Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Rose Landry, Yuna Hollander, Ottawa Centaurs Team Ensemble (Game Changers), Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros Team Ensemble (Game Changers), Original Characters, David Hollander

Additional Tags:

Started out cracky, Rapidly got out of hand, Loverboy Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Anxious Shane Hollander, Spoilers for Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Gratuitous Use of Karaoke, really indulgent, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov in Love, mentions of depression, Family Planning

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-14 Completed: 2026-06-17 Words: 33,457 Chapters: 4/4

Don't stop believing (hold on to that feeling)

Summary

Hollander: Head’s up. Next hazing is probably going to be karaoke.
Weston: fuck off hollander
Tireni: Hell yes I love karaoke!!!!
Weston: U fucking would. Love having a mic in ur face.

Or

A series of vignettes following Shane's relationship with music through the medium of karaoke, set along the timeline of his relationship with Ilya.

Notes

Inspired by a comment i saw on Tumblr where R.R. apparently considered making Shane a good singer.

Chapter 1: All the single ladies

Shane had been holding his (illegal) beer for well over an hour by the time J.J. and Hayden crawled back into the booth with him. The rest of the team were on the dancefloor gyrating to indiscernible lyrics set to thumping bass or ensconced in dark corners with their tongues in the mouths of girls in tight dresses. It was late, at least for Shane, and he wanted to go home. Or in this case back to his hotel room.

But he couldn’t.

“Hollander,” J.J. begins, and Shane knew what was coming before he continued in his slurred, accented drawl, “that girl over there has been eye-fucking you for most of the evening.”

Shane didn’t know which girl it was. There were a lot of girls. There were always a lot of girls now, hovering at the edges of every team gathering, like packs of hungry hyenas eyeing up a herd. Though in fairness to the hyenas, a lot of the herd were also hungry. Maybe it was a hyena-on-hyena thing.

In any case, it was intense. Overwhelming.

Thankfully, it was so hot in the club that he was flushed anyway so no one could tell how uncomfortable the prospect of eye-fucking made him.

“I’m good here, thanks,” he said, lifting his beer. He took a sip, so that it was more convincing. The beer was now pretty warm which made it remarkably more unpleasant.

“What?” Hayden shouted, leaning closer to him. He wiggled a finger in his ear. “Fuck. I think I stood too close to the speaker, man.”

Hayden had been very vigorous on the dancefloor, bouncing around like he didn’t give a damn, zero co-ordination but plenty of energy. His skin was coated in a layer of sweat, the V of his tight grey T-shirt stained dark. He smelled strongly of the aftershave he’d put on after the game, which Shane had noted in the car, and now there was a distinct, acrid scent of BO on top of that.

If he thought he could get away with it, Shane would have pulled away but he had tucked himself into the furthest corner of the U-shaped booth and now had J.J. on the other side of him.

He breathed through his mouth and discretely – he thought – checked his watch.

“Hollander, you cannot leave yet,” J.J. laughed, putting an arm around him. He was also sweaty. And warm. There was a time and a place for that, to Shane’s mind, and that was only in proximity to an ice-rink or a gym.

(A memory flashed through his mind, then, one of the traitorous ones. Ilya Rozanov between Shane’s spread legs, the bobbing of his head as his hot, wet mouth wrought the most spectacular orgasm from Shane’s body. Shane had been sweating then. For sure.)

Shane shook this memory off. Irrelevant. “Why? What are they going to do to us?”

Now in his third month with the Metros, Shane had been hoping that the hazing would ease off. Apparently, their veteran captain, Anderson, had long been a big fan of the ritual humiliation of rookies and fully encouraged it, despite the NHL being generally against such practices. 

Some had been the kind of thing he’d experienced in Juniors – his stuff being tampered with in the locker room, lugging around the vets bags, that sort of thing – but there had been a few more… creative rituals thrown in. Things that were clearly cooked up, spur of the moment. Weston had found a prostitute in his hotel room one time and had to give her all the cash he had on him to get rid of her. And Sharp had found a snake in his bed in Florida. They’d heard his screams all the way down the floor of their hotel and a polaroid photo of him, standing his underwear in the hall, white-faced with panic, was now taped to the whiteboard in the locker room.

Everyone kept warning him – and the other four rookies who had been drafted as part of the Metros big rebuild – that there would be more to come.

Suffice to say, Shane was on edge. More than usual.

“À soir? Nothing.” He grinned. J.J. gone through the rookie hazing when he’d joined the team three years ago. As had Hayden. They both assured him it was survivable and it would end. Eventually. “But it’s a poor show if you leave before, crisse,” J.J. looked at his watch with surprise, “is it midnight already?” 

Midnight after a game where Shane had been on the ice for twenty minutes, which was the longest he’d been on the ice since he’d joined the team. He’d had two goals and an assist, which was decent – and kept him ahead of Rozanov in points, just – but he’d been checked hard in the second period and the entire left side of his body hurt. Just bruising, and he’d had worse, but what he’d really have liked was to take some anti-inflammatories and get nine hours of sleep in the too-soft hotel bed.

“You can leave at 1am,” J.J. decided, slapping him on the shoulder. “Let’s get you something stronger. And then maybe get you laid. One of these girls will definitely suck you off if you want.”

Shane started to protest, but J.J. was off, crawling over the booth – his shoes touching the leather, which made Shane wince – and heading to the bar.

“He knows we have bottle service, right?” Hayden said loudly, watching J.J. leave with a furrowed brow.

Sure enough, one of the women who had been servicing the VIP area came over to ask if they needed anything. Shane had said a polite ‘no thank you’ to her each of the dozen times she’d checked on him that evening but this time ordered a rum and diet coke, which his dad sometimes drank, which he didn’t absolutely hate.

“I’ll get the same. But not diet. Regular coke, please.” He gave the waitress a big appreciative smile, which she returned, her dark eyes scanning Hayden from the top of his head, and down again. She made a note in her tablet and told them she’d be right back with their drinks.

Hayden leaned back towards Shane. “Not as hot as Jackie,” he said conspiratorially.

*

Shane shared a cab back to the hotel with J.J., Hayden and one of the older vets, Hammy, who had a sloppy backhand and was, to Shane’s mind, about a year or two out from retirement at the grand old age of thirty-three. They were all similarly drunk and handsy, the way guys in teams often got handsy at the end of the night, all Love you, man and You’re my brother, dude and I would kill for you, swear I would so he put them in the back and got the driver’s permission to sit in the front.

He closed his eyes, grateful for the white noise of tires on asphalt and the low volume of the radio. He ignored the whispers and snickering going on behind him.

Until.

A thick hand with too many broken-and-healed fingers clasped his shoulder. “You ever done karaoke, Hollander?”

“Hell no,” Shane said promptly.

Hammy snickered. “Shame.”

Suspicious, Shane met Hayden’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Of all the team, Hayden Pike had been the most welcoming to Shane. Only a couple of years older, Hayden had grown up in Ontario too and he’d apparently been following Shane’s career since he was scouted. They’d been put on the same line together and it was working out well.   

Hayden waggled his eyebrows at Shane. Knowingly.

Fuck.

*

The following day, after a refreshing afternoon nap on returning home, Shane reluctantly messaged the rookie chat group that he was otherwise silent on. The rest of the rookies had never exactly warmed to him, and he returned the favor by mostly ignoring them, but he wasn’t a total asshole. He knew he had info he had to share.

Hollander: Head’s up. Next hazing is probably going to be karaoke.

Weston: fuck off hollander

Tireni: Hell yes I love karaoke!!!!

Weston: U fucking would. Love having a mic in ur face.

Sharp: Lamb was going on about music last night in a fucking weird way. He wanted to know if I knew many Celine Dion songs

Weston: fuck off

Tireni: I’m not down for singing Celine Dion

Weston: U think they’ll choose the songs for us?

Sharp: and they’ll be fucking girl songs.

Tireni: Like what?

Sharp: I don’t know. Like Celine fucking Dion!!!!!!

Antonoff: I’m on it.

Weston: On what?

Tireni: Yeah, on what, you mysterious Ruski bastard?

Antonoff: For the last fucking time, my grandfather was Bulgarian.

Tireni: Buddy, that’s a made-up country.

*

They were on a coach to Toronto when Shane’s phone lit up with a text. And then another. And another.

He glanced over, saw it was from the group rookie chat, and was prepared to ignore it like always except in front of him Weston, who had spent most of the coach journey heaving into a paper bag due to ‘travel sickness’ that smelled a lot like stale alcohol, climbed up into his seat and gave Shane a sneer over the headrest.

He picked his cell up.

Antonoff: I have info.

Antonoff: On karaoke.

Antonoff: We need to meet.

Weston: Where? When?

Tireni: At the hotel.

Sharp: 9pm? Hotel lobby.

Antonoff: 👍

Weston: 👍

Tireni: 👍

Sharp: Earth to the robot?

Sharp: Hollander?

Weston: Hollander get out of ur fucking zen palace you princess and reply

Hollander: 👍

*

Shane hadn’t ignored the problem of karaoke. He was a solution-orientated guy, after all. He did his best thinking when he was running so he’d eschewed Hayden’s invitation to join him at the gym after they got back and took himself off for a run on the mountain.

When he returned, Shane had a plan of attack. 

The first was that he downloaded the entirety of Celine Dion’s back catalogue. He was familiar with some of her music, of course, because he was Canadian and she was a national treasure, but mostly because his mom had driven him cross-country to all his hockey games and they’d had precisely five CDs on rotation in the family VW since the mid-90s. Which were: Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill, The Best of Celine Dion, a 100 Best 80s Songs album, Red Hot Chili Peppers Californication and The Best of Whitney Houston. These five albums seemed to serve all of his mother’s moods equally.

The second thing he’d done was research karaoke itself, whilst listening to Celine Dion, specifically the 1996 classic album, Falling into You. There’d been a party, back when he was in juniors, where Guy Shriver had a karaoke machine in his parents’ basement and Shane had heard enough wailing from the top of the stairs not to venture down. Instead, he’d spent the night up in Guy’s bedroom playing with the family dog. And Jessica had been there, too, actually, though she’d been less interested in the dog. 

So he got the principle of karaoke – mic, screen with lyrics, backing track, singing – but what he had to work his head around was winning at karaoke. Specifically in the context of hazing. Obviously, the objective was humiliation. He got that. But Shane wanted to avoid abject humiliation. He wanted to appear a good sport. He wanted to be slapped on the back the way he was slapped on the back after a goal. He didn’t want to choke.

He was very much afraid that if he got up on a stage to sing in front of his twenty-plus teammates, he was going to choke. Singing along in a car to his mom’s music was one thing. Karaoke was wildly out of Shane’s comfort zone.

He needed to get comfortable with the concept. Fast. Which meant he needed to both study the medium and also practice it.

He placed an order for a home karaoke machine with expedited delivery, along with a selection of karaoke DVDs. Everything would arrive whilst he was in Toronto. He thought it unlikely they’d spring karaoke on them whilst they were there – it was an afternoon game and ops had already issued their travel arrangements. They’d get in the evening before, curfew would be in place, and then they’d return home straight after the game. Ergo, no time for karaoke.  

Shane reckoned he had a couple of days, at least.

*

Antonoff was already there when Shane got to the lobby. He was wearing – as Shane was – his Metro’s sweats and hoodie and was slumped on one of the uncomfortable couches, his laptop balanced on his knees.

“Hey,” Shane greeted him, taking a seat opposite.

He was acknowledged with a pair of raised rusty-red eyebrows which contrasted strongly with his bleached hair. The bleach had been another hazing prank – peroxide mixed in with his shampoo in the locker room showers. He’d taken it well, though it had happened the day before his mom had flown down to watch a game and she had not been happy.

Antonoff was a man of few words, which Shane appreciated. They sometimes sat next to each other on the plane in companionable silence. Of all the rookies, he was the one Shane could tolerate the most. Telegraphed every pass, though.

Tireni arrived next. He was wearing neon green.

“You look like a highlighter,” Shane said without thinking, as his fellow rookie threw himself down next to him on the couch.   

“That is a very on brand response from you,” said Antonoff thoughtfully.

“Fuck off,” was Shane’s response, mostly because he didn’t know if he was being insulted or not. He probably was.

Tireni shrugged easily. “I look good in green.”

Though the color was burning his eyes, Shane couldn’t deny it. But then with Tireni’s dark skin and model-handsome face, most colors looked good on him. That wasn’t a gay thing to think, Shane assured himself, as his eyes lingered on Tireni’s mouth. The receptionist who’d checked them in had been a woman and he’d thought she’d had nice curly hair.

Weston and Sharp arrived together, arguing about a movie they had watched on the plane, and they squeezed in next to Antonoff, both very deliberately not looking at Shane.

“Okay. Why are we here?” Shane asked, now that they had a quorum. 

Antonoff sat forward and placed his laptop on the table so they could all see it. There was a video already loaded. With a bit of a dramatic flourish, he hit ‘play’.

*

After, they all sat back as one.

Weston licked his lips. “How… did you get this?”

“I messaged Baron.” Baron was Antonoff’s older brother. He’d been one of the assistant coaches for the Metro’s until last year, when he moved to the Kings. “He sent it to me. Apparently, this was played at the Christmas party that year.”

Everyone’s mouths dropped open. Shane, mostly, because at the very least he’d thought the humiliation would be a one-off thing. Not, you know, filmed for posterity and repeated in front of a presumably larger audience. He was pretty sure the GM attended the Christmas party.

Someone had put some effort into the video. There’d been a backing track.

“Wow,” Weston breathed, which encapsulated everyone’s feelings.

“So, it’s at Le Mic,” Antonoff continued as once again they all lapsed into silence. “I called them, pretending to be one of the ops team. They’ve booked it out, week on Friday, after the game against Tampa.”

Shane’s shoulders hunched. Now there was a timeframe, this was getting real. “Fuck.”

“You know, if you don’t cut it in the NHL, P.I. work is definitely on the cards,” was Sharp’s view. He was looking at Antonoff in a new light.

“Yeah, appreciate the effort, man,” Shane said vaguely, because Antonoff had done them a good turn.

For some reason, this perfectly mild compliment made Sharp snort derisively and give Shane kind of a shitty look. Shane didn’t know why – had he not sounded genuine? – but he decided he wasn’t going to ask.

Instead, he stared at the now-closed laptop, as if he could see into the video. Putting aside the scale of humiliation he had just witnessed, there was another layer here. None of those rookies were currently on the Metros roster. A detail that Shane felt compelled to point out, and four pairs of wide, hostile eyes turned to him.

“Why would you say that?” Weston groaned.

Sharp’s head fell back against the couch. “Are you suggesting a poor karaoke performance is going to be career limiting? Of course you are. Fuck you, Hollander, you know even if you projectile vomited no one is going to eject you from the team.”

“Fucking hell, guys, it’s just karaoke,” Tireni said blithely, though his voice was a touch too high pitched to be genuine. “We’ll just get drunk and forget about it. No big deal.”

*

Shane, master of compartmentalization, scored another two goals and had one assist against Toronto, his mind blissfully clear of any worries about their future hazing.

And then he spent the four-hour coach ride back listening to Celine Dion in a vaguely fugue-like state.

Every so often, a scene from the video would pop into his head. Just manifest there, like a virus.

Stuart Donahue, now fourth-line forward for the Kings, white as a sheet, projectile vomiting as the instrumental chorus from Total Eclipse of the Heart played out in the background. 

Mateo Garcia, third-line, Penguins, stumbling through The Lion Sleeps Tonight and then being forced to do the high bit four more times until his voice cracked.

Charlie Spring, who had fucking left the NHL, singing nothing, just frozen whilst the lyrics to Close to You scrolled on the screen and the team jeered at him.

This – this – is Shane’s nightmare.

Well. One of them.

*

He told his mom, whilst he was unpacking the karaoke machine from its irritating layers of polystyrene. He was going to have to vacuum after this. The little white bits were getting everywhere and they made his skin crawl.  

Yuna Hollander was a ferocious, loving mother, the fuel to Shane’s professional career, and a Microsoft Office wizard. She was also gregarious and confident in any setting and, whilst understanding of Shane’s shortcomings in this area, believed he could overcome anything if he put his mind to it.  

“But you have a beautiful voice!” she laughed.

Shane rolled his eyes. Moms. “That is not the point.”

In the background, a playlist of Shane’s making was cycling through the songs he thought were most likely to feature in this karaoke hell night. After the video, he’d expanded it from Celine Dion to other major female singers known for their romantic power ballads. He’d also started to listen to the radio when he could, keeping a notebook to jot down songs that might be worth a re-listen.

“Sweetheart. I know you don’t like that kind of attention. But it’ll be a minute, maybe two, of discomfort. And you’ll be in the companionship of the other rookies. Perhaps see this as a bonding opportunity.”

Shane gave his cell phone, balanced on his coffee table, a revolted look. He didn’t want to bond with his fellow rookies. For one thing they didn’t really like him. For another, they had nothing in common except hockey – which would have been fine, obviously, but none of them were remotely in his league and knew it and that always caused problems. The only person who was played for another team—

Nope. Not thinking about that.   

“Sure, mom, will do,” Shane said, because he had learned that the quickest way to get his mother off his back was to agree with her.

Yuna sighed. Shane heard his dad’s voice, then, calling for her the way he had done Shane’s entire childhood, a joking, Honey, I’m home!, that had become serious. He must have just got back from work.

Used to this, Shane listened to his mother explain the situation and then was treated to the fumbling handoff from Yuna to David Hollander, with her instruction to say something reassuring.

“He projectile vomited?” came his father’s gleeful voice.

“David!”

“Literally everywhere. Pretty sure he hit people in the audience,” Shane said morosely.

“Do you have the video?”

The phone was snatched back. “That’s enough. Both of you.” She sighed. “I have some family news, if you want to hear about it.”

Shane’s interest in his extended family was close to zero – which was about the same as his mom’s, but she at least pretended by sharing information with him like she was passing a hot potato. His mom had an older brother (‘feckless’) and sister (‘flaky’) and consequently Shane had various cousins spread out across Canada, the US and Japan, most of whom he’d not met. His mom was kept in the loop about them through an email chain that went back decades and a once-a-month phone-call from her aunt in Tokyo. “Go on then.”

“Kiko got into George Brown.”

“Oh yeah?” Kiko was his uncle’s youngest daughter. Shane had met her twice, once a couple of years ago. She hadn’t been that interested in hockey. Or Shane for that matter. “Good for her. Remind me what she’s studying again?”

“Oh, goodness, Shane, I don’t remember that. I think it’s something to do with children. David?”

His dad’s voice came from the background, “Early childhood education!”

“Oh, yes, that,” said his mom.

Shane couldn’t think of anything more boring.

*

Shane set the karaoke machine up in his living room.

It was a blocky little unit, the most compact he could find, with about eight-hundred buttons and a little screen where the lyrics would play. It had also come with a number of unnecessary atmospheric features – red, blue, green and white lights that flashed at different tempos according to the music. It had been a shock when he’d first turned it on – massively distracting, and stressful – but thankfully there was an off switch, which he engaged now.

He’d set it up so it could mirror the screen contents on his TV and, for his first try, had loaded up one of his mom’s favorite Alanis Morissette songs that she had liked to play when he had lost games.

Shane had also set up his old camcorder by the TV, turned so that it was facing his couch. He made sure the viewfinder could take in the couch he was sitting on, pressed ‘record’ and then scurried back to take his position. The mic – weirdly bedazzled, which he had not noticed in the product description – felt heavy in his hand. He could do this.

He hit play and, safe in the cocoon of his apartment, the drapes closed and his door locked, announced, “Attempt number one.”

As with all practice runs, Shane expected there would be more than one.

The music started, a familiar, loose, mid-tempo beat but almost immediately the words ‘oooh oooh’ appeared on his TV screen, which Shane had forgotten about. He said them, croakily, a beat too late, wincing.

So, immediate learning here, needed to hear the song again before he sang it.

When the real lyrics kicked in, Shane did a little better, his memory returning more concretely – and it was funny because as a kid he hadn’t really got the song, or why his mom thought it was appropriate for devastating losses – but as an adult with a little more critical thinking he could see she had been trying to impart, musically, a lesson which she often verbalized.

Why she thought this would work on teenage Shane, he had no idea. It barely worked now. What the fuck did walking naked through your house have to do with anything?

Second learning – he needed to do some warm-ups. He didn’t typically raise his voice much and singing used muscles just the way skating did. Muscles that Shane did not often flex. He made a mental note to look up vocal warmups on YouTube.

Third – water. This song was four minutes long. By the time he was done, making his way through Alanis’s weird recommendations for personal growth, his throat felt like a desert, and he hurried to glug back a glass of water.

Shane reviewed the tape of his first attempt with, well, a grimace. At least when he watched tape of his games, it was at a distance. He could improve on the quality of the singing, he thought, with at least some familiarity with the song and by warming-up and properly lubricating his throat. But his face needed some work.

