid at all: pajamas folded at the foot of the bed, a stack of storybooks on the bedside table.

“You miss her?”

This isn’t—no. This isn’t what they do; what they should do. Shane shouldn’t let Ilya Rozanov prod the tender, shadowed parts of his life, innocent questions barbed like grappling hooks. 

He shouldn’t, but he does. He always does. Fucking fuck it.

“I mean, I feel when I’m away from her. Like, I feel her absence. Does that count?”

“Yes, Hollander, I think this is what it means to be missing someone.” An eyeroll in his voice, even if Shane can’t see it from where Rozanov stands, facing away. “I thought I was the one with bad English.”

“Fuck off. Don’t you have a curfew?”

They reach the mudroom next to the back stairwell, where Rozanov slips into his shoes and then grabs at Shane’s waist, a warm press of fingers; a quick, wet kiss, Rozanov’s tongue rough and searching. “Do not feel my absence too much, Hollander,” he breathes into the curve of Shane’s neck. “See you next time.” 

Always, next time between them.

“Your English isn’t bad,” Shane finds himself saying. “You said—I mean. I know you were joking. But you should know. It’s not bad.”

Rozanov blinks at him, inscrutable; tilts his head ever-so-slightly. “Okay,” he says in that way he does, the way he had in Regina, accented and upward-toned. Then he’s out the door, down the staircase and into the alley behind the building. Shane watches from the window as he disappears into the autumn night.

---------------

Lily: I’m going to score 9 goals next week.

Jane: Why 9?

Lily: One for each inch of the dick you want

Jane: America has ruined you

Jane: What happened to the metric system?

Lily: You are no fun

Lily: So boring

Lily: Does Sidney know her father is boring?

Jane: Leave her out of this

Lily: Maybe she is boring too

Lily: Boring is genetic, scientists will prove this

Jane: Pretty sure calling a 5 year old boring is something an asshole would say

Lily: Well I am asshole like my father. This is also genetic.

Lily: Did she win hockey game? You said last time she is trying out on defense 

Jane: Yeah they won

Lily: 👍

---------------

“Hey. I need a weird favour.”

“‘Hi, Shane. How are you, Shane?’ ‘Oh, I’m good, Jess, nice to hear from you.’”

She snorts into the phone. “You’re in a sassy mood today.”

“Sorry. It was—”

“Tampa?”

“Yeah. You watched?”

“Why the hell did Olsson drop gloves? Idiot handed them the power play.”

Shane sighs. “Burton insulted his wife.”

“He was baited. He has to know he was baited into it.”

“Gee, thanks, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Shane.” She laughs. “Okay, okay. I need a favour. You have, like, a gazillion likes on Facebook, right?”

“Um. I mean, I guess? I don’t really check it – my mom handles everything.”

“Do you think you could share my mom’s knitting thing?”

“Oh.” Because Evelyn Holmes, divorcée, no university degree, hasn’t had a job in twenty years, financially precarious in the way society has forced so many women to be should they dare unsuture themselves from the necessary bulwark of man, now finds herself breaking into e-tail, selling bespoke wool cardigans on a website called Etsy. “Okay. Yeah, I’ll send it to my mom.” 

“Thanks. She’s—yeah. Just, thanks.” He hears the low metal bellow of a streetcar, the whistle of winter wind wending past concrete buildings. She must be on her way to class. 

“How’d the meeting with your supervisor go?” he asks, because she’d been nervous about it, because in a few weeks she has to give a final oral presentation on her research, and there’d been a discrepancy in the data model she was using, and it was a whole thing.

“Good. Mostly.” In the distance, Hey Jess, someone calls. He imagines her waving at them across the snowy courtyard outside the physics faculty. “I have to redo one of my figures – radial velocity. Fucking annoying.”

Shane laughs, a dry sound, because Jessica is too smart, really. To be annoyed by radial velocity like it’s Isabel leaving dirty dishes in the sink.

“My dad isn’t talking to me,” she says suddenly. “I mean, we haven’t really talked in a while, I guess. But—I don’t know. It’s been different.”

“Shit, Jess.”

“No, listen. Promise me something?”

He closes his eyes, pictures them seated on top of the quilt his grandma made, pinkies interlocked, the summer before rookie season. “What?”

“Just. Promise you’ll always be there for her. That she’ll always have you.”

Okay. Yeah, okay. He breathes out slowly; thinks of Sid in her moss-green room in Ottawa. Of the picture his mom had texted on her first day of kindergarten: ponytail already mussed, shoes tied with careful practiced bunny-ears, lunchbox in hand, nose-crinkle grin. A whole entire person; sometimes a stranger, but. Never, ever not in his life. He can’t even imagine. “Of course, yeah. I promise.”

“Good.” He thinks she might be crying; or else sniffling from the cold air. “And tell Olsson he’s an idiot for me, please.”

“Yes, coach.”

They hang up. He texts the Etsy link to his mom; texts it to Jackie Pike, too. Maybe the WAGs will want matching toques to wear in the stands, or something. You never know.

---------------

Lily: If Boston wins this round I get to fuck you next fall. Deal?

Jane: And what do I get if Montreal wins?

Lily: Same thing 😘

---------------

The exhaustion of playoffs is a venomous, feral thing: sharp talons of muscle-ache; green-blue bruises blooming like algae on his hip, his shoulder, his thigh; a clawing ravenous hunger that scrapes at his insides despite a gameday regimen of protein shakes, Sunbutter oatmeal, half a cantaloupe, six eggs wrapped in warmed pita from the Lebanese market on René-Lévesque. He reviews tape with Laine on the flights to and from Washington; his mind narrows to tunnel-vision focus; nights are perfunctory and dreamless. He wonders if playoff beards are really even a superstition, or if it’s that the mere act of holding a razor is a waste of the meagre energy left in these men, which must be reserved like sunlight in solar panels on a cloudy day, scarce and ever-diminishing.

There are no visits to Ottawa, just short, tired phone calls before Sid’s bedtime. Rozanov was right; he misses her.

Washington goes down in game six, and holy shit, they’re on to round two, the reality of it swelling in Shane’s chest, a good-hurt. Holy fucking shit.

Round two is Boston. Of course it’s Boston. Each face-off is a campfire flint in him, harsh and sparking; blue-grey eyes and that sideways smirk that ignites something in him more than any chirp could; he’s propelled forward by fire, rocket fuel, trails of smoke. He trades goals with Rozanov like children collecting marbles: each one to be marvelled at, envied, bested with an even bigger, more beautiful swirl of colour enrobed in glass.

Montreal takes out Boston in game seven; then loses to Pittsburgh in game five of round three.

He’s too tired to even be properly angry. A numb disappointment throbs in his chest, beneath the Rorschach pattern of a yellowing bruise. The disappointment will fade like the bruise will fade, he knows; then, he’ll be able to inspect it clear-headed, analytical.

“We gave ’em hell,” Hayden says in the locker room. Shane nods reluctantly. “Seriously, man. You got us here. They better give you the fucking C next year. I’ll riot if they don’t.”

“Please don’t riot.”

“No, I will. I’ll buy a pitchfork at Canadian Tire.”

“Do they even sell pitchforks there?”

Hayden groans into his stall. “Well, they sure don’t sell them at Pharmaprix.”

Game five was at home, and his parents and Sid were there, and afterwards he fell into his mom’s arms and let her hold him tight and tell him that she’s proud.

He watches tape of the Pittsburgh series with Sid on the couch in Ottawa, luxuriating a little in being taken care of, his dad spiriting in and out of the room with trays of tea and fruit.

“Wraparound goal,” Sidney narrates through a mouthful of blueberries.

“Yeah. That was a good one.”

“Are you sad you lost?”

“I am,” he tells her. “I don’t like to lose.”

“Did you try your hardest?”

“I think I really did, yeah.”

“Okay, good.” She settles back into the couch cushion and levels him with this look of stern approval. “That’s important.”

He misses the MLH Awards for Jess’ convocation. He’s up for MVP; Rozanov, too; but Clarke from Chicago will probably take it. Shane sits in the backseat with Sid while his parents drive them all to Toronto, and it feels like being a kid again, small, on youth league roadies. He and Sid count cows and punch-buggies and license plates from all the provinces. Her eyes droop around hour three, and he scoots into the middle seat so she can loll her head onto his shoulder.

Mrs. Holmes – Evelyn – has spent the week in Toronto with Jessica, taking her shopping for a convocation dress, getting manicures, grabbing brunch. Normal things; things that maybe had seemed impossible when Sidney was new and small, when hurt and anger still darkened the distance between Jessica and her mother. So much better, now; clouds breaking. Evelyn takes Sidney into a warm hug when they find each other in the crowded convocation hall, a huge, dome-shaped place.

Shane gets recognized a few times; declines photos with a polite smile. He’s used to it, more or less, the laser-alert feeling of eyes on him from across a room, especially the eyes trying their best not to look.

Jessica receives her Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction, and Shane thinks, how lucky that their daughter gets to see this. That she has Jessica to look up to.

She finds them in the crowd afterward, hugs her mom, crouches as Sidney collides into her with open arms. David, teary eyed, grabs Jess around the shoulders and pulls her close. “I’m so, so proud of you,” he tells her.

Jess and Kavita and Isabel have conspired to rendezvous outside a turreted, castle-looking building up the way to take pictures in their hoods and gowns. Their poses grow sillier and there’s a breeze that kicks up their gowns and they’re laughing their heads off, and Sidney joins them for a few shots, and Isabel insists on a photo with Shane, for posterity. Kavita will stay in Toronto for her MBA; Isabel, onward to Vancouver to take auditions. Jess will spend a one-year fellowship at the Mont-Mégantic Observatory while she applies to PhD programs. Shane thinks of the draft, of the terror and promise of that day, of sitting opposite Rozanov on the floor of that shitty gym and wondering, what would they become?

And, okay. Yeah. He cries, just a little.

There’s a big chaotic dinner, Jess’ favourite Indian spot on Bloor that treats mild-level spice like a challenge. Evelyn’s two glasses of wine deep, a little weepy, leaning into his mom’s airspace. “Yuna. Thank you. Thank you.”

Jess spends a week with the Hollanders in Lanaudière before moving for her fellowship. It’s a rustic situation, cabins situated inside the national park. She’ll be assisting a lead researcher focused on using polarimetry to observe stars with closely-spaced exoplanets, which Shane is sure is very interesting and very important, even if he doesn’t understand what it means. Notre-Dame-des-Bois is about the same distance from Sidney as Toronto, but Jess will make it work. She always does.

They’ll stay for a couple more weeks, while Shane traverses back and forth to Ottawa for training; then, it’s Japan. Sidney practices konnichiwa and arigato from an illustrated library book, and bows to the squirrels and wading birds they meet on afternoon hikes.

Shane takes an appointment with a realtor; there’s a lot for sale ten minutes down the road from his parents’, secluded, a private wooded trail, a stunning slice of pebbled lakeshore crested by balsam fir. The appointment is in the evening since the realtor had to drive in from the city, and he comes back to the cottage as night falls, and they eat dinner on the deck with the fire crackling and the distant hollow sound of loons calling across the water. Above them, endless stars.

---------------

Jane: Have a good summer

Jane: [Attachment: Photo]

Jane: It’s really beautiful here. You would like it

---------------

Jane: [Attachment: Photo]

Jane: Mt. Fuji

---------------

Jane: [Attachment: Photo]

Jane: Senso-ji temple

---------------

Jane: [Attachment: Video]

Jane: Nara Park today. Sid met a deer

---------------

Jane: You ok? Usually you’re annoying as fuck all summer

Lily: 👍

---------------

Shane flies direct from Tokyo to Calgary on WestJet, which isn’t exactly glamourous, but it gets him where he needs to go. Orientation camp with the national team is a whirlwind of strategy and schedules and about a million hands to shake. The women are there, and the Para guys, too. He catches up with Stephenson, who plays for Anaheim now, and is dating a girl who rescues retired racehorses.

Suits from Hockey Canada run down transportation logistics and housing and what to expect at the Opening Ceremony; no ice time, just three incessant days of PowerPoint presentations. Forty-two MLH guys are here, but only twenty-five will be announced to the final roster in January. Yet, from the back-slaps and bright smiles the Hockey Canada people keep giving him, Shane is pretty sure. Like, he’s really pretty fucking sure.

It stirs and swirls in him, a wispy sort of feeling. He remembers watching Nagano, Salt Lake City, Turin, his parents letting him stay up odd hours to watch the live broadcasts across time zones and continents. He realizes, a heavy, glowing thing in his chest, that Sidney will watch him play in his first Olympic Games.

He wants to bring gold home to her. He kind of wants it more than anything, actually.

On a lunch break, he and J.J. and Stephenson grab a seat with some of the women’s team; J.J. spends most of the time flirting, dialing up his accent, eyebrows flying. A goaltender, Leah, whose save percentage is criminally exquisite, looks sideways at Shane. “Is he always like this?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Well, I’m taken, and I’m gay. Will that shut him up?”

And it’s just – just. Casual, joking, an honesty set loose like a paper airplane. He imagines, for a moment, creasing himself into something pointed and buoyant, and taking the nosedive; just saying it, here, over lunch, stupid and brave.

He can’t. He doesn’t.

---------------

Ilya gets the C. 

Hollander gets it, too; there’s a whole media storm about it, the rival captains – who will be first in the race to the Cup?

Summer was – what it was. He visited that record store, the one his Mama liked. It has different owners, now, and he found the classical stuff relegated to a small corner below a flickering light. He picked out Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, a low, thrumming, aching work written for a pianist who’d lost his right arm at war. Terrible things happen, but people adapt. Ilya knows this.

The law passed in June, and protests turned violent in July. Dozens of activists were arrested in Saint Petersberg; in Volgograd, a teenager was kidnapped, tortured and killed by neo-Nazi scum. He didn’t learn this from state media, obviously, but from Sasha, who texted him out of the blue with the English missive: Be fucking careful you fuckhead.

He focused on training with angry desperation. The ice always had been that for him, hadn’t it? Refuge, escape, whatever stupid metaphor. He could endure a summer of hearing himself called a pedophile, a deviant, by his father’s friends gathered over vodka and cigars in the living room at night. He’d been through worse. He could let the words course through his blood and zap out his fingertips like a superpowered hero from movies, or villain, maybe, slicing electric goals across the rink like machine-gun fire, wanton and deadly.

Oh, yes, and this: His father’s brain is well and truly fucked, by the way. Not that the man would concede to seeing a doctor; a conversation which had ended in a black eye for Ilya and a silent, reluctant alliance with Alexei.

That stupid text from Hollander, a pretty starlit sky reflected in lakewater; a fantasyland. Have a good summer being possibly the funniest thing Ilya had ever read in his entire life. He allowed himself a hysterical moment to picture it, being there-not-here, kissing Hollander roughly against the trunk of a pine-smelling tree. Swimming in the lake, splash-wars with the kid, laughing.

So, Ilya gets the C. He grabs onto it like debris in a flood, something floating, solid, important.

He’ll be a fucking good captain. He’ll be the fucking best.

Boston doesn’t play Montreal until December, an away game, a 3-2 loss. He’s annoyed about it, mostly; Hollander had played like a fucking mosquito, here-there-everywhere, exactly where you least wanted him when you least expected it. Ilya wants to fuck the annoying right out him, reduce him to silt, all shining eyes and parted lips.

“Oh, that’s your Jane face,” Marly teases.

“Shut up.”

“You’re blushing.”

“Russians do not do this,” he recites, rolling his eyes as he’s joined in unison by a chorus of teammates. “Yes, yes. I’m glad you agree.”

The night air is frigid and he’s not properly dressed for it, hands stuffed in his pockets while he waits for Hollander to open the fucking door. Inexplicably, Hollander looks annoyed at him; but then they’re inside the stairwell and he crowds Hollander against the bannister, greedily absorbing his body heat like a plant photosynthesizing, drinking warmth from Hollander’s mouth and swallowing it down into the core of him. And then they’re racing up the stairs like kids, like idiots, and Ilya has to school the grin off his face when they get to the mudroom and Shane sternly says, “Shoes,” as if he’s never been here before, subjected to Hollander’s strict anti-footwear policies.

“Water?” Hollander offers, because he’s so chronically Canadian it might be a diagnosable medical condition. 

“No thank you.” Ilya strolls the perimeter of the kitchen. He hasn’t been here since last winter. There are small differences tugging at his attention, like one of those find-the-picture games: an impressively executed child’s drawing of a hockey goalie mounted on the fridge; a ceramic teapot, plain and delicate and matte clay in colour, maybe brought back from Japan.

“Here. I got you this.” Hollander is passing him a plastic-and-cardboard package, long and narrow, Japanese characters on the label.

Ilya takes the package and looks at it for a stunned, helpless moment. “What is this?”

“It’s a spatula.”

“Yes, I can see it’s a fucking spatula, Hollander.”

“Well, you asked what it is.”

“Why the fuck did you get me a spatula?”

“I don’t know—In Japan there were all these stores with kitchen gadgets? And I noticed at your place, you only had one of those spatulas that like, bleeds microplastics into your food. So.”

Ilya is silent, probably for too long, English dissipating off his tongue. Finally: “You noticed my spatula?”

“Look, if you don’t want it—”

“Did I say that?”

“Okay, well, you’re being really fucking weird about it. It’s just a spatula.” He shrugs. “You always get Russian stuff for Sid in the summer, so. Yeah.”

Ilya wonders at Hollander’s strange and fascinating mind. Wow. Just a spatula. As if it didn’t mean Hollander had been thinking of him, him specifically, all the way in Japan, probably with his nice parents and his little daughter by his side in the aisles of a kitchenware store.

This is dangerous; the spatula may as well be a carving knife. 

Ilya had spent his summer soundly ignoring danger.

He barrels into Hollander, noses colliding, tongue tracing the dips of his molars; grabs at the hem of his shirt, presses his fingers into the chiseled shape of him, firm in places, soft in others, a secret only Ilya knows. They make it to the bedroom and he fucks into Hollander steady and slow, something different, a little, and Hollander does that thing where he coils his fingers tight into Ilya’s hair, and the fireplace is warm and the night is cold and Shane Hollander bought him a fucking spatula.

He ties his shoes at the bottom of the stairwell while they wait for his cab. Hollander in his blue hoodie; Ilya thinks, absurdly, of Cheburashka, a cozy-soft thing with giant pleading eyes.

“How is your Sidney?” he asks, beginning their little script.

“She’s good. She’s, um, good at reading, I guess? They put her in an advanced class.”

“Hm. Big IQ like you then, yes?”

He shakes his head, a rustling sound against the wall, and changes the subject the way he always does, eventually. “So, obviously, we won’t see each other during the Olympics, right?”

Boxes, Ilya thinks. Hollander lives his life in boxes. And Ilya will greedily leech what pleasure he can out of the box he’s been allotted. He’ll push at its edges and farthest corners, sneak the glimpses he’s trusted with and stow them in his pocket, small warm things, advanced reading class, a spatula. He’ll keep asking, keep gnawing, because he can, because he wants to, because he relishes the danger of it, the precipice he can already tell he’s toeing.

“Mm. Your Sidney will watch you win bronze medal?”

“You fucking wish, dude.” He rolls his eyes, but the soft smile stays. “Hey, I know you said—well. It sounds like your family kind of sucks. Will they be there?”

“My father, yes. Maybe my brother, but who knows.”

“Are you excited?”

How to explain that until this summer, he’s thought of this moment his whole life, dreamed of bearing that flag through the stadium, of the weight of a medal on his neck, for him, for his Mama, for Russia. And now he just wants to tear the flag in two with his bare hands, like the hot guy in the movie about the nun and singing children that Marleau showed him; or, no. Dye the flag in stripes of every colour and wave it in one hand while flipping the bird with the other. Or, no. Burn it to ash, and then find the parents of the boy in Volgograd, and give them all his money, and tell them there was nothing wrong with their son, nothing ever at all.

Instead, he says: “Hey, ah, remember when I made you come hands-free?”

“Go fuck yourself, Rozanov.”

“Such a good trick.”

“The cab is definitely here.”

He leans into Hollander’s lips, then, and surprises himself with the softness. Lets his mouth part, shares in Hollander’s featherweight intake of breath, the way scuba divers, in an emergency, pass the oxygen line between them, trusting that neither one will take too much too long, each one’s lives fragile and precious in the tissue of the other’s lungs.

“I will think of you when I make omelettes,” he mumbles against Hollander’s jaw.

“What?”

“The spatula, Hollander. Keep up.” He pulls away, grabs his jacket from where Hollander has folded it neatly in his lap. “Bye.” He leaves without looking back, into the cold and dark. His natural habitat, really.

---------------

Shane allows himself one small, private cry in the washroom at the Istanbul airport. He isn’t counting, but if he had to guess, he sheds six or seven tears before getting it together with a long, shaky breath, wiping his face with the heels of his hands, realizing he just did that with the same hands that touched the latch on the stall moments ago, and then frantically washing his hands, wrists, face, and neck with soapwater for two happy-birthdays.

It’s stupid. So fucking stupid. We are not anything. Go away, Hollander. He didn’t—obviously, he never thought they were anything. But he hadn’t realized, there was a tiniest, microscopic part of him, an irrational wavering gelatinous cell wedged between cardiomyocytes, that maybe, a little bit, wanted them to be something. Or, to be not-nothing. Not-not-anything. What the fuck.

He shouldn’t—for fuck’s sake. He should be so fucking happy. Should should should. He’s an Olympic gold medalist, a title eked in the final seconds of the final game of a tournament that had tested him in ways he should be proud of conquering; muscle-sore, ears rushing, strategy blurring to instinct, a last-ditch shot on goal fired off with Sidney’s name on his lips.

Jessica used to say that there was a string connecting her and Sid, stretching across the Trans-Canada Highway, and Shane hadn’t understood, not then. But now, he thinks, maybe, actually, he is made of string. A thousand filaments pulled taut; tethers in Ottawa, Boston, Moscow in the summers, a telescope room on the top of Mont-Mégantic. Maybe one day he’ll unravel, and nothing will be left of him but an empty spool.

He finds his gate, and calls Jessica.

“Fuck. Sorry. It must be the middle of the night.”

“Lucky for you, my job is literally to stay up all night waiting for a computer to tell me something interesting has happened. What’s up?”

“I don’t know. Fuck.” Two more tears; three. “I think it’s just all catching up to me.”

“Well, it was bound to eventually.”

He exhales a thin, breathy laugh. “I like him? My guy. I think I really fucking like him. Shit.”

“Oh. Shane. That’s great, right?”

“He doesn’t like me. Or, not—I don’t know. Doesn’t like me the same, I guess. And it doesn’t even matter, does it? We can’t ever—god. I’m so stupid.”

They’re silent for a while, the faint white-noise of whatever machines Jessica uses to read the stars, a million human languages coalescing to an unintelligible murmuration around him at the gate. Jess breathes, anticipatory, a hesitation. Then, so gently: “Is it Ilya Rozanov?”

A thin whining high-frequency buzzes in his ears. “Oh my god.”

“I mean, you are right. He’s insanely hot.”

He laughs because he has to, because she’s funny, because she’s his best friend and she knows so much of him it scares him sometimes. “How long have you known?”

“I guess more or less since you told me. You said July before your rookie season. That’s when you did that commercial, right?”

“Yes, yeah. That’s right. Jesus.”

“It’s pronounced Jess.”

Another laugh escapes; he can picture the nose-crinkle, the smug look. “Okay.” He breathes, presses his eyes shut, opens them. “Okay.”

“Hey. How do you know he doesn’t like you? Did he say that?”

“It was—implied.”

“Why don’t you just talk to him? Ask him what he meant?”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Isn’t it?” 

He looks out into the airport, morass of tired and tepid humanity like flotsam borne on currents with a strict ETD. “I hate when you’re right about things.”

“Oh, so all the time then?”

“Basically, yeah. All the time.”

His flight lands in Montreal; he has one day to recuperate from the travel, then the Nike thing, captains’ meetings, practice, Detroit. 

Fuck it.

He texts his mom. Peels out of the garage at Trudeau, sets off onto the highway. It’s late, pitch-dark; two hours pass, the hypnotic hum of tires, Go away Hollander, O Canada, the round solid cool of gold in his hands.

It’s all catching up to him.

He aches with stiff muscles and jetlag and he’s definitely dehydrated and probably smells bad. Still, the first place he needs to go when he gets to his parents’ house isn’t the shower or his bed. He sets his bags down in the foyer and climbs upstairs two at a time and pauses only when he’s at her door.

It stills something in him; seeing her after so long. He wonders if that’s what it’s like for people up in the farthest parts of Nunavut, when the first bright glimpse of sunrise arrives after polar night.

He steps inside, kneels next to her bed. “Hey, Sid,” he whispers.

She stirs awake, blinks; fixes him with those steady eyes. “Dad. You won.”

Shane nods; holds out the medal he’s been gripping in his palm. She touches it carefully, like it might break. He closes his hand around hers, gently presses her fingers around the curve of it. It’s hers, really. It’s for her.

She scoots over to make room, and he climbs in beside her, like they used to when she was smaller, and he was smaller, too. They sleep curled close, gold medal clutched between them.

In the morning, his parents take pictures of him and Sid holding the medal, fake-biting it, taking turns wearing it across their chests. “Wow, Shane,” his mom keeps saying. “Just, wow.”

Shane’s whole chest squeezes with a sudden and urgent appreciation. He’s spent so much time treading in deepwaters of guilt, salt-crested seawaves washing over him in reliable, periodic tides of sacrifice. His mom’s career, his parents’ finances, a life planned in phases upheaved and squandered; these soft older years of their lives now spent limitlessly caring for his small human, his best mistake, all so he and Jessica can reach the shore. The gold medal is his, and it’s Sid’s, and it’s theirs. They made it possible; they’ve made so much possible. 

He makes lunch for himself and Sid, grilled Sunbutter sandwiches toasted in real butter, not even the vegan kind his parents keep around for him, and blueberry jam because it’s her favourite. The jam oozes into the pan and carmelizes and he cuts them into triangles and they eat on the sofa watching highlights from the gold medal match. She leans into his side, tucked under his arm where she fits; he cards a hand through her hair and lets her tell him about praying mantises and army ants and how fireflies produce light.

And—okay. Okay. Fuck. When did this love become so fucking load-bearing? She’s erected a cathedral in him, stained glass webbed between the spines of his ribs, a reliquary made of sinew and bone. She’s sacred, holy, a worshipped thing.

This can’t be new; it’s too big to be new. It took a hundred years to build Notre Dame.

Fuck.

Fuck.

He should leave before he does something really fucking stupid, actually, like drive her back to Montreal to live with him.

“Hey,” he says into her hair. “I should go. I have media all day tomorrow.”

“Okay.” She sits up, moves to take the medal off her neck.

“You keep that, okay? Keep it safe for me.”

“Okay,” she says again, solemnly. “I will.”

---------------

Jane: I shouldn’t have bothered you

Jane: In Sochi

Jane: Just wanted to see if you were ok

Jane: I watched the game. Team wasn’t gelling but you played incredibly

Jane: Goal in the second period was a work of art

Jane: Besides, Latvia goalie is a fucking mountain. I didn’t know they made goalies that big

Jane: Anyway, you’re welcome over next week after the game

Jane: If you want

---------------

Lily: I always want Hollander. This is not the problem

Lily: Congratulations on medal

---------------

He asks his mom to fill his schedule: brand meetings, photo shoots, interviews. Gatorade makes him the face of a new line of electrolyte powder. He even agrees to a YouTube thing in which he and some beloved personality recently eliminated from MasterChef bake a cake together while exchanging would-you-rather’s.

It’s better this way, right? Maybe Sidney will wonder why he hasn’t been by in a while, but she’ll be happier in the end, without his halfway presence, a father she has seen more through a TV screen than at the dinnertable, a hockey-shaped hole in the daily arc of her life. He can live with the blunt-force ache of missing her. He can make her life make sense, contented and steady and normal. He can cut the string.

The earnings from the brand engagements are not insubstantial; he directs them all to Sidney’s trust. While he’s at it, he calls his financial manager and asks to increase his regular contribution. Maybe it’s the best way he can know to take care of her; to give to her of the success only made possible by their distance; to provide a future that never necessitates guilt or sacrifice or hesitation, so she can find her way in the world unburdened.

He hones his focus on the ice, but everything feels off-balance. Miitka is injured and Drapeau is still green. Hayden’s shoulder is fucked and Koch has a knee thing, and Olsson went and got himself punched again and McCann wants to pull him off second line because he’s a liability. They’ll make playoffs, just, but the precarity of it is eating him alive. The C on his chest feels like a threat.

He drives out to Lanaudière to check on construction. The contractor walks him around back and explains something about the dock taking longer than expected, and Shane takes it in, the lake, the green, the quiet, the bright wood and gleaming windows and sloped ceilings. It’s going to be so beautiful.

He spends time at the Pikes’. The twins are three-and-a-half and loud and chaotic in all the ways Sidney isn’t, and he feels a little smug about it, because she’s so great, really. She might actually be the best kid to ever exist. He babysits when Hayden and Jackie go out on date nights; he picks them up from preschool one day when Hayden has to stay late in Brossard for physio. There’s a day off toward the end of regular season, before back-to-back home games, and his meeting with the marketing people from Tim Horton’s ended early, and Shane joins Hayden at the Biodôme, herding a wayward Ruby away from a door very much marked Employees Only.

They wander through the jellyfish exhibit, lit up blues and pinks, ethereal. If Sid were here, she’d be crowding up to the glass, watching wide-eyed, reading the placards and carefully memorizing facts about how jellyfish sting and where to find their native habitat.

“Hey, how’s that ex of yours?” Hayden asks, glancing at him sideways.

“Jessica’s good. She might be getting published, actually, her lab has a paper out for peer review—”

“You ever hit that?”

“Don’t say ‘hit that.’”

“Oh, sorry, Virgin Mary.”

“I’m not—”

“Look, I’m just saying, man. I know you guys are close. If you ever do, you know, get back together or whatever, you could, like, bring her around. We’d do couples stuff. It’d be fun.”

“We’re not—We’re just friends.”

“You have a kid together.”

“Yes, we are very good friends who have a kid together.”

Hayden grins like he’s in on a joke no one told. “So if you’re not seeing Jessica, what about Lily?”

Shane’s heart catches, but it’s not even panic. It’s just a sharp, there-then-gone feeling, like muscle-hurt in the middle of a game, no time to acknowledge it, just have to get through. “You—know about Lily?”

“Come on, man, you used to text her, like, all the time. Not lately though—did something go down?”

“None of your business, Hayd. Seriously.”

Jade and Ruby are – somewhere. The jellyfish room has this ambient music playing, slow whooshy harmonies with eddies of piano and flute. The tanks are huge, lit in dreamy turquoise, their inhabitants moving in languorous, otherworldly orbits. A class of schoolchildren files in on a field trip, tour guide explaining in French that jellyfish have no brains, or hearts, or bones, or blood.

Ruby – he’s pretty sure – crashes into him, then, and tugs on the hem of his shirt. “Up, please.” He lifts her, turns so she can see into the tank; and across the room, is Sidney. It’s her class, her school. Shifting colours of light catch on her hair and the shiny parts of her eyes and she’s watching the jellyfish with studious interest, and the music feels louder somehow, all buzzing synthesizer, tempoless and grating. He feels the moment she sees him, confusion at the unexpected breaking into a smile, radiant. She waves.

It’s been over a month.

He waves back.

He gets a call from his dad that night. “Sidney says she saw you today.”

“Yeah. I didn’t know she’d be in town. You could’ve said.”

“I don’t know, Shane. You’ve made pretty clear you don’t want to be around.”

And that—no. That lands in his gut, sour and wrong. “I’ve been really busy, Dad.”

“Not too busy to hang out at the aquarium with someone else’s kids?”

“Dad—”

“You don’t get one foot in and one foot out with this, Shane. This isn’t you. What’s going on? Can we help?”

How to even explain, that if he goes to Ottawa, he might never leave? That she’s so loved by her grandparents, that they’ve raised her into someone so colossal, someone smart and curious and creative and self-assured and big-hearted and better off without him?

And the thing is—here’s the thing. His number used to be 10, all through Timbits and youth league and his first season in juniors. Just randomly assigned, the smallest jersey he’s ever worn picked out from a cardboard box, but he’d kept it all those years because he hated change and because it came to feel like his. And then he made the junior national roster and one of the older guys from Vancouver was also 10, and could Shane pick out another number please? And Shane has never been particularly creative or invested in symbolism or superstition, so he didn’t think too hard about it, just picked the first number that came to mind. And everyone thinks it’s a play on, like, 24/7, right? Like, he’s Shane Hollander, hockey is the whole point, twenty-four hours a day. There are entire memes about it; it’s on his Wikipedia page. And no one knows – he never even told his parents; they think it’s just coincidence, that he shares a number with Sidney’s birthday. May 24th.

But that’s just it. He’s been carrying her on his back since Regina in 2008, every loss, every victory, every goal and trophy and medal and challenge and triumph. Every face-off with Rozanov; every away game where the string that holds him together unspools across kilometres; every match in Ottawa where he finds her between his parents in the stands and waves big. All of it. She’s always with him, always has been, and he was just too fucking stupid to understand what that meant.

“I really miss her,” he tells his dad.

“I know,” his dad says. “So come home.”

---------------

Lily: I never said thank you

Jane: For what?

Lily: Spatula

Lily: Good luck in playoffs

---------------

“Captain’s here! Oh—and Mini Cap!”

“Cap! Cap! Cap!” comes a chant from the living room. 

“Hey, Jackie.” Shane passes her the bottle with a shrug. “My mom told me to get wine.”

“Oh, god. You’re so cute.” She pulls him into a hug, which hurts a little, because his shoulder is still messed up from a check in New Jersey. “There’s ginger ale in the fridge. What does Sidney drink? We have apple juice, fruit punch—”

“I’ll have ginger ale, too, please.”

“Ugh, I’m jealous, Shane. Yours is so polite. Can I keep her?”

They file into the living room. Olsson’s and Taylor’s kids are in the backyard with the twins, seemingly a game of tag but with an added layer of complexity that involves screaming their heads off. Shane looks to Sid, already knows the answer but asks anyway. “You want to go play?”

“No thanks.” Said with more disdain than a seven-year-old should be capable of. He loves her so much it’s ridiculous.

They find a spot on the sofa between Hayden and Mitty. “Is this the elusive Sidney Hollander?” Miitka asks, looking like he’s just won a prize in a carnival game.

“I keep forgetting you have a whole fucking kid,” Roy says, then oof when Hayden elbows him with a harsh whispered, “Dude!”

“Settle something for us, Hollzy,” J.J. jumps in. “Playoffs are over. Does Mitty need to shave his beard?”

“That’s not a rule,” Mitty objects.

“Hollander?”

Shane shrugs, looks at Sidney. “Thoughts?”

“Definitely shave,” she declares firmly. 

“Ouais! Mini Capitaine has spoken,” J.J. crows. 

Shane cracks open a ginger ale, passes it to Sid. She takes it, sips, crinkles up her nose when the bubbles hit her tongue. “You okay?” he asks softly, nudging her shoulder. “I know they can be kind of—loud.”

“I’m okay,” she assures.

Shane and Sid watch mostly in silence, exchanging commentary in private dialogue while the team jokes and complains around them. They’re on an island, they’re on their own exoplanet, laughing through their noses at Connors’ missed pass, synchronized sips of ginger ale.

