Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander & Scott Hunter, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Kip Grady/Scott Hunter

Characters:

Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander, Yuna Hollander, Kip Grady, Hayden Pike

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, POV Scott Hunter, POV Shane Hollander, Gratuitous Descriptions of Montreal, And Various Canadiana, Eventual Happy Ending, Grief, Vomiting, Angst, Scott Hunter is a Voyageur Now, Setting-Typical Homophobia, Recreational Drug Use

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-22 Updated: 2026-10-09 Words: 58,507 Chapters: 8/?

when there's nothing left to burn

Summary

If you’re wondering what the fuck happened to Scott Hunter, the answer is this: a series of cascading catastrophic decisions. A domino effect, a Rube Goldberg machine that starts at a club in Ibiza and ends with him eating a Montreal bagel on the floor.

In which Scott Hunter accepts a trade to Montreal, just as Shane Hollander is named captain.

Chapter 1: vespers | lake

Chapter Notes

This story takes place in the middle of the venn diagram between show canon, book canon, and stuff I made up.

The Voyageurs are nicknamed the Cours because I am using this logic, with permission. Also, the added detail that the imaginary logo of the Montreal Voyageurs looks like a heart (cours/coeurs, har har), just as the H in Habs comes from the H in the Canadiens logo.

It's all the days I carved in crimson streaks
It's all the days I starved for the dramaturgy
Alright, / Vespers over

Model/Actriz - Vespers 

If you’re wondering what the fuck happened to Scott Hunter, the answer is this: a series of cascading catastrophic decisions. A domino effect, a Rube Goldberg machine that starts at a club in Ibiza and ends with him eating a Montreal bagel on the floor of his brand-new, old-ass apartment, wondering what hell he’d done to end up in a city that considered this dense, loose circle a bagel. 

For the record, no, he had not seen the camera. When the photo ended up online, the yellow time stamp in the corner of the blurry, light-streaked photo had accurately reported: 07/23/2004. Someone’s photo dump, posted seven years later to a nonsense Facebook album. Some asshole, he would never know who, had recognized the half-dark face of Admirals Captain, Scott Hunter in the corner of the photos. Had uploaded it to a phpBB hockey forum, wondering Does that look like Scott Hunter??? with the username shartcaptain40. Scott Hunter nearly had his life ruined by a stranger under a shart-based name. 

Scott got lucky: a nerd in the teams’ hockey-forum-trawling PR department saw it on the forum before it went very far. They pulled some strings and claimed some legalities, and the post was pulled. But Scott was confronted with the photo in the brutally harsh light of a meeting with management, with no warning. 

The photo: Two men in the foreground. In the background, upper right quadrant: Scott Hunter, freshly 21 years old, one year into hockey stardom, stretching a size S t-shirt over his XL shoulders—a shirt now several summers retired, a new version waiting patiently for its annual summer outing, like a debutante dress waiting for its appearance at the ball. If, of course, the dance in question was Scott Hunter on his knees in a country that had never heard of hockey. The photo shows a younger, stupider version of himself. His face is in full profile, and his hands are also visibly down the back of the pants of the man who has his arm around Scott’s waist. He could claim plausible deniability, the grand mystery of a doppelganger with the same floppy long hair he himself had at age 21, the same jawline. Who could say? 

Age 29, nine seasons at the show, awards to his name, but no cup. A whole towering team built around a promising rookie who hasn’t delivered the one single metric that matters. Not a debutant anymore: old news, sad sack. Nine long seasons of keeping his head down, sucking poison straight to his veins. He is confronted with this fucking photo. Strangled, panicked animal brain, flushed with fear. He’s a deer in a trap, struggling against sharp teeth. It’s the moment of nightmares, hitting his nervous system with his heartbeat deafening in his ears, tongue numb and dead in his mouth like chewed meat. All he can think, staring at the photo, was: damn, they even used the colour printer for this. 

The underlying message of the meeting, Scott alone without a representative, wounded deer, across from the Admirals’ General Manager and Owner: Ha Ha, Very Funny. What a near miss. Aren’t you glad we’re here to protect you from your mistakes? No threat. Nothing actionable. Just: this recklessness is unlike you, Hunter. 

The recklessness of dancing with a stranger. Scott’s unhelpful floundering brain strays to the last time he was at a club with the team. The season before, four months prior to this meeting. They made it all the way to the Conference finals (before getting shut out spectacularly) Scott had gone to the after-party. Had to pry two rookies off a girl too far gone to be a good idea. Had told the rookies to delete the photos–are you fucking stupid, and what the fuck is wrong with you. He’d found her friend and guided the girl and her friend in a taxi. What he remembers most after grabbing and guiding was standing in the hot, wet night in Tampa Bay watching the cab leave. Then he had turned around and gone back in, said goodbyes and left. Mr. Fucking Nice Guy didn’t make accusations. That would be reckless. Head down; good team player. But yeah. He was reckless in Ibiza. 

Sitting in the floodlights of fear in the Admirals corporate office, nine years on the team, C stitched to the chest of his jersey. The expectation: you owe us. Scott had agreed, nodded, promised he’d heard and understood. Home to his high-rise apartment, numbness spread like hypothermia. 

The photo turned up, and the meeting was held in October. He can’t pinpoint the turn of the season to this. Could be anything. Could have just been a bad year. Could be that he did it to himself. Likely story. Second domino: throwing himself into the game. 

Scott needed to make up for his mistake. He took more hits, found himself alone on the ice more—Admirals’ defense did their job, but he needed to show grit. The irony is not lost on him: he was not a hunter; he was the hunted. He was the one lining up the scope to put crosshairs on his big, stupid face. When the puck was loose, skating after it with everything, thighs screaming every game. Playing like an animal stitched together wild in the woods. Willing to block a shot and be thrown. 

By December, he had a split lip that wouldn’t heal and a newly loose molar. That was the difference: rough checks and high sticks. His job as captain is to argue with refs, and he did it for anyone but himself. One game, he took the blade of a stick straight around the ankle, sent sprawling onto the ice, and tried to argue it. 

“Did you not see that?” he demanded, stick hitting the ice with a thump for emphasis. “That was fucking hooking!” 

“Not my fault,” the San Francisco Captain spat, “Got caught by Hunter’s fancy footwork.” 

No penalty. Bruise on the bad side. Scott wasn’t sure if he imagined the emphasis on fancy. 

He is pretty sure the photo never leaked beyond the Admirals’ front office. But people talk, even without photo evidence. Maybe it was just something about him, maybe he had slipped up somewhere else. Maybe he was looking for a reason. 

February: blindside hit to the shoulder, hard enough to land head-first. The third domino to fall: Scott’s brain getting rattled around inside his skull like the last marble in a jar. 

“I’m good to keep playing,” Scott said, words coming out like bubbles, hands and knees on the ice, panting, nauseous. He made it to half standing before he vomited blue Gatorade on the ice. Between that and the nosebleed, the rink was festively Admirals-themed before the mess was cleared and the game resumed without him.  

He was pulled for concussion protocol, benched for five fucking weeks. Dizzy with the curtains drawn, he turned into Bertha Mason, haunting the attic of his own life. He listened to 16 audiobooks about murder during slow incline treadmill walks. The constant litany of worse experiences and timely discoveries helped make sure the blood stayed inside his body. He subsisted on a makeshift diet of walnuts by the handful and meal replacement drinks recycled by the dozen. 

Maybe it was too many hours alone that did it. Right when he was a little too close to ending up like Bertha scattered on the pavement—he was approved to play again. His head improved, dizziness faded, stamped good to go by at-home doctor visits. 

Some good that did. 

The Admirals scraped a wild-card spot and got knocked out unceremoniously in the first round by Washington. Scott bit his cheek on a mild hit, spat blood, Admirals red, on the ice in Madison Square Garden for the last time as the home team captain, watching the clock go down as he changed lines, the knuckles on his right hand screaming, scraped into the gloves around them. 

Maybe it's brain damage that makes him say yes. 

————

“How’s your French, Scotty?”

When Todd starts a call like this—no preamble, just a question lobbed like a dodgeball—something unpleasant is to follow. Usually, Scott agrees to it. 

“Uh. Haven’t spoken much in a long time.” 

He actually does know more than the standard Moulin Rouge line. He can say, “oui j’aimerais une bière” and “j’ai envie de toi,” and “baise-moi jusqu'à c'que j'puisse plus penser.” Subjonctif and everything. Phrases he learned as an adult, later, not during innocent summers spent in the Montreal suburbs with the remaining splinters of his mother’s family. 

“Great. Great. I’ve got an offer you should consider,” Todd says. 

The offer is simple: the Montreal Voyageurs are rebuilding. Hollander has done what was promised—pulled the Cours too high for a good draft pick. Kalinsky, their captain, is retiring. They’re giving Hollander the captaincy this fall, the youngest captain in the league. Third youngest ever in the league’s history. Meanwhile, they have the cap space for a big swing, and the GM wants name recognition, a splashy get for a strong first line to back up Hollander. Someone good in the room who plays well with others. Scott has, for better or for worse, a reputation. Better for the team, worse for him. 

The Voyageurs are willing to trade for Scott if he’ll waive his no-move clause. They’ll honour it, keep him in Montreal to the end of his current contract term. Everyone has seen that the Admirals are a mess, and the Voyageurs have better defense. They need better forwards. 

“If you want a cup, the Admirals are a sinking ship, and the Cours are the rising tide.”

“What are the Cours putting up?” Scott asks through tense teeth, clenched jaw. 

“Nicholls, Aksamit, and Poirier.”

“All for little old me?” Scott asks. 

Maybe the flattery is why. 

Montreal, the most devoted fanbase in the league, the most rabid press. To play there means a higher standard, a higher level of devotion and intensity. Treated like a god when they’re winning and torn down like a false prophet if they don’t. He’s spent his adult life running away from what the microscope might reveal. He’s been so cautious. Let him decide: fuck it. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. He isn’t Bertha Mason, he’s Thornfield Hall: old neglected rocks ready to be set ablaze.

————

Two weeks later, Scott is sitting on the floor of an apartment near Parc and Bernard. The team referred him to a real estate agent who emailed him a series of condos exactly like his place in New York. He rejected them all and said: something old. Send me to the ghosts.

First floor of an old building, different in nearly every way than his old place. No elevator, just a few steps up to the front door. Big tree outside, less light. New kitchen and fittings. Old creaky floor to make him a little worse when he walks around at night, maybe a little Bertha Mason action if the season goes poorly. It has dark wood moulding and a pink stained glass flower framed by a rainbow kaleidoscope on the street-facing window. Every room has picture frame moulding. So old and French he can practically smell his long-dead mémère smoking in the next room. It smells like new paint and the sweet smell of old wood. Two bedrooms, because why not. He got rid of half his furniture. His remaining stuff, packed by professionals and shipped by strangers, fills half the space at best. In the back, it has a small balcony in a u-shaped courtyard between his building and the next. His neighbours are Hasidic families who do not recognize him at all. 

He tears apart the bagel with his hands, coccyx aching on the creaky old floors, and wonders what the fresh hell he’s done. From the floor of his apartment, he approves an official statement about how much he loved playing for the Admirals, how much he respects the legacy, and how excited he is to play for Montreal. 

Because if he wasn’t already haunted by the summer he turned 30—and let’s be clear, Scott Hunter is pretty fucking haunted—moving to Montreal is not about to help. 

His childhood home was eight blocks from the train tracks. Not near to be affected by the rumble, but close enough that he spent countless minutes in his parents' minivan crossing them to get anywhere at all. The notifying bell of an incoming train is etched somewhere deep in the wrinkles of his hippocampus, the part of his brain that wasn’t rattled like a marble. A train bell thrums a cord like his mother’s laugh in the one video he has of her: it is the sound of coming home. 

When Scott moves to Montreal, it’s the summer of 2012. It is the middle of the largest, longest student protest in Canadian history. Scott, half-Quebecois by ancestry and American born and raised, and until very recently, with every intention of dying there. He had no idea the protest was happening, its origin, or its aims. While Scott was throwing himself across ice rinks throughout the continent, three hundred thousand students were on the streets of Montreal to protest a tuition hike of less than two thousand dollars. By the start of hockey season, just a few months after Scott arrives, the tuition hike will be reversed. A lesson Scott isn’t paying attention to, but will learn instinctively: sometimes anger works. 

The protests are happening around Scott in his private exile. Spontaneously and sometimes organized across the city, people gather to bang pots and pans in the street. They call it casseroles, all this pot banging. 

Scott, obviously, has not even the beginning of an idea what is happening or why, the first time he hears it. Instead, everywhere he goes that summer, right before he jets off to be reckless again, he is followed by the sound of pots and pans clanging through the streets. And the thing is, all those pots and pans sound almost exactly like a train signaling its arrival. 

He’s moved to his mother’s hometown, at the end of his rope, two steps short of a full gallop toward worse decisions, and he’s followed around the city by the sound of his childhood home. 

[🅢🅗]

Shane Hollander has been trying to convince his dad to buy a fiberglass canoe. They have had this one—old, solid wood—since his childhood. It might be older than he is. It’s so heavy that his dad can’t carry it down to the water alone and has to wait for Shane’s visit to do so. With the hockey season, Shane isn’t at the cottage until late June. It’s three days after his arrival before they get to the canoe. He spends the first two days having post-season debriefs with his mom. 

Finally, the summer ritual of bringing the canoe down to the lake. Together, he and his dad carefully hoist it from its rack in the garage, where it has been stored, safe and dry, at the top of the hill. Shane could easily portage it solo, put the wood edges of the canoe’s centre yoke over his shoulders and walk it down by himself. But this is how they’ve done it year after year, since he was strong enough to help. He follows his dad’s lead: they flip the canoe and rest it on the ground of the garage, take paddles and life jackets off hooks by the door, and place them inside the canoe to carry it all down at once. One, two, three, lift, Shane takes the canoe by the grab handle at the back, sharing the load. He follows his dad right out of the garage and down the short, shrubby grass to the water; the sloped path curves around rocky mounds of Canadian shield granite. His dad, or maybe his grandfather, didn’t want to blast the rock to build stairs, so it has always just been this switchback path. 

The canoe is lighter than he remembers. He has been diligent about his cross-training this season; it is easy to carry, barely a strain at all. The only sound is the wind in the trees, the lap of water gentle against the dock he helped his dad repair last summer. When the team’s sport psychologist suggested meditation, this is the sound he imagines: rustling leaves, slap of water on wood. 

They gently place the canoe into the water, kneeling on the dock to place it there. Shane puts his feet into the canoe to hold it in place.

“Do you want to stern?” his dad asks. 

Shane shakes his head no. 

David climbs in first, Shane holding the canoe steady. Then, his turn, both hands on the gunwales, keeping his weight low as he clambers in. It has been over a year since he last canoed, but his body remembers the movements. Tensed core to say low and keep the boat steady when he’s getting in, bracing thighs to stop the rocking as he settles and then the easy repetition of muscles in his arms and back as he does a j-stroke from the front seat while his dad steers in back. 

The paddle in his hands is new. The one he had for years until he finally, definitively out grew it is a wooden one with his name shakily burnt into it. It now hangs in his cottage bedroom up the hill. The new paddle is metal with a plastic handle. Strange in his calloused hands, totally different feel than a hockey stick. 

The wind is low, the water is not glassy but it’s easy to cut through. They head out from the bay their cottage is tucked into, where the water is barely deep enough to dive into, out to the open water of the main part of the lake. Shane focuses on the view ahead, on making sure the downstroke of his paddle cuts into the water horizontally, slicing in without splashing. The horizon ahead is a green-black plane of water, verdant trees shimmering in the wind, and a wide open sky. He can’t remember the last time his eyes focused on a distance this far. 

This year, the Voyageurs made the playoffs for the second year in a row following the two-year drought before Shane’s first season. He sat through countless interviews and team marketing about it, photo shoots, and press. They clawed their way to the second round, not as easily as he would like. The last few weeks have been filled with the loud sounds of camera shutters clacking, answering press questions, and internal team meetings and post-season debriefs. The lake is quiet, still here. Unchanged. 

They paddle in silence until they round the bend to the next cottage. 

“Did you see that the Grahams got a new trampoline? I saw one of the little ones on it the other day—really got some height,” his dad’s voice calls behind him. 

Shane looks over at the Grahams’, their nearest neighbours, dock. Tethered to it, a large orange and yellow trampoline floats in the water, garish against the serene lake. Fluttering at the end of their dock is a faded Canadian flag, a faded red and black Ottawa Centaurs pennant, and below the pair of them: a new, crisp Voyageurs flag. 

“New flag, too,” Shane comments. 

“Your mom convinced them,” David laughs. 

They’re out in the middle of the lake. Shane is glad he remembered sunscreen. It’ll be the first question his mom asks if he comes back even somewhat pink. The lakeshore is a distant blur dotted with docks, the cottages themselves mostly hidden by the treeline. He’s looking out at them, trying to remember any names from the families around the lake. It’s been a while. 

“Your mom told me Kalinsky is retiring,” David says into the silence. 

“Yeah,” Shane says. “It was his last season.”

“She thinks you’re going to be captain.”

Shane stares at the light bouncing off the water, the sun glittering on the waves as he moves his arms mechanically—swing up, drive down—enjoying the rhythmic thoughtlessness of paddling. 

“That’s what a few people have said,” Shane agrees. 

“After your second season,” David says, pride obvious in his voice.

Shane smiles out at the water, “I know, it’s crazy.”

“How do you feel?”

Shane concentrates on the movement of his arms before he answers. He feels an almost physical sense of pressure when he thinks about the future. Like the press on his ears during airplane takeoff. But the pressure also feels like thrilling anticipation, stirring deep near the base of his spine. 

Shane was captain of his Juniors team; he has at least an idea of what to expect. What it means to be the face of the team in every way that matters. The need to take the temperature of the room, to try to swing it one way or another. The reality will be that he can’t have bad days or moods—stay even-keeled. 

“A little nervous, I guess. But mostly, excited,” he answers. 

“Youngest in the league,” David says, more to himself than anything.

Shane smirks. There’s no official competition, no title for this honour. But he did beat Rozanov to it. That excitement and pressure flicks a tendril of anticipation at his spine. Rozanov is somewhere in Russia now. Will he see the news? 

He and his dad continue their paddle route around the lake, traversing the usual loop from their bay around the uninhabited island just around the bed. The island is a large stony mass that rises from the lake, and Shane knows there’s a thicket of blueberry bushes, ready for anyone who launches their boat on its rocky shores. There would be nothing to harvest today. Shane will be back home, which is to say, Montreal, by the time they are ripe enough to eat. 

————

Half an hour later, the canoe stored upside down by the dock, paddles and jackets underneath, Shane and David return to the house. Yuna is sitting at the dining table, mouth in a half frown, face indecipherable. Shane goes to change out of his shirt, now damp with sweat, but his mom calls for him to talk.

“Coach Theriault called while you were on the lake. He tried to reach you but—no service.”

Shane sits at the table, nods and says, “Okay?”

“He called me, as your manager. They wanted you to hear the news as soon as possible. I was right—they’re naming you captain this season. They want you back in Montreal for a photoshoot next week. Once that’s done, they’ll do the press release.”

Shane looks down with unexpected and expected satisfaction. He smiles at the table, biting the inside of his cheek. “Oh, great. I can head back early, then.”

“Congratulations, honey,” his mom says, voice rich with honeyed pride. She reaches across the table and grasps his hand once, firm. “I don’t want to say I told you so. But I did tell you so.” 

He nods. His mom guessed this in February, that Kalinsky was slightly weaker on one side this past season, and that given the age of his kids and the way he was talking in the press, he would retire this year before wearing himself out. As always, Yuna Hollander was right. 

She picks up her phone and looks at it for a split second, too short a glance to really read anything from it. 

“The other news,” she says with furrowed brows, “It doesn’t affect you, directly. But it's an interesting roster shakeup. They need a new winger to replace Kalinsky. I guess management wanted someone with a proven track record and known appeal rather than adjusting the current lines. They traded for Scott Hunter. He’ll be joining the Voyageurs—probably on his way as we speak.”

