Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander, Yuna Hollander, Grigori Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Marriage of Convenience, Green Card Marriage, Angst with a Happy Ending, POV Alternating, Found Family, Explicit Sexual Content, Anal Sex, Bottom Shane Hollander, Top Ilya Rozanov, The Real Villain Is Canadian Immigration Paperwork, Or is it the hero???, You Decide

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-08-09 Completed: 2026-08-10 Words: 24,956 Chapters: 4/4

These Persons Here Present

Summary

Ilya's father wakes him at four in the morning to tell him that he never had dementia, and that Ilya must leave Russia, right now, permanently. Forty-something hours later Ilya is standing in a township office in rural Ontario, marrying Shane Hollander for citizenship. Everything after that — the lawyer, the joint account, the wills, the drive up to the cottage — was never part of the plan.

Alternatively: In the summer of 2016, Ilya must flee Russia, never to return. Shane makes a brilliant plan: marry Ilya to get him Canadian citizenship. It’s only after the wedding that they realize citizenship law doesn’t really work that way.

Alternatively x 2: My inversion of the “married for citizenship” trope.

Notes

The Canadian citizenship laws changed in 2017, which is inconvenient for a fic set in summer 2016. Therefore, I’m just using the 2017 citizenship laws in this fic. We’ll say in the Game Changers universe, they passed that immigration law in, like, early 2016 or something.

Chapter 1

July 5th, 2016

SHANE

Shane got the call from “Lily” at 10 PM, which was 5 AM Moscow-time. He didn’t like what it said that his brain automatically did the conversion without his conscious choosing. He and Rozanov didn’t talk when Rozanov was in Russia, so there was no reason to know the time difference. Hell, they didn’t talk at all. Not on the phone, at least, and barely in person. The whole of their communication was a series of texts about room numbers and times. And, well, sexts. 

That last part was what made Shane pick up. 5 AM Moscow time. Maybe Rozanov had missed Shane. Or at least missed his mouth.

“Hello?” Shane said, slightly out of breath.

Rozanov didn’t answer, but Shane could hear the man’s breathing. He hated that he could recognize Rozanov by the sound of his breath.

“Um. Are you—" Drunk, Shane was going to say, but Rozanov cut him off.

“I’m outside of your condo.”

“You’re. What?” Shane looked around his childhood bedroom, like there was anything there that would answer the question. His parents had left for their cottage yesterday, but Shane had a sponsor meeting today, so he’d stayed in town.

“In Montreal. The sex condo. I’m outside. Can you let me in? Please?”

Absurdly it was the ‘please’ that freaked Shane out. He didn’t think Rozanov had ever said that word to him non-ironically.

“What the fuck, Rozanov?” asked Shane, baffled. “No, I’m not— I’m in Ottawa. Why aren’t you in Russia?”

The sound of Rozanov’s breathing grew heavier and hiccupping, almost like—

“Are you crying?”

There was a pause.

“Oh. I think so. Yes.”

Shane wanted to ask what the fuck is going on? Instead, what came out of his mouth was: “Are you okay?”

“No. I just— Shane—" Rozanov’s voice cracked, and Shane’s heart felt like it was cracking too. “Can you please let me up?”

“I can’t,” Shane said wretchedly. “I have the only key and I’m. I’m in Ottawa.” Shane’s mind raced, thinking of what could make Rozanov sound like that. “Are you— are you safe?”

“I don’t know, Shane. I really don’t fucking know.”

“Are you in danger? Is this life or death?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe.”

Maybe. That one word cut through the static in Shane’s brain. Maybe Rozanov could die. Maybe Shane would never see him again, never play hockey with him again, never feel the touch of Rozanov’s skin against his or see his face across the dot or feel his lips—

“My real apartment,” Shane said before he’d even decided. “I’ll send you the address. I’ll call the doorman. He’ll let you in. I get groceries delivered so there’s a code for the door. I’ll send that too.”

“Shane. You don’t have to do that. I’m— I’m overreacting, probably.”

Ilya’s voice sounded wrecked though, and suddenly Shane couldn’t give a shit about anyone seeing him go into Shane’s apartment. The usual nightmare scenario — someone finding out about the two of them — was replaced by a different nightmare right now.

“Shut up, Ilya. Go to the address.” Shane grabbed his keys. “I’ll be there in two hours.”

~ ~ ~

July 4^th, 2016

ILYA

A hand closed hard on his shoulder.

"Wake up, boy."

Ilya came out of sleep all at once, and wrong. The room was black. For a moment he didn't know which bed he was in. Then he remembered. He was in his childhood home in Moscow, in his childhood bed. He preferred to stay at his apartment instead when he was back in Russia, the one that he’d bought exactly for these trips. But Alexei had trashed the place on one of his drug-fueled binges, and it was easier to be here. Well, not easier, but he was supposed to be in Russia for his father, anyway.

"Papa." He got up onto an elbow, and his voice went low and slow. "Papa, it's all right. You're at home. It's night, that's all. Nobody is here."

His father was standing over the bed, dressed, with shoes on.

"Get up."

"Come, I'll take you back—"

"I don't have dementia, you idiot."

Ilya's hand was already out, reaching for his father's arm. "Papa—"

"Look at me." His father didn't move. "Do I seem demented to you?"

Ilya looked at him.

Grigori was standing straight. His eyes were sharp, and Ilya realized that the sentence his father asked had been spoken clearly and crisply. He didn’t sound like what Ilya remembered. Or rather, he sounded the way that Ilya remembered from his childhood. Grigori did not seem like the weak, confused shadow of himself that Ilya had become accustomed to seeing.

"No," he said.

"No." His father nodded once, as though a subordinate had finally understood an order. "Good."

Ilya sat up. “Papa, what— I don’t understand.”

“I never had dementia, idiot boy.” He scowled down at Ilya. “I had secrets. Secrets that very powerful men would rather not be remembered.”

His father crossed to the window, looked outside for a moment, and let the curtain fall.

"When I was young I was in Leningrad. I taught. KGB officers came to me and I made them useful. Some of them were nothing and some of them were something." He said it flatly. "One of them was very ruthless and very ambitious. He was perhaps the most dangerous and powerful man I ever mentored. I signed the paper that sent him to Dresden in 1985."

There was one man very famous for being KGB in Dresden in the eighties. Ilya had learned about it in school.

"You mean...?"

"Don't say it."

"Papa—"

"Not in this room." His father turned around. "Not in any room. Not for the rest of your life, do you understand me?"

Ilya's mouth was dry. "Yes."

"When he came back to the presidency I thought: perhaps it is time that I became nobody's problem. So I began to forget things. Small things, at first. I thought if I was wrong, I could recover in a year or two." Something almost amused crossed his face and was gone. "Doctors are wrong all the time."

"And then?"

"And then they shot Nemtsov on a bridge, in daylight, in sight of the Kremlin walls, where anyone at all could see it." He shrugged. "And nothing happened to anybody."

Ilya made a mental calendar before he could stop himself. That had been seventeen months ago. And then last summer his father had taken a turn. It was sudden, a bad few months; the doctor saying gently that it went like that sometimes, that it was not anyone's fault, that Ilya should not blame himself for being abroad.

"So I understood that I must be seen to forget everything," his father said. "And I was not careful enough, or I was not fast enough. I don't know which. It doesn't matter now."

"They found out."

"Somebody did."

"Who?"

"It doesn't matter." He looked at his watch. "In four hours, a car comes to this house. If I am here when it comes, I die. If I am not here and you are, then you will be used to find me. So I will not be here." He raised his eyebrows. "And neither will you."

"What do you know?" Ilya was standing without remembering having stood. "What is it, what do you actually—"

"No."

"Papa—"

"Think, idiot boy." His father said it without heat, which was worse. "Knowing will get you nothing, except a bullet in the head. And if they find me, best that I can tell them truthfully that you do not know anything.”

Ilya stood there in the dark in his shorts, twenty-five years old, the best hockey player in the world, and could not think of a single thing to say.

"Where is Polina?"

"Tver. At her sister’s. Three weeks."

He remembered arriving on Monday and finding the flat emptier than usual and thinking nothing of it at all.

"Alexei?"

Something small and closed off happened in his father’s expression.

"It's too late for your brother."

"What does that mean?"

His father’s face was like stone. "His wife and the girl will be looked after," Grigori said.

"Looked after."

"Yes."

"No." Ilya's voice came out too loud and he brought it down. "No. I'll take her. I'll take her with me, I have money, I have people who—"

Something crossed his father's face that in another man would have been a smile.

"Stupid boy."

"I can—"

"You could not cross any international border with a child who is not yours, who does not have a passport. You’d never make it out of Russia, even if the government weren’t looking for you. She would be in a state institution by Friday and you would be in a cell, and both of those would be the good outcomes." He straightened his cuff. "As though you would do anything except get the two of you killed. No. I have solved this, as I have always solved everything."

Ilya didn't move.

"There is a family," his father said. "Far from here. They are good people and they owe a great favor to a man who owes a great favor to me. By the end of the week the girl will have a different surname and a garden and a school. She will not remember any of this. It is the best available outcome."

And Ilya understood, standing there, that he would never be able to verify a single word of it. Not next year. Not in twenty years. Not ever. He would not know her new name, and trying to find it would only put her in danger.

"All right," he said.

"Get dressed."

He pulled on yesterday's jeans and a shirt from the back of the chair. When he reached for his bag his father said, "Leave it."

"There's nothing in it, it's just—"

"Leave it. A man carrying luggage is going somewhere. You are not going anywhere." He smiled mirthlessly. "You need only your wallet and your passport." Grigori had both objects in his own hand, and he began steering Ilya out of the room. Then he paused, looking back at the nightstand. Grigori walked back, grabbed something, and put it in Ilya’s hand.

His mother’s crucifix. Grigori had told Ilya that he needed nothing, then stopped to make sure Ilya had his mother’s crucifix, that he wouldn’t leave it behind. Ilya's fingers closed over it.

They went down the dark hallway together, past the kitchen, past the door of the room where his mother had died. At the front door his father stopped with his hand on the lock and did not open it.

“Outside is a car. It will take you to a plane, and the plane will take you to another in St. Petersburg. From there, you will fly with a Finnish captain who has been paid to take you to Helsinki, where you will get your passport stamped in the Schengen.” He handed Ilya a stack of 50-euro bills. “When you get to Helsinki, buy an airline ticket, in cash. Go to Canada, you have the entry visa already because of hockey. Do not buy a ticket to America. Do not go to Boston yet.”

Ilya’s breath caught. “Will I be… even in America, will I be—”

“It is doubtful that they will bother you there,” Grigori said. “They know I would not be so stupid as to tell you anything that matters. Operating in America is not simple, even for them, and it is unlikely they will waste resources on you that would be better saved for someone more important.” Grigori’s face was grim. “It is unlikely. Not impossible. Wait in Canada, where nobody expects you to be. Before your hockey season starts, have a friend check on your apartment for you. If it is not ransacked by then, you are safe.” He paused. “Do not ask Svetlana. Her father risked much to get us this information. Never speak to her again.”

Out of everything, that was the thing that hurt the most. Grigori’s hand began to turn the doorknob and Ilya found himself reaching out for his father.

“Papa,” he said, voice cracking. Ilya understood what was happening. This would likely be the last time they ever saw each other.

Grigori’s eyes remained flinty, the way Ilya had seen since he was a child. But he paused for a moment, and he put his hand on Ilya’s cheek.

“You are soft, Ilyusha.” Grigori’s hand was gentle, but the diminutive hit Ilya like a slap in the face. His father had never called him that, not once in Ilya’s life. “And you long for softness in others. It is, perhaps, the thing about you that most disappoints me.” Despite the words, Grigori’s thumb stroked along his cheek, once. “I am not a soft man. I could never be that, not even for you. Even though you needed it from me.” He huffed out a humorless laugh. “Especially because you needed it.” He pressed his lips together tightly, and for the first time Ilya realized just how much his father’s disappointment looked like sorrow, or grief. “Go to your life in America, Ilyusha. Go back to your hockey. Never return to Russia again. Never even to Europe, if you can avoid it.”

It was the last thing his father ever said to him.

~ ~ ~

12:07 AM July 6th, 2016

SHANE

Shane’s heart was beating fast as he unlocked the door to his Montreal apartment. Over the last two hours, his brain had been tormented by visions of what he might find. Ilya, bleeding out on the floor of his entryway. Ilya, beat to shit but still breathing. Or worse, maybe nothing at all. Maybe he’d never see Ilya again, and the call was the last time anyone would hear from him.

But when Shane walked in, Ilya was sitting on the couch. He looked over and his face crumpled.

“Shane,” he said, once, desperately.

The next thing Shane knew, he was on the couch, arms wrapped around Ilya, pressing Ilya’s face into his neck. Ilya was crying now in earnest, big wrenching sobs that shook his shoulders. Shane was crying too. He didn’t know why; he didn’t know what had happened to Ilya. But he knew that Ilya was hurting, and Shane knew that it hurt him, somehow, just as much. Shane thought he knew what that meant, what it meant to throw everything away without hesitation for someone who mattered to you, to feel their pain like your own. There was a four-letter word for it, but that was insane, and there wasn’t time for Shane to freak out right now, because right now he had to be the one in control.

The crying went on a long time. Shane didn't check how long. He had one hand at the back of Ilya's neck and the other flat between his shoulder blades. Every so often, Shane would rub a hand up and down Ilya’s back and make soothing noises. Somewhere in there his own face dried but he stopped noticing it.

Ilya's hands remained fisted in the back of Shane’s shirt the whole time.

When it stopped, Ilya sat back and scrubbed his face with the heel of his palm and said, in an almost normal voice, "Okay."

Shane got him water. Ilya drank it in one go. Shane took the glass back to the kitchen and filled it again and brought it back, because his body wanted something to do and his brain had nothing for it. He noticed, filling it the second time, that nothing in the apartment had been touched. Two hours alone in here and Ilya had not turned on a lamp, or opened the fridge, or moved a single thing. He'd apparently just sat down on the couch in the dark and waited. In seven and a half years, Shane had never seen Ilya Rozanov sit still for anything.

"When did you last eat?"

Ilya thought about it. Then he shrugged.

Shane made him a peanut butter sandwich, because he hadn’t planned to come back to this apartment for at least a month and that was what was in the apartment. He stood there while Ilya ate half of it. Then Shane got him a t-shirt and a pair of shorts out of his own drawer. The shirt was tight on Ilya, who was just a little bit bigger than Shane.

Then Ilya sat back down on the couch and said, "My father does not have dementia."

Shane waited for the next part. It didn't come.

"Okay," he said carefully. "I didn't know he had dementia."

Ilya looked at him. Something crossed his face: surprise, and then a kind of embarrassment, and then nothing.

"No," he said. "I suppose not."

The story came out of him in bits and pieces, after that.

~ ~ ~

July 4^th, 2016

ILYA

The car took Ilya to a small airfield an hour outside of Moscow. He’d never seen it, never heard of it. The gate was rusty and there were no signs. There was only one plane, small, with two seats. One for Ilya, and the other for the pilot. The man was old, his father’s age. They didn’t speak a single word to each other for the entirety of the flight, but Ilya knew enough. This was an old KGB contact of his father’s, operating out of an old KGB airfield.