As always.

Why, for the love of God, did he look like he was in pain?

Was this really the face he wore when he was concentrating?

He slumped back on the couch and reached for his laptop. He’d researched quite a few YouTube compilations of karaoke and all the good performances – regardless of whether they were good singers or not – all seemed to involve the kind of expressiveness that Shane knew in his gut he would not be able to replicate. Dramatic turns to the audience. Acting out scenes. Looking like they were enjoying themselves.

He chewed his bottom lip. He maybe needed to reset his expectations on what he was going to achieve here. Perhaps he wasn’t going to win at karaoke. Perhaps he just needed to survive.

Jumping up, Shane placed his camcorder back in position and started recording again. “Attempt two,” he announced walking back to the couch. Maybe he’d try standing up this time as well. Give his lungs some room to do their thing.

*

The evening of karaoke night arrived, which the team still hadn’t told them about though they sure as hell weren’t being subtle, sending sideways glances to the rookies and snickering, whispering to each other and then barking with laughter. Shane had definitely heard Canada’s greatest songstress mentioned once or twice.

Instead, the rookies were corralled first to Murph’s for drinks, a fairly normal pastime after a Friday game. They’d won 3-2. It had been Shane’s first hattrick, which was the excuse apparently to explain the quantity of drink that was being bought.

“They’re trying to get us drunk,” Sharp surmised as another pitcher of beer was plonked down on the table in front of them with a request from Digger to drink up, boys.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Weston replied, pouring himself a glass. Both Tireni and Weston were going hard on the booze.

“Guys, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” Shane frowned. “At least drink some water or something. You’re going to be all over the place.”

Weston rolled his eyes. “Fucking killjoy.”

Shane withheld a sigh.

“I thought you liked karaoke,” Sharp said to Tireni. Like Shane, Sharp was holding back on the drink, though he didn’t think Sharp would appreciate him saying that. Under the table, his leg was bouncing up and down.

Tireni knocked back half his glass and then wiped the foam from his upper lip with his thumb, a gesture that gave Shane a strange, fluttery sensation in his stomach and couldn’t look away from. “On my terms.” He leaned forward, though no one was paying the rookies any mind, “I’m not singing no girlie shit.”

“Should have got my arm broken as well,” Weston muttered.

Antonoff had been injured in the game, the fucker, and so had been sent home to recover. He’d sent them all a ‘good luck’ message in the group chat which, unaccompanied by any emoji, still read smug as shit.

*

Le Mic was having some refurbishment done and had apparently hired it out to the team at a cheap rate. Which was why Shane was dubiously studying the frayed wires hanging down from the ceiling in reception whilst they all signed in. “Does this look up to code to you?” he asked Sharp, who gave him an incredulous look.

“Is that what you’re thinking about?” Sharp narrowed his eyes. “You know, you’ve been weirdly chill. Don’t tell me they’re excusing you from this one as well?”

Shane frowned. “What do you mean—"

“I wanna know what love isssss!” Tireni boomed from behind them, drowning out Shane’s train of thought and sending a ripple of amusement through the assembled team.

The member of staff looked up from his screen and pointed at Tireni with his pen. “Is he drunk?”

About fifteen members of the team had joined them for this humiliation and Shane had been piled into a van hired for the occasion. He’d been next to Tireni in the back. He wasn’t just drunk. He was fucked.

Not as fucked as Weston, though, who had pissed himself and passed out in Murph’s. He’d had to be taken home by Stonner. In the grand scheme of things, Shane suspected publicly pissing yourself was probably more humiliating than karaoke.

“Nah, man,” said Hammy, who was holding Tireni up, “just really excited.”

There was a brief stare-down before the member of staff caved, clearly deciding it was above his pay grade to contest the inebriated state of a six-foot hockey player. “Yeah, it’s your deposit on the line if he pukes all over our equipment.”

“We’re good for it,” Anderson said, smiling, all uber-white fake teeth. To make the point, he handed the guy a hundred. “Thanks for your support.”

Shrugging, the guy took the money. “Okay, Stacey, behind the bar, will be your server for the evening.” Stacey, violently chewing gum, was eyeing up the crowd of hockey players avariciously. She had a very low-cut top on and her breasts were disconcertingly smooth, round globes. “Everything that’s behind the bar and mixers is included. Everything in the big refrigerator is extra. Pizzas are on their way. And Elvis, which is our largest room, is set up for you. It’s the only room that’s working so the others are locked. The fire exit is sign-posted.”

Obviously, everyone went to the bar first.

Except Shane. Shane headed down to the room. He needed to get a feel for the lay of the land, do some visualization exercises. Get his head in the game.

It wasn’t a big room, which was good. The lighting was a weird blue color but quite dim, which kind of made it feel like a spaceship. There were a couple of padded benches and some bucket chairs but if everyone who’d come with them crammed in here, a few would have to stand.

It would probably get quite warm. Shane wasn’t absolutely certain the rattling AC was up to much.

The stage was big enough for four or five people and behind the stage there was a massive screen with ‘Welcome Montreal Metros!’ written in a blue script font. They’d put the old design of the logo on there, which probably no one would notice but Shane.

Taking a deep breath, Shane stood on the stage and, right up until that moment, he’d been fine. He’d practiced a whole host of likely songs. Learned a few more. He’d worked on his facial expressions, finding a kind of fixed, bland smile that didn’t look like he was constipated.  

But the moment he took that single step up onto the stage, and the four little spotlights were on him, his knees went funny.

Maybe he should have broken something.

*

“Gonna do you a solid, buddy,” Hayden yelled in Shane’s ear two hours later, before pressing something into his hand and then disappearing off.

Shane had now had two vodka tonics. Which he’d hated. He’d also sat through two different renditions of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing and AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long. All three of which paled in comparison to the Best Of karaoke complications he’d found on YouTube but given they’d been performed by the Captain and his As, Shane had been obliged to look impressed and applaud. He’d ducked out of Hammy’s Sweet Caroline because by this point the room had got so hot he was sweating and he had retreated to the bar with quite a few of the others.

For a moment, he had no idea what Hayden had given him. His initial thought that maybe it was a little baggie of drugs – which was surprising; he didn’t think Hayden was into that. His brain ran through the various ways he could respond. A polite ‘thank you’? The last time he’d been offered drugs – in the bathroom at a club in New York – he’d faked a stomach upset and hid in the cubicle until everyone had left.

But it turned out it was simply a folded piece of paper with a scrawled list on it.

Unfolding it, he read the first line, Weston - Girls Just Wanna Have fun.

“Oh my God,” Shane said, before turning around and grabbing hold of Sharp who was leaning against the wall, holding on to his beer for dear life. “Bathrooms. Now.”

“Good timing,” was Sharp’s response. “Pretty sure Tireni’s already there.”

*

The pulsing beat to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now added a real something something to the sound of Tireni puking up four pitchers of beer and the entire pizza he had hoovered.

Any lingering Thoughts Shane might have been having about Tireni were rapidly dissipating. Which was good, obviously. Shane really only had enough mental capacity to have lingering Thoughts about one other NHL player and that was frankly far too many Thoughts already.

Sharp unraveled the sheet of paper Hayden had snuck Shane and tugged at his bottom lip as he read. “Okay, Tireni, you’re down for Mariah Carey.”

Tireni groaned.

Shane had studied Mariah Carey, of course. She fit the parameters of the Metros classification of ‘embarrassing girlie songs’ so he’d memorized her more famous ones, including that Christmas song. His mom always groaned when it came on the radio.  

“Which one?” came a plaintive voice.

“You’ll Always Be My Baby?” Sharp asked, looking towards the stall door with a perplexed look. “You know it?”

“No fucking idea, man.”

Shane did. Of course. It had an irritating non-verbal intro. He really didn’t like those.

“Fuck,” whimpered Tireni. “What did you get?”

“Fucking Celine Dion of course. Power of Love.”

And Shane knew that one as well. It was a tough one though; he doubted Sharp had the range.

Sharp pondered the list. “Maybe I could swap with Weston, since he’s not here. He got Cyndi Lauper. That’s not too bad.”

Everyone, Shane thought, knew that one. He’d even practiced that one.

“What did Hollander get?”

“Fucking Beyonce.” Sharp’s grey eyes were strangely accusatory, looking at Shane now as if Shane somehow wasn’t part of the conversation. “That is so unfair.”

From the toilet cubicle came a weak voice, “Not… All the Single Ladies?”

Shane had obviously heard of Beyonce. He just hadn’t for one moment thought to include her in his copious research. She was, in a word, too cool.  

But. He had come prepared with his headphones for just this reason. Leaning against the wall of the bathroom – recently redecorated a sort of butter yellow which didn’t feel very bathroom appropriate - he opened Spotify. Whilst Sharp and Tireni moaned about their songs, he stuck one earbud in his ear and loaded the song up.  

It began with some sharp handclaps and percussion. “Oh, I know it,” Shane said with a sudden rush of relief, like he’d just mapped a pathway from the puck at the end of his stick to the goal.

Tireni flushed the toilet. “Of course, you fucking know it! Everyone knows it.”

“What a fucking surprise they gave you an easy one. You could easily ham that up.” Sharp amended, looking Shane up and down, “Well. Someone who isn’t you could ham it up.”

The stall door opened and Tireni slumped in the doorway. He was ashen but distinctly more focused than before he’d thrown up. Was that how it worked? You could just puke out the alcohol? Shane had never drunk enough to throw up but from what he’d seen, he’d always thought throwing up meant the end of a night. “I am so good at that song.” He did a strange twisting motion with his hand which Sharp mirrored. Perplexingly, they both fell about laughing.

Ignoring them, Shane pressed his headphones closer to his ears. 'Cause if you like it, then you shoulda put a ring on it.

Sighing, Tireni splashed his face with water and mostly missed his face, splashing his luridly patterned shirt. “Mariah Carey. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Why am I being punished?” Sharp demanded, waving the piece of paper around. “Is it because of that penalty last week?” 

“Probably,” Shane said vaguely. He had left the team shorthanded frustratingly late in a close game. But he was also never where he was supposed to be and regularly fucked up their drills, too, so there were a myriad reasons.

“Meanwhile they treat you with fucking kid gloves, their fucking golden goose,” Sharp muttered, not quiet enough that Shane couldn’t hear him, which Shane suspected was the point.

*

It was gone midnight by the time the rookies were up. Anderson summoned the whole team into Elvis, which was now, conservatively, the temperature of the core of the earth. Everyone was sweating. Everyone was drunk. Tireni had managed to top himself back up again and even Sharp had succumbed to the lure of tequila shots.

Shane had spent most of his time ducking into the bathroom to listen to Beyonce. Not a pastime he’d ever considered before.

“Now, you fuckers, shut up!” Anderson roared, his voice cutting through the boisterous sound of the Metros at their rowdiest. “It’s time for the highlight of the night. Tonight, we will be treated to the musical skills of our rookies!”

There was a round of vigorous, jeering applause.

The remaining rookies had all taken a position against the wall. Two defensemen were guarding the doors as if they were going to make a run for it.

Shane, briefly, wondered if they were going to also ask them to strip or something. He swallowed. His dick would probably recede into his body if they did.

“First up we have Not-So-Sharp singing Celine Dion’s classic The Power of Love!”

Tireni slapped Sharp on the shoulder. “Good luck, buddy,” he shouted over the roars of laughter. “Try not to puke.”

The next few minutes were, ostensibly, the most cringe-worthy few minutes of Shane’s life. And he was only watching. Sharp stumbled up to the stage, white and sweaty, and took the microphone he was handed. The music started straight away, as did Celine as there was no intro. She just got straight into it.

Sharp did not. For one thing, he didn’t seem to know where the screen was and when Anderson directed him to it, he did so with such force that the mic flew out of his hand and hit O’Neil. O’Neil then kicked it away so Sharp had to crawl on the floor to get it.

No sooner had this been righted and Sharp was back on stage, now blotchy red and sweaty, then the first attempt at actual singing was nothing more than a croak, followed by some garbled sounds that might have been words. His chest was heaving much too fast.

Anderson, who had taken a seat at the front, shouted, “Get on with it, you fucking pansy!” A sentiment that was echoed by many of the other men in the room.

Sharp wheezed some more, eyes blown wide.

“Is he… having a panic attack?” Shane whispered to Tireni.

He’d had one or two. When he was younger. So he recognized the signs.

Shane wasn’t the only one who was concerned. Hayden jumped up and climbed over a couple of people to join Sharp on stage. He draped an arm around him and grinned at the audience, leaned into the mic and then proceeded to absolutely murder Celine Dion. Passionately.

“Pike! Get off the stage!”

“You’ve had your turn!”

There was a chorus of boos, which Hayden took with absolutely zero shits given, spreading his arms wide to scream out the chorus.

The company seemed to help Sharp though, who was able to string together a couple of sentences before the song, mercifully came to an end.

“Well. That was… something,” Anderson said, looking pissed. He clipped Hayden on the back of the head as he dragged a wide-eyed Sharp off the stage and over to a corner where he slumped down in a heap.

Their Captain’s brown eyes swung around to find Tireni and Shane. They narrowed. “Tireni. Let’s see how you fare.”

Tireni knocked back the last of his drink and thrust the empty glass towards Shane. “I can fuckin’ do this,” he said. Or tried to say. Because what he actually came out with was, “’m can funni dwit.”

He was on stage for no longer than ten seconds. As soon as Mariah started up her nonsensical ‘do do doop dum’s, Tireni tensed, and then he collapsed in on himself and did a Donahue, throwing up all over himself.

And then stood there. Shell-shocked.

Groans rent the air, along with the rancid smell of bile. The guys manning the door immediately opened it as a handful of the team made their exit, gagging.

Anderson observed his rookie with a disgusted sneer. “For fuck’s sake, not again.”

“Sorry, cap,” Tireni hiccupped, the mic drooping his hand. A tear ran down his face.

Their captain pointed to the door. “Go clean yourself up.”

It was J.J. who stood up this time, wincing sympathetically. He helped Tireni down off the stage. “Come on, kid.”

Surely, surely, that was it?

“Hollander, you’re up! Just avoid the puddle.”

Dazed, Shane walked forward, vaguely aware of the sounds of protest from the team. He took the small step up onto the stage, carefully avoiding ‘the puddle’ of mostly liquid vomit. Looked like there had been sweetcorn on the pizza.

Shane’s knees quaked as he turned. Someone handed him the mic, which was heavier than the bejeweled one he had at home. The stage lights were blinding now and he could barely make out the audience, just dark, leering forms waving their arms about. The smell of sick permeated everything and was making him feel even more nauseous with every shallow breath he took.

A trickle of sweat crawled down the side of his face. He wiped it away with the hand holding the mic.

“Hollander will be performing a personal favorite of mine.” A hand gripped his shoulder. Anderson’s face was blotchy with alcohol. Shane hadn’t really ever noticed this before but his captain was really mean-looking. “Make sure you don’t butcher it, kid.”

The rest of Anderson’s intro speech was lost to Shane, as his ears started ringing alarmingly, his vision wavering. Even with the door open, it was so hot. He could feel every fibre of his clothes touching his body. The first thing he would do when this was over, when it was mercifully over, was get in a taxi and go home and take all his clothes off and wash forever.

Shane sucked in a breath as he visualized this. Yes. That was what he would do. When it was over, and it would be over, he would clean himself of this night, of this experience.

The percussive intro to the song started, he lifted his mic – forced himself to take a deep breath, to still his shaking hand – and opened his mouth—

And the room was plunged into an abrupt and silent, cocoon-like darkness.

“What the fuck?”

“Is that the power?”

“I can’t fucking see shit.”

“Where’s the fucking manager?”

A door slammed in the distance and then a loud, authoritative voice cut through the hub-bub. “Gents, I’m sorry, looks like the power’s gone out. We won’t be able to get an electrician out this time of night so I think we’ll need to call time on this evening. We’ll refund you, of course.”

Frozen on stage, Shane let out a noise. A tiny, hysterical giggle. But no one heard.

Chapter 2: Falling into you

Chapter Summary

“Shane.” Rose's eyes were almost wet. “Celine Dion. We’re in Canada. We must. Sing. Celine Dion.”

Fuck it, Shane thought. They must.

Chapter Notes

“Babe, do you know of any good karaoke bars in Montreal?”

Shane froze, the frisson of pleasure at being someone’s ‘babe’ immediately silenced by the actual topic. “What? Why?”

Rose waved a hand around, not looking up from her menu. “For… karaoke? I’m planning a little wrap party for a few guys from the movie. Karaoke is good for that sort of thing. Private. Activity based. Booze. Ooh, maybe I’m in the mood for steak.”

Relief surged through him. For a brief moment, he’d wondered if maybe she’d been thinking this might be some kind of date activity. For them. Because they were dating. He had been trying to convey a sort of casual, down for anything vibe these last few weeks but the reality was he absolutely, definitely was not down for karaoke.

“Um. Le Mic is the only one I know of. You can hire the place out. They, ah, recently had a refurb.”

“You’ve done karaoke?”

Shane shook his head, violently, and she laughed in that way she did – where he knew she was laughing at him but it wasn’t by any means cruel. It was just knowing. Only a few weeks and she knew him. “You’d rather die, huh?”

Shane smiled. “Literally cannot think of anything worse.”

She laughed again, quieter, her eyes crinkling with delight. “What exactly is it about it? The singing badly or the performing in front of people?”

“The performing.”

She tilted her head to the side like an adorable, inquisitive bird. “You perform on ice every week.”

“Different kind of performing.” Hard to explain, too. It was more of an inward thing, hockey. When Shane was on the ice, the crowd barely mattered whist he was actually playing. He was too busy focusing on the puck and the opposition, where his teammates were, mapping out the play. Maybe after a goal or a win, or even a loss, the crowd would seep into the edges but by then he was already thinking about what he could have done better.

Shane didn’t lack the self-awareness to acknowledge that Montreal fans loved him and the fans of the opposition team respected him, even if they didn’t want him to do well. The situation might feel different if they didn’t.

“What are you thinking? Wait, no,” Rose said quickly, returning to the menu, “let me guess. The salmon or, hmm,” she perused the options further, “the chicken? No. That lemon sauce will probably be buttery. The salmon. It even has quinoa.”

“Got it in one. What about you?”

“I’m getting the steak. I’m a sucker for chimichurri. If I get the fries, will you have one or two to help me out?” Rose fluttered her eyelashes at him, mock playfully.

Though he didn’t want to – well he did, but he shouldn’t – Shane smiled. “I can do that.”

The server arrived to take their order and she managed to convey whilst she jotted down their meals that she knew who they were, that she was freaking out about it, but also that she was super cool and chill, could they see how super chill she was?

It was an intense experience.

“I think they’re probably filming us from the kitchen,” Rose whispered as she walked away.

There was a kitchen hatch in this restaurant. Shane glanced over as their server went to stick up the order. One of the chefs came to talk to her, leaning close. His eyes drifted in their direction and then hurriedly away again. “Probably. Think it’ll be on Twitter tomorrow?”

Shane wasn’t sure what to make of this new angle to his fame. In hockey circles – the only circles that really mattered to him – he was plenty famous. If you knew hockey, you knew Shane Hollander. Maybe that was true in Canada if you didn’t know hockey, too, because hockey was the most popular sport. But outside? In the US? Europe? He was meaningless. At least, he had been until he’d started dating a member of the X-Squad. Now he was in gossip magazines and blogs. There was apparently a whole Twitter account dedicated to spotting them. He hadn’t looked but his team sure as hell had. They thought it was hilarious.

“Pfft, earlier than that, maybe even before we leave,” Rose said, picking up her glass. She was more blasé about this than he was. “So, what does this week hold for you? Oh, you know what, I do know. Boston! The famous rivalry.”

Shane grabbed his own glass. He allowed himself one glass of red with his meals with Rose. He thought it made him look more mature. “Yeah. Big game.”

Big in many senses. It would be the first game he’d play against Rozanov since. Well. Since.

They hadn’t spoken. There had been no text messages, which felt weird given they had usually messaged each other every day, increasing in frequency the closer they got to a game against each other. By now they would already have had a plan to meet. Rozanov would have probably sent him some suggestions on what they would do, or where they would do it. Maybe a dick pic. All of which Shane would have had to delete. 

Instead, here he was, on a date with Rose Landry. Drinking wine and helping her out with her fries even though they very much were not part of his diet.

Which was better. It was… right. He and Rozanov, that had been a one-off thing that had got really out-of-hand. They didn’t owe each other anything, it had been casual. A stupid, risky, electrifying, but casual thing. And now it was over and they would meet on the ice like they always should have done. As rivals.

He took a sip of wine, trying to cancel out the sudden weird taste in his mouth.

“Nervous?”

“No,” Shane said dismissively, automatically. He wasn’t nervous, not about the hockey. “They’re a great team. But we’re better.”