Early in the third, it’s clear that San Francisco won’t catch Boston. “I can’t believe that asshole’s about to win the cup,” says Taylor.

“Shane hates him the most.”

“What?”

“You hate Rozanov.”

Sidney looks up at Shane quizzically, head tilted. “No you don’t.”

“What do you mean?” Hayden probes. “He’s, like, your dad’s mortal enemy.”

“They’re not enemies,” Sidney explains, like she’s talking to a much younger, much stupider child. “They respect each other.”

“Huh.” Hayden leans back into the sofa, crosses his arms and looks over at Shane. “Well, he is very good at hockey.”

“The best, probably,” Shane says.

“No, you’re the best,” Sidney counters, which. He kind of has to hug her for that.

“Yes, Hollander’s the best, and not that animal shitshow cocksucking Russian,” spits J.J.

“Language,” Jackie warns.

They watch Ilya Rozanov lift the Cup, and Shane doesn’t know what to make of the feeling that rises in him, warm and sharply angled and important and sad. Sid leans into his side, and he brings an arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. “You’ll win next year,” she says into his shirtsleeve, certain and bright, like something she knows to be true. He’ll make it true, he thinks. For her.

He drives her back to Ottawa as the sky darkens. She’s mostly quiet in the backseat, contemplating the sunset; pointing out a pair of horses grazing somewhere outside Gatineau.

“What’s cocksucking?” she asks, forming the word carefully, like she knows it might be dangerous.

“Um. It’s a really bad word, Sid. It’s a slur.”

“A slur,” she repeats, understanding. “Okay. I won’t say it.”

“That’s good.”

“You should tell J.J. not to say it.”

“I—” Shane falters; glances in the rearview mirror to catch a glimpse of where she sits, earnest and concerned. “You’re right. I’ll talk to him.”

“Cool.”

---------------

It’s after, and they are bodies, sated and sweating and burning like embers. Ilya lifts the cigarette to his lips, savours the sour taste, where it mingles with the salt-sweet tang of Hollander in his throat, on his tongue, on the ridges of his teeth. A forgiveness handed to him in stolen breath and strong hands and his name sighed into the curve of his throat. He doesn’t deserve it; which is basically the theme of Las Vegas at this point. A fucking residency, like Celine Dion at Caesars Palace: Hey, fuckers. Get your tickets now for Ilya Rozanov’s Annual Shame Parade.

He exhales, watches the smoke wisp and dissolve. Hollander shifts impatiently next to him, and Ilya groans. “Go ahead. Say it.”

“You really shouldn’t smoke.” Uttered quickly, words blurring together like Hollander had been trying to hold them in, racehorses behind the starting gate.

Ilya takes a sarcastic, defiant drag; turns to look out the window. Blinking lights, distant, ostentatious. This stupid city. “Your family did not come this year?”

“No, it didn’t make sense this year.”

“Mm. You will see them in the summer?”

“Yeah—Actually, I built a cottage? Or, you know, construction workers built it. I just—had it built, I guess. Sid is going to stay there with me, like, the whole summer.”

“This sounds nice.”

Hollander breathes a long, deep breath. “I’m kind of scared, honestly. We’ve never spent that much time together, like, just us, pretty much ever.”

“Why are you scared?”

“I don’t know. Maybe—she’ll discover she doesn’t actually like me?”

He looks over at Hollander, balances the cigarette between two fingers. “This is stupid, Hollander. She loves you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You forget, I have seen you together. She loves you very much, I think.” He transfers the cigarette to his lips, balanced there, hot and bitter. His hand finds the cross on his chest, cool metal edges. “It is scary, maybe, but you are brave. My mother used to say this.”

Hollander rolls close against him, then, and reaches out to lay a hand over his, over the cross; a movement so unexpected Ilya nearly drops the cigarette.

“This was hers?” Those eyes, fucking tidepools to drown in. 

Ilya nods.

They’re silent, for a while, Hollander still tucked against the curve of his side, hand lingering on his chest, tracing absent mandalas with his thumb.

“What is the problem?” Hollander asks finally. “You said—‘I always want, Hollander. This is not the problem.’ So what is the problem?”

“I do not sound like this,” Ilya scoffs.

“You do, kind of. Don’t change the subject.”

“You are very annoying, do you know this?” Ilya lolls his head lazily to the side, pulling back so he can meet Hollander’s eye. “You want apology? I am sorry I was mean to you in Russia.”

“That’s not—I’m just asking.”

“You are always asking. So many questions. You are Mr. Jeopardy.”

“Put some respect on Alex Trebek’s name. And that doesn’t even make sense. It’s not questions on Jeopardy, it’s answers.” Hollander drops his hand from Ilya’s chest, sits up abruptly. “I know I overstepped, okay? I’m sorry. We said we wouldn’t see each other but I talked to you anyway.”

“No, Hollander, it is not this. You did nothing wrong.”

“Then, what is the problem?”

Ilya clenches his teeth, because if he doesn’t, the truth might escape out from between them, every terrible, clawing thing that lives inside him, the fear, the anger, the crushing sad; the increasingly unavoidable like for the man in bed next to him.

“Russia is very difficult place for me. My family is not kind like yours. There are laws, recently—”

“Vaughny said something. I looked it up.” Hollander is assessing him gently; those eyes. Those fucking eyes. “Were you not safe, there?”

Ilya reaches across to the ashtray on the bedside table; snuffs out the cigarette in a slow, grinding motion. Smoke lingers, a reminder. “My father is police. My brother is police. No, Hollander, I was not safe.”

Hollander nods; skirts his eyes to his hands where they worry the edge of the blanket in his lap. Thinking. “Why are you going back, then? If it’s not safe. Why not train in Boston for the summer?”

“I will take, ‘Annoy Ilya for $600, Alex’—”

“Oh my god, can you be serious for once?”

“Hollander. My father is very sick, okay? This is what you want to know? He is sick in the head – probably dementia. He does not remember things. It is—he will die, I think. I don’t know. So, I go back.”

“Shit, Ilya—”

“Oh, we are on first name basis now?”

Hollander freezes; he looks, for a moment, like he’s suddenly discovered that he’s made of glass, see-through and easy to break. “I should go.” He stands from the bed, gathers his clothes, starts hopping into one pantleg then the other.

“Shane—” He’s buttoning his shirt and shrugging into his jacket and fumbling for his shoes. He’s leaving, and Ilya suddenly and acutely and very, very stupidly, wants him to stay. 

“Fuck,” he hears Shane mutter. And then Shane is here and leaning over the bed and grabbing Ilya around the back of his neck, firm hands, warm. The kiss is so soft Ilya isn’t completely sure, afterwards, if it happened at all.

“Promise me you’ll be safe,” Shane whispers into his lips. “Please.”

Ilya nods against his forehead. “Is okay. I will be safe.”

“Okay.” Another kiss, just softly parted lips and feathers of breath and Shane’s fingers cupping the side of his jaw; it’s Debussy, Printemps, sparkling swells of pastel colour; and Ilya thinks, this is the end of him. “Okay. Have a good summer.”

Only when Shane reaches the door does Ilya rediscover English. “Say hi to your Sidney for me.”

“I will.”

Ilya chooses to believe him.

Chapter End Notes

🫴 I present to you...our Tuna Melt (Sunbutter melt?) and our Club Scene 🪼🪼

• Number 24 reveal - I thought about making it a reveal through dialogue, to Ilya or maybe to Sid. But it felt more important to make it a reveal to Shane himself.

• The kidnapping and murder described by Ilya is a combination of real events taking place in Russia in 2013. Major, major trigger warning - every possible trigger warning imaginable - you can read reporting on these events from PinkNews (here, here and here), The Guardian, and Human Rights Watch.

• Movie about the nun and singing children:

Chapter 6: Suddenly, a band of stars appeared in the sky

Chapter Notes

CW: Homophobia/F-slur and anti-Asian racism incl. a racial slur

Sidney’s fingerprints are on this place, even if she doesn’t know it, even if Shane barely knows it; in the swirling woodgrain and cool black marble and twisty stone sculpture out front that he’d commissioned because it reminded him of one of her drawings, from when she was younger. Meetings with the architect where he’d wondered whether the smooth grey stone of the patio would be safe, or slippery when they’d come up from a swim, trailing lakewater with them that would pool at their feet. Conversations with the landscaper, envisioning a garden of wild bergamot and blue vervain, so that butterflies and hummingbirds and bees would pay visit.

He really, really, really wants her to like it.

He’s actually, like, so nervous. It’s kind of laughable. He can go into a playoff game steeled and hyperfocused, like his body can’t remember ever feeling fear; but somehow, the weeks that stretch ahead, the idea of being alone with her – of her knowing him, really – has his heart doing alarmingly percussive things like the thronging drum circle that occasionally besets Parc du Mont-Royal.

What was it that Rozanov said? It is scary, yes, but you are brave.

He remembers, viscerally, before Sidney was born, the cold pit of terror that had encamped in his stomach, a fixture of those months, an anchor-weight that nearly drowned him. How his greatest fear then had been to have her in his life; and now, he fears that he may not. That she’ll realize he’s an insufficient proxy for a father, an imposter; that the depths of him don’t know how to love her enough or correctly; and she’ll politely take him up on his reminders that Baba and Jiji are only ten minutes away, she can go stay with them any time she wants, seriously, it’s not a problem, just say the word.

His parents drop Sid off with her small packed suitcase and he gives them a whirlwind tour. He doesn’t want to show his parents everything, quite yet – he can’t totally explain it; it’s like, he wants Sid to be the first person to really know this place. Like, it’s hers to discover. An astronaut on the moon: she’ll plant flags of laughter that bounces off the windows, leave cratered footprints chasing dragonflies through shoregrass.

“It’s really something, Shane,” his mom admires, glancing around the kitchen, its warm wood, flooded with sunlight.

“Do you remember your first summer out here?” his dad asks. “I think you were Sid’s age.”

“Yeah. It was right after Grandma died. I remember.” His parents’ cottage, really an ordinary place as far as cottage country goes, had been the first and only luxurious purchase he could remember his parents ever making. Shane had groused the whole drive out because the summer promised to be lacking in any meaningful access to hockey. But, there had been lake swims, and smores, and gin rummy, and a radiant glowing bonfire in the small nearby town on Fête nationale; an ease to his mom’s posture, a brightening in his dad’s eyes.

“She’ll make memories here, too,” his dad says.

“Yeah. I hope so, yeah.”

His parents hug Sidney goodbye, and remind Shane to call if they need anything, anything at all, and then they’re gone – a vacation for them, really – and now it’s Shane and it’s Sidney and the vast expanse of lake and blue sky.

He shows her the well; they sample glasses of fresh water. She agrees, with utmost sincerity like a sommelier tasting fine wine, that the water does taste better than at home, and that maybe it is actually the best water she’s ever had.

He shows her a terrarium with a plump, lime-green caterpillar that he’d special-ordered from an entomological shop outside Quebec City. She names it Green Bean after some contemplation, and determines to feed it every day with a buffet of leaves from the paper birch trees along the trail out back.

He shows her the training room with synthetic ice, a goal on one end, a row of sticks, skates in her size in case she wants to practice, too. He shows her the shelves with books she likes, the theatre room with DVDs and video games, the gym with two yoga mats, so they can do their nightly stretches together.

He helps her unpack her suitcase in her bedroom, wide windows facing the lake. T-shirts in the top drawer, pajamas below; swimsuit set aside for a dip in the afternoon. “Sid. Why don’t any of your socks match?”

She shrugs. “It’s more fun.”

They swim while the sun is still bright-hot and sparkling and she shrieks when something brushes her toes underwater, and he bravely dives under to check for sea monsters; no, none here, no creatures lurking – just a tangle of moss.

The night cools and Shane starts a fire, and they huddle under a blanket, and he teaches her how to cup her hands just-so and whistle against her thumbs – the way his dad had taught him – and it takes a few tries, but she figures it out; and when a loon responds to her call, warbling and mellifluent, she looks at him with shock and wonderment.

She settles her head into his lap; the fire is warm, crackling; the smoke-smell and the lake-smell, brisk and algal, mix with the clean dark air, oxygen freshly unleashed from acres of trees standing sentinel in the night. 

He traces a thumb along her temple, where her hair glows even brighter red in the firelight. “Hey, Sid?”

“Hey, Dad?”

“I kind of really love you a lot. I’m sorry I don’t say it very much.”

“That’s okay. I love you, too.”

“Why?” Because he can’t understand it; can’t make sense of the shining weight of her inside his chest, galactic, interstellar.

“Don’t know. I just do.”

---------------

Jane: [Attachment: Photo]

Lily: what the fuck is this Hollander

Lily: you have alien invasion in your home

Lily: Call Will Smith and this other guy

Lily: Call canadian horse police

Jane: this is Green Bean. she’s a caterpillar

Jane: wait why am I calling Will Smith?

---------------

They learn the rhythms of each other.

Sidney relishes slow, quiet mornings. She wanders into the kitchen after Shane has already had his first protein shake, worked out, warmed down, and prepared his second. He’s prepped pancake batter, a recipe his dad always used to make with oats and chocolate chips, and he heats the skillet while Sid goes to feed Green Bean. 

He’s arranged, at some expense, for daily delivery of a physical copy of the Globe and Mail, because she likes to check the stocks and read the editorial cartoons and puzzle over the sudoku, turning the large pages with rapt concentration. It’s such a David Hollander thing, holy shit; Shane flips the pancakes, leans back against the counter, and snaps a furtive photo that he texts to his dad.

They hike the private trail that twists through the woods that bound the lake. He goes a bit overboard with bug spray; she complains, crinkles her nose at the smell; he persists, citing data about an uptick – hah – of tick bites in the province. She gives him shit for the pun; he can’t stop grinning because she called it a dad joke and like, yeah. It’s a joke; he’s a dad. What a thing.

She wears a big floppy sunhat that he’d bought her at a hotel gift shop in Tampa, and the brim bounces as she skips ahead of him, intrepid. She pauses at a fern plant and shows him the spores that dot the undersides of the leaves.

He loves when she teaches him things.

They spend the afternoon in the synthetic rink, threading a puck between them in slow, deliberate passes until she gets bored, and then they’re racing around the perimeter, and he’s not even going easy on her, she’s just fast. He lets her lap him at the very end, just to see the smile that crosses her face, sunshiny and triumphant.

They read silently on the couch before bed, facing each other from opposite ends, legs extended. Shane recognizes her worn copy of Encyclopedia Brown from his own childhood bookshelf in Ottawa. He settles back against the arm of the couch, lightly kicks her sockfoot with his own so that she laughs through her nose, and opens to where he left off in Stickhandling through the Margins.

When he hears the soft thud of pages as she closes her book, he looks up, and she meets his eyes, focused, maybe shy.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I know you were really busy, when you couldn’t visit.”

The words land in his chest pointed and fragile, like the icicles that drip in the winter from colourful eaves around Square Saint-Louis. They haven’t talked about March; he’d just silently resumed his trips to Ottawa, exchanging a deferent nod with his dad; and he’d been entirely, undeservedly grateful to reenter her life as if he’d never been gone, peaceful visits on days-off, her hand in his – still, even as she’s older, now – on the walk from his car up the driveway.

“I’m sorry, Sid,” he says, and his voice is tight while something urgent presses against the back of his eyes. “I really am so, so sorry.”

“It’s okay.” And, like. She’s magnificent in ways he doesn’t understand, like the stars and planets which Jessica’s equations can attempt to describe, but never explain. Some things are unexplainable; celestial. To forgive such a fracture; to release him from his cowardice – it’s okay. So simple. 

“No, it’s not.” He sits up, draws his legs in close. “I shouldn’t have done that. It won’t happen again, okay?”

“Okay. Cool.” She nods. “I like when you visit.”

He scoots over into the corner of the sofa, pats the cushion next to him where there’s space, and she swings around to his side and tucks against him, adjusting so they’re both under the throw blanket. They read silently together in the soft warm lamplight.

---------------

Jane: oh you mean Men In Black??

Jane: Tommy Lee Jones

---------------

By the time Jessica arrives, Green Bean is so fat she spends most of her time lazing on a twig in the terrarium, absently munching the leaves Sid continues to deliver with the reliable precision of a wartime courier.

It’s early evening when Jess pulls into the pebbled drive and Sid shoots out the door to meet her. They stumble into the cottage laughing, tangled together with Jess’ suitcase and a long, hefty cardboard box. 

“What is it?” Sid wonders, standing the box on its side, inspecting it for clues.

“You’ll see.” Jess’ eyes sparkle. She cups a hand to the side of Sid’s face, a fond swipe of her thumb, then moves to hug Shane tight.

They grill up veggie burgers, and for some reason Shane has made eight even though there are only three people to eat them, and Jess makes fun of him for it, and Sid snorts laughing, which is like, kind of the best sound, actually. The sun sinks below the spired trees, blazing bands of orange and grapefruit-pink giving way to that deep, unmooring darkness Shane has only ever known in this place. Stars flicker to life, busy glistening things, like someone cosmic and unknowable has flipped a switch.

“Okay. Help me set it up,” Jess instructs, returning from inside with the cardboard box.

They unpack the telescope while Shane futilely flips through the assembly instructions, which seem to be written in Chinese. Trial and error and one Allen wrench accidentally flung into the bushes, and now the telescope stands proudly on the dock, pointed at the vast, star-spun sky that reflects a twinned other-world onto the water.

Jess adjusts the angle, turns the focuser, then steps aside for Sid to take her place.

Sid gasps, a smallest, unintentional sound. “Whoa.”

“Do you see the little blinking one, near the centre?”

She presses closer against the eyepiece, and her tongue sticks out a little in fierce concentration. “Mm. I think so.”

“That is 2014 CK1.” Jess grins this smug, bright grin and looks at Shane with a faux-humble shrug. “I discovered it.”

“Whoa.” Sid whips around to look at Jessica, probably a mirror-image of Shane, who feels his jaw actually drop in amazement, like a cartoon character.

“It’s a mid-sized main-belt asteroid,” Jess explains. “I’ve been tracking it since February. It just has a preliminary designation for now while we wait for other observations to be verified, which could take years, probably. But after that, I get to name it.”

“Dad, come look.” Sid grabs his hand, drags him along the dock, fists planted on her hips while he leans in. The stars snap into focus, gem-shaped and bright-white. In the centre there’s a small, oblong halo with oscillating edges. 

It’s wild because, like. Could they ever have imagined that Jessica would be, like, discovering entire asteroids, when they laid atop his bed in Ottawa one horrible Wednesday, fearing everything that now surrounds them with warmth? A goal-in-net feeling surges in him, catching in his throat; and Shane realizes, encircled by viscous darkness and starglow, that he is really, really happy.

What’s the thing sailors used to use to find their way by charting the stars? Astrolabe – that’s right. Shane can feel a calculation forming, a jumble of longitude and latitude straightening into a path through choppy waters. Jessica will start her PhD at McGill in the fall – could they? It’s objectively insane to think about, probably. Shane is gone half the year. Sid has a whole life in Ottawa. How would it even work?

He steps back from the telescope and finds the two of them smiling big identical smiles, looking up at the vast and untamed sky. “What will you name it?” he asks.

Jess looks at him like he’s just asked whether Santa Claus is real. “Sidney,” she answers, rolling her eyes. “Obviously.”

---------------

Lily: Tell me something nice

Jane: …

Jane: You’re very good at hockey

Lily: I already know I am very sexy and very good at hockey

Jane: I didn’t say sexy

Lily: VERY sexy

Lily: Was implied

Lily: I meant more like tell me a nice story from your summer

Jane: Oh

Jane: We took a canoe out on the lake today and saw a snapping turtle

Jane: How’s your dad?

Lily: Not good

Lily: I think maybe bad

Jane: I’m sorry

Lily: So am I

---------------

“Mom. Dad.” A quiet morning; sunlight through tall wide windows dappling Sid’s hair aglow. “It’s Green Bean.”

They crowd around the terrarium. Dangling from Green Bean’s favourite twig is a brown, leafy cocoon.

---------------

Jessica heads back to Notre-Dame-des-Bois to close out her fellowship. The telescope stays assembled on the dock, and Sid looks out into the sky every night, and somewhere out there is a glowing mass of rock and metal ore that her mother discovered and named after her.

It’s a clear-blue afternoon when Jessica leaves, and they’re both feeling kind of down about it, the cottage swelling with an echoing silence, so Shane drives them into town to stop at a farmstand that sells ice cream and cheese curds and amber jars of honey. Sidney loves ice cream. She orders an overstuffed cone of blueberry flavour and Shane gets something with chocolate and caramel because fuck it, it’s off-season, he can pop a Lactaid and live a little. They sit at a picnic table shaded by a copse of pines and swipe bites of each other’s with tiny plastic spoons.

“Do you love Mom?” Sidney asks, in a way that’s like a wandering thought spoken aloud.

“Yeah,” Shane says, because it’s true. “Of course.”

“Why aren’t you guys married?”

The question sets him off-kilter like catching an edge, an unexpected lurch. The weird shape of their weird family is so implicit, a way of things. “I think, um. There’s different types of love, right? There’s, like, get-married love, and then there’s the way me and Jess are, which is—We’re best friends.”

He stumbles through this inadequate half-answer, sheltered by omission, and the ice cream is suddenly too cold and too sweet. He looks across at his daughter who is inquisitive and open-hearted, the way the sun has brightened the freckles across her face, brown eyes which are his, ice cream melting purple-blue streaks down her wrists. The entire reason she exists, the fear and self-loathing that had once felt like helpless freefall; but none of it lives in her, none of the shadows he hides behind. He’d told her once before, when she was too small to know language, and it had felt then like handing her a piece of himself for safekeeping. And he just—suddenly and certainly, he wants her to know. He wants her to understand.

“I’m gay,” he says, for the third time in his life out loud. “Do you—know what that means?”

Sidney nods and takes a bite of ice cream, unfazed. “Yeah. It’s like, boys who like boys and girls who like girls.”

“You learned that in school?”

“Sometimes. Also Mom gave me a book about it.”

“She did?” Fucking—Jessica. He kind of wants to drive across Quebec and barge into her lab and give her a hug.

“Mm-hmm.” Ice cream taking precedence, for a moment. “She didn’t say it was about you, though.” Sid looks squarely at him then, the smallest frown, and his heart squeezes with it. “Is it a secret?”

Shane breathes out slowly. “Do you remember what J.J. said, when we watched the final?”

“The slur.”

“That’s right.” 

“It was about gay people?”

“It was, yeah.” Shane makes a decision then; he’s so sure of it, actually, that he finds himself smiling from the bright wave of confidence that overtakes him. “Sid, listen, okay? This is important. It’s—This is my secret to keep, right? Hockey people won’t be nice about it, so I won’t tell them, and that’s my choice. But I never want you to lie or keep secrets for me. I want you to always be honest.” Because Shane has spent so much time lying – to himself; to everyone. Because it eats at him, bitter and caustic and lonely. He never wants that for her. He doesn’t want her to be like him. “If you ever want to tell someone, you can tell them. I won’t be mad. I trust you.”

He does, is the thing. He really does.

She contemplates her ice cream cone, which is mostly melted at this point, and such a mess Shane is resisting the urge to douse her in hand sanitizer. “Okay,” she says finally, glancing up. “Do you like a boy?”

Shane huffs a laugh. “So nosy.”

She rolls her eyes and scrunches her nose and sticks out her tongue. “Well. Do you?”

And, like. Why the hell not? “Yeah,” Shane says. “I do.”

He remembers something then; fishes his wallet out of his pocket, unzips the small pouch where he keeps pennies and dimes and forgotten sticks of gum that he should probably throw away at this point. “Hey. Could you hold onto this for me?” He hands her the rainbow button, the one Jessica had given him, on the day he’d played his first MLH game and scored his first MLH goal and let Jess, in her kind and unabashed way, explain what he is still learning to understand – that for all hockey has given and will continue to give him, there is also so, so much that it is taking away.

Sidney takes the button, brushes a finger across it where there’s dust and detritus from years spent inhabiting this quiet, dark and smallest space he’s always carried with him. She closes her fist around it, nods firmly, and slips it into her pocket.

---------------

Lily: [Attachment: Photo]

Jane: Your family has a dog?

Lily: No, it is a stray. I feed sometimes

Lily: Look!! He has so many spots just like you

Lily: He is Dog Hollander

---------------

He finds her one night sitting cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by scraps of paper laid out in small piles across the comforter, surgically snipping something from that morning’s Globe and Mail with a small pair of crafting scissors that she must have packed from home.

He watches for a moment from the doorframe, then asks, “What’s all this?”

She looks up, not startled, exactly, but like she hadn’t noticed him approach, absorbed in her work. “Oh. It’s like my diary. Except, with pictures and stuff.”

“Is it private?”

She shakes her head. “You can see.”

He steps into the room and sits on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb her set-up. She passes him a hardcover journal, thick with decorated pages, and he flips through gingerly. Every page is collaged with the ephemera of her life, newspaper clippings, movie tickets, stickers, leaves, candy wrappers – the Russian bears – schoolwork, hockey cards, receipts. In blank spaces, she’s drawn skillful little doodles and left notes in meticulous, straight-edged handwriting. He realizes, as he peruses the most recent pages, that she must have been spiriting away tokens from their days together like a magpie, pocketing flora from their hikes, the little shovel-shaped spoon from the ice cream place, a torn corner from the instruction manual for the telescope. The rainbow button. He feels stupid, a bit, that he hadn’t noticed.

Everything is glue-sticked and taped into an assemblage that defies language; he thinks of the mind-meld in Star Trek which his dad and Jessica both like – nerds – like he’s been granted momentary permission to share space with her brain, a wondrous place.

“This is so cool, Sid,” he says, and his voice is scraped raw, because it turns out he knows his kid so little. “How long have you been doing this?”

She shrugs, fiddling with the scissors. “Since last year pretty much. Jiji helped me start it.”

“That’s good. That’s really nice.”

He says goodnight, drops a kiss to the top of her hair. It’s not something he does, normally; he’s not affectionate the way Jess is. He likes having her close, likes when she sits beside him reading and he can hear the trusted rise and fall of her breathing. But anything beyond that has always felt—he’s not sure. Off limits, maybe. Like it fits him weird; skates a size too small, the wrong brand of grip tape. Like, a real dad thing to do, the way his own parents had always been with him growing up, physical force-fields of gentle care. He’s not that, to her. He’s not supposed to be.

The cottage has a study on the basement level: an antique wood desk, stately and plain; a desktop computer, a printer, a bulletin board; a midcentury green-glass lamp that he’d specially asked the designer to find. He figured, contracts get renewed during the summer. Brands reach out during the summer. It might come in handy to have a proper workspace.

He’s not sure where to start. It’s all pressing in on him, the possibility, the gravity. So many questions and variables and insurmountable things. His hands hover over the keyboard until he arrives at something tangible, small enough to digest. Googles: Montreal private schools with art program

He’s always been greedy, hasn’t he? Wanting what he’s not supposed to want. Carelessly, recklessly wanting.

---------------

Lily: He did not know my name today

Jane: Fuck. That’s awful

Lily: How is your Sidney?

Jane: [Attachment: Photo]

Lily: I have not seen before

Jane: I send pictures all the time?

Lily: No I mean her face. Always in pictures she is looking away

Lily: Very beautiful Shane. You look very alike

Lily: You told me freckles but I did not know about the smile

Jane: …you think we have the same smile?

Lily: Yes

Lily: It is this word hang on, I look it up

Lily: Identical

---------------

Shane resolves to just float the question over dinner, just an idea, a seedling, a paper boat set sail on the lake. They’ll help him think it through properly, give rational edges to work within like bumpers on a bowling lane. Maybe they’ll talk him out of it; maybe they’ll see a way through that he hasn’t thought of yet.

That’s the plan he grasps onto as he boils spaghetti and squints at his phone, trying to decipher a blurry photo of his grandpa’s handwritten chicken parm recipe. Sidney sits on the counter swinging her legs under the guise of helping, but mainly she’s lining up the tomatoes by size and making fun of him for not knowing what it means to julienne the basil – as if she’s some sort of gourmet chef.

His parents arrive and he lets Sid answer the door like the duchess of a grand estate, ushering them in with a hyperbolically recounted tale about a close brush (spotted from across the lake) with a bear (might not even have been a bear – too far away to tell) on their hike that afternoon.

There’ve been visits with his parents all summer, lunches at their cottage, dinners at his, a day trip with Jessica into the national park to see the tumbling waters of Chute-aux-Rats and lounge on the sandy beach at Lac-Provost. It’s been a reversal of their usual cadence, Shane the occasional visitor. He thinks his parents have enjoyed some time to relax. They seem happy, peaceful. He slots that thought into the pros column in his brain, even as the cons continue to outweigh.

The chicken parm feels like a test he needs to ace, like – See? He can put dinner on the table, and it tastes good and has protein and vegetables and Sid likes it quite a bit. He’s made an eggplant version for himself, and a side salad with greens from the farmstand, and grilled slices of baguette from a woman in town who sells fresh bread and bouquets of flowers out of a cart in her front yard. He gets everything laid out on the patio with proper place settings and linen napkins.

He doesn’t ask at dinner; he doesn’t ask while they eat dessert, flaky miniature butter tarts his parents brought over. He doesn’t ask while they play gin rummy, Sid soundly beating all of them best five of seven; nor while Sid shows them the telescope and tells them about the asteroid; nor while they sit around the fire and Sidney rests her head on his side and they watch the flames in familiar silence until she’s yawning while adamantly pretending she’s not tired at all, and Let’s get you to bed, Sid, come on – and he brings her inside to brush her teeth and tuck her in, while his parents exchange this amused, enigmatic look and stay out back under the stars.

He returns to the patio and stands just on the perimeter of the circle of furniture that surrounds the fire, positioned behind the sofa that faces his parents like it’s a rampart, protective, and he opens his mouth to ask, and that’s when he realizes that he’s not asking at all. That this isn’t an idea anymore, a question, a maybe-what-if. And in the split-second that he realizes this, as the words amass into something comprehensible and desperate in his throat, a look crosses his mom’s face, her brow knit, her eyes wide, and – oh.

Oh.

She knows.

“Shane,” she says, that calm, rational voice.

“Mom—”

“Shane, no. You are not taking that little girl away.”

“Mom, what? That’s not—”

“Sorry, no, you’re right. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Yuna—” His dad has a gentle hand on her shoulder; steady, firm.

“David. How’s this going to work? He’s always on the road. You’re always on the road, Shane.” She looks between them, and Shane thinks of the hummingbirds that visit the garden here, the way their wings flap invisibly fast so that they just hover there, unmoving. “I get that you’ve had a very nice summer together, and she loves spending time with you, but—what? You played house for a few weeks and think you can raise a child?”

Shane has nothing to say to that, because that’s the truth of it, right? That’s the crux of it all, since he was fifteen, bags packed for the trade back to Ottawa from Kingston, helplessly borne forward on a tide of his own making, simultaneously unqualified for anything yet responsible for everything.

“Shane, sweetie. We have a plan.”

“I know the plan, Mom. There wasn’t—I mean. Was there even a choice?”

“No, there wasn’t. How were you supposed to raise her? We weren’t even done raising you.”

“I know. I know. Fuck.” He paces around from behind the sofa and sits down on it heavily, head in his hands. “I know.”

His mom is peering at him, gentle, studying. She’s not angry, he knows. She has that steady, open tone of voice, a determined set to it; her problem-solving voice. Only, he’s the problem.

He’s always the problem. 

How could you be so careless? 

He inhales a shaky breath. He knows there are tears pooling in his eyes, held in only by surface tension and force of will. He sets his arms on his legs, grips his fingers limpet-like around his kneecaps through the fabric of his jeans. “It took me so long, to figure out how to love her,” he says finally. “I just—She’s my kid, right? I’m her dad. I just want to be that for her. I want to give her a life.”

The tears must have broken out from where they’ve been gathering because his mom moves from the couch across the fire and comes to sit beside him, resting a hand on either shoulder, tugging him into her chest. She swipes her hand across his forehead and runs her fingers through his hair and says, “Of course you’re her dad. You’ll always be her dad. She loves you so much.”

“But that’s not—it doesn’t matter, does it? We have a plan. I’ll play until I’m forty or too injured or whatever, and at that point, she’s what? Twenty-five? And I’m just—some guy she hangs out with sometimes.” His voice is wavering, his nose is running a little, his body is trembling in his mother’s arms from the sheer effort of keeping himself from imploding into a tangled knot of thread. “I’m so grateful. You have to know that, right? I mean—She’s so loved. She’s so lucky. But I can’t keep walking away. I can’t.” He sits up, pulling away from her, finding his own shape again. He’s greedy; he’s selfish; he’s scared and he’s brave. He takes a deep breath and looks her in the eye. “I tried, Mom. I really tried. But, we need a new plan.”

“Oh, honey.”

“There are other ways,” he offers. Because he’s thought about it nights in the cottage study by green glowing lamplight. Because the way he’s learned to love is a three-ring binder of Options, whittled down with logic and care. “You could move to Montreal? The Treasury Board has satellite offices all over Quebec. I’ll buy you guys, like, an amazing house.”

“Shane—”

“Or I’ll talk to Farah, see if Ottawa will take me? I mean, of course they’d take me. They have the cap space. The issue is getting Montreal to release me.”

She tilts her head, this unguarded look of surprise on her face. “You would go to Ottawa?”

“I would, yeah.”

“Shane, that would be the end of your career.”

“I mean, yeah. I’m not saying it’s the top choice here. But I would, for her. You guys sacrificed so much. Maybe it’s my turn.”

His dad leans forward from across the fire, looking about as dead-serious as Shane has ever seen him. “Son. We never wanted you to need to sacrifice anything.”

“I know. But, like, I get it now. I know you guys would do anything for me – you literally, already did anything – everything – and I know it, like, here—” He taps his palm flat against his chest, and maybe the gesture is cheesy, but he’s running out of words for what he needs to say. “I know because I’m—It’s the same for me. I would do anything for her. I really would.”

“Alright,” says his dad, nodding slowly. “Alright, then. What’s your plan?”

“What?”

“You said we need a new plan. I know you, Shane – I know you have one. So, what’s your plan?”

Shane looks between his parents, their keen attention, the fire orange-hot and the night that rustles around them. He feels suddenly like he’s about to deliver a pitch on Dragon’s Den; he wants to laugh from it, actually. Everything that he’s researched and thought through in the study seems inadequate now, in the firelight, in the face of this huge thing he’s asking. 

“I, uh. Well. She’ll need an allergist,” he begins. “Pediatrician – Jackie Pike recommended one.”

“Speech therapist,” his dad says. “She has this thing with S’s. It’s not a big deal but if we don’t address it, she’ll need braces.”

“Okay, sure, yeah. And a speech therapist.” Shane nods, blinks hard, summons the words until they’re a locomotive train trundling forward. “I’ll buy a proper house, maybe in Westmount. It’s a little farther from the arena but it’s so nice there, with the park and the library. It’ll be big – not, you know, nothing crazy. But there will be room for you guys to come and stay, whenever you want. I mean it. And, um. Well, Jessica is in Montreal next year. She’ll be teaching and doing her research, obviously, but if she’s not out at the observatory Sid could stay with her while I’m travelling. You know Jess – she’ll be thrilled. And you guys, of course. And she can come to Ottawa, too.”