Shane can tell that his mother is gauging his reaction as much as she is sharing the information. He isn’t sure what the right reaction would be. Annoyance flares like a drop of ink in the water of his satisfaction.

“Scott Hunter? From the Admirals?” 

“Yes,” she says. Shane recognizes the familiar edge of competition there. She adds with a sniff: “Surprising. I thought he was loyal to them.” 

His mother has previously described Hunter as marketable, high praise in Yuna’s vocabulary. His mother values loyalty. Even after just two seasons, Shane knows that loyalty is a weak currency in the NHL. Players are traded up and down the league all year, even good players, even generational talents. Shane is the rarity: the Voyageurs are his team, the franchise rests easily between the stick in his hands and the ice. Hunter should be the same, legacy, captaincy, and security. Two questions compete for attention at the same time: why did Scott Hunter come to his team? And why did his team want him? 

His mom probably has opinions. Thinking about the trade leaves a sour taste in his mouth. Instead, he focuses on an image clear in his mind since the day he was drafted: a blue Voyageurs jersey #24, C neat on the chest. 

His dad has always been a collector. Nothing big or obsessive, he just likes to complete a set. Around age ten, when Shane’s interest and skill in hockey went from just a hobby his parents encouraged to his whole life, his dad took up collecting hockey cards. At the start of the season, his dad would stop at Tim Hortons on the way to early practice and buy a pack of cards along with his morning coffee. He always passed the pack to Shane to open. It’s one of his strongest non-hockey memories of those years. It was a way to test himself: rattling off stats for each player in the pack, what made them great, where they fell short. 

They don’t, it turns out, just give you a copy of your cards when they use your face on them. During his rookie season, David drove to store after store to find a copy of Shane’s Young Guns official rookie card. It sits in a plastic case on his desk at work. His dad told him they were worth a lot at first, but the demand was so high that they increased the run. 

The cards for this season will be released with his new jersey. There are a few different sets released every year; his dad isn’t dedicated enough to collect them all. But he knows his dad will want one of those. Another spot on the desk. 

Without looking up, his mother says, “Being named Captain will open some new opportunities for you.”

“Great,” he says, watching her work on those opportunities already, typing rapidly on her phone.  

He stands up and finds his phone, charging face down on a side table in the living room. He sinks into the familiar sectional and unlocks it to an email from Theriault, another from his agent. No one else knows yet, not officially. He texts Hayden the news. Waits a beat, hoping Hayden is by his phone. No answer. Without thinking about it, an impulse like scratching his nose, he scrolls down and flicks over to the text chain with Lily, dormant since the playoffs. He hovers for a second and then leaves it. Shane is the youngest captain in the league. He got there first. 

He looks to the window, out over the familiar bay of the lake, and smiles. The destination he has expected for years has arrived. 

‘Lake’, 

this old bare word,
fills me with symmetry 

just to look at.

Dave’s, Lake Michigan, Early June by Anne Carson

Chapter End Notes

this fic dares to ask the question: what if i spin scott hunter and shane hollander at each other like two high-strung beyblades??? ilya and kip will both show up, eventually. along the way: so much canadiana i'm making myself sick on the maple syrup.

title is from montreal-based band, stars - your ex-lover is dead .

it's the summer of 2012, the student protest and the pots and pans are real. there are some videos of it, but the smaller, one-off pots and pans truly sounded like train crossings. also, scott hunter is quebecois because why not.

this is a work in progress, a few chapters in the tank. join me for whatever's happening. i'm on tumblr too.

Chapter 2: press(ed)

Chapter Summary

Shane has new photos taken. Scott goes for a run.

Chapter Notes

For the ~2 people who may read this with an understanding of Montreal geography: the Voyageurs’ practice facility is now located where the Hippodrome used to be. Why? Brossard is none of my business.

Brands are not built to contain our multitudes; they demand fixedness, stasis, one singular self per person. Human statues. 

Naomi Klein, Doppelgangers. 

Shane can navigate his parents' cottage in the dark with no ambient city light to guide the way—the number of steps between rooms, the texture of the old carpet and the dented wood, the metal ridge of the partition between the flooring, the click of the door handles. He doesn’t have a childhood home, really. They moved to the Glebe, close to his triple-A team, when he was young, and again when his dad was promoted. As a teenager, he lived with strangers, billeted in Kingston for Juniors. The cottage is the closest thing to a childhood home: the familiar worn edges of its door frames, the board games they don’t play anymore, the spot on the deck with the best view of the lake. 

After finding out that he will be captain of the Voyageurs, he spends the remainder of the week helping with the endless upkeep of a house in rural Ontario. Landscaping the back, taking down a half-dead tree. Chopping the wood from the tree into usable firewood. Moving things around for his parents—memorabilia into storage, heavy wooden Muskoka chairs down to the dock, climbing up to the roof to take down a satellite dish. One day soon, he’ll pay for someone to do all this, repay all the years of sacrifice by easing every burden.

Meanwhile, neighbours keep dropping in just to say hi. Or, to see him, to tell him where they watched the playoffs. The Grahams show up from down the road, around the bend in the lake. They come for a whole dinner; a full gathering: the parents, slightly older than his own, their three kids, one of their wives, two grandchildren, all pile into his parents’ cottage. 

The Graham kid closest in age to him, who tapped out at house-league hockey and is now studying at some university, somewhere in Ontario corners Shane. Shane has never liked him. He always made Shane feel singled out as a kid, and now singles him out because of hockey, because of fame, because of that clawing gulf of people who feel inferior for wanting and not having. He invites Shane to go ATVing. Shane is relieved to cite his contract as a reason not to.

“Damn, dude, you make the NHL, and they’re still treating you like a delicate flower!”

Shane, six feet tall, all muscle, playoff bruise on his thigh still fading, tries to remember a single time he has been treated delicately. Shane thinks about how easy it would be to throw his neighbour over the railing, into the bushes. His former neighbour has a weak lower body, clearly skips leg day. Easy. 

Instead, Shane shrugs and says, “My contract doesn’t let me do anything risky during the off-season.”

Shane goes inside to get a ginger ale. When he gets back, he chooses a seat farther away from this childhood acquaintance. The group sits together on the deck while everyone catches up. Finally, as twilight settles its dusty blanket around them, Shane stands up and says he’ll make a fire. 

The patriarch of the Grahams says, “Still a good Canadian boy at heart.” 

“Making the fire is always Shane’s job,” Yuna says on his behalf. 

It’s true. He takes the stairs down to the fire pit they dug when he was a teenager, surrounded by stones he remembers dragging out from the car. Those would be easy to lift now, too. Logs and kindling are ready to be set ablaze. He kneels in the dirt and sets the fire up carefully: kindling around the beeswax firestarter, small sticks. It grows into a proper fire, hot enough for the logs. He enjoys the crackle of wood in the dark alone, until people begin to filter in around him. In the dark, it’s easier to slide away. 

————

He feels bad how relieved he is to go back to Montreal, to his newly-purchased condo. It is the opposite of his parents’ cottage. Blankly unfamiliar and new. He stands in his kitchen, looking out at the small cluster of skyscrapers that make up Montreal’s downtown, drinking a protein shake. The city’s downtown looks like nowhere else in Montreal. Outside of downtown, Montreal is a city of distinct architecture, almost entirely low-density, three-story brick apartment buildings with outdoor staircases to shovel in arctic winters. Shane has barely seen any of it. Shane’s view could be any city’s downtown. It’s skyscrapers: glass, steel. Anonymous and unfamiliar. From up here, he cannot hear the noise, the protest happening just down the street. He can just see the buildings. 

The apartment itself matches the exterior: hard edges, fully furnished, brand-new everything. Comforting blank slate. Returning to it from almost two weeks away, he fills his freezer with cod and his fridge with fibrous vegetables. He plugs in his toothbrush, unpacks his laundry into the wardrobe, putting the dirty clothes in the bag provided by his wash-and-fold service. It doesn’t take long to settle in. 

Hayden has invited him over for dinner now that he’s back in town. It is a good way to spend an evening: he knows exactly what to expect, what to do. Hayden’s wife, Jackie, is pregnant, their first, and she’s due in a month, right before the season starts. Shane is impressed by the timing—Hayden won’t have to miss any games. At his mother’s suggestion, Shane bought a copy of The Hockey Sweater, and he brought it along, wrapped neatly with a card. 

Shane is grateful for Google Maps, because Hayden has also moved this summer. Hayden’s now in one of the few areas on the island where the streets are not a grid, where the roads make circular routes that block any logical arrival.

Hayden opens the door with his phone glowing bright in his hand, “Ehhh, c’mon in, Cap.” On his phone, the contact name has been changed to Captain Hollzy. Hayden continues, “Jacks invited over some of the other guys to have a proper celebration.” 

JJ, Mitty, and Mitty’s girlfriend are circled around the kitchen counter. 

“Big man,” crows Mitty, grabbing Shane into a noogie that Shane ducks out of. 

“Congrats, capitaine,” JJ calls from the other side of the kitchen. 

“Thanks, guys,” Shane says, sitting down at the bar, settling into the buzz of conversation. 

Celebrating with his teammates makes the authority and the obligation feel real. The knowledge is heady, like the thrill of adrenaline after being hit and skating through it. 

They take photos together, but Shane asks them not to post anything until the formal announcement in a few days. He wants the fanfare. They discuss the lineup changes—in addition to the big news, Scott Hunter, they got rid of a few guys who Hayden liked but Shane never really bonded with, they brought up a hopeful from the farm team, and there’s a rookie in the development camp that people are hopeful about. They talk about the season, expectations, and strategies. Jackie and Mitty’s girlfriend excuse themselves to watch TV halfway through. 

————

Thrumming with excitement, Shane drives up the Décarie to the training facility. It’s the same route he takes all season long, and he’s glad to be back on it, the sunken highway, familiar with its cracking concrete walls. 

The smell of the CN Sports Complex welcomes him to his other home, the home of his adulthood. He swings by the practice rink, empty at the moment: sharp ozone, the bite of cold, rubber, and chemicals. He can smell it at all because he is not in hockey gear. 

He’s here for a photoshoot. He shakes hands with the publicity teams and accepts their congratulations. His new jersey is waiting for him in the locker room; they’ll meet him on the ice. He stops in the street clothes change room, changing into compression gear. He’s not actually playing; it’s just for the photos, but like a dog salivating at the sound of a bell, he’s excited to be here and get into gear regardless. He walks into the actual locker room, and there, in what used to be Nicholls’ spot, is Scott Hunter. He’s sitting in the stall, legs out, scrolling on his phone. He glances up as Shane walks in and stands.

“Hollander, hello,” Hunter says, extending a hand for a handshake. It feels oddly formal, like a business meeting. 

“Good to see you, Hunter,” Shane answers, shaking his hand. 

There are three versions of Scott Hunter for Shane, each paper-thin. 

One: the poster in his childhood room. When he went down to Kingston for Juniors, his parents used it as an excuse to repaint his room. He’d hung some posters to reclaim the space, but it was never really his room again. Hunter was one of four posters he’d put up, one of four players who wore the C young, in an era where most captains were near 30. Shane realizes: none of the four posters are captains, now. It is not a lifetime appointment.

Two: Hunter on the ice. Hunter plays wing; they’ve faced off against each other very rarely—he’s pretty sure he’s won every time. Hunter is a fast skater, good hands. Until last year, not a physical player, doesn’t start fights, reliable playmaker. Helped drag the Admirals to relevancy, but an increasingly consistent mid-season slump. 

Three: Hunter, suited up, old guard welcoming Shane during his rookie year to do shots. An invitation into the tier of players who are invited to VIP events and will be over and over again. Expensive whiskey as the entry price, a distraction from the fact that Rozanov was being a bitter loser. 

Now, the present. This is the first time he’s ever seen Hunter off the ice and not in a suit. They’re about the same height; Hunter only has an inch or so on him. He’s broader than Shane, wider shoulders but lankier, less power, and less muscle. He wonders if the nutritionists in New York are paying attention. 

“I haven’t been the new guy in a long time,” Hunter says abruptly. 

“Oh. Right. Of course,” is all Shane can think to say. He feels like he’s on a back foot, is he supposed to welcome the new guys?

They’re still standing in the half of the locker room closer to Hunter’s stall. Hunter turns and flicks a finger at the blue jersey on the hanger, which swings slightly in response.

Finally, Shane asks, “Doing photos today, too?” 

“Yeah… Congrats, by the way,” Hunter says as he starts to pull his shoulder pads on. “Well deserved.”

“Thanks,” Shane answers. He goes to his side of the room and starts to do the same, shoulder and shin pads on, lacing up his skates, when he hears Hunter’s voice again.

“Not so bad, I think.” Hunter has gotten geared up quickly. It is strange to see Hunter’s face above the Voyageurs jersey. “I always thought I looked like shit in red. Blue matches my complexion better. What do you think?”

Hunter is balanced on skates on the rubber pads, halfway across the room. His mouth is smiling, but it doesn’t seem like a joke. 

“Oh,” Shane looks up. A new piece of information pierces like a blade through all three of those paper-thin versions of Hunter. Scott Hunter is intense, steely-eyed. He is neither the poster captain nor the welcoming vet. The kind of captain Shane wants to be—one that leads by example, work ethic, instead of big dumb speeches that anyone could deliver—can work with intense. 

Finally, Shane says, “Voyageur colours suit you.” 

“Glad to hear it. Be a shame to move all this way otherwise,” Hunter responds, putting his bare, ungloved hand on the upper stall. 

“I heard you waived a no-movement clause,” Shane blurts out before he can stop himself, staring at his feet and pulling his laces tight as he says it. 

“I did,” Hunter answers simply. 

Shane looks up to get his shin pads on. Hunter is still there. His photoshoot should start soon, somewhere in the building. He wants to hear more, but Hunter is silent. Shane says, “So, you wanted to join a winning team?”

Scott laughs, loud and unexpected. “Yeah. Something like that.”

Shane continues getting into gear. There’s a mirror by the door, and Shane sees Hunter looking at himself in it. Hunter drags one hand down his cheek, pulling the skin below his eye taut. He glances up, making eye contact with Shane. His head tilts before he speaks. 

“Hey, ki–Hollander. I know this is weird. But. If you have any questions. About, I don’t know. Whatever. I probably can’t help, but I can listen? I was sitting where you are, once.” 

Shane looks at him, trying to understand what exactly Hunter is saying. Hunter did sit where he is now. But they are not the same. Hunter was good. Is good if he’s honest. But Shane is better. He’s younger with more to prove. Everyone will always treat him differently. There’s only really one person who can even come close to understanding this, and he isn’t in this city at all. Shane is avoiding his texts.

Hunter continues, “I’ve been around the block a few times. You don’t need my advice, but—keep your guard up. It doesn’t get easier. Not for a second.” 

He clomps out of the changing room, the swinging door blasting cool air as he leaves.

————

Shane’s photoshoot finishes relatively fast. They take a handful of photos on the ice, action shots. He’s relieved for the excuse to be there during the three weeks of rest his trainer told him to take, even if it’s just to pretend to play. They take a handful more photos back in the blue and red locker room, fully in gear. They take a final round of photos in which he’s in compression gear, holding up his new jersey. It goes by quickly; the flashes of the camera hurt his eyes as he figures out what to do with his face, what expression to make that isn’t too neutral. They still have an existing backlog of headshots they can use. 

Afterwards, they send him up to Theriault’s unofficial office. His real one is downtown, at the Bell Centre. This is just a room above the practice area, with plastic windows overlooking the rink below. Coach Theriault is at the desk, perpendicular to the windows when Shane walks in. He rises and shakes Shane’s hand, saying, “Congratulations, Hollander.”

“Thank you,” he demurs. “It’s an honour.”

“You were the obvious choice. No debate in the office about it,” Thériault says. “You have brand appeal. Management thinks there’s a strong image to build around, and fans love you. The team respects your skill. Obviously, you’ll have to do some work commanding the room, getting everyone paddling in the same direction, considering you’re so young. But even the more traditional players respect an outside perspective when you’ve got the skill to back it up.”

“Right,” Shane says. 

They’re still standing. Thériault glances out the window. Shane follows: down on the ice, Hunter is skating slowly back and forth. 

“Interesting choice by management, huh?”

Shane makes a noise of agreement. 

“Admirals always made up for some weakness by having good team sync. We could use that. Sounds like management got wind that Hunter was unhappy in New York and wanted a big story. Make the rebuild the talk of the league. But.”

Shane feels Thériault’s eyes on him. He turns to his coach, squaring his shoulders to full width and dropping them. He never knows what to do with his hands in public when they’re not on a stick. 

“There’s a rumour of some personal life drama that got in the way of their season last year,” Thériault says. “Don’t know too much about it, Admirals camp is a closed book. Still, Hunter has a good track record. I spent the morning watching footage to figure out what the hell to do with him now that he’s my problem. He’ll match your speed and style. Maybe keep up better than Kalinsky. Not your level, but I don’t need two Hollanders.”

Shane swallows the phrase personal life drama, which lands like walking into a fly trap—sticky, ugly horror. A rumour that resulted in a waived no-movement clause, a star position. If Hunter is running away from a rumour mill, Montreal is probably the worst place to go. Shane should know. 

“It’ll be good to have his experience on the team,” Shane says, because it seems like the right answer.  

“I sure hope so,” Thériault agrees. “The Cup is around the corner, I can feel it. You’re gonna take us there.”

“Yeah. Just a matter of time,” Shane says, not caring if it’s cocky to admit. 

They wrap up, discussing his personal summer training program, what to expect at team pre-season training in a month. 

Shane smiles to himself as he takes the steps down two at a time. On the ice, Hunter is having his photo taken without his helmet. Hunter glances over, nodding and waving with two fingers. Shane returns the nod. The authority of it feels easy as anything. 

————

The announcement goes out the next day. His mom gives him a heads-up before it goes live. He can’t help himself: he goes on Twitter and types in his name. Refreshes. Even before he sees the official post, it’s clear when fans see the news. He scrolls through the tweets. He’s sitting in bed, laptop on his chest, metal edge biting against his chin. 

Almost everyone is crowning the dawn of a new era, declaring Voyageur Victory early, talking about how they can’t wait to hit the streets of Montreal to celebrate the cup. A few posts about the potential for a Hollander-Hunter line. Next to him, his phone buzzes insistently: texts from nearly everyone he’s ever known. Current and past teammates from every era of hockey, friends of friends. The whole convoluted mass of support staff for an NHL team, anyone who has his number. 

By the time he has graciously answered as many as he can, there are a few stories popping up of journalists sharing their opinions about the decision. Shane doesn’t care to read the articles, but he scans the headlines. 

Why It’s No Surprise Hollander Was Named Cours Cap

NHL Brightest Young Star Now Youngest Captain 

Dawn of a New Era at the Voyageurs

Shane flicks over to Twitter again. His own account is basically dead; he uses it to retweet official news, never likes anything, and follows only his teammates and brands. He retweets the official announcement. Then he goes to his email and copies and pastes the tweet his mom, agent, and their PR consultant approved. 

The rush of energy takes him all the way to the gym and back.

Back in his apartment, he showers, changes, and eats dinner while watching ESPN. It’s baseball season, his least favourite sport, and he’s filled with restless, unchannelled energy spiraling through his limbs like a slinky. 

He picks up Hayden’s call on the second ring. 

“Congrats again, man,” he says. There’s a muffled sound in the background, like the TV is on somewhere. 

“Thanks, it’s really cool to see the news actually, like, go out,” Shane says. He has a grip strength trainer in his hand, and he flexes it shut, holding it there as Hayden speaks. 

“Yeah, man,” Hayden says. His voice changes, obviously reading, “Hollander is composed and productive… not just a superstar wearing the C for talent alone … With a mature team around him, the Cours competitive window is here, is too early to declare a playoff spot?”

Shane laughs, “Reading the blogs for me, Hayd?”

“Someone’s gotta,” Hayden pauses, Shane can hear the fwip of Hayden swiping on a laptop. “They’re all totally sucking your dick.”

“Uh. Yeah, that’s good,” Shane says, flexing the clamp over and over again, the muscles burning in a dull, remote pain.  

“Jacks is with her friends—Wanna grab a drink on Crescent? You’ll drink for free forever now.”