She laughed again. “That’s what I like to hear.”

He wanted to move the conversation on, away from a topic that felt prickly to Shane. This date had been going perfectly so far. They’d had to meet for an early dinner because Rose had to be up early tomorrow, even earlier than Shane, which meant there was no chance that he would be expected to invite her to his or he to her Airbnb. It was nice not to have that pressure. Not that there was any pressure. They were taking things slow. “What about you?”

“We’re playing a bit of catch-up, thanks to that storm a couple of weeks back, so I will be once again, wet, cold and mostly naked in front of most of the crew, starting tomorrow.” She shuddered, dramatically.

“Sounds awful,” Shane said, wincing, then wondering if he should have made some kind of suggestive comment there, about her being naked. On a burst of inspiration, he ran with, “Wish I could be there. To keep you warm.”

It was the right thing to say. Rose pouted. “Oh, me too. You’re so cute.” She reached across the table to take his hand.

A flash went off in the corner of his eye. Someone from the kitchen definitely had their phone out for that moment.

*

When he got back from the showers after their vaguely unsatisfying home game against Toronto, Hayden nudged him. “Rose has been blowing up your phone.”

“Invasion of privacy, man,” Shane said half-heartedly, reaching for his cell.

Though he could see he had several messages from Rose, he automatically scrolled down – and down – to where there was still nothing in the text thread he had with Rozanov. A text thread he knew he should have deleted, months ago. But like an addict he kept returning to it.

It had been more than a week since the incident at the club after their game. Or what Shane thought of as an ‘incident’ and Rozanov probably thought of as just another Thursday night, whilst he hooked up with someone else in front of his former hookup.

For Shane it had been the most fucked-up night of his life. He’d gone to bed with Rose that night, for the first time, and it had been fucking horrible. They’d both been drunk. His head had not been in the right place. His head still wasn’t in the right place. He kept reliving that night, over and over again, scenes flashing in front of his eyes. Ilya’s mouth on that girl’s neck. The way he rolled his hips against her.

Fuck.

Despite all this, there had been a tiny, tiny part of Shane who had nurtured a kernel of hope that maybe Rozanov might get in touch after. To say what, Shane didn’t exactly know. He couldn’t imagine anything that would get rid of this weird, heavy feeling Shane had been carrying around since. 

He scrolled back up to Rose’s messages. Tonight was the planned karaoke night. She’d been talking about it all week, as she and her team liaised with Le Mic on the details. He had paid the barest amount of attention, too caught up in— in whatever was going on in his head about Rozanov.

He was a terrible boyfriend.

Rose: This place is amazing. You’re the best.

Rose: Check out this spread. Good, huh?

Shane hearted the photo of a table weighed down with food and alcohol.

Rose: Enjoy this video of me absolutely nailing Whitney.

Shane decided for the sake of Rose’s self-respect, he wouldn’t be watching that video in the Montreal locker room. He hearted it anyway.

There was an hour’s gap between the video and her next message. He assumed she’d had a couple of drinks.

Rose: Heeeeey, please come join us?

Rose: It’s so awesome. I want you to meet everyone. I want everyone to meet you.

Rose: You don’t have to sing. You don’t even have to stay for long.

Rose: Pleeeeeaaaaase.

Shane let his head hit the edge of his locker. He didn’t want to go out. He wanted to go home, change into the softest clothes he had, and lie on his couch with the lights low and think of nothing.

The nothing part wouldn’t happen. His brain wouldn’t stop. Mouth on neck. Tongue on ear. Hand curling around hip.

“Hey, man, you okay?” Hayden’s voice lowered, inching into Shane’s personal space cautiously.

“I’m fine.”

“You sure? You seem a little down.”

Shane couldn’t seem to move. “I’m fine.”

“Real convincing, buddy.” Hayden leaned against his locker and Shane knew this was purposely to shield the conversation from the rest of the team. Fuck, he was a good friend. “Everything all good with Rose?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” With monumental effort, Shane pushed himself upright. “In fact, I’m going to see her tonight. She’s doing this wrap party thing with the crew.”

“Oh really? That’s great, Shane.” Hayden put his hand on Shane’s shoulder and squeezed, like he was proud of Shane and, God help him, that made Shane feel… something. Good. Normal. “That’ll cheer you up.”

It wouldn’t. But it might stop his brain from thinking about Ilya Fucking Rozanov for five minutes.

*

As expected, the party was well under way by the time Shane got to Le Mic. A wave of heat – the aircon battling with the number of people – hit him in the face as he opened the door. Briefly overwhelmed by the number of people, strangers, he took a moment to focus and put on his game face. He eventually recognized a few faces, including Miles, Rose’s co-star, and made his way over to him, anticipating he would be the beacon for Rose.

“Shane!” Miles kissed both of his cheeks in a lingering way. “Good of you to come.”

“Where’s Rose?” he asked, then remembered he should have said something pleasant. “I’m glad to be here. Nice to see you.”

Smiling, Miles leaned close, his hand touching Shane’s hip. “She’s in the last room with hair and make-up. I wouldn’t go in there if I were you. No one here can hold a tune. Can I get you a drink?”

Shane laughed, weakly. “I’m good, thanks.” He wasn’t totally sure about Miles and he didn’t know why. He was very good-looking and had always been very friendly to Shane. He moved in a kind of sinuous way and was a little handsy, which he’d mentioned to Rose once who’d laughed and said it was a theatre-school thing.

“I’m going to find Rose.” He smiled politely and escaped, heading down the short corridor to the larger of the selection of karaoke rooms. It had changed since the last time he’d been there. Definitely a paint job – more butter yellow – and there was some more art on the walls. And way more neon lights saying faux-inspiring things like Dancing Queen and Girl put a record on. Oh, possibly these were actually lyrics.

He pushed open the last door – it was still called ‘Elvis’, he noted – and was hit by a wave of female exuberance, both in song and physical presence. There were a handful of women on the stage – and one guy – and then the rest of the seats were filled with women waving their arms, and their drinks, in the air.

The song was one by the Spice Girls. He knew this one.

“Shane!” Rose yelled from the stage, breaking out of some crucial zig-a-zig-ah. “Take over for me!” She handed the mic to someone sitting in front of them and bounded over.

Rose embraced him with the force of a rookie forward chasing a puck and he reeled back in surprise. “You came!” 

“Ah. Yeah. Wow,” Shane said, as someone on stage broke the sound barrier. “This is—” Horrendous. He needed to leave right now. This had been a mistake.  “Wanted to say hi. Before I head home.”

“Noooooo,” she pouted, wrapping her arms about his neck and hanging off him like a limpet. “Staaaaaay.”

“Absolutely not.” In fact, Shane started backing them back to the door, dragging her with him to the sound-proof corridor. He needed to get out of that room ASAP. He could already feel a headache grinding behind his temples. “Super pleased you’re having a good time, though.”

“You hate it here. But you came anyway. That’s so sweet.”

Rose went in for a kiss, which he hadn’t expected. His mouth was caught briefly by hers, sticky with lip-gloss and some sweet-flavored drink. Not unpleasant, exactly, but they were surrounded by her colleagues – some of whom had clocked the kiss and were now whooping enthusiastically – and he hadn’t been mentally prepared to kiss her.

He kissed back, automatically, but ignored her tongue. “You’ve had a lot to drink,” he gathered, pulling back, red in the face.

“Pretty much,” she laughed.

Shane found the door handle behind him and yanked it open, stumbling out into the corridor. The sudden silence was what he imagined the vacuum of space sounded like.

But Rose seemed to see his emergency dash to the exit with her as some kind of cue, because she sprang on him, crashing their mouths together. He stumbled back into the wall, his hands out at his sides. It took him a moment to recalibrate, to pull back from the fight or flight reflex. This was his girlfriend. He should be okay with this. He was okay with this. He could kiss her back.

But he couldn’t.

Rose pulled back, a wobbly smile on her face. “I’m so drunk,” she said, giggling oddly.

Relived that she hadn’t noticed his lack of reaction, Shane smoothed a hand down her back. “You are. Should I get you some water?”

She let him go. “Please.”

Given a mission, Shane headed to the front and wound his way through the crowd to the table. Grabbing a bottle of water, he also put a couple of pieces of bruschetta on a plate, figuring Rose could do with some carbs to soak up the alcohol. He sidestepped another approach from Miles, waving the water bottle like it was Excalibur or something, and returned to find Rose slumped against the wall, her eyes closed. 

“Hey, you okay?” he asked with concern.

Rose blinked her blue eyes at him and gave him a faint smile. “Just hit by a wave of exhaustion.”

“You’ve been up against it these last few weeks, it’s no wonder. Here. Your water, ma’am.” Shane leaned against the wall and proffered the plate. “Perhaps a snack.”

“You’re so sweet,” she murmured, before uncapping the bottle and drinking half the contents. A trickle of water escaped the corner of her mouth and ran down her chin. He wiped it away with his thumb as she took one of the bruschetta. “We should grab dinner. Before I go. Next week.”

“Of course. Tuesday?”

They hadn’t exactly discussed what happened when Rose went back to LA. She’d made some vague reference to his birthday last week, which he’d ignored – his birthday always fell during playoffs and he didn’t like to make plans, in case he jinxed it.

His mom had suggested Shane might invite Rose to the cottage, that it would be a good time for his parents to meet her, but Shane had been uncomfortable suggesting it. The cottage was his. His space to just be, with no commitments to anyone. He supposed that wasn’t sustainable.

It was just… he’d tried to picture Rose there and for some reason it didn’t work.

“Sounds perfect.” Rose rose up onto her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “I’ll see you then.”

*

Nearly four weeks later, Shane picked up his now-friend’s call whilst he was on his cool down. “Ma’am,” he greeted and the smile on his face he saw reflected in the mirror was one of his real ones.

“Shane Hollander, guess what?” Rose trilled excitedly.

“What?” he asked, playing along. Preferring to talk to her whilst he wasn’t still on the move, Shane hit the ‘off’ button on his treadmill and snagged the towel draped over the screen, wrapping it around his neck to catch the sweat pouring through his hair.

“I am going to be in Montreal next weekend.”

This was unexpected. “Shut up, really?” He wiped his face with the edge of the towel. “Why?”

“Yup. Hold on, there is too much going on here, yeah, I’ll be five minutes,” she called and the background noise shifted into something quieter. “Hannah, the make-up artist I worked with when I was filming is having a baby shower and I had a free weekend and I said I’d come. However. You have to promise to go out with me on Saturday. Just us.”

Shane had zero plans and since they had broken-up Rose had easily, seamlessly, fallen into the very small community of people he would willingly socialize with, so he had absolutely no problem agreeing. “I’m all yours.”

“Babe, you’re so cute.”

Was it weird that the endearment still made him feel good? Even now he wasn’t playing at being a boyfriend? “What were you thinking? Dinner? I could book that place we like.”

“No, no, no, I’ve got an idea.” She giggled. “You haven’t got a game on Sunday?”

He narrowed his eyes. “No, Rose, what are you up to.”

“I’ve got to go! Love you. See you Saturday. Will send you the deets.”

Then there was nothing but dial tone and the lingering concern that Shane was in trouble.

*

Shane stood outside Le Mic and sighed.

Rose, arm wrapped around his, laughed. “Look. We’ve got a private room. And you’ve had two glasses of wine.”

He scowled. He had relaxed the rules, lulled into the false sense of security by his friend who was literally a trained actress. She had planned this. “You are a corrupting influence.”

“You can just listen to me sing.”

“Rose, I love you,” which was so easy to say now she was just his friend, “but you are basically tone deaf.”

“I know, and yet I love it so much. And I don’t know anyone who would tolerate me and be this much fun to tease.” She skipped towards the door and turned to look at him, her face bright with mischief and affection. “You’ll love it. I know you will.”

She wasn’t wrong. For one, he had had two glasses of wine, so everything was a little more rose-tinted (ha ha). Then she ordered a bottle of champagne as well as his ginger ale and he actually did like champagne when it wasn’t the cheap shit they served at all sports galas and he sipped a glass, then another, as Rose proceeded to theatrically absolutely murder a series of popular songs that had him howling with laughter. Actual tears.

“You are— so very bad,” he wheezed, at one point, reaching to top up her glass and his. It was an incredible relief to laugh. He hadn’t laughed like this for months.

“We should get some snacks,” Rose decided, tapping the screen for the menu. Her voice was a little slurred, her cheeks flushed. There had been alcohol at the baby shower – which seemed counter-intuitive to Shane as presumably mother-to-be hadn’t drunk – so she had arrived at their early drinks a little tipsy already. “Which of these things will you eat with minimal complaint?

Shane grimaced and after some debate they settled on some edamame, along with some chicken wings and Padron peppers. She also added a portion of fries, because she always did.

Rose pulled an elastic hair tie from her wrist and did one of those complicated girl twists with her hands so that her hair was contained on top of her head. “What shall I sing next?”

They flicked through the offerings, most of which Shane didn’t know, or wouldn’t admit to knowing, which opened up a whole other avenue for Rose to hum – so badly – songs in an incomprehensible way to get him to recognize them. When that didn’t work, they ended up playing them, Rose increasingly horrified at the depths of Shane’s lack of musical knowledge.

“It’s not that I don’t know music,” he protested, and even to his ears he could tell he was also slurring now. God. He was going to be hungover tomorrow. He picked up a chicken wing, because protein. “I know the stuff my parents listened to. Well, my mom.”

His dad was like Shane. He enjoyed the sound of silence or maybe a quiet radio station. Or a hockey podcast.

“So, what did she like?”

The trick with eating chicken wings was always to use one hand to eat them, the other to keep clean with a napkin. Delicately, Shane ate his way around the wing, sucking the meat from the bone. “You know. Typical stuff. Um. Actually. When I was kid, and she was driving me everywhere to my games, we had, like, a handful of CDs in the car so if we didn’t listen to the radio that was what we listened to.”

Drunk, Shane thought back to those times with fairly warm memories that didn’t really match with the reality – him tense, gripped with anxiety in the back, his mom being chipper in the front and trying to meet his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Shane, you’ve got this.    

“Oh, God, in one of those rotating CD players. I remember those!”

He wiped his fingers on the napkin, careful to get rid of all the sticky hot sauce. “Yeah, exactly. So we had Alanis—”

“Classic.”

“Whitney.”

Rose grabbed his arm. “Oh my God, of course.”

“Red Hot Chilli Peppers.”

“Okay, Mama Hollander!”

“And Celine Dion.”

“Shane.” Her eyes were almost wet. “Celine Dion. We’re in Canada. We must. Sing. Celine Dion.”

Fuck it, Shane thought. They must.

*

It was gone ten when Rose called, the Facetime request appearing on Shane’s tablet where he was rewatching tape. He’d had a mild headache when he woke up but he’d drank an electrolyte drink, taken some paracetamol and eaten some fruit so wasn’t feeling too bad.

Rose, however, had looked better. Her hair was all over the place, mostly on the left side, and she was still in the t-shirt she wore to bed. “Don’t laugh at me,” she said croakily.

He grinned. “I can’t help it. Did you call me the second you woke up?”

She dragged a hand over her face. “I needed to get the shame over with quickly. Did you put me to bed?”

“I did.” Looking at her now, he didn’t think he’d done a very good job with the face wipe. He’d been too gentle and she had streaks of mascara under her eyes. 

Rose grimaced and reached up to delicately pat her head. Her eyes were vague and faraway. “Did I— did I make you get McDonalds?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. I’m really sorry about that.”

“Hey, I was drunk, too. I just—” Well, Shane didn’t want to rub it in. His metabolism was faster. And he weighed probably four times as much as she did. “Anyway. I had a really good time.”

“You did?” Rose’s face crumpled. She was a sentimental hungover person. “That’s so lovely. I had a good time too. You’re my best friend.”

Okay, so maybe Shane was also a sentimental hungover person. His eyes were stinging in a suspicious way. “We put a McDonalds coke in your fridge, by the way.”

It had been very, very important that they do that, according to Rose, who had become extremely serious by the time they’d got back to her hotel room. They’d carefully removed the ice, too, so – in Rose’s words – it’s magic wouldn’t be ruined.

“We did? Oh my God.” She dropped her phone as she scrambled out of bed. He saw a flash of leg and her bright pink panties. He’d seen a whole lot more last night but, then, he’d seen it before and in radically different contexts.

He heard her bare feet running away, the sound of a refrigerator opening and a small shriek of joy.

Rose returned and stood over the bed, slurping on the liter of regular coke like it was a lifeline. “This will cure me,” she told him huskily.

“Can’t go wrong with a chaser of paracetamol.”

“God. You’re so smart.” She disappeared again and returned with a bottle of pills. She knocked two back like a professional. “Ugh. The caffeine is already working.”

“Not sure that’s medically possible.”

“Let me live, Hollander.”

“Sorry.”

With a sigh, Rose sat back down and arranged her phone somehow so that it was propped up and she could talk hands free. “I seem to remember you talking to me about next weekend. All-Stars? That’s in Florida, right?”

“Er.” Shane vaguely remembered this. It was after the second bottle of champagne had made an appearance and they’d moved on to Mariah Carey.  

What he didn’t remember was what he had told her.

“Yeah, Florida. Makes a nice change.” He sought for a safe topic. “That stylist I told you about has put together some outfits for me.”

“You said.” Rose narrowed her eyes and took a particularly fulsome slurp of coke. “You also said your man is going to be there.”

“Oh great,” he muttered. He had told her.

Well. They were all on a learning curve here, weren’t they? He was apparently a chatty drunk. And she remembered things. Great. So great.

Rose pressed, “Your mystery man.”

He exhaled. “Let’s not talk about this.”

“Oh, no, I want to talk about you wooing him back.”

Fuck. “Rose. This is— I cannot—” Form words, apparently.

Shane couldn’t believe he’d spilled this secret to her. He’d barely spilled it to himself. When the selections for the teams had been announced earlier that month – not that he had been surprised both he and Rozanov had been selected – the vaguest, vaguest of ideas began to form in his head. It had occupied most of his waking hours. Half-dream, half-plan, he’d envisioned speaking to Rozanov. Not wooing him. Just talking to him, face to face. About what had happened. Apologizing, at the very least. Rozanov deserved an apology.

Okay. Once or twice he’d thought about the wooing part. Or the kissing part of said wooing. And more.

Okay. He’d jerked off almost incessantly to the more part. 

He wanted to be fucked by Rozanov so badly he had started to dream about it.

“God, I love it when you blush. It’s like art.” Rose scooted closer, really gave him an eyeful of the mascara he’d failed to get off whilst she’d been half asleep propped up on the counter in her hotel bathroom. “Promise me when you can you’ll tell me all about it, huh? I want to hear all the details.”

“Yes, yes, I will, some other time.” Shane brain flailed around for some way to distract her, some way to exit himself from a conversation he couldn’t think about without a wave of intense fluttery panic. Being gay was one thing – it was a big thing, a big deal for Shane to acknowledge – but acknowledging the Ilya Rozanov of it all was something else entirely. “Hey, you could— visit. My cottage. This summer. Maybe Labor Day weekend?”

Her bloodshot eyes were baleful. “In fucking September?”

“Well, by then I will either be over it or—” He, once again, failed to find some words.

“Under him?” she proffered cheekily.

Shane sighed and his brain took something of a nosedive. Being under Ilya Rozanov. Yes, please, and thank you. “Yeah. That.”

Rose snickered and fell back into the mountain of pillows, triumphant.

Chapter End Notes

Don't worry. Ilya is in the next two chapters.

Chapter 3: I'm on fire

Chapter Summary

Lily: I am making a playlist about us.
Jane: What?
Lily: I am making you a playlist of songs that feel like they are about us.

In February, they had one of those miraculous two-days-and-two-nights together, two-days-and-two-nights that they both fought for – Shane missing a Christening in fucking Vancouver, Ilya turning down a riotous 25^th birthday weekend in Miami, both citing nebulous ‘family commitments’. 

They’d both been watching the weather nervously – both Boston and Montreal were prone to snowstorms this time of year – and it was only when the seatbelt sign was turned off at Boston Logan that Shane breathed a sigh of relief.

The first thing he did was turn on his cell phone and message Ilya.

Jane: Landed.

Lily: Thank fuck.

It was too risky for Ilya to pick Shane up from the airport so he got the world’s most expensive Uber – thank you, surge pricing – to drop him off. He found this part particularly excruciating. Whilst he always wore a hat, with his hoodie up over his head, there was always the possibility that he would be recognized by the driver – even though his account was set up with a different name and even though Boston wasn’t as mad for hockey as Montreal was. What was more, unlike his old apartment, Ilya didn’t live in an area where it was possible for Shane to be dropped off down the road. It was an affluent, suburban area and it would look super dodgy for a guy to be walking along the road with a bag over his shoulder all dressed in black.