He tells them about the top-rated private school that Olsson’s kids attend, and that could be nice, because they’re about the same age and she already knows them and it would be easy to make friends. But also, there’s an arts school close to McGill campus, and yeah it’s public, but it has some of the best academics in the province, and he thinks Sid would really love it because she’s so creative. Not just art classes, but choir and orchestra and theatre, too. “I’d like to tour both, I think. And Sid should come and help decide.”

The Metros have a youth development program she could join for U8s. There’s a Japanese cultural centre up in Villeray; they can take a language class together when there’s time. He’ll have a housekeeper, a nanny, a chef, and someone to pick up laundry twice a week. And – he braces himself – “I would step down as captain.”

“Shane, what?”

“No, listen.” He nods; he’s thought about this a lot; watched hockey is the whole point dematerialize into beads of mercury slipping uselessly through his fingers. He’s really, really sure. “I’m me – you know? They’ll still listen to me on strategy, without the title. I’ll still have authority in the room. It’s not like I need the money. And if it’s the difference between—Mom, seriously, listen. If it’s choosing between going in early for extra meetings, or making her breakfast and taking her to school – that’s not even a choice, right? It’s not a sacrifice. It’s just, what I would do.”

They sit in his words, the echo of their meaning, while the fire licks into the darkness and a loon calls across the lake. Abruptly, his mom stands. “I just need a minute.” She walks away from the fire and retreats to the end of the dock, a shadow-figure framed against the star-swathed water.

He finds his dad’s eyes, soft around the corners, and Shane realizes, he might have been crying, too. 

“You weren’t planned, Shane,” he says slowly. Always so deliberate with his words. “The concept of you was planned, of course. Very planned and very wanted. But the timing—wasn’t.”

“Oh,” is all Shane can manage.

“Your mom was still finishing her master’s. I had just started in the Public Service. We were so blessed, but we weren’t ready. But then, can you ever really be ready to have a kid?”

Shane breathes out a strained laugh, because, obviously, no. There’s no such thing as ready, here. Just closing your eyes and diving headlong off the cliff.

“We wanted to give you a brother or sister. We tried, for a while – realized it wouldn’t happen for us. That was fine. We had you. You’ve made us so, so happy, Shane. Every minute of every day, and none of it is because of hockey. I hope you know that.”

“Even when I fuck things up?”

“Even. Always.”

Shane swallows back a sob, or maybe a laugh; maybe both; breathes a shallow breath through his nose. 

“Your daughter is very special to us. She’s so special.” His dad pivots his head to the side, glancing out at Yuna where she stands. There is a string between them, Shane imagines, even across this smallest distance to the edge of the lake. “We weren’t ready to be grandparents – you might understand – but it’s been such a gift. It’s like—holding a magnifying glass up to all the things we love about you, and watching them show up in her, in all these unexpected ways.” He chuckles to himself. “It’s the most incredible thing – the ways she’s like you. The ways she isn’t. Who she’s becoming.”

“Yeah,” Shane agrees, almost a whisper. “She’s pretty incredible.”

His dad nods, leans forward. “So you have to understand – if this works, Shane; if we make this work – it will be an adjustment. For you, for her. For all of us.”

“I know. I understand.”

His dad jerks his head to the side. “Go,” he whispers, taking the blanket from his lap and folding it into a neat square. He holds it out as Shane stands. Shane takes it, steels his shoulders, and makes his way to the dock.

She doesn’t look at him as he comes up beside her; just shifts her stance a little to the side, making room. He unfurls the blanket and drapes it over her shoulders. “I, um. About the captaincy – I know how much we both wanted that. How much I worked for it. I know you’re disappointed.”

“Shane, stop.”

“Mom—”

“No, I mean. I’m not disappointed. You could never disappoint me.”

“I kind of feel like I’m always disappointing you,” he says, an awful, unfiltered thing. He wishes he could stuff the words back in his mouth and chew them to shreds, sour-tasting like lemons and charcoal ash.

She turns to him, then, and he’s dodging her gaze, but she persists – she always does – grabbing his shoulder and stilling him until their eyes meet. “I’m not disappointed. Look at me – Do you understand? I’m so proud of you. Only, always proud.”

He shakes his head wordlessly; she tightens her grip on his shoulder.

“You’re such a good dad to her. You’re ready. I’m only sorry I didn’t see it.”

“I’m not ready, Mom.” His voice is small; he feels small. “I’m really scared.”

“That’s being a parent for you. You’re going to be scared for the rest of your life. Welcome to the fucking club.”

He laughs, and it’s a wet sound, and he’s so sick of crying today, but she’s crying now, too, and she’s holding out her arms and pulling him close and the blanket surrounds them both and Shane thinks of Green Bean in her cocoon, cozy and dark, silently transforming into something that will take their breath away. Above them, an asteroid continues its slow, steadfast orbit around the sun.

---------------

Jane: I think Sid will come to live with me in the fall

Lily: Congratulations Shane

Lily: I am happy for you

Lily: However I have some serious concerns

Jane: you think I can’t do it?

Lily: nothing like that

Lily: we just will have to be very quiet when we fuck

Lily: mainly this is problem for you I think

Jane: jfc you’re impossible

Lily: 😇

---------------

“Ready?” 

“Ready.” Sid nods resolutely.

He lifts the lid off the terrarium, and she scoops her hand inside. Green Bean flexes her brilliant yellow-green wings, the long trailing shape of them, and lands whisper-soft on Sidney’s outstretched finger.

They’ve talked, and in the end, really, it’s her choice. He can’t ask of her to leave her grandparents and her school and her friends and her team. All he can do is offer her this adventure together, this foray into the unknowns of a shared life. She’s given him an earnest I’ll think about it, which means exactly that, because she’s thoughtful and analytical and interior in ways that startle him, sometimes, because he sees himself reflected back.

Whatever she chooses, he’ll be ready. 

They step out onto the patio and Sidney lifts her hand into the air, and Green Bean’s wings catch on an eddy of breeze, and she flies away, a magnificent speck, toward sun and trees and wild endless sky.

---------------

Shane makes a list.

That’s always how he’s calmed the waters of his mind: lists, spreadsheets, plans. In juniors, he’d ruthlessly heeded his list until a man was left injured for it. This list, he hopes, requires fewer machinations to conquer. It’s shorter, anyway; only two items to check off:

1. Win the fucking Stanley Cup
2. Get the gay thing under control

Because here’s the thing. Everything has to be perfect this year. He can’t afford another playoff run that leads to fucking nowhere. He’s keeping the C for now – a trial run, at his mom’s encouragement, and with some negotiation about meeting hours and virtual-remote options with Theriault, McCann, and the front office. He has to prove – to the team, to his parents, to himself most of all – that he can do the single-dad thing and the hockey thing, that this won’t blow up spectacularly, that yeah, maybe there are hair ties now on every conceivable surface of his home, but he’s still Shane fucking Hollander and he has a Cup to win.

(The hair ties – Jesus Christ. They’re everywhere. Shane is seventy-percent certain they’re made of organic material, spawning through mitosis. The kitchen, the bathroom, the bottom of the dryer, his skate bag, his car, inside his Nikes. He’s put a jar on the narrow table in the foyer of their new home, and deposits his findings each day until it’s full, and then Sidney wordlessly and dutifully collects the contents of the jar, and the cycle begins anew.)

The gay thing, Shane is realizing with an encroaching sense of alarm, is really more of an Ilya Rozanov thing. And of course Ilya had been joking, about fucking quietly or whatever, but the thought of Ilya merely existing within a discoverable radius of Sidney, let alone in the same building, let alone fucking him down the hall from her – no. Absolutely fucking not. 

They’d texted, and sexted, all summer, and Shane had typed and backspaced multiple unsent I miss you’s. He’s really kind of losing his grip on this thing, and his choices are to stop it completely, or put it back in the tidy square box where it belongs.

So, he doesn’t sell his old building. He hires the same designer to redo it into something neutrally luxurious that he can let out short-term, and meets Ilya there after their first home game in mid-October, an exhilarating 6-4 win for Montreal with a hat trick from each of them. Ilya lingers in the mudroom, looking around at the bland decor, earth tones and stainless steel. 

“You redecorated.”

“I moved.”

“Ah.” He toes off his shoes and crowds Shane against the wall. “New home for you and your Sidney?”

Shane doesn’t bite. “Are we going to stand here all night? I only have the sitter til ten.”

He whispers a kiss along the shell of Shane’s ear, a graze of his teeth, chilling. “So sexy, this talk.” 

“Prove it.”

Limbs tangled, fingers hungry for touch – it’s been too long – Shane is pressing and exploring into Ilya’s skin like terrain that’s shifted after a floodstorm. He kisses up Ilya’s thighs, the backs of his knees, the mole on his sternum; clutches his hands around sloping shoulders and angled elbows and soft coils of hair as Ilya pushes into him; comes with Fuck, I missed you heaved into the curve of his neck.

So much for the unsent texts.

So much for the stupid fucking list.

Sid is asleep when he gets home. He thanks Véronique and sees her out, then goes to Sidney’s room, quietly pushing open the door. Just to check that she’s still really there, mostly. That they’re really fucking doing this. 

He showers; does his stretches in the gym; pours a glass of water and starfishes into bed, where he finds a hair tie under his pillow.

---------------

A package arrives at the house in Westmount, addressed to Jane. Yasmin the housekeeper almost throws it out, but Shane grabs it off the kitchen counter and hastily explains it’s a joke from a friend.

He slices through the tape with a kitchen knife and pulls out handfulls of packing popcorn until he finds nestled a small potted plant, green with patches of swirling pink, long spiny tendrils around enclosed pods like teeth. The package label says, Venus fly trap.

“The fuck?” he wonders out loud. Yasmin raises an eyebrow and goes to take out the recycling.

He actually – he can’t believe he’s doing this. He fucking calls Ilya fucking Rozanov.

“This is booty call?”

“Shut up, asshole. I’m going to need you to explain why you sent a venus fly trap to my house.”

“Ah.” Shane hears a loud, rough exhale, and wonders if he’s smoking right now. “This is your housewarming present. You like?”

“How’d you even get my address?”

“Andropov.”

“Of course.” He really needs to talk to Andropov about boundaries. “Am I supposed to—Is there like, a joke, or something? I don’t get it.”

“No joke. I see it online, I think your Sidney will like it. You say she is liking bugs and weird creepy things. That is all.”

Shane sets the plant pot on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, where it looks eerie and regal in the thin autumn sunlight. “You don’t have to get her things. I’ve never understood why you do it.”

“You don’t want me to?”

Shane doesn’t answer that. Instead he says, “She’ll like it. You’re right.”

“I’m always right.”

“You’re always an asshole. See you in November.”

---------------

He’s cutting it really fucking close.

His flight back from Minnesota lands at nine, and Sid needs to be at the rink by noon. Minnesota was a one-off in the middle of a string of home games, so Véro stayed the night rather than shuttling Sidney to stay with Jess or his parents. Montreal won 4-1, and Shane even kept his cool when Lemaire called him a fag at face-off.

The Metros youth program is more intensive than Timbits, two practices a week instead of one, and games almost every weekend. A bunch of guys’ kids are enrolled, and he’s part of a carpool group chat with some WAGs. 

Does Sidney want a ride to the game Sunday? texted Ingrid, Olsson’s wife.

I’ll be there for this one. Thanks though.

He told Sidney he’d be there, so. He’ll be there.

He finds Sid already dressed in her base layer and winter coat, boots tied, skate bag packed, waiting for him at the door with hands on her hips. “Took you long enough.”

Fuck, he’s glad to see her. “Two minutes. Let me change. Go put your things in the car.”

They make it to the rink with minutes to spare, and Sid jets off to the locker room, catching up with Alva Olsson’s bouncing blonde ponytail. Ingrid waves from the stands, and Shane goes to say hi, because Ingrid is really nice, actually, even if Olsson is a petulant idiot who can’t tell the difference between a chirp and a genuine threat to fuck his mother.

“I can’t believe you made it,” Ingrid says in her lilting accent. “I will tell Elias, next time, no excuses.”

His parents text that they’re almost there – traffic is slow with the weather, but should still make it on time. Jessica arrives while Sidney is on the ice warming up, but it’s kids, so they’re mostly goofing off while their coach futilely tells them not to.

“Hey,” Jess says, and kisses his cheek as she slides onto the bench next to him. “What’d I miss?”

“Nothing yet. How was seminar?”

“Too fucking early.”

“Any luck with hot British guy?”

“Hmm, not with him, no.” She grins at him slyly.

“With someone else?”

She shrugs, crinkles her nose. “Post-doc might have asked me out.”

“That’s—the botanist?”

“The mycologist.”

“Right. The mushroom guy. Is he as hot as the British guy?”

“Hotter, probably.”

He high-fives her. She laughs her best laugh. Sidney hears from the ice and waves at them big.

His parents hurry into the stands right as the game is about to start, and they’re all crowded close, leaning forward to watch. Sid is a defender, strongest one on her team. Shane would say she’s above average in IQ but about average for her age in technique. She’s skilled at reading the other players, and she’s fast, speeding into position to block shots before the forward line even know what to do with the puck.

He loves watching her play. He loves witnessing the moment when she sees a play unfolding, the focused tilt of her body, the way she absorbs every practice like moss in the rain, so that every week she’s a little faster, a little smarter. He sees it, the progress, the effort, the way her mind works through problems. Her hockey is different than his hockey. The ice is her own.

Her team wins 1-0 and they go out afterwards to a place that sells sixteen different flavours of hot chocolate. Jess and Sid debate between peppermint and salted caramel before agreeing to split one of each. His dad grabs his elbow next to him in the booth; squeezes. “You’re good?”

The thing is, Shane is exhausted, like, a hundred and ten percent of the time. He misses her hockey games. He misses choir concerts. He bolts off the team plane and breaks traffic laws to get her to the rink. He has no fucking idea what he’s doing and he went to a parent-teacher conference one time with Jess where a pinch-faced lady told them that she was concerned Sidney might have an unstable household. Sidney fucking loathes speech therapy and never does her fucking exercises, and she’ll probably end up needing braces after all. 

And still, all Shane can say is the truth. “Yeah, Dad. We’re really good.”

---------------

Lily: You are ok?

Jane: Yeah why?

Lily: You are texting me less

Lily: It is ok. You are busy

Lily: I just wanted to check if you are fine

Jane: Yeah I’m fine. Sorry

Jane: Just busy and really fucking tired

Jane: Nice work in Dallas. Goal in 2nd was fucking slick

Lily: You watched?

Jane: I always watch

---------------

It’s intermission before the third. They’re holding the lead against Calgary, 3-2. Fucking Bruce Lipinsky, of all fucking people, is left wing on Calgary’s first line, because they’d had to shuffle around when Olsson dislocated Antonelli’s retina in game five. Which, yeah. Needless to say, Olsson is not playing tonight.

Comeau was called up from Laval in January and he’s holding his own on second line with Andropov and Wilson. Hayden is very expertly concealing a situation with his knee and managed two out of three assists. Everyone is tired to the core of their marrow; ribs hurt, legs burn, lungs gasp. But they can do it. They can take it in six. They can really fucking do it.

“Lipinsky is reactive,” he tells the room. “Can’t read a deke to save his life. Fucking use that.”

“Aye aye, Capitaine,” J.J. calls.

“Pekkanen is favouring his right side. Shoot left and aim low.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” the room bellows.

“We’re faster than them. Use that to tire them out. Make them fucking chase us to the last fucking second.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

“Go win us a fucking Stanley Cup.”

The room roars.

Out on the ice, he finds his family. Sid, his parents, Jess, Evelyn, Aunt Rita, Zachary the mycologist, which – if it’s serious enough for a thousand-dollar ticket to the Stanley Cup final, it must be pretty fucking serious. Even if Jess won’t admit it quite yet.

He taps the number 24 on his shoulder and raises his hand to them. He’s so lucky.

He lines up at the blue dot opposite Martel, who isn’t much of a chirper, more of a creepy stoic brutish guy with a mean death-stare. Beside him, Lipinsky sneers.

“Hollander. Does your half-breed daughter know what a pussy-ass faggot you are?”

It rolls off him, water on a sea otter’s fur, impervious.

His daughter does know; his daughter, who, at eight years old, possesses a vast and glowing sort of kindness that this league will never know or understand.

Bruce Lipinsky is nothing. A speck of dirt on the bottom of Shane's shoe. A forgotten footnote on the Calgary roster; stunted, unchanged from when Shane first met him. Meaningless and weak. Not worth dropped gloves. Not worth a damn thing.

His mind stills. He lets the arena noise thin to an electric, high-pitched silence.

Puck drops. Snaps against his stick. Only way through is to win.

Hayden scores the goal that situates them 4-2 with five minutes left. Calgary pulls Pekkanen and a lane opens and the play unfolds in Shane’s mind’s-eye before the puck even passes to him. He catches it, pushes off, hip-checks Lipinsky; gains speed, aims left, shoots low.

Ilya will text him that night. Congratulations. Sexy fucking goal.

His parents will hug him on the ice. We’re so proud of you.

Jess will grab his hands and spin him around. I fucking knew you would.

It’s Sid he finds first as families spill onto the ice; lifts her into his arms even though she’s getting way too fucking big for this, and she wraps her arms around his neck and smiles into his shoulder and says, “Dad. You did it.” And it feels like she’s only half talking about the Cup.

“We did it,” he says into her hair, holding tight, and there’s confetti falling from the rafters, white and blue and red, and someone is calling his name, and his heart might be made out of pulsing neon light, and none of it fucking matters, nothing but this. “We did it. We did it.”

Chapter End Notes

• Experimented a bit with writing style in this one - I wanted the cottage to feel like Ep. 6, more ethereal and sunshiny. Green Bean the luna moth has my heart.

• Please know that I did do a good amount of research about asteroids and the life cycle of luna moths, and ignored most of it in favour of metaphor. On the chance you are expert in one of these topics, I apologize.

• One commenter pointed this out so I just wanted to clarify - Yes, Russian has a very close cognate for identical, идентичный. It is not a perfect cognate and as the English word does not generally come up in day-to-day conversation, I think it's normal that 2014 Ilya would have wanted to look it up for his text exchange with Shane.

• Edit 10/18/26: I've just been informed that the name "Elias" which I dubbed Olsson's first name here is apparently an AI tell. Absolutely no AI has been used. This is the website where I got all the names for the Olsson family - Ingrid, Alva, Hugo, Elias and eventually Agnes in Ch. 8. I searched for whatever year I believed the character would have been born and selected a name from the top to middle of the list.

Chapter 7: Everything is so perfect and so wonderful that you almost feel sad

Chapter Notes

CW: brief/implied mention of past physical abuse

Not a content warning, but spoiler/heads-up for people who are particular about their Hollanov tropes:

Shane hooks up with a guy who isn't Ilya. It's super brief with no smut.

It was a good thing, maybe, that Sveta had been out of town for the cup final, and his team had been too bitter and injured to want to watch together, and so Ilya sat alone on his sofa in his big new house with his big flickering TV smiling to himself like a fucking idiot, some stupid clenching feeling in his chest.

There’s this part in Beethoven’s Seventh, the first movement – after the slow sunrise of exposition, after the jaunty little flute-oboe duet in six-eight time – there’s a water-rush of violins and French horns, a grand, galloping, triumphant swell, cellos swirling, woodwinds layering bright brushstrokes across the shining mass of sound. Ilya thought of this as he watched Shane Hollander win the fucking Stanley Cup.

His Mama had been partial to Beethoven’s Seventh. Especially its second movement, which she’d once told Ilya was the saddest song ever written. He would come home from practice after school sometimes and hear the funereal cellos and basses, the keening melody, blasting from the record player, loud enough to swallow him whole. He wondered if this was what life was like for his Mama: the second movement on repeat, trapped perpetually in a minor key; the first movement’s joy forgotten, the third movement’s reprieve impossible to reach.

He watched Shane’s daughter crash into his arms. Watched him grin into her hair and tell her something, just for her.

She must be so proud of you, he typed. Backspace.

You were so brave this year. You fucking deserve it. Backspace.

Sexy fucking goal, is what he ended up sending. Which was true, at least. He went to bed with the highlights reel looping on his phone and jerked off thinking of sinking his body into Shane Hollander’s, arms entangled, both their hands weighted with a championship ring.

Sometimes Ilya thinks – not in words; just flashes, gasps of air – after a game, the way their paths are etched into the ice, interlocking, where they’d chased one another, pushed one another, matched one another – after sex, sheets snarled around twined limbs, where they’d chased orgasms like their own Cup final – he thinks, sometimes, that it is like they fuck greatness into one another. Like every part of them that vibrates on the ice is a shared, precipitated thing that they can hold onto together at night in hotel rooms and Shane’s boring-ass condo and a penthouse high above Las Vegas; hold it glowing between them and each admire the way the other looks in its light.

There’s nothing else like it. No other body he shares this with, this infuriating, incandescent language they speak on the ice and off it; maybe why it’s become rarer that he brings a girl home from the club these days. 

(Back in November, he received an envelope addressed to him in a child’s careful cursive, precise curved letters likely learned on dotted tracing paper at school. Dear Mr. Rozanov, Thank you for the Venus Fly Trap. She is named Antoinette and she lives in the kitchen and eats fruit flies and mosquitos. Sincerely, Sidney Hollander. And Ilya could imagine Shane, new to parenting, really, his Canadian brain, so polite, teaching his daughter that when you receive a gift, the nice thing to do is write a thank-you note. He imagined him helping her spell mosquitos.

What myth had he told her, about them? Ilya Rozanov is my professional rival. He sent us a housewarming gift, out of professional respect.)

Shane won MVP because of course he did, and they fucked in Vegas because they always fuck in Vegas, and Shane curled against his side with his palm flat on Ilya’s chest and stayed longer than he’d ever stayed any night before.

“You’re going to Russia this summer?”

“Yes.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“You do not get to wish this, Hollander.”

“Why not?” He was tracing a finger along the white crescent of a scar on Ilya’s waist, a childhood thing, basically forgotten. A belt buckle.

“You know why not.” Said facing away, looking out the window. Bright lights; stupid city.

“I just want you to be safe.” Shane’s hand stilling, thumb pressed to the scar like saving his place in a book. “You’ll text me?”

“Yes, Hollander. I will text you.”

He flew to Boston from Vegas; was supposed to have one night at home before an early flight to Moscow. Spent two hours on the phone with a nursing agency Sveta’s father recommended; transferred $25,000 to Alexei and spent another half-hour arguing with him while doing his best to remember that is was both of them – boys, then – who used to come home to the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, cellos like dark clouds in the kitchen; emailed the Boston trainers to let them know he’ll be at the Wilmington facility for summer ice time; and cancelled his plane ticket.

And now it is the next day and he has slept through the morning and noontime sun blares through the tall wide windows of his big new house that he’s still getting used to, artwork picked out by someone else, Raiders magnet on the fridge holding up a thank-you card written by a kid he’s never met.

Electricity buzzes under his skin. He can’t believe he’s done this. He’s never skipped a summer in Moscow before. He feels a bit like a kid again – like the first time kissing Sasha in the equipment room before early morning practice – like he’s just gotten away with something, giddy and scared and disbelieving.

He dresses for a run. Normally he’d run by the water or at the park, someplace quiet, uncrowded. But today he wants the press of people, the roar of traffic, crumpled Dunkin cups abandoned on the sidewalk. This place he lives, loud and imperfect and proud as fuck to call him theirs. He cuts up Brookline Ave, wends through Back Bay, pauses to high-five a kid that recognizes him outside a T station. By the time he reaches Boston Common, he wonders if he’s crossed into a waking-dream; bright sun and old statues and picnic blankets and people drenched in rainbow colours – flags, confetti, facepaint – men holding hands with men, music playing from a stereo, someone is laughing but it sounds almost like crying. A pair of older women, matching grey hair earned over time, arms linked, a kiss pressed quick and fierce between them. The one with longer hair and sunglasses hands him a small pride flag on a wooden dowel.

“What is today?” he asks her.

“It’s legal,” she tells him, a little breathless, maybe laughing, maybe feeling young again. “The Supreme Court just legalized gay marriage in this country.”

A pack of kids races by with bubble wands and Ilya is surrounded by iridescent orbs that catch the rainbows around him so that he’s floating among rainbows, hundreds of them, and there’s music and laughter and the sky is blue and he’s not in Moscow and his father is dying in the slowest, most terrible way and two men can get married in the United States of America. He takes a picture, of everything, of nothing, of green grass and people celebrating in the open air, sunlit and unafraid. He texts it to Shane.

He doesn’t write anything, but he thinks: This is for us.

---------------

“You are going hiking. You.”

“Don’t sound so surprised. I hike with you guys at the cottage every summer.”

“Yeah, on a flat trail around a lake. You’re talking about, like, hiking-hiking. On a mountain.” Shane grins. “You must really like him, huh?”

Jessica crinkles her nose and shuffles her feet into Shane’s under the table. “Yeah. I do.”

Jess flies out tomorrow for the reading break, to spend Thanksgiving with Zachary and his parents in Canmore. Zachary grew up outdoors, parents a Nordic skier and a geologist, finding moss and lichen and mycelium on damp mountain trails after the spring thaw. He and Sid are alike that way, both interested in the smallest and strangest life-forms; both children of an athlete and an academic. They get along well.

They’re inside one of the grey, fortress-looking buildings on campus, in a library with brick archways and wide tables occupied by whispering study groups. Shane is trying to ignore a guy in a Metros hoodie sneaking a photo two tables away. He’s tired; back from Toronto late last night. This morning’s practice ended with a couple hours to spare before Sid gets out of school, so Shane drove into the city, grabbed a pair of tofu bánh mì from the spot Jess likes on St-Denis, and found her in the fifth-floor study room buried in Thermal structure of an exoplanet atmosphere from phase-resolved emission spectroscopy.

Jess leans in close, shoulders hunched, voice lowered to a dramatically miniscule whisper. “How’s Ilya Rozanov?”

Shane shrugs, because he honestly doesn’t know. Ilya, apparently, had not gone to Russia after all, and Shane was at a loss whether that had anything to do with their conversation in Vegas. Maybe something happened – maybe his dad had died, and he just didn’t need to go anymore, and was grieving, or not-grieving, alone in Boston, and Shane would have no way of knowing, because the guy texted nothing but chirps and dick pics and photos of dogs and random check-ins on Sidney all summer; Shane’s you ok? and how’s your family?, unanswered.

There had been that one picture of the park, the rainbow flags, a bright sunny day, and Shane had deleted it almost faster than he deletes the dick pics. A penis on his phone could maybe be passed off as, like, a prank, or something; but the flags felt – accusatory; specific. Like, this is what you are. Even if a part of him, the small folded part he keeps stored in the farthest shadowed recess of his brain, ached to be out in the sunlight next to Ilya, holding his hand.

“You’re in Boston this weekend,” Jess prods.

“Saturday,” Shane confirms. “I’ll see him. Probably.”

Jess gives him this little sideways smile. “Good.”

They work on their sandwiches quietly for a while, even though they’re probably not allowed to eat here, and Jess types clacking notes on her laptop while extricating pickled daikon from the baguette and eating it plain with her fingers, because she’s a psychopath, basically. Shane checks his watch and taps her arm across the table. “Let’s go get our girl?”

Sidney’s school is only a few blocks away, just off Sherbrooke. They walk side by side, the air carrying that autumnal smell Montreal uniquely seems to wear this time of year, bus fumes and chill grey skies. They’ve only just missed the bell, and kids are milling in the fenced courtyard, buzzy Thursday energy because there’s just one more day of school and then the long holiday weekend. Shane spots Sid in animated conversation with her friend Sophie, who matches Sid’s weird and sits next to her in choir.

She spies them, hugs Sophie goodbye and runs up to the gate. “Hi.” Her biggest grin. “Can I have a sewing machine please?”

“A sewing machine?” And he’s smiling because, like, how does she come up with this stuff? How does her mind have this endless capacity to be so interested in so many different things?

“Yeah. I want to make my uniform like—” She indicates the hem of her polo shirt, tracing a wavy ruffled pattern with her finger. “Like that.”

Jess accepts the backpack passed to her, slings it over her shoulder. “How’d you think of that?”

“Don’t know. Just think it would look cool.”

“Yasmin can help with that,” Shane offers. “Or Grandma Evelyn.”

“I know. But I want to learn it myself.”

Shane thinks, he’ll never get tired of trying to figure out the puzzle of her, a Rubik's cube with infinite colours and edges. He meets Jess’ eyes over Sidney’s head; she shrugs back at him, like, I don’t see why not. “Alright,” he says. “We’ll think about a sewing machine.”

She tells them about her day, about the St. Lawrence Iroquoians and the states of matter and a new song they’re learning for the fall concert. They walk Jess back to the physics building for her office hours, and she pulls Sid into the tightest hug.

Tomorrow after school, Shane will drive her to his parents’ in Ottawa, then catch a late flight out to Boston, separate from the team, which has Theriault grumbling, but then, Theriault is pretty much always grumbling. Back to Ottawa early Sunday – playing the Cens that afternoon; he’s gotten his parents and Sid some solid tickets – the holiday Monday, a day off; dinner with his parents, then the drive home to Montreal; Véro covering Tuesday while he’s in Pittsburgh. After that it’s a string of home games, and Jess will be back from out west, and the week will settle into the fragile stability they’re used to, at least until Buffalo after that.

The push and pull of the year, constantly leaving her behind, the shuffle of cities and caretakers, the tired he wears like second skin by midseason – he wonders, a lot, if he did the right thing. If she’s happy; if this is good for her. For either of them.

(He won’t tell Ilya about this, the doubt that he carries like deadweight, Saturday night after losing 3-1 to a fucking hat trick, hockey-anger simmering beneath the glittering calm post-fuck. How is your Sidney?, always; more and more, he wants to answer honestly. She got a bad grade on her French test. I wonder if that’s my fault.

But then: She wants a sewing machine. She is so full of ideas. She’s brilliant, so brilliant, bright bright bright, and I miss her every minute I’m away.

I miss you, too. I miss touching you. Five games this season, All-Stars, Vegas – it’s not enough. It’s never enough. I want to pet the dogs you see on your runs and I want you to show me the swan boats and the tulips in the Public Garden. I want to bring you to Sidney’s choir concert so you can see the way she lights up, and afterwards we’ll get samosas from the hole-in-the-wall place on Rue Milton.

I want you to tell me about your dad. I want to feel sad with you, so we can share the weight of it. I want to know your mother’s name.

Shane wants to say these things. He doesn’t.

He wants to punch his head through a sheet of plywood. He doesn’t.)

It’s Thursday and Sidney is his, tonight. They drive out to Westmount and her nose is pressed to the window, orange-yellow-red leaves blurring past, and he deposits a pocketful of hair ties into the jar in the foyer as he slips off his shoes, and turns on the oven to heat up whatever the chef has stocked in the fridge. They tumble onto the sofa and she sits leaning against him with homework in her lap while Boston-Winnipeg plays in the background, soft churning of commentary and roaring crowd, and there’s a venus fly trap in the kitchen and a raccoon in her bedroom and a small stash of Russian snack foods in the pantry, and Shane thinks maybe this is his true greatest failure, that all the lines he’s ever tried to draw around the sectors of his life have turned out to be nothing more than feeble suggestions that Ilya Rozanov somehow manages to completely and infuriatingly ignore, every single time.

---------------

Jane: Feel like getting murdered in a dark scary alley in Mtl in 2 weeks?

Lily: no thank u 😇

Jane: oh ok

Lily: I am kidding Hollander

Lily: You can murder me any time 🔪

Lily: you have babysitter?

Jane: she’ll be with her mom

Lily: 👍 

Lily: Is nice she has her mama like this

---------------

Three months into the season and Shane wants another fucking Cup.

They can do it. The team is riding last season’s high, playing smart, gelling in a way that Shane would have really fucking liked to see years ago, but then, you can’t rush a rebuild. This is the team actualized, he thinks: Miitka and Drapeau seamlessly trading places in the net; Comeau an asshole on second line exactly when he needs to be; Hayden and Andropov – new on first-line wing – reading Shane’s pace like a fucking dream; J.J. and Roy and Koch like some Minority Report-ass task force intercepting plays that haven’t even happened yet.

Laine put in for a trade to Columbus over the summer to be closer to family, and Shane would much rather Olsson be the one gone because he’s way too much of a wildcard, but the new kid Couillard is a playmaker if Shane ever saw one, and the desert-mirage vision of a second consecutive Cup win has Shane feeling like a shark scenting blood, hungry and single-minded.

He’s back from Los Angeles Friday morning, 3-0 shutout still sweet on his tongue; comes home to an empty house, because Jess had Sid overnight and took her to school. There’s a video call with the Nike people, an afternoon skate followed by a captains’ meeting, then he’ll grab Sid from school, take her to her own hockey practice, and after that Jackie’s invited them out with a few of the other families to the marché de Noël that pops up on Ste-Catherine every winter.

Jackie is six months pregnant and Ingrid is four months and they’re wrapped in coats and scarves and matching Mittens by Evelyn™, while Ruby and Jade and the younger Olsson kid, Hugo, attempt to topple over a lighting display, and Sid and Alva bicker over who received the most impressive portion of tire d’érable. Hayden is dealing with the trio of tornadoes aged five, and Shane goes over to help because it turns out the polar bear light is connected by wires to the tree next to it, and if that goes down there might actually be an electrical disaster.

Hayden is weirdly, blissfully unfazed as he disentangles Ruby’s ankle from the string of lights she’s peeled off the tree. Freed, she jets off like the grasshoppers Sid catches and releases in the woods behind the cottage, and Hayden stands wistfully with his hands on his hips watching his kids and his wife lit up pale glowing colours as they weave through the village of kiosks and oversize candy canes.

“You’re so sappy,” he tells Hayden.

“You ever think about it? Settling down with Jessica or Lily or whoever the fuck, and having another one?”

“Jesus, Hayden. You trying to get me pregnant?”

“I’m just saying, man. The dad thing suits you.”

Shane knows this much about himself: he doesn’t love being a dad – he loves being Sid’s dad; he doesn’t love having a kid – he loves this specific and highly excellent kid. It’s him and it’s her, and she’s like a best friend he grew up with, sort of, and all the ways he loves her are so uniquely because she’s who she is exactly. He can’t have another because there’s no such thing as another; Sid is a fingerprint, a snowflake, a Van Gogh. One of one.

And, like. He’s seen the WAGs’ posts on Instagram – which he mainly checks when he needs to remind himself that Ilya is out at a club somewhere in Boston with a woman or three draped across his shoulders – pregnancy announcements and newborn photoshoots with captions like, I’ve always wanted to be a mom. And he wonders, like, how can someone possibly know that? How can someone want to build their identity around a person who, like, barely even exists? He’s not sure he even ever wanted kids in life, in Phase Four or Five or whenever, other than the ways he knew it would make the uncomfortable shape of him finally make sense one day, normal, expected. 

Nothing about Sid has been normal or expected. Maybe the best things aren’t.

He knows, at this point, anyway, that he won’t be settling down in a way that’s normal or expected. Or perhaps even at all. Reckless, probably, to even think about it.

He says none of this to Hayden. He catches up with his kid, and listens to her banter with her friend, and the shine of her laugh.