The flight took a little over four hours, and Russia went on underneath them for all of it. Forest. Then more forest.  He kept waiting to feel something about leaving and the feeling did not come. Mostly he was cold. The heater blew on his face and not on his hands, so he sat with both fists in his lap and thought about nothing, on purpose, with enormous effort.

The second airfield was a real place. It had tarmac instead of grass, a fuel tank on wheels, and two business jets parked nose-in at a hangar with a company name on it. A man in a high-visibility vest was doing something unhurried to a trolley.

The old man taxied to the far end, away from all of it, and shut the engine down. When they got out of the plane, he went to a hatch behind the seats and pulled out a suitcase. It was hard-sided, dark green, scuffed white along one corner. He set it on the tarmac and pushed it upright toward Ilya with two fingers.

"Now you are tourist," he said, "who likes small aircraft because you are eccentric hockey star."

Ilya took the handle. The weight of it was wrong, too light.

"Where is my father now?"

The old man closed the hatch.

"Is he already—"

"Second door," the old man said, and nodded at a low building at the edge of the runway.

Ilya stood there for a moment with the suitcase. Then he said, "Thank you," because his mother had raised him and his father had not.

Behind the second door there was a corridor that smelled like floor cleaner, and then a room with four plastic chairs, a rubber plant, and a booth with sliding glass. A red line was painted across the tiles about a meter in front of it. On the wall above the booth was the double eagle. The boy in the booth was maybe twenty. He had a summer haircut and a paper cup of tea going cold at his elbow.

Ilya put his passport through the tray. He wondered if there was a word for the kind of fear that he was feeling, right now.

The boy opened the passport. He looked at the picture, looked at Ilya, then typed.

"You're Rozanov," he said.

"Yes."

The boy sat back. A big smile grew across his face.

"My father says there's been nobody like you since Kharlamov."

Ilya heard himself say, in the voice he used for these, the one that was warm and slightly modest and entirely automatic and belonged to no part of him, "Your father is very kind. Kharlamov was better."

"That's what you're supposed to say." The boy was grinning now. "Purpose of travel?"

"Holiday."

"Where?"

"Finland. Fishing."

"Ha." He picked up the stamp. "My uncle goes for the pike. He says the Finns charge you to catch your own fish."

The stamp came down. It was a very small sound.

Ilya took the passport back through the tray and looked at it. There was a date, a place, and a little aeroplane. It was legal, real, entered into a computer by a boy who appeared to be no more than what he seemed. He wondered what kind of favors his father had called, in the middle of the night, to ensure that this stamp could make its way into Ilya’s passport. He wondered what it meant that Grigori had used those favors on Ilya, instead of himself.

He wondered if his father was already dead, because he had spent those favors on Ilya.

"Have a good trip," the boy said.

~ ~ ~

The Finn was called Mikko and he was about thirty-five. He shook Ilya's hand for slightly too long.

"No. No. No," he said, delighted, before Ilya had said a word. "They tell me the name on the booking and I think, sure, it's a joke, it's some guy with the same name." He was already reaching for the suitcase. "My brother is going to be sick. He's going to be actually, physically sick."

The plane was a small twin, tidy, twenty years old. Mikko did his checks talking the entire time — the weather over the Gulf, a customer last month who had been sick into his own hat, the price of avgas, which was a scandal.

They were airborne before he asked anything.

"So," he said. "You know it's not my business."

"No."

"Right." He nodded, entirely satisfied. "You're not the first guy I fly who doesn't want to be in an airport. Usually it's a divorce."

Ilya looked out of his window at the water.

"Ah, hey. Can I—" Mikko had produced a phone from somewhere. "For my brother. He won't put it anywhere, he's not—"

"No." It came out too fast and too hard, and Ilya heard the shape of it in the little cabin, and made himself add, "Sorry. It is private. This trip."

"Sure. Sure, sure, sure." The phone went away without any fuss at all, and Mikko was already on to something else.

Ilya’s heart thundered. To make up for it he signed Mikko's clipboard, and on the back of a fuel receipt, for Jussi.

Then Mikko wanted to talk about hockey, so they talked about hockey. He played beer league on Thursdays in a rink in Vantaa and his shot was, in his own estimation, garbage. Ilya asked him two questions about it and then told him he was trying to hit it hard, which was the problem. He should stop trying to hit it hard and start trying to hit through it.

Mikko went quiet for a second. "Through it," he repeated.

"Yes. The puck is not the point. The stick is the point. You must hit through the puck. The motion is the same, always, whether or not the puck is there. If you focus on the puck, you take away your own—" He couldn't find the word in English and used his hand instead.

"Huh," Mikko said, and then, with real feeling: "Huh."

It was the only part of the day that made any sense. It was the only thing Ilya still knew how to do, and it worked. For about ninety seconds he was completely fine. Below them the coast disappeared and the water started. Somewhere over it, without any announcement, without anything at all happening, Ilya left Russia.

~ ~ ~

Helsinki-Malmi had two runways and a beautiful old round terminal building. Passport control was easy; a Finnish border officer in a booth asked him his purpose, duration, and accommodation. Ilya said holiday, one week, and a hotel he invented. She stamped it. The whole business took perhaps ten seconds. He had spent twenty-five years inside a country and he got out of it in the time it takes to tie a skate.

The taxi to Vantaa took thirty minutes and cost forty-five euros. He paid with one of the fifties that his father had given him and didn’t ask for change. In the departures hall he found a bathroom stall and sat on the closed lid and counted the money properly for the first time.

Four thousand eight hundred euros. Ninety-six notes. Euros, not rubles. His father had been prepared for this for some time. Ilya put his head back against the partition and breathed through his mouth for a while. Then he went to find a ticket.

~ ~ ~

The woman at the ticket desk had a lanyard and a very pleasant, entirely unmovable manner.

"To Canada," Ilya said. "Any city."

"Any city," she repeated.

"The first one."

She typed. He had put the suitcase between his feet and he was aware of being enormous and unshaven and Russian and paying cash.

"So, nothing more today, I'm afraid, everything's gone. Tomorrow morning I have you Helsinki to London, and London to Montréal. Nine fifteen." She looked up. "One way?"

"One way."

"Return date? Sometimes they want to see—"

"One way," Ilya said.

She let it go and typed some more, and Ilya stood at the counter in an airport in a country he had never intended to be in and heard the word Montréal come out of a stranger's mouth. For years he had built reasons to be in that city. Elaborate ones. Stupid ones. He had once flown to Montreal for eleven hours in February and told two separate people it was about a watch. Now a computer had decided it for him, and he did not have to want it, and nobody would ever be able to say that he had chosen it.

"Yes," he said. "That's fine."

He counted the notes onto the counter. His hands, he noticed, had stopped shaking, and he did not look at that too closely either.

~ ~ ~

8:04 AM, July 6th, 2016

SHANE

The Township of Glengarry West ran its municipal office out of a low brick building in Ste-Colombe with a flagpole out front and a gravel lot big enough for maybe nine cars. There were two in it. Shane parked at the far end anyway, out of habit, and then sat there for a second wondering why he'd bothered.

Ilya hadn't spoken since the 401. He was wearing Shane's clothes, which was its own problem. The t-shirt was strangled across his shoulders, which meant that Shane had a hard time keeping his eyes off him. The shorts were fine but stupid-looking, and he looked like he’d been awake for two days, even though Shane had let him sleep between 3 AM and 6 AM. Fuck. He was still so fucking beautiful that it made Shane want to cry, for some absurd reason.

"This is city hall?" Ilya said.

"Township office."

"It is very small."

"That's the idea."

Shane had not slept. He had spent the hours between three and six sitting on his own kitchen floor with his laptop, reading about Ontario marriage licenses. Somewhere around four-thirty he'd stopped feeling anything at all. It wasn't numbness. It was the other thing.

On the ice, everything went quiet. Nobody understood that about him, because everyone who'd ever met him for ten minutes knew he was a nervous wreck about restaurant reservations and flight delays and whether he'd been short with a trainer in 2013. But the second the puck dropped, all of it just — stopped. There was the puck. There was the task. There was no room for anything else.

This was like that. Something so bad had happened that everything smaller had been cleared off the board. Shane kept reaching for the fear, and he kept not finding it. Nobody understood how he could be so fucking paranoid every other hour of the day, and then just… lock in sometimes. Except, Shane thought that Ilya understood it. On the ice, Ilya understood him better than any person alive. And off the ice, the only other time Shane’s head went quiet like this was when Ilya was fucking him.

So Ilya was looking at Shane, and Ilya looked tired and overwhelmed and sad, but he didn’t look surprised. Whatever was on Shane’s face right now, Ilya must’ve seen it a hundred times, across from him during face-offs and above him in bed.

Shane had a plan. He was going to marry Ilya, and they’d get Ilya a Canadian passport, and everything would be fine. Everything would be fine. He’d spent hours reading about it. They couldn’t do it in Montreal because in Quebec you have to publish a notice for twenty days, publicly. In Ontario you could get a marriage license same-day. Shane had found Glengarry by cross-referencing townships that could issue a license against the NHL viewership rates.

He’d looked it up online. Forty-two to fifty-eight percent of Canadians didn’t actually watch or follow hockey. It seemed insane to Shane, but he wasn’t actually as famous as he felt, sometimes. He’d chosen the township with the lowest viewership in Ontario. There was a decent chance they could walk in and walk out without anyone recognizing them.

Ilya had a problem. Shane was going to solve the problem. They’d get married; they’d get Ilya citizenship; Ilya wouldn’t disappear into a Siberian prison camp. He’d be safe and he wouldn’t ever get taken away from Shane—

He cut that thought off. This wasn’t about him. He was doing this for Ilya.

"Okay," he said. "Passport."

Ilya patted his pocket.

They went in.

~ ~ ~

Inside it smelled like carpet and toner. There was a counter with a bell on it, a rack of pamphlets about septic inspections, and a corkboard with a poster for the Highland Games in August, curling at the corner. A window AC unit was humming somewhere out of sight. Behind the counter a woman in her fifties was eating a muffin out of a paper bag and typing one-handed.

"Morning," she said. "Give me one sec." She swallowed. "Sorry. Okay. What can I do for you."

"We'd like to apply for a marriage license," Shane said.

"Sure." She reached under the counter and came up with a form. "Both of you here? Great. That makes it easy, half the time it's one of you and the other one's in Alberta." She clicked a pen. "I'm Denise. Two pieces of ID each, one with a photo, and I need to see something with your date of birth on it."

Shane put down his passport, his driver's license, and his birth certificate. Ilya put down a Russian passport and his American driver’s license.

Denise picked it up and opened it and looked at it for exactly as long as she'd looked at Shane's, which was about a second and a half.

"Okay," she said. "Middle name?"

"Grigorevich."

"Can you help me with the spelling, dear?"

He spelled it. Then, because she'd stopped writing and was waiting for something, he added, "It is not a middle name, exactly. It is patronymic. It means my father is Grigori."

"Oh, that's nice," Denise said. "That's like the Icelandic. We had a family here, out past the tracks. Every generation the son's last name changed, drove the assessment office up the wall." She typed. "Father's full name?"

"Grigori Pavlovich Rozanov."

"Place of birth?"

"Leningrad. Uh. Now called St. Petersburg"

Denise's fingers paused a quarter-second over the keys, presumably deciding which city to write down. But she moved on without asking any other questions.

"Mother's full name, including maiden name?"

“Irina Rozanova. Um. I do not— She never told me…” Ilya swallowed thickly.

“That’s okay honey. Is there someone you can call real quick?”

Ilya shook his head. “No. She, ah, died. Many years ago, when I was young.”

Unsurprisingly, Denise melted. “Oh, honey. That’s okay, we can leave off the maiden name. Lots of times they don’t even need it.”

Shane felt like he was dying.

It was such a small thing. Irina. Shane had known this man for seven and a half years. They’d been sleeping together on-and-off for six years. He'd have bet a lot of money he knew Ilya better than most anyone did. He knew the way Ilya liked to shoot the puck. He knew what Ilya sounded like when he was so fucked out that he went languid with it. But he hadn’t known Ilya’s mother’s name, until just now. He hadn’t even known that she was dead.

"Occupation?" Denise said.

"Hockey player," Ilya said.

She wrote it down.

"Same," Shane said.

She wrote that down too, and turned the form around, and said, "Sign at the bottom, both of you, and it's a hundred and thirty-five, debit or cash, no credit."

While the machine was processing Shane's card, Denise squinted at him. Here it was. Shane felt it coming, but even that felt distant, like watching a game on mute.

"You look like a Lalonde," Denise said.

"Sorry?"

"Are you related to the Lalondes out on 9th? You've got the whole—" she made a circle in the air near her own face. "The forehead."

"No," Shane said. "I don't think so."

"Huh." She tore off the receipt. "Everybody's related to the Lalondes."

She slid the license across the counter in a paper folder. Shane looked at it. It was a piece of green-tinted paper with their names on it. Valid for ninety days. No waiting period. Nobody had asked him a single question he hadn't been ready for.

"So we can get married with this," he said.

"That's the general idea, yeah."

"Today?"

Denise did not react to this at all. "Do you have an officiant?"

"No."

"Do you have witnesses?"

"No."

"Okay," she said, unbothered, like she’d heard worse before nine in the morning. She leaned back on her stool and hollered down the hallway, without turning her head: "Judy! Are you doing anything at nine?"

Judy MacRae was the Clerk, which apparently also meant she was licensed to solemnize marriages, which apparently also meant she could do it whenever she felt like it if the room was free. She came out with reading glasses pushed up in her hair and a Tim's cup and looked them over.

"I've got the Beaudettes at eleven," she said. "Big one. Forty people, they're doing it in the garden." She jerked a thumb at the front window, at a strip of flowerbed and a bench and the flagpole and the road. "It's actually not bad out there this time of year, the peonies are—"

"No," Shane said.

It came out with more edge than he'd intended. He heard it, and he watched the whole thing start to happen: Judy's eyebrows going up, Denise's head coming around, the moment where two people begin to work out what's actually in front of them.

He was still deciding whether to be terrified about that when Ilya spoke.

"Sorry," Ilya said. "We are not— uh. Out."

Shane stopped breathing.

"It is strange for us," Ilya went on, in the flat, careful voice he used for English he'd thought about in advance, "to be like this in public. That is all. We are not trying to be rude."

Shane had spent his entire adult life making sure no sentence like that was ever spoken about him. He’d bought an entire building to make sure that it would never get out. Once, in Montreal, he had made Ilya walk around an entire city block in February because a guy Shane vaguely knew was smoking outside the front door. And yet, Ilya had said it, out loud, to a stranger in a township office and the sky hadn’t fallen.

Denise put her hand flat on her chest.

"Oh, honey," she said.

"Say no more," said Judy. "Denise, put the phone on service."

And that was it. Judy walked them down a hallway past a photocopier and a bulletin board and into the council chambers. She crossed to the windows and brought the blinds down without making any kind of production of it, just wound the wand until the slats came shut and the room went dim and gold. Then she flipped a light on and said, "There. Now, do you want the long version or the short one? The short one's about four minutes."