It wasn’t like Ilya’s address was public knowledge but, still, this journey was the most overt evidence of their relationship that they carried out in public.

Pretending to be looking at his phone, Shane waited until the Uber left Ilya’s drive before he put in the keycode to the door, an unnecessary act because Ilya yanked it open before he’d even finished the last digit.

Shane was cross. They had rules. Ilya was supposed to wait inside, so no one could see him, not that anyone could because there was a fifteen-foot hedge and a massive wooden gate, but just in case. “You’re supposed—”

His boyfriend rolled his eyes, said something in Russian and grabbed the loose material of Shane’s hoodie, and yanked him forwards. Their mouths met and Shane dropped his bag… somewhere. From then on, it was a clash of lips and teeth and tongue and wandering hands. The door closed, somehow, and Shane kicked off his shoes without losing contact. The hoodie and the hat were discarded and then Ilya picked him up and carried him to the kitchen counter.

“Why do you always pick me up?” Shane wondered, tipping his head back as Ilya kissed ravenously down his neck. He moaned.

“Because you love it.”

God. He did. He really did.

At Shane’s urging – a hand in his hair, yanking him around – Ilya returned to Shane’s mouth. They kissed for a long, luxurious moment, mouths open wide enough that it was almost a parody of kissing, the accompanying soundtrack of panting hot breaths and slick wet noises near pornographic.

Ilya pulled back suddenly, smoothing a hand down Shane’s side. “Can I get you a drink,” he asked, deadpan.

Shane listed towards him, drunk with need, staring at Ilya’s reddened, spit-slicked lips. The words didn’t compute. “Huh?”

“Are you thirsty?”

“No, I’m not fucking thirsty, what do you mean am I thirsty?” He probably was thirsty but far, far more pressing was his need to get off.

Ilya pulled an exaggerated, faux-innocent face. He squeezed Shane’s thigh, about a million miles from where Shane needed to be squeezed. “Just trying to be a good host, Shane.”

“What? What?” Then Shane gasped as he connected the rage-baiting dots. He shoved at Ilya’s shoulder. “You piece of shit, is this because I didn’t offer you a drink last time?”

Ilya grinned. “And you made me work so hard.”

Shane, who had already been pretty hot and bothered, felt his core temperature surge with the memory of Ilya working hard on top of him. “You asshole, you know where the refrigerator is, you are not a guest in my house, what the fuck.” Giving in, he laughed and dragged Ilya back to him, hooking his legs around his hips. “Fuck you. Next time I’ll bring you water, you massive princess.”

The next kiss was half laugh, half lust. Groaning, Ilya gathered him close, hands running over and under Shane’s T-shirt, pushing it up so he could touch more skin. His hands were hot, calluses dragging along the muscles either side of Shane’s spine. “Where? Upstairs? Here?”

“Are we cooking here tonight?”

In answer, Ilya lifted Shane down and they stumbled towards the stairs, still kissing.

“Not going to carry me up?” Shane teased as they paused at the base of the stairs for them to take off each other’s T-shirts.

Ilya stopped, tossing Shane’s T-shirt somewhere else. “I could.”

“No, you couldn’t.” This was a mistake. Ilya’s eyes flared with the challenge. “I don’t want to be dropped.”

“I wouldn’t drop you.”

Shane yelped as he was summarily grabbed and hoisted into the air. “Fucking put me down, Rozanov. You’ll injure yourself.”

He was ignored because of course he was. Helpless, Shane wrapped his arms about Ilya’s shoulders, his legs about his waist, pressed as intimately close as they could be vertically. With pants on. “This is crazy. I saw that check on Tuesday night.”

“Just a bruise,” Ilya grunted as he climbed the stairs to his second floor carrying a two-hundred-pound man.

As Shane watched the downstairs disappear behind them, he knew he would never admit out loud that this was impressive. And also really kind of hot. There was probably some truly bullshit societal undertones here that he wouldn’t want to dig in to too deeply lest it reveal something about himself he didn’t want to admit.

But anyway. Hot.

He mouthed Ilya’s neck, helpfully. He tasted of salt and soap. One of the things Shane had always appreciated about Ilya was how clean he was. He took care of himself. His nails were always trimmed and never dirty underneath. He washed first thing in the morning and late at night and after exercise and after sex. He smelled fantastic all the time. Shane’s world was full of men who stank, very badly, and Ilya was a musky-scented delight.

Ilya was very red-faced by the time he dropped Shane on his bed and then he stood above him, hands on his hips, panting triumphantly, like he’d just scored an impressive goal and wanted Shane’s approbation.

Naturally, Shane wasn’t about to do that. He didn’t want to encourage this reckless behavior. 

Instead, Shane patted the mattress. “Want to have a little break?”

Ilya groaned and dropped down, rolling onto his back and draping an arm over his face. “You’re going to have to do all the work now, Hollander.”

Shane, whose erection had been rubbing up against his jeans uncomfortably, began to finish undressing. “Oh no, what a shame…”

*

The pattern of their time together was becoming routine – and Shane meant that in the most celebratory way. Shane loved routine. They’d had a routine before, of course, when they had been fucking in hotel rooms internationally – but it had never felt like a surety. One day, he’d assumed, Rozanov would stop texting. He’d lose interest, find someone else, a beautiful girl, mostly likely, that he’d want to marry.

And Shane would be alone again. A floating glacier.

But now Ilya was a surety – Shane was pretty sure – and so was their time together. Once the first desperately needed fuck was out of the way, they could usually keep their hands mostly to themselves whilst they did necessary things like shower or eat or just talk.

So much talking.

After sex, this was what Shane most liked about their routine. How conversations would meander from one subject to another as they navigated each other’s homes, the routine of just being together. Because it turned out, they liked being together. They liked each other’s company – maybe even the best.

“Okie, you want lunch?” Ilya asked as they dried off briskly.

Shane’s stomach rumbled, as if on cue, and Ilya smirked. “So yes.”

Like Shane, most of Ilya’s meals were prepared for him by a chef, delivered weekly by a discrete somebody who stacked them in glass Tupperware in his fridge without Ilya ever seeing them. But when they knew they would be together, they’d order in groceries and cook, usually exchanging different recipes to try.

In the beginning, Shane suspected Ilya agreed to this to humor him but recently Ilya had been the one volunteering recipes and rarely suggesting the easy route of take-out.

For lunch today, they were having a ‘healthy’ chicken Caesar salad, the dressing made with Greek yoghurt. Shane’s chicken was seasoned and baked. Ilya’s was breaded and fried. They made out whilst Shane’s chicken was in the oven, which led to them stumbling to the couch, Shane straddling Ilya’s lap whilst he jerked them off together.

“Shane. Fuck— this feels familiar,” Ilya gasped with a laugh at one point, but Shane was far, far too gone to process this.

They were rinsing off in the downstairs guest bath, giggling, when Ilya pressed him against the counter. “Thank you for not running away.”

“Shut up,” Shane replied, not really liking to be reminded of his less-than-stellar behavior. He had become aware that he had hurt Ilya very badly. Through dribs and drabs, Ilya had let him in to the months when they had been apart. Little anecdotes about the games they had played against each other where they hadn’t messaged. That night they had seen each other in the club. The articles that he had read about Shane and Rose, most of which Shane assured him had been works of fiction.

Though Ilya had never said, it, Shane knew he had broken Ilya’s heart. He, Shane Hollander, had the power to break Ilya Rozanov’s heart. And it turned out Ilya had a very big heart to break.

He did not like that power. He worried he was not responsible enough to have it.

Shane nudged Ilya’s nose with his own and met his gaze dead-on. “Sorry again.”

Ilya kissed him, eyes soft. Forgiving. “Is okay.”

Well, it wasn’t okay. Shane curled his arms around him and rested his cheek on Ilya’s shoulder. They held each other for a moment, Shane wanting to miraculously turn back time, and his ability to process, and fix things. Which he couldn’t do and maybe they wouldn’t have ended up here anyway, where things were very nearly perfect.

He kissed Ilya’s shoulder and thought of their routine. “Do you want to put some music on?” he suggested.

Ilya shook with laughter. He squeezed Shane tight. “Ah, you must be feeling very bad.”

*

They ate their lunch at the preposterous dining table which, when Shane had first stayed over properly, Ilya had told him he rarely sat at the table to eat. He’d then told Shane that he’d probably had sex on the table more than he’d eaten at it, so Shane had been forced to get the antibacterial spray. Ilya had a housekeeper – and he was a pretty clean person – so this was an exaggerated response on Shane’s behalf.

Ilya speared some cucumber. “You really don’t care about music.”

“I just— no. You do, though.”

“I cannot imagine going through life without. Like breathing.”

Shane pressed his lips together. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard something like this and he felt, as always, the damning implication of his otherness.  

Brow furrowing, Ilya touched his knee. “Is not criticism, Shane. I just want to know you.”

Shane nodded slowly, accepting this. Ilya teased him about many things but it was never malicious. And he wanted to know Ilya, too. So he tried to explain, “It’s just… noise. I guess. Sometimes nice noise?” He gestured now, around them. Whatever this was that Ilya had put on, some low-timbred male voices set to a relaxed beat, wasn’t bad. “But otherwise it’s distracting.” Ilya also listened to a lot of loud, Russian rap. At least he thought it was rap. He wasn’t good at distinguishing different genres.

“You don’t listen to the words?”

“The words?”

“Like, you hear things that make you think about your own life.”

“Why, are there songs about hockey?” Shane joked.

Ilya’s eyebrows rose, as he smiled faintly. “Probably not. But there are songs about, you know, the feeling of hockey.”

Shane wrinkled his nose, not certain how that would work. “I guess. I guess some songs are catchier than others but I don’t really get the feeling part.” He thought about his mom’s CDs. The passion with which she’d sung the chorus of some songs. He’d sung along, of course he had, because he’d been comfortable to do so around her, but he hadn’t felt much.

“Hmm,” said Ilya thoughtfully.

*

A few days after that weekend, Shane received a message during practice.

Lily: I am making a playlist about us.

Jane: What?

Lily: I am making you a playlist of songs that feel like they are about us.

This was more helpful information. But Shane chewed his lip, worrying.

Jane: I can’t guarantee that I’ll like them

Lily: Is okay.

Lily: But this is important [IMAGE] [IMAGE]

Normally Shane was hesitant to publicly open images Ilya sent him in their messages – he had been jump-scared by a dick pic too many times – but these just looked like screengrabs of text. Still, he glanced over to make sure neither Hayden or J.J. were standing too close, just in case Ilya was sexting him with instructions on some new sex act. He’d once sent him a description on fisting. With a helpful diagram.

He clicked on one. Read it. Frowned. Clicked on the other.

Jane: Why have you sent me the dictionary definition of ‘analogy’ and ‘metaphor’????

Lily: Forgot one. [IMAGE]

Jane: Simile????

*

Weeks passed and when nothing materialized, and Ilya never mentioned it again, Shane forgot about the threat of the playlist until late one night when, after a brutal game against Toronto where someone had clearly let Kent into the rumor about Shane’s sexuality, Ilya’s name popped up on his phone.

This was one of a dozen messages he’d received from Ilya, each one with increasingly less punctuation, which was always a bad sign. They usually spoke after away games but he’d avoided a call that evening, claiming he was out with the team. Guilt gnawed at him over this white lie – he had been out with the team, that was true, but only for about half an hour where he had pretended for the sake of morale that he was totally fine - but had then come back to the hotel room when it got too much. He had needed some time to decompress before he spoke to Ilya properly.  

Shane had been ignoring chirps all his life. Most of them were easy to ignore – bullshit about his performance (he was, statistically, actually the best), about being an emotionless hockey robot (he was focused), about his ‘unmasculine’ lack of interest in fighting (he wasn’t a fucking enforcer and he wasn’t interested in being unnecessarily injured).

A few chirps had crossed over the line from chirping into outright racism. He had been coached by his mom to anticipate that, since before Juniors even. Ignore, ignore, ignore, that was the name of the game. Just like when he had been bullied as a kid. Rise above it, Shane, you’re better than them.

But today, Dallas Kent had verbally attacked Shane for being gay. Or queer, as he spat across the ice. As well as some… well, overt allusions as to Shane’s preferences in bed.

Correct ones, in this case, phased in such a way to reinforce that Shane’s preferences were considered lesser.

Because – as with all the other things that were wrong with Shane – he had to have the wrong kind of preferences. In this case the kind of gay that only liked to take it up the ass.

When Shane had come out to his team a few weeks ago, he had anticipated that this new otherness would spread through the NHL. Maybe someone in his team told their wife. And their wife told a friend who told her husband who happened to be on another team. Who then told their team. Hey guys, you never guess what Mel told me she heard about Hollander. He’s a flaming queer.

It had been tactical decision. A way to come out without really coming out. Unless someone asked him directly, and he confirmed it, no one would actually know for sure outside of his team and they sure as hell didn’t want to talk about it. And no one would ask Shane Hollander to his face if he was gay. And he would never confirm it. Not yet anyway.

But people like Dallas Kent would have new material to taunt Shane with on the ice. And if you were going to chirp someone about being gay, clearly the way to do it was to make some kind of weirdly negative parallel to taking it like a girl. Which kind of told Shane what Kent thought about women, too.

So he had a lot to process and he didn’t feel like doing that on the phone with Ilya, who had already messaged him several times to ask what Kent had said to him. Because Ilya had apparently been able to tell through the TV screen that it wasn’t the usual shit.

Sighing, Shane checked his phone.

Lily: if you dont want to speak thats ok

Lily: but i am here if you do

Lily: I love you

Shane groaned and pressed the phone to his face because he couldn’t shove his face against some part of Ilya instead like he desperately wanted to. He didn’t deserve him. He couldn’t believe he was in this position, that someone like Ilya loved him. Cared for him this much. It was unconscionable. Inconceivable. Wonderful.

The phone buzzed again.

Lily: i have present for you

Lily: Link

Lily: listen in order very important

Ignoring the vague prickling in his eyes, Shane clicked on the link which tried to open a browser window and then instead opened up his Spotify app to a playlist.

Lily loves Jane was its title. There were forty-five songs.

Forty. Five.

With a rush of air through his teeth, Shane exited the app and dialed Ilya.

Ilya answered after barely one ring. He sounded amused. “You haven’t listened already.”

“Not yet.” Shane’s bottom lip wobbled. “I love you. I can talk about the game now.”

“Ah,” said Ilya. Something rustled in the background. He imagined Ilya sitting up on his couch or perhaps in bed. “Will I need drink, you think?”

“Maybe,” Shane said, though he wouldn’t normally encourage it, “if it’ll make you feel less like punching Kent in the face.”

“Mmm. Not sure there is enough vodka in the world.”

*

Shane tried to open the playlist on the plane the next morning but frustratingly he needed signal to do that so he listened to one of the podcasts he’d downloaded instead. He met his mom for lunch, who did her usual thing of briskly getting the family updates out of the way first – his cousin Kiko was a nanny now to some politician’s family, his other cousin Jason had bought a new car and immediately totaled it – and then she forced him to confess to her everything that Dallas Kent had said on the ice. Like Ilya, she had known something was up.

His mom knew better than to suggest he make a formal complaint, but he could see in her eyes and by the sudden snapping tone, like one of those turtles, that she was furious.

Yuna smoothed her napkin over her lap as their appetizers were taken away. “What did Ilya say when you told him?”

This was an interesting new dynamic that Shane had noticed with his mom – one that he didn’t know was normal for people in relationships or was a particular quality of his mom. She always asked Shane what Ilya’s view was on a topic. At first he thought it was kind of a test, to judge whether or not their relationship was real by how much he and Ilya talked.

More recently, Shane had begun to wonder if it was her way of trying to get to know Ilya. They’d only met a couple of times over the summer.

Which reminded him – he should ask Ilya about Christmas. It would be nice to share the interrogation load with someone else. Being an only child was hard.

“He was furious. I had to talk him down from punching Kent’s lights out next week.”

His mother smiled, slowly.

“Mom,” Shane said, warningly. “I don’t need Ilya fighting for me.”

“No, no, of course not.” But her smile didn’t dim.

Afterwards, Yuna hugged him goodbye as they stood outside the restaurant waiting for his taxi. “You’re practically dead on your feet,” she said, rubbing his arms sympathetically. “You’ll nap when you get home?”

“I will.”

Back in his apartment, Shane showered perfunctorily, and fell into bed, only just remembering to set an alarm for an hour. Any longer and he’d wake up groggy and he wanted to get in a work-out that evening.

He slept, soundly, until his alarm jerked him out of bed and by then he had a handful of messages from Ilya, who had just landed in Florida.

Lily: Flew past a thunderstorm.

Lily: [Image]

Lily: Was pretty

Shane dutifully admired the photograph taken from the plane of what looked like a fairly dramatic thunderstorm. It was beautiful – the clouds the color of dusky ripe plums. He hearted the photo, even while he thought about how it would have made him anxious to know that Ilya was flying past it. 

Jane: Did you have much turbulence?

Jane: My mom said hi.

Jane: She also said you have her permission to knock Kent’s teeth out next week.

Lily: Was bumpy for a while. Like rollercoaster. Connors was green.

Lily: She is bloodthirsty woman. Should be Russian.

Jane: You know she would take that as a compliment.

Not allowing himself to get too nervous about it, Shane quickly wrote. Do you want to spend Christmas with me and my parents this year?

There was a long pause. Long enough that Shane did start to get nervous. Maybe Ilya already had plans. There was that friend of his, the one who would marry him, apparently, because he was a fucking catch. Maybe they already planned to spend Christmas together. In his house in Boston. Exchange presents by a Christmas tree and drink whatever it was that Russians drank during the holidays. Maybe—

A response arrived, preventing Shane from spiraling further. It was uncharacteristically earnest.

Lily: Yes I would like this very much.

Shane let out a breath.

Lily: In Ottawa?

Jane: Yes. At my parents’ house, not their cottage.

Lily: Will we have to sleep in separate rooms?

It was a good question. Shane had never brought someone home to stay over before. When he’d been a teenager, his mom had only ever asked him to keep the door to his bedroom open when he had a girl over, not that he’d ever really done anything to warrant that. He wasn’t certain what the rules were here.

Then, of course, he remembered he was a fucking adult.

Jane: No. Think they know we have sex.

Lily: We do

Lily: and I want to

Lily: In your childhood bed.

Lily: 🥵

Shane made a sound that was almost definitely a giggle – a squeaky, embarrassing noise – and pressed his face into the pillow until the accompanying soft, squishy feeling left him. He sent a quick message to his mom, telling her that he had invited Ilya for Christmas, and then rolled out of bed to change into his workout clothes.

*

Shane didn’t actually get around to listening to the playlist until his first clear day off. Every time he thought about it – which he did, frequently – he wanted to make sure he was in the right frame of mind. Which meant no distractions.

So on Saturday, Shane returned from his run, showered, and synced his Spotify with the high-end speaker system that had come with his new house. This took a few minutes as he’d never used it before; the only person who had was Ilya. The first few attempts failed and it was getting to the point where he thought he might have to call Ilya to get instructions on his own equipment when it finally connected.

He carefully selected the first song on the playlist, remembering Ilya’s instructions to play them in order, and then set about making breakfast.

By the time Shane got to the third song, he was sitting at his breakfast bar, his protein shake and accompanying bowl of yoghurt and fruit and nuts untouched.

This was… not what he had been expecting.

*

“Wow,” said Rose.

In desperation, Shane had sent her a series of screengrabs of the playlist with the accompanying ‘help me’ and then immediately sworn her to secrecy when she called. At a guess, Ilya wouldn’t be pleased to know that Shane had shared his private playlist with his ex-girlfriend.

Whilst Rose perused the list of songs, Shane was on a lyrics website, tugging at his hair as he combed through the words to a surprisingly sexy Bruce Springsteen song that he’d never heard. He had about a dozen tabs open. It was helping him process. “Uh huh.”

“Wow,” she said, again.

“Can you stop saying that.”

Rose ignored him. “When I was in high school, my secret boyfriend made me a playlist. We were in the throes of passionate, teenage yearning – he was my brother’s best friend, it was a whole thing – and that wasn’t as romantic as this is. Did you know he was romantic?”

Shane didn’t. But also maybe did. Ilya had a big heart. And it was perilously tender, bruised over years of neglect from his awful family and from the challenges of their own relationship. Which he had aptly demonstrated with a forty-five song playlist that documented their relationship from their first meeting in Saskatchewan through what he was pretty sure were songs that referenced the first time they’d had sex and when he’d ghosted Shane for months and—

“Cannot believe Ilya Rozanov listens to Taylor Swift.” 

Judging from her popularity, Shane assumed everyone did. “She’s really famous, though, right? She’s always in the charts.”

“Yes, but.” Shane watched on the screen as Rose processed, clearly changed her mind about whatever she had been thinking, and alighted on a renewed expression of positivity. “You know what, she is. And obviously her music struck a nerve more than once.” Her eyes dipped down to her phone. She had called him on her iPad so that she could review on her cell phone simultaneously. “Shit, do you think this one’s about me?”