Shane and Sid drive to the cottage after back-to-back losses in Nashville and Saint Paul, and he feels shitty from the travel and the awful fight of those games, close but not close-enough; but then Sid uses the car ride to fill him in on all the details of the last forty-eight hours, and he loses himself to the confident flow of her voice and the small, ordinary dramas of her life.

He’s hosting Christmas this year. His parents arrived a day early and let themselves in, shopped for groceries, assembled the artificial tree Shane grew up with. Jessica, Zachary, and Evelyn pull up on Christmas Eve and the guest rooms are all full and the fireplace is warm and bright, and there’s hot chocolate, and ornaments to be hung, and skating out on the lake. Zachary skated up until U16s; had a shot at the AJHL, but was too focused on school and too fed up with the locker room. There’d been about as few Asian guys as Black guys in the youth league growing up; he and Shane traded horror stories the first time Jess brought them together over beers and ginger ale at some trendy microbrewery on Sherbrooke and Jeanne-Mance. 

Shane really likes him for Jessica. He’s older by five-ish years, but not in a weird power-dynamic way – Jess is technically actually his boss in their interdisciplinary lab on exoplanet habitability. He has this calm, tempered aura that balances Jess’, fast-paced and bright. They co-host a YouTube channel together about their research, and it’s like watching two perfectly-cast anchors on a morning show, chemistry sparking between intellectual riffs.

Zachary is hot, Shane can admit. Tall and weirdly muscled for a post-doctoral mycology fellow, single gold stud in his left ear – and fuck if Ilya ever got one of those Shane thinks he might go feral – all softened by cable-knit sweaters and a pair of round, scholarly glasses. 

They pass a puck between them across the glassy lake. Sid chirps Zachary’s edgework, and he takes it in stride. “We can’t all be Shane Hollander.”

His mom grabs his arm in the kitchen with a gentle squeeze; catches his eye. “You’re good? With Zachary and everything?”

“Yeah, of course. Jess really likes him. I’m happy for her.”

She tilts her head, looking doubtful. “You’re good that he hangs around with Sidney?”

“Yeah, I mean, he’s great with her, right? He’s a good guy.” And he feels like an idiot when he finally catches her meaning. “Mom, seriously. Jess and I haven’t been together in, like, years. She can date whoever she wants. I’m fine.”

“You can date whoever you want, too, you know.”

“Oh my god. Mom.”

“I just want to make sure you’re not—I don’t know. Sometimes you get so focused, I worry you forget that you’re allowed to be happy.”

“I am happy Mom, and I’m focused. Those aren’t, like, mutually exclusive.”

“Okay.” She releases his arm with hands raised in surrender. “As long as you’re happy. That’s important.”

On Christmas morning, Sid unwraps a brand-new Singer sewing machine and a case of thread in every imaginable colour. He reminds her there’s a mandatory safety lesson with Grandma Evelyn before she’s allowed to use it on her own, and she rolls her eyes in that completely Jessica way, but throws her arms around him anyway and says thank you into his shirt, and he feels gold light course through him because making her happy is sort of, like, the whole point, isn’t it? It’s that, and hockey.

---------------

Jane: Merry Christmas Ilya

Lily: Merry Christmas Shane

Lily: please say this to your Sidney also

Jane: 👍

Jane: hey did you ever think of getting your ears pierced?

Lily: wtf is this question Hollander

Jane: nevermind. Was just wondering

---------------

Arthur Pike is born the week all hell breaks loose.

Hayden is out on family leave for their west coast roadie, then Andropov manages to get slammed head-first into the boards in Anaheim, so he’s on IR until the Dallas game at least. Shane’s entire first line is gone, just like that.

Wilson and Olsson are his wingers for Los Angeles and Winnipeg, and it goes mostly fine until Olsson drops gloves in the third period and Winnipeg does exactly what they’re supposed to do with the power play. Shane ties it up in the last five and Comeau scores in overtime, but the win feels perfunctory and desperate.

He returns to Montreal feeling like his body is a maraca filled with loose teeth and bones and shards of glass. He goes to pick up Sidney from Jess’ apartment near Atwater Station. The next week and a half of games are all at home, and Jess needs to drive out to Notre-Dame-des-Bois to use the spectrometer at the observatory while she prepares for her prelim exam.

“Shane. You look like you’re vibrating out of your skin.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sid is darting around the apartment humming to herself, collecting her belongings and stuffing them unceremoniously into her backpack. Jess leans close, whispers conspiratorially, “Do you want to get laid?”

“Jess. What the hell.”

“Look. I don’t know your deal with Ilya Rozanov because you won’t tell me shit. Are you guys exclusive? Dating?”

“We’re not—No. We can’t like, date.”

“So it’s casual.”

“Yep,” Shane says. “Casual.” The word tastes like tea that’s been steeped too long, lukewarm and bitter and not-quite-right. “We don’t play each other again for the rest of the season, so. It’s not like I’ll even see him for a while.”

“Okay,” Jess intones. “Well if you’re interested, I found you a guy.”

“Oh my god, you sound like my mom.”

“Your mom is wingmanning for you?”

“My mom still thinks you and I should be dating.”

Jess scrunches her nose at that, like he’s just suggested they go get matching face tattoos. “He’s kind of perfect for you, Shane. He’s a statistician, he’s cute, and he’s not out to his family, so he’ll keep your secret, I swear. He did his master’s thesis on hockey analytics. I think you’ll really get along.”

“Jess—”

“I’ll just give you his number, okay? I didn’t tell him anything, just that I have a hot single friend. You can think about it. You don’t have to.”

He does think about it. It haunts him, actually, the phone number in his contacts. Philippe. Shane thinks about Ilya Rozanov, about the shitshow in Winnipeg, about Ilya’s sure hands, his chirping voice, his checking-in voice, about the season schedule, how many months until the next hotel room in Vegas, the next road trip New York-St. Louis-Detroit, Sidney’s orthodontist appointment in two weeks, Sidney needing a French tutor because she speaks fluently but as soon as she has to think about grammar on paper her mind goes blank, his mom grabbing his arm in the kitchen at the cottage, the word casual, Ilya Rozanov’s cock, Ilya Rozanov’s lips, a to-do list with one item perpetually incomplete, Ilya Rozanov papped at a club in Boston with women’s hands on his shoulders, neck, waist, ass.

He ends up on Philippe’s sofa in the Mile End while a tuxedo cat named Larry glares at him from across the room. “Just ignore Larry. He’ll leave us alone once he realizes you’re not here to feed him.” He has the softshoed accent of someone raised with French at home and English in school. He’s cute, like Jess said; kind of an angular face, broad shoulders, nice eyes.

They eat takeout from a Greek spot, and Philippe tells Shane about his thesis, which is actually pretty interesting, and then Philippe leans in, and Shane realizes, he has no idea if it’s normal to kiss right after eating without brushing your teeth, because he and Ilya never eat when they meet up, and that makes him kind of sad, actually – how have they never shared a meal together, this whole time? Now he’s hyper aware of the bits of cucumber salad stuck in his molars; but the kiss is mostly otherwise okay, and Shane pushes forward to deepen it, and then they’re moving to the bedroom and it’s good. It is good. Philippe has a body that benchpresses at the gym and a respectable cock and he whispers Shane’s season unblocked shot attempts in his ear which kind of does something for him.

They lie in bed for a bit afterwards. Shane tucks his arm against his forehead, trying to decipher why something that feels good can also feel kind of awful.

“Did you know that you and Ilya Rozanov consistently have higher possession stats when you play each other than when you play any other team in the league?”

“What?”

“Higher everything, actually. Possession, shots on goal, face-off wins.” Philippe rolls to face him. “Interesting, ouais? The rivalry must really motivate you.”

Jess has Sid for the night – wingmanning – and Shane gets home to his quiet, empty house. Showers, does his stretches, sweeps the living room for hair ties. He checks the Boston-Carolina score; Raiders won at home, 3-2. Is he out celebrating with his team? Probably. Shane chances it anyway.

“Hollander. You are alright?”

“Oh. I didn’t think you’d actually pick up.”

“Then why call?” 

Shane laughs, because why, seriously? “Why aren’t you out partying?” he deflects. “Big win tonight.”

He hears a gravelly sound, half-laugh, half-sigh. “I went out. I partied. I came home.”

“Didn’t bring anyone home with you?”

“No, Hollander. I did not.”

Shane feels like there are glowing embers nested in his chest, slowly charring his insides while warming him at the same time. “Sid isn’t doing well in French class. It’s my fault. I’m not around enough to help.”

“I am sure this is not your fault, Shane.”

“The next time we’ll see each other is Vegas, right? We can’t meet up during playoffs. We’ll both be exhausted.”

“Right—”

“What if we meet up but don’t fuck? What if we just—get dinner.”

“Shane. It is late. This is a very confusing phone call.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird that we’ve known each other this whole time, and we’ve never had dinner?”

“I don’t—Shane. This is what you want? You are wanting to eat dinner together?”

“I want to eat dinner with you, yes.”

“Okay. Fine. We will have dinner.” Ilya huffs a low breath. “You sound very certain you are making playoffs this year for someone whose entire first line just turned to dust.”

“Shut up. I’m winning the whole damn thing. Just watch.”

“I always watch.” A pause. “Good night, Shane. I will see you for our dinner.”

“It’s a date,” Shane says, and hangs up immediately, because what the fuck what the FUCK. He clutches his phone to his chest and falls back onto his pillow and stares at the shadow-shapes across the bedroom ceiling.

---------------

Sidney turns nine in the middle of the conference final and Shane calls her from the hotel room in Tampa and feels like his whole entire heart is missing from his chest. Véro is live-in for the playoff run – which, thank fuck for her, honestly – and once it became clear that the Metros would make it out of round one, his parents basically moved into the house in Westmount, too. So Sid is surrounded by family while Shane traipses up and down the east coast, returning home between flights to find his mom helping Sid with her French homework at the kitchen table, dinner reheated and ready for him, and the tired that’s scraping him raw ever-so-slightly eased like a cat on alert retracting its claws, just for now.

Jess is in the middle of her own grueling battle. She submitted her written prelim, received back minor corrections which had her feeling tendrils of self-doubt, and is now locked away in the library preparing for the oral. Shane has no doubt that she’ll pass, but he’s never seen her so stressed, sleepless, hyperfocus tuned like a weapon. Zachary actually texts him to ask his advice, and the best Shane can do is send him a link to the lavender soap he knows she likes, and remind him that she’s badass and resilient as fuck, and she’ll come out the other side.

There had been one dinner, in Boston, during round two. Ilya picked the place – his favourite, he said; Russian; vegetable options for your rabbit diet, Hollander, do not worry. They ate a beet salad and a fish soup and something with cabbage and enough potato and mushroom pelmeni to feed a small army, or perhaps a large one; seated on the sofa in his house with the airy tall ceilings.  

Ilya wasn’t wearing a shirt, and a dark purple bruise bloomed below his ribcage. “Shit. Did I check you that hard?”

“Was not you, Hollander. Was Pittsburgh guy last round.”

They ate while watching a replay of Brooklyn-Tampa. “Tampa will take it in five,” Shane predicted.

“Maybe,” Ilya agreed. “Here, try this.” He swirled a dumpling in a small dish of vinegar and plopped it on Shane’s plate.

Shane tested a bite, grimaced at the assault of acid, and Ilya laughed at him, and Shane shoved his shoulder. “Asshole.”

“Mm,” Ilya mumbled, stealing the dumpling back from Shane and popping it in his mouth dramatically. “You said it is her birthday soon. How old will she be?”

“Nine.”

He whistled. “Wow. I remember she was very small, at Prospect Cup.”

“Yeah, she was.” He reached for more cabbage. “It’s weird. It’s like – I’m glad she’s older, because she’s like, the coolest person, and I get to know more about her every day, which is sort of the best. But I’m also, like, really fucking sad? Because she’s growing up, and she’ll be a teenager soon, and then university, and then her whole life, and it all feels too fast, and like I’m missing too much of it.”

He hadn’t meant to monologue, and Ilya was looking at him with this soft sort of intensity, and Shane averted his gaze back to his plate of cabbage and worked on carefully stacking the shredded leaves onto his fork.

And that was – it. Maybe forty-five minutes of eating and hockey commentary and one weird foray into the nautilus-shaped anxieties that haunt Shane’s brain. Shane pulled him into a kiss at the door on the way out, soft and quick at first, then deeper, then he left for the hotel and fell into bed with a stupid fucking grin on his face that Hayden for sure noticed but had enough self-restraint not to comment on.

Montreal and Boston went to seven games, which was terrible and wonderful, the ways Ilya challenged him, made him want to win with every cell in his body. Tampa did beat Brooklyn in five, and now it’s Montreal and Tampa, and Sidney is nine years old, and it’s game five of the conference final and like fuck is he going to let Tampa make it to six.

San Jose wins in the west and then they’re off trading wins, games one, two, three; by four, Shane thinks his shoulder might no longer be part of his body; five goes into double overtime, Montreal wins, and Shane actually cries because holy fuck, they’re still in it. The commentators are floating words like dynasty and legacy and historic, and the cross-continent flights are gruesome, and Shane wakes up in a hotel room on the morning of game six to a text from his dad – a photo of Sidney in her Metros jersey, HOLLANDER 24.

He calls her before the game, just to hear her voice. 

He stands on a bench in the locker room and looks out at the slouching, tired shape of his team. “This is our fucking game tonight,” he declares. “This is our fucking Cup.”

And it is.

---------------

Lily: Lucky

Jane: The luckiest ;)

---------------

Ilya orders room service to the penthouse at the MLH Awards, because apparently Hollander has developed some sort of food fetish or something. His eyes go wide when he opens the door with the keycard Ilya slipped him, and sees the trays and cloches.

“You didn’t have to,” he says.

“Ah ah. Only the best for two-time Cup winner Shane Hollander.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.”

Shane steps close, then, takes Ilya’s jaw in his hands, thumb swiping the line of his chin, and succeeds in making Ilya shut up.

They shower, then eat, naked except for Shane’s socks, legs tangled together facing each other on the bed. Ilya thinks never before and never since has someone this hot eaten a thing called cauliflower wings.

“It is a performance thing, the vegetables? Dietitian tells you to?”

“Um, no. Actually my dietitian kind of hates it.” Shane shrugs. “No, my ex sort of convinced me – you should read some of these articles, Ilya. The meat industry in North America is super inhumane.”

“Your meat industry is inhumane.”

“Shut up. That makes no sense.” But he’s laughing, knocking his sockfeet against Ilya’s shin. “So, Russia this summer?”

Ilya nods, presses his lips together. “I cannot skip this year, I do not think. I have a bad feeling – I don’t know. My brother says I should go, so. I go.”

Shane regards him steadily, not pityingly, and Ilya steals a kiss just for that, and it tastes like cauliflower and shower-soap. There’s something new about Shane Hollander, Ilya thinks, a quiet, intrinsic self-possession glowing from his skin like dew-mist in the summer. It’s in the sex and it’s in the hockey, and it’s in the way updates about his daughter and his life now come unbidden. Ilya drinks it in like nectar, and fears it, all the same.

“Do you go out when you’re in Moscow? Clubs and stuff?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you hook up?”

“Sometimes.”

Shane clears his throat, looks away, looks back at Ilya. “I’m not. Hooking up.”

“You are not hooking up,” Ilya echoes, stupidly.

“Last time was March,” he says, an edge of caution to his voice. “I’m not saying—Look, you don’t have to do anything. I just wanted you to know.”

Ilya has to turn away from the weight of Shane’s eyes on him, suddenly unbearable. He finds the skyline out the window and remembers a rooftop, a clawing desperate anger-jealousy-fear. None of that, now; just something dizzying and unknowable catching in his chest. “Since April, for me,” he says to the window. “So you know, too.”

“Okay,” Shane says.

“Okay,” Ilya repeats.

Shane nudges his foot against Ilya’s, like at the press conference when they were rookies, like what they’ve just spoken into the air, a hex, a curse, isn’t dancing on a dangerous ledge. “Yeah. Okay.”

They eat, and it’s mediocre room service gone cold and viscid, and Ilya thinks maybe it’s actually the best meal he has had in a long time.

---------------

Jane: Don’t work too hard this summer, I’m gonna win again next year.

Lily: The only cup you’ll have next year is the one I’ll take off with my mouth 😜

Lily: Sidney likes the chips with the red bag, yes?

Shane: yeah she likes those

Lily: They are my favourite too. I will bring many back

Shane: [Attachment: Photo]

Shane: She says thank you

Lily: 👍

Lily: what do you tell her about me?

Shane: Just the truth. That we’re friends

---------------

The thing is, when the starting offer was a tarantula, a chameleon actually sounds incredibly reasonable by comparison.

It’s the end of August, training camp starts next week, and Shane sits on the edge of Sid’s bed making unsettling eye contact with his new housemate.

“You want to hold him?” she offers.

“Um—”

“He’s not scary, Dad. He mostly just stands there.”

“Okay.” Shane braces himself while he watches Sid reach into the tank and Richard coils his tail lazily around her wrist. Sidney loves Richard, he reminds himself; Richard makes Sidney happy. And she’s so gentle with him, so curious, wearing the mantle of pet-ownership with a self-assured, earnest gravity that he’s pretty fucking proud of, actually. 

Sidney doesn’t ask for much, is the thing. The sewing machine; a new set of maps for her room when the Czech Republic became Czechia. The tarantula got an immediate and resounding veto, but the summer had been a tough one, and a mostly sedentary lizard was a lot harder to say no to.

It hadn’t struck him right away, when news of Olsson’s trade to Colorado hit the Metros group chat. His first thought was, fucking finally.

But then he looked across the table at Sid, patiently pasting leaves from their hike around the lake into her collage journal, and realized with an awful choking feeling that he’d have to break the news to her, that her best friend Alva would be moving away. And all he could do was lay beside her in bed that night and let her cry into his shoulder, and wonder at the way her heartbreak had become his, too.

Richard settles onto Shane’s outstretched hand with a prickle of small scaly feet. He’s quite beautiful up close, actually, whorls of orange and yellow like mosaic tiles. A change shudders through him, colours shifting, greens and blues and reds. “Whoa.”

“So cool, right?” She’s grinning wide, nose crinkled, eyes bright.

And, like. How can you say no to that?

She’s just started Grade 4, and her closet hangs with uniforms updated with neon thread adorning the seams, hemlines in waves and zigzags. She’s gotten quite skilled with the sewing machine, and he takes her sometimes to her favourite thrift store on St-Laurent, a huge labyrinthine place where she picks out designer jackets for a few dollars and reconfigures them to her size, merging fabrics and patterns. 

There was an email exchange with the principal last week, which had gone something like, Actually, no, there’s nothing in the handbook about modifications to the uniform. Feel free to contact me should you update the uniform policy in accordance with the handbook revision procedure outlined in Section 17, and I’ll ensure my daughter complies at that time. And Shane had felt a rush of adrenaline clicking send, because getting in trouble by a school principal was like, basically his childhood worst nightmare. He actually called Ilya afterwards, high on the badass feeling of having sent it.

“Oh, very brave, standing up to an elderly lady with an education degree.”

“Shut up.”

“No, no, you are right. This was a very scary situation.”

There’s an off week between camp and the first pre-season game in late September – New Jersey at home – and Shane and Jessica fly to Toronto for Kavita and the coxswain’s wedding. Shane is Jess’ plus-one, because Zachary is in Brazil for an eight-month research posting, and they’re doing long-distance, and Jessica is kind of miserable about it. 

“I don’t understand how you two do this.”

“It’s not—We’re not in a relationship, Jess.”

“Sure, you just call each other, and text each other, and have really hot sex with each other and with no one else.”

“I regret telling you things.”

She sticks out her tongue and pokes his shoulder with an accusing finger. “You regret nothing, I think.”

Jess and Isabel are bridesmaids, and it’s a multi-day, multi-cultural situation with a mehndi and a sangeet and a Shabbat dinner. The ceremony is intimate and the brides are luminous and Shane wears a yarmulke and sits among rainbow flags and flower petals and shimmering music that vibrates through his feet, until Jess grabs his wrists and pulls him onto the dance floor. She’s so beautiful in her sparkling yellow lehenga and emerald earrings and ornate vines of henna twisting around her arms.

“Do you want to marry Zachary?” he asks into her ear, over the music.

“I think so,” she says. “Do you want to marry Ilya Rozanov?”

He laughs, loud and sharp, from deep in his stomach. “That would be insane.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He looks away, shakes his head at empty air, and Jess steps closer and pulls him into a hug, and they sway together while the music and a chameleon-palette of colours swirls around them.

---------------

“But this is Shane Hollander’s fortress of solitude. Here in Eastern Quebec is the house he had built on a private lake.”

Down the hall, Sveta flits like an impatient bird, clanking bottles of various nice-smelling things around in the washroom. Ilya watches TV-Shane leaning back in a Muskoka chair by the water. “It’s my favourite place on earth. My daughter and I come here every summer. I don’t get to spend too much time with her during the season, so this place is really special to us.”

The camera pans through the sun-soaked cottage – that word, cottage, is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, Ilya thinks – and there’s evidence of Sidney everywhere: a small pair of bright-green Crocs by the door, colourful spines of children’s books on the shelves, a glass terrarium where he knows she takes care of otherworldly-looking creatures every summer. And he feels an illogical, roiling bite of annoyance rise in him, hot air trapped in his throat, because—

Because.

Because Shane Hollander is showing the world this piece of himself, this life he lives and the life he cares for, and it’s ridiculous and mortifying and entirely insane that Ilya is maybe possibly probably a tiny bit jealous of the amorphous audience of this chronically boring documentary, that they know about as much about Shane Hollander’s life as he does. Ilya is nothing more than a blob, a speck, a number on some ESPN executive’s data report.

He’s never even met her.

Fucking fuck.

“I’m ready,” Sveta says, standing by the screen. “Unless you’ve decided we should stay in and watch—whatever this is.”

“Sorry. It’s so fucking boring I almost fell into a coma.”

“Mm. He’s fucking hot though.”

TV-Shane is now doing some very not-boring yoga stretches, arms flexed, back arched. The camera cuts to a wide shot and now there are two figures silhouetted against the lake, Shane and Sidney doing matching tree-poses while the sun sets brilliant-bright behind them.

They text and they fuck and they call sometimes, and it’s nice until it’s dreadful, because it’s nothing, isn’t it? It’s an empty, futureless abyss of useless longing and a little kid in the middle of all of it, and Ilya has no right, no fucking right, to think that maybe he’ll know her one day.

Sveta looks at Ilya, the screen, Ilya again, and he sees the moment, the exact hair of a second when the microprocessor in her brain figures him the fuck out.

“Oh. Ilyusha.” She tosses her heels to the floor and drops onto the sofa next to him, tucking her legs beneath her. “Jane? Seriously?”

He exhales a helpless laugh and leans into her shoulder. “You’ve never accused me of being particularly creative.”

“This is going to be a big mess for you,” she says into his hair.

“Yes,” he agrees. “I think you are very right.”

---------------

Lily: Ready to lose in like 4 days?

---------------

Shane is weightless. Shane is flying. Shane is an inertial body lifted onto a kitchen countertop and kissed and kissed again, and his hands are in Ilya’s hair and on Ilya’s chin drawing him back in, stealing breath from his nose, and they’re half-hard, pressed close, and he thinks, as he has before, that Boston is really rather lovely in the fall.

There’s something about being with Ilya in the daylight, the broad expanse of windows looking out onto his walled green yard, autumn treetops rustling beyond in shades of yellow and red, so different from late at night when it feels like they’re enveloped in a pressing, desperate quiet.

They’re in bed, and Ilya kisses his shoulder, his neck, and Shane turns to meet his lips and it catches Ilya by surprise, just a little, teeth grazing tongue. “I should go,” he says into the kiss.

“Or you could stay.”

“Stay?”

“Here, tonight. I’m not done with you.” A shrug. “And we have afternoon game tomorrow, so, no morning practice.”

Shane tilts his head back against the pillow and lets the sunlight spill across him. He is weightless; he is flying. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

There’s ginger ale in the fridge, and it’s Canada Dry, not Schweppes, and it kind of feels like that means something, even though it’s stupid. And now Ilya is assembling tuna sandwiches, for which he’s specially bought a vegan cheese because You do not eat dairy, this is right?, and he’s arranging them onto an oven tray with a spatula.

“You still have that?”

“What, spatula? Yes, it is a useful spatula. You want it back?” He brandishes it at Shane like a child with a toy sword.

“Fuck off.”

They tumble against each other onto the sofa and watch the Buffalo game while the oven timer counts down, and Ryan Price delivers a brutal hit, fuck, and it’s almost four o’clock by now. Sid should be settled in at Jessica’s, snacking on blueberries and doodling in the margins of her homework.

“Hey, I’m just gonna call Sid. She just got done with school. Is that okay?” He moves to stand.

“Of course. You do not have to leave. Unless it is private.”

Shane blinks at him. It feels private, somehow, even though it’s really not. He dials.

“Hey, Sid. How was the French test?”

“Mostly good.”

“And mostly means…?”

“Mm, I got two wrong. Vouloir and choisir.”

“Hey, that’s really good. We can work on those.”

“Alva sent me a postcard.”

“Yeah? What’d she say?”

It’s small things, ordinary things, just the sound of her voice and the tapping of her pencil in the background. Richard ate twenty crickets and two hornworms. Sophie joined the fencing club. Mom’s ordering pizza for dinner. Love you, Dad – Love you, too – then a quick exchange with Jessica about scheduling around her next trip out to the observatory. He hangs up and finds Ilya’s eyes on him, soft and studying.

“What?”

“No, nothing.” Ilya looks away, taps his fingers on his pantleg. “It is nice, the way you talk to her. Like she is a person.”

“She is a person.”

“Yes, well. A lot of people do not talk to children this way. They are this word, like, talking down to them.”

“Condescending?”

“Yes, this.” Ilya snakes an arm around Shane’s shoulder and pulls him against his side. “Condescending,” he repeats slowly, snapping each syllable into the shell of Shane’s ear.

Ilya’s hand is brushing through his hair and he’s planting a small, hesitant kiss on the top of Shane’s head, and Shane kind of feels like he’s floating on his back on the lake behind the cottage, dappled in sunlight that catches gold on billowing crests of water. He doesn’t hear what Ilya says at first, just a mumble.

“Hm?”

“When can I meet her?” Ilya asks.

And, okay.

Fuck, okay.

He’s frozen in Ilya’s arms, and his heart is made of cement in his chest, and Ilya’s hand has stilled in his hair, and it’s like the moment before a botched shot on goal, when everything slows to a standstill and the distance between puck and net becomes something incalculable.

When can I meet her – when, when – like a foregone conclusion; Ilya has just sent a radio-burst into the universe, scrambling Shane’s sensors. When implies a future-state. When? Not now – later. When. And what future is there? What future could there possibly be?

Shane is the best playmaker in the league. He sees what no one else sees; creates lanes through an impossible forest of blades and sticks and muscle-sore bodies whose sole purpose on this planet earth is to prevent him, specifically, from scoring a goal. 

He does not see a play here. He sees – nothing. A black-hole. A neutron star, collapsing into its own core. 

Well, no – he sees Ilya and Sidney meeting. Summers at the cottage, Ilya’s long lazy body stretched out next to him by the fire, Sidney between them, loons calling in the night. Two people he loves – he can admit that, now, even if it’s fucking tearing him open like a gut-wound – a galaxy all his own, twin stars to his orbiting moon.

Jessica had asked, Do you want to marry Ilya Rozanov? And maybe not, maybe—What is married, anyway, without the paperwork, without the ceremony? Just an agreement to spend life together – a future – when, when. 

Shane knows this for certain: a future, a real one, can’t be lived in secret. He won’t raise his daughter in the shadows of something the world is ashamed of on his fucking behalf.

And if it’s not a secret, then it’s a shitstorm. Hockey stripped away from them both, leaving them identityless, purposeless, broken; a media circus, his name – his daughter’s name – keelhauled through a public humiliation ritual; probably some sort of drawn-out legal battle; threats to Ilya’s immigration status, his safety – fuck.

How could you be so careless? his mom had asked him, once, and Shane thinks, maybe, that’s all he’s ever been. To let it get this far, to let it hurt this deep, when he’s the best playmaker in the league and there is no. fucking. play.

“Ilya,” he says, and his voice is small. “I can’t. We can’t.”

And what now? Ending this would be unbearable, and staying as they are is unbearable, too. There’s no putting this back into boxes. It’s too big; it’s too much.

All he can think to do, right now, is leave.

“Shane. Hey, okay. I didn’t mean—Hollander.”

But he’s already sitting up and pulling on his shirt, or maybe it’s Ilya’s shirt, and the oven timer is going off, incessant and shrill, and Shane wonders why all the heartbreaking inflection points in his life seem to involve sandwiches.

“I, um. Thank you. For having me over. I’ll see you tomorrow, right? And at All-Stars. And, um. I’ll text you.” He leans across the couch and kisses Ilya, but Ilya’s lips are stiff, his jaw gritted, eyes surprised and frightened. 

“Okay, yes,” Ilya monotones as Shane pulls away. “You will text me.”

“Yep. Okay. Have a good game, Ilya.”

He doesn’t cry until he shuts the door behind him. The next day, they both play the shittiest hockey of their lives.

---------------

A few things happen all at once, an accident of the universe, a planetary alignment. 

First, is the tweet:

Was no one going to tell me that Shane Hollander is DILF?

It’s accompanied by a blurry photo of him and Sid after her hockey practice; he’s carrying her gear bag, holding her hand, looking at her attentively while they debrief the day’s drills. He remembers that day. He’s not sure who took the picture.

That goes a little bit viral. Like, a normal amount.

The next thing is also a tweet. Some American scientist-slash-TV personality who has a Netflix show about the Wonders of the Universe retweets a video from Jessica and Zachary’s YouTube channel. This tweet doesn’t really go viral, but it does lead to Jessica getting invited to a conference of the Consortium of Canadian Science Communicators, which leads to a CBC producer handing her their business card, and now her YouTube channel is a CBC webseries.

And, like. Jessica is very beautiful. Shane knows this, objectively. But he hadn’t really thought of her before as hot. Which, he supposes, is really the crux of their entire life story at this point.

So now, Hot Science Girl from That One CBC Show is going viral, and someone puts together that they saw Noted Hockey DILF Shane Hollander hanging out with Hot Science Girl at the McGill physics library one time, and then someone finds Jessica’s private Instagram and there’s the pictures of them at Kavita’s wedding, dancing and laughing and holding each other close, and, yeah. Shane can see how that could be misconstrued.

So now the locker room thinks he’s gotten back together with his baby mama – “About time,” J.J. crows – and eTalk runs some nosy commentary with the irritating chiron HOLLZY’S BRAINY BABE, and a bunch of strangers on the internet are picking apart his personal life with hashtags and a scalpel. Zachary sends in guest videos from time to time, field notes from the Amazon, and a breakaway sect of internet sleuths seem to think this means that Shane is in a throuple with Hot Science Girl and Sexy Mushroom Man. Jesus fucking Christ.

And Shane can’t even be mad about it, really, because Jessica is so, so happy. She loves talking about her research, and she’s good at talking about it, these unknowable, cosmic topics distilled to a summary a child could grasp. She’s charismatic on camera; plus, there’s some money coming in from the CBC, which – Shane’s got her covered, obviously, but he knows she’s proud that this is her own.

In the end, he’s almost grateful for the distraction, because Ilya’s leaving him on read, and his heart hurts, and playing hockey feels like trudging through a field of mud; and then there’s the whole thing with Sid.

Their first fight, ever, and it’s over a lie. 

She’s in her room upstairs, sewing something while Richard watches with his big goggling eyes, when Shane gets an email from her coach reminding him about the development league’s absence policy.

He starts typing a reply, there’s been an error, Sidney was present today, but then he realizes, he actually doesn’t know that for sure. He was at his own practice across town; one of her teammate’s moms was supposed to drop her off and pick her up.

He texts Alice, Hey, thanks for grabbing Sidney today, I appreciate it.

Happy to any time, comes the reply, but she said there was a mix-up because she had fencing practice after school

He races upstairs; her door is ajar, the rhythmic whir of the sewing machine. He knocks, doesn’t wait for a response.

“Sid, were you at hockey today?”

She freezes, spins around to look at him, all wide eyes and short, nervous breaths. “Dad, I can explain.”

“Okay, explain. You went to fencing?”

She nods, and her hair falls in her face a little, and he wants to reach out and brush it back, and he also wants to scream. “Yeah, I went with Sophie. Her mom took me home.”

“Sid, no. You can’t do that. You can’t lie to three separate adults. You can’t lie to me – not about where you are. Not ever. What if you’d had a reaction, or got hurt, and I didn’t know how to find you?”

“Dad, I’m fine.”

“You could have—Of course you can go to fencing if you want. You could’ve just asked.”

“No I couldn’t.” She’s raising her voice, just a little, and he’s not sure if it’s bravery or anger. “You wouldn’t get it.”

“What won’t I get?”

She looks down at her feet, crosses and uncrosses her ankles. Takes a breath. “It’s ’cause I don’t want to do hockey anymore.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to do hockey.”

It sits in the air between them for a moment, like a half-deflated balloon, dismal and frail. “Sid. Why did you lie about it?”

“I didn’t want you to be mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

“Yeah, but you’re disappointed.”

And that—Hm. He might be, actually. Disappointed; like the shine fading from a brand-new coin. Not disappointed in her; never, in her – just. Sad, that they won’t have this in common; that the thing that brings him joy doesn’t bring her joy. That he can’t give her the same feeling on the ice that he’s spent his whole life chasing.

“I only want you to do things that make you happy, okay? You don’t have to keep stuff like this from me. I’ll always support you.”

“You keep stuff from your parents,” she counters, and then shrinks in on herself, regretful. She peers up at him through strands of hair; steels her gaze.

He knows what she means. Of course he knows – what she’s been carrying for him. With him. 

“Sid. Whoa. You know that’s different.”

She just shrugs. An impasse.

He breathes carefully. “Five minutes. Kitchen. Rulebook.” He goes downstairs.

The rulebook is something they’ve crafted together since their first night moved into the Westmount house. It works because hockey has rules and life also has rules, and maybe the life-rules aren’t spelled out all the time, but they can figure them out together; trial and error. For Sid: no sugar after 8 p.m. For Shane: house centipedes are to be humanely caught and released and never-ever stomped on.

She plods into the kitchen when five minutes are up and climbs onto a stool at the counter. He stands across from her, slides a notebook and a pen over the marble surface.

“First rule, okay? You’re allowed to have secrets. You’re entitled to privacy. But you can never – I mean, never – keep your location a secret. I need to know where you are, like, at all times. No lies. Can we do that?”

She nods, bites her lip. Writes in the notebook: Dad knows location. ALWAYS.

“Second rule. If you must lie about something, you lie to me. Never to other people’s parents.”

She writes it down.

“Rule three. It’s November. Do you think you could make it to the end of the winter session? Honour your commitment to your team?”

She considers, tapping the pen so it prints little dots across the top of the page. “Yeah. I want to win the winter tournament, anyway.” She writes it down.

“Okay. I think that’s it,” he says. “Do you have any rules for me?”

“Not right now.”

“Okay.” He reaches across the counter and closes the notebook. “So. Fencing, huh?”

“I really like it, Dad. It’s like—powerful. It’s really fun.”

“I’m glad.” He nods, smiling as he pictures her waving an imaginary épée through the air. “You used to pretend to fence in front of the TV when the Olympics were on. You were like, five, maybe. Do you remember?”