“Thanks, man,” Shane deflects, “But I’m pretty tired, so I’m gonna stay in.”

“No worries. I’ll hit up JJ," Hayden says, "Next time." 

“For sure. Have a good night.”

Shane hangs up and stretches his arms, swinging them across his body. He is restless, an untapped energy spiralling through his body like a coiled spring. He decides to take himself for a walk.  

Downtown Montreal is hot and quiet on a summer night—people are elsewhere. The distant clangs of protest do not make it here tonight, where the air is thick with humidity bouncing off the concrete and glass. Shane is surrounded by a funnel of buildings, avoiding people in the distance. There’s no sky, just orange artificial light. Shane is sweating within half a block. 

Finally, he gives in. He leans against the concrete of a building, still sun-warm. He takes out his phone and opens Twitter again. From there, the search bar, the fourth most recent search: @rozanov81. It is 3 am in Moscow, about an hour after the news went out. 

He doesn’t expect anything, but then: 25 minutes ago, a photo of Rozanov’s big feet in slides that say D&G garishly large in white over a black band, propped on a couch. The photo is captioned: staying in, good night 2b boring ))))hahahaha

Unconsciously, his lower lip bites into his teeth. He closes his phone, looks up at the nearby empty office tower, its windows dark and unanswering. No one to see the smile on his face. 

[🅢🅗]

So, where did we leave Scott Hunter? Haunted by the ghost of a train that will never arrive, the rolling sound of pots and pans resounding over the neighbourhood he chose in Montreal. Most of the team, he’s told, live downtown or west, by the training facility. Scott is getting used to the sly double-takes when he leaves his apartment. 

He is more famous in Montreal. Back ho–back in New York, he had the benefit of playing the city’s third favourite sport. Now, straight north past Albany, he’s thrown himself onto a place where hockey not only matters, but where the hockey team is a defining symbol of identity. One upside, however: Canadians are fucking uptight to a rule. He is recognized more but bothered less. 

So that’s nice. 

He considers, very seriously, cancelling his annual vacation, sex escape. His annual sexscape. Perhaps Je-me-souviens-ing a little harder about the events of the last year. But the five weeks he spent in the dark of an increasingly musty apartment linger like a wolf in the dark. 

He goes to Rio: beach, sun, strangers. Spends a week of indulgence having sex with beautiful men. By now, Scott Hunter has a near Pavlovian response to the smell of sunscreen. The coconut, powder, and salty smell of summer is the smell of indulgence, the other half of himself, the flip of the coin from the rusty, musk of a hockey rink. Two sides, same coin. Now the coin is a shiny yellow loonie. 

He is more anxious about safety this year, tops exclusively, doesn’t meet up with the same guy twice, and introduces himself as Steve from California. On the flight back, he books himself a business class ticket so he can lie down and tally the limits of the life he’s flying back to. It’s ten hours from Rio to Montreal. 

He shows up a little worse for wear for his headshots, a shade darker than he will be on the ice, worn out within an inch of his life after the flight. Like a beacon of the future or a ghost of the past, Shane Hollander walks into the Cours locker room looking well rested and satisfied. 

Scott is pretty sure he scares the shit out of Hollander. Scott considers the optics of making a good first impression, the one he’ll have to make to his new team in a few weeks. He should get Hollander onside, start endearing himself. But when he looks at Hollander, he sees a brick wall. The pity of someone promising, looking at the path to be avoided. 

Fuck that. 

Scott wants to grab the kid by the shoulders and shout into his pretty, placated face: all the old fucks are right, youth is wasted on the young. Scott wouldn’t have listened to him at Shane’s age either. 

He turned 30 in Rio with a caipirinha on the beach. Six years earlier, he was named Captain of the Admirals. Six years from now, he’ll outlive his parents. In mathematical terms: inflection point. In hockey terms: momentum shift. 

————

His memories of Montreal are tainted: his grandmother’s apartment in Hochelega had a sunny backyard wringed in vines that shone yellow-green light down on a wrought iron garden set, white paint peeling to reveal black metal. He remembers sitting on that garden set, being fed piece after piece of buttered toast the summer after his parents died, as people packed up his childhood home, deciding what he would and would not keep, what would be stored for him in two boxes, and what would end up god knows where. After that, boarding school. One cold climate to another.

His dad’s brother and his wife, well-intentioned maniacs in western New York, bridged the final gap after that, until Scott signed a half-million-dollar ELC at the turn of a new millennium and learned that good intentions can be corrupted. 

A decade of scar tissue and physio later, Scott has dragged his increasingly sore ass back to Montreal. 

Here he is. On his feet, as usual, running, as usual. It’s the high heat of August in Montreal, a city where most apartments and many restaurants do not have air conditioning. Scott’s brand-new, old-ass apartment has all the luxury upgrades that make it triple the cost of its neighbours. He may be on the lam from his own expectations, but his money is still good up here. The rest of the city sprawls on terrasses, in parks, drinking beer in the middle of weekday afternoons. A city draining every last dreg of joy out of the coffee grounds of summer. 

The day after the photoshoot, he runs up Mount-Royal, as an act of ceremony or an act of penance. The line between them is thinner than a hockey blade. He leaves for the run early in the morning, to run up the “the mountain” as the locals call it—a hill, less than 200 meters in elevation that rises over downtown, a park in the middle of the city.  

He maintains a steady pace through the streets that will take him to the base of the park and  then slows to a jog up the hill itself, across the slow gravel path that cuts above Parc Ave, panting in the sunrise-yellow light of trees as he drags himself up the final steps to the scenic overlook. 

It’s not yet 8 am when he arrives at the belvedere that surveys downtown Montreal. The overlook is an enormous half-circle of cement stones, cutting out over the trees for a panoramic view of skyscrapers, the St. Lawrence River behind them. From here, the giant light-up cross that is visible from everywhere else in the city is hidden. The spread of downtown Montreal is vast, anonymous, and dense. 

It’s too early for crowds, and the few people there haven't recognized him. He walks his tired legs to the edge, both hands on the concrete railing, nearly a foot wide. Not for the first or last time, Scott says, out loud to himself: “What the fuck.”

Behind him, there’s a large chalet building. He goes inside, expecting to find a cafe at this major tourist destination. Instead, there’s a half-assed vending machine with chocolate bars he doesn’t recognize and a machine that dispenses hot chocolate on this summer day. He drinks from the water fountain and leaves. 

As he runs back, the heat of the city rises to meet him like descending into a pool. The park feels familiar, an organized wilderness in the heart of the city. His body is still a fast-moving machine. 

————

Later, Scott is on the phone with the board of the St. Thomas Scholarship Fund. The St. Thomas organizers are not happy about Scott’s move to Canada. Their prime alumni is no longer in the city, their proof of the success, one of the graduates they can point to to usher new generations of down-on-their-luck kids like him. Other kids who need the scholarship that gave Scott his whole life. And the rich kids whose parents pay out of pocket, of course. 

He is sitting on the couch, the call on speaker phone, still cooling down after his shower. He has taken ice from the ice maker built into his fridge and is rolling one arched cube, wrapped in a napkin, across his forehead.

Scott is half zoned out of the call when a woman’s voice l says, “Well, that’s interesting.”

Someone else cuts in with: “Care to share with the class, April?”

“Shane Hollander has just been named captain of the Montreal Voyageurs.”

There’s a symphony of interested murmurs, agreements that it’s not a surprise. 

“Care to comment, Scott?” says the initial woman’s voice.

Scott has lost the plot of the conversation; he’s not entirely sure who is asking. He closes his eyes and presses the half-melted cube against his orbital bone. Water runs down his cheek, is in his eyes. He blinks it away to answer. 

“Oh, yeah. Not a surprise. The next generation of hockey has arrived,” Scott says, trying for a half-hearted laugh. 

The silence is tense. A man’s voice: “You know, this doesn’t reflect well on St. Thomas, Scott.”

“Shane Hollander?” Scott asks, genuinely confused. He rakes a hand through his damp hair, making it stand on end. He takes the remains of the ice cube and pops it in his mouth, crunching it with his back molars, his strong fake teeth. 

“No,” someone else says. “You going to Montreal, losing your captaincy.”

“St. Thomas tried to recruit Hollander, but his mother said no,” adds another. 

“I didn’t know that,” Scott says, defensive, swallowing ice. “I doubt prospective parents know that. And. I didn’t turn in my captaincy—I took a very lucrative trade that was offered to me, after nine successful years on the Admirals, to a team with a strong future.” 

“We have wondered,” says another voice.

“And now you’re playing, well, under him.”

Scott rolls his eyes. He recognizes the voice this time. “Mariane, hockey is a team sport.” 

“The next generation of hockey, as you put it—and it’s not coming from us.” 

He feels like he is on a call with a panel of judges. Other than this, there is no one with any sway over his choices. He is expecting this from the press in a few weeks, but not now. It feels as though the heat of the outside is back around his throat. He drapes the cold napkin with the remaining ice-cold water across his neck and stands, taking the phone with him, cracking his back with a twist. 

“The school has always seen you as one of our most powerful success stories,” says one of the voices.  

“I’m very grateful for everything St. Thomas did for me. Has done for me,” Scott says, struggling to put the necessary, standard gratitude into his voice. “I’m proud to continue representing the school.”

“We’re glad to hear that,” Mariane says. “Hopefully, this doesn’t impact our fundraising goals for the year.”

The feeling of being judged dissipates into a lingering cloud of guilt, running like the ice down his neck. 

————

Summer is for bulking, conditioning, and strength. The team assigns him a trainer, and they meet at a small gym in his neighbourhood. The Voyageurs, Scott learns, have invested a lot in player comfort. They take more measurements, provide a more specialized nutrition plan specifically for him and his current health and concerns. 

His new trainer is skeptical of the running. Scott insists that it’s part of his personal health program. Is there a milder way of saying: if I don’t do cardio daily, it feels like my veins turn to cement and my life is a river? He’s not sure, so that’s what he says. The trainer relents. 

He finds himself running laps in a mindless circle around St. Viateur Park near his apartment. It’s a strange little park with a circular pond, a clumsily ugly bridge, and a large white pavilion. From the right angle, the stucco building reflects serenely, a perfect mirrored pavilion upside down in the pond. The whole park, whimsical and strange. He’s recognized one morning, stopped on his run. He learns that the pond, a wonky O, turns into an ice trail in the winter. For skating, not hockey. Of course it is. There’s nowhere Scott could run on this island that would take him more than a few steps from the anticipation of winter. 

He runs his laps and finds himself thinking of Shane Hollander again. He doesn’t have Hollander’s phone number yet. It’s the off-season. He, Scott, does not have a fucking life. Maybe Hollander does. 

The facts he knows about Hollander consist of his stats (steadily groundbreaking) and his brand (increasingly ubiquitous). There’s also the unnameable feeling, which is not a fact at all. If Scott knew the word “gaydar,” he’d have a name for it. But he does not. 

Scott was sitting next to Hollander when Rozanov beat Scott’s shot accuracy record. Hollander had inhaled, Yeah, when Rozanov’s score was posted. A tiny, unconscious noise. And Scott thought: Shit. 

It’s the way Hollander holds himself neatly in the corner of NHL events. An airtight galleon that can’t take on even a drop of water. Scott knows that look. He’s felt it for a decade now—maybe longer. But at the same time. All of this is just speculation hovering in the periphery. The idea that Hollander has an unrequited crush on his rival is none of his fucking business. 

Scott finishes another lap past the pavilion. 

He walks home, showers, and steps out onto his new balcony. Scott hates reading about himself. He avoids it: didn’t make a Twitter account when the team suggested it a year ago. Doesn’t know or check any other sites. But he’s in charge of his own image, and it’s humiliating to ask his agent to summarize his own news when it’s not relevant to a specific endorsement or deal. So he does it, miserably, once a month. The bruising last year has taught one lesson. Even when rumours stay put, they still cast shadows. 

His old apartment did not have outdoor space, so he ordered an iron patio set. He dragged the heavy thing all the way through the apartment and set it up out here. An echo of the one his grandmother had.

He creaks into the chair and sets his laptop on the table. The sunset is blocked by buildings, and the heat has not lifted much even without the sun. The water from his shower still clings to him as he searches for his own name on Google, scanning and reading a handful of articles. He’s not the first captain to be traded. A few years before Hollander was drafted, Montreal let go of a defenseman so popular that someone took out a full-page ad to apologize on behalf of the city. Shit happens. Players are chess pieces. 

The articles mostly guess what the front offices of the Admirals and the Voyageurs are thinking. He’s relieved that most of them are praising the Cours and condemning the Admirals' hasty choice; only one writes at length about the potential foolishness of trade. His name brings up a few articles about Hollander, excitement about them playing together. 

Somewhere in the distance, the song of the summer, Somebody That I Used to Know, echoes tinnily, playing off bad speakers and reverberating into the alley between buildings. The apartment directly across is less than ten feet away. The curtains are, as always, drawn. He can see the blur of movement inside. He sits there, the song’s chorus faint but audible, backgrounded by the distant sounds of socializing. 

He chose this neighbourhood because he prefers to be surrounded by people. It’s comforting that in the city, someone can always hear you scream. 

Chapter End Notes

Shane gives Hayden and Jackie a foundational Canadian children's book.

Je me souviens means “I remember,” and it is the official motto and license plate slogan of Quebec.

The park around Mont-Royal feels familiar to Scott because it was designed in the same style, by the same designer, as Central Park. Google tells me there is now a cafe at the Chalet Mont Royal, which is nice. It is characteristically Montreal that it is mostly just a giant, beautiful empty building. The view and the building in question.

For more of ... whatever, I'm on tumblr too.

Chapter 3: preseason

Chapter Summary

Pre-season skates, celebration, and anticipation.

Chapter Notes

It’s just the dress rehearsal rag

Leonard Cohen

August cracks into September. Scott travels for two late-summer weddings, one over Labour Day weekend, the other just three days later, all the way in Italy. Hockey players are always getting married, having children, and building new ugly houses that Scott used to have to go to housewarmings for. He shows up to everything: good guy in a suit. The same housewarming gift every time: an outdoor speaker. Inoffensive and unremarkable, usually appreciated. He likes seeing them in use at future barbecues. He has no idea when he’ll next need to buy a new one. 

He stands at the edge of the party near Lake Cuomo, European extravagance: palazzo behind him lined in manicured trees, a dark lake in front, shadowed by mountains. Between them, the production of a wedding, the dance floor and tent. The groom’s father, a booming, severe Swiss man, has been plying all the players with family-made liquor. Scott is several rounds of quince schnapps in; it’s hot on the way down and fills his mouth with fruit. He’s having a smoke on the edge of the party, the nicotine kicking through his bloodstream and making the world liquid. 

Carter Vaughn approaches. The wedding is for a former teammate, traded five years ago—thank whatever higher power is left, so there are only a handful of current Admirals. The other hockey invites are people he doesn’t know.  

“How’s it hanging, Scotty?”

“You’ve seen me get suited up enough to know, to the left,” Scott answers. Juvenile drunk; ready to dance like a frat boy on a pogo stick in his best bro armour. 

“The Montrealer’s got jokes!” Carter crows, watery remains of a neon orange spritz flinging drops in an arc as he throws an arm around Scott. 

“Not a Montrealer, not yet,” Scott huffs, turning his head to take a drag. 

“I can’t fucking believe you moved, man.”

Scott flexes his neck slightly away from Carter. The smoke burns in his lungs before he exhales a long plume, the burning reminds him of an intense drill on the ice. Pleasantly familiar. “Me neither.”

“Why’d you do it?” Carter asks. “Move to the enemy.”

Scott squints and pinches his fingers, his voice more Mario Kart than Marlon Brando when he says, “They made-a me an offer I could nawt refuse.”

“Dude, was that an Irish accent?” Carter asks, glancing dramatically around the corner of the building. “Don’t let any of the waiters hear you.”

“Take-a the cannoli,” Scott responds, smoke in Carter’s face. 

“I hope your French is better than your Italian,” Carter says, waving smoke out of his face. “Starting strong with the cigarette there, bud.”

“Smoking doesn’t count in Europe.”

“Are they giving you new lungs in Montreal?” Carter prods Scott’s side, stepping out of range. 

“Yeah, that’s why I traded. Canadian health care.”

“You telling the press that? Scott Hunter embraces communism?”

“I’m going to be the first player in the history of the NHL to celebrate a higher tax rate. Que sera.”

“And you haven’t even packed a box. But fuck—Montreal, man. Wild choice. Their fans are crazy, they’re gonna tear you up.”

Scott grins with too many teeth, canines out. “Not if I get there first.”

Whether he means the fans, himself, or the game goes unsaid. He drops the butt of his cigarette into Carter’s glass with a flourish and goes back into the party. 

He drinks enough water to stay on the steady side of sober, letting the buoyancy of the wedding push his mood up; the happiness bouncing around the room nearly meets his eyes. 

The honest truth: Scott says yes to every wedding he’s invited to because he loves going to them. He’s a softie, Scott Hunter. A wedding is like standing under a disco ball and catching a bit of the light, just for a second before it flashes on to someone else. 

The party goes until sunrise. Scott heads to his room somewhere around 3 in the morning, asleep in his suit pants, belt unbuckled but through the loops.

In the morning, he says goodbye to the happy couple, ducks out of photos, and naps in his car to the airport.  

End of summer treat: he turns on Grindr in the Frankfurt airport. He hooks up with a Croatian guy in a bathroom. They jerk each other off, efficient and impersonal, the guy wetly mouthing at Scott’s neck. Scott doesn’t even use a fake name; they barely exchange ten words. Not for the first time, he wishes a furtive exchange of appetites was enough. When the bathroom door clicks behind him, he’s still hungry. But he arrives back in Montreal revived and rested after sleeping for the full eight-hour flight. 

————

He unpacks his last box: trophies. He hadn’t meant to leave them till last—that blade edge between ceremony and penance—but they’d been at the back of the truck and the back of his apartment. Inside the box is a tidy, organized stack of metal and plastic, framed plaques; awards dating back to adolescence. 

His new apartment is big enough that he doesn’t need to see this incomplete collection of accolades when he’s trying to relax. The second bedroom is an office and home gym. He organizes the trophies onto built-in shelving that crowds one large, empty wall. He does a full set of strength training, stretches for his ankles, anticipating the next day. Then he closes the door on the whole setup, gym, trophies, and all. 

Scott reports in early for pre-season training to get some ice time after weeks off it. His muscles are itching for the easy stride of skating. He crosses the city in his car, still loaded with new car smell. Importing a car wasn’t worth it; he had this one purchased and parked in the spot he’s paying extra for. He can’t take public transit here. He’d be swarmed. Scott hates driving. Because, well. Answer available in the first lines of the Early Life section of his intentionally sparse Wikipedia. 

It is unsurprising to find Shane Hollander already there, doing practice drills. It’s not even 10 am, on this day of unofficial open ice time. Hollander is skating back and forth, hands behind his back, helmet on, no stick in hand, darting easily between cones. Scott watches him appreciatively. Even skating idly, Hollander is so fast, just by stride alone. 

Scott feels a little selfish bubble of joy pearlescent in his heart. Hockey is the easy part. The best part. Whatever is happening in his life disappears on the ice. At the very fucking least, he can play some good hockey. He hits the ice, skating warm-up laps in big, wide arcing circles around the full circumference of the ice. After a few minutes, Hollander skates up to him, stopping with a twist of ice. 

“Wanna run some drills?” Hollander asks. He is pink-cheeked, bright-eyed: he looks his age. 

They grab sticks and go for it, 1-on-1s, calling shots with a shout across the ice. Scott isn’t surprised when Hayden Pike shows up. Scott skids to a stop and shakes hands. Pike plays left wing on Hollander’s line, the other side of the superstar. Scott wants to be there with them. It’s not up to him—but. Why not. For the first time since his concussion last year, Scott Hunter feels good, right down to the spongy marrow in his bones. He used to joke: I feel like a million bucks, 6.8 million to be precise. 

Passing the puck to Hollander is exactly as fun as he expected it to be: wherever he sends it, Hollander is there. 

“Love the enthusiasm, boys,” Coach Thériault calls from the sidelines. 