“Which one?”

“The one about you wanting a bride,” she said wryly.

Shane had that tab open. He groaned. The asshole.

“The range of this playlist, Shane. Seriously. There’s indie-rock music on here. And, I mean, that’s an 70s classic from before we were born. Pop music. EDM. Rihanna? Aw, he thinks you’re diamonds in the sky, Shane. Oh, no. That you’re… Simply the Best.” She leaned forward until she was almost nothing but eyeball and nose. “You’re simply the best, Shane, I could literally die.”

That Tina Turner song had been on his mom’s 80s album. He knew it well; she’d often played it when they won games. “I don’t know what to do about this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I have to respond, right? How do I respond to something like this? It’s like—” Shane was flummoxed at the scope of this… this gift. “He documented our relationship through songs. It’s basically a love letter.”

“Great songs, too. This is a really good playlist,” Rose said thoughtfully. “I would listen to this playlist.”

“This isn’t helpful.”

“Shane, this is not a crisis.” Rose let out a gurgling laugh. “Tell him you love him, that this is hella romantic, and next time you see him you’re going to sex him up to I’m on fire. Which is pretty short, by the way, so you’ll have to loop it.”

Shane grumbled. “Some of these songs are not romantic.”

“Yes, because he was really sad and pissed you were fucking someone who wasn’t him.”

“Barely.”

“Don’t I know it.”

He blew straight past that commentary on his lack of heterosexual bedroom expertise. “And he was fucking other people in songs one through,” Shane counted quickly, “thirty-six.”

“Wow. You were able to do that math pretty precisely.”

Shane blushed. “Yeah, well, we listened to that diamond song a lot at the cottage last summer and, um, we were both exclusive by then.”

And he’d just thought it had been because Ilya thought it was catchy. Not because he thought it was about them.

Rose groaned. “You’re killing me, Hollander.”

*

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the playlist was a transformative musical experience for Shane.

By making these songs about pivotal moments in Shane’s life, Ilya had done what no artist had ever been able to do for him – which was make music relatable. All the notes and instruments and vocals came together in a harmony that Shane suddenly understood with the kind of clarity he usually only experienced on the ice.

He pressed ‘play’ and his brain said—

This song is about kissing a boy for the first time and he is seventeen again, his heart fluttering as Ilya Fucking Rozanov holds him by the chin and guides their mouths together and switches on a part of Shane’s brain that had been locked down.  

This song is about the first time you and Ilya fucked and suddenly every atom of his body was on fire just the way it was when Rozanov folded him in half in his Montreal apartment and slid inside him like they were made for each other.   

This song is about the torment of not being able to be together and Shane was twenty-four again, his cell phone a lifeline to hotel rooms and hook-ups, to a secret, the best and worst secret in his life.  

This song is how Ilya feels about you and Shane had tears running down his face because he felt the same way and he feels the same way.

Suffice to say, Shane loved the playlist.

No longer music for when he was alone at home with no distractions, Shane listened to it every time he missed Ilya, which was a lot. When he opened his eyes first thing in the morning, he thought about Ilya and then he thought about the playlist. He bought expensive new noise cancelling headphones so he could listen in locker rooms, on planes, in hotel rooms, whilst running, whilst working out. Sometimes he’d sneak an earpod in one ear when watching tape review or in meetings with sponsors, the music turned down so it was just barely audible. It was remarkable how tolerable listening to songs about their relationship made even the dullest meeting.

When Shane wanted to relax, when he wanted his brain to shut off, he lay on his couch and let the music wash over him, along with all the memories that accompanied it.

Shane had his favorites, of course – notably the ones after they had become official – but he obeyed Ilya’s rule and only ever listened in order, reliving the decade of their relationship over and over and over again. The highs, the many highs, but also the extreme lows. But it was all okay, because he knew it had a happy ending. Or would do, one day.

They fucked to it, the next time they met. Shane had taken Rose’s advice and effusively thanked Ilya for the playlist – “You are the most romantic person on earth” – and, indeed, suggested which songs could be background music to their next meet-up.

“You were serious,” Ilya said, when Shane paused their reunion in his front entranceway to sync up his cell phone to the speaker system.

“Dead serious.”

His boyfriend kissed his neck, smiling wide. “You really liked?”

“I really, really liked.” Shane wrapped his arms about Ilya’s neck. “Now shut up and fuck me to Bruce Springsteen.”

Chapter 4: The language of love

Chapter Summary

Shane: So, where’s the footage of you singing?
Ilya: Harris has it.
Shane: Uh oh.

Chapter Notes

Music had never been part of the Metros locker room. Though the captain was ostensibly responsible for ‘locker room culture’, Theriault hadn’t liked it. Said it was ‘distracting’ which, hilarious in retrospect, had also been his view on Shane’s sexuality and, indeed, his eventually public same-sex relationship.

But for the Centaurs, music and the locker room went hand in hand. The aux cable was a much-contested commodity, so much so that Ilya had drawn up a roster on the whiteboard which Shane had – on joining the team – requested to not be added to.

Every day, a different person would be in charge of the music and for actual game nights there was a group curated playlist where songs were added to ‘set the mood’. Ilya maintained overall veto power for that playlist, though he was surprisingly equal opportunities given the disparate likes and dislikes of his team.

And if there was music, then someone – or many someone’s – was usually warbling along with an impassioned ‘I love this part’ and sometimes air guitar.

It was a very, very different locker room than the one Shane was used to. And – Ilya claimed – it was also different from Boston which suggested it wasn’t wholly down to a reflection of who the captain was, more of the mixture of team dynamics.

“Hey,” Bood announced one morning after practice, as they listened to the dulcet tones of – Shane thought – the Dixie Chicks, “we should do a team karaoke night.”

Eyes wide as he stared into his tidy locker, Shane prayed, prayed, his husband hadn’t heard this.

“We have a karaoke machine,” Ilya announced from the showers.

Shane cleared his throat. “It’s pretty old. Maybe it doesn’t work.” He’d told Ilya it had been a joke gift.

“We can get a new karaoke machine,” was Ilya’s response, waltzing back into the locker room with a towel clinging to his hips. He had barely dried off. Droplets of water skated down his pecs, over his abs. His happy trail was dark like it was when Shane sometimes licked it in bed, an arrow pointing directly to Shane’s actual happy place. He looked like a fucking wet dream.  

Quickly, Shane averted his gaze. One day – one day – he would be numb to his husband wet from a shower. He lifted his eyes to the sky. But please, he asked whoever was listening. Just here, in the locker room. Nowhere else.

“Well, if you’re happy to host…” Bood said, glancing between Ilya and Shane hesitantly.

Shane nodded readily to show his agreement. It was admittedly an odd dynamic, that any invitation from their captain was an invitation to their joint home and he had noticed that the team were very kindly mindful of this – again, a vastly different mentality from the Metros – but he would never gainsay Ilya when it came to team bonding.

At least not in front of everyone. 

“You can cater,” Ilya offered, out of the goodness of his heart, and everyone’s stomachs.

Bood grinned. “You’re on. Partners invited?”

Ilya glanced at Shane now, as this increased the scope of the effort.

“Sure, the more the merrier,” was Shane’s view. He had always got on well with the wives and girlfriends of the Metros – sometimes better, even – and it was no different with the Centaurs. Plus, this meant Harris could come and Harris was great at parties.

“Do we have to sing?” Luca asked tentatively.

“No,” said Shane firmly, just as Ilya said, “Yes.”

They exchanged a challenging look. “No one is being forced to sing,” Shane repeated and for whatever reason, Ilya clocked something in Shane’s voice that had him backing down straight away. 

“Agreed. No one is being forced to sing. It was joke.” Ilya held his arms to the side and turned to include everyone. Or possibly to show off the impressive musculature of his upper arms and the ability for his towel to cling on, against all the odds. “But you will all be forced to listen to my beautiful voice.”

Ilya could hold a tune, that was true, but probably only Shane thought it was ‘beautiful’.

Pleased, Ilya flung his arm around Shane, one of a handful of permitted locker-room PDAs. “This will be fun!”

*

In Montreal, most of the hosting had been done by Hayden, as he’d had the hockey-appropriate wife and the big house. When Shane had moved out to Brossard, though, into his own house, that custom had still continued because it had been made clear to Shane, through some subtle and not-so-subtle hints, that the team would not be comfortable being in Shane’s house now that he was ‘suddenly’ gay.

Shane had told himself he hadn’t minded and in a way he hadn’t. He didn’t want anyone who wasn’t comfortable with Shane being in his private space. He didn’t want anyone like that wandering through rooms that Ilya used, touching things that Ilya touched, tainting Shane’s home with unkind thoughts about his sexuality.

“We need to make the rec room nicer,” Shane announced the morning after Ilya’s announcement to host a karaoke party. He’d been thinking about this, on and off, waking up well before his alarm to ponder.

The house that Ilya bought, the house that Shane now called home, was enormous. A family home - with a dozen rooms in the sprawling downstairs and six suites upstairs plus the primary bedroom and the office and the trophy room. Ilya hadn’t done much to the house when he moved in, just made sure he had the basics in place, which Shane realized now was a sign of how unhappy he had been.

The rec room was at the western wing of the downstairs. The previous owners had used it as some kind of workshop so it had polished concrete floors and a rustic wooden bar against one wall, with working sink and a bunch of under counter storage space. They’d mostly been using the room for storage of all the stuff Shane had shipped over from Montreal that they didn’t know what to do with, as the living room was large enough for their needs anyway.

Ilya paused in carefully scrunching gel into his wet hair and came out of the bathroom to look at him. “Why?”

“It’s got a wet bar. I think we could install a projector. A sound system.” Better lighting. He wasn’t sure about the concrete. Maybe they could put down wood floors, like the rest of the house, and to match the bar. Something reclaimed so it kept a kind of rustic, casual feel. Didn’t make the room feel too formal. The foosball table was in one of the other rooms, next to the dining room, which Shane hadn’t always liked. Maybe they could move it in there. Get a pool table.

He picked up his phone to email his interior designer.

Ilya wiped his hands on a hand towel and then tossed it towards the hamper. “We have a sound system in the living room.”

“Yes, but the living room is really nice. And we just got those new chairs. The new rug.” Shane was particularly pleased with the rug. The blues and greens really tied the room together.  

“Ah,” said Ilya, knowingly. “You don’t want the team to ruin the furniture.”

That was part of it. But he also was thinking about building a space where they could have regular events. Family nights, maybe. Karaoke if they were forced to. And not have to constantly set the whole house up for the occasion. “It would be more convenient.”

Shane fired off an email and then dropped his cell back down on the bed. He’d been for a run, showered with Ilya, and now was just… lying here. They had nothing pressing to do. And they were together. They had slept together. They had woken up together. They had been doing that for weeks.

It was still new enough that Shane shivered with pleasure. And relief.

“We do all this before party?” Ilya crawled across the bed to drape himself over Shane.

“Oh, no. No, it’ll take too long.” Shane knew better than to comb his fingers through Ilya’s hair before it dried, so he rubbed the nape of his neck instead and used the tips of his nails to scratch down his back the way Ilya liked, the way that always seemed to lull him into a quiet stupor.

“Big renovation, then.”   

“Do you not want to? We don’t have to.”

“No, I like it. Would be good to have a space for the team.” Ilya rubbed his cheek against Shane’s chest. “And it would be good for kids.”

“Yeah, exactly, everyone can bring their kids.” He mentally added wipe down surfaces to his checklist.

Ilya was quiet for a moment. Then he cleared his throat, “I like that you want to decorate our home.” His finger traced around Shane’s nipple. And Shane couldn’t see his face but he knew Ilya was going to say shit. “Such a good little wife.”

Shane dug his nails into Ilya’s back, hard. “Little? You asshole,” he hissed and he pushed off the bed, flipped them over. Under him, Ilya shook with laughter, his face creased with mischievous joy.

*

As it happened, Shane missed that first karaoke evening. His dad called, flustered, two hours before it started, as Shane was pouring chips into different bowls. “Shane, sorry, but I’ve – ah. Sort of had a fall. Maybe sprained something.”

All this would have just been unfortunate information had his mother not been in New York for a reunion with some of her friends from college. So, it was Shane who drove his father to hospital, leaving Ilya to host the team karaoke night. Three hours later, he drove his father home wearing a walking boot, having been entertained all evening with a stream of video clips from the team chat on his phone.

“Would never have thought Dykstra had that voice on him,” David commented as Shane helped him up to the front door.

“I know! Wasted in hockey.”

They both snickered.

Inside, David hobbled over to the couch and eased himself cautiously down. “Do you think it’s late enough now to tell your mother?”

Shane glanced at the clock on the mantle. It was nearly eleven. Knowing his mom, she and her girlfriends were still out, probably on their umpteenth bottle of wine. She didn’t see this group of women often – they were scattered across Canada and the US now, only managing to meet up every few years – but whenever they did meet up it was usually a long-weekend deal and much looked-forward to.

Which meant that Shane and his dad had agreed not to tell Yuna until they knew all the details and until it was definitely too late for her to book a return flight that evening.

“Maybe we do it tomorrow morning,” Shane decided, just in case.  

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a sprain. David had fractured a small bone in his foot. The doctor had called it a nondisplaced fracture of the lateral malleolus, which Shane had diligently written down in his phone so he could report back to his mom when needed. Not a bad break at all and certainly not worth his mom flying back urgently, not when Shane was perfectly capable of making sure his dad was comfortable.

This was, Shane thought, one of the many benefits of being back in Ottawa.

He made them both a snack and propped up his phone so they could watch a video of Haas and Dykstra singing These Boots Were Made for Walking, complete with some half-decent synchronized 'walking’ on the spot that caused whoever was filming to laugh so hard the camera shook. Luca was grinning and pink cheeked – which meant he’d been drinking – but all Shane could think was that he really hadn’t wanted to sing. He’d been nervous.

And yet here he was. Clearly enjoying himself.

After helping his dad upstairs, Shane opened up his own chat with Ilya which, apart from a few sweet texts to check in on his dad, had been mostly silent as he had been busy being a good host.

Shane: So, where’s the footage of you singing?

Ilya: Harris has it.

Shane: Uh oh.

Ilya: No, I said okay. He can post if he wants.

Ilya: He wants to do team montage.

Shane: What did you sing?

Ilya: We are the champions!!!!!!!!!!

Shane: of course.

He could see why Harris might want to have footage of that. It would be useful film for after a win.

Sighing, Shane looked around the living room of the home he grew up in, feeling a little unsatisfied. He hadn’t exactly been looking forward to an evening of karaoke, but he had been looking forward to hosting properly for the first time and spending time with the team. He liked the Centaurs and their various partners. They were easy-going and open-minded – and that was more than accepting Shane’s and Ilya’s relationship, they just let everyone be who they wanted to be. A comic-book enthusiastic. An artist. A lover of Country music. Any teasing was light-hearted, never barbed. The toxic masculinity that had been a feature of his early years in hockey just seemed to have passed the Centaurs by. It was a fucking relief.  

And he wished he had been there to see Ilya sing. He sang at home, of course. It was usually a sign of a good mood, and it never failed to make Shane smile. He would have liked to smile at Ilya in public when he was singing. Safe in the knowledge that everyone knew that they were together. Bound by love and a piece of paper.

His phone buzzed again.

Ilya: Will you come home tonight?

It was very late. They both kept some things here, in his once childhood bedroom, so it would be easy for Shane to stay over rather than make the drive home and then come back early to help his dad out. It would be logical to stay the night. Certainly, he’d get more sleep.

Shane: Yes, I miss you.

Ilya: I miss you too ❤️

*

They were on the coach back from Toronto and Shane was half asleep against the window, Ilya’s head lolling about on his other shoulder. Their hands were clasped together between them, which was the sort of thing that would have given Shane hives a few months ago.

Things were different now.

“What about a New Year’s karaoke party?” Wyatt piped up somewhere behind.

There were murmurs of interest from an otherwise lethargic team. They’d won, reasonably easily, against Toronto – including an absolutely spectacular goal by Haas which Harris said was now blowing up on socials – but they were at the tail end of a two-week roadie and everyone needed a break.

Ilya lifted his head as if ‘karaoke’ was his activation code. In the dark of the bus, his eyes met Shane’s with a question.

“Up to you,” Shane murmured. New Year’s was a weird one for Ilya. Whilst Shane’s family had normally ignored it, New Year’s was a more meaningful Russian holiday. Ilya sometimes wanted to celebrate and sometimes he wanted to pretend it didn’t exist.  

Shane squeezed his thigh. It would be good timing. The rec room would be ready by December. The floors had been laid that week, conveniently timed for when they were away. They’d gone with some reclaimed oak so it matched the rest of the house and the installation team had sent a few photos – it looked beautiful. He had been looking forward to seeing it in the daylight tomorrow.

“At ours? Maybe,” Ilya said, turning to look down the aisle. He smiled vaguely at everyone. “Too tired to think about it now.”

The team began to chatter amongst themselves, floating ideas for songs they might sing. As the waves of contentment continued without his input, Ilya turned back and tucked his face back in Shane’s neck.

His breath puffed out, warm and damp against his skin. “I am not doing so good,” he whispered after a moment.

Shane knew this. Ilya had been a little brittle this week, the boisterous team captain façade fracturing at the edges. Shane hadn’t mentioned it because drawing attention to it was sometimes worse. He had just adjusted, slightly, where he could, and willed the time to pass so they could get home, so he could tuck the walls of their home around Ilya. Therapy and medication could only do so much. As much as it pained Shane, the rest was up to Ilya, and Ilya’s mean brain.

Shane had read endlessly about how to support a partner with depression. Everyone was different, was the general gist. What worked for one person wouldn’t work for another. There were no clever tricks here. It was Shane’s responsibility to work out what he could do to help, where he could help, because this wasn’t something he could fix himself. Ilya had warned him this would be a hard pill to swallow – and it was. But he was trying.

The lighting was dim and Shane didn’t really care much anyway about what the team saw when his husband cracked himself open to reveal his wounds. The priorities map in his brain shifted, immediately. He pulled Ilya close and wrapped his arms about him. “Nearly home, hey? We’ll grab a snack and go straight to bed. And tomorrow you can do nothing and just nap on the couch,” not in bed, Shane had learned that the hard way, Ilya needed to be around activity or he seemed to sink further, “and I’ll get Anya and she will be so excited to see you.”

“I miss her.”

“Me too.” Shane kissed his head, making meal plans for tomorrow. They had briefed their chef on a variety of Russian soups for exactly this purpose. Ilya wasn’t normally sentimental about the cuisine of his homeland, or Shane hadn’t thought so until one time he was sick – back when they were still dating, and he had been in Boston with flu. Shane’s dad had sent Ilya a Doordash care package, which had included a lurid-colored soup made with beets. Ilya had been wet-eyed on Facetime to him that evening, snotty and feverish, and since then Shane had always made sure to have soup on hand. “I think we have the meatball soup. Would you like that?” 

Ilya nodded and cuddled closer. “That sounds good,” he said thickly to Shane’s chest.

*

In the end, they didn’t talk about New Year’s for a few weeks. Ilya’s bad week turned into two which turned into a discussion with their doctor and an agreement to increase Ilya’s medication. Which led to a period of adjustment – both in terms of actual physical symptoms, thankfully quite mild, but also Ilya’s feelings about his meds being increased. Which were deeply negative – an indictment of his failings, his perceived own weaknesses despite constant reassurance that this was the anticipated process when trying to find the right balance of medication. He had not been using them for very long, their doctor explained. It was perfectly normal to make changes. But Ilya did not see it that way.

So it was not a great few weeks for the Hollander-Rozanovs but at least Ilya voluntarily added additional sessions with Galina, which was a big improvement on his old tactic of ignoring the problem, and he was communicating more clearly with Shane. If Shane asked ‘how are you?’, Ilya would say ‘not good’ or ‘a bit better’ or ‘can you wash my hair for me’ instead of outright lying.

Things did pick up and by the time December rolled around, the question of New Year’s floated to the top of the pile.

“Maybe it would be good,” Ilya said, as he pulled into the parking lot outside of training.

Shane reached over to stroke the back of his head. “We really don’t have to. We could schedule something for January, maybe.”

Ilya turned off the engine and stared through the windscreen, a faraway look on his face as if he was trying to visualize himself, four weeks from now. “I think I would like to do it. Would you like to do it?” he checked, turning to Shane.

“I would like to spend New Year’s with the team.” Shane paused. “And kiss you at midnight in front of everyone.”

His husband brightened. “You would be fine with this?”

“I would be more than fine.” Good people. A couple of glasses of excellent champagne. A heady kiss at midnight with the love of his life. And then straight to bed. It was basically Shane’s dream New Year’s. “I am looking forward to it.”