“Yeah. I think that was the first time I liked it.”

He’s glad she has that; an origin story. On the medal podium, they’ll ask her, When did you fall in love with fencing? And she’ll say, At my grandparents’ cottage. The Olympics were on TV.

“You’re sure you’re not mad about hockey?” she asks.

“I’m sure, Sid. Really.” He considers. “I am curious why you don’t want to do it anymore. Besides fencing.”

“It’s less fun without Alva there,” she explains. And Shane gets that. He really gets that, actually, because Ilya Rozanov isn’t responding to his texts and Shane thinks, Ilya is actually his best friend on the ice. If he ever disappeared from across the red line, the game would suddenly go greyscale. It wouldn’t be fun anymore.

“Dad. Can I ask a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Why are you sad lately?”

And—and. He could say that he’s not, but that would be a lie, wouldn't it? He’s pretty sick of lies for today.

“You asked me once if I like a boy,” he begins. “There’s a boy I’ve liked for a really long time.”

He tells her about Ilya Rozanov.

---------------

He brings Sidney to Ottawa at the start of her school’s holiday break, before he leaves for a zigzagging roadie leading up to Christmas: Washington, Anaheim, Minnesota, Columbus. It’s a cold day, snowing, and the roads are a mess; he and Sid both slog into the house and peel off their coats with the world-weary aura of a pair of zombies.

Sid bounds upstairs with his dad to set Richard up in his Ottawa habitat, and Shane finds himself standing across from his mom, who’s looking at him with gentle concern in her eyes, because she always knows, doesn’t she? 

He thinks of Ilya. He thinks: It is scary, but you are brave.

“Hey Mom?”

“Sweetie?”

“I don’t want Sid to keep secrets from me. I don’t want her to feel like she ever needs to hide from me.”

“Okay—”

“And I think—I’ve been hiding from you. I’ve been keeping something—Fuck. Okay.” His heart beats faster; he shakes out his hands, the way he loosens them between drills. 

“Shane, honey. What do you mean?”

“I’m gay.” He feels like one of those inflatable tubes at a car dealership, waving wildly in the wind, madcap and untethered. “I’m gay. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Shane. No, no—you don’t have anything to be sorry about.”

“But I do. I do. Because I just can’t seem to stop fucking everything up. I could have ruined hockey, with Sid, if you hadn’t stepped in. Which, obviously I’m grateful, but you shouldn’t have had to. And this could ruin hockey, too. You said, don’t be careless. I’ve been so careless, Mom—fuck. I could lose everything.”

He’s not sure when, but she’s grabbed him around his shoulders and lowered him beside her onto the couch, and now he’s slouched in her arms, and she’s rubbing smooth circles across his back and murmuring nice mom things into his hair.

“I’m so proud of you, okay? So proud. Nothing changes. I love you so much, Shane. Always.”

He’s nodding along, then shaking his head. “It’s not fair. It just—it isn’t fair.” Tears prick in his eyes, hot and fierce. “Every other asshole in the league with two teeth and a concussion gets to have their kid, and their person, and hockey. They get everything. And I have to choose. I have to choose.”

“It isn’t fair,” she agrees, and he thinks she might be crying, too. “Oh, Shane. You have a person?”

“I do—I did. I don’t know. I think I might have fucked that up, too.”

She laughs then, a wet breathless sound. He sniffs. “What’s so funny?”

“Just—There was a time when I thought, you know, you might be gay.”

“Really?”

“Well, you had all those hockey posters in your room – all those shirtless men, Shane. I thought, maybe. But then, you and Jessica went and did just about the most heterosexual possible thing, so.”

“Oh my god. Never tell anyone that, ever, please.”

He’s drying his eyes on his sleeve when his dad and Sid come downstairs. “What’s going on here?” his dad asks gently, as Sid comes to the sofa and climbs up at Shane’s side.

Shane looks at his dad across the room, and finds the words inside him. “I’m gay.”

His dad nods. He doesn’t hesitate.  “Hi, Gay. I’m Dad.”

Sidney laughs her best laugh, then, the one that sounds like fireflies lit up in the dark, and then his mom is laughing, and his dad, and now he’s laughing, too. Shane collects the fireflies inside him like a glass jar, where they glow and glow and glow.

Chapter End Notes

• 2015-16 in canon is part of the fuck montage at the start of Ep. 4, so I've taken a lot of liberties to imagine what was going on in this version of the universe. I really wanted to look at Shane a year into full-time parenthood, and all the ways he's grown from that.

• I originally had Rose Landry making a cameo on Jess' science show, but we don't really need Rose here for the plot, because Jess is doing the heavy lifting as straight best friend / media-storm girlfriend. Sorry Rose!

• Zachary is loosely inspired by former NFLer/MIT professor John Urschel - just the idea of an athlete turned academic (who looks like a cutie in glasses and a cozy sweater). His story is super interesting to check out!

• To the exactly two commenters concerned that Shane would not have time, and Sidney is too young, to support the proper care and keeping of a panther chameleon, please know that he has hired a reptile expert to regularly help out. He has spared no expense on Richard!

Chapter 8: ...All that matters is we're going

Chapter Notes

CW: Medical situation/hospital scene; brief mention of abortion

Jane: Sorry I left like that. I was just sort of freaking out

---------------

Jane: we should talk about it

---------------

Jane: I don’t want you to think I don’t want the same thing

---------------

Jane: good game in LA. you ok? check looked like it hurt

---------------

Jane: Merry Christmas Ilya

---------------

Jane: Happy new year Ilya. I’ll see you in Tampa

---------------

And the worst part is, Ilya can’t even be mad. He can’t find it in himself, the anger – he reaches for it, high on a shelf, but it’s not there; instead, an empty, resentful sorrow that sounds like Chopin’s B-minor prelude, an echoing loneliness stretched across aching arpeggios. He’d ignored the first text, just to be a little petty, because he was hurt, and annoyed, and god Hollander had looked, in the moment before fleeing, like one of those – броненосец. Whatever the word is in English; the animal that rolls itself into a small, armoured ball, as if that’s a strategy that can actually protect it from a much larger creature with claws and teeth. He’d wanted Shane to stew like that, maybe just for a day or two, balled-up and scared, because Ilya, too, was scared; and maybe this fucked-up, cold-shoulder revenge would make him feel less alone.

But then, the pictures. Connors: “Did you see Hollzy’s dating some rocket scientist chick?” He ended up having to see the team doctor after that, because his stubbed toe swelled to an alarming shade of purple. And he can’t even be mad – he can’t – because it’s her, isn’t it? The one person he makes sense with, can have a normal life with. Can give his daughter a normal life with.

They look happy, is the thing. In the pictures. They look happy.

Who is Ilya, of all people, to wish to deny a child of her mother?

He knew, really, that what he had asked was an impossible thing. He’d said it because he couldn’t help himself, because he’s edacious, because the fantasy of being enveloped into Shane’s pretty little family was such a delicious imagining to swim around in like the picture-perfect lake behind his so-called cottage; fully expecting Hollander to say back, Of course you can’t meet her. You know you can’t.

And why did it even matter to him like this? Why, if not that Ilya wants to know every part of Shane Hollander, every centimetre of skin, every blunt curve of fingernail, every divot of muscle. Every neurosis and canine tooth and strand of hair and tone of laugh (Ilya has counted six distinct laughs, so far) – and is his daughter not an extension of him, of his life, of the way his clumsy, wonderful heart wraps around people with an eclipse-corona of blinding warmth? 

We should talk about it. As if there was anything to talk about; Shane made his choice, and it was a logical one, and Ilya can’t be mad. All he can do is mute the text thread – he can’t even bring himself to block the number; Jesus Christ what is wrong with him? – and play mediocre hockey through a month that grows colder and a sky that grows greyer, and field calls from his father through a haze of bitter confusion, and tell Sveta that of course she was right. She’s always right. This has all become a huge fucking mess.

He determines to make the most of Tampa. Bright-hot sun in the middle of January gift-wrapped with an open bar, a pretty beach, and bleach-blonde waitresses one semester shy of a bachelor’s degree. Hollander will be there, but Ilya can deal. He has to. Another decade across the ice from him lies interminably ahead; may as well get used to being nothing to each other. Maybe what they always were supposed to be.

The place is overrun with kids – it always is – and Ilya doesn’t think much of it. Sits down on a barstool next to one of them sipping a frozen drink from a comically large cocktail glass. “I’ll have what she’s having,” he tells the bartender, and he did mean it as a joke, was planning on a beer, but then the bartender gives him sass, like, “You want a virgin piña colada with extra cherries?” and now Ilya is kind of annoyed, so he parries with a flat, “Yes. And put hers on my tab.”

The bartender raises an eyebrow and works on the drink, and Ilya becomes aware that the kid on the stool has turned to look at him. She’s wearing these oversize, round mirrored sunglasses, but even in the moment before she lifts them to the top of her hair, before freckles, before the same brown eyes Ilya has spent nearly as long as she’s been alive memorizing from across the blue dot – he knows, doesn’t he? His stomach drops, and she lifts off the glasses and holds out a hand. 

“You’re Ilya Rozanov,” she greets him plainly.

What is it with Hollanders and handshakes? He’s seventeen again, smoking outside some fuckass rink in Regina, Seskatchawan, nervous and annoyed and delighted at once.

He’s seen pictures, but he takes her in now, wary, as if she might not be real – long limbs and rounded face and pin-straight, dark-red hair cropped neatly at her shoulders, brushed off her forehead by the sunglasses with wayward wisps frizzed out around her ears. She wears the same challenging half-smile that Shane gets whenever they’re competing over something stupid, who gets the last pelmeni, who can race first to the top of the stairs, who guessed correctly the winner of Edmonton-Chicago; and it reaches her eyes, peering and bright above a scattered cosmos of freckles.

He takes her hand; she grips back, firm, and shakes once, resolutely. “I’m Sidney Hollander.”

“Hello,” is all he can manage to say.

The bartender sets his drink down in front of him with a sarcastic clunk, and he eyes it, the twisting plastic straw, the little pink umbrella, no fewer than six maraschino cherries; and he laughs. He probably sounds insane. He sips the drink and it’s actually really delicious.

They sit side by side, elbows perched on the bartop, nursing their matching piña coladas while the room churns around them. He knows that if she is here, he is here; if he listens carefully, Ilya can hear his voice cutting through the chatter – something something save percentage something something helluva game, man – and he doesn’t dare turn around to look. He’s not sure if Sidney’s presence here is a peace offering or a gut-punch or, more likely, has nothing to do with him at all; just taking his daughter on a sunny vacation to Florida. Ilya hardly a thought.

“Your mom and dad are here?” Ilya asks as nonchalantly as he can, picking a cherry off the top of his drink. It tastes medicine-sweet.

“My dad is. Not my mom.”

“She does not like the ocean? Prefers ice-cold Montreal?”

Sidney shrugs beside him. “She has classes.”

“Ah, that’s right. She is the rocket scientist.”

“Astrophysicist,” Sidney corrects, and Ilya can’t help but smile, because sometimes he makes mistakes on purpose – swapping English cognates or mangling a pop culture reference – just to hear Shane correct him, so earnestly punctilious it’s ridiculous.

“Mm. Your dad is very lucky, yes? Very smart girlfriend and very smart daughter.”

“They’re not boyfriend-girlfriend.”

“They’re not?” And his vision swims, the room is suddenly too warm, because if they’re not boyfriend-girlfriend they must be fiancés. Or maybe they’ve already gotten married; some quiet, private ceremony in a government building, making official what they’ve been all along. One big happy family.

He looks up from his drink and finds her peering at him with a careful, assessing glance. “My mom and dad aren’t compatible,” she explains.

“Compatible,” he repeats numbly. “This is big word for a small human.”

“I'm not small. And it means, like, they’re not meant to go together.” She swivels on the barstool to glance around, pivots back and levels the bartender with a circumspect scowl until he slings a rag over his shoulder and walks away. “I’m going to tell you something,” she announces, and leans in toward him.

“Okay.” He plays along, stoops low, lets her cup her hand around her mouth and whisper in his ear.

“My dad is gay.”

Ilya chokes on his drink, an actual, honest-to-god sitcom-style spit take, pineapple slush snorting from his nose.

Wordlessly, Sidney offers him a napkin, and he takes it in a daze.

“He tells you this?” Ilya asks when he’s recovered enough dignity to look her in the eye.

“We tell each other everything.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because.” She shrugs, turns back to her drink and sips like she hasn’t just sent seismic tremors through the earth Ilya stands on. “You’re the boy he likes.”

He feels the smile that sprawls across his face uninvited, the round, delirious shape of it. He wonders if cartoon birds will come land atwittering on his shoulders. These past winter months sequestered in his own misery replay now in his mind as though pumped full of helium, high-pitched and absurd.

He regards Sidney Hollander beside him and it’s as if she’s seated directly in a sunbeam. Or maybe she emanates her own light. Strange, isn’t it; how he can know her so long and yet not know her at all.

She’s well-dressed, he notices, and vibrantly so. Certainly not a trait inherited from a man with all the fashion sense of a sentient treadmill. Black and white stripes zigzagging like op-art across a trendy shift dress that’s just her height; mismatched socks in neon colours and black canvas sneakers; a mishmash of bright beaded bracelets and rubber bands on either wrist.

“You are much cooler than your dad,” he tells her.

“I know,” she says without a hint of conceit, as if just stating the most obvious of facts. “He can be so boring sometimes.”

Ilya barks out a laugh. “You and I are going to be very good friends, I think.” He lifts his glass in toast; she raises hers, and they clink in the middle.

By the time Shane finds them, they are on their second round of piña coladas and discussing something called upcycling and how Sidney had found her dress at a secondhand store, cut it apart for the interesting fabric and sewed it together again into something new.

“Dad, you’re not wearing them,” Sidney accuses as Shane rounds the corner of the bar.

“Oh, you’re right.” He unhooks identical round sunglasses from his collar and Ilya watches as they both lower the glasses over their eyes in perfect sync, like buddy-detectives in a TV show from the eighties. They’re snickering through their noses like it’s an inside joke, and Ilya is met by the pair of mirrored gazes. He adds this new Shane laugh to his repertoire; number seven. The way he laughs when he’s with his daughter.

“You are looking very pretty today,” Ilya goads, because he’s feeling brave, two virgin piña coladas deep, and Shane does look good – he always looks good; fuck – crisp, cream-toned jacket over broad muscled shoulders. Somehow still so deliciously boring, even when he’s trying not to be. “Someone take you shopping?”

“I hired a stylist,” Shane explains, which would be a ridiculous enough statement from this man on its own, but there’s that laugh again, something shared between the two of them, matching smiles and ridiculous sunglasses, and Ilya realizes.

“Hollander. Did a nine-year-old girl pick out your clothes?”

He shrugs, which is answer enough, and god, Ilya wants to kiss him right there.

“I’m glad you two met,” Shane says. He brushes a hand fondly across the back of Sidney’s head and traces it down to her shoulder, resting there quickly, before dropping his hand to his side; the whole motion so natural, unconscious, Ilya doesn’t think Shane even realizes he’s done it.

“Are you? Glad?”

“I am.”

He can see himself reflected back in the stupid-looking glasses, warped and muted silver-grey. Maybe he is trapped there, in Shane Hollander’s gaze like some Medusa-spell. Maybe it’s not such a bad place to be trapped. Maybe he’d like to be trapped there forever.

Just then, across the room, a voice bellows: “Hollander! I hear you named your kid after me.”

Shane abruptly goes tomato-red, and Sidney is laughing at his side, and Ilya thinks, oh. This is what love is. There’s not a symphony for this. Just the timpani-thumping of his heart in his chest and a smile he can’t school off his face. He wishes he had a pair of those sunglasses, too, to protect himself from the light of it.

---------------

“How about this one?”

Shane held up a blazer he rather liked, dark grey that was almost black, unadorned, straight simple lines. Sid just crinkled her nose and shook her head. 

He likes these outings to her favourite thrift store, in part because it’s underground and artsy and staffed by slightly rude young people with dyed hair and nose rings who have probably never watched a hockey game in their lives. Mostly, though, he enjoys setting her loose in the sprawling aisles and watching her explore the textures and colours of the place with a skilled eye he can’t begin to understand, only marvel at.

“Here.” She’d raced ahead of him to the end of the rack and selected an off-white suit jacket with wide lapels.

“You don’t think it’s kind of—bright?”

“That’s the point, Dad,” she complained. “It’s like, happier than what you wear usually.”

“You think my clothes are unhappy?”

She just held the hanger out toward him and waited, eyebrows raised, like a dare.

And that’s the thing with Sid, isn’t it – she’s always challenging him, daring him. Making him braver in ways he never expected. He stands now across the crowded hotel bar, feeling a bit hi-vis in his bold white jacket, but knowing too that she’s embroidered a small, green heart inside the sleeve for him, like a secret message.

He hovers there at the edge of the room, watching his worlds collide, the last of the fragile barriers he’d once erected with stubborn desperation dissolving to stardust. He thinks about Jessica. He thinks about celestial events: orbits that interleave once a century, once a millennium, a rare and divine alignment.

His daughter and Ilya Rozanov sit side-by-side at the bar in rapt conversation, and Shane watches and loves and watches and loves.

---------------

Tell me about your person. 

It’s weird, now that his parents know. Good-weird, mostly, he thinks, but also – a bit like those dreams he has sometimes, where he skates out onto the ice for the face-off only to realize he’s not holding a hockey stick, but a pool noodle, and also his hair is made of spaghetti. It’s so misaligned with the reality he’s carried for nearly a decade, he’s not quite sure what to do with the freedom of it.

His mom only ever asks gently, and he’s grateful. He can tell she’s holding back; that a thousand questions are queued up on an infinitely-scrolling teleprompter in her brain.

He’s the best person, Mom. He is so good and no one even knows. He’s the person I trust most in the world.

There’s a family lunch before the skills competition, and Colorado have sent fucking Olsson on the fan vote, because apparently the people of Denver love a good fight; and now there’s a great deal of high-pitched squealing as Sidney and Alva reunite. The girls tackle the buffet with elbows linked, piling paper plates high with a Jenga-tower of fish sticks, and they eat at a big round banquet table with Olsson and Ingrid and Hugo and new baby Agnes. 

“Is this seat taken, Captain?”

Before he can answer, Ilya is plopping dramatically into the chair beside his, and Marleau in the next chair over.

“Hello, teammates,” Shane acknowledges, doing his best to sound annoyed and not completely glad. Under the table, he taps the side of his shoe to Ilya’s and is rewarded with a tap in return.

It’s incredible, really, the way Ilya commands the table, charms Ingrid while Olsson crosses his arms and sinks back in his seat, sets Alva and Sidney giggling, abets Hugo in a fish stick heist, all while relentlessly chirping Shane. He listens to the kids like they’re peers, leaning forward, nodding at their every word.

“Dolphin trainer? What will you train them to do – play hockey?”

“No,” Alva objects, laughing. “Like, doing jumps and tricks.”

“Ah,” Ilya says, nodding solemnly. “I see. This is very important job.”

(Shane thinks it’s a dubious career path for someone who lives in a mountainous, landlocked place, but he doesn’t say so.)

“And what about you, Sidney Hollander? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

She considers the question deliberately, scowls a little, thinking. “I’m not sure yet.”

“You do not want to be bug doctor? Or fashion designer – no?”

“Entomologist,” she corrects. “Maybe. Or a detective. Or an actuary.”

“Actuary? What is this?”

“My grandpa says actuaries are the unsung heroes of the public sector.”

Shane has never heard her mention actuarial work in her entire life, and he’s pretty sure she’s messing with Ilya, actually, and this delights him. He’s a little worried he’s smiling too big, Cheshire Cat-deranged, and that Olsson or Marleau will call him on it.

He cares about Sidney. My person – I think maybe he’s cared for a long time. 

This is all just a way for him to know Sidney, Shane thinks; chameleon-camouflage, bright colours in plain sight: a secret knowledge between the three of them, sheltered from view by Ilya’s blinding, brilliant light.

He wishes suddenly, sharply, like pressing on a bruise, that he could lean to the side and nudge into Ilya’s shoulder. Peck a kiss on his cheek. Hold his hand. Anything, really; any small, innocuous affection. He taps Ilya’s foot again, and thinks, My person.

How long is a long time, Shane?

Since the beginning. Since we were rookies.

Ilya was the first person to ask his daughter’s name. In a hotel room in Toronto, before they were who they would become. Teammates, coaches, scouts at the combine, all teeming with questions and encroaching curiosity, and not one of them had ever asked her name.

Sidney lounges next to him on the pool deck with A Wrinkle in Time, wearing the sunglasses she’d insisted they buy at the airport newsstand. She’s such a person, Shane thinks, it blows his mind sometimes.

“Hey.” He nods his head toward the pool, where Alva and Hugo and the nieces of a goalie from St. Louis are riveted in a game of Shark Attack with Ilya loudly splashing in the title role. “You can go be a kid, you know.”

“I know.” She shrugs. “I like reading.”

One of his favourite things; quiet nights at home between away games, his kid and a good book. “We read together all the time. Go hang out with Alva. Make sure Ilya behaves.”

He’s pretty sure she’s rolling her eyes behind the glasses, but she sets down her book and drops into the water off the pool ledge.

“Sidney Hollander. You are shark or you are fish?”

She thinks for a moment. “I’m a frog.”

“Secret third option. I like this very much.”

Shane wonders if Tampa Bay, Florida is even a real place, sun-saturated, chlorine-scented, or if he’ll fly to Columbus two days from now and find that it never happened at all. 

Since the beginning. Since we were rookies.

Oh, Shane. He’s another player?

Yes. Yeah, he is. I think I fell in love with his hockey before I fell—

He cut himself off, then. His mother shouldn’t be the first to hear him say it. Even if he’d irrevocably fucked up by running away, even if Ilya never wanted to speak to him again. He owed Ilya that much; the truth that has taken root inside him.

And Shane is so in love with Ilya’s hockey, and maybe that’s the whole of it: Shane is hockey and Ilya is hockey and Shane loves hockey and Shane loves Ilya. They’ve never skated together before, and it's a oneness years on the same line couldn’t achieve if it were anyone else; Ilya’s instinct to Shane’s pragmatism, opposite charges finding one another across an electromagnetic field; a law of nature. Ilya passes long and trusting across the ice, Shane hooks the puck into the cradle of his stick and shoots fast and low, and the goal crackles with inevitability. My person, Shane thinks when Ilya smacks an ostentatious kiss onto his helmet. My person. My person.

He watches the sun set in ten million colours that maybe don’t even exist in Canada, reflected fire-bright into the ceaseless churn of the ocean while Sid collects seashells at the spot where the tide just meets the shore, lapping around her ankles. 

“Found you.” Ilya drops onto the sand beside him. The space between them feels too close and too far, all at once. 

“So you were looking for me?”

“Of course not.”

Shane exhales a laugh into the salt-air. Looks out at his daughter silhouetted against the glowing sun. He feels Ilya gazing along with him.

“Sidney tells me something,” Ilya says cautiously. “She says you and her mother are not compatible.”

“We’re not,” Shane confirms. “Not in that way, anyway.”

They’re silent, for a while, just waves and wind.

“It is, ah, very good to know her, Shane.” He turns his head to find Ilya still watching Sidney where she strolls along the shoreline. “She is nothing like you, obviously.”

“That so?”

He shakes his head. “She is very interesting, and you are very boring, so.”

“Right. Of course.”

Ilya turns his head then, storm-coloured eyes catching orange and gold in the light. “Is different, than what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. You are lighter, when you are with her. It is like—you are friends.”

“Well, yeah.” Shane tilts his head toward where Sid is marching their way, her harvest of shells gathered in cupped palms. “She’s my best friend.” 

“Your best friend is a child?” Ilya chirps loudly. “This is very sad for you, Hollander.”

Sid crouches to deposit the shells in a small pile at Shane’s feet. She looks Ilya squarely in the eye. “Your best friend is Cliff Marleau. I think that’s sadder.”

God, Shane loves her so much, he thinks he might explode from it.

Ilya looks between them, scandalized, and Sid doesn’t even gloat; just stands and skips away, back toward the water.

“She is a much better chirper than you, Hollander.” Ilya’s hand inches closer to his.

“Trust me, I know.” He glances down at their hands, close enough to touch; grazes Ilya’s thumb with his own. He feels the words sizzling under his skin; fears that he might just say them, artless and windswept, here in this impossible place. “What room are you in?”

You’re safe here, Shane. With us. I wish I could fix the world, I wish I could—

Mom, I know. I know.

I can’t give you a kinder world. But you have us, okay? You and your person. You’re safe here.

And maybe it’s not enough; maybe they will still be stranded in this futureless limbo. But it’s not nothing, either – right? To be known in the light. Maybe it’s a way to start. Run the drill before the play.

“Sid. Come on,” he calls, and gathers the shells into his pockets. She skips to his side and they walk up the beach, and she tells him about tiny crabs that burrow in the sand, and purple sand dollars with a thousand crawling legs.

He helps her rinse the shells in the sink and lay them out to dry on towels strewn across the hotel room floor. She points out the shiny spiraling one and the one with leopard-print spots, and a pretty, pearly white one with a shock of orange striped through.

They brush their teeth side by side, making a game of elbowing one another, then he sees her settled into the farthest bed closest to the window with her book propped open. He sits down on the edge of her bed. “This weekend was good, right? You’re good?”

“Yeah. Ilya’s cool.”

“Cool? That’s a rave review.”

“I like him, I mean.” She shrugs, a rustle of sheets. “He’s funny.”

“Yeah. He is.” Shane smooths the comforter around her shoulders. “Hey, do you really want to be an actuary?”

Sidney shrugs again. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I kind of want to be everything.”

And that – well. That’s his whole job, Shane is pretty sure. Making sure she can be anything and everything she wants to be; giving her a future that’s safe and bright and entirely hers. Fighting for that future, if he has to. And he’s scared, so scared, that he’s about to walk into room 1217 and throw a grenade into their shared life without so much as a plan to take cover.

“I’m going to go talk to Ilya, alright? I have my phone. I’ll be just down the hall if you need me.”

“Okay.” She settles back into her pillow. “Light on for reading, please.”

“Not too late, yeah? Honour system.” Shane brushes the hair out of her face and kisses her forehead. “Good night. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

He’s had years of practice now; words that once felt like they couldn’t belong to him, now a native language. He’s learned, same as on the ice: time, repetition, perseverance until the thing that seemed impossible is as natural as breath. 

He waits for a pair of Vancouver guys to clear out of the hallway and into the elevator; finds 1217 and texts Ilya.

Here.

He sits on the end of the bed; Ilya hesitates at the door, then sits down next to him, a chasmic centimetre of space separating their legs. Shane looks down at the bland static pattern of the carpet; how many carpets like this, over the years, nondescript rooms in uninteresting cities, where they learned to speak the language of each other’s bodies?

“I’m sorry,” he says to the carpet. He can’t take it anymore; closes the gap, nudges his leg against Ilya’s. “I’m sorry I left like that.”

He feels Ilya nod beside him. “I’m sorry I asked. I know—I understand. Why you did not want us to meet.”

“No, Ilya.” Shane is shaking his head because that’s all wrong, so completely backwards. “I did want that. So much, it scared me. That’s why I ran.”

The carpet in Toronto had been a darker colour, Shane thinks. He remembers every room since then. Ilya has been there for all of it, hasn’t he? From a time when Shane barely even saw her and didn’t have the vocabulary to understand that he missed her – but Ilya helped him find the words. A scratched game in Atlanta, summers at the cottage, their first impossible year together in a home they would grow into over time. Every How is your Sidney?, from the one person who could make him feel second-best, a challenger, an equal, who cared to know his daughter’s name.

He turns to meet Ilya’s eyes. “It’s not just me, right?”

“Not just you what?”

“You feel it, too, don’t you?”

“Feel what?”

Shane shifts off the bed, hooks a leg across Ilya’s lap, takes his face in his hands like something to be protected. He is scared and he is brave. 

This time, Shane can be the one to knock.

“I love you.” Steals a kiss, careful and soft and important. “I love you. I’m in love with you.”

“Fuck, Hollander.” Ilya’s breath tattoos whispered Russian syllables into the skin of Shane’s neck, his jaw, until his lips find Shane’s and they kiss, deep and unhurried and golden-bright. His voice breaks: “I love you, too.”

Foreheads touching, Shane exhales a shaky breath. He wraps his arms tight around Ilya’s neck, pulls his body as close as he can, and Ilya’s arms wind around him, all that strength and muscle and warmth. “Fuck, Ilya. What the fuck are we supposed to do?”

They hold each other for a long time, anchored in place. Intertwined.

---------------

Ilya thinks often of genetics. Of the rot in his father’s brain; of the darkness in his mother’s. Over the summer, after a grim day spent descending into a vortex of unsettlingly circular conversations with his father, he’d gone out to some flashy new taqueria to pick up dinner; not that Mexican food in Moscow was especially interesting or authentic, but it couldn’t be worse than the Chipotle he and Marly regularly house while playing Call of Duty. Ilya laid out the spread on the same kitchen table where his Mama used to chop potatoes and onions while he did homework; just as Alexei came downstairs with Masha on his hip. “None of the green stuff,” he said tersely. “Tastes like soap.” And of all the differences between them, this is what made Ilya wonder, then, how he and his brother could be genetically related, really, at all. 

Sidney Hollander is nothing and everything like her father. Measured, but not shy; thinks before she speaks. Generous with her laughter. Intelligent; candid; funny. Creative in a way that’s foreign to Ilya, likely foreign to Shane, too – but then, Ilya has seen Shane Hollander score goals off a puck that’s nowhere near him, plays that unfold chess-like in his unbelievable mind, twelve moves ahead of everyone else; and is that not, in a way, like looking at a piece of fabric and seeing the dress it can become?

Sidney is a prism, Ilya thinks; Shane is light refracted through her in a thousand different ways. And how can you not love the prism, when you love the light?

And love, Ilya does. I love you, into the bend of Shane’s knee, the V of his abdomen, the slope of his neck. Я тебя люблю, against his lips, his shoulder, the curved spot behind his ear as he comes. He wonders if the words will burrow into Shane’s skin and leave behind little marks; freckles, as innumerable as the ways Ilya loves and loves and loves.

Shane Hollander loves me. He wants to shrink to Sidney’s size and huddle with her under a blanket fort and kick his feet in the air and giggle with her, exchanging secrets the way children do. He loves me. He loves me!

Neither one of them can seem to keep their hands still; Ilya traces his thumb in circles on the broad plane of Shane’s thigh; Shane trails his index finger along the fortune-telling lines of Ilya’s palm. Like they are exploring, discovering one another anew; the words between them, a baptism. It’s a fairy-tale elation matched by grim reality, as they lie together after, facing one another, noses so close the air one breathes out is inhaled by the other, as if they share a set of lungs. 

Stravinsky, Ilya decides; Firebird suite, the khorovod dance; a heart-swell of rich, wine-dark strings. The movement ends with a wavering tremolo, French horn and oboe in tenuous call-and-response. Uncertain of what comes next.

“Will you meet my family?” Shane asks. “Maybe when there’s time, in the summer?”

“I will meet whoever you want, Shane.”

“You should meet Jessica, too. If you’re going to be in Sid’s life. If we’re, you know—dating. Boyfriends. Whatever.”

“Boyfriends?”

“I mean, I think so, right? Probably?”

Ilya becomes aware of the cold metal of his mother’s cross, squeezed between the mattress and the tilt of his chest, over the exact spot where his heart feels like it might spontaneously combust. “You really want this? You are sure?”

Brown eyes meet his, steady and deep. “Do you want this?”

It defies logic, the want that crawls through Ilya’s skin, his chest, his throat. To love Shane is to love alongside him; this entire other soul that burns bright in Shane’s life, more important than the both of them. Ilya knows what Shane is asking, what Shane is trusting him with. He doesn’t deserve that trust, every voice inside him screams. He shouldn’t; he shouldn’t.

But maybe, he can learn. Maybe he can earn it.

Ilya nods, a small, halting motion against the pillow; presses his thumb into the flesh of Shane’s upper leg; terra firma. “I want.”

Shane swallows; nods. Blinks back the shine from his eyes. “Does it ever make you mad? Like, really fucking furious?”

“What does?”

“I don’t know. The world, the league. Everything.” Shane takes Ilya’s hand in both of his, lifts his palm close to his face as if to examine it for answers. “I just want my kid to have, like, an easy, normal, ordinary life. Why is that so hard to give her?” 

“Her life was never ordinary.”

“Why’s that?”

Ilya smiles. “You are Shane Hollander. As long as you are her dad, her life will be extra-ordinary.”

“You mean extraordinary?”

“So you agree. You are extraordinary.”

“Fuck off. You tricked me.”

“You can’t stop yourself correcting me. Very annoying.”

“Shut up. You love me.” And a grin breaks across Shane’s face like a sunrise, like realizing he can say that is a dizzying truth that will dawn on them both again and again.

“I love you,” Ilya affirms, because he can, because he wants to.

“I love you,” Shane echoes. “Fuck. This is going to be so difficult, Ilya. I don’t know how we fix it. I don’t know how to make it easier.”

“Shane—We are okay. We figure this out together, yes?”

Shane nods. “I’m still angry.”

“I know.”

“It isn’t fair.” He brings Ilya’s hand to his lips and kisses his palm. Breathes out the words, almost a whisper: “You would be such a good dad.”

---------------

Lily: does your Sidney have a cellphone? Can I text her?

Jane: She’s 9. Her phone is for emergencies only

Lily: Ok. Send her this please

Lily: [Link: YouTube: The Fascinating World of Ants – BBC Planet Earth]

Jane: Are you going to do this a lot?

Lily: probably

Jane: fine hang on

---------------

Group Chat: Me, Jane💕, Solnyshko☀️

Lily: [Link: YouTube: The Fascinating World of Ants – BBC Planet Earth]

---------------

Lily: [Link: YouTube: MAKE IT WORK – Best Looks Compilation – Project Runway Season 15]

---------------

Solnyshko: [Attachment: Photo]

Solnyshko: This is Richard

Lily: hello Richard

---------------

SMS: Me, Jane💕

Lily: what the fuck is Richard?

---------------

A 2-1 loss in Philadelphia has Shane feeling like a stranger in his skin. The likelihood of a Metros three-peat is looking bleaker every day – other teams have come raring out the gates to make sure Montreal doesn’t defend; something must be in the water in New York, Jesus – but Shane is far from resigned about it. He's determined they’ll still eke out a playoff spot, and from there, Shane is willing to fight for it.

The team flight in the morning was delayed due to weather conditions. He was supposed to get home midday, pick Sid up from school and take her to fencing. Instead, Véro covered the afternoon, and Shane trudges into the Westmount house just before dinnertime, exhausted and annoyed.

He texted Ilya from the grey terminal, cold despite a lackluster effort from the heating vents. Airports suck. A minute later, he received back a close-up selfie of the top half of Ilya’s face, eyes crossed comically, fluorescent lights of what must have been Washington-Dulles blurry-bright above him.

Hayden slouched into the seat next to Shane. “You’re all smiley. Texting Lily?”

And, like, why the hell not. “Yes, Hayden. I am texting Lily.”

“Fucking A, man. You guys made it official?”

“We made it official.”