Hunter hadn’t seen Thériault show up. He’s met his new coach twice now, and each time he feels like a slab of blood-red ribs at a butcher counter. Weighed and measured, assessed to see if it has too many bones, or if he’s just too old to cook in the first place. He does a quick turn to face Thériault at the boards. He wants to ask: Was that an audition? I was just having fun. Training is next week. 

Hollander skates up to Thériault. Scott, and Pike follow. It was just a warm-up, but Thériault has feedback: clinical and precise, he recounts all their weak points. Scott is an increasingly cynical, tired old man who just turned thirty, but he lives and dies by coach approval. The words are instructions, not observations. If his coach notices some stiffness on his right side in the way he shifts weight for his slapshot, he’s going to train the hell out of exactly that. 

The three of them head to the locker room together, discussing the skate, imperfections, and all. It’s the first real conversation he’s had with Hollander in years. Confirming his assumption, Pike and Hollander had planned to meet here. Hayden Pike, Scott learns, is enthusiastic, deferential to Hollander and maybe in awe of him, but undercuts the deference with brotherly ribbing. 

In the locker room, two of the team's defensemen are lacing up. Quebecois guys, chatting quickly in French, Comeau and Drapeau. They switch to English to introduce themselves and shake hands. Scott is unlacing his skates when they start speaking again. 

“Penses-tu que c'est un problème de genoux ou quoi ?” says one of them, muttered but not quiet. Comeau, Scott thinks, bristling like an alley cat along his spine. 

“Selon mon ami à New York, s'agenouiller pose aucun problème,” the other, Drapeau, answers. 

Like a cattle prod, electric fear bolts up his back. For a brief moment, he’s a wounded deer again, broken leg in the floodlights of an oncoming car, back in the Admirals’ office. The fear melts into a hot knife of anger. 

Instinctively, he looks around, animal fight or flight of anger as the deer kicks its weak legs against his chest, his hammering heart. Scott is used to this spotlight like a needle in the eye, the loneliness of hiding. He spots Hollander, staring at the d-men, unmoving. He knows for a fact that Hollander speaks French. 

Comeau snickers, has his mouth open to speak when Scott finally cuts in. 

“Eh, les gars,” Scott says, anger fumbling his tongue. His atrophied French fails him. “My knees and ears are fine.” 

Downplay, deny, defend. Your honour, I plead not guilty. He chooses to deflect. Hockey is a team sport. 

“Happy to answer questions about the trade. I’m excited to play in my mother’s hometown,” Scott continues, switching to English. 

The blueliners look caught out, children with pilfered candy, not willing to double down on the joke. Comeau, smiles wide, “Captain America est un francophone, what the fuck.” He crosses the room and this time claps Scott on his back, turning to Hollander saying, “Did you know that, Hollzy?”

Hollander shakes his head. Expression unreadable. 

“I’m rusty,” Scott says. 

“So,” Drapeau, the one who made the comment about kneeling, says, “What about the trade?”

Scott shrugs, “I was on the Admirals for ten years. I was offered a chance to play here. I took it.”

“Greeny is pissed,” Drapeau says to no one in particular. Maybe to Scott. 

Mark Greenfeld plays wing on the Cours’ second line. Probably thought he’d move up. Scott files the information away: someone else to win over. 

“I think he expected to replace Kalinsky,” Pike says, stating the obvious. 

“If he wants to be on the first line, he needs to clean up his passes and learn to preserve some stamina for 45 seconds,” Hollander cuts in, pulling his shin pads off. 

There’s a chorus of “oooh” from Comeau and Drapeau, and Hollander smiles without looking up.

“Speaking of Kalinsky,” Pike says. “Shaney boy, are you hosting a season kick-off?”

Hollander looks up, a quick blink. The big metal grate at the front of the Fortress of Hollander has fallen. The excited kid from the ice drops out of sight, a movie flicking from one frame to the next. 

“Oh,” Hollander says. “Yeah, I’m going to organize something.” 

The conversation continues, stumbling back to hockey small talk. Scott joins in as he can, guessing at the meaning behind names, strategies, and shorthands as they zip past him back and forth. Asking for too much clarification is another way to stand out. Pretend to know and deny that you were ever unaware. 

The defensemen head off to their own practice, and Scott, Pike, and Hollander shower in silence. The two-in-one shampoo and body wash smells the same as every practice arena, away game, and home ice has ever smelled. Antiseptically familiar. 

Pike is quick to rush out, leaving with his hair still soaking wet, citing some family obligation. 

Scott dresses quickly, seeing an opportunity. He rubs a towel through his hair as he glances over at Shane, who is dressed and pulling his ankle socks on.

“I never really liked hosting people at my place,” Scott says—a half-truth. 

Sometimes he liked it, genuinely enjoyed sharing his space with people. The space felt alive filled with voices. Other times, trying to make conversation with people in his personal space felt like they were going to grab his tongue with a metal clamp and inspect it. 

Scott continues, “When I didn’t want to host at my place, I did team dinners at a restaurant. I’d just book a private room somewhere nice, tell the guys it was my treat. They’d rib me for being fancy about it, but no one complains about steaks.”

Hollander is staring at him, thoughts visibly turning over across his face. “Just a thought,” Scott adds, confidence waning. He doesn’t have any uncles with bad advice to ignore, but he assumes that is what he looks like right now. 

“Right,” Hollander says. 

Scott wants to ask if Hollander’s schedule if they should practice together again. But the kid feels like an easily startled colt, so he drops it. 

“See you around,” Scott says with a nod and heads out of the locker room.

————

A week passes the way it always does: scheduled days, long hours in between. By early September, he has fully recovered from the previous season, fully relaxed over the summer, restless to begin. 

He does a bunch of press scheduled by the team. Delivers his perfect PR-approved answers: never disparaging the Admirals, talking about being excited to play with his former teammate Stedlund again, his respect for leadership, the Cup. Mad libs, blanks filled in by publicity experts and delivered with a smile.

In between, his half-empty apartment echoes, not an empty threat. He will not have time for slow errands or lazy afternoons soon. So, he walks fifteen minutes up Parc, the wide open boulevard, half empty shops and kosher grocery stores, under an underpass where the actual, real train cuts off this neighbourhood from another. The train tracks are hidden from view: the street and sidewalk go under them through a dark, musty underpass. It is possible to forget the train tracks are even there; there is no need for a train signal. In the weeks since he moved to the city, the protests have died down. The haunting has faded to a manageable hum. He’s just settling into the ghosts, the way you stop hearing the buzz of a noise if it goes on long enough. 

At a hardware store, he buys himself three large, verdant house plants. As he’s checking out, he notices the key rings amongst the last-minute purchases by the cash register. He has had his keys looped onto a large spinning Admiral's logo for years. He grabs a large silver carabiner to replace it.  

He walks his plants home, pausing along the way to reshuffle the awkward balance. He is confident at least three people recognize him as he does this, but no one stops him. In New York, he had a handful of fake plants because his interior designer convinced him they’d add a pop of green and his schedule is too erratic to water them. 

Here, this time: real ones. He doesn’t even have enough furniture for them to go on. They sit on the floor by the window with the brightest light, the kitchen in the back. He crouches to water them until the air fills with the sweet smell of wet dirt. At least three living things in his apartment. 

————

[Unknown] Hi Hunter, this is Shane. Confirming this is the right number?

[Scott] Yeah, this is Scott. Sorry, with the new phone, I lost all my contacts. Shane who?

[Shane]: Shane Hollander. 

[Shane]: Captain of the Voyageurs.

[Scott]: Sorry, that was a joke. Yes, this is my number. 

[Shane]: Great. I am hosting a team dinner at Moishe’s on St. Laurent, Friday Sept 21st. Please let me know if you can join. 

 [🅢🅗]

Shane asked his mother for steakhouse recommendations. Yuna hadn’t lived in Montreal for over 25 years, but she knew the institutions. She recommended Moishe’s, and it fit the bill: classic, private room. 

Shane surveyed the room before everyone arrived. The ceiling is a shiny metal, reflecting light from a wide light fixture, and the walls are lined with wine bottles. As of just a few months ago, he can now drink everywhere hockey takes him. In Quebec, he has been legal to drink since 18. Not that he likes drinking. It makes all the muscles he’s worked so hard to own fall loose, and it would be so easy to say something wrong. But he’ll have a beer tonight. None of the guys even really like wine, despite all the bottles that decorate the space. Hockey players drink beer. Except JJ, who orders some specific type of white wine at every dinner, and Mitty who doesn’t drink at all. 

The restaurant asked him in advance how to set up the room. There are 19 people invited—the official roster isn’t set yet. Sitting at the head of a table felt too much like he was the mafia boss. He asked for two tables of ten, five on each side, no head of the table. He chooses a spot right in the middle of one table, back to the wall, that faces the room. He reads the menu to find the beer with the lower percentage number next to it. 

Hayden arrives first and takes the seat next to Shane. Slowly, everyone trickles in after. He stands and greets people as they come in, accepting the congratulations, asking about the summers of anyone he hasn’t seen yet at the training facility. The waiters breeze in and out, taking drink orders and confirming choices from the set menu. 

Once the last chair is filled, a drink proffered, Shane stands and clears his throat. It takes a few seconds, but slowly the group sees him standing, and the room falls silent.  

“Thank you all for coming,” Shane says, the condensation of his beer glass wet against his fingers. “I’m honoured to be your captain. I’m looking forward to this season together.” 

He lifts his beer up and says, “To playing some good fucking hockey.”

That gets a round of noise, cheers, and clinking of glass. Shane settles back in his chair, tension easing out of him as the conversation picks up around the room. At his table, they’re talking about the perpetual start-of-season conversation: who moved, where people are renting. Hayden’s new house, Shane’s new apartment. Real estate, smart investments, where to buy in the city, rates, and mortgages. 

He recommends his broker to Berkes, who is looking to buy a bigger place. The room is loud with conversation, everyone is chatting, the friendly camaraderie of team brotherhood. 

It’s good. He feels good. He is relieved they are out in a third space, not shouting in his apartment. Not filling his home. Like a fish slipping into the stream, the current of conversation rushes him easily forward.  

Dinner complements the easy feeling: steak expensive enough to cut like butter at the slightest touch from the elegantly handled knives. By dessert, everyone is rippling out around the room, making conversation with new people. The tables are set far enough apart to make it easy to walk around, take new seats, traverse and converse. 

Shane is sitting with Stedlund, who tells Shane all about the newly opened rink near his hometown near Stockholm, from which he has just returned with his newly minted fiancée. 

“Of course, we spend the summer relaxing,” Stedlund says, “But Ella, she understands, she is a pianist, and it is the same, in a way. She encouraged me to go because she is the same way. A little bit every day to keep moving forward.” 

“Yeah, that’s exactly it,” Shane agrees. “Actually. My dad gave me this book that talks about these two arctic explorers who both said they were going to be the first ones to see the South Pole. Basically, one guy said, ‘We’ll wait for good weather and then walk sixty miles, and rest in between. Make up for lost time. The other team, this guy, uh, Amundsen, said no. We walk for twenty miles every day, even if the weather is bad. And they made it to the South Pole and back early.” 

“Damn,” Stedlund says. “What about the other team?”

Shane shrugs, “Didn’t do it, I think. But I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Twenty miles a day, no matter the weather.”  

“Hardcore,” Stedlund says with a laugh, and then lifts his glass and says, “Twenty miles a day until the Cup.”

Shane flushes and looks down, feels a clap on his shoulder—someone else greeting and congratulating him. The evening filters on, the cool water of small talk around him. He’s standing by the wine-decorated wall when Hunter walks up and nods a greeting. 

“How’s it going?” Shane asks. “Settling in?”

“Good, thanks,” Hunter answers. “Yeah, all unpacked.”

They discuss housing: Scott is renting, says something about being near the bagel place. The team has catered breakfast a couple of times a season from the same spot. It makes Shane miss Kettleman’s, but he knows not to say that around the Montrealers. 

The conversation lapses for a second, and then Hunter says, “I read that book, by the way, the one with the arctic explorers.”

“Oh,” Shane says, he didn’t realize he’d been overheard. “Cool, yeah. It was a good book.”

“Yeah, I listened to an audiobook about the explorer guy, Amundsen. He was crazy. He didn’t do anything his whole life that wasn’t about exploring the Arctic. And he managed to do that, like a bunch of times. First guy to make it to the South Pole. First to fly over the North Pole. But—did you know he died in a plane crash looking for some other guy? Went down somewhere in the Arctic. They found part of the plane, but they never found his body.”

Hunter delivers this in a long tunnel of words, hands moving, more expressive than Shane has ever seen him. 

“I didn’t know that,” is all Shane can think to say. 

“It’s funny. A hundred years later, and now people fly over the North Pole every day,” Hunter huffs a dry, weird laugh. “Those guys all died doing what’s just … a normal flight today. You know what I mean?” 

“Yeah, I guess,” Shane says, having no idea what he means. “But one guy, Amundsen, he was the first. That never goes away. I bet he would’ve wanted to go out that way, in the Arctic. If that was his whole life.”

Hunter’s face shifts, eyebrows up. “You’re probably right.” He takes a sip of the beer in his hand. 

“How are those exercises going for your slapshot?” Shane asks, hoping to change the topic. 

They return to the familiar and comfortable waters of hockey talk until someone declares that they’re going to a second location. Shane knows that it’s best to do this at least once, now, in the early season, for team-bonding’s sake. 

There are just ten guys left, and they all leave together, walking up St-Laurent. Boulevard Saint-Laurent, Saint Lawrence, The Main, a street that shares its name with the river that sweeps in from the ocean down into the land. The street is the central spine of the city, the dividing line between east and west, between English and French. Shane is never this far up north on St-Laurent, even just three kilometres from his apartment. He has left the skyscrapers of downtown for the low density of the rest of the city. The street is thrumming with people, students recently returned, the glow of nightlife. A car slows to scream with excitement, to chant olé, olé at them. Shane joins in the chant back, fist pumping in the hot end of summer air.

They walk a few short blocks to a speakeasy-style bar behind an unlabeled door. Hunter disappears without a goodbye somewhere in between. 

At the bar, the cocktails are elaborate. Shane orders one with whiskey that tastes like campfire in his mouth. He drinks it carefully, a slow sip at a time. Someone brings a group of girls over, and Shane is squared off with a pretty brunette, her hair swept in a braid that runs across her forehead. He flirts with her, which mostly amounts to asking her questions and trying to follow the confusing looped answers she gives. 

But he is tired from the evening, and for some reason, he can’t stop thinking about how cold the Arctic Ocean would be. When she goes to the washroom, he slips away. He feels like he can breathe again, alone in the cab ride home, cocooned by the trapped heat of the city. 

————

Training camp, pre-season rolls ahead like an oncoming train barrelling through the orderly wilderness of Shane’s life. The energy of training camps is infectious. Being captain is easy, the mood is high and optimistic, everyone wants to get back out there, rookies hoping to get a permanent spot on the roster, and vets excited to play again. Thériault tries out new lines and new combos, new power plays. 

After a lengthy, exhausting practice, Shane stops by the massage therapy room, just off the hall from their changing room and showers. In the massage room, Campbell, one of the new players brought up straight from the draft and who has been called Soup all week, is on the massage table. 

“Clear out rook,” Wilson, six-year vet and third-line centre, appears behind Shane. “You’re new to the show, but it’s captain on the table first, then it goes by seniority.”

Soup, a few months past eighteen, eyes flicking between them, sits up immediately. The truth is, it’s early in the season, and Shane is not even desperate for a massage. He has always hated this power-tripping from weak players. Throwing their weight around off the ice to make up for their performance on it. 

“It’s fine, Soup, I’ll come back after,” Shane says. 

Shane continues to the changing room, sheds his equipment, and heads to the showers. Hunter, MItty, and Drapeau are mid-shower as he and Wilson join. 

“Bro, rookies have gotta pay their dues,” says Wilson, through the spray of the water. 

Shane blinks shampoo out of his eyes, turning to face the wall. 

“It’s fine,” Shane says to the wall. “I don’t care about that stuff.”

From across the room, Hunter’s voice echoes across the tiles, “Why?” 

“Why what?” asks Wilson.

“Why do the rookies have to pay their dues?” Hunter repats.

“What do you mean?” Wilson says, now turning to Hunter. “That’s how it works. Pay your dues, wait your turn, carry bags. Work your way up.”

“Hazing is for players who peaked in Juniors,” Hunter says, turning off the spray of water and walking across the room to the towels. 

“Hazing?” says Wilson, “Spare me, dude. It’s just the massage table.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” says Drapeau to Hunter, finishing his own shower and crossing to the towels as well. The room is filled with the wet, echoing noise of the water spray. 

“I seem to remember that Montreal was in a playoff drought a few years ago,” Hunter says, aggressively toweling his hair. “Anything change? You make Hollander carry bags when he was a rookie?” 

“Cut it out,” Shane says to the room at large, ignoring the attempt to speak on his behalf. “I don’t care about who gets a massage first. We’re all teammates. Everyone should have trained enough this summer to carry their fucking own bags.”

“Hollzy’s just bragging because he got yoked over the summer,” Mitty says from his corner of the room. “How much are you benching these days, dude? You look ready to tear me in half.”

“Bench? The combine is over. It's all in the kettlebells, Mitty.”

————

A series of exhibition games, home and away. Feels like stretching, testing. Theriault tries out the Pike-Hollander-Hunter line across a blur of pre-season games. 

During their fourth exhibition game against Detroit, deep in a tied third period, Shane sees Hunter free, a sliver of a window, Shane hammers the puck to him with minute accuracy, and Hunter snaps it in, a perfect one-timer that hits the net before Detroit’s goalie so much as twitches, faster than a snap of the fingers. 

It plays on highlight reels all week, along with a shot of Shane and Hayden slamming into Hunter, celebrating. There’s something about it that feels like a stone in his ice skate. 

They fly back to Montreal and have their final pre-season practice at the start of October. At the end of it, showered and crammed into the meeting room at the practice facility, Theriault confirms the roster. Soup has made the official lineup, and no one has bothered him. 

After their last pre-season practice, before the regular season, the team has the same annual ritual, part team-bonding activity, part PR event. The entire team goes to the Orange Julep just outside the practice rink. It is a giant sphere, the shape of the fruit and the same bright colour, rising over the nearby highway like an orange moon. A three-storey orange with a panel of glass takeout windows at the bottom serving mediocre fast food. For some reason, it’s a local landmark.

It’s a full-press marketing moment; they’re filmed for Facebook and the news, ordering poutine and drinks, gearing up for the season. 

The experience feels like his mind is two feet to the left of his body, like his calloused, stick-ready hands are controlled by strings—the team is supposed to be getting drinks together, but it is not really happening. They’re being filmed for it, fake cheers. He knocks his plastic cup with Mitty, and someone holding a camera asks them to do it again; they missed capturing the shot. 

Shane wants to say, no. We’re hockey players. There are no second shots.

But he’s a good team player; he fakes the cheers for a second time, slower, with his body turned toward the light. There are a bunch of 1950s cars outside in the parking lot, and Shane stands between them with Hayden, pulling a long string of poutine for a camera and taking an insincere bite. Like the fiberglass sphere behind him, an idea of the real thing. He assumes that somewhere inside the roadside attraction is a pile of real oranges. 

🍊 

Chapter End Notes

French translation:
“Do you think it’s a knee problem or what?”
“According to my friend in New York, kneeling is not a problem.”

The steakhouse, Moishe’s, moved to a new location from the one described and is bad now. As is the Orange Julep (bad). In reality, Shane Hollander would 100% take the team to the Keg. But that is not very fun for me.

Shane and Scott are talking about Roald Amundsen. Shane’s twenty-mile book is referencing a popular corporate self-help book (that is ahistorical bullshit).

Feel free to follow me on tumblr too.

Chapter 4: new branches

Chapter Summary

Shane issues a challenge. Scott makes an invitation.

Chapter Notes

My loneliness grew into a forest atop me.

Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

It is the skate out for the first real game of the season. The Voyageurs are standing, geared up, bouncing with excitement, in the tunnel. The whole team is antsy, hyping each other up, bumping gloves. From within the rink, down the corridor, Shane can hear the pre-roll footage building the crowd’s energy to a frenzy. It is a video montage of a hundred years of history, here in the city where the first professional game of hockey was played. The footage includes a clip Shane filmed last week, introducing and thanking all six trainers of the team skating, the full roster. He can hear his own voice in the Bell Centre, from here in the tunnel. 

Finally, the team is called out one by one. The rest of the season, they skate out together. For the opening ceremony, they get individual introductions. Standing in the dark tunnel, last to be called out, Shane shakes the smile off his face and gets serious as they call his name. Votre Capitaine, Your Captain, le numéro vingt-quatre, number twenty-four, Shane Hollander. Shane stills his face into placid authority and glides out onto the ice, stick in hand. One of the few times he’s out on the ice without a helmet or a mouth guard, just his own face, exposed as the season begins for Shane Hollander. He keeps his expression still, taking in the moment. Looking up at the faceless mob of twenty thousand fans waving white towels. The Bell Centre is the largest arena in the league, sounding its approval of their captain. 

He lifts his stick high in the air as he skates to his team, waiting in a circle around centre ice. The entire team is hitting their sticks on the ice in sync as he skates up to join them. The lights are down, the arena glowing Voyageur bright, primary colour blue. He lets himself close his eyes for a half-blink. Here it is. 

There, in the ceremony of it all, like the cool blue heart of flame. Hot enough to melt, Captain of the Montreal fucking Voyageurs. The feeling lives under his shoulder blades, cupped there. His thundering pride is a physical feeling running through his body that blazes past the singular focus of hockey, right down to his heart. 

They trounce Toronto, 4-1. Shane has over twenty minutes of ice time, and he makes the most of it by scoring twice. It would be too much to ask for a hat trick during his first regular-season game as Captain. But hockey is where Shane always expects more. 

Afterwards: his hair, already soaked in sweat, is greasy from hands rubbing his head, hands that grab around his shoulders to shake him in celebration where that feeling still sits, lifting him like wings to the upper bowl of the Bell Centre, which is so steep that the fans look like a flat wall from the rink, an imposing wall of devotion that other teams have to play under. 

He leaves his hair greasy and wild when he steps into the hall to do press about the season ahead. Happiness cracking the icy facade. 

——

The real churn of the hockey season begins in October, starting immediately with a weeklong west coast road trip. Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Francisco, Phoenix. The heat is receding from Montreal, and the brittle crisp of fall is here, just in time for the team to fly to California’s eternal warmth. 

His mother has scheduled meetings while he’s in LA. Yuna is coming out to meet him there, overlapping for an afternoon photoshoot with a new brand deal: Rolex. His first non-athletic sponsorship. Proof, his mom says, of his brand relevance and cross-market appeal into the luxury space. 

She’s driving to Montreal and taking the six-hour flight just to have two meetings and attend this photoshoot. It’s another milestone along the way. 

When you drive from Ottawa to Montreal, there’s a big blue sign as you cross the border to Quebec. But it doesn’t feel like anything has changed for kilometres and kilometres, other than the fact that the highway signs are in French, they say Sortie instead of Exit. The signs change but, the drive and the landscape are the same. The flat, farmed fields do not reflect that a line has been drawn in the rocky soil. The trees are all the same. It’s half an hour past the border into Quebec, in Vaudreuil, that it feels like you’ve arrived in a new province. In Vaudreuil, traffic crunches to a stop because there are suddenly stoplights on the highway. Montreal, the island, a city older than cars, stalls your arrival. That is when it feels like you have arrived somewhere new. 

Shane has passed all the signposts—the draft, his NHL debut, Rookie of the Year—but this season feels like he is really somewhere new. Not just making it, but made it. He has to be focused. He cannot let himself be distracted. He has been good, so good so far, at ignoring the worst distraction for the whole of last season, no matter how much the distraction has texted him. It has felt good to prove to himself that he can ignore it. 

As of this season, his mom has quit her job to manage his career full-time. They hired a lawyer and signed a contract they both agreed to, bringing in a third party to ensure the split is equitable and clearly communicated to both of them. 

She isn’t, she reminds him all the time, his employee or his boss. It’s a partnership. 

In Los Angeles, at the start of this weeklong road trip, Shane skips the voluntary pre-game skate and takes a taxi to his photoshoot. One of the downsides to the endless rhythm of hockey travel is how often he has to let someone else drive. Shane prefers driving. Too long in a car and he gets motion sick, too long with nothing to do and he gets antsy, useless. 

Los Angeles is a shock to his system. A city large enough to support two hockey teams closer together than the drive from Montreal to Ottawa. A city of sprawl. He has never been here long enough to drive all the way out of the city, but he figures it must stop somewhere. It feels endlessly unfamiliar with its wide boulevards, dry wind, and spindly palm trees grown skinny into a cloudless sky. 

It’s October and nearly thirty degrees in Los Angeles. Scaldingly hot for the few steps between the hotel and car, the car and his destination. The photoshoot is in an industrial space, hockey-rink cold despite the weather. 

Rolex is a watch brand, so he assumed the photos and videos would be of his wrist, upper body at most. But a production assistant hands him in a full suit, and then someone else does his makeup and his hair. His face feels strange covered in a layer of airbrushed makeup on it. It feels like he’s skated hard and has let the sweat dry on his face. His hair is smoothed away from his face, exposing him to the lights. Looking in the mirror, it’s like a versio of himself run through a filter. Changed, pampered, and ready, he steps out to the studio and his mother greets him, adjusting the collar of his shirt. 

“This suit looks nice on you,” Yuna says. “Did they say who made it?”

Shane shakes his head. It was handed to him. 

And then he is surrounded by a new flurry of people, positioned against a sky-blue fabric pulled taut. The tenseness in his stomach, in his abs, makes his shoulders stiff. He rolls his shoulders between takes, instructed to stand with his arms across his chest. Someone comes and adjusts his cuff to make the watch on his wrist visible. He pretends to put the watch on and off, touching the small silver dial on the side like he’s adjusting it. He thinks about his face and then tries not to think about it as someone tells him what to do with it. 

People buzz around. He’s told that the watch on his wrist costs fifteen grand. He assumes that’s American dollars.

After they wrap, the brand representative from Rolex, flown out from New York, emerges from the edge of the room. She is wearing a sort of suit with a sweater under it. Confusingly, her honey blonde hair is tucked into the turtleneck and has stayed like that, intentionally, all morning. She tells him how great the photos look already before he changes back into his own clothing. 

There’s a table full of untouched sandwiches, and Shane takes two of them and goes back to his mother and the brand rep, who are standing at a tall table. His mother taps the edge of her phone unconsciously on the tablecloth next to her as they talk. 

The brand rep is explaining the production process to follow. Rolex is licensing clips of him from the NHL to go along with the photos taken today. Clips of him skating, at practice, marketing assets. The ad’s story has something to do with him always knowing the time. Suddenly, the brand rep says, “And we were intrigued to see Scott Hunter join the Voyageurs.”

“Oh,” his mom answers, “Do you work with Scott Hunter?”

“We haven’t done any editorial work like this with him,” she waves a hand behind her, toward where assistants are dismantling the set, “But he’s on our allocation list. We’d love it if you were both wearing a piece from the same line for high-visibility events.”

“Right,” Shane says, dabbing his face. He bites delicately into the sandwich, which dusts his knees with crumbs. He feels childish as the only one eating, but he has a caloric schedule to maintain and a game later today. He is the subject of the ad, the conversation, and also completely unnecessary here. 

“Are you looking to do… editorial work with Hunter?” Yuna asks. “I don’t have his team’s information.” 

“No, no,” the rep shakes her head, dislodging strands from the turtleneck. “We know Shane already has a clear media story with Ilya Rozanov. We’re not interested in diluting that narrative! We’d just be open to loans for relevant appearances.”

“Well, I’m sure we could discuss something,” Yuna answers. “There are the NHL awards at the end of the season.”

The conversation swings to which Rolex lines would best fit his demographic. Shane doesn’t even like wearing a watch. It’s just another thing to take off, an annoyance on the wrist when moving through the world. 

His drive back to his hotel later takes him past the Staples Centre, where they’re playing later. It’s a double-header day: the massive venue hosts two basketball teams and a hockey team. Today, game day, there’s a basketball game before the hockey game. A team of 50 people will dismantle the court and set up a rink in its place. Shane has watched YouTube videos about every arena he plays in. Partly research, partially he just likes the calm feeling of long-time-lapse videos. He’s watched a video of how it works, and he knows that the basketball boards, the stadium for concerts, all of those happen over the scuffed hockey rink. 

The ice is always there, waiting. Boston, too, shares their arena with a basketball team. Diluting the narrative, he repeats to himself on the drive. 

Shane falls bonelessly to sleep in his hotel room. Later, when he heads to the game, he does not tell anyone where he spent his morning. It’s LA, lots of people skipped practice to do something, somewhere in this busy city. His mother texts him later, before his game, that her meeting with Reebox went well. A notification pops up, an event has been added to has calendar in a few months. 

——

From Los Angeles to Anaheim is a bus drive. And then, under two hours flight to San Francisco.  

“Planes, trains, and automobiles,” Hayden sighs next to him, putting on an eye mask for the flight. Shane watches footage of the Mission to memorize their gameplay, see how their refs call shots.

One part of being a captain that he is looking forward to: the definitive responsibility of being the representative for the other players, of skating to the refs, and learning what a call was. Visibility, authority, on the ice, where he knows all the rules. They win in LA, lose in Anaheim and San Francisco. Early season, still figuring it out. 

Their last stop is Phoenix, in an arena only three-quarters full and half the size of a home game, and they win 6-1. For scheduling reasons, they stay the night, and their flight home the next day doesn’t leave until mid-afternoon. Most of the team is excited to play golf at one of the many private clubs someone always seems to have a membership at or an invitation to.

Hayden extends an invite, Shane tells him he’s busy, which is most of the way to the truth. 

After a week on the road, he always has a bit of a loopy, displaced feeling. He brings his own house shoes on the road, always has, even in Juniors, when roommates made fun of him for being girly or weird. They make him feel comfortable with all the travel, just a pair of cheap fabric slides to wear around the hotel room. By the end of a roadie, he is always looking forward to putting his feet into his own proper slides, the pair he keeps at home. He’s used to all the travel, just as he’s used to the loosened knot of relief when it’s over. 

He has breakfast in his room, catches up with his mom over the phone, and then follows up with a workout. Restless energy, no ice time today. Nothing on the schedule for a few blank hours. 

He goes down to the sun-bright hotel restaurant, where he finds Stedlund and Hunter having lunch. The restaurant is a large, beige room, mostly empty of other guests, dotted with heavy stone tables. Everything in Arizona is sand coloured, a reminder of the vast desert the city has metastasized over. 

Hunter and Stedlund are sitting with half-finished beers and a full plate of fries between them. Hunter nods and waves him over. 

“Joining for lunch?” Stedlund asks, gesturing to the fries, “Please, share.”

Shane drops into the open chair next to Hunter and reaches for a menu. 

“Didn’t go out for the golf tourney?” Hunter asks. 

“No, it’s not really—I had a meeting.”

“You both always make an excuse,” Stedlund says, lifting his glass and nodding at Hunter across from him. “I just tell them very clearly that I don’t want to play their boring sport.”

“I didn’t make an excuse this time,” Hunter says, picking up a fry and popping it in his mouth. “I slept in.”

“It’s true,” Stedlund says, glancing at him, “Hunter, you’re a changed man in Montreal.”

“I resolved to stop faking shit I didn’t want to do in the first place,” Hunter says, sounding weird. 

Stedlund, across the table, tilts his head, looking at Hunter. Shane glances between them but is saved by the server's arrival. He orders his lunch, ginger ale, and a Southwest chicken bowl. 

Shane asks Stedlund, even though he already knows, “You were on the Admirals, right?” 

“Before the Cougars, I played three wonderful seasons with Scotty and the Admirals,” Stedlund answers. Stedlund came to the Cours last year, after one year on the Florida Cougars. 

“Wonderful is one word for it,” Hunter says, shaking his head. He turns to Shane and says, “So you avoid golf too?”

“I‘ve gone golfing before,” Shane rebuffs.  

“We’ve all gone golfing,” Hunter chuckles. “But do you avoid it?”

Shane admits, “Uh, sort of. It is kind of boring. I didn’t totally hate it when I’ve played for like, charity tournaments. Or with my dad sometimes. But,” he unrolls the napkin, placing the cutlery on his plate and then unfolds the napkin one crease at a time and places it on his lap. “If I wanted to drive in circles that badly, I would’ve become a Zamboni driver.”

Hunter laughs and agrees, “Less sunburn risk.”

“And you can still drink and drive,” Stedlund says. 

“One of the drivers at my practice rink growing up got a DUI on the Zamboni,” Shane says, suddenly remembering. “The rink was closed for a week because she clipped one of the boards.”

“Damn,” Stedlund says. “What happened to her?”

“She didn’t get hurt or anything. I think she just got fired. I was nine, so I didn’t really understand what was going on until later. I was just kinda glad to miss a practice. Stayed home and played Nintendo 64.”

“Mmm,” says Hunter, a murmur of agreement. “Super Mario?”

“Goldeneye,” Shane answers. “My neighbour and I played together. But he was way better than me because… y’know.”

“Practice,” Hunter says, not a question.

“It’s hard to imagine you wanting to skip a practice,” Stedlund says to him. 

Shane shrugs and says, “I was young. Not competitive yet.”

Probably a year after that is when Shane hit his first growth spurt, when hockey went from something he was good at to something he was better at than anyone else by a margin that grew steadily through puberty. By the time he was ten, he was no longer young, no longer small, and his neighbour wasn’t inviting him to play Goldeneye anymore. 

“Hunter not making excuses, Hollander admitting he once skipped a practice. I’m learning so much,” Stedlund says. “‘Maybe Phoenix isn’t so bad.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Scott says. 

“Their team won’t either,” Shane adds. 

The server cuts in to drop off Shane’s ginger ale along with Hunter and Stedlund’s food. Shane eats some of their fries as the conversation slips into small talk, league gossip. 

Later, after lunch, Shane stands outside the hotel waiting for the bus that will take them all to the airport. He is, as always, the first one here, packed and ready to go. Across the street, visible through decorative, twisted trees, is a large grey parking lot. On either side of the pickup where he is standing are two more parking lots. A desert wind blows through the trees, across the scorched tarmac of the parking lots, lifting the hair off Shane’s forehead. It’s so hot it feels like standing behind an idling bus. 

Hayden, flushed from the sun, is the next person out of the hotel doors. 

“Hey man, missed you on the green today,” Hayden says with an affectionate punch. “Meetings go well?”

“Yeah. They ran long. Sorry, I missed it,” Shane answers. 

—— 

Shane has had a point every game this season. They are playing Boston in a week. In the lead-up, he has taken to carrying his phone with him everywhere, not letting it charge out of sight like he usually does. He checks it first thing after practice, after PT, after team meetings. 

He scores his first hat trick against Pittsburgh during a home game, the last two goals off Hunter’s assists. The third goal hits the net with seconds to go at the end of the second period. The picture online tomorrow: Shane with an open-mouth roar of adrenaline, gloved fist in the air, Hunter next to him, pointing down the barrel of the camera at the sight before them: a dozen hats on the ice.

Shane breaks routine and checks his phone during the intermission before the third period. He knows the schedule, he knows they’re the only Atlantic division game tonight. On his phone is one text. His mom, a photo of the TV at home that says “Yes!!!” 

Back to the ice, third period, quick shifts, and a final win of 5-2. In the locker room someone starts calling them “Hollzy and the Huntsman,” which is overheard by the attending press scrum. It’s not the headline, but it’s the story the next day. 

He’s not waiting for any particular texts, even with the game next week; he has a busy schedule. Practice, games, press, and scheduled rest. But he is wondering. He’s been avoiding Rozanov for almost a year. It feels good to control this one thing. In a life full of things he just agrees to, Rozanov keeps asking, and Shane lets his desire take root, something stable that can say: No. Try again. 

Two days before their flight to Boston, Shane is watching Edmonton play Vancouver at home when the text arrives:

[Lily]: is old man keeping you too busy

[Lily]: or do you want to see what a real hockey player can do

Shane frowns. He’s slumped low on the couch, upper body almost flat. He puts his phone face down on his chest and stares at the movement of the game on his TV, unseeing. Scans over to the skyline visible from his apartment, the constellation of office building lights left on. For the last year, he has mostly responded by not responding. The power of keeping something at arm's length, of knowing the rules and following them. Annoyance makes him pick up his phone and type in a flurry. 

[Jane]: I’m owning you in points rn asshole

[Lily]: owning asshole 

[Lily]: okay 👍 

Shane worries his bottom lip, staring at the phone. He types several messages and deletes them before throwing down his phone. On the TV, an insurance commercial of a tree falling on a car. Shane picks up his phone again and sets a challenge. 

[Jane]: Catch up, and we’ll see. 

 [🅢🅗]

After his miserable last season in New York, a small part of Scott, the part that had fomented and grown leathery wings in the weeks spent alone in the dark, was afraid the rumours were true: he is past his prime, too weak, too slow. 

It turns out the path to playing the best hockey of his life is simple: blow everything up and get himself on a line with a centre who doesn’t let up for even a second. Hollander is a better defensive centre than he’s ever played with. Theriault, once he trusts what Scott is good at—speed, agility, accuracy—puts him on the ice relentlessly.

As snow lands in Montreal, Scott hears from his agent again. The whole hockey-watching world, even his own damn agent, was holding its breath to see what would happen with the trade. If it would prove Scott as a valuable investment by Montreal or a distressed asset offloaded by New York. He has put up 32 points by November when his agent calls. 

“Good news, Scotty,” his agent starts—no other greeting. “Under Armour wants to bring you in for a Spring campaign for the Canadian market.”

“Good news,” Scott sighs. He is standing over his couch, stretching his hamstrings. 

“Your Montreal rumspringa isn’t scaring the brands away,” Todd says, “Probably helps to be seen alongside Shane Hollander. Kid has great brand recognition. Clear story. Memorable face,” Todd says, almost wistful in Scott’s ear. 

Scott thinks of Hollander’s face as he sees it most: helmeted, mouth guarded, looking ready to tear a bite out of something. Most often, he sees Hollander’s face from the side—on the bench, at practice—the sharp cut of his profile is the kind of face they used to venerate as statues.

“Anywho,” Todd says, blithely ignoring the silence, launching into a lengthy explanation of the timeline for the UnderArmor photoshoot and campaign. Scott will stay an extra day in New York, after their back-to-back away games against Boston and New York. 

This season they have played New York once in Montreal—won by two—but this game is the first time going back to his old home ice. 

At the game in Boston, Scott readies himself at the wing for the puck drop. He watches Hollander and Rozanov face off, the referee standing between them. He’s never witnessed the rivals up close: they say something to each other, inches from the ref, but too quiet for Scott to hear. They look like they’re the only idiots in the room. Rozanov’s impish grin around his mouthguard. Scott catches only the word chance from Hollander. 

It’s a messy, physical game. Scott gets one in, but it’s contested for interference, noisily celebrated by Boston fans. In the intermission, they’re treated to one of Hollander’s rare motivational speeches. His style, Scott has observed, is to guide from the back—leading the pack in drills, providing pointers, and setting a relentless example, a pace to be met. 

But in Boston, before the third period, Hollander clears his throat to get the room’s attention. He says, “We can show up better than this. Clean it up, boys.” And then he claps his hands like he’s washing his hands with the whole ordeal.

They win 4-3, Hollander scores twice. Scott is unshackling his gear as Hollander answers questions from the media scrum. He looks radiantly happy as he deflects a question about his rivalry with Rozanov, saying something about “We’re motivated by teams that put up a good fight.”

It’s Scott’s first game in Boston as a Cour, as an entry in the great legacy of one of sport’s greatest rivalries. The energy is high: the team celebrates at the Irish pub in the lobby of their hotel. He leeches onto the infectious merriment; hope like new blood. He nurses a beer until it's warm and loses its condensation. Hollander spends the evening looking at his phone. 