God, the flip switch from tender to horny was less than a nano-second and did not leave Shane much time to react before Ilya launched himself across the center console and caught his mouth.

Kissing in the parking lot was really not on the list of approved PDAs but they were early and there was no one else around and Shane was trying to be less rigid.

But he forgot the main reason for the PDA rules which was less to do with others seeing them behave unprofessionally in the work environment and actually more to do with Ilya’s ability to totally disconnect Shane from reality.

Brain producing nothing more than white noise, a humming sensation at every point their bodies touched, and his hormones shot through the roof of the car, Shane had his hands down the back of Ilya’s sweatpants in no time and was half wondering how they could get into the backseat without separating. Was there even lube in the car? There should be lube in the car. There was some in Ilya’s kit bag. There was some in Shane’s kit bag.

Ilya was the one who pulled back, lips swollen and wet and eyes fully blown with lust. He was panting. His hand was inside Shane’s T-shirt, palming his pec. He was practically in Shane’s lap. “I am so fucking hard right now I am not sure I can walk.”

It was on the tip of Shane’s tongue to suggest Ilya sit back and let him take care of that when Shane recalled with sudden, blinding clarity where exactly they were.

He touched his tingling mouth and glanced at the clock, dazed. “Fuck, it’s nearly 8.30.”

They had been there for nearly half an hour. And the parking lot was… significantly fuller.

“Maybe no one saw us,” Ilya suggested as they hurriedly grabbed their things.

Yeah, everyone had seen them. There was a chorus of whistles and applause as they made their way into the meeting room they used for tape review. Wyatt whooped. Several of the guys stood to give them a standing ovation.

“Rozanov. Hollander. Nice of you to finally join us,” Wiebe said, his mouth struggling to stay in a firm line.

Cool. So they were both late and publicly shamed. The blood that had pooled in his dick had now migrated to Shane’s face. In some ways better. In some ways much worse.

Coming up behind them, Bood slapped them both on the back. His grin was ear to ear. “Honeymoon not over, huh?”

“Oh my God,” Shane whispered, covering his face with his hand.

“We were just discussing,” everyone laughed, more than aware now of what discussing looked like in the Hollander-Rozanov household, “New Year’s,” Ilya said forcefully. He swept the room with a narrow-eyed gaze, defying his very definite blush. “And were considering inviting you all. There may be karaoke and also vodka.”

The team cheered.

“And food. And other beverages that are not alcoholic,” Shane added weakly, taking his usual seat in the front row and facing forwards. He crossed his arms and stared fixedly at the screen. He would survive this.

Wisely, Ilya did not sit next to him.

*

Ilya’s phone was refusing to connect to either of their car systems, and neither of them had prioritized getting this looked at which meant their journeys were currently being musically led by Shane’s Spotify.

Which was, as Ilya mentioned approximately a thousand times a day, substandard.

“We should have a joint account,” Ilya grumbled, as he shared his current favorite playlist with Shane’s Spotify so they could listen to it.

“No,” Shane said, waiting patiently for Ilya to finish, one eye on the time. They weren’t allowed to leave the driveway until they had music. That was one of Ilya’s rules. But they were currently cruising into ‘being late’ territory, which for Shane meant arriving not early enough to work. This was one of Shane’s rules. “You’ll change my algorithm.”

“Change how? How would Spotify have any data on you? You listen to white noise.”

It would be pointless to say that, actually, the white noise tracks did lead to Spotify suggesting things to him. Like, well, other colors of noise. And rainforest sounds. He liked those. And the rainstorms. Also, he’d recently been trying out some ASMR, though he had some decided preferences there. Yes to hair combing. No to mouth sounds.

“You know, there is a playlist already on there. The one you made us.”

Ilya smiled and it was soft. “I know, sweetheart.”

Shane still listened to the playlist sometimes when he was alone, which wasn’t often these days. It was almost nostalgic now, listening to the songs that had once represented who they were. The pain and the longing wasn’t as potent as it had once been but it was a part of them, their origins.

He wondered what songs Ilya would choose now, if he continued the playlist. What songs would represent the first months of their marriage.  

Probably something from Dua Lipa. Ilya was obsessed with her.

“Okie. Here we go,” Ilya sighed, pressing play on the screen and then immediately pausing. “Hold on. Marly is calling.”

Taking this as a sign that he could finally get going, Shane left the drive as Ilya answered. Only for some reason, it didn’t answer on his phone but connected to the main sound system. “Why the fuck is it connecting to the car now?” Ilya demanded, infuriated.

“Er, hello?” said Cliff in the car’s surround sound audio.

“What the fuck.” Ilya jabbed at the console, trying to disconnect. “How did it override your phone?”

“Maybe it’s a safety feature? We should stop syncing both our phones to both our cars.” Shane patted the dash and then returned his hands to ten and two as he joined the highway. “It’s confusing for them.”

“I see. You are anthropomorphizing our cars now.”

“Anthropomorphizing? Fuck, Ilya,” Shane crowed, impressed, and risking a glance over. “What’s that in Russian?”

“Is very similar,” Ilya laughed, clearly pleased with himself, too.

“Ah. Guys, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” they chorused, pulling identical, wincing faces.

“Well. I guess good I have both of you. I wanted to extend an invitation—”

“So formal,” Ilya mock-whispered to Shane.

“—for after next week’s game. Asshole. What would you think about a little afterparty? Cens and Raiders. Once we crush you, we can stand you a couple of beers.”

“Yes!” shouted Ilya excitedly, so excited he forgot to deny the possibility of the Raiders beating them.

“Er,” said Shane.

His husband grabbed him by the thigh which Shane had asked him repeatedly not to do whilst he was driving. “We would love to. Cross-team mingling is very good sportsmanship, yes? I have always cared about this. Is well known. Where shall we go?”

Whilst Marlow and Ilya commenced a good-natured but hotly contested argument about the pros and cons of a variety of Boston hotspots, Shane tried to concentrate on the road and pull himself out of the small spiral he found himself in. The spiral had many threads. Some he recognized easily – anxiety and burgeoning stress at being faced with a social situation he was not comfortable in. He did not like clubs, particularly not clubs with large groups of hockey players. He did not know the Raiders well and for most of his adult life they had been the enemy, and he had played them like the enemy. Some might say – and had indeed said - this would include poaching their captain as the narrative that Ilya had moved to Ottawa for Shane was now fairly well established.

But the thread that he was most surprised by, the one that had him frowning, was something that felt a little bit like jealousy.

Listening to Ilya and Marlow bat barbs back and forth about bars and clubs and nights out that Shane had not been part of back when he had been a rare hook-up on Ilya Rozanov’s roster was disquieting. A decade into their then undefined relationship, they’d probably tallied up a handful of days together, which was nothing compared to the time Ilya had spent with Marly. Spent in those clubs, leaning over bars, shouting in the ears of his team and DJs and girls and – how had Ilya put it once? – the occasional ‘treat’ of a male hook-up.

A whole era of Ilya Rozanov that Shane had observed only through blogs and social media.  

And he would come face to face with that Ilya next week, apparently.

Shane wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that.

The car was suddenly quiet. He had missed Ilya saying goodbye.

“Shanya?”

The Russian diminutive, used infrequently but for maximum devastation, never stopped making Shane smile. “Yeah?”

“It’s okay? Drinks with the Raiders?”

He reached across to touch Ilya’s thigh. “Of course. I’m sure the team would love it.”

*

Shane had been relieved to find that club culture was not rife within his new team. Some of the younger players did go out, but there was no pressure, no expectations, though they were very inclusive, always inviting the vets to join, which some did. It helped that the family men in the team were genuinely family men and not the kind of guys Shane had been relieved to leave behind in Montreal, guys who smiled in social media photos with their arms around their wives and then fucked girls in bathrooms on night’s out.  

No, the Ottawa Centaurs were wholesome in that way the had Metros pretended to be. More often than not, their away game evenings ended after a couple of drinks in a hotel bar, maybe a meal or a movie in someone’s room with room service.  

Still. The concept of going out for post-game drinks in Boston with the Raiders caused a surprisingly enthused frisson to spread through the room. For days, the details of this occasion cropped up repeatedly, in the locker room in San Francisco, at the Bell Center, at their home game against Toronto, even in the group chat. Apparently, the rookie chat was one long thread on what outfits they would wear.

Which obviously led Shane down another spiral. His go-to ‘going out’ outfit was, like most of the team, jeans and a T-shirt that he’d never defiled with exercise. But this was Boston and his husband regularly wore vintage designer clothes and he felt like he had to make some effort.

He messaged Rose for ideas and then ran her suggestions past Ilya, who rolled his eyes and chose something else, after flicking crossly through their shared closet. “She is not allowed to dress you.”

“I can dress myself,” Shane muttered, packing what Ilya had chosen nevertheless, an outfit he’d worn on their honeymoon that he recalled had led to them coming back earlier than expected.

By the time they got to Boston, this night out almost overshadowed the actual game itself and the gameplay that Wiebe had been drilling them on.  

Thankfully for Wiebe’s blood pressure, the game had ended a respectable 4-3 win to Ottawa, but with a genuinely beautiful top-shelf goal from Boston’s new right wing that Shane watched afterwards three times in the hotel bar, Wyatt Hayes leaning over his shoulder watching through his fingers.

After nine, Ilya shepherded most of the team towards the awaiting mini-bus that would take them to tonight’s chosen club. A few beers had already been drunk in the bar so water bottles were distributed, and Ilya proceeded to lecture everyone as if they were on a school trip or something and had never left their houses after dark. Far from being patronized, the team viewed this as just another quirky Ilya trait.

“I am putting you in pairs,” he announced from the aisle, having been told twice to sit down by the driver. “You must have eyes on your buddy at all times. Where he goes, you go. For instance, my buddy is Hollander here, you may have heard of him, is okay hockey player, and it is my responsibility to make sure he is hydrated and happy as it is your responsibility to do the same with your buddies.” He grinned as everyone groaned and then proceeded to pair everyone up by tapping each of them on their heads. “One, two, yes, you Luca, you are responsible for Tanner. Wyatt, please take care of Nick, he gets lost easily…”

“It was one time!”

The venue was nice, as clubs went, but Shane’s frame of reference was pretty limited. The last club he’d been to was Ciel, in Montreal. Though it was about the time when Shane liked to be doing his nightly skincare routine, it was early for most nightlife and not too busy, the aircon working fiercely so that the large room was pleasantly cool. There was a VIP area reserved for them behind a curtain, where the music wasn’t as loud and there was a dedicated bar.

Ilya’s eyebrows raised when Shane ordered a beer, but he said nothing.

The Raiders – not all of them, as there were quite a few teammates in the current roster who had not been captained by Ilya and so felt zero obligation to him – arrived after them, which made Ilya chuckle. “Late, as always,” he said, getting up to great them.

Shane and Bood joined him, like some kind of welcoming committee, and it was awkward for a few minutes and continued to resemble some kind of school function as everyone tried to work out how to talk to each other off the ice.

It settled down, eventually, as the drinks started to flow and everyone remembered they had hockey in common with each other. The Raiders rookies and the Cens rookies disappeared off into the main club, not without Ilya yelling at them to behave themselves, leaving the vets clustered in little groups around the bar and tables. Quite a few people knew each other from other teams, after all, just like Ilya and Cliff did.

Shane reflected that this would never have happened with Montreal. Rivalry between teams was cultivated to the point of obsession.

Ilya, Shane and Cliff took a booth to themselves. After a little polite chat, Shane had stood and made a meagre attempt to leave them to it, figuring he could go and hang with Bood or Troy, but Ilya had grabbed his arm and explained that the buddy system meant they could not be parted. He had batted big, soft eyes at Shane, who had immediately given in because, well. He didn’t want to be parted from Ilya either.

They settled back down and, this close to the holidays, the topic of their New Year’s plans came up. Marly was taking his family away for Christmas and then would be taking a vacation from said family with his current girlfriend over New Year’s. “Though not sure how peaceful that will be. She has a kid.”

“A kid? How old? You have pictures?” Ilya demanded. Ilya loved kids.

Marly laughed. “I sure do. Here.” He opened his cell phone and scrolled. “He’s four. Fucking funny kid. So smart, too.”

Ilya cooed over the photos. “You are a step-father now, Marly? You did not tell me.”

“Well. It’s early.” Marly was trying to sound casual about it but even Shane could see he was invested. “His dad’s a deadbeat so we’re taking things slow.”

Ilya turned the phone to Shane so he could see, a soppy expression on his face. Shane nodded gamely. He was really only interested in kids if they were connected to him – like Hayden’s – but he could admit the little boy was cute.

Marly took back the phone, a little shyly, and tucked it away in his pocket. “What about you guys? What are your plans for the holidays?”

“Christmas with Shane’s parents. Sveta is coming, too, because she has to go back to Russia for the New Year and we have not seen each other.”

It was going to be an interesting experiment. His parents had met Svetlana at the wedding but only briefly. Ilya had theorized that by the end of the Christmas vacation, his mom and Svetlana would either have formed an unbreakable bond or have killed each other. There was apparently no middle ground.

Share cleared his throat, attempting to distract himself from this unsettling thought. “And we are hosting a karaoke party for the Cens for New Year.”

Marly laughed. “Ah, yeah, Rozy always did love a bit of karaoke. Go-to song still We are the Champions?”

Ilya leaned forward so they could clink bottles. “You know it.”

“Was it something you did often? When you were with the Bears?” Shane asked. It had never really come up before.

“Sometimes. Was fun.” Smiling, Ilya draped his arm across the back of the booth, his fingers brushing the nape of Shane’s neck. Shane tensed, automatically, part of his hind brain connecting being in Boston with not being out but Marly’s eyes tracked Ilya’s arm movement and there was no tell-tale moue of distaste. He even smiled a bit, his dark eyes flicking to Ilya fondly.

So, Shane firmly sat back and Ilya’s hand made contact with the back of his head. Ilya took a drag from his beer to hide the pleased tilt to his mouth.

“Shane has never done karaoke,” Ilya told Marly. “Metros too boring.”

“No, our old captain loved karaoke,” Shane corrected, thinking back to that disastrous experience in his rookie season. “He liked to use it to haze the rookies. But then he retired so. It kind of lost favor.”

Puzzled, Marly asked, “How do you haze using karaoke?”

“Oh, they’d pick something embarrassing and force you to sing. When you were eighteen, that was obviously the end of the world.”

Ilya nudged him with his knee and then left their thighs pressed close together. “But you never?”

“No. The power cut out when I was about to. Thank God. The other rookies did not fare so well.” He had played Tireni a few times over the years – he was now a winger for Tampa – and every time he thought of him staring desolately at his puddle of vomit.  

Marly was grinning, because it was ostensibly a funny story, but Ilya leaned towards Shane, his brow furrowed. “They hazed you? I did not know this.”

“Yeah. Anderson was all about ritual humiliation. Went on for months.”

Ilya shook his head. “Our GM shut that down years ago.”

“But what did they have you do?” Marly leaned forward, a shark scenting blood.

“Um. We paid for really expensive dinners. Had our clothes stolen.” Both Ilya and Marly nodded, because this was typical stuff. “We had our kit vandalized. That was fucking irritating. Put bleach in our shampoo. Oh, one guy found a snake in his bed. Another a hooker in his hotel room, that one was bad. He could have got arrested.” Shane blew out a breath. “They got us drunk a lot. Made us do… stupid things. You just had to go along with it.” It was a long time ago but Shane felt the same nervous flutter now talking about it as he had felt way back then. The feeling that something was about to go very wrong.

“This is shitty,” Ilya said softly, his fingers soothingly carding through Shane’s hair. “Bears did not do this.”

“Yeah.” When Shane had become captain, he’d also shut down the hazing fairly quickly – at least the extreme stuff. It had taken Shane some years to work out that other teams didn’t have the same hazing culture as the Metros and by then he had enough authority to kill it all. If there was any ‘hazing’ the rookies got it was just more training. “Kind of weird that you didn’t. The perception of your team was so much more aggressive than ours. Figured you’d be tossing them out into the snow naked or something.”

“There was a bit, when I was a rookie,” Marly said thoughtfully, “but it was harmless, funny stuff. And Ilya didn’t believe in it. Treated all our rookies like his kids.” Marly’s handsome face broke into a fond smile. He reached a long arm across the table to smack Ilya on his arm. “Remember Stevenson calling you Captain Dad for a whole season?”

Ilya made a funny noise and took a long pull of his beer, maybe embarrassed by this story of his tender heart. “What kind of a snake was it?” he wanted to know because of course he did.

“I don’t know actually. Made Sharp scream though. They had to call animal control.”

The curtain opened and their rookies tumbled back in, bringing with them a collection of young women, all of whom looked bright-eyed with excitement.

Spotting them, Luca hurried over. “Captain, is it okay—?”

“Yes, of course, Haas,” Ilya said, eyes crinkling with ill-repressed amusement.

Their star rookie beamed and returned to the group, at which point Shane realized it wasn’t all young women. There was a young man in the group, too, who Luca immediately sidled up to, a sweet smile on his face and his hands nervously trapped in his back pockets.

Shane tensed.

“Is Boston, Hollander, and this is a gay friendly club,” Ilya whispered, having accurately read Shane’s expression. His fingers twirled in Shane’s hair. “We made sure.”  

“Oh. Yeah. That’s good.” Shane tried to relax, still keeping an eye on Luca, trying to decide if the guy he was flirting with looked, you know, like the type of guy who would take you to bed for the first time and make absolutely sure you were a willing participant.

Speaking of which, “You been here before, then?” he asked his husband, slyly.

Ilya grinned. “A few times.” He leaned towards Shane. “But I have wanted to come with you, many times.” His eyes glanced down to the beer Shane was halfway through and then to Shane’s mouth. “How many of those, do you think, before I can convince you to come dance with me?”

*

They were back in their hotel room, Shane lying on the bed waiting Ilya to finish up in the bathroom when his phone buzzed, reminding him that he needed to put it in Do Not Disturb for the night.

“Marly messaged me,” he announced with some surprise when he read the notification on the screen.

Ilya appeared in the doorway of the pokey bathroom, naked, his toothbrush whirring. He had toothpaste foam around his mouth and was unconsciously stroking his abs. “Mrgh?”

Marly and Shane had exchanged phone numbers at the end of the night, mostly because Shane had some initial thoughts on what to do for Ilya’s birthday and wanted to loop him in. He clicked on the message and a video opened. It was Ilya. His shirt was undone. He was very sweaty.

In his life, Shane had seen about a thousand videos of Ilya in various states of undress, as well as the real-life version, so this wasn’t anything new. But— “Is that a microphone? Are you singing?”

Ilya gurgled, returned to the bathroom and spat. “He sent you a video of me singing?”

Shane fumbled for the volume button. The familiar sound of Ilya’s baritone voice filled the room. He smiled, automatically, as it was a funny thing that when Ilya sang English-speaking songs, he lost his accent. Then his smile dimmed. “Wow. This is an angry song.”

The mattress dipped as Ilya joined him, smelling of spearmint and their shared apple-cider shampoo. “Oh, yes, I remember this.”

“I know this song. This is the one my mom always skipped because it was dirty.”

“—go down on you in a theater,” Ilya sang along with his younger self and then snickered.

“Yeah, that,” Shane said, cheeks heating up. The Ilya on the video wasn’t snickering. The Ilya on the video was pissed. Really hot but pissed, his face scrunched up as he belted out the lyrics. “You’re really letting your feelings out.”

“I was drunk, Shane.” Clearly disinterested, Ilya nudged the side of Shane’s head, removing the phone from his hand. It clattered on the bedside table behind him as he pushed Shane down into the pillows and began kissing his neck. “I’ve brushed my teeth now. No more ashtray mouth.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Shane replied, tilting his head to invite Ilya to kiss him which he did, judiciously, eyes open as if waiting for judgement. Shane would never, ever admit this, but since Ilya’s pre-hook-up ritual used to be a cigarette, had furtively standing outside his apartment, Shane did have a fairly Pavlovian reaction to the taste and smell of them.

He licked his way into Ilya’s mouth and wrapped a leg over his thighs.

After a minute, Ilya pulled back, breathing hard. “Well?”

“Mmm, you may continue,” Shane said, licking his lips.

His husband laughed. “Why thank you, your highness.”

*

Of course, Shane watched the video again later on the flight home, his headphones in and Ilya lolling against his shoulder, listening to his own music.  

Thoughtfully, he opened up the playlist, Lily loves Jane, and scrolled through the songs. He hovered around songs twenty-five to thirty, which had a distinct wounded and cheated on vibe. They were his least favorite of the songs on the playlist, reminding Shane of how hurt Ilya had been, a once implausible concept back when Shane had thought him uninvested in their Not Relationship.

Shane returned to the video and tilted it towards Ilya. “Was this when I was dating Rose?”