“Hell yes.” Hayden punched him in the shoulder, and Shane winced, because a Philadelphia D-man had decided that particular shoulder could use rearranging last night. He’ll be clocking extra hours with the trainer for the next two weeks, at least. “Fuck. Shit, sorry, man. But also—fucking hell yes. Congrats, dude.”

“Thanks, Hayd.”

“Seriously. Invite her to dinner with me and Jacks, yeah? Next time she’s in town.”

And it was a small thing, really, but Shane felt a jolt of that anger, then: the injustice of it all. If Ilya were in fact Lily, then yeah, she could come to dinner at the Pikes’ and all would be swell. The thought curdled in Shane’s chest, heavy and wrong.

Sid is at the kitchen table doing something for school that involves a colourful worksheet and a protractor; looks up when Shane steps through from the foyer, and he soaks in a warming dose of her smile. He hates that he’s missed the afternoon they had planned; that hockey and a snowstorm can so readily devour the time he tries so hard to carve out with her. He still hasn’t been to a fencing practice.

Véro has already heated whatever the chef lined up, orzo and salmon and asparagus with a lemony sauce. She stays for dinner, reviews the next week’s calendar with Shane before leaving, and reminds him that Yasmin brought in the mail; it’s on his desk.

His business mail is routed through his mom’s office, fan mail goes through Farah, and he has a PA that handles stuff like hydro bills, so he doesn’t really get mail sent to his home all that often. Which is why it’s unusual that a large padded envelope waits for him on his desk; it’s addressed to Sidney, with a Boston poststamp.

He brings it upstairs to her bedroom, where she’s reading in bed with Richard curled up on her shoulder. “Hey. I’m sorry about today. How was fencing?”

She sits up, setting her book facedown in her lap. The change in elevation prompts Richard to seek higher ground, and he crawls slow, alien steps up the slope of her arm. “It was good. We’re doing footwork.”

He gently lobs the package onto the foot of her bed. “I think Ilya sent you something.”

“What is it?” She tears carefully at the end of the envelope, but her small fingers can’t cut through the adhesive, so he sits down beside her on the bed and helps wrest it open. She pulls out a folded, silky swath of fabric, white and black and gold; shakes it out to find a button-down shirt Shane is fairly certain he’s seen Ilya papped wearing at Boston clubs, splashed with a huge, gaudy leopard-pelt design. 

“Whoa,” Sid admires, running a hand down the boldly patterned sleeves. “Cool.”

Shane runs a quick calculation; Ilya had been stuck in the same snowstorm, but he ought to have made it home by now. “Should we call him?”

Ilya answers the Facetime from the sofa in his living room, Raiders hoodie, face lit up with the faraway flash of a muted TV. “Hello, Hollanders.”

“Thank you for the shirt,” Sidney tells him, holding it up to the camera.

“Ah, good, it arrived.” He smiles softly. “You can upcycle this, yes? I think you will make something very interesting with it.”

She considers; fiddles with the collar and the shoulder seam. “Maybe, like—this part can be a belt.”

“Mm, good idea. I see the vision.”

They brainstorm the design for a bit, and Sid lifts Richard onto her fingers and brings him close to the camera, and Ilya carries on a one-sided conversation with the lizard, asking about his day, nodding thoughtfully at imaginary responses, and the whole thing is so endearing Shane feels his heart squeeze.

Shane told his parents about Ilya, last time he brought Sidney to Ottawa; Boston-Philadelphia playing muted on the TV in the living room while Sid performed a fashion show of her latest creations. Ilya scored a sickening no-look goal in the third period, and Shane just, couldn’t not say it.

“That’s my person. Ilya – Rozanov? He’s my boyfriend.”

And, like. His mom had needed a minute to process – “You said—Shane. Since rookie season?” – but then his dad had put a hand on her shoulder, the reassuring weight of it, and his mom just nodded. “Okay. Okay. And he loves you? You love him?”

Easiest question Shane’s ever been asked. “I think he’s probably the love of my life.”

What they’re doing is stupid. Like, staggeringly so. Nothing has changed since Ilya first asked on his sofa in Boston; everything that could go wrong remains a looming threat. It’s not fair to Sidney most of all, who’s protecting their secret not because he asked – he hasn’t; he won’t – but because she understands in a way that kind of breaks him, that she knows these things about the world.

He nudges Sidney’s shoulder. “Hey. It’s almost nine. Go brush your teeth?”

“Good night, Ilya.”

“Good night, Солнышко.”

“What does that mean?” Shane asks as Sid skips down the hall. He leaves her room and enters his own, flopping backward onto the bed. God, he’s so fucking tired.

“It is like, ah, little sun. Like, sunshine.”

Shane is too tired to really pay attention to what his own face is doing, but he’s pretty sure he’s smiling. “I love you,” he says. Because, like, how can he say anything else, to that?

---------------

Okay, so, the shoulder thing, it turns out, is a bigger deal than Shane had thought. Scans are clean but Mathieu the trainer keeps saying, “Huh,” in their sessions, and then fucking Matti Jalo who’s been traded to the Admirals for all of five seconds makes it his personal mission to prevent Shane from even looking at the puck, and now Shane is out on IR for a week with a sling and a strict icing regimen.

The good news is, Sidney’s first fencing tournament is on Saturday, and he would have missed it for a roadie in Columbus. She’s overly talkative at breakfast, a bundle of movement, knees bouncing; nervous, Shane thinks. He remembers being nervous for his first real hockey game, after he’d been moved out of Timbits and into a proper development league, the youngest and smallest on his team; how he’d begged his mom not to go, even though he secretly wanted to, even though every part of him was itching to get on the ice, because he feared so badly that he’d lose, and his coach would be mad, and his teammates would hate him, and his mom would be disappointed. But she was having none of it; herded him into the car with the reminder, “It’s hockey, Shane. You love it.”

Sidney is braver than he ever was. She’s first into the car – “Dad, hurry up!” – and bounding from the parking lot into the rec centre with a steeled determination to her gait. She looks badass in her breeches and jacket, hair in a neat French braid he’s rather proud to have mastered, mask tucked under her arm as she sits in the bleachers next to Sophie, nodding along to a pep talk from her coach.

He finds Jess and his parents, already in the stands. As the host of a moderately popular Canadian space-science webseries, it’s Jessica today who’s fielding a small queue for autographs. She seems to find this mostly amusing. She goes into the Radio-Canada offices now to film, in a little studio with a greenscreen. Shane can see his mom’s wheels turning, the question unasked on her lips: Jessica, sweetie, do you have an agent?

He sits next to Jess and nudges his knee against hers, and thinks of the day he and Sid fought about hockey and fencing and lying, and how she told him that fencing makes her feel powerful. He’s studied the rules of épée, understands the gist of what is happening, but as the competition begins he mostly is absorbed in just watching her move, advance and retreat and parry, calculated footwork and an effusive confidence through the nerves. Jess grabs his hand and squeezes, and he thinks she must see it, too. That this is where their kid belongs.

He suddenly wants, needs, for Ilya to know this about her. He’s in Dallas today, Arizona tomorrow. They won’t see each other until the end of the month, and Shane aches with it. He records her bout against a girl from the Drummondville club; texts it to him and hopes he can see what Shane sees so clearly.

Sidney seeds well after the pool bouts, then she’s up against a girl from the Laval club in the direct elimination bracket, and they’re evenly paced at first, but Laval is first to fifteen touches, and like that, it’s over. Sidney lost; the tournament goes on without her. She pulls off her mask and shakes hands with Laval, and something angular and wrong crashes over her face, and – oh. Oh fuck. She’s crying.

Shane unlaces his hand from Jessica’s. “I got this.” Follows after her into the back hallway of the gym. Because he knows this exact feeling; it stirs in his chest like a sense-memory, small and alone in a locker room after listening to his coach enumerate all the ways he’d failed, and finding his mom in the parking lot, falling into her waiting arms. “You’ll win the next one. I know you will.”

But that’s not what he wants Sid to hear, now. That’s not what would have helped. And he knows his mom was only ever supportive and encouraging, but the next one doesn’t matter. This one matters, and it feels like shit, and Sidney is crying because of it, and—

“Hey. Hey.” He rounds the corner and finds her leaning against the concrete wall, shaking. “Come here.” He wraps his good arm around her shoulders and pulls her close, and she cries into the front of his shirt, and he holds her and holds her and loves her and loves her.

“I really wanted to win,” she mumbles against him.

He squeezes harder. “I know. I’m so proud of you.”

“You’re just supposed to say that.”

“No—hey. Sid, hey, listen.” He pulls away from the embrace, settles his hand on her shoulder, and waits for her to look at him. “I am proud of you, like, one-hundred percent of the time. You win, I’m proud. You lose, I’m proud.” He realizes, as he says it, that no one ever said that to him as a kid. His parents felt it, he’s sure in his bones; but they never said it.

She shakes her head, looks down at her feet. “Why would you be proud of losing?”

“Sid, I’m proud of you for, like, tying your shoes and, I don’t know. Eating breakfast. Everything you do. You could be the worst fencer in all of Canada and I’ll still say it. Okay? I need—hey, look at me. I sort of need you to believe me here. Do you?”

“I guess.” She crinkles her nose. “So you’d be proud of me if I did tax fraud?”

God, this kid. “Jiji might have a thing or two to say.”

She sniffles, lets half a laugh escape through her tears. “Can we go watch Sophie now?”

“Yeah, of course.” He gathers her into one more hug. “There’s a whole cheering section waiting for you. They’re proud of you, too, you know.”

They walk back down the hall, and he gently hip-checks into her side, and she laughs and shoulder-checks him back, and then they’re racing each other, and he lets her speed ahead, so she can feel the thrill of a win today.

---------------

Jane: [Attachment: Video]

Lily: Wow Shane

Lily: She is incredible

Lily: Please tell her this for me

Jane: I will

---------------

Group Chat: Me, Jane💕, Solnyshko☀️

Lily: [Link: YouTube: TOP 15 EPIC FENCING FAILS – You won’t believe #1!]

Solnyshko: 😂

---------------

Ilya scores a hat trick the day his father dies.

Boston wins and there’s no time to see Shane after; team has a late flight out to Nashville; but then it’s Alexei on the phone, and Ilya blinks, dazed, and now he’s in Moscow, and it’s like his field of vision has one of those Instagram filters superimposed, cool tones dimly lit. He left so quickly he didn’t grab his set of keys for the Moscow house, and Alexei has to let him in from the doorstep like a stranger, and they just nod at one another and move past each other silently, and it will be another twelve hours before either of them says a word.

He texted Shane during his layover in Dubai, just, My father died, then turned off his phone because the team chat was blowing up with condolences and ESPN had reached out for comment. 

He scrolls through his missed messages now, Sveta, Connors, Marly, Sveta, Alexei, Desjardins, Sasha, Sergei Vetrov, his agent, Sveta again. It reminds him – when they were twelve, the both of them, she wouldn’t leave him the fuck alone. After the funeral. She’d trailed him around at school and at the rink like one of those wooden toy horses on a string, sometimes silent, sometimes peppering him with hockey statistics or bellyaching about schoolwork. He loves her so much.

He scrolls and scrolls until My father died and Shit Ilya and I’m so sorry and Can I call you? Alexei is out who-knows-where, his wife and kid asleep, and Polina is wherever the fuck Polina goes. It’s half past ten, which means there’s a nice, cheerful kitchen in Montreal, Canada where Sidney Hollander has just gotten home from school and is eating a snack she likes and doing her homework and telling her father about her day. A father who sees her, who cares to know her; who has sacrificed to love her.

His thumb hovers over the dial button, but he doesn’t call. Doesn’t usher stormclouds into their happy kitchen. I am okay, he types instead, a reassurance and a lie. I will call later. He’s not sure; that might be a lie, too. I love you. That, at least, is true.

But then the funeral, and the fight, and the warming burn of vodka in his throat. It’s frigid cold, and he’s been walking – anywhere, nowhere – it’s an obscene hour by now; he ducks into a tunnelled walkway and finds himself dialing Shane. And when Shane invites him to speak in Russian, offers to listen, just, listen – all the words he’s ever smothered with the weight of silence, now come pouring out like ceaseless, churning arpeggios. Moonlight Sonata; another sad song his mother had always liked, listening on warm bright days as if to challenge the sun itself to a fight.

“I give them everything, but I feel fucking empty. And I’m scared, Shane. Scared that I cannot give enough to you, don’t have enough left in me to give to you. To your daughter.” He exhales; swallows back a pressurized feeling that builds in his chest. “I never learned how. I never had a father who could show me.”

The world beyond the tunnel is a narrow, dark place; a tableau. A police car drives by, red-blue lights. “And that’s the worst fucking part of all of this,” he says into the cold air, to a man he loves but cannot bear to make understand. “I care about her more than I have any right to. I do not know. It’s stupid. It’s—I’ve met her one fucking time and think I can be something to her? How selfish am I, to think this? How can I know that I am not like him—that I won't hurt her?”

“But I see what you’ve built together, how hard you’ve worked, and I think, I want this, too.” He sinks lower against the concrete wall, looks out into the night that’s actually morning, a liminal time. “I want all of it. I want—I don’t know. A house. A life. Maybe I am no better than all of them, always asking for more. I want everything we cannot have, and I don’t know what to do about it.” 

He presses the phone harder against his ear, as if that can bring Shane closer. “Okay. I’m done.”

“Hey, um. So, I told Sid I’d call her at nine to say goodnight.”

“Oh, right. You are in Carolina, yes? I can go. Thank you for listening.”

“No, Ilya, I was going to say—do you want to call with me?”

Ilya finds himself laughing, a strange, harsh sound after a strange, harsh day. “Okay. Yes, okay.”

Shane switches the call to Facetime, and Ilya is glad to see his pretty face, his freckles, even in a grey shadowed stairwell. “Hey,” Shane says, a quiet smile on his lips.

“Hey,” Ilya says back. They watch each other silently until a third square blinks onto the screen.

“Hi, Dad. Hi, Ilya.” She is tucked into bed, someplace different than when they last spoke. Her mother’s place, maybe. “I’m sorry about your dad.”

“Thank you, Солнышко.”

“What’s Russia like?”

So many things he could say; so many awful, stinging parts of this place that he never wants to return to.

Instead, he thinks of the park by the grocery store where he first learned to skate. The zoo where he used to take his niece in the summers when she was small. The babushka who sells bright flowers from a rickety cart next to the cemetery where his Mama is buried. “It is cold today,” he begins. “But you should see Moscow in the summer. So beautiful. There is a record store, near the rink where I played hockey when I was your same age. My Mama used to take us there, me and my brother.”

He tells her all the things he wants to remember, and it’s like planting them in soil and watching them take root in the light of her shining sun.

---------------

When Zachary returns from Brazil, Jess is unreachable the whole weekend, which Shane can only presume, from his own long-distance experience, means that she is getting spectacularly and deservedly laid.

Zachary texts him the next week and asks to meet for lunch; he’s flexible, can pick a spot near the Brossard facility if it’s easier. They end up in a quiet café overrun with vine-like houseplants, sipping coffee that’s a little too hot and making small talk about the season. 

“And Brazil was – successful?”

“Very.” Zachary holds out his phone to show a photo album, his research team grinning in vests and bucket hats. “We established a program with Munduruku leaders to restore mycorrhizal networks in deforested soil caused by illegal gold-mining.”

Shane will never not wonder why Jessica ever went out with him in the first place, when they were fifteen and Jess was already ten thousand times smarter than everyone else in their class. Zachary is definitely more her speed. 

And, like, Shane isn’t always the greatest at picking up on cues, but Zachary is nervous, fingers drumming on his coffee mug, and Jessica is so in love with him, and Shane is pretty sure here. “You, uh—Are you proposing to Jessica? Is that why you wanted to meet?”

Zachary looks relieved that Shane was the one to say it. His shoulders relax as he nods. “I know it’s old-fashioned, but I wanted to ask your blessing.”

“I mean, Jess is her own person. You don’t, like, need my blessing.” Then Shane wonders if that sounded too harsh, so he adds hastily, “I do approve, though. Totally.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that. But I meant, I want your blessing to be a stepfather to Sidney.”

“Oh.” Shane feels something strange coil in his stomach, because that word – he hasn’t really thought about it before. Not with that much specificity, anyway, only the vaguest shape of it: Ilya and Sidney, Sidney and Ilya; something Jessica had said before he and Sid left for Tampa, when Shane was a wreck of nerves, doubting whether Ilya would even be willing to look his way. But Jessica is so smart, and knows him so well, and squeezed his arm with a small encouraging smile. The people you love deserve to know each other.

That’s what this is, though, right? That’s what he’s asking of Ilya. Love me, and love my kid. Be a family with us. Only, there are no rings or paperwork because, how could there be? How could that even be possible? And maybe the feeling in Shane’s stomach as Zachary looks across at him hopefully, is jealousy, convoluted and bitter, at what Zachary can ask in broad daylight, while Shane is left to dream in the shadows.

“I mean, you care about her, right?”

“A great deal,” Zachary says. “She’s an amazing kid. I’m proud to know her.”

Shane has wondered, for a while, if Jess told Zachary about him, or if he figured it out on his own; or maybe Zachary is just that cool and secure in his relationship with Jess, that he’s never once felt threatened by her wealthy, famous ex who’s also the father of her daughter. Whatever it is, Shane finds his guard let down. 

“You should know, my boyfriend is also in Sid’s life. It looks different for us, obviously, but. He cares about her, too.”

Zachary nods thoughtfully, and Shane sees his eyes processing this information with quiet, steady understanding. Okay, so he didn’t know; he’s just an unbelievably cool guy. “Sidney is really lucky, then. She has so many people who love her.”

And that – yeah. That’s about right. 

“Consider yourself blessed,” Shane announces, and raises his coffee cup in salute. Zachary returns the toast, and tells Shane how he plans to ask Jessica, and Shane listens and nods and tries not to think about impossible things.

---------------

Смех без причины – признак дурачины. He heard this growing up; something his father would say on his Mama’s good days, when she’d grin and glow in the kitchen in her long pretty skirt with the flowers on it, chuckling to herself over a boiling pot on the stove while the frantic, frolicking strings of the Overture to Руслан и Людмила whirled from the record player.

Laughter for no reason is the sign of a fool.

Ilya feels like a fool, now, smiling silly as Shane reads his deke – fucking of course he does; loses the puck and still he’s smiling as he pivots to chase it back. It’s one of those games where he feels a fire lit within him, kindled by the heat of Shane’s presence across the ice. They trade goals like it’s just the two of them, each hungry to beat the other in the clawing, dire way they always are, and Ilya wonders if it is possible to outlove someone, to win at loving, because he wants to beat Shane at this, too.

The lines change and Ilya joins Marly on the bench, and he must still be grinning because Marly elbows him. “Seeing Jane tonight?”

“I am,” Ilya tells him, breathless from his shift and too happy to lie about it. It’s not even a hookup tonight; just dinner with Shane and Sidney. Something so ordinary Ilya fears it’s a trick.

There’s some commotion happening in the crowd across the ice, the area where the home team WAGs usually sit, above the sin bin. Some people in neon yellow shirts moving through the rows. Now there’s noise at the Metros’ bench, and Ilya looks to find Shane, just off his own shift, tearing off his helmet and hurrying to the tunnel. What the fuck.

“What is happening?” he asks Desjardins.

“Beats me.”

The lines change again and Ilya is back on the ice but Shane isn’t, and he tries to keep his heart rate normal and play the fucking game, but something is wrong, seriously wrong, because there’s really only one person in the world Shane would leave for in the middle of a game, and Ilya is suddenly very, very certain that something bad has happened to Sidney Hollander.

Is Sidney ok? he texts at intermission before the third.

He calls. No answer.

He thinks about what it is like to find someone you love, hurt and unmoving on the ground.

The game ends 5-2 Boston because Montreal’s lines are a mess without Shane and because Ilya is playing scared and angry, letting instinct take over, taking high-risk shots Desjardins will chew him out over later because he’d had an open lane to pass. There’s still no response to his text, no answer when he calls, just the voicemail greeting that Shane never bothered to change from the default robo-voice, which Ilya would find endearingly boring if he weren’t so freaked out. 

He texts Andropov, Where did Hollander go?

They just told us family emergency.

Fucking—useless. Fucking fucking fuck.

“Whoa. Hey.” Marly is behind him, eyebrows raised. “You alright, Roz?”

“I’m fine.” He strips off his base layer and crumples it into a ball that he slams to the ground.

“Sure you are.” And Marly knows him; seven years on the same line, how could he not? “Is it Jane?”

Ilya can’t look at him; looks everywhere else, the floor, the ceiling, Carmy’s fucked-up back tattoo that spells his own name wrong. “She, ah—there was an emergency. I haven’t heard from her. I am worried.”

“Shit, man. That’s brutal.” Marly claps an arm around his back. “I’m sure she’s fine. Is there someone you could call? Her family or someone?”

And there’s no one – there’s no one. Because who the fuck is Ilya to Shane Hollander in an emergency? To Sidney? He’s a figment; a myth. A fake name in Shane’s cellphone. He’s not entitled to feel this way; like the earth has dropped out from beneath his feet, and he’s falling and falling and falling and there’s nothing there to catch him.

The last time he’d felt like this—

Marly doesn’t go out drinking with the others; just changes into sweats and puts on The Princess Diaries, casting occasional concerned glances at Ilya where he lies flat on his back in the other bed, eyes closed, heart pounding, imagining the worst.

Finally, finally, his phone rings. Ilya shoots out of bed, into the washroom; closes the door and sinks down to the cold tiled floor.

“Shane. She is okay?”

“Yes. Yeah, she will be.” And Ilya feels his entire respiratory system return to his body like the first breath after diving underwater. “She had an allergic reaction. Um, anaphylaxis. It was pretty severe.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. Fuck.” A strangled laugh. “Fuck, Ilya, I kind of really want you here, but they’re not allowing—It’s family only, this time of night.”

Family only; a bitter taste to those words. “In the morning, I can come. Yes? First thing.”

“Don’t you have a flight?”

“Not until eleven.” There’s always a deadline with them. He thinks, deliriously, of asking Desjardins to scratch him for the home game tomorrow night. Sorry, Coach, my rival’s kid is in the hospital. You know how it is. Nothing about what they’ve embarked on makes any sense outside of the bubble they’ve constructed.

“Okay,” Shane says finally. “Yes, please. I’ll text you where to find us.”

“She is okay, really? Doctors say this?”

“She is really, really okay.” Shane exhales a shaky breath. “I was so fucking scared, Ilya.”

“I know.” And because he can think of nothing else to say: “I love you.”

He spends the night wide awake, feeling as though strapped to the turntable of his Mama’s record player, endless circles in the dizzying dark of the room.

He thinks of Masha, his niece, and all the ways he could never save her; the future she may never escape, women married off to cruel men; even with the trust money, a grim trap of generations.

He thinks of Sidney Hollander learning to skate for the first time, pixels on a phone screen, fast like her papa.

He thinks, if something ever happened to Shane – his heart hitches, bile in his throat; but people die; people die, they do, all the time, every day – and if. If. He would never know Sidney’s future, would he? She would grow and become; win her fencing medals, get her bug degree, show at Paris Fashion Week, and maybe she would remember meeting Ilya Rozanov at a hotel bar in Tampa one time, but. Ilya would be left behind to grieve and to wonder, completely alone, having lost something unnameable that was never truly his.

All the ways he’s known her, needling Shane for hard-fought glimpses, texted photos, a thank-you card on his fridge; before ever even meeting her, when care wore the cloak of curiosity; before he understood that to care for Shane, to love him, is to love with him, too. Shane was brave enough to decide that it would be less agonizing to survive this impossibility together than apart. Ilya isn’t sure that’s true. But if there’s one thing Shane Hollander loves to do, it’s win; and if there’s one thing Ilya loves to do, it’s beat Shane Hollander.

Shane isn’t the only one in this relationship who can make a fucking spreadsheet.

He Googles, MLH teams Canada current cap space. 

---------------

There are thirty concession stands at Centre Bell, of which twenty-four operate deep fryers. Shane would learn this in the coming weeks from his mom, a lawyer, and inspectors from MAPAQ and CFIA. 

He and Jess and Sidney get home from her forty-eight hour observation hold, and they just kind of stand there in the kitchen of the Westmount house, the silence thick around them – no monitors beeping, no tinny announcements beckoning Dr. So-and-So to Cardiology – and then Shane is crouching down, “Can I have a hug please?”, and Sidney just nods and throws her arms around his neck, and she fits so exactly inside the shell of his body that he thinks maybe the whole point of being a hockey player, the training, the bulking, is to be able to protect her.

“Dad, are you done yet?”

“No, not yet. Maybe never.”

She rolls her eyes against his neck, and he only squeezes tighter.

There are thirty concession stands at Centre Bell, of which twenty-four operate deep fryers. Each deep frying station uses sixteen litres of vegetable oil per day of operation. A supplier out of Terrebonne trucks in pails of oil in sixteen-litre quantities, three pallets of sixty-four pails delivered weekly. That’s 3,072 litres of oil. And in all of that, one pail – one – was contaminated with unrefined peanut oil.

It was Jackie Pike, fully five months pregnant, who saved Sidney’s life, actually; quickest to find the EpiPen in Sidney’s bag, and acted without hesitation. Shane isn’t sure how to thank her for the enormity of that.

She looked so small, hooked up to an IV dispensing bronchiodilators and antihistamines, tubing coiled from her arm, monitors and machines checking her oxygen. He hated watching her get stuck with the needle, even though she was brave the whole time and didn’t even flinch.

There was an entire four-minute period during which he didn’t know for sure if she was even alive, just McCann tapping his shoulder and saying something about his daughter and paramedics and then racing to the locker room and where the fuck were his shoes, and Jessica frantic on the phone and an ambulance with sirens and lights, the whole nine yards. 

The last time this happened, Shane had been across the continent, and the reaction had been smaller, and his parents had handled the scary part; and even then, his entire heart had leapt out of his body. This time, it felt like he was disintegrating to dust, incorporeal, helpless, reaching out with hands made of air and grains of sand, grasping for anything to hold onto, but it all kept slipping away. He had this roiling, primal thought in those four minutes, maybe the first time he’s ever considered a higher power: Why can’t it be me instead?

And he was alone. Jess and Zachary were at UCalgary for a conference; the last flight of the evening had already boarded; they booked onto the next one, first thing. His parents were on that fucking Mexico trip that he had paid for, postponed from February because of a weather cancellation. He listened to his dad’s steady voice over the phone tell him that everything would be okay, trust the doctors, just breathe, Shane, while Sidney slept fitfully, her neck and arms still red-swollen with hives.

He didn’t get any sleep; just sat upright in a chair by her bed, listening to the rise and fall of her lungs. Ilya texted every hour to check in. Shane wished he could hold Ilya’s hand.

He called the front office to request a scratch for the next two games. Texted Véro to cancel her next overnight. Emailed the reptile guy to please stop by and feed Richard. His PA could have done all these things, but Shane liked the useful feeling of it. Something he could actually do when there was nothing, really, that he could do at all.

The hives looked much better in the morning, faded pink, and her breathing was steady and even, and Shane pulled his chair up close to her bed so they could play gin rummy with the deck of cards he’d bought at the little shop downstairs. That’s how Ilya found them when he tapped lightly on the door and pushed it open, hesitant, like he was scared of what he might find.

“Hi, Солнышко,” he said softly, standing close to the wall. “I am very glad you are okay.”

“Thanks,” she said. Her voice was tired. “Wanna play?”

Ilya looked to Shane for permission, and, like. It might not have been doing any favours for the already-flimsy story of Boston’s concerned captain checking on his rival in a moment of emergency, but Shane found that his sense of fear had totally recalibrated, after last night. Seven years of secrecy and panic paled compared to his daughter waking from rough-edged sleep in the septic-smelling dark of the hospital room to tell him, shaking, I was scared, Dad. I couldn’t breathe.

Wordlessly, Shane nodded; Ilya dragged an empty chair over next to Shane’s, and sat down while Sidney dealt him in with that deliberate way she has, counting the cards to herself with a small, silent movement of her lips.

She took charge of explaining the rules, and Ilya made all these dopey mistakes and pretended not to understand just so she could correct him with exasperated authority, and at first they were playing for fun, but of course it became a competition, best of five, best of seven, then they were on their ninth round and Sidney was winning which Shane was actually sort of grouchy about, and Sidney was laughing triumphantly and Ilya was grinning giddy at the way Shane grumbled, “Best of eleven?”

“Ilya,” Sidney said as she dealt the tenth round, “What do you do in the summer?”

“You mean, besides winning the Cup?”

Shane shoved his foot into Ilya’s shin, because he couldn’t say fuck off, asshole in front of his kid, which was very inconvenient and maybe is something Shane should have considered before deciding to date Ilya Rozanov. 

“You should come to our cottage,” Sidney continued, unbothered. “It’s so pretty there. It’s like, our favourite place in the world. We play gin rummy all the time and I always beat Dad. He hates it.”

Ilya looked to Shane, eyes searching, and all Shane could think was that his daughter is safe, she’s safe, she’s fine, she’s happy, she’s playing sharks and frogs with Ilya in the glittering lake.

“You should,” Shane said, and tapped his foot against Ilya’s.

“Okay,” Ilya said. “Yes. Okay.”

And Shane thought: Ilya is his and Ilya is here, after a night spent maybe almost as frightened as Shane had been. Because they’re tied together now; because Sidney is a sun around which they both revolve. And there are no clear answers, no next steps besides an inevitable flight to Boston-Logan and the ethereal promise of a summer by the lake. And it’s stupid and reckless and sometimes it hurts, but his daughter first taught him how to say I love you and now he can’t stop.

He can’t fucking stop.

Sidney squirms in his arms now, “Dad, let me go, I’m hungry,” and he finally releases her to follow Jess into the kitchen, and they make heaping bowlfuls of buttered elbow noodles, and Jess frizzles some garlic in a skillet to sprinkle on top because apparently she’s a gourmet chef all of a sudden. They eat in the living room huddled close under a blanket, watching A Bug’s Life, and Jessica says, “This is an allegory about capitalism,” and Sid just blinks at her and says back, “I think it’s about talking bugs.”

They tuck Sidney into bed together, which they really haven’t done since she was a baby, that first summer when Jess stayed long stretches of overnights at the Hollanders’ house, wary of her own parents, pumping breast milk and holding the small lump of their daughter close to her chest. He hadn’t understood how it was so easy for her to just, love, then, like it was a straightforward thing. 

Jess is set up in one of the guest rooms, but he’s brushing his teeth when she marches into his bedroom with a pillow tucked under her arm and announces, “Slumber party,” before dramatically throwing herself onto his bed. He rolls his eyes and she crinkles her nose and he complains that she’s on his side, can’t she move over, but she stays put defiantly, settling under the covers. He climbs in beside her and turns off the light.

He finds her hand under the comforter, brushes his thumb over the cold metal of the ring that’s there, new. “Did he take you to the planetarium?”

“How’d you know that?”

“He asked for my blessing.”

Jess snorts a soft laugh. “Of course he did.”

“Congratulations,” Shane says, and means it with his whole heart. He squeezes her hand.

Jess rolls closer to him, and he brings an arm around her shoulder and pulls her against his side, and, like. He just floats in this helpless, existential stew, a knot in his throat. Sid is Sid because Jess is Jess, and Jess and Shane are who they are because of Sid, and Sid is here because Shane was an idiot, and he never should have done what he did, but if he hadn’t then there would be no Sid, and that’s not a world he can reconcile with.

“I never, like, apologized to you,” Shane whispers.

Jess stirs in his arms. “For what?”

“I knew. That I was gay.” Shane finds his eyes feeling tight all of a sudden. “I mean, I didn’t know with words, I guess. And I really didn’t want it to be true. But I knew. And I still dated you, and—”

“Shane. Do you think we had sex because you were afraid to be gay?”

“I mean. Yeah.”

Jess laughs, and he can picture the nose crinkle in the dark. “We had sex because I was horny and you were my hot boyfriend.”

And, like. Shane hadn’t really thought of it that way, and it sort of tilts something in his mind. Obviously it was, like, consensual, and took two of them, and Jess had been the one brave enough to unzip his jeans while they were making out on her bed, but, he had been the one to show up at her parents’ house with an entire box of condoms and Nelly Furtado loaded onto his iPod Classic, the afterimage of Tampa’s goalie’s abs imprinted on the panic centre of his brain.

He’s literally played dozens of games against that guy by now. Halvorsen. He was traded to Detroit last year. Shane weirdly thinks maybe he owes the guy a thank-you.

“Do you ever think, what if we hadn’t? Or, if the condom hadn’t broken, or what if you did get an abortion, or—I don’t know. Like, what if we didn’t have her?”

“She’s fine, Shane. She’s safe. We have her.”

“No, I know, I just mean—Everything would be different, wouldn’t it?”

Jess hums, thinking. “Do you remember who I dated before you?”

“Wasn’t it Patrick Lalonde?”

“Sure was.” She tilts her head up to look at Shane, finding his eyes in the faint greyscale light cast by the bedroom window. “Sometimes I wonder, like, what if he had gotten me pregnant.”

“Your kid would have buck-teeth.”

“Oh my god.” She cackles. “We never actually fucked, though. I just gave him, like, two hand jobs, then he dumped me for Jennifer Reid.”

“She was so mean to you. I really kind of hated her.”

“Yeah. She was a bitch. I think she's fully a dentist now.” Jessica reaches a hand to his arm where it’s wrapped around her and squeezes his wrist. “I just think, sometimes, like, what if it wasn’t you? And I’m just really, really fucking glad that it was you. And I’m sorry—”

“Jess, no—”

“Hey, let me finish. I’m sorry it made things harder. I’m sorry we were so young and I’m sorry we weren’t ready and—and, I’m sorry the sex was really bad and I never even told you—”

“Jesus Christ—”

“—but I’m not sorry that it happened. Not for a minute. No regrets.”

Shane stares at the ceiling, a distant abyss. “Me neither,” he says, and he feels his mind go quiet with the confidence of it. “No regrets.”

Jessica falls asleep at some point, and she snores a tiny bit, which Shane didn’t know about her. He lies awake for a while, until his body needs to move, his fingers jittering against his palms. Carefully, he unfurls from around Jessica and pads down the hall to Sidney’s room.

She’d conceded to leave the door ajar so they could check on her, and he pushes it open gently now, careful not to make a sound. Soft glowing nightlight in the shape of a butterfly; raccoon tucked under her arm because even though she’s too old for it now, he still catches her hugging it close when she’s scared during a thunderstorm or after watching Coraline, which is actually creepy as fuck. Richard is asleep on a branch in his enclosure, colours dimmed to pink and green pastels.

He lowers himself to the floor beside her bed and sits there in the still of her room, listening to the sound of her breaths. It’s been years since he’s done this. He tells her, in a softest whisper, all the things he wants to say. 