"Short," Shane said.

"Long," Ilya said, at the same time.

Judy waited, pleasantly, with the patience of someone who had watched a great many couples negotiate in front of her.

Shane turned and looked at him. Ilya was standing in the middle of a council chamber in Shane's too-small t-shirt with his mother's crucifix around his neck. His face did absolutely nothing, which was what it always did, which was the thing that had been quietly killing Shane for six years. He had no idea what was happening in Ilya’s head. He never had.

"Long," Shane said.

They needed two witnesses. Denise was one. The other was a girl named Chloé who was in for the summer scanning building permits. She was maybe seventeen, and stood against the wall trying very hard to look like she attended weddings all the time.

Judy read off a laminated card. She had clearly read off it several hundred times and she still slowed down at the parts that mattered. Shane was surprised at how much that affected him. She said something about the reasons people come together, then something about the law of the province.

Then she said, "Now you're going to repeat after me, and I need you to say it just how I say it, because this part's the actual legal bit."

Shane went first.

"I do solemnly declare that I do not know of any lawful impediment why I, Shane Hollander, may not be joined in matrimony to Ilya Rozanov."

The words were absurd. They were from a costume drama. He said them in a room with a fire extinguisher on the wall and a recycling bin under the desk and he meant every one of them so hard his jaw hurt.

Then Ilya.

"I do solemnly declare—" He stumbled over the words. "I do solemnly declare that I do not know of any lawful im—"

"Impediment."

"Impediment. Why I, Ilya Rozanov, may not be joined in matrimony to Shane Hollander."

His accent got worse when he was tired. It was very bad right now.

"And now the second part," Judy said. "I call upon these persons here present to witness—"

"I call upon these persons here present to witness," Shane said, "that I, Shane Hollander, do take you, Ilya Rozanov, to be my lawful wedded husband."

These persons here present. A deputy clerk with a muffin in a paper bag at the front counter and a seventeen-year-old summer student holding her elbows. Two days ago, Ilya had been asleep in his father's apartment in Moscow and now these strangers and a flag were watching him say this. Somehow, Shane had never in his life been less afraid of anything.

Ilya said it back. He got through the whole sentence without stopping. At the end of it, on the last two words, his voice warbled slightly before he got it under control.

"Then by the authority vested in me by the Province of Ontario," Judy said, "I declare you married."

Chloé clapped. She caught herself immediately, and went red, and then Denise started clapping too, so it was fine. The signing took longer than he expected. There was the register, and the license, and a page where the witnesses printed and then signed. Chloé printed her name in careful round letters like it was a test.

Judy handed them a document with a scalloped border.

"That's your Record of Solemnization. Keep it somewhere you'll find it. Now, that's not the certificate. If you need the actual marriage certificate, you order that from ServiceOntario, and it takes six to eight weeks, sometimes longer in the summer."

Shane's brain, which had been an entirely quiet and orderly place since four-thirty in the morning, produced its first hiccup in hours. Six to eight weeks.

He hadn't known that. He had read four government pages and one forum post and he had made a plan and he had driven ninety minutes to execute it, and there was a whole enormous machine on the other side of this that he had not looked at even once. Citizenship. Sponsorship. Whatever the actual word was. He had a piece of paper and no idea, none, what the rest of it looked like.

Later, he thought. Later.

"Six to eight weeks," he said. "Got it. Thank you."

"Congratulations," said Judy MacRae, and shook both their hands, and then, to Ilya, with no particular weight on it: "You take care of yourself, now."

"Yes," Ilya said. "Thank you."

~ ~ ~

Outside it was 8:41 and already hot. Somebody two properties over was running a leaf blower. A pickup went past on the county road and did not slow down.

Shane stood in the gravel lot next to his car with a folder in his hand and waited to feel it — the sick lurch, the replay, the part where his brain came in and started listing everything that could go wrong with what he had just done. It was going to be an extraordinary list. He knew exactly the shape of the panic that should smother him any minute now.

It didn't arrive.

"Hey," he said.

Ilya looked over.

Shane didn't have anything to follow it with. He'd just wanted to see if he could say it out loud in a parking lot, which he could, apparently, and which no longer seemed to cost anything at all.

"We should eat," he said finally.

"Yes."

They were back on the 34 before Shane realized Ilya had fallen asleep. His breathing evened out somewhere around the on-ramp. Shane knew that sound. He'd known that sound for years, in hotel rooms, in the ten or fifteen minutes he allowed himself before he got up and got dressed and left first.

Shane drove back to Montreal with the radio off, going exactly the speed limit, married to Ilya Rozanov.

Chapter 2

ILYA

When Ilya woke up, Shane was in his arms.

It was such a strange feeling that it took him a moment to understand. They’d barely gotten back to Shane’s apartment in Montreal yesterday before crashing, even though it had been midday. Shane had gotten something delivered for lunch and then both of them, sleep deprived, had collapsed into his bed. Ilya remembered vaguely intending to put the bed to good use, but his head had hit the pillow and that’d been the end.

It was dark outside, which meant that it was somewhere between 9 PM and 5 AM, probably. Ilya thought that he could go back to sleep, body still heavy, but there was a light in front of him. Shane was awake, on his phone.

Ilya groaned and pressed closer to him.

“Oh shit,” Shane whispered. “Did I wake you?”

“No,” Ilya mumbled. “What time is it?”

“Uh, three-thirty.”

“Why the fuck are you awake.”

“I slept for like, eleven hours.” Shane sounded amused. “Are you feeling okay?”

Yes, he meant to say. “I think I will never see my family again,” he said instead.

Shane went still, then he squirmed, turning around in Ilya’s grasp. He’d put the phone down, and the room became fully dark. Ilya could barely see Shane in front of him, face three inches from his own.

“Fuck, Ilya. I’m so sorry.”

“No, I— shit, I don’t know why I said that.” He would never see them again, and his father was probably dead, and he would never know either way. That’s just what was real, now, and there was nothing to do about it. The bad things simply must be endured; Ilya had known it for his entire life.

“Ilya,” Shane breathed. “Please don’t do that. Please talk to me.”

His honest, first reaction to that was to lash out. Ilya wasn’t proud of it, but he’d at least grown enough not to actually do it. He knew, for certain, that if he tried to talk about his feelings or whatever, then it would end poorly. That was how it always ended. He let Shane too close, so then he pushed Shane away. Except now, Shane had done something for Ilya that he could never repay. Ilya hadn’t really called Shane expecting to be saved. He’d just… fuck, his father had been right about him. He’d craved the softness that Shane always gave him; he’d craved the softness in himself that Shane had always brought out of him. So he’d settled himself in Shane’s apartment and waited for him like a dog. Then Shane had come and seen the oozing wounds of Ilya’s soul and had taken pieces of himself to stop the bleeding. He owed Shane an answer. He owed Shane something. He owed Shane everything, really.

“I do not know how to feel this way and not be an asshole,” Ilya said eventually, because it was the only thing he could say that was true. “All of worst things I have ever done to you, is because you found me when I was feeling this. Please do not make me talk.”

Ilya had closed his eyes, so he was startled when he felt the tentative press of Shane’s lips against his own. Shane froze at Ilya’s flinch, but Ilya surged forward before the inevitable apologies came.

Sex, Ilya always knew how to do. Sex with Shane was even better; it was always good, even when things between them were not. Hockey and sex were the two things that Ilya screwed up the least. He knew Shane’s body better than anyone he’d ever had. He didn’t need words to make Shane feel good. He didn’t need words to release the jittery feeling inside of him that normally had him reaching for a cigarette.

Ilya rolled them so that he was on top. He sucked a bruise into Shane’s neck and Shane let him. Shane dragged his nails down Ilya’s back and the hurt was so good that it made his cock throb and his skin stop crawling. Going inside of Shane made Ilya feel like he was coming home. Shane’s moans and begging made Ilya feel more encouraged than the cheers of eighteen-thousand fans. He had never felt this way with anyone else. Nobody had ever made him feel the way that Shane made him feel.

When he came, Ilya collapsed down onto Shane, tucking his head into the junction of Shane’s shoulder. His head was pleasantly blank, fuzzy with endorphins and exhaustion. But he knew that he was on a clock. Shane never let them stay like this for long; he hated the stickiness of it, the dirtiness of the sheets. Ilya hadn’t even pulled out of him, desperate for their closeness to last. He grasped for anything that could extend the moment and felt the press of the crucifix between their chests. Ilya knew what would keep Shane here.

“It was my mother’s,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“The cross. The one I wear. It was hers.”

Shane’s breath hitched, and his hand came up to cup the back of Ilya’s neck, pressing down gently. “Tell me about her?” he asked softly.

“She was, hm. Very kind. Very good mother.” He thought it was easier to talk about her like this, in the dark, with his face pressed against Shane’s skin. “She killed herself when I was twelve.”

Shane’s hands tightened on his skin. “Fuck, Ilya.”

“It was not her fault. She was very young, and my father very old, when they marry. My father was very hard on her.” Ilya huffed against Shane’s neck. “He was very hard on all of us. But he was most hard on himself, I think. Before he sent me away, he told me that I was soft, that it was a disappointment to him. I think he was scared, though. Scared that I was too soft to survive the world he had lived through.”

“You’re not soft, Ilya.” Shane sounded like he was crying. “You’re the strongest person I know.”

“Hm. No, I am definitely soft.” Ilya wiggled his hips to emphasize the point. Shane flinched and then flexed his shoulders, uncomfortable.

“Asshole,” he said.

“Hm,” agreed Ilya. He started getting up. Shane’s hands lingered on him for a moment, before releasing. “Come, Shane. Shower. I know you want to.”

When the water poured over him, Ilya realized that he hadn’t taken a shower in days, since Russia. He wondered if the last bits of the Russian part of him were getting washed down the drain. He was suddenly exhausted, even though he’d slept fourteen hours straight. After a long while of not moving, he felt Shane’s hands on him, lathering him and rinsing him off. Shane wrapped himself around Ilya from behind, letting his body warm Ilya from the back and the water warm him from the front. It was the safest Ilya had felt since waking up in Moscow.

“I should hate him,” Ilya said to the tile, as though there hadn’t been any break in their conversation. “Him and my brother both. They were only ever terrible to me. But I think my father was trying to tell me that he loved me, in the end. He could not even do it, but I think he was trying. It is all I ever wanted from him. Is that pathetic?”

“No Ilya. It’s not pathetic, and it’s not soft or whatever fucked—” Shane cut himself off, and Ilya could feel him palpably restraining himself from cursing out Ilya’s family. He appreciated it, both that Shane wanted to and that he didn’t. When Shane continued, his voice was choked with emotion. “You’re perfect, Ilya. You’re perfect.”

Ilya found that he couldn’t say anything to that, so he tilted his head forward into the water and let Shane wash his hair.

~ ~ ~

SHANE

When Shane finally got them dried off and back to bed, he felt terrible. He felt terrible for Ilya, who was hurting so much, and who had lost so much. But he felt worse about how good it felt, to finally be let in, to finally be allowed to be the person that did this for Ilya.

“My husband is so good to me,” Ilya whispered, just a hint of his devilish smirk on his face.

“Shut up.” Shane could feel his face burning.

“What? Is official now, no? We have consummated things.”

“Where the fuck did you learn that word?”

“I asked Judy, when you were distracted.” Now Ilya was smirking fully.

“Oh my god,” Shane groaned. But secretly the sight of Ilya’s smile made his heart feel overfull.

“Yes, so you are very good husband to me, taking my cock like champion and cleaning me up afterwards—” Jesus fucking Christ— “So it is my turn to be good husband to you.” Ilya poked Shane on the chest. “You can have panic attack now. I am ready.”

“Um. I don’t… want to do that?”

“Hm. Yes, you never want to, I assume.” Ilya sighed and stroked his hand down Shane’s back, pulling them in close. “Or maybe you do, would explain why you do it all the fucking time.”

“Fuck off. What am I supposed to be panicking about?”

“I don’t know, maybe the fact that three women in Ontario signed names on our marriage license? That maybe they sold the story to top bidder, or something? I assume that is why you were on phone at three-thirty AM, checking every news site in Canada.”

“Oh.” Right, Shane probably should be panicking about that. As he thought about it, he could feel the terror in the back of his throat. But it was muted, pressed down by the bigger concerns. “No, I kinda forgot about that already.”

Ilya’s hand stilled against him back. “You— What? Hollander, you forgot that there were witnesses to our gay wedding?”

“You call your husband by his last name?” Shane chirped weakly, instead of answering. Saying the word, husband, sent a jolt of something through him. Even though it was only true on paper.

“Ok. Fine, Shane, what were you worrying about?”

Shane didn’t really want to tell Ilya the truth, because the truth was that he was more distracted by Ilya’s potential deportation to Russia than by their potential Big Gay Scandal, and that would tell Ilya something that Shane wasn’t sure he was ready to say, yet. Unfortunately, he kind of had to tell Ilya, at least the subject matter, because it was important.

“Uh, I was, um. Emailing lawyers.”

“For like, NDA or some shit?”

“No, immigration lawyers.”

“Why were you emailing immigration lawyers?” Ilya asked cautiously.

Shane sucked in a breath and then let it hiss through his teeth. “So, uh. The thing is. When Judy said the marriage license would be ready in six-to-eight weeks, it made me, uh, realize.”

“Realize what?”

“That I didn’t think about how you’d actually get citizenship. Or how long it would take. Or if it was… actually possible.”

Ilya, naturally, came to the worst possible conclusion.

“It’s not possible?”

“No! I mean, yes! It’s possible, I mean. But it looks like we could fuck it up by doing it wrong, and the government is looking specifically for people who get married just for permanent residence. And I was trying to work out what we’d need, but it’s fucking complicated. There’s no way we could do it by ourselves. So, lawyers.”

“Right, lawyers,” Ilya agreed.

“Anyway, now that you’re up. I actually have a lot of stuff to print out. And we should probably eat, again. And, um. I maybe have a list of things for you to do. I already texted it. Two versions actually, because I found out more stuff after I texted the first. So.”

“Of course you did,” Ilya said, but he couldn’t quite hide the fondness in his tone. He reeled Shane in for a kiss before he got up and found his phone.

~ ~ ~

ILYA

Mikhail Ivanov was in his late fifties, probably nearing retirement. Shane said he’d looked up Ivanov specifically; he specialized in immigration and asylum cases from the Soviet Union and Russia. That is, the Soviet Union back in the eighties, when he’d started his career, and now Russia. There’d been a surge of successful asylum cases recently, as well, after the passage of the anti-LGBT laws in 2013. They’d driven back to Ottawa for the meeting.

Ivanov peered at them over his reading glasses. He’d been looking at their documents: Record of Solemnization, passports, Shane’s birth certificate, and so on. They’d told him the whole story, haltingly, and Ivanov had looked at them placidly the entire time, as though they weren’t famous hockey players, as though Ilya’s story weren’t fantastical.