The next day, New York. It’s strange to be in the visiting team room at Madison Square Garden. And it’s stranger still to skate out to the sounds of reticent boos. Not a full dismissal, but not a welcome. Standing by the bench, Carter Vaughn taps Scott’s shoulder with his stick to say hello. Scott grins and taps him back. 

They’re on a hot streak: another win, 2-0. Montreal’s defense shuts the Admirals out. His former team’s weak defense leaves the path open for him to score a goal in their rink in front of their audience. His former crowd boos him with force. It’s another home Scott has left without a trace. The goal is a gift, repayment for the year prior, earned with the blood of last season, as the calendar careens into December, his least favourite time of year, the worst month. 

Hockey is the good part. The day after their game in New York, he stays behind to do a photoshoot in a warehouse so cold that he has to wear pasties while he jogs on a treadmill and then gets dinner with Carter at a Thai place in Nolita. 

Hockey is the reward. He flies home on brand money. His empty apartment is filled by the wins, by the memory of standing in Madison Square Garden and not hearing the Admirals' goal song. Hockey pays for the creak of his floorboards when he gets up in the middle of the night and opens Grindr at 2 am just to see the profiles, the distances, the possibilities on the other side. He closes the app without messaging anyone. 

Hockey is the easy part. The cleaner who makes sure the gaps in his floorboards stay empty of dust, who rotates his suits. The food service, the physio, the organized schedule of events emailed by his agent's assistant. Everything streamlined to an empty efficiency, as few choices as possible. 

Hockey is the obligation. He agrees to fly back to New York for less than 24 hours in January to attend the St. Thomas gala. He gets off the phone with them and looks at his calendar, at the dates ahead, at what December will bring. 

——

One of Scott’s post-concussion convalescence requirements is to leave the house every single day, even rest days. His neighbourhood is hibernating. The difference between winter in Montreal and New York is that the snow stays here and landlords aren’t required to shovel. The sidewalks are treacherous when he takes himself out for a walk. 

His day off ritual: walking down St-Viateur, across Parc to buy two bagels and a coffee. He tears into the first bagel and eats it in doughy chunks, fresh enough to warm his fingers through the cold. 

On the corner, there is a cafe with giant glass windows that span the whole corner, making the shop an aquarium, visible from both angles. The coffee bar is tucked next to a men’s clothing—giant mahogany wood apothecary counter, warm against cold white tile. 

The barista behind the counter recognizes Scott from his other visits. He is the reason Scott has chosen this cafe: broad-shouldered, curly-haired, with a permanent five o’clock shadow. Hot in an obvious way. His arms are crossed when Scott walks in, a loping fox tattoo across the forearm in front. 

“The usual?” the barista asks. 

“I’m a man of routine,” Scott says. 

“I can see that,” the barista smirks. 

“You must have other regulars ordering the same thing every day,” Scott retorts, mock-defensive. 

“Definitely,” the barista says and then adds, “You seem normal, don’t worry.”

“No promises,” Scott says. Leonine hunger rears its head. He takes another bite of bagel. 

“Normal for a hockey player, at least.” The barista sets Scott’s coffee—a cappuccino—on the counter with a goading smile. 

Scott crosses from where he was sitting and says, “Ah, my cover is blown.”

“It’s Montreal, and you,” Kip points at him, “are Scott Hunter.”

Scott is no longer in New York, where he can count on even a moment of anonymity.

“Caught me,” he says. “Now we’re at odds. What’s your name?”

The barista motions to his chest and says, “Kip.”

“Nice to meet you,” Scott says. Kip picks up the cardboard cup from where he set it on the counter and holds it over to him. Scott goes to grab it. Lets his fingers trail intentionally over Kip’s. 

Kip looks at their hands, at Scott’s fingers on his, and then locks eyes with Scott who looks like a hound dog in front of a plate left out overnight. Kip says, out loud: “Holy shit.” 

Scott hears the clanging of a bell in his head, the ring of danger, bad idea, turn around. The bell is a ghost; it’s every good idea he ever avoided. It’s the cautious face of Shane Hollander and the ashen decade ahead of the kid. It’s the fact that it’s December. It’s the fact that Scott says, “See you tomorrow, Kip.”

—— 

A week later, at the team’s Christmas charity fundraiser gala, Scott is humming along to the music. He really fucking hates Christmas. Because of season scheduling, the “not officially mandatory but socially required” Christmas gala is mid-afternoon on December 15th. It’s an extra affront to be forced to do Christmas early and to have to do it twice. He’s standing on the edge of the room, crawling out of his skin, when he finds himself being stalked like prey by Yuna Hollander in a navy velvet dress. 

“Scott Hunter,” she says, hand extended. He shakes it. “Yuna Hollander; Shane’s mother.”

It’s a Christmas event: parents, spouses, and children are here. Scott is, obviously, alone. 

“Nice to meet you,” he answers. 

“You’ve been playing well,” she says. “Worked on your edges this season. You always play better when you’re fast.”

Scott laughs, “Well. Maybe taking the pressure of the C off my chest helped.”

They’re facing the room at large, and she nods, staring out over the crowd. By way of responding, she turns to him and says, “Shane told me it was your idea to host team dinners at a restaurant.”

Scott blinks. This was almost three months ago now, he’d totally forgotten. “Oh, yeah. It was my suggestion. I wasn’t sure if he—it was a nice dinner. That reminds me, I should ask him, I used to host a Christmas thing. Obviously, I assume Shane is celebrating with you. But there’s usually some Europeans around. I’d like to do that here, but I don’t want to step on his toes.”

She looks at him, he can feel her eyes scanning his face, an unreadable expression. “He is coming home for Christmas. But that sounds like a nice tradition.”

“It’s nice,” Scott says. It’s either host his own dinner or recreate the Fairytale of New York, which feels less apt here in Montreal. He takes his drink off the table and sips.

Yuna places her clutch on the table and drums a manicured hand on it. “How has it been since the trade? Did you keep your endorsements?”

Scott swallows, “Most of them. Brands with a presence here. My agent kept pushing for a Bud Light spot that is out now. He’s threatening me with Tim Hortons, but I’m not sure I read Canadian enough.”

Yuna raises an eyebrow and says, “Your mother was from here, wasn’t she?”

Scott coughs, surprised by the frankness of the question. He dabs his mouth with his hand. “Yeah, Montreal. But she left for a hockey scholarship at RIT. We didn’t… visit all that often.”

“I grew up on the West Island,” Yuna says, that unreadable expression gone to softness. “I played a little, too. I wasn’t very good.” 

Scott forces himself not to do the math. Yuna is younger than his mother; there would be no overlap, they would’ve played in different leagues. Her stare, here, at this miserable time of year, daggers through him, a shard of glass in the eye. He coughs to cover it up. Yuna places a hand, just briefly, over his, and then leaves it. 

“So,” she clears her throat. “Probably not Tim Hortons. Who does your strategy?”

“Uh, my agent,” Scott says with a nod. 

The softness clears into renewed focus, “Your agent also does brand management?” 

“Well, the agency. It’s a full-service operation, someone makes the decisions and the deals and then delivers me paperwork to sign,” Scott says. “I prefer to deal with fewer… people.”

He has always tried to keep his circle manageably small. Fewer loose ends. 

“I see. Well. You’re the highest-profile player on Shane’s roster. Can you give your agent my number?” she says, unclipping the clutch on the table and pulling a business card out of it. 

“Sure,” he says, taking the card. 

“I hope you do that Christmas party,” she says, tucking the clutch under her arm. 

Scott spends the rest of the afternoon making small talk, watching the way bodies pose for heartwarming photos, the ease of arms around a loved one's body. Aching from eye to heart. 

Scott is an uninhabited island, watching from the shore. The party wraps up before dinner. Everyone else has somewhere to be this time of year. 

Scott gets a cab back to his apartment. The sun is long down by 6:30. Scott stands in the dark, still in a suit, for five minutes, his hands wearing circles into the back of his couch. 

Two paths stretch before him: opening Grindr and throwing himself on whatever pyre is available. Or, taking off his suit jacket, tie, and putting on his largest parka, the one with the hood deep enough to be anonymous in the dark and stumble down the icy road. Walking into the coffee shop, where Kip is in the middle of brushing crumbs out of the pastry shelf. Risk it all on a total stranger, the bells now ringing too loud to overthink: “When does your shift end?”

In the worst month of the year, he chooses the better path. 

——

Two hours later, Scott returns from his en-suite bathroom to where Kip is still naked in his bed. Scott is thirty years old, and no one has ever said his real name while he’s been on his knees before. They have not talked much. Scott feels like he has been skating for hours, heart-racing high. Kip is lying upside down, with his back on the mattress and his heels on the wall, where a headboard would be if Scott had one. 

“What are you doing?” Scott asks from the doorframe. 

Kip looks over at him, upside down. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m baby trapping you. This is my chance at financial security.”

“Oh?”

“I poked a hole in the condom. I’m hoping this one sticks,” Kip answers, flexing his feet against the wall. A bad tattoo of Homer Simpson on his ankle moves as he does so. He shimmies his pelvis for emphasis. 

“Oh, sure,” Scott lies down on the bed so his head is next to Kip’s but upside down. Kip turns to look at him. Scott adds, “What are we naming our bundle of joy?”

“Christopher, obviously, after me.”

“I thought your name was Kip?”

Kip’s eyebrows shoot up. “Kip is a nickname.”

They are lying eye to eye. Scott wants to bite Kip’s brow bone. He gives in to the impulse, leans in, and nips at Kip’s eyebrow. Kip makes a noise like, ack, backs away, Scott chasing him with teeth gnashing. Scott brackets Kip’s face with his elbows, hovering above. 

“Kip, short for Christopher. I like it.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Scott flops back next to him, and Kip explains, “I’m stretching out my back and hamstrings. I have chronic back pain from bad habits while painting."

“You’re a painter?” Scott asks. 

Kip laughs again and says, “Damn, you really know nothing about me. I could ruin your life with a phone call.”

Scott twists, somehow lighter to acknowledge this truth, “Is that the plan?”

“We’ll see,” Kip says, laughing. “Maybe you’ll ruin mine.”

Scott sits up and grabs his phone from the nightstand. “Christopher, what?”

“Huh?” Kip says, arching and stretching his back. There’s an audible noise when he does so. 

Scott wants to crawl into the space between Kip’s arched back and the mattress and live there. A more pressing question raises its head. He asks, “What’s your last name?”

“Grady.”

Scott settles onto his back, his head near Kip’s stomach as he holds the phone over his head, assessing the search results. “Christopher Grady, Concordia MFA student?”

“That’s me,” Kip says. 

“Hey, your paintings are good,” Scott says. On his phone is Kip’s website, a portfolio of large-scale paintings, a mix of abstract, ethereal landscapes, as well as portraits of men, sinewy muscles contorted in dance-like poses, sensual and dreamy, sometimes among the landscapes. 

Kip drums his feet on the wall and says, “This is the weirdest day of my life.”

Scott drops the phone to his left and turns his head to lick Kip’s hip across the edge of another tattoo. Chaos, like a dart thrown over his shoulder, not looking where it lands. Scott says, “I want to see you again.”

“Well,” Kip props himself up, “You know where I work.”

Scott leans his head on Kip’s stomach and says, seriousness passing over him like a shadow. “And you know where I work.”

“How does this go? Should I expect a fat stack of paperwork and an NDA coming my way?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never done this before,” he adds quickly. “It’s complicated.” 

“Well. Does it have to be complicated?” Kip asks, lifting his hip up against Scott’s face. With a laugh, Kip adds, “I can keep it a secret. Look how easy it was to get me in bed.”

Scott, for whom nothing has ever been easy, who exclusively takes the hard route professionally, says: “Sure. I can be easy.” 

Later, Kip, back in his boxers, crouches over a heavy nylon messenger bag with a yellow pinecone logo beckoning from its sun-worn black front. The bag opens in one long, loud rip of velcro. Kip pulls out a pre-rolled joint and hands it to Scott like an offering. 

Scott opens a window, not wanting to get dressed and step outside, be seen by his neighbours. The open window leaks cold air into the kitchen, a shocking cold dose of reality. Kip hops onto the kitchen counter and leans to the window, wind in his hair as he blows smoke out of it. Scott stands between Kip’s knees and watches him smoke. It’s not the summer, and it’s not Europe. Scott takes two hits and then opens his mouth to let Kip shotgun a plume of smoke between his lips. Not enough to get high, just enough to blank out the ache in his knees and leave him languid when he asks Kip to stay the night. 

The old floorboards creak goodbye as Kip leaves in the early morning light. On the kitchen counter, Scott finds a phone number written on a torn-out page of thick sketchbook paper. 

——

Scott shows up to their next game, a home game against Edmonton, with energy burning like an electric current under his skin. He’s never fucked or been fucked so close to a game. Both, even, in twenty-four hours. Some part of him is afraid it’ll be bad luck, and he needs to go twice as hard to beat the odds. He laces his skates in a crowded locker room full of men who would call him a cocksucker without even knowing that they’re right or how great it feels to be one. Maybe the stupid part was not doing this the whole time. 

If the last ten years of purgatory almost killed him, how much worse could hell be? 

He hits the ice that night with furrowed, determined brows that are captured on the Jumbotron. The roar of the Bell Centre when he scores hits right between the eyes. On the bench, he catches Hollander staring at him as he pours Gatorade into his mouth. Scott has a stupid look on his face, and he knows it. 

“Damn dude, you’re in a good mood,” says Pike, on his other side. 

“Hollzy and the Hunstman,” Scott says, jostling Hollander. “I want a goal tonight.”

“Okay,” Hollander says. “Don’t we all.”

A moment later, Theriault says, “Hollander, Hunter, Greenfeld, let’s switch it up, you’re up.” 

“Actually,” Hunter says, standing up to the gate. He calls back to Pike, “I’m going to score.”

Later, after press, showers, and a meeting. It’s nearly midnight and the team is milling about, making jokes. Scott catches Hollander halfway out the door. Standing in the antiseptic arena hall, he tells Hollander about his plans to host a small Christmas gathering for the handful of European players and anyone who has nowhere to go. 

“I assume you’re in Ottawa,” Scott says, knowing the answer. “But you’d be welcome.”

Hollander nods, “Thanks, yeah, I’m with my parents. But that sounds cool.”

“It’s something to do,” Scott says. “Christmas can get pretty grim.”

Hollander opens his mouth and shuts it, and then asks, “Is that something most teams do?”

“I think so. No one is ever surprised to get the invite,” Scott laughs, “I’ve heard some teams get kind of crazy with it, but I just do a dinner.”

“And it’s like, the European players and people with family—away?” 

Hollander is doing the thing that Scott is pretty sure he’s unaware he does, where he stares over your shoulder with an intensity like he’s collecting data from the wall behind you. The wheels click into place in Scott’s game-addled mind. Rozanov’s face-off grin flutters to the surface. 

“Yeah, it’s tradition. This old timer I played with years ago, before he moved back to Denmark, would invite people to his house. When he retired, I took up the mantle…” Scott pauses and asks, another dart thrown in the dark, “Do you wanna like, send a bottle of whiskey or something?” Shane’s eyes flick back to him. Scott adds, “To our dinner.”

“Oh, yeah. Good idea,” Shane says. He turns halfway and then adds, “Thanks.”

Later, after his apartment is scoured clean by his housekeeping service, and he sits around a dining table and chairs so rush-ordered they have a factory smell, looking at five Voyageurs over catered turkey and potatoes, Scott is sure to introduce the bottle as the captain’s whiskey. He doesn’t have enough glasses of his own, but he added rocks glasses to his tableware rental. 

The evening passes with the stilted relief of people happy to not be alone, while all aching for something unnamed. Later yet, in the dark of the night, Scott feels a skittering in his skin, the simmer of potential as he puts all the dirty dishes into the milk crates for pickup the next day. How easy it is to have a party, a room full of people, and then clean it up and make it disappear before the clock strikes midnight. 

Hockey, the good, the easy, the reward and the obligation will resume in a few days. The next day, December 26th, is a holiday for the NHL, and it’s a holiday in Canada, Boxing Day. It is also his mother’s birthday. December is the darkest month of the year. 

Scott wraps a scarf around his face, high across his nose, and goes to the park nearby where he ran during his summer. It’s a clear day, which means it’s deep, deep cold, sun bright over muddied snow. As promised, the park has been turned into an ice loop. He watches the families and couples skate, the same faces going past over and over again, here in his mother’s hometown. 

If he went back to his apartment and brought out his skates, hit the ice, he’d probably make someone’s day. It’d be a story they’d be telling for months, maybe years: the time they skated with an NHL star. With a Voyageur, specifically. The one-sidedness feels like brittle glass—another way for him to watch happiness from the sidelines. 

He fumbles in his pocket for his phone, taking off one mitten to unlock it. It’s cold enough that the air hits like needles. On his phone, thinking of you texts from a cousin, another from his mother’s best friend who checks in on him a couple times a year. He ignores them and opens the contact he has saved as K, and reaches for something solid.  

They've got cars big as bars, they've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you, it's no place for the old

Fairytale of New York - The Pogues

Chapter End Notes

there are almost no niche montreal references in this chapter. i will rectify this in the future.

Feel free to follow me on tumblr too.

Chapter 5: snow

Chapter Summary

Kip Grady goes for a walk. Ilya Rozanov goes for a swim.

Chapter Notes

Late afternoon, another day is nearly done / A darker grey is breaking through a lighter one 

One Great City - The Weakerthans 

Scott watches the Winter Classic on January 1st. The universe has delivered another cosmic joke: it’s the New York Admirals vs. St. Paul Nomads. They’re playing outside in the frigid Minnesota winter on a rink set up to look like an outdoor game of shinny. It’s Hallmark-cute. Scott sits with a Theragun on his left thigh as Carter Vaughn skates out to a noisy crowd in a crisp, faux-vintage Admirals jersey. The camera pans across the team, and Vaughn looks appropriately cheerful and focused. 

Scott picks up his phone and texts: Looking cute Vaughny. Too bad you can’t play in earmuffs. 

Behind him, the door opens. A cold blast of air hits the back of his ears like it’s coming straight out of his TV, the frigid Montreal wind seeping through the double doors. The stained glass window at the front of his apartment reveals the downsides of this beautiful old building. The cold seeps in: frost patterns the interior of his windows. Even with Scott’s metabolic rate making him, base-level, an eternal furnace, the baseboard heaters are pumping out hot air that Scott combats with a humidifier. 

From the freezing outside world, Kip Grady breezes in. He was away for the holidays, at some unspecified family location but has been back for a few days, working before the semester starts. Based on the vagueness of their text exchange, Scott does not probe. 

Scott twists his upper body, his lower body still trapped under the Theragun. 

“Hi, c’mon in,” he calls, as Kip toes off a pair of Blundstones that leak snowy water onto the plastic mat by the door, discards a wool coat, and reaches into a faded tote. 

“I brought you ginger cookies,” Kip says as a greeting, lifting and shaking the tin. 

Scott says, “Thank you.” Opens his mouth wide, “I’ll take one now.”

Kip circles the couch, taking out a cookie and leaving a Christmas-y tin on the coffee table. He climbs into Scott’s lap to feed him a cookie, one bite at a time. After, Scott grabs his wrist. Another tattoo, this one a big lopsided circle with his wrist bone at the centre. Scott kisses the bone. 

“What do your tattoos mean?” he asks. 

Kip cocks his head, “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“This one,” Scott taps the circle. 

“This one,” Kip leans back off Scott’s lap and holds his wrist aloft, “Means I was at a party in undergrad, and someone brought out a tattoo gun.”

“And a circle…?”

Kip returns his arm to the side of Scott’s head to rest on the couch. He leans in, his breath smells of ginger and coffee as he says, “My friend Elena says a crush is just a lack of information.”

Scott pouts, sliding a hand down Kip’s sweater, tipping his fingers under his belt, “But I’m so Googleable. Does that mean you can’t have a crush on me?”

Kip, a novel body under Scott’s shaking hands, presses Scott back against the couch and fits their bodies together. They don’t make it to the bedroom. Scott tastes sweet coffee-ginger, feels the warming burn of beard when Kip presses his jaw into Scott’s neck and jerks them off together, purring whinily into skin. 