Chapter End Notes

• Actuary has an exact cognate in Russian, актуарий. Ilya knows exactly what she means but wants to ask her a million questions and hear everything she has to say :)

• Moonlight Sonata here is meant to be the payoff of the classical music interwoven throughout, but I do want to highlight one other easter egg, which is that the Mozart Ilya describes in Ch. 4 as sounding like Shane's laugh, is what plays in the show during the CCM shoot :)

• Marleau working his way through the Julie Andrews oeuvre

• Chekhov's Peanut Allergy: Shoutout to the good people of r/peanutallergy and r/anaphylaxis for their descriptive and educational first-person accounts

Chapter 9: The person I most want to be

Chapter Notes

CW: Homophobia/C-slur, F-slur

10/16/26: Hello! If you are a newcoming reader, you can ignore this chapter note! If you are a WIP warrior, I just wanted to say, first of all, THANK YOU. I cannot believe how many of you are here. In the last couple weeks this got circulated out in the real world and blew up in a way I wasn’t expecting, and now there are a ridiculous number of you subscribed waiting for this final chapter, and yes, that prolonged my editing process and gave me a bit of stage fright. But! I do not ever want that problem to go away. It is genuinely humbling and such an honour to have you guys here. Thank you for your patience, comments, dialogue, kindness, and interest in a story that I brainstormed in my notes app back in June and seriously thought would max out at 30k and take me like a week to write, tops. Lol oops

I think I responded to like a quarter of the comments on Ch. 8 before I got a bit overwhelmed. I’m going to get back to responding to comments now that I’m through writing! It may take me a minute but just know that if you have commented, I have seen and cherished every one.

Much requested, here is a playlist of Ilya’s musical references.

Thank you for being here and I very much hope this closes things out meaningfully for all of you who have followed along <3

Montreal clinches a wildcard spot and Shane is going to make the fucking most of it.

It’s instantly clear that the first round is going to be brutal. His team are playoff veterans; they know how to pace themselves, how to battle through injuries, how to balance speed when it counts with endurance, which sometimes counts more. Meanwhile, the Admirals are determined to make it out of round one for the first time in a long time; they fucking want it. Shane takes the face-off against Scott Hunter and loses the puck out of the gate.

The Metros lose the first two games; settle into a strategy by the third, and take the fourth in a 5-1 rout with a hat trick from Andropov. They lose five in overtime, a sleek wraparound goal from Vaughny that Shane has to admire, even through the angry, copper taste of failure.

By second intermission of six, Shane knows it’s over. Hunter is on a rampage, Bennett is impenetrable, and Jalo is a fucking nightmare. Montreal just doesn’t have the stamina to outlast them. Some heroics from J.J. and Mitty keep it tied until the very end, then Hunter scores in the final two minutes. Theriault pulls Mitty, but the clock runs out and it’s 3-2 New York.

The team is supposed to fly out in the morning, but Shane books onto a commercial flight that same night. Theriault can yell at him later. He just wants to go home and see his kid. 

Sid has basically two whole months of school left, and there are a few end-of-season obligations, some media, tape review, exit interviews and medical; but really it’s the first time ever that Shane can kind of just, be a normal parent. He drops her off at school and picks her up. He makes and packs her lunch, which usually the chef does, a week of bento boxes lined up in the fridge, because there’s just never time. In a moment of innovation, he decides to write a note to put in her lunchbox, Have a great day! on a neon yellow Post-It tucked beside her Sunbutter-and-jelly sandwich; something his dad used to do when Shane was a kid, little daily messages to let Shane know he was thought-of from a tidy office at the Treasury Board. But he asks her when she gets home, “Hey, did you get my note?” and she says “What note?”, and he realizes he’d left it on the kitchen counter.

After the last team meeting of the season, he clears out his stall for the summer. Carefully, he peels the tape from Sidney’s fingerpainting where it hangs on the back panel, as he’s done every summer. He’ll bring it back in the fall and hang it again with fresh tape, and marvel at how small her fingers once were.

He stays through fencing practice to watch the way she learns and thinks with her whole body, and also goofs off sometimes until she’s caught by her coach. He takes her to pick up falafel at Jess’ favourite spot and bring it to her office where she’s grading lab assignments or working on her thesis late into the night. He agrees, exactly once, to help Sid feed Richard his dinner, but draws the line when she tries to hand him a live discoid roach, and instead watches from a safe distance while she cares for their strange transforming housemate with gentle hands.

Evenings, they watch Boston play Washington in round two, then New York in the conference final, both flinching when Brisebois fucking cross-checks Ilya in the ribs. It’s Sidney who texts their group chat, Are you ok?

I am fine Sidney. Thank you for asking.

It’s 11:59 on the twenty-third of May, and Shane hovers in the doorway of Sidney’s bedroom, watching the shallow rise and fall of her breathing beneath the quilt that had been his, once, that his grandmother had made.

He glances at his watch and wishes the next sixty seconds would freeze right there, this moment exactly, a precipice. But time is a forward thing, a puck on the breakaway.

At midnight, he climbs into his daughter’s bed and curls beside the shape of her. “Hey,” he whispers, and nudges her shoulder.

She snuffles and rolls over and blinks up at him with tired eyes. “Hey.”

“Happy birthday, Sid.”

She smiles, an easy thing. His favourite thing. “I’m ten?”

He nods against the pillow. They’re nose to nose. “You’re ten.”

“Cool.” There’s wonderment in her voice, a quiet satisfaction.

Moonlight and the yellow of a streetlamp cast hazy stripes across them, rippling over her bed-mussed hair, catching her freckles in a warm glow. Genetic, he thinks. He slings an arm around her back and pulls her close to his side, her head tucked against his chest, where she fits.

“When you were born, you were so ugly,” he recounts.

She snorts into the seam of his shirt. “No I wasn’t.”

“You were, I swear. You looked like—”

“—like E.T. I hate that movie.”

“No one hates E.T. It’s heartwarming.”

“It’s creepy and boring.”

“Well. You looked like E.T. when you were born. Just wrinkled and, like, the ugliest pinkest baby.”

Her face is pressed against him, but even so, he can feel her roll her eyes. “You don’t have to tell this story every year, you know.”

“I think I kind of do.”

“You really don’t.”

“Your mom and I were like, what the heck do we do now?” he continues defiantly. “We have this ugly baby now, and we’re still in high school—like. What were we supposed to do? It was pretty scary.” He exhales a kiss against her hair. “I was so scared, for a long time.”

“Oh,” she says softly. “You never told me before. That you were scared.”

“Mostly I was scared that I would let you down. That I would do something wrong and really mess up your life, somehow.”

She cranes her neck up at him then, brown eyes flecked with the gold of the outside light. “I like my life,” she says plainly.

“I know.”

“When did you stop being scared?”

He breathes out a laugh. “I haven’t, really. I’m still scared sometimes.” He traces his thumb in small circles across her shoulder.

“Well, don’t be.” And the command is so simple, he thinks, that maybe he can heed it. Because she told him to. Because it’s her, and it’s him, and what’s there to be scared of when they have each other?

He exhales. Runs his hand through her hair, the way the dome of her head fits exactly in the curve of his palm. 

“Greatest honour of my life, Sid. I need you to know.” He pulls away a little so he can look her in the eye. “Being your dad is the greatest honour of my entire life.”

“You have two Stanley Cups and an Olympic medal.”

“And an Art Ross, a Rocket Richard, a Conn Smythe and a Lady Byng.”

She laughs his favourite laugh, the one that rises from her stomach and shakes her shoulders and rings out into the dark of the room. “Humble much.”

“That’s what the Lady Byng was for.” He grins into her hair. “None of those matter. Okay? Being your dad. That’s the prize.”

“You’re so cheesy.”

“Can’t be. I haven’t had dairy in like, nine months.”

She snuggles closer, into the warmth of him. He wraps his arm tighter. “We’re going to eat so much pizza this summer,” she declares.

“And poutine, and nachos.”

“And Kraft Dinner, and ice cream.”

“Oh, yes,” he agrees. “Definitely ice cream.”

Ilya takes Boston to seven. He’s playing hurt, shielding his right side, but his hockey is still gorgeous. Raw and visceral and so full of power. Echoes of the boy Shane first saw tearing across the ice in Regina at seventeen, grown stronger, more skilled, more certain. Shane could watch him play forever and never get tired of it.

Vaughn scores in overtime, and Shane feels his heart break, twinned with Ilya’s across the string that connects them. So close to his second cup; so fucking close. He watches Ilya bump his helmet to his goalie’s, hand grasped at the back of Koslov’s neck, before skating off with his team, reassuring slaps on the back through the gut-wrench of loss.

Shane’s phone dings that same night, late, with a screenshot of a plane ticket in two weeks’ time.

He picks Ilya up at YUL and Ilya calls his car boring fewer than five times, which feels like a win; tangles his fingers with Ilya’s and rests their joined hands on Ilya’s thigh, while the sun honey-coats the curls of Ilya’s hair. 

They pull into the gravelled driveway and Shane knows, achingly, that all semblance of privacy is about to dissipate as soon as they open the cottage door. He grabs Ilya’s wrist and presses him against the side of his boring, practical car. “Kiss me. Right now please.”

Ilya doesn’t need to be asked twice. He takes Shane’s face in his hands, thumb swiping his jaw, once, twice, and presses his lips to Shane’s, gloriously hungry. Shane leans in closer, digging his fingers into the dip of Ilya’s waist.

“Fuck, I missed you.”

Shane isn’t sure which one of them said it. Maybe both of them at once, like telepathy.

Ilya slows the kiss, pulls back, and Shane objects with a small choked sound. Ilya presses his forehead against Shane’s, noses brushing. “We have an audience,” he whispers.

Shane tilts his head to find Jessica leaning against the stone sculpture by the door, grinning like a maniac and flashing him a two-handed thumbs-up. “Oh my god,” he laughs, because Jessica always makes him laugh.

He unlocks the trunk and lifts out Ilya’s bag over his objections, and they trail into the cottage, and Jessica swipes aside Ilya’s offered handshake, instead grabbing him into a freakishly strong hug, and Ilya lets out a small oof because of course his ribs still hurt, Shane fucking knew it.

“I like you,” Ilya tells the top of Jessica’s head. He turns to find Shane. “I like her.”

“Yeah,” Shane agrees. “She’s pretty likeable.”

Everyone’s already here. Sidney is helping his dad in the kitchen, stirring a pot of spaghetti with a long wooden spoon. Richard, lounging in his summer enclosure, overlooking the wide windowed doors that lead to the lake. His mom and Zachary, watching the pre-game commentary, Yuna disagreeing in her all-knowing way – “I just think it’s Scott Hunter’s year.” 

Shane grabs Ilya’s hand, standing there in the foyer, and just – exists. Him and Ilya and bright sun streaming through tall slanted windows, illuminating their little world of people who see them and know the truth of them.

“Alright, come on. Come meet my family.”

Hand in hand, they cross into the light.

---------------

Before Scott Hunter kisses a man on the ice, there is this:

Sidney leaning into Shane’s side where they sit on the sofa, his arm around her shoulder, unconsciously tracing his thumb in small, gentle arcs across her wrist.

Yuna Hollander shaking Ilya’s hand like a business partner, then laying out exactly what went wrong for Boston in game seven like Desjardins’ evil twin, then clapping him warmly on the shoulder and asking if he’d like some wine.

Zachary the Mushroom Doctor exchanging phone numbers with Ilya, and naming their chat in WhatsApp, Stepdad Club. 

David Hollander pulling him aside in the kitchen and wordlessly handing him a shot of good Russian vodka, and then patting him on the back and saying, “Glad you’re here, son.”

Before Scott Hunter kisses a man on the ice, there’s this: Shane turning his head to find Ilya, brown eyes lit up happy, arm still wrapped around his daughter, his free hand weaving into Ilya’s fingers in the way that they just fit, like hands that were always meant to hold each other.

And then: “Dad. Dad, look.”

Surely Jessica the Astrophysicist has a word for this; the Planet Earth suddenly, sharply tilting on its axis.

After: “Holy shit” – “No cursing, Yuna” – “Sorry, but, holy shit.”

After: Shane grabbing the side of his face and pulling him into a fierce and urgent kiss, right there in front of everyone who loves him.

After: Hunter, this is Rozanov. I got your number from Hollander. He is my gay lover – “Ilya, you absolutely cannot send that” – “What, it is not true?” – “Oh my god.”

Yuna and David go home to their cottage down the road, and Zachary and Jessica drive off to their nearby rental, and Shane says goodnight to Sidney in the lamplit quiet of her bedroom. Ilya listens from the hallway and feels his heart warm as if over an open flame.

After Scott Hunter kisses a man on the ice, there is this: Moonlight. Shane’s skin, silver-glowing, wide windows, silent forest watching. Ilya fucks him slow and assiduous; kisses along his jaw, the exposed arc of his neck; trails fingers up the rippling muscle of his inner thigh.

They wake up sweat-hot from each other’s warmth, the heft of Shane’s body half on top of his, Shane’s fingers unconsciously curled into a cupped shape that rests listless on the dip of Ilya’s collarbone. Ilya watches the way Shane’s skin changes as the sun rises, shifting auroras of pale pink and gold.

They’ve never had mornings before.

“Hi,” Shane says, blinking awake as his alarm sounds, a restrained electronic beeping – so boring. So Shane. (Ilya’s alarm is the second movement of Shotakovich’s Tenth.)

“Hi.” Ilya presses his face to Shane’s hair. “You always are awake this fucking early?”

“Pretty much. I get in my first workout before Sid is up.” Shane squirms to pull away from Ilya, regarding him with this curious look.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just.” Shane kisses his temple, his shoulder, the fleshy part of his pec. “I like waking up with you.” He kisses lower.

Everything feels dream-like here, as if everyday objects glow with the same golden sun-sheen that coats the lake. Shane makes oat-and-chocolate-chip pancakes while Sidney reads the stock market report in the newspaper like she’s a Wall Street guy from some bygone decade, and they eat with a bowl of fresh blueberries out on the deck by the warming sun, pine-scented air, butterflies that dart past in fleeting shocks of colour.

They hike a shaded trail with Jessica and Zachary, and Sidney forges ahead like the commander of an expedition, and collects fallen leaves and interesting rocks into her pockets. After, they cool off in the lake, and Sidney and Jessica concoct a synchronized-swimming routine while Shane sits watching on a boulder, sunlit and beautiful.

Ilya towels off, slips into his shoes and discovers inside of one a small hair elastic. He holds it out to Shane like, what should I do with this?, and Shane just shrugs. “You get used to it.”

There’s an afternoon that Jessica is locked away with Zachary in the rental cottage down the road, entrenched in a thesis-writing spree; Shane is on a trail run; and Sidney finds Ilya sitting alone outside, watching the breeze that ripples across the lake, thinking about his mother, and the Cup he didn’t win, and the ways everything has changed, and nothing has changed at all, since Scott Hunter kissed a man on the ice. 

His Mama used to have a pair of salt and pepper shakers, little ceramic husky-dogs with heart-shaped noses. One of them had gone missing at some point, the pepper one; Ilya was fairly sure Lyosha had nicked it, for no reason, really, just to make mischief; and so she’d bought a new one at Sadovod, and it was same-but-different, the colours a little off, the heart-nose a little lopsided. Not quite part of the set. 

Sidney has this beautiful family that encircles her: father, mother, grandparents. A step-father in Zachary, whom she’s known now for years. Ilya stands toeing the edge of this bright, soft place. He wants, and he fears. He wonders why Shane would invite him to disturb these practiced, loving orbits, throwing things off-balance.

She’s carrying a book clutched to her chest, and settles cross-legged into the Muskoka chair next to his; does that thing he’s noticed, where she inhales a small breath, deliberates what she’s going to say with a look of great focus, then sets her words free into the air. “You’re being weird,” she announces. Accuses, really.

“I’m being weird? You are the one who drinks milk from a bag.”

She presses forward, not taking the bait. “I think you’re like, nervous, or something. About hanging out together.” She holds out the book like an offering. “So I wanted to show you.”

It’s a cloth-bound journal, pages thick with pasted-on decorations. He opens it gingerly, taking in the organized chaos, a farrago of whatever objects Sidney Hollander found interesting on a given day. 

“See, look.” She’s pointing at a miniature painting of bears climbing a fallen tree-trunk, from a flattened wrapper of Мишка косолапый. “Dad says you always get me these, from Russia.”

There’s a little pink umbrella from their piña coladas in Tampa. The cut-out Cyrillic logo for the chips in the red bag they both like. A Polaroid photo – “Aunt Jackie took this” – Sidney and Hayden Pike’s various children bedecked in Metros tricolore, smiling wide; it’s a Montreal-Boston game, the ice behind them, Ilya’s number 81 just visible in the background warming up.

“So it’s like. We’ve been friends for a while, basically,” she concludes, looking up at him with this sort of smug, inspecting glance, like, See? I’ve made my point.

“You are very like your dad, Солнышко. Same heart, I think.” Ilya nods a few times, a terrifying splendour heavy in his chest. And because sometimes he says stupid things without thinking first, he tells her the truth that comes unbidden to his lips. “My mother would have loved you.”

She accepts the book passed back to her with thoughtful silence, thumb riffling the corners of the pages. There’s that small breath again, before she speaks. “What was her name?”

“Irina.” It’s the first time he’s said her name out loud, maybe in years.

“That’s pretty.”

They watch the water for a while, and the dragonflies that swoop by the shoreline, flickering silhouettes, there-then-gone.

“Wanna skate?” she asks.

Shane finds them on the synthetic rink, a game of keepaway that Sidney is squarely winning; peals of laughter. He watches from the entryway, arms crossed.

There’s a text from Hayden Pike after lunch; a photo of a brand-new baby swaddled pink. Shane and Sidney spend half an hour on the phone with Pike peppering him with questions and chirping the fact that his children are named after rocks.

“Sid was smaller than that,” Shane tells Ilya, after Pike hangs up. And Ilya had never thought about what Sidney Hollander might have been like when she was born; but now he wants to know.

“Show me?”

They flip through an album of baby pictures on Shane’s phone, and she was small, and Shane was small, too. Just a kid, holding Sidney in one arm and a trophy in the other. Ilya feels awed in a way that carves a hollow, aching feeling in his chest; like leaving home and returning years later to find the sapling once planted in the backyard is now a fearsome, towering tree.

“Watcha doing?” Sidney peers at them, suspicious.

“Looking at your baby pictures,” Shane answers innocently.

Sidney groans in embarrassment and threatens to dump her dad’s protein powder in the lake.

At night, Shane lights a fire outside, and they toast marshmallows on sticks, and Ilya teaches them the best way to make smores, which is with potato chips in between the layers – the regular kind, not all-dressed, because what the fuck is that – and they are sweet and salty and crunchy also, and Sidney goes wide-eyed in surprise at the taste.

An eerie, quavering howl cuts knife-like through the quiet night, and Ilya shudders. “What the f—What was that?”

“It’s a loon,” Sidney explains, laughing at his expense.

“A what?”

“A loon. It’s a bird.”

“Sounds like a wolf.”

She cups her hands over her mouth and echoes the birdcall, a haunting, whistling sound. Shane copies her, and now the two of them are competing to be the best and loudest wolf-bird, and Ilya wants to wrap them both in a fine piece of silk and pack them into his bag and take them everywhere with him, all the time.

“Oh, so you speak bird now? You are a bird-speaking family?”

Sidney moves from her spot next to Shane and crosses over to Ilya’s seat on the other side of the fire. “Here. I’ll show you.”

She teaches him, the way her papa once taught her.

The fire licks fluttering tendrils that eat at the dark, and Sidney leans into his side, just a little, and Shane watches from across the flames with this serious look, like he’s trying to memorize something, focused and wholehearted.

“It’s not always like this,” Shane whispers in bed. They are spent, elated-exhausted, breathless bodies twisted together like tree roots grown too close.

“What is?”

“It’s—During the year, I mean. It’s harder. It’s like, exhausting.” Shane’s fingers press into the soft hollow part of Ilya’s back, wandering like a pianist’s. “Summer is the best part.”

“Shane Hollander’s favourite time of year is off-season? This is scandalous news.”

“Fuck off. It’s your favourite, too.”

Ilya sighs into the curve of Shane’s neck. “Yes. It is, now.”

“We could do this,” Shane says, so quiet the words are almost lost, dissolving into warm breath on Ilya’s skin. “Together. If we could find a way to be on the same team. Or closer, at least. Would you want that?”

“Yes.”

“For real?”

“Yes,” Ilya says again. Because it’s the only answer.

“Why?” Shane tilts in his arms, eyes finding his in the dark. “Your life could be so much easier.”

“Mm, no. Actually, life is much more difficult without you. This is a very annoying problem.”

“I’m serious, Ilya. You could—with a woman. You could have a real life. No hiding. You could have your own kid one day.”

“Shane. Stop.” And there are tears pricking in his eyes because sometimes, with Shane, English words melt to saltwater before they can reach his tongue. “I wonder this also. Why you are offering me this.”

“Ilya—”

“Could be easier for you, too, no? If maybe we just hook up like before. Could be simple.”

Shane laughs, a small, choked exhalation that vibrates through Ilya’s sternum. “It was never simple.”

“Maybe not, no.” He steals a kiss, because he can and because it’s been too many minutes since his lips have touched Shane’s, salt-sweet and toothpaste-scented. “I want to do difficult things with you, Hollander.”

“But why?” And it’s this helpless, stricken sound, Shane tightening his arms around him, as if to keep from floating away on a current of impossibility.

And it’s so many things, the answer to this. It’s his Mama in the record store, looking over her shoulder to find Ilya and Lyosha racing through the aisles, a soft smile as she turns back to the orchestral albums, long careful fingers picking through faded cardboard sleeves. It’s Svetlana at twelve and Svetlana at twenty-six; two funerals; the inextinguishable ways she loves him without ever needing to say it. It’s Sidney Hollander on a beach at sunset, and Sidney Hollander in her papa’s arms after he wins the Prospect Cup, and Sidney Hollander on the shore of a pretty lake extending him friendship in the pages of a book as easy as offering a piece of fruit to share between them, cold and fresh on a summer day.

It’s that Scott Hunter kissed a man on the ice and something changed in the air; a wind-shear. 

It’s that Ilya should have tried harder not to fall like this; years ago, should have tethered himself to the cliff ledge and only ever looked from a height. But he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t fucking help it.

It’s that Shane is a person and Shane is a place and Shane is a father and Shane is his maddening, unfaltering equal. His возлюбленный. Shane is a sacred, abstruse entry in a Russian-English dictionary that means to feel safe and to feel whole, in both languages and in no language that exists at all.

Ilya tells him the answer, then, with the words that he has. “Because you are my family, I think.”

He flies private out of Joliette for the MLH Awards, which maybe is wasteful, but better than dealing with prying eyes at Montreal-Trudeau; and it’s the first time he’s left Shane’s arms with the promise, “I’ll be back in the morning,” instead of weeks and months stretching between them. The white-noise silence of the plane, the empty rows of premium leather seats – Ilya hasn’t been totally alone like this since arriving in Canada. He finds he’s lost his taste for it.

He accepts his Rocket Richard with a perfunctory thank you to my team and better luck next year, Hollander.

Asshole, reads the text that greets him when he returns to his seat.

Scott Hunter receives MVP, and the crowd applauds his speech with precisely the obligatory amount of enthusiasm and nothing more; and Ilya thinks about the teenagers who paint rainbows on the sidewalks in Moscow under cover of night, and protesters who wake up knowing their day will end in a prison cell, and lonely kids like he and Sasha had been, finding each other through curiosity and trust and devastating fear. He thinks, maybe, these are the bravest people in the world.

Ilya knows, in the coronary depths of him, that they have to come out. They have to; for Sidney. Because he knows what it is to be a child wearing the burden of a lie – an accident when anyone asks; the empty pill bottle a spectre, an omission, torn with angry fists from the pages of the narrative.

He never did send that text to Hunter; just relished the delicious predictability of Shane’s exasperated objections. He finds Hunter now at the bar, and it’s like there’s a force-field around him the other players won’t cross. Ilya crosses it.

He orders a shot of vodka and leans back against the bar, looking out at the winner and two losers of Rookie of the Year, who are children, basically.

“Careful, Rozanov,” Hunter warns without looking at him. “Haven’t you heard? It’s contagious.”

“You’re welcome, Hunter,” Ilya drawls.

“For what?”

“Was very generous of me, to let you go first.” He tilts the shotglass at Hunter in salute. “Only time you will ever beat me at anything. Do not get used to it.”

“I literally knocked you out of the playoffs like a month ago—wait. What?”

“I need to know how you did it. Locker room, front office, sponsors, league. Who you told and how it went.”

“Rozanov.”

“Hunter. We can set a meeting. You are in New York for the summer?”

“Kip and I are going to Greece—”

“After, then. Before camp starts. I can schedule through your agent?”

“What the fuck.”

“Yes, exactly. What the fuck.” He knocks back the vodka, slams the glass down on the bar and looks Scott Hunter in the eye. “I should say thank you. For what you did. It changes things.”

“Jesus, Roz. You’re fucking serious.”

“Just paying my respects. You elder queers are the cornerstone of our community.” 

He leaves Hunter at the bar, bewildered and maybe less alone; calls an Uber to the airport.

He has a flight home to catch. Home.

---------------

After school on Sid’s tenth birthday, Shane drove her out to Ottawa for dinner with his parents. His dad made the chicken parm she likes, a grilled tofu for Shane, and a lemon-blueberry cake with ten candles that she blew out in one impressive breath. A proper birthday party was planned for the weekend, something Jess and Zachary organized at the Insectarium with her classmates and fencing team. She’d spent two weeks designing an elaborate crown to wear to her party, made of cardboard and sculpted aluminum foil and the shiny beaded necklaces the Metros give out at home games.

They ate cake in the living room watching game six of Boston-New York. Sidney tackled her cake the same unhinged way Jessica does, frosting first, then working her way through the layers. 

Before the drive back to Montreal, his dad pulled him into his study. It’s looked the same all of Shane’s life, dusty books in perfect alphabetical order on rows and rows of shelves, never a one out of place. “I was cleaning out some of my parents’ old things in the attic,” he told Shane. “You never met my father, but, I think he would want you to have this.” He passed Shane a small, carved wooden box, square with beveled corners.

Inside, a hammered metal ring; a thick men’s band, matte with age in warm, honeyed gold.

“I’ve wanted to pass this on to you for a while, before we knew about Rozanov. So, maybe it’s for him, or for someone else, or for no one but yourself.”

Shane touched the ring, the minute textured dips and angles. For a while. “You knew.”

“I know you pretty well, Shane.” 

“The whole time?”

“Most of it. Jessica threw me for a loop, but then I figured – you two adore each other. There must be a pretty good reason you never stayed together.”

Shane shut the box and closed his eyes and breathed, in, out. “It’s not. For someone else.”

His dad laughed. “I think I figured that one out, too.”

“I don’t know what to do, Dad. I don’t know how to protect her from this.”

His dad nodded, lips pressed thin. “I think, in the long list of traits she gets from you, courage is definitely one of them.”

Shane picks Ilya up from the quiet little airport in Joliette in the earliest hours of the morning while the sun rises weighted and ripe in a firestorm sky. Sidney is still asleep when they get back. Shane brews some coffee, an oaken bitter smell; Richard rustles in his enclosure opposite the kitchen, watching. He finds Ilya perched on the boulder at the edge of the lake, a Rodin bronze, cigarette balanced with practiced precarity between his lips just like the day they first met.

Sidney soon discovers them, the blanket from her room wrapped around her shoulders and trailing along the dirt-path to the lake; Shane will have to put it in the wash later. Silently, she clambers onto the rock between them; rests her head on his chest, right where his heart beats. They watch the sunrise.

There's a Friday that Jess and Zachary come over for lunch, and they take canoes out on the lake, and Sid grabs his arm and says, “Look,” every time a silvery-grey fish passes by. After, they play gin rummy and taste-test pints of ice cream from the farmstand in town, and Sidney teaches Ilya fencing footwork in the tall grass at the lakeshore.

It’s too much, this place. Shane feels like if he tries to hoard all the memories that spark here, like coins in his pocket, he’ll drown from the weight of them.

Jess plops onto the sofa-seat next to him and they watch their kid and the light she emits.

“I still can’t believe she’s ten,” Jessica sighs.

“I know.”

“Do you ever just think, like. She’s going to blow us all away, you know? She’s going to be something so huge in the world. We won’t even see it coming.”

Shane doesn’t have anything to say to that. He leans his head onto Jessica’s shoulder and she wraps an arm around him, and he thinks about something Sid taught him: that chameleons don’t change colours for camouflage like everyone believes. It’s actually the way they communicate – excitement or aggression or romance or fear. A language of shifting tesserae; a vivid silence.

He tucks his daughter into bed that night with Jane of Lantern Hill propped open on her chest. She’s crafted a homemade bookmark from fabric scraps and bright blue thread. Her hair splays wild and shower-damp across her pillow, catching red in the lamplight.

She’s too old to be put to bed like this, really, but he still feels like he’s catching up. Like there were all these nights that he wasn’t here to do it, and there’s a quota somehow; a finite resource. 

“I love you, like, a ridiculous amount,” he tells her.

“I know.” She sits up, closing her book. “Could you help braid my hair?”

“Sure. You have a hair tie?”

“No.” She blinks at him like this is a totally reasonable response.

“How? Literally how is that possible, dude.”

Ilya isn’t in their room when he comes upstairs. Smoking, maybe; he swears this is his last pack, so Shane is being patient. He brushes his teeth and sets his alarm and reads for a while. Drifts off to lazy cricket-song beyond the windows. When he nods awake, maybe thirty minutes later, or maybe hours, Ilya is still missing, the mattress cold where the shape of him should be. 

Shane pads downstairs and hears, then, a faint mechanical sound coming from the basement study.

Ilya is there, lit up ethereal by the green glass lamp, seated cross-legged in the middle of the floor. Around him, a sea of stacked pages while the printer shakes and sputters.

“Hollander. You are a multi-millionaire. You cannot afford better printer?”

“I use it, like, once a year. What on earth are you doing?”

Ilya gestures vaguely at the papers that encircle him like Stonehenge. “I am printing.”

“Um, yeah. I can see that.” Shane steps over a row of printouts and lowers himself to the floor. He picks up one of the pages—

“Shane. It’s not—I’m not finished yet. This is just ideas.”

“Ilya.” The page he’s holding is a list of every Canadian MLH team in descending order of cap space. He sifts through the piles and picks up another list, and another. Immigration attorneys. Crisis PR firms. Contacts in the main office at the league and the Players’ Association with a checkbox column for whether they posted something positive on social media after Scott Hunter’s Cup win. “You did all this?”

“Some. Not all of it.” He shrugs, and Shane thinks, he seems smaller. Like, delicate. Like, nervous in a way Shane has only ever seen him wear exactly one time, a nanosecond, a flash, in a hotel room in Toronto. “Your Jessica helped with this one.” He passes Shane a stapled packet of universities and observatories with research vacancies, cross-referenced to the MLH team in each corresponding city. “And this, your mother helped.” Athletic brands with a history of Pride campaigns.

“Of course she did.” Shane breathes out and doesn’t manage to breathe back in, his lungs suddenly filled with molasses, and maybe also his heart, and his brain, and his throat. Everything is viscous, slow-motion; the printer spits out another paper and Ilya catches it as it tumbles from the tray, setting it in front of Shane like an offering.

“Zachary is helping with this one,” he explains softly as Shane casts his eyes over an article called Family Law in Canada: Stepparents’ Rights and Responsibilities.

Okay.

Okay.

Shane searches his body for the familiar thronging of panic, but it’s not there, a breezy tranquil glowing thing instead taking purchase like a heron bird landing on the branches of his ribcage, watchful and magnificent. He sees it, is the thing. What Ilya is building them. And maybe it’s made of paper, so fragile a birthday wish could scatter it to nothing, but, it’s there, in front of them, spelled out in stupid-expensive printer ink.

A lane opens, and Shane sees it. He sees it.

Scott Hunter ran the drill, so they can make the play.

Words evaporate, a meniscus of saltwater pooling but failing to fall, cohered on his lashes; Shane reaches out erratically, plucks a random sheet, and Ilya’s eyes widen as he rushes to explain. “This is just one way—see? I have, mm, twelve pages about it. Your dad is helping research this. My friend Svetlana, too. There are a lot of ways.” He huffs out a breath and stretches an arm behind his neck to scratch an imaginary itch, restless, elbow angled in the air like a spinnaker.

Shane finds himself holding a printout from the IRCC website, titled, Permanent Residency through Spousal Sponsorship.

“Ilya.” Did Shane say that? Yes; that’s his voice, distant through the ringing in his ears. “You want this?”

Ilya lowers his arm; folds his hands in his lap and meets Shane’s eyes. Blue-grey; the most beautiful eyes in the world, Shane thinks.

“I want to teach her how to drive,” Ilya says carefully, like someone hiking a narrow ridge.

“You want to teach her how to drive,” Shane repeats dumbly.

“Yes. I want to teach her how to drive stick-shift—”

“Absolutely not—”

“Will buy her an excellent car. Safe but also very pretty. Porsche, maybe.”

“Ilya—”

“I want to teach her Russian. Just a little – just a few things. I want to share this with her. And I want to see her do fencing. Not in a video – for real. I want to be there. And I want her and me to have a secret handshake.”

“A secret handshake?”

“Yes. Like in Parent Trap. They do fencing in this movie, too, I just realized.”

“Isn’t that movie from the sixties?”

“Oh my god, you are five hundred years old. The Lindsay Lohan one.”

“Haven’t seen it.”

“We watch tomorrow, then. Mandatory.” Ilya gently takes the paper from Shane’s hands and sets it down on the shuffled mess between them. “I want to watch her grow. Okay? I want a phone call if there is an emergency. Maybe this is stupid, or—I don’t know. Maybe you do not want these same things. But these are the things that I want.”

Shane nods slowly, skirting his eyes across their future deconstructed around them, bright-white, US Letter size, 100% recyclable.

He drove Sid back from Ottawa with birthday cake leftovers in a Tupperware on the passenger seat and his grandfather’s ring in his pocket; looking up now and again at the dark shadow-shape of her in the rearview mirror, passing headlights glancing off the shine of her hair. 

Straight to bed, a school night. He climbed in and laid down beside her while she settled herself under the covers; flat on his back, hands folded across his stomach. He’d spent a Saturday off last year helping decorate her bedroom ceiling – little mirror balls and hanging trinkets she’d made, and diaphanous silk scarves that meander and billow whenever the A/C kicks on. Her room here is so hers, all colour and patterns, a map of the world opposite her bed with shiny star stickers on all the places she wants to visit, patchwork curtains she sewed herself that she draws open every morning to let in the light.

“Hey, Sid?”

“Hey, Dad?”

“If I married Ilya one day, would you be, like, okay with that?”

“Mom already told me you’re going to, so.”

He rolled to his side to face her. “She really said that?”

“Yeah.” The rustle of her hair nodding against her pillow. “She said you probably don’t know it yet, but you’ll figure it out eventually.”

“Your mom is ridiculous.”

“Yeah, but she’s usually right about stuff.”

“She is, yeah.” He exhaled; looked into her eyes, so close, steady and trusting. “It’s going to be a mess, Sid. I’m scared this is going to ruin your life.”

She blinked; crinkled her nose in silent thought. “I could go.”

“Go where?”

“To live with Mom. Or back with Baba and Jiji.”

“Sid—Do you want that?”

“No. Not really.” She shrugged beneath the blankets; the rippling shape of her. “I just don’t want you to be worried.”

“Hey. Sid. No.” And he wanted—god. He wanted to shrink her to a size that could fit in his palm and keep her tucked inside his ribcage where she’d be safe and protected, right there, in place of his heart. “You’re not the problem here. You’re the easiest part in all of this. You’re the best part of my life.”

“Better than hockey?” she teased, trying and failing to hide her smirk.