Shane’s hand was clenched in his own. Ilya still wasn’t used to it. He couldn’t believe that Shane hadn’t flinched away yet, under Ivanov’s gaze. But they were supposed to be married, now, so maybe it wasn’t so strange that Shane would hold his hand.

“Well,” Ivanov said finally. “First, Mr. Rozanov, let me assure you that you are not in any physical danger.”

Shane relaxed, but Ilya just got even more tense. “You don’t believe me.”

“Oh, I believe you just fine, Mr. Rozanov. But your father has an outdated understanding of Russia’s ability to exert power across international borders. He has spent the last quarter-century as internal police in Moscow, where the government’s authority is absolute.” Ivanov leaned back into his chair, his elbows on the arm rests and his chin on his hands. “You are concerned about physical harm: assassination, assault, etcetera. Arranging an assassination of a celebrity on American soil would have been extremely difficult even in the height of the Soviet era. Today’s regime could not afford the backlash. And their priority is likely to suppress whatever information your father has. They want to keep things quiet. Assassinating a famous hockey player is rather the opposite of that.”

Something unclenched inside of him that had been tight since his father woke him up in the middle of the night. That… that made sense. Of course they would not want to make a big scandal out of things, especially if Ilya showed every sign of wanting to stay in North America and never bother them.

“That being said,” continued Ivanov. “Your father was certainly correct that you should not set foot on Russian soil. Even a Russian embassy here in North America could be dangerous for you. So, we should discuss the ways to get you legal permanent residence in Canada.”

“Thank you,” Shane said into the silence. Ilya probably should’ve said something, but he couldn’t think of a single thing.

"Yes," Ilya said aloud to Ivanov. "Thank you." Because, when in doubt, repeating whatever Hollander said was usually a good choice.

Ivanov accepted both thank-yous with a small nod and reached for the next document.

“There are a few options. The first is an asylum case. We could go for political asylum on the grounds of your family’s disappearance. This is the option I recommend the least.” Ivanov’s voice hardened on the last word. “You are currently a very low priority for the Russian regime. If you make a public claim that you are in danger because Putin wants your father dead…?”

“Bad idea,” Ilya agreed easily.

“And the least likely to be successful. You don’t know who went after your father. You don’t know why. And, officially speaking, your father has dementia.” Ivanov grimaced. “Not the grounds for a winning case. However, there’s another way to get asylum.” He looked pointedly at Ilya’s hand, where it was still clasping Shane’s.

“Asylum for sexual orientation,” Shane said. “You’ve represented a lot of those cases, since the 2013 law passed.”

“Twenty, successfully,” Ivanov agreed. “If you wanted to go that route, I am certain that we could succeed. Asylum cases are strictly confidential. You would not need to go public about your sexuality. However,” he stressed, “your immigration status would change. You would have a Refugee Travel Document instead of a passport. Your employer would have to be informed, though they wouldn’t need to know the reason for your Refugee status. You likely would no longer have legal status to live and work in Boston, even though you could theoretically travel to America for games. If you played for a Canadian team, this would be my recommendation. And I am not an American employment lawyer. You should consult one to double check, but I am almost certain that getting Refugee status in Canada would end your career in Boston.”

Ilya wasn’t certain how he felt about that. He wanted to play hockey, of course, desperately. It was his life’s work, and his only source of income. But there was a part of him that had been assuming, this whole time, that he wouldn’t be able to keep it. Naturally, Shane didn’t feel the same way.

“So we get you traded to a Canadian team,” Shane said. He turned to Ivanov. “Would that work?”

Ivanov shrugged. “As for the trade, you would know better than me how that could happen. But if he did play for a Canadian team, then I think it would work, yes.”

“Everyone would know,” Ilya said softly.

“Refugee cases are very confidential—”

“Even if the case did not leak, the trade would be public.” Ilya scoffed. “It would be insane move for Boston to make, trading me away. Everyone would want to know why. Eventually someone would leak that I use Refugee document instead of Russian passport. The new team would want to know why I am refugee. Someone will guess. It is obvious.”

Neither Shane nor Ivanov argued the point, which Ilya figured was as good as an agreement.

“What about spousal sponsorship?” Shane asked. “That’s the whole reason we— I mean, that was our plan in the first place.”

Ivanov sighed. “If you applied for spousal sponsorship today, you would be rejected,” he said bluntly. “Publicly, you are rivals. You have no evidence of a relationship—”

“We have years of texts!” Shane insisted. He’d printed them out, and they were laying on Ivanov’s desk, much to Ilya’s humiliation.

“You have no evidence of a relationship beyond physical,” Ivanov clarified. Shane blushed a bright crimson. “Then one day you get married, even though you are both publicly heterosexual, and apply for permanent residence? This is exactly sort of case that the IRCC looks for, looks to reject.”

“There is nothing we can do, then?” Ilya asked despondently.

“I didn’t say that. In fact, I think it is very likely that we can eventually get you citizenship. But you must change your time horizon.”

“What does that mean?” Shane asked.

“Let me repeat, Mr. Rozanov. I do not believe for you to be in any imminent physical harm.” Ivanov tapped Ilya’s passport. “You have a valid Russian passport for three more years. Your American work visa is valid for another two years, until the end of your hockey contract. I think it is unlikely that Russia will rescind your passport. Until that happens, you are a legal resident of the United States, with legal permission to enter Canada to play hockey. You have been focused on getting permanent residence today, but you don’t need it for another two years.”

Shane’s hand squeezed his. “But what happens if Russia does rescind his passport?”

“Then things become urgent, and I would recommend applying for asylum based on sexual orientation, regardless of what that might mean for your hockey career.”

There was a tense silence while they digested that.

“But that is Plan B.” Ivanov smiled at them. “Let’s discuss Plan A. The problem with your application for spousal sponsorship is that there is no evidence of a relationship. Your texts are evidence that you knew each other more than just publicly, that you spent years arranging to meet. That is a good start. Now you are married. Many people get married impulsively. The next step is to make your relationship real in the eyes of the Canadian government. Build a paper trail. Open a joint bank account. Put each other’s names on the deed to your properties. Change the beneficiary of your life insurance. Update your wills, and so on.”

Shane understood it first, of course. “In two years, Ilya’s going to be an unrestricted free agent. If he’s a Canadian Permanent Resident then, he can sign with a Canadian team and have legal work authorization in Canada. He wouldn’t need to involve Russia at all.”

“Yes, and Mr. Rozanov would need 1,095 days of physical presence in Canada before applying for Canadian citizenship. Even before he establishes permanent residence, each day physically present in Canada as a temporary resident counts as half a day, up to 365.”

"How long before we apply?" Ilya asked.

"A year. Twelve months of ordinary documents with two names on them."

"And then we submit the application," Shane said.

"Next summer, yes. In the meantime, you should make it look very convincing on paper that your lives are, at the very least, financially entangled. Also, Mr. Rozanov should spend as much time in Canada as possible, since he’ll spend much of the next two years in America.”

“Right, yes,” Ilya said. “That is not problem. I will spend offseasons in Canada, and breaks, and any time I can come up. Is only two-hour flight from Boston to Montreal.”

Shane and Ivanov talked back and forth about all sort of minutia. Ivanov gave Shane the contact information for multiple other lawyers, who specialized in different parts of the law which would help them set up various things that would help them convince IRCC their relationship was real. Ilya couldn’t keep up with it, nor did he have any interest, honestly. Eventually, the meeting wound down and Ilya could tell Shane was already mentally fixated on those next steps.

“One more thing,” Ivanov said, as they were getting up. “The IRCC will understand why you want to keep your relationship a secret from the public. But spousal applications are supported by statutory declarations — sworn statements from people who know you. Family. Friends. Teammates. Anyone who can write, under oath, I have known these two men for years and this relationship is real."

They looked at each other, and Shane finally seemed daunted.

“How many?” Shane asked.

“Six would be comfortable. Four would be workable.”

Shit.

Chapter 3

SHANE

Ever since Ivanov had told them that they would need sworn letters from Shane’s parents, Ilya had been looking at him like a wounded dog. Shane wasn’t even worried about it, though. Well, that was a lie. He was incredibly worried about it; however, there were tons of things that he could use to distract himself.

“So I was thinking that we could buy land around Hawkesbury, about halfway between Montreal and Ottawa,” Shane said. “It’s right on the Ontario side of the Ontario-Quebec border, which is better because then we’d file for PR through Ontario, which is much faster than Quebec. Plus, we could use numbered companies so that our names aren’t directly on the deed. In Quebec, there’s all sorts of laws preventing that, or at least making it more complicated.”

He had six listings open. He'd had them open since five-forty that morning.

"And land's cheap out there. Like, genuinely insane compared to anything within an hour of Montreal. You can get forty acres for less than my parents paid for the cottage lot in 2004. Which matters, because if we have land then we have somewhere we can actually—" He gestured, encompassing the concept. "Be outside. In a yard. Like people."

"Mm," said Ilya.

"There's one that's a hundred and twenty acres, but it's mostly bog, so that's out. But this other one backs onto a woodlot, and the woodlot's Crown land, so nobody can ever build on it. Ever. Which means we'd only have sightlines on three sides. Two, really, if we set the house back far enough from the road, and there's already a laneway cut, which saves probably sixty grand—"

"Sure."

"—and it's an hour ten from my place and fifty minutes from Ivanov's office, which is going to matter, because we're going to be in that office a lot this year." Shane scrolled. "Do you have a preference about water? Because there's frontage on the Ottawa River but it's a premium, and honestly frontage means boats, and boats mean people with binoculars, so I actually think we don't want it? But if you want it—"

"Whatever you like."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it is true," Ilya said.

Shane looked up. Ilya was lying along the other end of the couch with one arm over his eyes. He’d been lying like that for most of an hour, and he had not looked at a single listing.

Fine. Okay. Shane could work with that. Shane could absolutely work with that, because if he stopped working with it then he would have to sit here in a quiet apartment and think about how, at some point, he was going to have to look his mother in the face and ask her to swear a legal document about the man on his couch.

He clicked into listing seven.

"Okay, so, the septic on this one is from 1988, which sounds bad, but—"

“Do whatever you like. I will pay for it.”

“We both have to pay for it,” Shane said. “That’s kind of the whole point, the joint financial entanglement.”

“Hm, no.” Ilya smiled at him. “We both must own, yes? But I can pay and still put your name as co-owner. Is the least I owe you.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Shane insisted immediately.

Ilya laughed. “You are only putting your whole career at risk to save my ass, Hollander. Least I can do is buy you house.”

“Shut up, Ilya. I kinda trapped you into this, actually.”

Ilya’s eyebrows rose. “Trapped me? Hollander—” He rolled his eyes at whatever Shane did. “Shane, in what world did you trap me?”

Shane winced, because he’d been thinking about this. “So, us getting married was pretty dumb, actually.”

“You regret it already?” Ilya’s tone was teasing, but there was something careful in his expression.

“No! I mean, it wasn’t dumb for me. It wasn’t the right decision for you. You’d have an easier time establishing citizenship in America. You’ve already been working there for six years. If you married an American it would go a lot faster for you.”

“And you just have American sitting in closet somewhere, ready to marry me?” Ilya drawled, amused.

“Are you kidding me, Ilya?” Shane gestured at Ilya’s whole — everything. “You seriously think you couldn’t find a woman who’d be dying to lock you down? I bet you pick her up in a club in Boston in, like, three hours.”

Ilya preened. “Yes, I am very sexy. Many women try to trick me into marrying them.” His grin softened a shade. “But I do not want those women, Hollander.”

Shane felt hot, down to his toes. I do not want those women. Did he want Shane? Did he want Shane for more than just a quick fuck, when it was convenient?

“Still, sorry about visa-trapping you,” he said, hoping his thoughts weren’t on his face. “Like baby-trapping, but for immigration documents.”

Ilya didn't answer for a while. When Shane looked over, he'd taken his arm off his eyes and was staring at the ceiling.

"You know is not me who is trapped," he said.

"...What?"

"Say out loud what you did this week. Go on. All of it."

"It’s not a big deal—"

"You drove to little town in Ontario," Ilya said, "and you put your name on a paper that says you are married to a man. And you gave that paper to a woman called Judy, and Judy put it in a government computer." He turned his head. "It is in there now, Hollander. It does not come out. Even if we get divorced, that paper does not go away. Not when you’re thirty, or fifty, or seventy. Not even if you want some different life."

Shane's mouth had gone dry. "I know what I signed."

"Hm." Ilya went back to the ceiling. "I do not think you do."

"Ilya—"

"Me, I have nothing to lose. Is important you understand this. Everything I had, I lost already, in my father's apartment, before you even wake up." He said it evenly. "So for me? Fine. I marry my rival in a small town. Who cares. Costs me nothing.

"But you had a whole life waiting for you. A real one. Maybe you meet someone, eventually, some girl. Actress, singer, whoever you like. They are lining up for you; do not pretend they are not. You could take her to some, I don’t know, gala or something and every person in Canada would lose their fucking mind. Magazine covers. Your mother crying in a church. Babies, probably, you would be very annoying about babies." His voice had slowly lost its evenness, and now there was something in it. Sorrow, maybe. "And you could have it in front of everyone. Where they can see. But instead you get this. Me.”

He stopped. Shane waited. He didn’t think he could speak if he tried.

"So," Ilya said. "Thank you."

It came out in the flat, careful voice he used for reporters, when he wasn’t being a cocky shit with them instead. It was the kind of voice that Shane didn’t think he’d ever once meant. But then, a second later, his jaw moved and his eyes blinked closed for a beat too long, and Shane knew that he meant it entirely.

Shane tried to figure out what to say.

The problem was that Ilya had it exactly backwards, and there was no way on earth to tell him so. Because Shane wasn't sorry. He wasn’t sorry that there was a piece of paper in a government office that bound him and Ilya together, forever, for as long as they lived. That even though they could break the marriage they could never break the record of it. Shane wasn’t sorry that some part of him was tied to some part of Ilya, and that neither of them could ever escape it. He wasn’t sorry that he’d set them on a collision course that inevitably led to one place, that he’d lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite lodged in their lives and careers. There was no telling how long the fuse ran, how much time they’d get before it all came tumbling down. Shane was scared, obviously. He was scared as fuck. But he wasn’t sorry. He’d light the match again, right now, without a single regret.

He was the precise opposite of sorry.

There were two reasons for that, neither one of them he’d ever so much as thought, let alone said. The first was so big he couldn't look directly at it. And even if he could, he couldn't say it, not this week, not to a man with no passport and no country and nowhere else on the planet to be. Ilya couldn't get up and leave. He was trapped here, with Shane, so Shane couldn’t say a four-letter word that Ilya would feel forced to say back to him.

The second reason was that Shane knew he could never have the life Ilya had just finished describing. The gala and the magazine cover and his mother crying in a church and the babies he'd apparently be annoying about. Ilya thought he'd taken that from Shane. Ilya was lying on Shane's couch feeling guilty, saying thank you for Shane’s sacrifice, as though it hadn’t been free. There was no cost to it, because Shane was never going to have that life. Shane had kept lying to himself about it, over and over again, because he hadn’t been able to accept it. He still couldn’t accept it, even now, but he hated the fact that Ilya was tormenting himself over this, because he hadn’t taken anything from Shane. He hadn’t taken anything at all.