Ilya rubbed his cheek against Shane’s shoulder. “Mmm, probably.”

That was a ‘yes’. Ilya’s ‘probably’s were always ‘yes’. “You didn’t put it on the playlist.”

“No, it was maybe not romantic enough and I had too many songs. I had to, you know,” Ilya gesticulated with a relaxed hand, “pare down.”

Though Shane smiled at the idea of Ilya crafting this playlist to some romantic criteria, he would have liked to have seen the un-pared down playlist. “So, instead, you went to karaoke and sung angry songs about me.”

“Maybe.” He lifted his head up, blue eyes wide with faux innocence. “Sometimes I sang horny songs about you.”

“Did you now.”

“I did.”

This deserved a small kiss. Most of their teammates were asleep or occupied with their own media entertainment, and Ilya was in the window seat so they were semi-private. Shane let the small kiss linger a little, Ilya’s lips moving against his languorously.

Shane pulled back with a question, “Who did they think you were singing about?”

Ilya’s eyes dropped to Shane’s mouth and back again. “Montreal Jane, of course.”

“People knew about me?” Marly even. Maybe that was why he had sent Shane the video.

“They thought they knew about a girl I fucked in Montreal.”

Shane supposed Hayden had known about Lily. And eventually made the connection himself between Lily and Ilya. “They thought I cheated on you?”

Ilya’s eyes were knowing. “I didn’t exactly give them details, Hollander. Are you going to be weird about this?”

“I don’t know,” Shane said, not sure which way he was going to go. The idea that Ilya’s teammates thought ‘Jane’ had broken Ilya’s heart did not sit well with him. The situation had been complicated, okay? “But I didn’t cheat on you.” The I would never Shane left unspoken.

“You did want her to have your babies, though,” Ilya announced, sitting up and away from Shane, crossing his arms.

“Oh wow. You really do know that song,” Shane teased, before belatedly clocking that Ilya’s posture was very much no longer in the teasing or be teased zone. It was in fact much closer to pissed-off-karaoke-singing zone. “Woah, what happened?” He reached out to touch Ilya’s chin, to try to get him to look at Shane, but Ilya shook him away.

These days, they didn’t actually miscommunicate that often. For one, they knew each other better, knew all the sore spots that were triggers for a reaction, or an overreaction. Ilya, too, had learned some methods from Galina that Shane had adopted. ‘I statements’ and some listening techniques that helped them stay on the same page.

But when a miscommunication did happen, Shane always reacted first with panic. At heart, he was a people pleaser and Ilya was his very favorite people.

Fumbling between them, Shane pushed up the armrest and then unclipped his seatbelt, though he didn’t like to do that in the middle of a flight. He squished himself closer to Ilya. “Hey, hey, you’ve gone all sad. What’s going on in there?”

“Nothing, is fine,” Ilya muttered, barely audible over the sound of the engine. He stared out of the window, jaw tensed.

This truly, truly couldn’t be about Rose, could it? Rose and Ilya were good friends now. They had a whole text thread together, without Shane, and messaged constantly. She was even coming to the New Year’s party and staying over and Ilya had insisted on buying new sheets for the guest room.  

It couldn’t be that.

“Hey, I’m sorry if I’ve said something that’s upset you,” Shane said nevertheless, cuddling up to his very resistant husband and kissing his ear. “Talk to me.”

Ilya rubbed at his nose with his thumb. “Is okay, Shane.”

“Well, it’s not. Is it?” Shane kissed him again, mouth rasping over the day-old stubble along his husband’s jaw-line.

“Can we talk about this later?”

“Sure, if you tell me what this is.”

“Later.”

“Okay, okay, later.” Shane pressed another kiss to his cheek and finally Ilya unbent enough to nudge back at him.

*

Ilya was almost normal for the rest of the flight and the journey back home. He kept up a steady stream of bright conversation with Ray, who was one of their usual drivers, but he kept touching his nose, a nervous tic that could mean many things but was predominantly a sign that he was uncomfortable.

Shane watched this, with the growing understanding that whatever was happening was big.

Was this about Rose? Had Ilya somehow been hiding his real feelings about Rose all this time? It was going to be very disappointing if that was the case. Shane didn’t have that many close friends and Rose was important to him.  

Some vague thoughts about getting Ilya and Rose in a room together to talk things out, Shane followed Ilya into their house. No enthused barking greeted them; Anya was with his parents.

“Is it later, yet?” Shane asked, trying to sound breezy.

“Can we at least unpack?” was Ilya’s irritable reply.

This struck Shane as somewhat unfair but he bottled the feeling down beneath the rising anxiety and followed Ilya upstairs. They unpacked in silence, edging around one another like a particularly unpleasant dance.

When both suitcases were put away, Shane sat at the end of their bed and clasped his hands together. “Now?”  

Ilya rubbed at his nose. “Maybe downstairs,” he muttered, avoiding looking at Shane. He fled their bedroom.

Shane rolled his eyes. “Jesus.”

Stomping downstairs, he located Ilya in the kitchen, where he had poured himself a drink. “Is that fucking vodka?” Shane demanded, noting the bottle gathering condensation on the kitchen counter. It was the good stuff, too. “Ilya, it’s barely 12.”

“I don’t know what the time has to do with anything.” Ilya knocked back his drink and poured another.

Shane was entering full freak out mode now. “What the hell is going on?”

Was Ilya about to break-up with him? Was that what this was? Had Shane missed some massive warning sign or something? His mind raced back over the last few days, filtering through all their interactions. Was it being back in Boston? Did he miss it that much?

They were married now. Ilya would literally have to kill Shane to be rid of him if—

“I want to have a baby.”

—holy fuck.

Ilya was glaring into his glass now.

If Shane had thought his brain was scrambling before, it was nothing compared to how he felt now. This was not in any way shape or form what Shane had been expecting.

Eyes bulging, he tried to form some words, mouth opening and closing like a guppy. “Okay. Yes.” They had talked about this. Kind of. So Shane did have an answer. “I want that too.”

Ilya shook his head, still not looking at Shane. “No. I want—” Ilya heaved out a breath. “I would like to discuss,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “when we can do that.”

“Okay. Yes.” Shane’s hands felt weird. Like maybe he needed to be doing something with them? He rested them on his hips, which felt suddenly aggressive. He dropped them back down to his sides again and they felt useless, dangling and useless fleshy digits, so shoved them in his pockets where they were contained. “I guess I thought after we retire—”

Ilya was already shaking his head. He turned to Shane and, backlit by the floor to ceiling windows, his eyes were now the darkest shade of blue. “And that is when, Shane?”

“God, Ilya. I don’t know.” Shane laughed nervously. “Maybe ten years if we’re lucky.”

“You mean, if one of us doesn’t get our neck broken or shatter a knee or get a concussion that leaves us brain damaged?” Ilya’s mouth moved into a sneer. “No. I want before, Shane. I do not want to be an old and broken father.” He took another sip of vodka.

“I mean, we probably won’t be old…” Shane protested weakly, not denying the broken part was possible. He had always planned – or hoped, at least – to retire before that. When he found himself being outpaced by the new blood, not forced to retire against his will.

Carefully, Ilya put his glass down and then immediately picked it up again. “I want to be able to run around with them and not be worrying about a shitty knee or fucked up shoulder. I want to be able to pick them up and play and do all the things my father never did with me.”

It was a ‘them’ now, Shane noted, hysterically.

He edged himself over to the counter so he could lean, as the emotional ups and downs of this unexpected conversation required support. “I guess I hadn’t realized we weren’t on the same page, timings wise. I thought we had a plan…”

“We had a plan, to retire and come out,” Ilya said sharply. “That plan changed.”

“Yes. That’s true.”

Shane fell into a thoughtful silence. Having kids whilst actively playing hockey hadn’t ever been part of his own plan. The vision that he’d had, in his head, but never really explicitly outline to anyone. It had pre-dated Ilya, this plan, and come with so many complications, namely the lack of interest in a woman to facilitate said plan.

And recently he’d been too caught up in the seismic changes of the last few months to think about kids as anything other than a distant wish. They’d been busy, hadn’t they? Coming out, getting married, moving cities and teams. In fact, the actual how of having kids had been very vague, once he realized he was gay and wanted to be with Ilya. Would they adopt? Do surrogacy? His parents had done IVF, to have Shane. A little Ilya would be… something.

A nugget of pleasure accompanied that thought, in and amongst everything else.

“I’m sorry,” Ilya said faintly. He rolled the glass against his chest, leaving little wet smears on his grey T-shirt. “I did not handle this well. I wanted to have proper conversation and I’ve messed it up.”

“I guess this has been on your mind?” When Ilya did bottle things up, an implosion was normally the end result.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

Ilya finished his vodka in one gulp, and turned to rinse the glass. “Um. Few months.”

“Months? Like. Before we got married?”

His back to Shane, he shrugged. “Maybe.”

Wow.

“So, you don’t want?” Ilya held himself like he was about to be rebuffed. Which was so unfair.

“I didn’t say that,” Shane said, trying his best to be gentle. He pushed off the counter and approached Ilya slowly. He laid his hands on Ilya’s shoulder blades, really felt that tension radiating through him. “I want to have kids with you. I do. I just hadn’t imagined that would be now. Or in the next couple of years or whenever,” he said hurriedly when Ilya flinched and turned as if to protest at this timeframe.

A bubble of panic within him popped, and Shane found himself blurting it out, “I literally don’t know how that would work with both of us still playing hockey, Ilya. I mean – most guys have a wife who stays home—”

Ilya scoffed. “That is antiquated, Shane.”

“Fine. If not a stay-at-home partner, they have at least a partner who is home most nights, unlike us. We play forty-one away games each year. We’re gone for a week, even two weeks sometimes.”

Ilya pulled a face, like this was an irrelevant concern. “Is like with Anya. We have your parents. We could get a nanny—”

“You can’t compare this to a dog! These are our kids!” Shane covered his face. He was spiraling. He did not do well when he spiraled; everything he said came out wrong. He needed to think and he was too freaked out to think. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Okay. I hear you. You want to have kids sooner. I need a little time to get my head around this. Can I have some time to do that, please?”

“Fine,” Ilya said, sounding— well, not resigned, actually, but close to it. As if he had expected this response but he was still fundamentally disappointed.

Fuck.

*

Ilya apologized several more times over the next few days. “Galina warned me about making it sound like an ultimatum. And I did literally that,” he said ruefully, pulling off his sweaty tank.

Shane was sitting on his balance ball, rolling back and forwards. He’d been watching Ilya running for a few minutes, sort of in a daze. He loved the way Ilya moved. Like a leopard, all economical and smooth, all these powerful muscles flexing in glorious synchronicity. Ilya was so beautiful. “It’s super weird to me that your therapist knows this stuff before I do.”

“She also encouraged me to talk to you. But I.” Ilya shrugged, twisting his shirt between his fingers. “It felt— sore.”

“Sore,” Shane repeated.

“Yes. It’s something that I really want. I was sore that you wouldn’t want it too.”

Shane nodded. “I understand what you’re saying.” He frowned. “You absolutely, definitely, should have let me in on that earlier. We could have had a proper conversation.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Shane.”

They didn’t talk about it, otherwise, but it was there. It was there whilst they oversaw the finishing touches to the rec room and Shane thought about their kids playing there. It was there when they were gritty-eyed on an early morning flight and Shane thought about going home to kids feeling tired like that. It was there when they played home games and other people’s kids raced around them in the players lounge.

Shane drove over to his parents one Saturday and waited until his dad was out of the room before he awkwardly asked his mom about IVF.

“Did Ilya talk to you?” Yuna asked, her eyebrows practically in her hair. Whilst Shane had known that he was a ‘test tube baby’, it wasn’t something he had ever really broached with either of his parents in any detail. He had vague, very vague memories, of them trying for a second child when he was maybe four or five, but it hadn’t worked and his mom had been sad about it so it was generally a topic he had avoided.

“What do you mean? Ilya already talked to you about IVF?”

She poured him some coffee and nudged the plate of Christmas cookies towards him. “Yes, a couple of months back.”

“Of course he did.” Apparently, Ilya was talking to everyone but Shane. What the actual hell?

Sore, Ilya had said. Well, Shane was feeling pretty sore now.

Yuna was quick to come to Ilya’s defense. “He didn’t bring it up, honey, it just came up naturally in conversation about you. I mentioned to him that you were conceived through IVF. But I guess, given your circumstances, it’s a topic that might interest you both.”

“I guess,” Shane muttered.

His mom smiled. “So, are you talking about kids? That’s exciting.”

“Well it should be,” Shane groused, “if Ilya hadn’t fucking—” He stopped himself. He was not going to complain to his mom about this. This was a private matter that they would sort out, together. “We’re talking about when, mostly, right now. I had always imagined we’d start a family after we retired.”

His mom nodded. “Logical.”

“But Ilya feels that is a long way off and plenty of things could go wrong in the meantime. I think,” Shane paused and let out a deep breath, “I think he really wants to be a dad. I want to be a dad, I do, but I think he really wants to be a dad.”

“He has a lot of love to give. As do you.” Yuna reached out to take his hand. “You will make great parents. You have very complimentary skills.”

Shane narrowed his eyes at her. His mother was being suspiciously easy-going. “You just want grandchildren, don’t you.”

“Like yesterday, Shane,” she laughed, rolling her eyes.

Shane had really thought she would be on his side with this one. She’d been driving his career for well over a decade, after all. “Mom, come on. We’re away half the year.”

She shrugged and took a sip of her coffee. “Plenty of parents have challenging schedules. Your father and I both travelled for work, when you were little. And you have us. We would love to be involved, in whatever way you need. That’s what’s so great about you being back home.”

Shane picked up a cookie, nibbled the corner reluctantly. He wondered if Ilya had primed his mom for this conversation. Outside, he watched his dad refilling the bird feeders on the patio. He was talking to Anya, whom Shane had brought on this little trip – telling Ilya he was taking her for a walk. Which he was. Just near to his parents.

“And of course there’s hired help. You could get a live-in nanny—” Shane blanched. A stranger? In their house? His mom, seeing this, course corrected quickly, “—or someone who comes in and stays when you’re away.”

“I can tell I’m not going to get a reasonable answer from you. You’re biased.”

“Shane,” she said sternly. “If you really don’t want to have kids before you retire, that is a conversation you need to have with Ilya.”

Shane sat back in his chair, the legs creaking underneath him. “I’m not saying that,” he said slowly. Because he wasn’t. “It’s just different from what I had in my head. Sooner. Maybe… a little scary.”

“That’s fair.”

They sipped their coffee for a moment. His mom hummed thoughtfully, “You know, whatever route you go down, surrogacy or adoption, it takes time. This isn’t an immediate thing. You’re talking at least a year with surrogacy, and that’s if everything goes smoothly. I’m not sure how long it would even be with adoption. You’d probably have to go private and it’s not like you can just pick a baby up immediately.”

“Yeah. Yes, that’s true.” He’d done a little bit of research into adoption and he had a vague suspicion that whilst, yes, they could provide a comfortable home for a child, their jobs might be considered detrimental to stability. Maybe they wouldn’t be seen as a viable option. Surrogacy would give them more control but there were lots of other factors to consider there. Like donor eggs. And choosing a surrogate. And which of them was the biological dad.

Again, the thought of a little Ilya popped up in Shane’s head. God. What a sucker-punch to the gut that was.

“Can you even time a pregnancy?” he asked, half to himself as he began to fill out the gaps in his thinking. “Ideally, the baby would be born in the off-season so we could at least get used to having a kid and not, like, be on the road.” The NHL didn’t have a formal paternity leave – you had to request it. But it wouldn’t be like he and Ilya could both take time off. Maybe they could do some kind of one week on, one week off thing?

His mom pressed her lips together, hard, as if she found this question pretty funny. “If you’re doing IVF, yes, possibly. Your father and I had trouble because of various factors but providing you, or Ilya, have good sperm, and your donor eggs are top quality, it should be easier. Theoretically.”

Shane decided he would mentally erase the part where his mother talked about his sperm. There was just no way in hell he could keep that in his brain. Absolutely not.

Yuna touched his hand again. “But it’s not an exact science, Shane. You may have to anticipate there are things that are not in your control. Which is actually part and parcel of having children.”

“Oh, yeah, not being in control, my forte,” Shane said drily.

His mom laughed. “You get that from me. Speaking of, Ilya also mentioned your New Year’s plans. I can’t believe I didn’t get an invite. What are you going to sing?”

“Nothing, thank you, I’m going to leave that to the team.”

“But you have such a beautiful voice!”

Shane rolled his eyes. “Mom. Stop.”

*

Rose was very excited about the karaoke. Her agent less so; she was apparently under strict instructions not to sing, not when Harris would probably be filming the evening. Even though both Harris and Shane had promised that no footage of Rose would be shared on social media, her agent did not want to risk it and have it getting out that Rose had the musical abilities of a horny moose.

A description that, unluckily for Rose, was very apt.

“So unfair,” Rose muttered. He pictured her pouting.

“And also weird? Is she thinking that maybe you might be offered a part in a musical or something?” When, surely, that wouldn’t happen?

“Something about it ruining my perception.”

Well, Shane knew all about that. “Look. Maybe we can have a session another time. Just us.”

She sighed. “Yeah. Maybe. And you? Will you be regaling us with Celine?”

Shane laughed. And then groaned. “Wow. I had totally forgotten about that night.”  

The front door opened and a clatter of claws on wooden floorboards announced Anya’s and Ilya’s return. “Shane – Anya has a boyfriend!”

“Woah.” Shane sat up on the coach, cell phone tumbling from where he had precariously balanced it on his knee. “Big news.” Anya ran to him and bounced up, her paws scrabbling on the coach as she tried to lick any part of him that she could reach. “Hey, sweet girl, did you fall in love?”

“I’ve had dogs; I don’t think that’s what happened,” came Rose’s amused voice.

“I don’t know what you’re implying Rose Landry but Anya is a lady.” Ilya leaned over the couch and looked him up and down. It was a very fond look. “Gimme kiss,” he instructed Shane.

Shane tilted his head up, teasing. “You give me a kiss.”

“Oh my God, you cannot third wheel me over the phone.”

Well, what Rose couldn’t see, she couldn’t complain about. Grinning conspiratorially, they kissed, quietly. “Rose was just reminding me that I have done karaoke before. With her. In Montreal.”

“Ah-hah!” Ilya crowed. “So the truth comes out.”

Rose, clearly feeling mischievous, possibly because she hadn’t missed the kissing, drawled, “Yes, and it was the night he first told me about you.”

Ilya’s eyebrows rose. “What?”

In the words of Celine herself, it was all coming back to Shane now. “Oh God. Rose.”

“You were his mystery man. He was going to woo you at All-Stars.”

Mortified, Shane grabbed his phone so he could shut her up. “All right, Rose, nice talking to you! Goodbye!” He hung up as she cackled and dragged one of the couch cushions over his face. “Please don’t start.”

“But— I must.” There was a rustle and then a large, muscular Russian climbed over the couch and draped himself over Shane. They wrestled over the cushion Shane was attempting to smother himself with. Ilya won, mostly because Shane didn’t want to rip it. It was tossed to the side, to the delight of Anya who chased after it.

They regarded each other. Ilya’s expression was one of irrepressible, smug delight. “You planned to woo me.”

“Please don’t.”

“Is this the word you used? Wooing.”

It was almost obscene coming out of Ilya’s lips. Almost as bad as lovers. “I really don’t remember,” he said, finding a fixed point on the ceiling above Ilya’s head and staring at it. “I was drunk. You know what a lightweight I am.”

If anything, this delighted Ilya even more. “You got drunk and told your ex-girlfriend that you were going to go to Florida and woo me. Ilya Rozanov.” Ilya propped himself up on his elbows. They were nose to nose. “Tell me about this wooing. What was the plan, hmm?”

Would the ground swallow him whole?

Shane fought back with the only weapon he had and glared at him. “Pretty sure all I had to do was turn up single, Rozanov.”

“In your pretty new clothes.” He tweaked Shane’s hair. “Were the pretty clothes for me?”

Yes. “No.”

“What else? There was a plan. There is always a plan. Tell me.”

Of course, there had been a plan. “It wasn’t… it wasn’t that well-formed. Obviously, I had to work out if you were still interested.” So he’d had various scenarios for that. He’d even – he would never tell Ilya this – written himself a little script. Admittedly, he’d scrapped that script and shredded it into little pieces in the recycling. Ilya did not need to know this.

Ilya snorted, as if his interest couldn’t possibly be refuted. “Oh yeah?”

“Well, I wasn’t sure. You sent out very mixed signals! Do you like girls, Hollander, I like girls, we just fuck it’s simple for me, Hollander, oh I could marry Svetlana,” he mimicked.

This got him a laugh. “But despite all that you worked it out.”