“Obviously.” And, like. How does she always do that? Settle his deepest fears with a tectonic shift of the ground beneath him. Because actually, yeah. Hockey was the whole point, until it wasn’t. 

“Hockey is stupid, anyway. If they get mad about people getting married.” She tugged the edge of the quilt that was his, once, up closer to her chin. “I just think, like, you should be allowed to if you want. Like Mom and Zachary.” 

“It wouldn’t be weird for you? If Ilya lived with us?”

“It would be kind of weird, I guess.” She paused, considering. “We’d have to show him the rulebook.”

Fair enough. That’s how Shane and Sidney learned to build their life together, to navigate the currents of one another; to trust and care and compromise and fuck up and apologize and grow; which really are all just synonyms for love, when you think about it. There’s room still, in the rulebook, empty pages yet unwritten, tucked inside a kitchen drawer in Westmount.

Rule number one. “You are not buying her a fucking Porsche.”

“What, you will get her a Jeep? Have you met your daughter? She has aesthetic taste. You would know nothing about this.”

Okay. The thing is: Sidney deserves an expansive, sun-bright, limitless world, and Shane will do anything to give that to her. Anything; even if it’s ruinous, even if it scares him. 

This sport that has made him, formed him from clay; this world he’s inhabited since before he had words to name it; this lifeblood – hockey can try to take and take and take. It can fucking well try. But Shane won’t go down without a fight.

Shane Hollander wins. It’s what he fucking does. It’s what he was put on this planet to do. And he needs to know that at the end of it all, when the battle is over and the losses are tallied, that he’ll still have what he set out to protect: his kid, and his person.

Shane needs to know that Ilya is his – a grail, a prize, a fucking Cup. A championship ring on his finger.

Rule number two. “Marry me.”

The air goes thin like on the summit of a mountain; the world suddenly small and insignificant below them. Ilya freezes, a smallest crease forming at the top of his nose, sad warm eyes, huge heart. Shane wants and wants and wants, and for once it’s not careless because how can it be, when his entire bloodstream is made of care, when he cares with every vibrating cell of him? 

“What?”

“You heard me. Fucking marry me, Rozanov.”

“Shane—this is not. I was just saying, it is an option. I was not asking.”

“Well, I am. Asking.” Shane shifts to his knees, papers crinkling crushed beneath him; leans across the space between them to take Ilya’s face in one hand, thumb cradling the hard line of his jaw, its slightest tremble. “I want to do difficult things with you.”

It will be difficult; printed lists Shane hasn’t even seen yet crumple under the tumult of their kiss – private security firms for Sidney’s school; journalists whose reporting on Scott Hunter has been less than favourable – they’ll weather months, years, of doubt cast on their integrity, threats to their safety, on the ice and off it. Someone who knows someone in real estate will doxx their new house in Ottawa, and they’ll have to move twice that year, and Sidney will get sent to the principal’s office for shoving a kid who called her dad a cocksucking faggot so hard into the pavement he’ll need stitches. And it’s Ilya, famed fighter of the MLH, knuckles still bandaged from a rendezvous with Toronto the week prior, who will sit with her in the kitchen that night, bowls of ice cream, Richard nestled in the curls of his hair, and listen to her pour out all the anger that boils inside her, until she can understand how to put it somewhere that doesn’t shed blood.

It will be difficult, and it will be good. It will be so, so good. Because Sidney is the hallowed heart of this life they will live, an immovable heliocentrism; she’s a red-giant star, growing and growing, enveloping them all in her sunglow. There will be so many good things that Shane will lose count: the dog they will rescue, the thesis Jessica will defend, the first of the Cups they’ll lift together, him and Ilya and Sidney between them while confetti rains down from the rafters. There will be French homework and fencing practice and a secession from school choir to form her own garage band, and summers at their cottage, and visits to Japan, and driving lessons, and birthdays, and a Winter Classic in Miami where she’ll surprise them by flying in from university and ambushing them at Family Skate.

And before that, before all of it, there’s this: a ring inherited, lifted from a small wooden box with beveled edges and slid onto a waiting finger. Loon calls that echo like siren-song across the lake, an infinity of stars reflected. Above, two-hundred-million kilometres away, an asteroid on its steady, ceaseless path. And quietly, in her bedroom with its tall wide windows, their kid asleep, safe and dreaming, until the sun will rise over the crest of pine trees and morning light will find them a little closer to the next day, and the next.

But even before that: a door; a choice. I might answer. I might knock. Every stupid, reckless, careless decision he’s ever made, leading them right here:

“Yes.”

---------------

Group Chat: Me, Dad😤, Ilyushka🤪

Sidney: Has anyone seen my airpods?

Ilyushka: [Attachment: Photo]

Sidney: ok ew

Sidney: RULEBOOK

Sidney: No one borrows anyone else’s airpods for gross sweaty runs KTHANKS

Ilyushka: 👍

Dad: 👍

---------------

Group Chat: Me, Mom🪐💕, Dad😤, Ilyushka🤪, Zach Attack🍄

Dad: [Link: Fencing.ca: Canadian Fencing Federation announces 33 athletes to represent Canada at Junior & Cadet World Championships]

Mom: HOLY SHIT

Ilyushka: [GIF: Michael Scott Happy Tears]

Zach Attack: Insanely proud of you

Zach Attack: FYI your mom is crying

Mom: Traitor

Sidney: 💀

---------------

Group Chat: Me, Baba💜, Jiji💙

Jiji: [Link: The New Yorker: Meet the Teenagers at the Heart of the Upcycling Revolution]

Jiji: They should have interviewed you!

Sidney: 🥰

Baba: Bug, we’re grocery shopping for your visit. Anything special you want?

Sidney: chicken parm please 🙏🙏🙏

Jiji: Let’s make it together this time. I’ll teach you!

Baba: Bring those university brochures your counsellor gave you. I know you said it’s overwhelming. We can make a plan together ☺️

---------------

Group Chat: Me, Dad😤, Ilyushka🤪

Sidney: Tell Bood that pass was shit

Sidney: [Link: Google Search: Ophthalmologists in Vancouver, BC]

Sidney: That’s for the ref

Sidney: sweet goal ilya!!!!

Sidney: ouch

Sidney: ok ok tell Bood actually he’s cool

Sidney: HAASY 😍

Sidney: HOLLANDER HAT TRICK

Sidney: when you get back I’ll teach you a new tiktok dance for the celly

Dad: Go to bed please

Dad: [Replying to: HAASY 😍] Do I need to worry about this??

Sidney: DAD omg

Ilyushka: do not worry. Everyone in the world has heart eyes for Haasy

Sidney: can you bring me back the chocolate hedgehogs?

Dad: Already got em 👍

---------------

SMS: Me, Mom🪐💕

Mom: I’ve been instructed to very subtly find out if you have a crush on Luca Haas

Sidney: I might do a murder

Mom: I’ll help

---------------

Group Chat: Escrime d’Ottawa Juniors/Cadets Advanced Group III (Épée) 🤺

Sidney: hey I’m allowed to invite you guys to the wedding. Parents can come too. Here’s the info

Sidney: [Attachment: Screenshot]

Élise: my mom says I can come!

Ian: I’m doing camp in vancouver all summer 😫

Anna: El could I get a ride???

Élise: ofc bestie

Anna: eeyyy tysm. I’ll be there !!

Jasper: I’ll be there

Sidney: Jas jsyk you’re only invited bc it would be rude not to 😎

---------------

Group Chat: Me, Dad😤, Ilyushka🤪

Dad: Leaving 6:30 SHARP tomorrow with or without you guys

Dad: It doesn’t sound like you guys are packing

Sidney: what does packing even sound like? how would you know?

Dad: [Link: Wikipedia: Shane Hollander: Shane Hollander (born May 10, 1991) is a Canadian professional ice hockey player who is a centre and alternate captain for the Ottawa Centaurs of Major League Hockey (MLH)...]

Sidney: why did you send your own wikipedia page?

Dad: because apparently you forgot

Dad: I’ve packed a suitcase nearly every day for the last 12 years

Dad: I know what it sounds like and whatever you two are doing upstairs is not it

Ilyushka: we are doing scientific experiment

Ilyushka: [Attachment: Photo]

Dad: Sid please remove your chameleon from on top of our dog

Sidney: 🙄

Sidney: you’re literally so boring

---------------

Sidney wakes up on the morning of the wedding, and her first thought is, Buttons.

Of course it’s the buttons. She’s been staring at the dressform for months, darting and re-darting the pleats in the trousers, trying to follow along with a stupid TikTok tutorial that goes way too fast so she keeps having to pause it and restart. The tailoring on the jacket came together the way she’d envisioned, and the fabric is so cool, a deep turquoise cotton that’s light for the summer but looks like worsted wool, with this textured weave that gets more and more complex the closer you look. She’d picked it out in New York, when Dad and Ilya had taken her to Mood like on Project Runway, after the charity thing with Scott Hunter just before Christmas. They also saw Hamilton.

It’s like, five a.m. because they’re driving out to Lanaudière at 6:30 SHARP because Dad is a pedant whose main personality trait is punctuality, basically, and Richard is confused why he’s receiving his morning allotment of crickets so much earlier than usual, but he doesn’t complain. She also treats him to a silkworm because they’ll be gone a few days, and she’ll miss him.

Then: buttons. She slips on her eyeglasses, drops into her sewing chair and combs through the desk drawer for the button box where she keeps mostly random ones she’s collected from thrifting. Because the thing with the suit, the problem, really, is that the buttons are all the same. It’s annoying she didn’t notice it before. It’s too symmetrical, too normal, pretty much, and now that she sees it she can’t un-see it. She grabs the jacket off the dressform and takes her seam ripper to the three irritatingly identical buttons and fishes through the box for three more: one that’s lime-green and chunky, one that’s a sort of coral-pink and glass-like, and one that’s gold and square. 

A knock on her bedroom door. “Yeah?”

“Breakfast is ready.” Ilya pushes the door ajar. “But you are not ready for breakfast. Your dad will not like this.”

“I’ll eat in the car.”

“6:30 sharp. Sharp, he says! This is not sharp.”

“Seriously, I’m almost done. I’ll get dressed so fast.”

He narrows his eyes, like, I don’t believe you, but gives one terse, punctuated nod. “I will pack up your breakfast.”

She grins her biggest possible grin. “Спасибо, Илюшка.”

“Do not manipulate me with nice Russian.”

Sidney can sew on a button blindfolded; it’s muscle-memory, at this point. She shrugs into the jacket to try it on, stands in front of the mirror and straightens the lapels. The buttons are perfect.

The suit goes in a garment bag and the rest of her stuff is already packed except her toothbrush and her hairbrush and her retainer case for at night. She throws on leggings and her Cens crewneck, the Championship one that has all the players’ names on the back, and twists together a quick French braid. Duffel loaded into the trunk of the Jeep, her garment bag laid flat in the backseat with Dad and Ilya’s suits, too. Big hug around Anya’s ridiculously fluffy neck, and Richard-related instructions relayed to Casey the dog-slash-lizard sitter who looks entirely displeased to be at their house before the sun has even risen.

Dad grabs her shoulder as she slips past him into the garage. “Big day today. You’re good?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” She nods as convincingly as she can. She is good, mostly. Like, ninety-two percent good and only eight-percent what-the-fuck. 

He gives her that smile that’s only ever really between the two of them, this small trusting thing that’s like a secret they share. And it’s okay, really. The eight percent is just because, like, things are changing sort of always, which is scary; but something that never changes is that he’s there for her. Annoyingly sometimes, but. Yeah. He’s always there.

“What happened to 6:30 sharp?” Ilya calls from inside the car, followed by a string of exasperated Russian.

The drive out is chill. Normally Ilya would fight her for the aux to put on his weird classical stuff that she actually secretly likes but will never admit to his face; but he lets her have it today with a performatively generous “Here you go,” maybe because he can tell she’s feeling a little weird about the wedding. It’s a good thing, so good, but weird, too, and Sidney doesn’t know what to call the nervy feeling in her stomach that’s excited and a tiny bit unsettled, all at once. Anyway, she puts on Luna Li and eats the yogurt Ilya packed for her in one of Dad’s glass meal-prep containers, with slices of mango and blueberries and the granola she likes. Ottawa gives way to Gatineau which unfurls to stretches of empty green punctuated by small forested towns. The sky is the sort of perfect gemstone blue that feels almost ominous, like, the weather can’t possibly be on its best behaviour today when they need it most. She shoves the thought away quickly; don’t jinx it.

Baba and Jiji are already at the cottage, just-woken up and in absolutely no rush to accomplish any wedding-related tasks, which Sidney points out to Dad several times while Ilya mouths 6:30 sharp behind his back with a gratuitous eyeroll for Sidney’s benefit. She pours herself a cup of coffee that Baba brewed, but Dad plucks the mug out of her hands, slurps a dramatic sip, and offers to make her decaf.

The wedding planner is there by ten, a pencil-shaped man named Jules who carries around a walkie-talkie that he never seems to use. By 10:30 the florist is out on the deck working on an archway made of daisies and peonies and roses and hydrangeas and draping wisps of fern. Chairs arrive by eleven, which had been a close call, because apparently the original chair-rental place had cancelled at the last minute; but Jules and his walkie-talkie came to the rescue. 

A tent goes up around the time the Pikes arrive, and Sidney is assigned the task of showing Jade and Ruby and Amber and Arthur where they’ll find their baskets of petals and how to discreetly get to the starting point of the aisle from the cottage side-door.

By lunchtime the place is packed: Mom’s here, finally, hair half done, and Zachary, and Grandma Evvie and her Just-a-Roommate Justine, whom Sidney is under strict orders to ask absolutely no questions about until such a time as Grandma Evvie is ready to discuss it. Sveta shows up in a rental Lambo, black; Sidney is still trying to figure her out, honestly. She’s nice to Sidney and mean to Ilya, and either nice or mean to Dad depending on the day. Kavita and Isabel set up a staging area in one of the guest rooms for hair and makeup, and all the women Sidney loves crowd around a single vanity mirror, tangled arms reaching around each other for the right shade of foundation.

Sidney slips into the hall and passes by the master bedroom, door slightly ajar. She pauses, leaning back against the wall. Dad and Ilya are already in their suits, facing each other, careful hands smoothening each other’s lapels and cuffs and ties. They’re muttering to each other, joking around maybe, because Ilya has this stupid annoying smirk on his face, even though his eyes are kind of teary. She spies the pocket squares she made them from her leftover turquoise fabric. She’d decorated the edges with a wavy border in bright yellow thread, and embroidered a loon on each bottom corner.

She retreats to the quiet of her own room and closes the door, and takes her suit out of the garment bag, and wonders if she made the right decision with the buttons.

Sidney dresses slowly, waistcoat, trousers, jacket. Little silver beetle-shaped cufflinks from a vintage store in Centretown. Shakes out her hair and combs it to straight, tucking it behind her ears so it rests neatly at her shoulders. She debates putting in contacts, but decides to stick with her glasses. She’d been embarrassed to need them at first, but Ilya has told her that they suit her nicely, the tortoiseshell that’s sort of red like her hair.

“Knock knock.”

“You don’t have to say ‘knock knock.’ You can literally just, you know, knock.”

Mom snorts. “Hey, be nice to me. It’s my wedding day.”

She’s so pretty. That feeling drops in Sidney’s stomach again, sort of happy-wistful, topsy-turvy. She’d helped pick out Mom’s dress at a boutique in Montreal, off-white with a blue undertone, billowing long sleeves and a tiered hemline to just below her knees. She’s looking Sidney over with this teary-eyed expression, and Sidney’s pretty sure something embarrassing and maudlin is about to happen, but. That’s what today is for, anyway.

“Wow, Sid.”

She rolls her eyes. “Thanks, Mom.”

“Did you change the buttons?”

“Yeah.”

“I really love it. I can’t believe you made this.”

Sidney shrugs, and lets the hug just happen to her, enfolded in her mom’s arms, pressed tight against the warmth of her and the slightest alien arch of her stomach.

That’s part of the weirdness Sidney’s feeling, maybe, probably. She can’t quite put words to it. Because she loves her mom to the depths of her toes and she’s never been mad or angry at her, but she has been divided from her across an aching distance, because of the Houston years. Because right after Dad and Ilya traded to Ottawa and came out spectacularly and blew up hockey as the world once knew it, Mom got a phone call from the CSA that her astronaut application had been accepted, and—

“You didn’t even tell us you applied.”

“I never thought I’d actually get in. It was just—I don’t know. I didn’t think—”

“That’s just it. You didn’t think, Jess. I’m so proud of you, but some honesty and planning would have been really freaking helpful here.”

It’s the only time in her whole life Sidney has ever heard her parents fight, and really they were fighting about her, in a way, because Dad mainly felt bad that he’s already not around a lot because of hockey, and he was taking it out on Mom which wasn’t totally fair, and Sidney was eleven then and didn’t have the words to explain to him that she can miss people and love people and still be happy and still feel loved back from anyplace in the world, and Dad should really know that by now, after everything.

(Sidney was always interested in maps. It started when she lived with Baba and Jiji, and they would tell her what city Dad was playing hockey in that day, and she’d ask, “Where’s that?” and Baba would pull out a book with a map in it, and show her Anaheim or Chicago or Boston. Even once she went to live with Dad, she kept a world map hanging huge in her bedroom, and would look at it while they were Facetiming after a game, so she could picture wherever he was.)

And, yeah – it was the best-worst thing, to be so proud of Mom, and happy for her and with her, and also miss her for the two years of basic training, all while the stuff about Dad and Ilya, which had more or less died down in the media at that point, resurfaced because of the novel fact that Shane Hollander’s Ex-Baby-Mama would be going to outer space. 

(That’s when they got Anya. Sidney knew Ilya would be on board, but was pretty sure Dad would need her to put forth, like, a PowerPoint presentation of research before he’d consider. Instead, she just mentioned it once over dinner, and he nodded thoughtfully. “This will make you happy? And you’ll help take care of it?”

They went to the shelter that weekend.)

There was good stuff, obviously, during the Houston years. Sidney went to visit a bunch, and had the best tacos of her life, and stayed a whole summer to do a robotics camp hosted at the Space Centre, and Zachary even helped her find a local fencing club and a private coach to train with. She flew out with Dad and Ilya and Grandma Evvie to see Mom graduate from basic training, and felt in the moment they called her name, just, like – whoa. Like, Mom’s an astronaut now. That’s crazy.

And, like, there was something so magical about that day; a feeling like – well, okay. So, in fencing, there’s this moment, right before the fifteenth touch, when it’s like, either you or your opponent could score. It’s like that with Jasper, anyway, when they do practice bouts at the club; he’s the only one who can really keep up with her, which is annoying as fuck, and they trade points like it’s bloodsport. ANYWAY. There’s a moment when it could go either way, and everything happens so fast in fencing, but in that specific moment time just sort of stands still, everything slows down and Sidney can see all the possibilities unfold before her, ghost-like; a million different versions of herself and all the decisions she could possibly make.

It felt like that, pretty much, watching Mom achieve her dreams – like Sidney could do anything, everything. A million possibilities.

Mom got special dispensation to carry out her pre-assignment training between Ottawa and Longueuil, so she and Zachary finally moved back, and before their house was even totally unpacked Mom was in the crowd at her very next fencing tournament, wearing a stupid foam finger which was sort of against the general decorum of the whole sport of fencing, but it made Sidney laugh. 

(Pre-assignment training includes an intensive Russian language program, to Ilya’s absolute glee, because now he and Mom can talk shit behind her and Dad’s backs. She and Dad are working on Japanese, in revenge.)

It’ll be four years before Mom is even considered for the next Canadian mission, and so she and Zachary finally scheduled their wedding, and also, you know. The baby.

So weird. Sidney had never really even thought about it before, what it would be like to acquire a sibling. And there’s this other blustery, uneasy thought strumming the insides of Sidney’s ribs like a xylophone, and she hugs and hugs her mom in her pretty wedding dress, and there’s a kick, and Sidney just—

“You were fifteen,” she says quietly into Mom’s shoulder. “Like me.”

Mom nods, face squishing against Sidney’s hair. “I was.”

And, like, Sidney has been told she has an overactive imagination. But her imagination hits an absolute brick wall when it comes to this. Like, the idea of being pregnant, of having a kid, now, when a couple weeks ago her biggest worry had been passing her math final. She literally cannot imagine it; her mind goes blank, like, pitch-dark.

She says as much: “I can’t imagine having a baby.”

“Luckily you don’t have to imagine it.” Mom hums teasing into her hair. “Unless you have something you need to tell me?”

“God no.”

“Good.” 

Sidney knows it was hard. She knows her own origin story. She knows how hard her parents and grandparents worked to find all the best ways to be there for her, to love her through everything, through all of it. And now there’s this, like, primordial cell-culture propagating that’s twenty-five percent her same DNA, and it kicks, and it has a mother who has, like, a job and a husband and a whole bunch extra years of, like, life experience or whatever. And it’s not that Sidney’s jealous, exactly – maybe a little? – but also, like, she’s maybe, weirdly, feeling kind of guilty. Even though she knows that’s irrational and pointless and totally unfair to all three of them.

And she’s excited, too. And scared. And, like, motivated, if that’s the right word. Like, she wants to be a really good sister. She wants to freaking crush it.

She doesn’t say any of that. Not today. Instead she asks: “Did you find out if he’s coming?”

“He is.” Another squishing nod; they’ll both have to fix their hair after this. “You don’t have to talk to him, Sid. You don’t even have to look at him. He’s not forgiven, okay? He’s just – there.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t really remember her Grandpa Greg. Vaguely, she recalls that he had a big, shiny wristwatch. It had been a literal decade since Mom last spoke to him. He’s sick, though, is the thing. Some situation with his heart; there was a surgery. And now he’s coming to the wedding, which. Yeah. Another strange, upside-down thing about today.

“He was a pilot. Did I ever tell you that?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“He was an engineer for the RCAF. He used to take me to see the planes he worked on. That’s when I first got interested in space. He bought me my first telescope.”

“Oh.” And it’s a strange thing, isn’t it? That Mom’s whole life’s purpose began with a guy who fled like a coward from all the best parts. She’s not sure how to say that, though, so she just says: “Dads are weird.”

Mom laughs wetly into the top of her hair. “Yeah. They are. You have some pretty good ones though.”

“Rock solid,” Sidney agrees. “Four out of five stars.”

“Why only four?”

She shrugs. “Have to keep them on their toes.”

“I love you so much, Sid. I love you 768,800 kilometres worth.”

“To the moon and back?”

“Bingo.”

Sidney laughs. “I love you a ridiculous amount.” That’s Dad’s line, but, she’s heard it so much she thinks she’s entitled to borrow it. It’s a good line.

“Hey. Whatever weirdo pops out of here – we’ll love them together, too, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sidney says, and finally breaks away from what might hold the record for Canada’s longest hug. “Definitely.”

Mom helps fix her hair, combing it gently back and tucking it behind her ears the way she likes. They put on makeup together. Sidney doesn’t really wear makeup very much, but she has a neon green eyeliner that she uses to draw little stars at the corners of her eyes and tiny dots among her freckles.

Downstairs, it’s almost time. The Pike kids are busy weaving flower crowns with stems of daisies, yellow and white and pale blue. “Do you want one?” Arthur offers. Sidney sits on the floor with them, and Amber teaches her how to twist the stems together just right.

Zachary’s parents are here from Canmore, and his sister who teaches skiing in Whistler, and her son who’s five and the ring-bearer, and also Zachary’s grandmother who flew in from Lagos. Sidney’s only met the woman on a handful of Facetime calls, but she might basically be the coolest person in the world, actually. She’s an award-winning economist, which is very interesting, and has been added to the untenably long list of possible university majors Sidney reviews twice a year with her irritated school counsellor.

Sidney is maid-of-honour, and Kavita and Isabel and Zachary’s sister Zoë are bridesmaids, and they all bustle together to get in position on the left side of the flower arch that frames the sunlit lake. Opposite, Zachary is there, handsome and dapper with his own turquoise pocket square, and Dad and Ilya and the other groomsmen from Zachary’s lab, and Dad catches her eye and mouths “I love you,” and she sticks out her tongue and crinkles her nose, and he laughs.

It’s Jiji who walks Mom down the aisle, hugs her fiercely – he really gives the best hugs – and takes his seat next to Baba in the front row. Mom’s PhD advisor is officiating, and she’s a short older lady with a melodic voice, and Zachary and Mom both end their vows with “Thank you and I love you,” and just as they kiss a great blue heron flies low across the lake, a single soaring flap of magnificent wings, and Sidney gasps and, for a moment, believes in magic.

Dad and Ilya’s wedding was pretty different than this. Just privately signing some paperwork at Ottawa City Hall; afterwards, a big catered dinner at Baba and Jiji’s house with Mom and Zachary and Great-Aunt Rita and the Pikes and Cliff Marleau and J.J. and Sveta. Mom set up the telescope in the backyard, and the various Pikes, including Uncle Hayden, got violently involved in a stargazing competition. This was after Dad and Ilya had come out as a couple – with the aid of a coterie of attorneys – to the league, the union, and the HR departments of their respective teams; before the trade and before the news broke publicly. Things were weird and probably kind of bad for Dad in Montreal, then, and difficult with Ilya still being so far away in Boston. Sidney knew they’d be moving away by next season, and she spent those last months in the Westmount house memorizing all its textures and secret hiding spots. It was a good house.

Ilya came to find her after dinner, on the porch eating one of the mini butter tarts Jiji had made. He held out a hand and she stuffed the rest of the butter tart into her mouth and responded with a fist-bump, and launched into the thirteen steps of their handshake, ending with a respectful bow.

“You ready?” he asked her.

“Ready.” She looked across to Dad on the other side of the yard. “Hey, Dad. We have a surprise.”

The party continued without them while Ilya ushered them into the Jeep and drove them down the road, ignoring Dad’s bewildered and increasingly irritated line of questioning. Then: “Oh.”

They were at the community rink where Dad first learned to play hockey. Dad, and Sidney, too, back in Timbits.

It was late, but Ilya had arranged special access. A disgruntled Zamboni driver unlocked the front door and whisked them inside. Ilya and Sidney had conspired to pack their skates, all three pairs. They played keepaway, then raced around for a bit, then just skated idle loops around the quiet empty rink, just the three of them. Dad grabbed her hand at one point and they synced up their strides, just gliding together, aimless and fast, while Ilya watched with that expression he gets sometimes, as if he’s fascinated by whatever small everyday thing they are doing.

“What are you looking at?” Dad accused as they skated past.

“My husband and our Sidney,” Ilya said with a shrug, and Dad stopped short and Sidney barrelled into him and Dad used the opportunity to pull her into a hug and they just stood there for a bit, on the same ice that had raised them both. And he had his hand on the back of her head and his other arm around her shoulder, and he was shaking a little, and she realized he was crying.

“Dad—”

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” Ilya had skated up to them now, set one hand on Dad’s shoulder and the other on hers, so she was sort of sandwiched between them.

“You are good, Shane?” he asked softly.

“Yeah. Yes. I’m so happy.” Dad nodded a bunch of quick, small nods. Took a breath. “I never thought I could have this.”

(Ilya says that a lot, by the way: How did our Sidney do on her math test? or Does our Sidney need more yogurt from the store? It was a little annoying at first, but, she’s gotten used to it.)

Anyway. Mom’s wedding is definitely much more wedding-y. There’s a big tent outside with a dance floor and a ton of tables, and a DJ, and speeches where people tap champagne glasses with a butter knife. The DJ announces Mom and Zachary as “Dr. and Dr.” which is sort of badass, and they pull Sidney onto the dance floor with them for the Macarena, which is objectively stupid, but so much fun.

Sidney was allowed to invite her friends, and Sophie is here from Montreal, and even the Olssons flew in – they’re in Edmonton now – and Sidney flings her arms around Alva and they go to take selfies where all the flowers are arranged by the water’s edge. Her fencing team is here, too, Élise and Anna, and Jasper, annoyingly. 

A man is seated at a far table in the back of the tent, with a cane and thin wire glasses and a shiny wristwatch. “Hang on,” she tells Alva. She goes to the buffet table to get two slices of cake, and sits at the far table, a seat apart from the man. She passes him a plate. He nods, accepting it.

They don’t say anything for a while, just eat their cake in silence and watch the party swirl around them. Dad and Mom are dancing goofily with Zachary’s little nephew and Ilya is at a table with Baba and Jiji lighting up with laughter, and Grandma Evvie and Justine are strolling by the lakeshore pointing out turtles and wading birds, and there’s music and so much colour and sun everywhere, they’re drenched in it, and finally Sidney looks at the man and tells him:

“I just think, like. You really missed out.”

Suddenly and sharply, she wants to hug her dad. Because she can’t imagine being pregnant at fifteen, but she can imagine a whole litany of other fuck-ups that she might stumble into, and she knows, deep in her gut, that Dad will support her through all of it. She’s pretty sure she could commit murder and he’ll be there with a shovel, or she could drop out of school to become, like, a potato farmer or something, and he’ll be right fucking there, helping her research the most fuel-efficient kind of potato-farm tractor.

She shoots up from her seat and finds him on the dance floor and hugs him from behind his back, squishing her face against his shoulder.

“You’re being sweet. Why are you being sweet?”

“I’m always sweet.”

“No, you’re a teenage sarcasm machine.”

“Rude.” She releases the hug and he turns around to face her.

“You okay?” he asks, concern written on his face.

“Yeah.” She glances back at the far table, then down at her shoes, then back at Dad. “What would you do if I committed murder?”

“Help you bury the body,” he says without missing a beat.

“That’s what I thought.” She grabs him in another hug, and his big arms wrap around her shoulders. “Just wanted to check.”

She gets a ginger ale from the bar and sits with Sophie and Alva and Anna and Élise, and Sophie fills her in on all the gossip from their old school, and Jasper comes up to their table and hovers there like an asshole, and Sidney goes, “What, are you just going to stand there?” and he goes, “I came to ask you to dance, Lizard Girl,” and Sophie and Alva and Anna and Élise all squeal and push her out of her seat and she kind of stumbles into him which is so embarrassing.

“I don’t want to dance,” she tells him.

“You don’t have to,” he says, and it’s sort of taunting like a challenge, and now she has to dance with him, basically, because otherwise she’d be backing down, and she can’t back down from Jasper Ramos. She has to beat him at everything, basically, always.

They’re on the dance floor and he’s sort of just standing there with his arms at his side, looking at her, and she says, “Well? You’re the one who wanted to dance.”

“Um. Your dad is watching.”

Sidney laughs through her nose. “Is he glaring?”

“I think so. Should I be worried?”

She puts her hands on his shoulders and starts leading them in an awkward half-dance. “Now you should be worried.”

He blanches, eyes wide, and she smirks, and now he’s the one steeling himself against her challenge. He settles his hands on her waist, loose and polite, and they dance mostly poorly for two people who spend much of their lives training around footwork.

Jasper is so good at fencing, as good as Sidney, maybe better, and it’s infuriating. They don’t even compete together because there’s men’s and women’s, but they practice together all the time, one-upping each other, and god he’s so annoying when he gets to fifteen first, pumping his fists in the air as if he’s at the Olympics and not on a random piste in random Ottawa on a random Thursday night; tearing off his mask and shaking out his hair and smiling this bright, self-satisfied grin and—

“Hm?” She didn’t hear what he just said.

“I said, do you want to really annoy your dad?”

“Yes please,” she replies, immediately suspicious.

“Okay,” he says. “Don’t panic.” Then before she can formulate a thought, he’s kissed her, a brush of lips so quick she wonders if she hallucinated it. 

She stares back at him, frozen; her whole brain has gone offline, pretty much.

His eyes are smug; laughing. He’s just won. “See you around, Lizard Girl.” He walks away.

She’s left there on the dance floor, positive her face is warm and bright-red the way Dad’s gets, and she kind of wants to punch Jasper in the stomach so that he can't breathe, and mostly she really, really wants to beat him at fencing, and also a little bit she wants to kiss him again. For science.

And now Dad’s here, of course he’s here, tall and protective and teddy-bear soft. “You good?” he asks gently.

“Yes,” she squeaks out.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No thank you.”

The music shifts; Coldplay comes on, thick piano chords and churning reverb. So corny. “Hey, I like this song.” Dad starts dancing, jerking his elbows left and right, making wavy disco moves with peace-signs for fingers.

“What are you doing?”

“Dancing to Coldplay.”

“How do you even know Coldplay? You know, like, zero pop culture.”

“How do you know Coldplay? You’re, like, five seconds old.”

’Cause you’re a sky – ’cause you’re a sky full of stars—

Zachary picked this out for Mom, probably. She spots them across the dance floor, coming closer, hand in hand. Dad’s still doing this awful, ridiculous dance, persistent, dead-serious expression, and she has to laugh. She can’t help it.

I’m gonna give you my heart—

She starts to dance with him, throwing her arms around, shaking her hair loose. They’re jumping up and down now, laughing, singing along to the ooh’s. 

“You two dance like the hairless boy and his rude dog,” Ilya says from behind her.

Dad looks at him, completely perplexed, which is classic, even though Ilya always says shit like this to mess with him. “He means the Peanuts, Dad.” She rolls her eyes.

’Cause you light up the path—

She steps back so Ilya can join them, and now they’re all three dancing stupid while Chris Martin sings basically the same two lyrics over and over again. Mom and Zachary are dancing together, arms wrapped around each other; and Baba takes Jiji’s hand and leads him onto the dance floor. 

’Cause you get lighter the more it gets dark—

It’s getting late; the sun is starting to dip below the lake, shades of pink diffusing into blue-grey twilight. She thinks she spies a bright-green flash of wings blur through the tent, blink-and-you'll-miss-it; a luna moth. They’re native to the woods out here. They have long spindly hindwings that scientists believe confuse predators that use echolocation. As larva – caterpillars – their diet is mainly paper birch leaves. They eat constantly for a month until they’re ready to spin their cocoon. 

It’s so interesting, that such a beautiful fragile airborne thing ever used to be a caterpillar, once.

Her flower crown is jostled loose from jumping and dancing. She’ll take the crown back to Ottawa and press the flowers between the pages of a book, then paste them into her collage journal – she has so many now, years’ worth, lining her bookshelf. Inside, there’s confetti from three Stanley Cup wins, doodles scrawled with a ballpoint pen she stole from the clerk at Ottawa City Hall, the folded government letter Ilya received with his permanent resident card, bright pink papel picado from a taqueria in Houston. And there’s so many more pages to fill, and empty journals she hasn’t even bought yet.

She’s a gravitational body, a planetary mass, encircled by loving revolutions. If she closes her eyes, she can zoom out like a satellite telescope in the cold of space, capturing these spinning orbits as they intersect and collide in defiance of Kepler’s Laws. She zooms out and out and out, until she’s floating, weightless, beating hearts dancing around her like a galaxy, endlessly glowing, ever-expanding.

She tilts back her head and opens her eyes. A loon calls from across the lake.

Chapter End Notes

• I wanted to give this story its Diamonds moment, but Diamonds belongs to Hollanov. This one goes out to Jess and Zachary.

• American astronaut Anna Lee Fisher was the first mother in space. She had her daughter in 1983 and flew on the space shuttle Discovery in 1984. Canadian astronaut Jenni Gibbons was selected to the CSA's astronaut class at the age of 28; Jessica is a year younger here, setting a new Canadian record.

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