“I think I— I think I’m gay,” Shane blurted out. “I mean, maybe. I don’t know.”

Ilya just stared at him. He opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of it.

“Shit, Ilya, say something.”

“Shane, I have fucked you for years. You are married to me, a man. Yes, I know that you are gay.”

“You aren’t gay, at least not completely.” Shane scowled at Ilya. “And you’re married to me, too. So that’s not, like, a rule or anything.”

Ilya put his hands up placatingly. “Okay. Yes. I get it.” He hesitated. “Um. So there are no girls that will do it for you?”

“I don’t know,” Shane said miserably. “I always kinda thought— I guess I’d just find the right woman, and…”

“And then you wouldn’t be gay anymore.”

“Shut up, Ilya.” It came out with more heat than Shane had intended, and Ilya ducked his head, raising his hands a bit higher. “Sorry. Just. Don’t joke about this.”

“I wasn’t joking!” insisted Ilya, wounded. Then he winced. “Okay, maybe a little. But not… I don’t know how else to say it, in English. You thought you would find the right girl and then… not be gay anymore.”

Shane groaned and let his head drop into his hands. “Yes. Okay, I guess so.”

“I don’t think that is how it works, Shane,” Ilya said hesitantly.

“Yeah, probably not. But how do you— know?”

Ilya shrugged helplessly. “I just do, Shane. I look at women, and I think they are hot. You said, the first time we…” Ilya mimed giving a blowjob, and Shane threw a pillow at him. Ilya yelped and ducked it. “I’m trying to be delicate, Shane!”

“In what fucking world is that delicate?”

“What-ever,” he said, with feeling. “The point is, you have been with women before, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And did you… like it?”

Shane felt the color rising in his cheeks. “Sure, I mean, I guess so.”

“You guess so,” Ilya deadpanned. “And when I fucked you last night, were you thinking ‘sure, I guess so’?”

He covered his eyes and collapsed backwards onto the couch. Ilya curled a hand around his ankle, patting it pityingly. Fuck. Maybe he could just die now and get out of this conversation. Why had he even started it?

“Shane. I have had sex with a lot of people, yes? You know this.”

Shane uncovered his eyes so that he could glare at Ilya incredulously. To his credit, Ilya didn’t look like he was boasting, though with him it was always safe to assume, as like, a default state.

“I have had sex with lots of people,” Ilya continued doggedly. “But I have never met anyone who loves sex as much as you.”

“You— Wait, seriously?”

Ilya clapped his hands together as if in prayer. “So serious. Most serious I have ever been. About anything, probably. You are biggest freak I have ever fucked.”

“Um, sorry, I guess?” God, he felt the twin threads of humiliation and excitement that he always felt, when Ilya said shit like that to him.

The other man’s jaw dropped open. “Shane. I swear to fucking God. Don’t apologize for that. Never apologize for that. It is the hottest thing I have ever seen in my life.”

Jesus Christ. Shane was hard, just from Ilya saying that to him. Somehow (unsurprisingly) this had become foreplay. He should say something back, something sexy. Or maybe he should just be himself, which apparently meant being the biggest freak that certified man-slut Ilya Rozanov had ever managed to find.

Instead of doing that, what slipped out was: “Really?”

Now it was Ilya’s turn to blush. Shane was fascinated. He’d never seen Ilya looking… shy before. There was a splash of color high in his cheeks and on the tops of his ears.

“Um.” Ilya didn’t quite meet his eyes. “I have fucked many women, hot women, who were desperate for me.” If he didn’t sound almost embarrassed about it, Shane would be kicking Ilya right now. “I prefer women to men, in general, I think. But you—” He swallowed. “You are better than any woman I have ever had. Any man, too.”

Shane’s brain simply stopped. For six years, Shane had assumed that Ilya was basically just… slumming it with Shane. That he got off on the danger, or that Shane was just easy, convenient, gagging for it. That he was there, and Ilya wasn’t picky. Shane had been living with the shame of it, of wanting Ilya so bad, for nearly six years. He’d been wrong about that, apparently. Like, completely wrong.

That’s what gave him the courage to open his mouth and say: “You too. I mean, there’s never been anyone else like you. Not for me.”

The apple on Ilya’s neck bobbed. “Well, yes. I am sex god, everyone knows this.”

But it sounded weak, almost. Shane could finally hear the bluster for what it was: bluster. Holy shit. It was true. Shane moved his foot to Ilya’s lap and pressed it against— Yup. Ilya was hard as a fucking rock, just from talking about this. Just like Shane was throbbing for the same reason.

Ilya's hand closed around his ankle.

"Say it again," he said.

"Say what?"

"The thing you said." Ilya's voice had dropped into the register that undid Shane every single time. It was the voice he used in hotel rooms, except that they weren't in a hotel room, they were in Shane's apartment and it was two in the afternoon and Shane had their Record of Solemnization in his kitchen drawer. "About what you are."

Shane's whole face went hot.

"You already know what I am."

"Yes," Ilya agreed. "But I have never heard you say it."

“Make me.” The words tumbled out before he’d given them permission to leave his lips. But Ilya’s mouth fell open and Shane couldn’t regret it.

“You think I can’t get you to say it?” Ilya asked challengingly.

“Definitely not,” Shane said hoarsely, even though it was a fucking lie and they both knew it. He would say anything Ilya wanted him to say. He was desperate for it. That was, in hindsight, probably why Ilya said Shane was the biggest freak he’d ever met.

Still, he held out for as long as he could. There was the competition aspect of it; he’d made it a challenge, and he fucking hated losing. More than that, though, the words felt lodged somewhere in his ribcage, like saying them would carve out a piece of him, something essential. He could talk around it, and he did, but he couldn’t say those words.

“Tell me what you are,” Ilya said, after he’d pulled his mouth off Shane’s cock.

“I’m a slut,” Shane replied instead.

“Tell me what you are,” he said again, after Ilya pulled Shane’s mouth off his cock.

“I’m your husband,” Shane attempted. Ilya’s dick jumped at that, and he groaned, and Shane thought that he might’ve won. He knew better though. Ilya was ruthless in pursuit of a goal.

“Shane, moy zaychik, tell me what you are.”

This time, the words were mumbled into the inside of Shane’s thigh as Ilya’s clever fingers were buried inside of him to the knuckle, twisting and thrusting and making Shane pant with it. He wanted Ilya so fucking badly. He wanted him more than anything, more than a third Stanley Cup, more than breath. This was the only thing that ever made him feel okay, that ever made him feel enough. It was the same feeling as holding the Cup above his head, except he could have it every day, so long as Ilya was with him.

“I— I’m desperate for your cock, Ilya. I’m yours.”

“Mmm,” groaned Ilya. “I’ll give it to you, baby. Just tell me what you are.”

“Please, Ilya. I need it— I can’t— please fuck me.”

Not even their competition was enough to make Ilya resist that. He worked his way into Shane, just the right side of too fast. The stretch of it made Shane see stars. He could finally stop thinking, stop feeling anything except for Ilya, inside him and around him. Ilya took him hard and fast, tongue in Shane’s mouth and cock in Shane’s ass, and Shane never wanted it to end.

Just as Shane was getting close, though, Ilya slowed down. His hips moved in long, deep motions. Shane tried to chase it, tried to up the pace again, but Ilya pressed his weight down and stopped him.

“Shane. Say it. Tell me, lyubimyy, tell me.”

“I’m gay,” Shane cried, finally. Once it came out, he couldn’t stop. “I’m gay for you, Ilya. I’d do anything for your cock. Anything. Just please— please—”

The rest of the words were punched out of him as Ilya brought the pace back and then some. He fucked them through Shane’s orgasm and then his own, and kept going until it was too much.

After a minute, or an hour, or however fucking long it was, Shane’s mind cleared.

“Fuck,” Shane said. “I’m gay. I’m definitely gay.” He was almost giddy, as he said it. Ilya had knocked something loose inside of him, had filled the wounds that the words had left behind. It was terrifying, saying it aloud now. But it was terrifying like being at the peak of a roller coaster, staring down at the drop.

Ilya patted his ass. “Congratulations. I am very glad my husband is gay. Would be very awkward otherwise.”

Shane rolled over onto him. Ilya's arms came up around his back without any hesitation at all, one hand settling at the nape of his neck like it belonged there. And Shane lay on his husband's chest with his heart still going too fast, and listened to Ilya's breathing start to even out under his ear, and thought, with total and unhelpful clarity:

Fuck. I love you so fucking much.

He didn't say it.

He was getting very, very good at not saying it.

~ ~ ~

ILYA

Ilya should’ve known that Shane was going to be a freak about the paperwork. He stared down at his shiny new debit card, linked to the joint bank account that he and Shane now co-owned. Shane insisted that they use the account for all their day-to-day expenses, and Ilya remembered Ivanov saying something about that. So Ilya called up his bank and had them transfer a hundred grand. He’d managed to do it sneakily, too, but he supposed that he should’ve also known that Shane would have alerts set up for that kind of thing.

“A hundred thousand dollars, Ilya? What the fuck? This is for, like, groceries and stuff.”

“You think we need more? I will transfer.” Ilya smirked at Shane, because he knew it would make him scowl in the cute way Ilya loved to see.

“Don’t you fucking dare. We should both put money in, and I’m not putting a hundred grand in our checking account, Ilya. That’s terrible financial management.”

“Okay, good. You do not put anything. I will pay for everything.”

Shane rolled his eyes. “Not this again. Didn’t we already have this argument?”

“Never finished, I think. Got too distracted by something.” Ilya leered at his husband.

Shane blushed prettily, but also set his jaw, unwilling to be distracted again. “You know I’m way richer than you, right?”

“Uh, no. I have bigger contract, I know this, by point-two-nine mil AAV.”

“Of course you know exactly how much bigger your contract is.”

“Is not the only thing bigger.”

“Hm. Sounds like you’re compensating for your tiny net worth.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Ilya asked.

Shane stared at him. “Wait you actually don’t know? Do you think I do all those sponsorships for fun?”

“Obviously they pay, Hollander.” Ilya had known that Shane got paid for the ads and stuff, but he got paid ten million dollars a year to play hockey. “How much do they pay?” He asked hesitantly.

“Well, Rozanov, last year I made five million from endorsements alone. It’s been getting higher every year, but when you add up six years of that…?”

“Holy shit, Shane. You are like, rich rich. Even for hockey star.”

“Yes, which is why I don’t need you to put a hundred thousand dollars into our checking account.”

“Is not big deal. It’s just Alexei’s coke money,” Ilya said thoughtlessly. Then he realized what he said and he froze.

“Are you addicted to cocaine?” Shane asked indignantly.

“No! Obviously no.” The question was so completely, magnificently wrong that Ilya laughed, one short bark of it that didn't sound like a laugh at all. Of course. Of course. Ilya says the word ‘cocaine’ in a sentence and within one second Shane Hollander has built an entire scenario in which his brand-new husband is an addict, and has probably already found three treatment facilities in Ontario and started comparing their intake procedures.

He could stop here. It would be easy. He had a hundred ways to stop here: a joke, a leer, his hand on Shane's thigh. Shane would go pink and get distracted and forget about it until three in the morning some other night.

Ilya was so tired of hiding himself from Shane.

“I just— my brother. He asks me for money. Asked. For my father’s medicine, for my niece. I know he’s using it for drugs but…” Ilya shrugged helplessly. “My father, I thought he had dementia. I was not there, and Alexei was. So I send him money, definitely more than hundred grand every year. I did not know what else to do.”

Shane put on his ‘problem solving’ expression. Ilya had watched him do it maybe a hundred times, on the ice and off it.

"Okay. Okay, so, we set up a trust," Shane said, already reaching for his phone. "For your niece. A blind one, where the money just sits and grows and nobody touches it. Then if there's ever a point where you… if you ever found out where she—"

He stopped.

Ilya watched him get there. It took about two seconds. Shane Hollander, who could solve nearly anything given a laptop and one uninterrupted night, sat on his own couch with his phone in his hand and arrived at the fact that there was no way to solve this. They would never know her name. That was the entire purpose of the thing Grigori had done, and it had worked, and it was going to go on working for the rest of Ilya's life.

Shane put the phone down.

"Ilya. Fuck. I'm sorry, I wasn't—"

“It doesn’t matter anymore.” Ilya stared fixedly over Shane’s left shoulder. “I don’t want to talk about it. Point was that I have more money now.”

Neither of them spoke for a while. Ilya didn’t know what else he could say. Then, Shane suddenly reached for his phone.

“Actually I just remembered that I should put my meal prep service on the card, too. It’s pretty expensive. And we’re probably gonna be flying back and forth a lot more this year. I’ll put in a hundred grand in as well.”

“I thought hundred grand in checking account is huge waste,” teased Ilya, feeling his heart rate slow, glad to be back on solid ground.

“I wasn’t considering our expenses in a holistic way,” Shane said primly. Ilya didn’t even know what the fuck that meant. “Actually, now that I think about it, we should definitely make a budget.”

Jesus. Ilya loved this man so much.

Wait. Fuck.

~ ~ ~

SHANE

He'd been married for five days before his mother finally called him. Honestly, it was a small miracle that she'd waited this long.

Shane had spent the morning trying to get Ilya invested in the Hawkesbury house. It was still kind of insane to him, thinking of things like this as their house, but legally and practically speaking, it was the truth. It was early — he'd only emailed the agent and the architect yesterday — but he figured they could at least start drafting plans. He still had CAD on his laptop from designing the cottage. Ilya had been aggressively uninterested in every part of it until Shane remembered his obsession with muscle cars; now Ilya had been hunched over the laptop for forty minutes with his tongue between his teeth, laying out a six-car garage. Shane owned one car and could not possibly have cared less about fitting five more in his garage. He was watching Ilya do it anyway.

Then his phone lit up with a picture of his mother.

Shane's whole body did something unpleasant. He answered on the second ring, because not answering would make it worse. He knew this from extensive experience.

"Hey, Mom."

"They sent the deck." No hello. There never was one. "Six pages of it, for a glove. I told them we'd look at it after the fifteenth, so don't reply to anything, they'll try to go around me. Did you eat?"

"Yeah."

"What?"

"Eggs." It was almost true. It had been Ilya's eggs, and Shane had eaten about half of them standing up.

"Mm." She let it pass, which meant she was building to something. "So I made soup and drove it over to your place this morning and your car isn't there."

"Oh," Shane said. "Yeah. Um, I'm in Montreal."

Ilya looked up from the laptop.

He had known this call was coming since Wednesday. He had a lie ready and he'd practiced it in the shower like a psychopath. It came out of him smooth as anything.

"Jackie's sister got sick. Hayden asked if I could come help with the kids for a bit."

"Sick how?"

"Just— sick. Flu, I think."

"In July?"

"I didn't ask a lot of questions, Mom."

"Which sister?"

There it was. Shane's stomach dropped through the floor of his apartment, through the parking garage, into the bedrock of the island of Montreal. He didn't know how many sisters Jackie had. But clearly his mom knew, which meant that there was a right answer and a wrong answer.