“Well, when you kissed me on the ice in front of thousands of people, that was probably a hint.” It was very hard to keep up the pretense of being resentful about this, not when it was one of Shane’s happiest memories. So he let the smile spread across his face, a smile that was mirrored on Ilya’s.

There were other memories from that weekend that Shane treasured. Ilya’s stupidly hot resort shirt. The way he had played with those kids in the pool. Horsing about, letting them win, bribing them with candy. He remembered distinctly thinking how good he was with the kids, a whole side to Ilya Shane had never seen before.

Ilya dropped down on Shane properly, then, and nuzzled his neck. “I loved that weekend.”

“Me, too,” Shane said thoughtfully, stroking his fingers through the curls on Ilya’s head.

*

Nearly eight hours later, Shane slapped a hand on Ilya’s chest, actually quite forgetting they weren’t in a conversation already and that he had just started one out of the blue. In the middle of the night. In the dark. “Okay, here’s what I think.”

Ilya jerked up in bed with a gasp. He had been asleep. “What? What’s happening?”

“Er. We’re talking about kids.”

His husband’s arm reached out and hit the bedside table. He scrambled around for his phone and the blue-white glare of the screen lit up his face. “At three in the morning. Yes. Of course. This is very you.”

“Do you want to talk about this or not?”

“I want, I want. Give me a moment.” Ilya pushed himself upright and rubbed at his eyes. “Okay. Tell me.”

“I think we get moving on IVF. It’s the only way, in the end, where I think we can vaguely plan things around our work. So, we choose a donor and we, you know, give our stuff and get tested and all being well get some viable eggs fertilized and frozen. You can even do these tests now that check that there are no, like, major problems with the embryo. And also find out the gender, though I’m not sure about that, in principle. And also did you know you can choose a donor based on ethnicity? We could maybe even find someone who is Russian and Japanese, so our kids could look a bit like each other as well as being half-siblings. I’m assuming we would have one of each here,” he added because little Ilya haunted his dreams and maybe it was the same for Ilya.

Ilya swallowed loudly, nodding. “So… you are saying…”

“I’m saying, that this might take a while. We can start looking for a surrogate, of course, in parallel, but we won’t be able to press the button until that first part is done either way. And,” he took a deep breath, “I was kind of thinking that maybe we could be married for a bit? First? And, you know, living together. We’ve not been married very long, we’ve not even had our first anniversary, and I know in some ways we’ve been together a really long time but not like this and I sort of want to experience it before we add kids to the mix.”

“That’s very reasonable. I would like this, too,” Ilya said softly. “Do you have a timeframe?”

“Well, realistically, it won’t be next year. Just because of logistics and, you know, biology. So maybe we plan for the year after that? Ideally, we try to time things so that we have a baby in the off-season because fuck knows how parental leave is going to work when we both work for the same team.” Shane sighed, already picturing the conversation with Wiebe. “Anyway. If that works out, we try for a sibling when they’re a couple of years old. That’s a common age gap. Does that… sound okay?”

Ilya nodded. His eyes were very wide.

Shane’s shoulders relaxed a fraction. He had been concerned Ilya would want to negotiate. “But we can kick these other workstreams off now, the donor and the embryos and stuff. So, you can be assured that it will happen, yeah?”

Ilya licked his lips. “This is a good plan.” His voice was a little wobbly.

“I’m still not totally convinced on the whole working parents thing, just to be totally transparent. We are away a lot and we can’t just rely on my parents. I think we’ll have to find a nanny we really trust because they’re going to be a big part of our kids’ lives, for years. Practically family— holy shit, my cousin Kiko,” Shane gasped, the bolt of inspiration shooting up his spine, propelling him upright in bed. 

Clearly confused by the change in subject, Ilya grasped Shane’s wrist. “You have a cousin?”

“I have dozens,” Shane said dismissively. His uncle had married three times. His aunt twice. He’d occasionally wondered if his mother’s active disinterest in her siblings was partly because of their profligate fertility. “But Kiko is a qualified nanny. For, like, really high-profile people— I’ve got to text my mom. Maybe she’d be interested. I think she’s living in France right now.” He leaned over to get his own phone.

“Shane, Shane, do it in the morning.” Ilya’s arm came around him, tugging him over until they were pressed together. He could feel Ilya’s smile as he kissed him. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“We have a plan. I love your plans.” Ilya rolled them over until he was on top and began kissing his way more purposefully down Shane’s body and then he simply… stopped and flopped down, his face pressed to Shane’s abdomen.

Shane reached down and touched his curls lightly. “You okay?”

“Bit emotional,” said Ilya, the words muffled by Shane’s stomach.

“Yeah.” He stroked his hair with a smile. “Me too.”

Whilst Ilya wasn’t looking, Shane reached for his cell phone. No harm sending his mom a text. Just to get the wheels moving on that front…

*

A rec room full of a hockey team bent on having a good time was a loud place to be.

Bood was yelling song names across people’s heads at Troy, who was mixing up some kind of cocktail for a cluster of wives by the bar. Wyatt and Nick were doing something with the lights that had come with the karaoke set, trying to arrange them whilst Tanner stood holding the mic, wincing as he was occasionally blinded.

Nick’s wife, Selena, and Bood’s, Cassie, had already taken up position either side of Rose on one of the sofas, their heads close together as they talked, wine glasses dangling in their hands. Rose was gesticulating wildly and the other two women were grinning.

Their rookies, and a couple of their girlfriends, were clustered around the dartboard, in the middle of a drinking game that appeared to be based around missing the dartboard. Or possibly they were all just really shit at darts.

Harris had a big grin on his face and his cell phone out taking photos – he really needed to take his comms director hat off for the evening – and all in all Shane was pretty damn pleased with the way the rec room space had come together.

He couldn’t really take credit for it – he and Ilya had briefed their interior designer, who had enhanced their vision, creating a space that felt warm and fun and somehow very Centaurs without their ugly logo being everywhere.

“This is great,” he told Ilya.

“Is this straight?” Ilya adjusted the New Year’s headband he was wearing. A gold sequined 2021 haloed his hair, resting on two glittery prongs. He had tried to convince Shane to wear one but from experience he knew it was the sort of thing that would give him a headache.

Shane adjusted the headband back a little. It had been a cheap Amazon purchase so he wasn’t certain if they were ever going to achieve some kind of symmetry. The prongs holding the numbers up were kind of wonky to begin with. He took a step back to check it. “Not gonna lie. It’s about as straight as I am.”

“Shane! That was a gay joke. I am so proud.” Laughing, Ilya leaned forward to give him a smacking kiss. He then turned and clapped his hands. “Let’s get this party started! Who has the list? Where is the list?”

The list was duly found and Ilya ran his eye over it as people took their places. “What a surprise. Lisa and Caitlin are up first.”

There was a general cry of support at this. The women had formed a tight karaoke unit, apparently. Shane had watched a whole video of them performing something from Miley Cyrus about flowers last time.

Whilst the ladies warmed up, and Ilya ran around distributing 2021 headbands, Shane perched at one of the high tables with his bottle of 0% beer, which he planned to alternate with the real thing through the night. There was champagne in the fridge and his goal was to kiss Ilya at midnight – and he wanted to be in that perfect buzzed state to do so.

Luca hopped up on a stool next to him. “Are you on the list?”

“Oh, Shane doesn’t sing and we will not make him,” Ilya said lightly, passing by with his box and handed Luca a headband as he did so. It had blue sequins. He spotted someone and wandered off. “Harris! I think you need one of these.”

Luca’s blue eyes widened. “What? Ever?”

“No,” Shane confirmed.

“Terrible singing voice?” Luca suggested as he carefully arranged the headband. His tone was mournful, as if he was saddened on Shane’s behalf.

Shane opened his mouth to reply but someone else did it for him. “No, he literally doesn’t sing ever.” Ilya swung back past them wielding a green headband now. His own was definitely wonky now. “He doesn’t even hum.”

“Who doesn’t hum?” Dykstra asked, taking another one of the stools. His 2021 headband had pink sequins.

“Shane doesn’t.”

Dykstra looked at Shane askance. “You don’t hum?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“How about whistling?”

“I don’t do that either.”

“You make no noises whatsoever.”

Like a particularly perverted leprechaun, his husband made his return and tossed the now empty box against the wall. “I can get him to make plenty of noises,” Ilya leered, draping his arm over Shane’s shoulder.

“I brought that on myself,” Dykstra decided.

Shane nodded. “You did.”

*

That evening, Shane found himself watching Ilya probably more than he watched the karaoke performances. There was something particularly captivating about him tonight and he was finding it hard to look away.

Ilya had squeezed himself into one of the couches with Bood, Selena and Nick and was well on the way to being drunk. He’d already performed his go-to Queen song to rapturous applause – and did a decent job of it too – and now was being an enthusiastic supporter of everyone else. He had something positive to say about each and every performance. He sung along to every song. He’d put on another one of those headbands, this time in red, and taken about a thousand photos with everyone. He was, by Shane’s reckoning, having the best New Year’s.  

And Shane loved that. He’d half a mind to suggest they did karaoke monthly if it would mean Ilya would look like this, practically luminous with happiness.

A laughing Selena broke free of the couch and her husband with a desperate cry for the bathroom, and Ilya swung around to find Shane, who was leaning against the wet bar with Harris, getting a lesson in portrait photography which he would probably never use. “Shaaaane,” he called, beckoning him over. “Come sit next to me.”

Shane couldn’t resist the summons – not with the glowing expression of want on Ilya’s face – but he eyed the couch doubtfully. Selena was a slender woman and the three men currently occupying the couch were not. “There is not a lot of room.”

Ilya patted his knees with a grin.

“I’m not sitting on your lap, asshole.”

His husband’s eyes lit up with mischief. “Why not, you sit on my—”

Shane didn’t exactly know what Ilya was going to say – nothing good – so he threw himself in the small gap between him and a blustering Nick and wriggled. There were a lot of complaints but at least it had stopped Ilya from making some reference to Shane riding him or whatever.

Ilya put his arm about Shane and kissed his cheek. He was slightly sweaty and there was a hint of sour alcohol on his breath as he whispered, earnestly, “Are you having a good time? I am having a great time.”

Shane leaned forward so their foreheads touched. “I am, thank you. And I’m so happy you are.”

“So polite, my Shane.” Then, throwing his arms up in the air Ilya boomed, “Hayes! You’re up!”

In truth, Wyatt was not a great singer but what he lacked in capability he more than made up for in enthusiasm. He battled his way through that Journey classic Shane remembered to rapturous applause from the team – most of whom joined in during the chorus. Lisa whooped the loudest and practically threw herself at her husband when he finished like he was actually a member of the band.

Beaming, Wyatt dipped her – which made her howl with laughter and flail about in panic – and then pulled her up so he could bow to his audience.

He wasn’t remotely embarrassed by his lack of singing voice. In fact, no one was. No one was even that drunk either. No Dutch courage needed at a Centaurs event. The room was warm and accepting.

It was… nice. The whole thing was nice.

Which was probably why an alien took over Shane’s body and he found himself standing and making his way over to the karaoke machine, as though his feet had made the decision without consulting him, instinct overriding sense. The room was buzzing, people still congratulating Wyatt, so no one was really paying attention to Shane.

A feeling of intense calm settled over him.

Compelled by that same alien force, Shane typed in what he was looking for. It was song forty-five on Lily Loves Jane. The last song Ilya had chosen to represent them back when they had been doing the long-distance thing, before plane crashes and marriage and Ottawa and babies.

It was a song that had featured in his childhood but then forgotten about in the ensuing years until Ilya had made it part of their now. Shane had listened to it probably thousands of times. He could sing it in his sleep.

He was going to sing it now.

Ilya finally noticed what he was doing and jumped up from the couch anxiously. “Shane? What are you doing up here?”

Shrieking, Rose bounced to the front and dropped down on the couch, causing a rather star-struck Nick to flush bright red and immediately go search for his wife. “Woo, Hollander! You gonna sing?” She clapped. “Is it Celine Dion? Please do Celine Dion. Where’s Harris? Harris, you have to film this.”

Ilya shot her a dirty look and then located Harris in the crowd. “No, Harris, put your phone away.” He positioned himself in front of Shane so the team couldn’t see him. “Shane, sweetheart… you don’t sing.”

“Everyone,” Rose shouted, waving her hands around, utterly ignoring the vibes Ilya was giving out. “Shane is going to sing for us. Take your seats! You do not want to miss this.”

Shane nudged Ilya, who had frozen in place with panicked indecision. “It’s fine. Go sit down.”

“You really want to do this?” Ilya asked, painfully earnest.

“I really want.”

Ilya studied him for a moment and then, brow furrowed with concern, he kissed Shane quickly. “Okay. If it’s what you want. You give me a sign if you want me to join in.”

Ilya returned to the couch, where a beaming Rose awaited him. She was very wobbly, even sitting down. Harris had been making her some apple liquor drink all night. “Is it Celine Dion?” She listed into Ilya. “Last time we did karaoke, we sang Celine Dion.”

“It’s not Celine,” Shane said into the mic. It felt comfortable in his hand, even though it was disappointingly not bedazzled.

Leaning to the side, Shane pressed play.

Of course, as soon as the music started, everyone – well, possibly everyone except the rookies, who were basically fetuses – recognized it. There were a few whoops of support. Some laughter. Many of the songs that evening had superficially the same theme. They were hockey players, after all, in the middle of a season that had stadiums packed and fans in their city screaming their names across streets. The playoffs were around the corner. They could practically taste the Stanley Cup.

But this song held more meaning than that. This song was personal.

Shane supposed if he’d thought about this – if he’d planned it, like he planned everything – he might have acknowledged more clearly what he was doing up here, with this particular song. He was performing, yes, but he wasn’t performing for the Cens. He was performing for his husband. He was performing to his husband.

He met Ilya’s eyes and he did not look away.  

Shane lifted the microphone and the words came to him like he was born to sing them, smooth as the blades under his feet. He didn’t even need to look at the screen. He had sat on planes and in cars and run endless kilometers to this song, daydreaming of the man he now called his husband.

So Shane sung his words of devotion to Ilya, who was always there when Shane needed him, who had made him stronger with his love.

A lifetime of promises and a world of dreams, indeed.

Distantly, he was aware that the Cens and their partners had drifted silent, their good-humored support fading into shock. That they were open-mouthed and still. Surprised that Shane – introverted, occasionally bitchy, but not musically inclined Shane – could hold a tune. More than hold a tune.

But, really, he only had eyes for Ilya. Ilya, whose gaze had widened but was otherwise frozen in place. He just stared at Shane like he had never seen him before, a red flush creeping up his face.

It was Bood who broke first and joined in at the chorus, but he was soon followed by Wyatt, by Troy, by Harris, by Rose, by everyone else. Thirty of Shane’s closest friends and teammates belting out a lovesong to Shane’s husband, their Captain, and by the time Shane sang the final words, that Ilya was, to him, simply the best, they were all on their feet, their arms in the air, already clapping, screaming, nearly deafening.

“Holy shit, Hollander!” Bood yelled, laughing as Shane dropped his mic arm. He grabbed Shane by the shoulders and squeezed, shaking his head, wide-eyed with astonishment. “Where have you been keeping that? Did you know you could do that?”

Hayes pushed his way to the front to slap Shane on the arm. “Um. So, when were you going to tell us you can sing? Like really sing? What the hell?” He grabbed Bood urgently. “Hey. Isn’t there a karaoke competition at the Oak every month? He should enter. He would wipe the floor with them.”

“I got the whole thing on video,” Harris laughed, pink cheeked with alcohol and joy, leaning over the couch to show Rose, Troy over his shoulder. “Holy shit. That is gold-dust. Tell me I can post this?”

“It was even better than Celine,” Rose sniffed, her hands clasped to her chest. “And that’s really saying something.” She hiccupped gently. “God, I really need some water.”

Silently, Ilya passed her a bottle of water and then stood. He smoothed a hand down the front of his silk shirt and sauntered towards Shane, looking him up and down in such a way that a tickling, prickly heat spread in a southerly direction down his body.

Ilya draped his arm about him in a proprietary manner, pulling them tightly together. “My husband, everyone. Shane Hollander. Possibly better at singing than hockey, which is as big a surprise to me as it is to you.”

The Cens applauded once more, laughing as Shane tried to shove away from Ilya but didn’t get very far as Ilya's grip on him was vice-like. “Asshole.”

“Mmm, no, you are an asshole, for keeping this secret.” Ilya pressed his face to the side of Shane’s head, and his long eyelashes fluttered closed as he lowered his voice, too low for anyone one else to hear him, “But it was a beautiful secret, lyubimy moy. Now,” Ilya announced, more loudly, “we have to go.”

Smiling politely at everyone, he grabbed Shane’s hand and tugged him. Hard.  

Bemused, Shane tossed the mic to Zane as he was summarily dragged towards the door. “But it’s not midnight yet. Where are we going?”

“Need to discuss…” Ilya waved a hand carelessly over his head, as if this was an irrelevant detail, “…important things. In our bedroom, yes?” 

Behind them, Zane said something about their honeymoon again, much to the amusement of everyone else. Hayes was still going on about the karaoke competition, suggesting various songs they could perform as a team, with Shane as the lead.

“But we are definitely coming back right?” Shane asked as friendly catcalls followed them down the hallway towards the stairs in the main part of their house, “Because we have a plan for midnight, remember? The champagne? The kissing?”  

“Yes, yes, or maybe we have new plan,” Ilya said brusquely, dragging him up the stairs at pace. He spun when they were halfway and Shane was suddenly pinned by the intense look in Ilya’s eyes. He pulled ineptly and urgently at Shane’s shirt, tugging it over his head and then pressed Shane against the wall, fumbling for his belt. He crushed their lips together whilst he spoke, panting slightly, “Going to fuck you through the New Year now. Better plan. Then you can give me repeat performance, solo, also naked. Maybe every day for the rest of my life, bozhe moy, Shane, help me take off your clothes, my hands are shaking.”

Shane was smiling so hard his cheeks hurt and, oh God, so turned on. “You liked it then?”  

Ilya’s gaze was hazy. “If I don’t fuck you now I may die, yes, sweetheart, I loved it, was best moment of my life after our wedding day, now please take off your clothes.”

“We are literally on the stairs,” Shane said, nevertheless kicking off his jeans, giggling, feeling like a kid again. Different city, different staircase, same absolutely desperate need to get naked with Ilya Rozanov.

Somewhere down the hall, the familiar strains of Rhianna’s Diamonds began.

“Oh, God, I love this song,” Shane sighed, as Ilya hoisted him up in the air and staggered up the stairs to their bedroom.  

-end

Chapter End Notes

Oh my god after posting this I found so many typos. If you're reading this immediately after it went live, I'm so sorry.

Anyway.

This chapter was the entire reason for writing this fic and required me to write THREE chapters before it. Keep in mind, too, that all I wanted was for Shane to sing to Ilya. That ONE scene??? And somehow we have depression and babies and confessions wtf. I hope it pays off :-(

Also - for the purposes of narrative, Schitt's Creek does not, sadly, exist in this world, so it doesn't seem like Shane is copying Patrick (Shane sang the original anyway, which is more karaoke appropriate).

Also 2 -

The Cens won't stop going on about performing at the karaoke competition at the Oak (a bar in town that I have made up). Its the main topic of conversation in the locker room, everyone throwing out suggested ensemble songs. Finally Shane is forced to point out that he literally CANNOT sing a song that isn't on his Lily loves Jane playlist. It has to be about Ilya or he cannot visualise it or put any emotion into singing, which had always been a crucial feature lacking from his musical abilities.

No worries, the Cens say, share the playlist. After some consultation with Ilya, they do, and the Cens comb through it.

Which is how Shane ends up singing Taylor Swift at a karaoke night, Ilya sitting front row with heart eyes, the whole place tricked out with gob-smacked Cens fans. Shane, of course, goes viral.

Several months later, the Cens have pretty much wrung the Lily loves Jane playlist dry so - unbeknownst to Shane and Ilya - they collectively start a new playlist of songs they think are about Shane and Ilya, based on the very limited information that they have about their relationship (the not-so-real rivalry, that they did long-distance for an undetermined length of time, that they are very horny for each other). They have a whole chat group about it, with the team making various suggestions to each other. It occupies many a plane ride and Ilya wonders why everyone is being so quiet, diligently listening to their music, but it's nearly playoffs and he supposes everyone is just trying to get into the zone.

When the Cens finally present Shane with this masterpiece (EIGHTY-THREE SONGS????), Shane is overwhelmed and insists that the only one who can possibly judge whether a song is appropriate is Ilya, who ends up working through the playlist and culling songs.

"Why is there so much Taylor Swift on here? Who the fuck is Delta Goodrum? Aerosmith?!? Oh, no, that is good actually, he did make me crazy... NO. Shane is NOT singing Dirrty who put this on here??? Oh, this one is about me? Okie, that makes more sense. Justin Bieber?! You assholes."