It’s mid-afternoon, mid-week, mid-season. He picks his t-shirt off the floor to clean them up, finally warm after days of fighting the heater. He is struck by an unsatiated hunger, as Kip lifts his calf and inspects the bruise on his shin, almost clinically. 

“I watched a game,” Kip says, speaking directly to Scott’s leg, his thumb on a scar under the fading green. “I haven’t watched hockey since I was a kid. Had to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.”

“Well,” Scott says, flexing his calf in Kip’s hands. “Hockey is very real.”

Kip looks at him, unreadable, thumb still on the bruise, “I can see that. 

Scott asks, “Can you show me what you were working on?”

Kip pulls out a half-broken iPhone, a web of cracks across the screen distort the paintings on the screen. The paintings are nice, if not a little strange to Scott’s eye: bodies in motion in water. Kip tells him about someone named Hockney, making a bad joke of how similar the name sounds to hockey, and shows Scott paintings of men in Californian pools. But what Scott likes best is the swipe of Kip’s hand against his cheek because of how close he is sitting, his head on Kip’s lap. 

Kip was vague about his holiday plans, evasive about his tattoos. But Scott is nothing if not persistent. If a crush is a lack of information, Scott wants more than a crush. He’s had crushes before, and true to their name, they left him pulverized. They spend the afternoon just talking. Scott tells him about the parts of his life that are not on the Internet: boarding school and summers abroad. He learns that Kip spent three summers tree planting and then a year painting houses—all of which explains why this painter and barista is made of coiled, lean muscle and why he eats three-quarters of a rotisserie chicken with his hands while Scott agrees to speak at a St. Thomas fundraiser in the summer. 

When Scott ends his call and finds Kip in the kitchen, he finds Kip illuminated by the yellow glow of sunset, under-cabinet lighting on. It’s past four o’clock, and the natural light is fading fast. The icicles on his balcony drip in the dwindling light. 

Every porn search for boyfriend, romantic; every summer hookup—they all end after the sex part. Scott can’t remember the last time he talked this much or this easily. Maybe never. Maybe not even one single time. There’s a horror story here in between the brackets of intimacy, of waking up and discovering that he’s 30 years old and never kissed someone who made him laugh. He has been laughing all afternoon. Outside, the melting ice is loud and rhythmic as it hits the balcony, like a metronome or a timer counting down. 

Scott recognizes an obvious, vicious fact, the way a room looks smaller when it is empty of furniture: the enormity of his loneliness is put into perspective once someone else is there to measure it against. The more they talk, the more they create a secret to keep. Scott is a slowly melting spike of ice clung to an old roofline. 

“Sorry, I finished the chicken,” Kip says, looking up with a smile. 

“I’ve got food delivery in the morning,” Scott says. “Team nutritionist restocks meal kits on Mondays.” 

“Fancy,” Kip says flatly, rubbing one of his hands absently on his arm before he locks eyes with Scott again, a soft look on his face. “For a minute back there, I forgot about the whole…” Kip trails off and then waves a hand to the window. He swallows and looks at Scott, measured and straightforward. “The fact that you’re the actual, real-life NHL star I watched on my dad’s TV and who has a nutritionist on call—not some hot guy who keeps randomly inviting me over.”

“Can I be a hot guy who invites you over… not at random?” Scott asks, with a frown. Last month they said easy and easy for Scott Hunter means asking and doing. “I want you to stay over tonight. I want you to come over on Wednesday, after my game. I know you have school and work, but… My schedule is online. Like you said, I’m Googleable.” 

“Oh,” Kip says, pauses. His eyes dart across Scott’s face. “Okay.” 

For dinner, Scott goes to the high-end grocery store around the corner. The sun has melted the snow into panes of ice, and he has to penguin-walk through the dark to the store, then back to where Kip is waiting to reheat the frozen lasagna together. 

—— 

Two weeks later, during a post-away game team meeting in Dallas, Scott realizes he has maintained the ice time, assists, and points that usually elude him at this time of year. For the last three years, he has been prone to a mid-season slump. He does consistently pick back up enough to justify his salary. This year: no slump. 

Somewhere in the last two months, after their Boston-New York road trip, Hollander started leading the charge during their team-wide cross-training two days a week. Mobility, core work, strength training. Hollander isn’t likely to stand in front of a room and yell, but he somehow remembers everyone’s one rep max, their numbers from their last workout, and points out if someone’s slacking. 

To the competitive animal that lives under Scott’s skin, it is extremely effective to have a 21-year-old look down and say, “You did twelve reps last week, got another one in you?” 

Half a season in, and Scott has no better read on Shane Hollander than when he started. Hollander is a closed book, an airtight safe that only opens on the ice. Scott has looked up birthdays, made it a point to include injured players and healthy scratches during pre-game jokes. He goes to dinners he doesn’t want to attend in cities he’s never seen more than two blocks of. Now, he is laughing with the team under the rain of jeers during this away game in Dallas. 

All that extra work, the team bonding in the locker room, the mobility and stability: his focus and stamina haven’t waned. Scott is still getting used to Montreal media and the expectations of Montreal fans. Speculation on every inch of his performance, every swing of his stick, and debates about his age like he’s a stallion in the prime of its life or an old horse ready to be sent to the glue factory. Right now, this week, and this game, he’s worth betting on. 

After the game review, Theriault singles him out. They’re in a cinderblock hallway, between the video room and a wellness facility. Scott can hear the splash of someone descending into an ice bath. 

“I wasn’t sure what to make of it when management traded for you,” Theriault says, taking the games’ creased and used lineup card out of his pocket and looking at it appraisingly. 

Theriault has a habit of doing this: taking something out of his pocket—a whistle, one of his fancy pens, the game's notes—and looking at them while he talks to a player. It’s never a phone or something with new information; he needs to consult. It’s an object that successfully tells the millionaires in his employ that they are secondary to his attention. He continues, eyes down and lips pursed as he flips the paper over, “I was catching up with my friend Stankovic over the holidays, he told me about your… erraticness last year. Happy to see you stay steady,” He looks up with a magnanimous smile and says, “Let’s make sure it stays that way. You and Hollander are a great match right now.”

Stankovic was a skills coach on the Admirals, sycophantic and ambitious. There it is again: the fluttering animal in a trap. But it is weaker. His limbs do not have the numbness of panic: his hands and feet belong to him. Flexing his toes in his post-game shoes, he feels the solid ground beneath him. He has done the thing he swore never to do, and the world hasn’t collapsed. The defiance is an armour. 

“Absolutely,” Scott agrees, looking at the paper in Theriault’s hands and then he knocks his tired fist lightly against the wall. Here, here, here, his body chants as he steps into the locker room. 

The next morning, he boards the plane home. Hollander is there first, as he always is, and drops his phone as Scott walks by, that unguarded look on his face. Scott drops into a seat a few rows back and texts Kip before the plane takes off. 

[K]: Studio till late. After?

[Scott]: I’ll leave a key under the mat. 

Kip arrives after dark. The paint in his cuticles ends up in flecks on Scott’s skin. Scott shyly shows Kip a clip of the goal he scored in Dallas; Kip shows him the mark-making practice he was doing: big gestural swatches on canvases the size of a door. The next day, showering after practice in the big communal shower, Scott finds a triangle of green paint, like a freckle, on his ribs. He peels it off with a nail, glancing around. The most momentous thing, not notable enough to warrant a second glance from the teammates around him. 

——

Kip is over again when the All-Stars lineup is announced. For the first time in a decade, Scott was almost convinced he could get out of it, and for the first time in a decade he really has better ideas. Winter in Montreal is an indoor season: the city is blanketed in snow. It’s early on a Sunday morning, Kip has been in his apartment for almost three straight days, he’s wearing a pair of Scott’s sweatpants, and is reading a book on Scott's lap when Scott gets the email. 

“Is it fun, at least, getting to play with a different team or whatever?” Kip asks earnestly, not looking up from his book. “New, uh, lines?”

“It’s hot when you talk hockey to me,” Scott laughs. He thinks about the question, and his mind conjures up Hollander in his rookie year, all those years ago at All-Stars, watching Rozanov. The little exhale of breath. And now, having watched Hollander up close for the past four months, day in and day out, the fact that Hollander never involuntarily reacts like that. Scott worries the inside of his lip and answers. “Yeah, it gives us a chance to see guys we wouldn’t normally play with. Catch up with people. The actual games can be fun, sometimes.” 

Kip hums a that’s good response, and returns to his book. Scott drums his fingers antsy along Kip’s shoulder. Scott gets up and paces back and forth, putting away the breakfast dishes needlessly slowly, one dish at a time, so he has to go to the kitchen three times. Kip is still reading. Scott stands by the arch between living and dining spaces, shifting from foot to foot while scrolling on his phone. 

Kip looks up and says, “You really don’t want to go, huh?”

“I wanted to stay here,” Scott says and thinks: with you. 

“You’re going to burn a hole through the floor and then you’ll definitely be stuck here. Do you want to go for a walk?” Kip says, “Burn some energy?”

Scott swallows—they have not left the house together. Kip has come over two, sometimes three nights a week for the last three weeks. Spent more and more time here. Kip adds, “There’s a place nearby no one will see.” 

Scott agrees cautiously.  

They bundle up—Scott in that deep parka he bought for this move, the one that buries his head in shadows and fur. Kip in two thin jackets over his sweater. Together, they head out into the impossibly bright winter morning where the sun off the snow gives the world an absolving paper-white glow. 

“Follow me,” Kip says. He takes Scott up Scott’s street, past minivans, quiet houses, and leafless trees, to where his residential street ends and the industrial buildings begin surrounding the train tracks that Scott has not crossed since before the season began, just a block north. The streets are nearly empty this early. The sidewalk has narrowed from so much with the snow that they have to walk single file. Kip crosses the road into the industrial area to a large abandoned building, its grid of windows completely blown out. Written in graffiti across the building in yellow dripping paint are the words PEUR PEUR PEUR PEUR.

“C’mon. It’s just through here,” Kip says, and climbs into the open mouth of the abandoned building, and then turns to pull Scott through the fear into it. It is echoing and damp with snow drifts inside, dark corners in the distance as they cross through it. 

“What was this building?” Scott asks, finally able to walk normally on the ground without snow. 

“Not sure. This whole area was a, uh gare de triage?” Scott can’t help but laugh at Kip’s French and Kip shoves him playfully, “A train yard, I guess. Not sure what this building was.”

They reach the other side of the building, where steps take them down into a huge open field, a plane of white space with a set of train tracks on either side. There’s evidence of other people: tracks veer off in every direction in the snow. It’s enormous, maybe four rinks long, an unused, untended wedge of space in the middle of the city, hidden by empty industrial buildings and fences. 

“I had no idea this was here,” Scott says into the wide silence. “It’s huge.”

“They’re building a campus here in a few years. Won’t be empty for long.” Kip says.

Then, Kip turns and grins boyishly at Scott and takes off into the snow. Scott pauses for a confused second and runs after him, his long legs catching up easily. He plows into Kip, sending them both crashing to the ground. Snow seeps into his jeans, a temporary freeze. 

[🅢🅗]

All-Stars is in the middle of the season, when ratings and energy levels dip. The early-season excitement has waned, and the late-season rush to secure a playoff spot is months away. Shane is a few minutes late—which is to say, right on time—to the chartered flight. Hunter is already in a seat when Shane turns into the small cabin. 

Without a greeting, Hunter calls, “I thought I was going to get to Cabo for once,” from the depths of one of the bucket seats, in the section where four seats face each other. Hunter has thrown himself like a sad spider, legs sprawled. Shane takes the seat diagonally across and stretches, liberating his phone from his sweatpants pocket. It’s odd to be in a plane this empty. 

“There’s always next year,” Shane responds. 

Hunter laughs and says, “But this year is in Winnipeg.” 

“In January,” Shane adds. 

“The only place colder than Montreal. There must have been some kind of backroom sponsor deal,” Hunter says.

“Maybe they’re going to sacrifice us to Molson and make us play outside,” Shane retorts.

Hunter laughs and asks, “Have you checked the weather? I’m scared to look.” 

Shane grabs his phone from the armrest. There’s a text on the screen. 

[Lily]: ready to get warmed up?

He instinctively locks his phone and puts it down. When he glances up, Hunter is looking at him, head cocked. Distantly, Shane remembers he picked up his phone for a reason. 

“All good?”

“Oh, uh. Email from my building, got distracted,” Shane says and unlocks his phone again, pulling up the weather app to confirm. “Yep. It’s snowing.”

“If anyone shows up next week with a tan, I’m going to be furious,” Scott groans. 

They take off moments later. Shane turns on the new James Bond movie, but his mind feels abuzz. He picks up his phone again and looks at Rozanov’s message. They haven’t spoken since Shane’s challenge, a few months ago, for him to catch up in points. Shane’s text is sitting right above this one. 

He reads it again and then worries he is checking his phone too much. Glancing up: Hunter is fast asleep, mouth open. Shane goes back to the movie. Somewhere along the three-hour flight, he falls asleep as well. The plane jostles him awake as they come in for a bumpy landing in Winnipeg. 

Rubbing at his eyes the plane interior comes back into focus. Across the seats, Hunter is awake and typing on his phone. Shane stretches and Hunter’s stare catches Shane like a lighthouse, disappearing as Hunter puts his phone down. Shane leans over and opens the plane window: white snow is coming down in droves over the tarmac. 

“Jesus,” Hunter says. “If other flights get cancelled and we came here for nothing, I’m getting injured in the first game. Throw me into the boards.”

Shane laughs and stares out the window. The plane has come to a stop and he gets up to leave. Hunter says, still seated, “Hey, don’t worry about me, I need to make a personal call,” Hunter says. “I’ll get a cab.”

Shane pulls on his winter jacket and walks down the plane’s stairs, leaving Hunter behind. A car is waiting for him. It drives him through the desaturated landscape of a blizzard in Winnipeg. He’s been to the city before to play games, but never for more than a day. Usually, All-Stars is somewhere hot and nice, somewhere sponsors can be wined and dined. His teammates are resting at home or on vacation somewhere beautiful, and here he is in Winnipeg during a prairie winter. It is forty below, the same temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit. 

Most of the twenty-minute drive is through wide six-lane roads, grey with dirty snow with more on its way down. In the last minutes of the drive, they turn into Winnipeg’s downtown, which looks the same as so many cities that hockey has sent him to. A dense core of old buildings mixed with concrete slabs from the 70s, all hollowed out by the removal of industry. Just like every major Canadian city, there’s a Fairmont Hotel at the centre. The Winnipeg Fairmont is neither grand nor historic: it is a concrete rectangle, straight up, a grid of windows, surrounded by other buildings just like it. Shane has four days here to look forward to. 

He gets out of his car and drags his suitcase through a crunching channel of snow, high walls of plowed white on either side like a parted sea. It is mid-afternoon, but the snow and low clouds make the world feel close and quiet as he walks into a hotel crowded with NHL staff and stars.

His world is small. As though waiting for him, the person Shane most and least wants to see is standing in the lobby. Ilya Rozanov, the straps of a siren-red Canada Goose parka around his shoulders, is talking to another player by a set of escalators. 

It has been ages since he saw Rozanov out of hockey gear. Now: the straps of Rozanov’s parka dig into the well-developed arches of his trap muscles. Shane’s eyes are a fish on the hook of Rozanov’s jaw as he turns. Shane watches the jaw flex into a smile, remembers with force what it felt like to cup that bone, the light facial hair, the sharp point of his chin. The bystander Rozanov is talking to—Skinner, veteran defense from the Denver Blizzards—turns and spots Shane as well. 

“Oh shit, Rozy watch out,” Skinner says. “Hollander’s here.”

This year, the teams were decided by a fan vote. He and Rozanov are on opposing teams again. Rozanov’s eyes slide over Shane like a passing car. Shane wonders, not for the first time, how many other people Rozanov has texted like the one burning its way through Shane’s pocket right now. The thought sends an itch to his nose. 

“Ah, they invited him again this year,” Rozanov says to Skinner. They are less than 10 feet from Shane.

“Of course they invited the league’s point leader to All-Stars,” Shane says, recomposing himself and dragging his bag toward the escalators. 

“By three points,” Rozanov calls. 

“Good to know you’re tracking,” Shane says, stopping for a beat, turning to him. 

“I am told these numbers are important.”

Skinner glances between them and says. “Alright, boys, simmer down before one of you whips out a measuring tape.” 

Fear and embarrassment, heats through Shane. He grips his luggage handle, whitening his knuckles. Rozanov grins and says to Skinner, “Ah, you would like to see this.”

“God no, I’ll see enough of you in the locker room,” Skinner spits back. 

“There’s a lot to see. Make sure to take a step back to admire,” Rozanov grins. 

“As I was saying,” Skinner sighs with a roll of his eyes, and he glances at Shane before launching into a lengthy description of some concert, some band Shane’s never heard of. Shane nods at them both and turns to check in. Rozanov doesn’t watch him go. 

——

It sets his teeth on edge, this approximation of hockey with all the bite taken out. After their first practice with their makeshift team, there’s a lengthy photoshoot with celebrity ambassadors he’s never heard of, but one of his teammates’ wives is really excited about a guy Shane’s dad’s age with plasticky skin. It’s all the extra stuff, the business side, and it makes him wish his mom were here to be his face. 

That night, a long formal dinner with the suits. Across the room, Shane watches Rozanov in a black turtleneck overlaid with a blue triangle, emphasizing the span of his broad chest. Rozanov catches Shane’s eye and, without breaking eye contact, takes a long draw of his glass. Shane looks away, returning his attention to the conversation around him about some prospect who everyone thinks will be first pick in the draft this year. Shane puts a hand in his pocket, and sure enough—it buzzes. 

[Lily]: i know a better use for your mouth than this shitty food 

Shane reads it quickly and then pockets his phone. His desire is overwhelming, a torrent of need he cannot control. The wildness still feels foreign, an unfamiliar burn. He shifts his phone to his back pocket, waits for a lull in the conversation, and goes to bed without answering. 

Rozanov doesn’t text again. The next day is fan activities—a blur of strangers, signing and taking photos. Shane wants to like these kinds of events more, but he usually feels like a cardboard cutout of himself would do a similar job. Then, the skills competition: Shane protects his shot accuracy record and sets a new one for the breakaway challenge. He’s photographed pumping his fist, tongue out. 

The game the next day passes in a blur. His team wins. He checks Rozanov into the boards. Quiet in his ear, Rozanov says, “Is like that?” And Shane scores twice.   

Shane is in a good mood after dining with a crowd of players from teams he’s never spoken to, across lines, divisions, and conferences. He has loved being captain and the face of his team during real hockey, but he is relieved for the ease of an evening off that is still structured by the game he loves so much. The stuffy hotel lounge, carpeted and paneled in dark wood, lends the evening a dark, secretive clubhouse feeling. 

Somewhere along the line, someone suggests the hotel pool. Just like in Montreal, the downtown is all connected by deep tunnels to protect pedestrians from winter. But they have all played in Winnipeg enough to know there is not much nearby nightlife. A group of nearly twenty players troop up to the pool. Shane is powerfully aware of where Rozanov is in the room at any point. Shane is careful to keep a wide berth, even as people joke about them.

Shane has the feeling of swimming even before there’s any water. The pool deck is on the 21st floor; a small rectangle of turquoise in a black-and-white tiled room overlooking the city. Like everywhere in the hotel, it’s a little rundown, there’s cluster of plastic, peeling tables and chairs near the pool. He spots Hunter at one point talking to a player Shane doesn’t know at all and spinning his phone face down on a table. Shane spends a while catching up with someone he knew a little from Juniors. The evening floats along. 

Someone brings out cups from somewhere, and Shane joins a game of watery beer pong. He is a good shot: barely has to drink any beer. Rozanov is by the pool, his long legs in the five-foot deep end. No one has bathing suits, they’re all in their boxers. Shane looks away, and agrees to do a round in the cedar sauna attached to the pool. 

It is a bad idea: the beer sloshes in his stomach, his head swirls. He lurches out of the sauna and finds that the mood has shifted: people want to find a third location. There are no fans, no girls, at this hotel filled with NHL staff. There’s talk of calling a cab to a karaoke bar. Shane leaves with the crowd pretending to go to his room and get dressed. He has no intention of going anywhere else. As his room door shifts shut behind him, Shane realizes with another drop of his stomach that he left his phone behind. He has every notification off, everything hidden, but still. He stays in his room slippers and heads back to the pool.