"Uh," he said. "The, um—"

"Melanie?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, that's too bad." His mother made a small sympathetic noise. "She's the one with the little boy, the one who wouldn't eat anything at the christening. You remember."

"Right," Shane said. "Yeah."

Fuck. Now Melanie was sick with the flu in July in his mother's head and would stay that way. Shane had no idea if Melanie’s son wouldn’t eat anything at the christening, which meant that his mom talked with Jackie directly. That meant that it was only a matter of time until his mom texted Jackie, wishing her sister well. He’d have to send Jackie a text first, asking her to back up his lies, which meant that the house of cards was growing larger and more precarious.

"I'll send something," she said. "Does she like the ginseng chicken, or is she one of the picky ones?"

"You don't have to—"

"I'm not going to bother anybody, Shane, I'll drop it at Jackie's door."

"Mom." It came out too fast. He heard it come out too fast, and he made himself slow down, and he hated himself a little. "You’re not driving three hours to Montreal to deliver soup, c’mon."

She huffed out a laugh, and Shane relaxed. Objectively, driving three hours from the lake to Montreal was insane, the exact kind of insanity that Shane and Yuna Hollander shared. The only way to get either of them to back off was to point out how unnecessary they were being. The laugh meant that she’d realized how she was sounding, too. Now that she was diverted off the war path, she’d be susceptible to misdirection.

Shane did the only thing he'd ever found that reliably worked on her, which was to hand her a job.

"Actually, can you push the glove shoot? To August?"

"It's booked."

"I know. But I'm going to be back and forth for a while, and I don't want to be doing it jet-lagged and looking like garbage in a national campaign."

She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had changed. The flatness had gone out of it and something warmer and more focused had come in, because he'd asked her for something, and Yuna Hollander was never happier than when she was being asked for something.

"No, you're right. You look terrible when you're tired, it's your father's eyes." He heard her pen. "August. I'll tell them the twentieth and let them negotiate me down to the fifteenth. Don't reply to anything."

"I won't."

"You'll be good to those kids?"

"Yeah, Mom."

"I know." She said it easily, like it was a settled fact. "That's the thing about you. Your father would've made a whole story out of it — dropping everything, flying in, the big rescue, and everybody has to hear about it for a year. You just go. You've never once needed anyone to watch you do the right thing."

Shane looked at the wall.

Ilya was still looking at him. He'd stopped drawing. He'd been listening to the whole thing. Or at least he’d been listening to Shane's half, which was the half where Shane explained in a calm and reasonable voice why he was in Montreal, and it had nothing to do with anyone in this apartment. Ilya's face was doing what it always did. Nothing at all.

"Shane?"

"Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, I'm here."

"You sound funny."

"I'm tired."

"Mm." Another pause. He could feel her deciding whether to push, and could feel her deciding not to. That had been the deal his whole life. She would push him to the wall on his diet, his contract, his French, his posture in a photograph, on the exact wording of an Instagram caption. But she never pushed him on things that were actually personal. It was how he’d managed to hide things like his sexuality and absolute-lack-of-girlfriends from her for his entire life. He used to be grateful for it. “Make sure you eat well. Don’t just eat eggs."

"I will."

"Text me when you're coming up. Your father's asking."

"I will. Love you, Mom."

"Love you too."

Shane hung up and put the phone face-down on the coffee table with great care, kind of like a bomb, or a loaded gun. Then he sat back into the couch like he'd just finished a two-minute shift on the ice. He made himself breathe, and did not look up, because he already knew.

Ilya closed the laptop.

“What?” he asked, a tinge too defensive.

“Shane,” he began carefully. “If you change your mind, is okay.”

“I haven’t changed my mind.”

Ilya put his hand on Shane’s knee. “I am alright, Shane. I can play next two years for Boston, save my money, maybe you help me get some ad sponsorship so I will be rich rich like you. Then when my contract is up, I do refugee for sexuality in Canada. Maybe I give up hockey, but I will not have to go back to Russia.”

“You’re not giving up hockey,” Shane insisted. The thought made something happen inside his chest, hot and sharp. He imagined not having a rival, not having anyone who could match him or challenge him. Shane imagined what it would be like, playing a season without Ilya on a team somewhere. Then he stopped imagining it, because it fucking sucked to imagine.

“Okay, okay,” Ilya said placatingly. “I do not want to give up hockey, either. It would make me fucking miserable. But Shane—” he squeezed Shane’s knee lightly. “If we do this, you will have to tell them about us.”

“I know that.”

Ilya didn’t say anything. He just stared at Shane with one eyebrow slightly raised. When the silence between them got too loaded, Shane spoke again.

“I know that, okay. It’s just. There’s no rush for that. There’s so much other stuff we have to do, too. Like…” Shane looked at the papers spread across his coffee table. “Like— wills. We haven’t even talked about wills yet.”

Ilya waited for a moment, but Shane was resolute. Eventually, Ilya sighed. “Okay. Fine. You want to talk about wills?”

“We have a lot of assets, Ilya. And as your— husband. Um. As your husband, there’s laws about this. If you don’t want me deciding what happens to your assets, you need a will that says otherwise.”

“That’s easy.” Ilya leaned back, removing his hand from Shane’s knee to make a gesture. “If I die, you can have everything.”

Shane’s brain short-circuited. “What. Ilya. You can’t leave me everything.”

“Why not? I don’t have anyone else.” He was clearly trying, and failing, to make it sound flippant.

Shane wracked his brain for anyone who was close enough to Ilya to be in his will. His only family was back in Russia, and they were— not an option. He seemed friendly with his teammates, but not particularly close. Hadn’t he mentioned someone? A friend, or something?

“What about your friend from Russia. Uh, Svetlana?”

Ilya’s expression went blank. “My father told me… Well, Sveta’s father is Interior Minister in Russia. My father said— not said, but said without saying?”

“Implied?”

“Yes. He implied that Sveta’s father was the one who warned us. Told me to never contact her again, that it would not be safe for her.”

Holy shit. Every time Shane thought he understood how shitty life had been to Ilya, somehow this whole thing just kept getting worse. Before he could reply, Ilya plastered a smile on his face and poked Shane’s side with his foot.

“So, you get everything. You will be even richer rich hockey player.”

It was obvious that Ilya was trying to make a joke to lighten the mood. He always did that, Shane was realizing. But Shane also knew him well enough to understand that he wouldn’t get anything more out of Ilya by pushing.

“I… okay. We’ll still have to talk with our lawyers, obviously, to get them drafted—”

“Obviously,” Ilya drawled.

“Seriously, it’s important that we have the paper trail—”

“I know about the paper trail, Shane.”

“I just…” He hesitated. “I have trusts set up, for Hayden’s kids.”

“Seriously?” Ilya asked, delighted. “Wait. Do you babysit Pike’s kids? Was no trouble convincing your mom.”

“I mean, yeah. Sometimes. Not by myself, though, at least not after…”

“After what?” Ilya’s eyes were bright now.

“That’s not the point—”

“What if immigration officer asks me if I know story of why my husband is not allowed to babysit alone, anymore? Could be difference between Canadian citizenship or dead in gulag.”

“Don’t joke about that! Asshole.” Shane wished he felt irritated by this, instead of helplessly happy that the light had come back into Ilya’s eyes. “We’ll practice stories about each other. I’ll add it to the list. But, about wills…”

“You do not have to leave me anything,” Ilya said, because of course he’d known the whole time what Shane was dancing around.

“Yes I do,” Shane insisted. “It’s important to show that I’m taking the marriage seriously. And… I— if I, uh, die. You couldn’t get citizenship through our marriage, if I died. So, I’d want you— the money could help you.” Looking at the softness in Ilya’s eyes, Shane suddenly understood why the other man kept making jokes in serious conversations. “Maybe it’ll, uh, keep you out of the gulag.” Fuck. It didn’t help. Shane’s heart still felt like it was beating out of his chest. “But, I need to take care of my parents, too. Maybe I’ll split it into thirds, you, my dad, and my mom.”

“Shane—” It came out thickly, and Ilya cleared his throat and tried again. “Shane, you do not have to leave me anything. The courts will understand. I am rich hockey star, your parents are not. Give me a million dollars, or the Hawkesbury house, or something. It will still work.”

“I’m leaving you a third,” Shane decided, suddenly resolute. “I want to.”

“Okay. I— okay. I will… I will just have to keep you alive, then.”

“Deal.” Shane stuck out his hand. Ilya stared at it incredulously for a second, before taking it and laughing. Shane laughed too, because, well. It was silly. And he often laughed, with Ilya. He hadn’t quite realized that before.

~ ~ ~

Later, though, that night when they were lying in bed, Shane thought about it. Ilya didn’t have anyone. He didn’t have a single person who truly cared about him, except the husband he’d courthouse-married for a visa. Except for Shane.

There’d been so many times throughout the years where Shane hadn’t even been sure if Ilya liked him. And now Shane was the only person in the world whom Ilya had. Suddenly, Shane remembered what Ilya had said to him, a couple of days ago. ‘All of worst things I have ever done to you, is because you found me when I was feeling this.’ Sochi, and the silence afterwards. The roof of the MLH awards… right before Ilya had to go back to Russia for the first time, back to his asshole brother and asshole father.

How many times had Shane wished that he could find a girl who turned him on? Ilya didn’t have that problem. He could’ve stopped this thing between them at any point. He could’ve found a girl who did it for him. Shane had resented that about Ilya for a long time, honestly. He’d resented that things seemed so easy for Ilya. But now Shane knew about the kind of pressures that Ilya had back in Russia. How fucking bad Ilya would have it if his sexuality ever became known. And yet, Ilya kept coming back to Shane. He didn’t find a girl to settle down with, even though he must be so fucking lonely all the time.

Shane knew why he kept going back to Ilya, why he couldn’t resist it. He’d always known, even when he couldn’t admit it to himself consciously. He was gay. There was no safe exit option, not for him. And for so long, he’d tortured himself, thinking that he was in this alone, that he was the only one who felt like this. But he wasn’t. Ilya had said it himself. Sex with Shane was better than anything he’d ever had. It still seemed impossible, but Shane thought it was true. Sex with Ilya was better than anything Shane had ever had. It was why Shane kept coming back, even though it was such a bad fucking idea. It was probably the same reason why Ilya kept coming back, too.

Shane’s parents were— fuck, they could be overbearing, and annoying, and a pain in the ass. But they loved him, and he loved them. Jackie and Hayden loved him, too, and so did Jade and Ruby and Arthur, in the kiddie way they loved everyone. He tried to imagine what it would be like to have nobody in the world who loved him. To have nobody at all who would care if you died, except for the guy you fucked every now and then, who married you out of kindness to keep you from getting deported.

Suddenly he couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear Ilya living in a world like that, not even for another second. He was wriggling, turning around in Ilya’s grasp, because of course they’d been spooning. Ilya grunted, opening his eyes groggily.

“Wha…? Shane—”

“I love you,” he said, like the words had been burning a hole in his mouth and he needed to get them off his tongue. “I didn’t marry you for— I did it because I wanted to. I wanted to, okay, and I’m so fucking tired of giving up the things I want because of what other people need from me. I couldn’t let them fucking take you from me. I couldn’t— I’d fucking die. Or maybe that’s dramatic, I don’t know. I don’t want to live without you, Ilya—”

“Shane,” Ilya interrupted, voice still thick with sleep. He put his hand on Shane’s cheek, and his eyes were big, pupils gone large in the darkness. “This is a dream.”

“It’s not. Sorry, I know this is— probably way too fucking much. Sorry. You don’t have to say it back. You don’t have to feel it, either. I just. I couldn’t let you think you had nobody. You have me. You have—”

His words disappeared into Ilya’s lips. “I love you,” Ilya kissed into his skin. “Fuck, Shane, I—” Shane swallowed the words eagerly. “I love you, too, so much, more than—”

Shane pulled Ilya onto him. He licked the words from off of Ilya’s tongue, because fuck words. They’d always done better with this, anyway. Shane would gladly never speak again, if he could just keep this, if he could keep Ilya’s body against his own, forever.

Chapter 4

SHANE

There was a bottle of wine in the back seat that cost eleven hundred dollars.

Ilya had bought it at the SAQ on Sherbrooke on Monday, with the joint debit card, which meant Shane had watched the alert arrive on his phone in real time and had said absolutely nothing about it. It was sitting back there in a wooden box with a hinged lid. Shane's father drank Molson Canadian out of the can and had done so, without variation, for Shane’s entire life.

He hadn't been able to make himself say that either.

Ilya had put the passenger seat all the way back and lain there for the last ninety minutes with one arm over his eyes. Shane thought it was because he was nervous, rather than tired. He'd taken his arm off exactly twice: once for gas, and once when Shane's phone had rung on the Bluetooth and they'd both jumped like it was a gunshot. It had been the architect.

They passed the general store. Then the church. Then the bend where the pavement ended, and Shane pulled onto the shoulder ten feet short of the gravel and put the car in park.

Ilya took his arm off his eyes.

Through the trees, up the hill, you could see about a third of the roof of his parents' cottage and the top corner of the boathouse. Shane had made this exact turn probably four hundred times in his life. He had never once had to think about it.

Neither of them said anything for a while. A truck went past and the car rocked.

"Shane." Ilya's voice was very careful. "Is not too late."

"I know."

"No, listen to me." He sat up properly, and Shane realized, with a lurch, that Ilya had this ready. That he'd been lying there under his own arm for an hour and a half thinking of exactly this conversation. "We can turn around here. We drive back. Nobody in that house knows anything, and nothing has happened. I will go to Boston, play my two years. I save my money, and then I do the refugee claim like I said. It works, Shane. Ivanov said is not impossible, only riskier. And you—" He stopped, jaw working. "And you get to keep your life."

Shane stared at the steering wheel. He thought about the life he’d have, without Ilya.

"I don't want to tell them it's for immigration," Shane said.

He heard how it landed about half a second after it left his mouth, which was, as usual, about half a second too late. Ilya went very still. His expression cleared and went cold. In the past, this would be the point where Shane had no fucking clue what Ilya was thinking. Except this time, Shane did know, and he was annoyed because Ilya didn’t have to be thinking it.

"Okay," Ilya said. "Okay, then is easy. We don't tell them anything at all. We say I am staying with you because of Russia, is true, they will believe it. Maybe tell them about foundation." He was already reaching for his seatbelt. "You turn around here, there is room, is fine—"

"Ilya."

"Is fine, Shane—"

"No! That's not—" Shane got a hand on his forearm and held on. "That's not what I said. Listen to what I actually said."

Ilya stopped, seatbelt half unclipped, and looked at him.

"I don't want to tell them it's for immigration," Shane said again, slower. "I want to tell them we're married. I want to go up there and tell my parents that I'm married to you. I just don't want to give them that part."

There was a long pause.

"...Why?" Ilya asked. He sounded genuinely lost. "Shane, is the part that makes sense. Is the good part. It is part where you are not—" He gestured, hunting for it. "Where you are hero. Where you did a nice thing for a person in trouble."

"I know."

"So?"

And Shane sat there on the shoulder of a road he'd been driven down as a kid and tried to work out how to say it. He found, to his enormous irritation, that he already knew exactly how. He’d known it his whole life, actually; he’d just been too much of a coward to ever verbalize it.

"Because that's what she'll hear," he said. "If I say it's for a visa, my mom's going to hear that I did somebody a favor. She's going to hear that Ilya Rozanov was in trouble and her son quietly took care of it and didn't make a thing out of it, and Ilya, she is going to be so fucking proud of me." His throat had gone tight and strange. "She's going to tell people. Not the marriage, obviously, but… she'll find some version of it she can tell. She'll be proud of me for the rest of her life. And it'll be a lie, and it'll be the exact same lie it's always been."

"What lie?"

"That I don't want anything." Shane's hands were still on the wheel. He looked at them. "That's the whole— that's the thing about me, right? Shane Hollander never wants anything. He doesn’t want to eat red meat, or— or fucking bread. He doesn’t want to stay up past ten PM or to drink alcohol. He certainly doesn’t want to have any opinions that aren’t triple checked by a team of PR consultants. And, it’s my choice, okay. This is what I have to do, to play hockey like I do. But of course I want all that; I’ve just gotten so good denying it that nobody can see the cost, anymore. I’m just hockey robot Shane Hollander, perfect Saint Hollander. Even my mom, when we talked. I don’t know if she sees me at all, anymore. Or maybe I don’t let her. Fuck. I don’t know.”

Ilya didn't say anything.

"But I wanted this." It came out of him low and fast. "That's the actual truth. Nobody made me do it. I wasn't being good. I've wanted this since before I even knew what I was wanting. And I’ve never been allowed to have it, and it’s not because of me. It’s because of them.” Shane waved his hand towards the window, towards his parents, and his sponsors, and the entire National Hockey League. “They’re the ones trying to stop me now, okay? Before, it was us. We kept— getting in each other’s way. But then you called me, and I came, and I knew I could have it. Everyone else would want to stop us, but we could finally have it. And you love me, and I love you, and for once in my fucking life—” He made a fist and opened it. “I just want to take it. I want to have it. I don’t care what it costs.”

He made himself turn his head and look at Ilya, which was harder than the driving had been.

"So I'm not walking in there and telling them I did it for paperwork. Because I didn't. I did it because I wanted you and I was so fucking tired of not letting myself have anything."

Ilya was looking at him with an expression Shane had never seen on his face before.

"Say it in English," Shane said weakly, when the silence had gone on too long. "Whatever you're doing right now."

"I am thinking." Ilya rubbed his hand over his mouth. Then he laughed, once, not really at anything. "Okay. You know what is funny? Is my whole life, this. Take what you want."

"What?"

"Take what you want, Shane. Is the only thing I am good at, besides hockey. I see something, I want it, I have it." He held up fingers, counting, entirely without pride. "Cars. Drugs — yes, do not make that face, you knew this. Women, so many women, you would not believe me. Money that was not mine, when I was young. Anything at all. I never in my life told myself no about one single thing."

"Ilya—"

"And every time." He opened his hand, palm up, empty. "I take it, and then I have it, and then it is nothing. Is less than nothing. After, I feel— worse. Emptier. Every time, my whole life. So I take something else." He shrugged. "Is a very stupid way to live. I recommend it to nobody."

The truck came back down the road the other way. Neither of them looked at it.

"Until you," Ilya said.

Something painful happened in Shane’s chest.

"Everything I ever took, it did not want me. It was only there. Even the women, they want to say they fucked Ilya Rozanov, or they want to feel good. They did not want me." He wasn't looking at Shane anymore; he was looking through the windshield at the sliver of roof up the hill. "You are the only thing I ever took that wanted me back. And that stayed. Everybody in my life goes, Shane, every single one. And mostly is not even their fault, but they go. And you—" His voice cracked straight down the middle. "You would not let me go. You took me, too."

"Yeah," Shane said. "I did."

"So." Ilya cleared his throat, hard, and clipped his seatbelt back in with great precision. "Okay. Then we go up there and you tell them that you wanted me. And I will stand beside you and try very much not to say anything stupid."

"You're going to say something stupid."

"Almost certainly. Is a lot of pressure." He reached over and put his hand flat on Shane's thigh, warm through the denim. "Drive the car, Hollander."

Shane put it in gear and pulled onto the gravel. He’d taken this road four hundred times in his life. And yet, somehow, this felt like the first time.

~ ~ ~

Absurdly, Shane almost knocked on the door. He’d never in his life knocked on the door to his parents’ cottage. He had a key, obviously, so he put it in the lock, unnecessarily, because the door was already unlocked. They were in the middle of nowhere. They never locked the door.

“I’m here,” he called out, once they were inside. Shane had texted ahead, so they knew to expect him. “And, uh, I brought someone with me.”

Ilya’s hand touched the small of his back, briefly, encouragingly, before dropping back down.

“What was that, honey?” his mom called from the kitchen. “I could’ve sworn you said that you brought—” Her voice cut out as she rounded the corner.

“Mom this is Ilya… uh, Rozanov. He’s gonna stay with me in my cottage.”

Next to him, Ilya waved. He’d managed to sneak a bouquet of flowers into the trunk. They were a little wilted from the long drive. Ilya took two steps forward and handed the flowers to Yuna. She took them, but it looked mostly like a reflex.

“For the house. It is good to meet you,” Ilya said, flashing his best smile at her. “I have bottle of wine, too, for dinner.”

“We’ve met,” she said lamely. Then she remembered her manners. “I mean, thank you. These are very nice.”

His dad rounded the corner. “Hey buddy! How was the… drive,” he finished lamely, staring openly at Ilya.

“Um. It was good. This is—”

“Ilya Rozanov, I have wine.” He smiled again, and Shane could see the nerves in it. He wondered if his parents could, too, or if it just looked cocky to them. Ilya handed David the box with the eleven-hundred-dollar bottle of wine. Shane’s dad wouldn’t know anything about wine, but anyone could tell that it was expensive, just from the packaging. That was kind of the whole point; if someone buys a bottle that expensive it has to look expensive, too.

“This is great,” his dad said. “Uh, we’ll. Serve it with dinner? Or should we save it for a special occasion?”

“With dinner,” Ilya said confidently. Then he faltered. “If you want. Is best to enjoy together, but maybe you and Yuna want for special time. Is gift, for you.”

“No, no! Dinner is great.”

Fuck. This was so awkward. Fuck. Shane opened his mouth, but nothing came out. That was probably for the best. He’d never once in his entire life made a situation less awkward by talking.

Mercifully, his mom spoke. “I didn’t know that you two knew each other— or, obviously you know each other. I didn’t know that you were… friends?”

Ilya glanced over at him. Now was the moment to say we’re not just friends, mom. Shane wanted to. He’d meant every word that he said in the car. He was going to do it. He was going to tell his parents that he was gay, and that he was married to a man, and that the man was Ilya Rozanov. He was going to tell them that he was in love with Ilya, and that they were going to build a future together, and that they would make hockey work, too. He was going to tell them right now.

“We’re starting a foundation together,” Shane said instead. He didn’t look at Ilya; Shane already knew the blank expression that would be on his face. “Um. Focused on mental health and sports. We’re calling it the Irina Foundation, after Ilya’s mother.”

Holy shit, Shane was such an asshole. Jesus Christ, what the fuck was wrong with him?

“Irina was my mother’s name,” Ilya said. Shane couldn’t stop himself from turning to Ilya. His face wasn’t entirely blank; he looked a bit resigned, but his lips were quirked upwards, like some tragically beautiful painting of a man finding meaning in suffering. Shane thought that Ilya had been expecting this, had always expected it to go this way, regardless of what Shane had said to him. “She was very sad. Depression, I think it is called in English. She— died when I was twelve.” He said died, not killed herself. Shane thought the context said it for him, though.

“Oh, that’s awful,” Yuna replied. For the first time her gaze had softened towards Ilya. “I’m so sorry to hear that. I think the foundation would be very meaningful. Have you started the paperwork yet?”

He could see it happening. His mom’s focus was turning to action planning. The conversation would shift easily to forms and publicity and strategy. This would be one more thing that she was proud of Shane for, one more way that Shane kept up his perfect exterior. One more way that he hid what lay beneath the mask of Shane Hollander.

“It is still very early,” Ilya said cautiously, presumably because Shane was silent for too long. “We are—”

“We’re married,” Shane heard himself say.

Ilya’s voice cut out with a high-pitched noise. His parents looked at each other, brows furrowed.

“Sorry,” David began. “Did you say you’re…?” He didn’t even finish. Probably the word was too ludicrous to say aloud.

“We’re married,” repeated Shane. “Like, legally. There was a courthouse. Jackie’s sister was never sick. Sorry, I asked her to lie to you about that. I’m sure you texted. I didn’t come to the cottage because Ilya and I were getting married instead. Eight days ago. Oh, and I’m— uh, gay.”

Nobody said anything. Ilya shuffled a step closer to Shane and put his hand on the small of Shane’s back. He left it there, this time.

“You’re married.” His mom sounded like she still didn’t quite understand it.

“And gay,” Shane added, in case they had missed it.

“That…” David trailed off. “We had kind of. Well, we’d suspected you might be, uh, gay, buddy. The whole—” He waved a hand. “Marriage thing. That’s the bigger surprise, right now. Let alone to…”

“We didn’t even know that you two liked each other,” Yuna added.

“Well, we do.” Shane leaned slightly back into Ilya’s hand. “We, uh. We love each other, actually.”

“Since when?”

“Since our rookie year.”

“No,” Ilya said. “Was before that. Summer before.”

“Six years ago?” his mom said faintly. “But, wait. What about all the—” She looked at Ilya.

“I am, uh, bisexual,” Ilya said. “Um. It means—”

“I know what bisexual means.”

“We weren’t exclusive then,” Shane said. “We were mainly just—” His face turned crimson as he remembered what they were just doing.

“Just…?”

“Yuna,” David said quietly.

“Just what?”

Shane physically couldn’t make himself answer that question. He made desperate eye contact with Ilya, who set his shoulders determinedly.

“We were lovers.”

“Oh my god, Ilya.”

“Lov— Oh. Oh.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Shane said urgently. “The point is that we’re married.” Because he’d rather talk about his impulsive gay marriage than his six years of on-and-off non-exclusive fucking. From the look on his mom’s face, Shane thought she felt the same way.

“Maybe we should sit down,” David suggested, because he was the only person in this family with a single shred of common sense.

~ ~ ~

Shane stared down at his teacup. Nobody had quite managed to speak, yet, at least not about anything real. They’d talked about the drive up. (Oh yeah, pretty easy, traffic backed up a bit through Ottawa.) They went over the offseason free-agent signings. (Rodgers will be pretty good in San Jose, I think.) There was a new piece of art on the wall. (That looks really nice there. Uh, impressionist? Oh, modern. Yeah. That makes sense.) The whole time, Shane had watched his mother visibly work herself up to the topic at hand.

“Can I see the rings?” she asked eventually, probably because she thought it was a softball question.

Except—

They didn’t have rings. They didn’t have wedding rings. That was what finally sent Shane into a tailspin. The panic attack had been building for eight days. Shane honestly didn’t know how it hadn’t happened yet. Maybe because everything else had been a crisis? Regardless, this was going to be a big one. He felt his breath quickening, his vision greying at the edges.

“Ilya. We don’t have rings.” His voice sounded far away.

“We will get rings, Shane.”

He turned to Ilya, silently urging him to understand. “We don’t have fucking wedding rings, Ilya. What kind of couple doesn’t get rings before they get married?” Shane could hear the shrillness in his voice. He couldn’t do anything about it, but he could hear it.

How the fuck were they supposed to convince the IRCC that their marriage was real if they didn’t even have fucking rings? How could he have been so stupid? What else was he forgetting? The IRCC was going to take one look at their application, reject it, deport Ilya from the country, and then Ilya would probably die in some nameless gulag—

“Shane.” Ilya put his hand on Shane’s neck. “Lyubimyy. Look at me.” He shook Shane’s head gently. “I will buy us rings. Right now, if you want. I will get them delivered here.”

“I don’t know my ring size,” Shane said stupidly.

“Mm. Yes you do. You were fitted for Cup ring, twice.” Ilya’s hand was warm on Shane’s neck. “I am sure you had every finger measured.”

“Oh. Yeah. I had them measured twice, actually, and took the average.”

“Of course you did,” Ilya said. He radiated a fondness so bright that Shane almost couldn’t bear to look at it. Almost. “We will order custom, exact to the millimeter. Do you want gold or silver ring?”

“Nobody gets a silver ring, Ilya. It’s white gold. Or platinum, I guess, but that’s more expensive.”

Ilya’s face lit up with the cocky grin that Shane loved. Fuck, he loved Ilya so much.

“Well, if it is more expensive, then we definitely need it. Lucky I am very rich.”

“Platinum would clash with my Rolex,” Shane realized. “I’m under contract to wear the Yellow Gold at public appearances.”

“Hm, Rolex has platinum watch, surely. They would not give you? Maybe if you asked very nicely?”

They did have a platinum watch, the 950 Platinum series. They also had ones with both gold and platinum, which would be more flexible, but Shane found those tacky. Huh. Maybe they could fit it into his brand strategy? He turned to his mom with the question on his lips, and—

And she had a hand in front of her mouth. There were tears in her eyes. Suddenly, Shane realized what they must look like. How many times had he seen his own parents do this? How many times had he seen his mom worked up into a frenzy, only for his dad to gently steer her into problem-solving mode?

Seeing her like that made the last of the panic drain out of him. They were going to be alright, Shane thought. Things were going to be okay. His mom blinked rapidly before her face set.

“Ok, the foundation,” Yuna said. Her voice was thick with tears, but determined. “I’ll figure out what needs to happen on the legal end. Don’t worry about that. I’ll have it in your email tomorrow.”

“Hm, maybe next week?” David suggested gently.

She scowled at him, but then she looked at Shane and changed her mind. “On Monday. I’ll email you on Monday. Are you planning on coming out?”

Shane shook his head immediately. “We don’t want to be public. And if Boston reacted badly, Ilya’s immigration status could be jeopardized. It’s not— It’s not safe, in Russia.”

“Right, of course. So we need to get Canadian citizenship for Ilya. I’ll start contacting immigration lawyers.” She pulled out her phone and started tapping on it frantically. His dad put a hand on her back, like a mirror of Ilya’s hand on Shane’s neck.

God, he loved them so fucking much.

“We have lawyer already,” Ilya said. “Was very first thing Shane did. I wake up at three AM night after we got married and he was on his phone, had already emailed seven lawyers.” Ilya looked between Shane and his mother, then his eyes met David’s and they both smiled.

“Send me your lawyer’s contact info. I’ll— I’ll…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She was staring at the coffee table like it held all the answers. “I’m so sorry, Shane.”

“What?” he said, heart in his throat.

She looked up at him. “I’m so sorry I taught you this. To—” She made a helpless gesture. “To focus on the things you can— control, I guess, instead of the things that matter.”

She was crying, now, and then Shane was crying. Somehow they’d gotten out of their seats and his mom was pulling Shane’s face down into her shoulder, like he wasn’t six inches taller and sixty pounds heavier. He felt his dad wrap his arms around them both, then David said, “You too,” and Ilya was joining them also.

“I never wanted you to be like me, Shane,” Yuna said. “I never wanted you to have to hurt like I did. I wanted to protect you from all of this.”

Shane knew that it hadn’t been easy for his parents, getting married in the eighties as an interracial couple. He wondered if loving his father had hurt her as much as loving Ilya had hurt Shane. Would he want that deal, giving up the love to spare himself the pain?

“I don’t think you can protect me from that,” Shane said quietly. “And I don’t think that’s what I need. I think I just need to be less scared of myself, of the world. To learn that being scared costs me something — something worse than the things that scared me.”

Yuna’s palm was on his cheek, and she wiped at a tear with her thumb.

“Have you learned it?” she asked. “How to be less scared?”

There was probably an inspiring answer to give, here. If he dredged up his PR training, he could almost hear it coming out of his lips.

“Fuck no,” Shane said instead, with feeling. “I’m still terrified. But. I’m doing it anyways.”

She laughed at that, surprised and a little tearful. “Oh, baby. I love you so much. I want to know all of you. Everything.”

“Okay, Mom,” he said. Shane put his head back down on her shoulder. “I love you, too.”

Somewhere in all of this, Ilya had disentangled himself from them. Shane looked up and found him. Ilya was smiling at them encouragingly: warm and loving and entirely separate.

~ ~ ~

ILYA

The teacups gave him somewhere to go.

There were four of them, and a plate with two shortbread left on it. Ilya gathered them up and carried them through to the kitchen, because it gave him something to do. He ran the water hot enough to hurt. Behind him, through the wall, he could hear Shane's voice and then his mother's, both of them teary, both of them laughing at something. It was a good sound. He had no business inside of it. He washed the first cup. Then he washed it again.

"Hey."

Shane’s father came into the kitchen sideways, a little tentative. He opened the fridge door and emerged with two cheap Canadian beers, Molsons. He offered one to Ilya. The stupidly-expensive bottle of wine was still in its box, on the table. Ilya took the cheap beer from his father-in-law and tried not to feel like it was another way he was fucking up. He probably should’ve googled what Canadians liked drinking before dropping a grand on a bottle the Hollanders probably wouldn’t even like.

David filled the silence by talking about grills.

"So we got the new one in May," David said. "Propane. Yuna wanted propane." He drank some of his beer. "I'll be honest with you, I don't love it. Everybody says it's the same. It's not the same. You put a steak on charcoal, and you put a steak on propane and I'll tell you which is which, every single time, blindfolded."

Ilya nodded. He had nothing at all to offer about this.

"Do you grill?"

"No," Ilya said.

"That’s alright." David nodded slowly, like this was a reasonable position for a man to hold. "We can teach you."

The silence went on a beat too long, and Ilya heard himself fill it.

“I know Shane is special. He is special, to me.” Ilya had rehearsed this speech in the car ride, in his head. He hadn’t actually believed that he would need it, hadn’t dared to hope that Shane would really come out to his parents. But he’d rehearsed it anyway; he hadn’t wanted to mess up the English. “I am not— I have not always been a good man.” Ilya formed the words carefully, despite his stumble, ensuring the grammar was correct. “But Shane is worth being good for. I will try hard to be worthy of him.”

"Oh," David said.

He put his beer down on the counter. Then he picked it back up.

"Okay. See, this is—" He rubbed his jaw. "Yuna's the one who'd know what to do here. She'd have something. She'd probably have it written down somewhere." He huffed a laugh at nothing. "I'm gonna be straight with you, Ilya. I've got no idea what a person's supposed to say to that."

Ilya opened his mouth to tell him he didn't have to say anything, which was a lie, because Ilya had never met a paternal figure whose approval he didn’t crave.

"I'm trying to think of a story that Shane won't kill me for telling you. Um." He cocked his head to the side. “You know about the time Shane babysat the Pike kids by himself?”

Ilya’s lips quirked up. “He has said that he is not allowed to babysit alone, now. He would not tell me why.”

"Couple years back, Hayden and Jackie go to a wedding in Kingston. Overnight. Arthur's maybe eight months at that point." David cracked his beer. "Shane volunteers. Nobody asks him. He volunteers, and then he shows up at four in the afternoon for a seven o'clock bedtime with a printed sheet of emergency numbers, which he had laminated."

"Laminated," Ilya repeated.

"Uh huh. He went somewhere and paid money to have it laminated." David took a drink. "So they come back the next morning around ten, right, and the girls are fine, everybody's fed, dishes are done, the kitchen's cleaner than they left it. And Shane is sitting on the floor of the upstairs hallway with his back against the wall, facing Arthur's door."

Ilya waited.

"Turns out Arthur made a funny noise around one in the morning. Some breathing thing, babies do it, means nothing. Shane checked on him, and the kid was fine, and then Shane came out of the room and thought, well, what if he does it again and I'm asleep."

"He sat there," Ilya said.

"Nine hours. On the floor. He'd brought his phone charger up so he wouldn't have to leave to plug it in." David turned the can around in his hand. "And when Jackie asked him about it, he said it wasn't a big deal. Genuinely. He wasn't being modest, that's the part that got her. He'd sat awake on a floor all night and he honestly could not see what there was to make a fuss about."

Ilya laughed. It came out of him rough and unplanned.

"Yeah," David said, and he was smiling too, a little. "So that's why he's not allowed to do it by himself anymore. Not because of the kids. The kids had a great time. Because of what it did to him."

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Ilya opened his own beer and took a sip, mainly to have something to do. Eventually, David started talking again.

“He’s always been like that, so serious about everything. I knew he was gay, you know? I told him earlier that it was only a suspicion because I didn’t want his head to explode, but I think I’ve known for a long time. I worried a lot that he was torturing himself about it. I always figured I’d have to, uh, catch him in the act— with a man.” David shook his head. “I never imagined that he’d tell us, himself, let us in like that without his hand being forced.”

The implication was obvious to Ilya. David thought that he’d been the one to help Shane, to make Shane more comfortable in his own skin, or something. David didn’t know that Shane’s hand had been forced, because of Ilya’s immigration case. He didn’t know that Shane probably would never have said anything, would’ve happily kept their marriage a secret for their whole lives.

“That is— I do not do this. Shane does this, for himself, I think. Not because of me.”

“Hm,” hummed David placidly, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. They stood together for a few minutes in silence, but it didn’t feel uncomfortable. David puttered around in the kitchen, preparing some sort of snack plate. “Have you ever asked Shane?” David said eventually.

“What do you mean?”

“You said you’d try to be worthy of him. Have you ever asked him if he thinks you are?”

"No," Ilya said.

It had not occurred to him that it was a question a person could ask. Worth was not asked about. It was assessed, elsewhere, by other people, and delivered to you afterward as a verdict, usually late and usually in a form you could not appeal.

“Maybe you should,” said David easily. “I think his opinion is the only one that really matters. But if mine is important to you, I think you’re good for him. I’m happy he has you, son.”

Ilya looked very hard at the sink.

"Okay," he managed.

"Okay," David agreed, and went back to the snack plate, and did not look at him at all, which Ilya thought was probably the kindest thing he could have done.

Then there was a hand at the small of his back, and Shane was there, tucked in against his side like it was nothing, like he did it every day. He'd been crying. His ears were pink and he wouldn't quite look at either of them.

“What are you guys talking about?”

“Grills,” Ilya said immediately, clearing his throat when it came out slightly too high-pitched. “Your father thinks that Foreman is best.”

That immediately set Shane off, and somehow Ilya found himself surrounded by three Hollanders, each of whom had an extremely well-formed opinion about grill technique. Ilya had never so much as touched a grill in his entire life. Ilya watched Shane’s hands as he made some sort of presumably-grill-related gesture to explain his point. Yuna slapped his hands lightly and then made a very convincing argument to get Ilya on her side. He’d never imagined that a conversation about grills, of all things, would make him feel a part of a family again.

“Let’s open the wine,” Ilya said apropos of nothing.

“Are you sure?” Yuna asked. “It seems kind of… expensive. Should we save it for a special occasion?”

“No,” Ilya said. “We should drink it now. If we like, I will buy another for special occasion.”

David and Yuna looked at each other, but David shrugged and got a corkscrew. Ilya opened the bottle and poured into four glasses that Yuna took out from a shelf.

“Wow, this is really good,” David said. “I can really taste the notes of, uh.” He glanced down at the card that had come in the box. “Of black currants,” he finished, with a proud grin.

“Definitely. Thank you, Ilya. I love it,” Yuna said.

Ilya could tell that neither of them had any clue what they were talking about. Ilya didn’t even know what a ‘black currant’ was. Honestly, wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to be tasting. He was certain that he wouldn’t remember a single word to describe it, once it was gone. 

But he would remember what he was feeling as he drank it. For that reason alone, it was the best wine he’d ever had.

~ ~ ~

Later, Shane found him in the hallway, staring at a family picture framed on the wall.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Hm. That is my line, no? You are one who has done difficult thing.”

Shane didn’t respond. Instead, he just looked at Ilya like he was actually seeing something underneath the surface. He had a little wrinkle between his eyebrows. It made Ilya want to turn away. It made Ilya want to step closer.

Shane made the decision for him, stepping into Ilya’s space. He put a hand on Ilya’s face and kissed him, just a brush of lips on lips.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what? Overpriced bottle of wine?” Ilya joked.

“I loved the wine,” Shane said entirely seriously. “But no. I mean, thank you for being here. It means a lot. To me.”

“Shane. I would burn down a city for you,” Ilya said, probably way too honestly. He tried to salvage it. “And not even shitty city like Edmonton or something. Cool city, like New York. Meeting nice Canadian parents is nothing.”

“It’s not nothing to me,” said Shane, hand still on Ilya’s face. “And I don’t think it’s nothing to you, either.” He cut through the humor effortlessly, down to the bleeding core of Ilya that lay beneath it.

“No,” Ilya agreed. “Is not nothing, to me.”

Shane smiled at him. “I think you’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m so fucking sorry that you had to go through so much heartbreak for us to get here.”

Then Shane was making shushing noises and wiping at Ilya’s cheeks, and Ilya realized that he was crying. He squeezed his eyes shut and wrapped his arms around Shane. He wanted to put his head down on Shane’s shoulder but Shane’s hands were on his face. Shane’s forehead was against his.

“It is so— this is so fucked up, but…” Ilya choked out. “I am not sorry. Is that terrible? It is terrible. I would make the same trade again, easy. My family for this? My country for this? No hesitation. I am terrible, and selfish, and I want this.”

“No, Ilya, no. It’s not terrible.”

His eyes were still closed, but he could hear the tears in Shane’s voice.

“Hey, baby, look at me.” Shane’s thumbs stroked his cheeks, and he couldn’t help but obey. Shane’s eyes were big and dark, so close to his own. Both of their eyes were filled with tears. “You’re not terrible, not any more than I am. You’re not selfish for wanting to choose me over them, and I’m not selfish for wanting to choose you over everything else, too. Or maybe we’re both fucking selfish. I don’t know. But I’m choosing you anyway, okay? I don’t give a shit if it makes me selfish. I’m gonna be so fucking good to you, Ilya Rozanov.”

“I’ll be good to you, too,” Ilya said, because he couldn’t address any of the rest. He just couldn’t.

“We’ll be good to each other,” Shane decided firmly. Then, more tentatively: “I guess that’s what… what husbands do.”

“Okay, Shane,” Ilya said. “Okay.”

~ ~ ~

Yuna put them in Shane's old room. She announced after dinner that she was making up the room and went to find pillowcases, even though Shane owned an entire house approximately five miles away. Neither Shane nor Ilya had protested.

The bed was a double. It had been an entirely adequate bed for a fourteen-year-old and was entirely insufficient for two grown men who between them weighed over four hundred pounds. Shane was asleep in ninety seconds, one arm thrown across Ilya's chest and his face pushed into the side of Ilya's neck. And so, Ilya was laying there awake, cuddled with his husband, in his husband’s parents’ house, and he was once more struck with the utter unreality that this was his life, now.

The house settled and made its noises. Ilya lay in the dark and catalogued them, because he could not stop himself, because he had been doing it since he was a boy. A tap ran. The fridge cycled on. A door closed. There was a murmur through the floorboards, and then nothing.

In his father's apartment, a sound at night had meant something. Every sound had meant something, and you learned very young to lie still and work out what. Here it meant that David Hollander had gotten up for a drink of water.

Ilya put his hand to his chest and found his mother's crucifix, warm from his own skin, where it had been every day since a man stopped in a dark hallway with his hand already on the lock, and turned back, and went to get it so his son would not leave it behind.

You are soft, Ilyusha. And you long for softness in others.

His father had been right, of course. Ilya was soft, and he did long for softness in others. The only thing that Grigori had been wrong about was what it meant. He’d called Ilya soft like it was shameful. And he had made Ilya ashamed of it, too. Except now Ilya thought that Grigori’s shame had stemmed from fear, a terrible fear that Ilya’s softness would get him killed, someday.

But Ilya was alive.

In fact, he was more alive than he’d ever been, because after having gone through the worst experience of his entire life, Ilya had called Shane. And he’d called Shane because something inside of him — something that he could never quite kill — had longed desperately for the softness that nobody else had given him since he was twelve years old.

Grigori Rozanov was dead. Perhaps the man was physically alive, somewhere, but Ilya’s father was gone. Grigori would spend the rest of his life answering by another name, hiding, desperately afraid. He would spend the rest of his life suffocating in secrets too heavy to bear, too heavy to live with.

Ilya Rozanov was alive.

He looked at himself, at the secrets he’d been suffocating under for so many years. His bisexuality had never been his most shameful secret. No, that had been the softness buried deep inside of him. The fear of it had always been what had kept Ilya from Shane. He’d been terrified of it being seen, every time Shane brought it to the surface. He’d been terrified of his father being right about him. Except now Ilya knew that his father had been right about him, but it didn’t scare him anymore.

Go to your life, Ilyusha, his father had said.

Grigori had released him. He’d released Ilya of his responsibility to Russia, to his family, to his shame. He’d freed Ilya from the ties that had bound him to his love and to his misery. It was perhaps the kindest thing that his father had ever done for him.

Who would he be, Ilya wondered, without the weight of Grigori Rozanov hanging over him, without the weight of his shame? He wanted to find out.

Shane shifted and made a small noise and did not wake up.

For six years, one of them had always left first. From hotel rooms, mostly. They had ten minutes, fifteen, and then the getting up and the getting dressed and the door clicking shut behind whoever had managed it that time. It had never once mattered which of them had left. The leaving was always, always what remained constant.

I did it because I wanted to, Shane had said. I don’t want to live without you.

Ilya decided, finally, to believe him.

Go to your life, Ilyusha.

He had. It had cost him every person he came from, and he had done it. Now here it was: a too-small bed in a cottage in Ontario, with three people in the house who knew exactly who he was, and with Shane Hollander breathing slow and warm against his neck.

Ilya closed his eyes and went to his life.