At first, Shane thinks the pool area is empty. The signs of the party are still there: the pool deck littered with empty cups, half-crushed cans of beer near, but not in, a garbage can, chairs turned over. Shane heads to the sauna, sure he left his phone there. He is avoiding a puddle of beer when he hears a splash of water and turns. Rozanov is swimming on his back in the hotel pool. His vast, muscular body lit by the overhead light in the unnatural blue of the water, watching him. 

Shane stops in his tracks. 

“I thought you were going to the bar,” Shane says. 

Rozanov stops. The water is shallow enough that his entire upper chest rises out of the water when he stands—Shane’s eyes watch a drop slide down his neck and rest in the hollow of his clavicle. 

“I wanted to swim,” Rozanov says, not swimming. He wades toward Shane, arms twisting above the water. Shane can feel the bad idea approaching as he stands by the lip of the pool. His feet do not move. Rozanov says flatly, a statement and not a question: “You are avoiding me.” 

Under his breath, Shane whispers, “I’m trying to stay focused.”

Rozanov reaches out and wraps one of his large hands around Shane’s ankle. It’s the first time they have touched in over a year. Rozanov’s wet fingers press around his leg. 

Shane thinks of his body as a complicated machine he is in charge of. In a very real way, his body belongs to the Montreal Voyageurs. His body is an apparatus he tends to, feeds and maintains. It is a brand, image rights sold. It is the hockey machinery. It does not belong to him. Playing hockey from a young age has gotten Shane used to being touched constantly. A coach’s hand between the shoulder blades to correct form, movement of muscle by a masseuse, physio moving and manipulating limbs.  

And here, with this hand on ankle, is the problem with Rozanov. The problem: Rozanov is a pair of pliers. He reaches into the machinery and plucks the chord that connects Shane’s body, the physical fact of himself, to his brain. 

The wet hand circles Shane’s ankle—hockey strong and knobbly—wrapping it completely. 

“Okay. So I will help you focus,” Rozanov says, and presses firmly into the pulse point, his thumb fitting perfectly under the ankle bone. It sends a jolt, electric through Shane’s body. Hot, wet desire, need that is driven from his body to his brain instead of the other way around, like a newly awake animal. All of Shane’s careful calculations and mechanisms are overruled by brutish need. 

Shane’s breath catches in his throat. He stares down, not into Ilya’s eyes, which he knows would break the machine completely. He concentrates on the pool, blue like the eyes he is not looking at. 

“There are cameras,” Shane says, finally, voice small, shifting his weight slightly. Rozanov’s fingers move with him. 

“To see what?” Rozanov says, tracing his thumb in a circle, intimate and ticklish. It feels like he’s being touched somewhere no one has reached before, like an avenue of skin just for this hand. 

The door swings open. Scott Hunter enters and Shane’s stomach drops. Hunter’s eyes glance over the two of them and Rozanov’s hand slides back into the water. The air over Shane’s wet ankle is cold. Shane tries to calibrate what they look like.

“Oh shit, sorry, I was looking for—” Hunter stutters, and then scratches his neck and says, “Going to the bar, Hollzy?”

“Just getting my phone,” Shane says, his voice small. 

“Cool,” Hunter says, “I think I’m going to turn in, actually. See you on the plane tomorrow.” 

Shane closes his eyes. Waits a beat. There was nothing to see. Two rivals talking. 

“Hollzy?” Rozanov says, his voice echoes across the tiles. 

“That’s what my team calls me,” Shane shrugs it off. Hunter has never used this nickname before. 

“Right. And Scott Hunter is your teammate,” Rozanov says. He moves backwards into the water, toward the windows shining with city lights behind him. 

“Yeah,” Shane says. 

“How is this going? Sharing spotlight?” Rozanov asks. 

Shane’s eyes narrow. “I’m not sharing the spotlight. He’s in my spotlight.”

“Is this why team trades for him,” Rozanov says. “To give young captain advice elderly?”

Anger flares through Shane, pushing out everything else. It’s so much easier, such steader ground, “Fuck you.” 

Rozanov grins, undeterred in the water, shaking his wet curls and then twirls his fingers in the air and says, “The other way around, yes?” 

Shane takes a step back and says, “Maybe. If you can keep up.”

Rozanov laughs, high and satisfied. Shane grabs his phone from the shelf near the sauna where he left it. Shane leaves Rozanov to his solo night swim. 

——

Shane gets to the airplane first, taking a cab by himself and not waiting for Hunter. He puts his headphones in and pulls up Angry Birds. He flings the tiny icons across the screen, concentrating furiously as the blur of Hunter arrives and takes a seat across from him. They sit in silence as the plane takes off. 

“All good?” he hears Hunter, distorted by his noise cancelling headphones.

“Good game,” Shane says, trying for flatness. 

“So, you and Rozanov,” Hunter says with startling directness. Shane puts down his phone. Hunter is sitting upright, looking at him directly. “What’s the story there?”

“What, last night? We were just talking. By the pool.”

“That’s not what it looked like,” Hunter says. His voice is quiet over the hum of the airplane in motion around them. Part of Shane’s brain registers that they are having this conversation 30,000 feet in the air. Hunter is wearing a pair of sweatpants and rolling the tab of the drawstring between two fingers. 

“What are you saying,” Shane says, defensive. 

“Hollander. I—" whether it’s the word or just a sound, it catches in his throat. Hunter pulls at the drawstring and drops it. He suddenly leans all the way out, looking up and down the aisle. The cabin of the plane is empty. Looking down, Hunter mumbles, “Fuck, this is a bad idea. But. I think we’re…. a lot alike. If you know what I mean.”

Shane stares at him, and says, “Uh.” Rozanov’s words from last night rankle in his ears, the feeling of them a bitter aftertaste. “I think you’re a good player. But,” Shane tries to figure out the kindest way to say I am way better than you ever were. 

“Player? Wait,” Hunter laughs and then glances up the aisle again. “Shane, I’m gay.”

The words hang in the air. Shane thinks about all the half-jokes this year around the locker room, the personal life drama. Hunter stumbles on, “Whatever is between you and Rozanov—I thought that was a one-way thing but. I don’t know. I won’t say anything. Obviously.”

Shane stares at him. It takes a second for the words to register and then the meaning to sink in. They sit in silence. There’s a sudden franticness in him, a need to run. But they are in a fucking airplane, somewhere above the Canadian prairies and there is nowhere to go. 

“I’m not gay,” Shane says. “I’ve slept with women.”

He realizes after it comes out of his mouth that it’s not a proper denial. He clears his throat and adds, “And there’s nothing going on with Rozanov.”

Hunter ducks his head into a nod and says evenly, “Okay. Sorry.” And then he catches Shane’s eyes. They are wide, hazel and, Shane realizes: scared. Hunter says, “Well now you know.” 

“I won’t tell anyone,” Shane murmurs. Hunter makes a noise of affirmation. 

The tension in the small cabin feels like lead. Shane feels panic rising in his chest, intense, like he has never felt before, an unbearable clawing weight. The weight has a question in it, a need. He is a bug under a magnifying glass. The machinery of his body, the facsimile of himself and the real thing, everything is heavy. 

“I’m—just, going to the bathroom,” Shane says, and stumbles down the aisle to the bathroom. The charter jet bathroom is a small room, not the closet of a regular flight. Shane grips the sink with both hands. His heartbeat thrums in his veins. It is the terror and the reality that anyone could have seen him and Rozanov in the pool last night and it would have been, apparently, obvious. That he was so close. And then also: that Hunter thinks he is. That Hunter himself is. The heartbeat rises into his throat, which feels tight, high, suddenly strange that he has a neck at all: that his head is on top of his body and this aching throat is the only thing keeping himself attached to a body that might float away to the beat of a heart he cannot keep a handle on. 

He sits heavily on the closed toilet lid and takes a deep breath. He can get himself under control. He knows how to get the machinery of himself back together. He takes ten even breaths, counting the space between them by tapping his fingers lightly on the plastic counter. Someone will wonder where he went. He waits until his face looks normal. 

When he makes his way back to his seat, Hunter looks up from his phone. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” 

“Sorry. Again,” Hunter says. “Hey look, I’ve been in Canada long enough to apologize as often as a Canadian.” 

Shane laughs mirthlessly. His phone is where he left it. He has two texts, a follow-up email from his financial advisor and a reminder for a haircut. The question spills out of him, the one he has never had anyone to ask, “How did you know?”

Hunter has a drink halfway to his mouth when he says, “What,” and puts it down. 

“How did you know… that you were,” Shane feels his teeth clench, “Gay. Like, for sure.”

“Oh,” Hunter pauses and then his voice quiet, the same level as the hum of the airplane again, continues “I just sort of always knew? When I was in middle school I kissed a girl playing seven minutes in heaven and it was… fine. But I was so relieved when the lights turned on. Deep down, kissing her felt like… a thing that was happening, not that I was doing. But I didn’t know what it meant, yet. I learned the actual word when people threw it at me.” 

Shane physically flinches, familiarity unpleasant.

“When I kissed a man for the first time, it wasn’t like that. Seven minutes was too short,” he clears his throat. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s different for everyone. I just knew.  And then I wanted to be different because it would make our—my life easier. Hockey easier. So I hid,” Hunter works his lips together and then says, crisply and looking at Shane with that unflinching intensity across the small table between them, “But. All that hiding. You… don’t get the years back. There’s another season and it’s the same game, same expectations, another chance. But the time is gone.”

Shane feels a pitying sadness, unsure of where the conversation has gone, these uncharted waters. There’s no screen in the four-seaters, he quite literally does not know where they are over North America, how far to home. 

“Is that why you came to Montreal?” Shane asks, “To get the time back?”

Hunter’s expression shifts, his face changing, and he says, “Something like that. Yeah.” 

They sit in silence, the plane hitting some minor turbulence. Shane leans back, the jostling of the plane feels like being rocked in a giant cradle. It is soothing if he doesn’t think too much about what’s causing it. How comforting it is to be swayed along by machinery and air. Turbulence has never worried him because it’s out of his control. 

When it passes, Hunter says, “Did that answer your question?”

“Yeah,” Shane nods. Not really, is one answer. Yes, is another. He remembers kissing a girl at a party back in Juniors, down in the mosquito-filled ravine behind someone’s house in Kingston. How her mouth had felt warm and nice. More than the kiss itself, he remembers the relief that someone else saw them come back up the hill together. 

But: Hunter is wrong—they are not the same. Shane is better, in a class of his own. The expectations are different. The years ahead are his to shape. 

Chapter End Notes

Canadiana Notes: First and foremost: my apologies to the city of Winnipeg. It is much nicer there than written about here. All of the nice parts (wide open skies, prairie sunsets, good restaurants and bars, the WAG) were out of scope. I just asked myself: what is the funniest possible place in Canada to send them? Hockey-knowers, don’t think too hard about the fact that there’s a team in Winnipeg and one in Phoenix in the last chapter, nor the fact that they’d never host All-Stars. I saw this pool and the rest wrote it itself.
 

While it seems almost on-the-nose to make Scott walk through a building that literally says “FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR” on the side of it, that is just the real building that led to the abandoned trainyard (that has now been turned into a university campus) near Scott’s fictional apartment. If you click this link you might ask yourself: was Scott scared to follow someone he has known for a month into this building? No. Obviously not.

I'm over on tumblr doing stuff, sometimes.

 

Chapter 6: melt

Chapter Summary

Giving in, putting out, and the middle.

Chapter Notes

"This winter hasn't been so rough
Oh, it was cold, but still, it wasn't cold enough
To freeze the blood beneath my spine
And at least I survived"

PUP - Dark Days

It is their first practice after All-Stars, the dregs of January turning into February. Shane is pulling on his gear piece by piece, first in the room as everyone cycles in. He is almost entirely dressed, zoning out the chatter around him when he hears his own name. 

“Don’t bother Hollzy, we already know how many goals Cap scored at All-Stars,” Shane hears someone say. 

“What’s up?” Wilson asks, coming into the room. 

“We’re doing show and tell about what we got up to over the break,” says Drapeau. 

Show and tell means passing around their phones. Shane is relieved to be left out of this game that happens after every break, even just the two days over Christmas. He accepts the phones as they’re passed around, haphazard tosses as they’re all actively strapping pads and plastic to their bodies. 

It starts benign, three different guys pass around their golf scores. Stedlund makes a big exaggerated groan that gets a laugh from the room. Someone shares a video of their kid’s karate tournament. The Cours are a young, rebuilding team: most guys are under 30, and a kid old enough for a tournament is an outlier. Pike shows a picture of Jackie and their new baby. Soup went ice fishing. Greeny and Berkes both show a woman’s selfie: sultry eyes, cleavage. Comeau shows off a Tinder screenshot. 

Next, Shane is handed a phone with a video looping of a woman. She is on her back, looking at the camera, making what he can only imagine is a seductive face. She’s aware of the camera, posing for it, while someone is having sex with her. He averts his eyes from the confluence of bodies at the bottom of the screen. Most of the screen is taken up by her pale, naked body. 

Shane blinks, forcing himself not to recoil at the unexpected escalation to a video. In terms of locker room antics, this should just barely register. He’s had a lifetime of practice ignoring it. He’s seen more faceless breasts than ones attached to a real body. Shane passes the phone along without comment and concentrates on pulling his skate laces tight enough to cut into his palms. There’s chuckling around the room, and then a thud of someone dropping the phone. 

“What the fuck?” says a startled Pike next to him. 

“She know you’re showing that around?” Shane hears Hunter from across the room. 

“That’s the highlight of my All Stars break,” Wilson says, picking up the phone. Shane looks up and sees Hunter, phone proffered at the end of a long arm. Wilson takes it back and says, “Dude, why are you getting your panties in a twist? Don’t like what you see?”

The expression on Hunter’s face twists, animal mean. 

“You know why he doesn’t want to see that,” says a voice behind Shane. He doesn’t turn around, but he knows it was Drapeau. 

Hunter turns to Drapeau behind Shane, and for a moment, his eyes lock with Shane’s. Something else flickers on Hunter’s expression; his mouth twitches, his face changes. Shane, sitting there with his skates done and shoulder pads sitting but not secured. Halfway ready, stopped in his tracks. Shane feels his heart rate pick up, and the anxious feeling curdles into a sour fear: don’t bring me into this. 

Over the last few months, the team has softened to Hunter. Their wariness has come undone, like a loosened knot. Most people like him, follow him to social events, and listen to his advice. Wilson is not one of them. Hunter turns back to Wilson at his side. 

“You’re from Winnipeg, right, Wilson?” Hunter says. 

“What?” Wilson says. 

“Just got back from there. Lots of really nice guys, I bet I could set your sister up with one of them.”

Shane remembers Wilson mentioning a sister back home. Shane always feels weird acknowledging that he has paid attention to people’s stories about their lives, like it’s an overstep. 

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Wilson says, stepping into Hunter’s space. 

“Dunno. Seems like she may need a nice man in her life, doesn’t seem to have a role model in you.”

“Fuck you, Hunter, and your Mr. Perfect act, telling us what to do. You lost at All-Stars, and Hollzy won the skills competition. But at least it sounds like you met some nice guys in Winnipeg, eh? That your fucking show and tell?”

That expression in Hunter’s face tilts, visible to the now silent room. Everyone has stopped, watching the two of them standing nearly toe to toe. Neither in skates yet, loose clothing halted mid-action. Shane’s mouth feels dry; there’s a tingling in his fingers. It is the first time someone has drawn out this open secret. The unsayable thing Hunter put into the air, thousands of feet up, right to Shane’s face last week. 

Hunter steps back out of Wilson’s space, and the meanness drops into a plasticine smile, “No thanks. No show and tell here.”

“That’s what I thought,” Wilson says, stepping back. 

Shane is annoyed—at Wilson always peacocking, at Hunter for responding, at everything. Hockey is a team sport, too fast for one person to carry a team. The Voyageurs look like sure playoff contenders for Shane’s first year as captain, his third year on the team. They need depth, and Wilson is a decent centre. He’s comfortable, six years in. They could probably do better, but he’s who they have now. 

As he leaves the locker room, thumping down the hall in skates toward the rink, Shane wonders when he will have the leverage to make a scene like that. Not now. Maybe not ever. 

So Shane sends a message the best way he knows how. During practice, he puts himself on a scrimmage team with Wilson. He’s noticed that since mid-December, Wilson has a slight lag on his left side, some old strain or new injury he’s compensating for. Under the watchful eye of their coach, Shane whips shots at him from the left, passes he knows Wilson does not have the experience or skills to connect. He makes Wilson look bad. Shane has no interest in making the team suffer for petty grievances, locker room discord, whatever Wilson has no problem implying in front of the team. But he also doesn’t need the team to prop up mediocrity. 

The reward: the skeptical eyes of Theriault, his hand moving rapidly over the notebook he always has on hand, turning to comment to the assistant coaches; there are also the fans who have come to their open practice, and the recording Shane knows will be online on Twitter later for them to dissect. Let hockey tell the story. 

Hours later, in the locker room at the Bell Centre, it smells like a win after their game against Cincinnati: rubber mats, industrial 2-in-1 soap, sweat, and the blue Gatorade someone poured over Greeny’s head. No one has dared to pour one over Shane’s head since his rookie year. He’s waiting for the spray of champagne, one day. 

Shane showers and does post-game press, his mind swimming as he switches between English and French, the same answers twice over to the same generic questions. 

After each game, Theriault deems someone the game MVP. He usually goes in a random order to make sure that everyone gets it at least once a season. There’s always a reason—a successful play, pushing through an injury. Sometimes the reasons are thin, and it is clear that it is a pity win. Sometimes it’s obvious. Shane is pretty sure it should, statistically, go to either Wilson or JJ today. They haven’t had it all season. 

A few minutes later, the social media team comes in and takes the picture of JJ wearing the novelty helmet that Theriault hands over. It’s Voyageurs blue, modified to look like a canoe paddle is going through his head. 

They crowd into the meeting room to go over the stats in their 4-0 blowout win against the Cincinnati Chill. Shane does the math in his head, reviewing the board: Wilson’s ice time was down 20%. 

—

Shane crosses one hundred points for the season a week later. In the middle of the month, Boston is playing in Montreal. Home ice advantage. Shane is the fifth Voyageur to ever reach this point, and the first person in nearly forty years. 

Sitting on a bus between airports, Shane flicks through the headlines, reads the forums. Fans are happy. The press is optimistic. Someone on the Cours subreddit has posted a link to an in-depth analysis of his goal differential, his offensive production over the last few years. The numbers are armour; what everyone needs to focus on, the most important thing about Shane Hollander. Numbers tell a story that can’t be argued with or misinterpreted. 

The bus makes a tight turn, jostling Shane against the window. The seat next to him is empty. He texts Rozanov with nothing but the number 100. Rozanov responds only: easy. Shane checks his stats: Rozanov is sitting at 96 points. He pockets his phone and heads to the airplane home. 

This far into the season, his mother does not schedule many extraneous events or meetings. HIs days are routine, with a few manageable variants. February 16th is Hayden’s birthday, coinciding with a Saturday off. 

They host a proper house party. Really, Jackie and a handful of the other wives do—the team is traveling right up until the day before. Shane can’t imagine Hayden does much for it. Their house is filled with Cours blue helium balloons and a giant gold 24 that floats in the corner. It’s a long, lean evening. The house is bustling with the entire team, girlfriends, wives, the handful of young kids. Nannies to supervise. Some trainers and people Shane doesn’t recognize— friends Hayden must know from elsewhere. 

He’s making small talk with their goalie, Mitty, when Jackie pulls Shane into the kitchen and points to the enormous sheet cake, “Can you carry it in? I’m scared to drop it.”

Shane carries Hayden’s birthday cake into the living room, his stomach acidic at the centre of a room. The lights are low and Jackie follows closely behind him, filming him from behind. In the video, which he later sees online, shows his shoulder delivering the cake with its ring of candles in front of Hayden. It cuts to a beat later: Shane standing with his arms loose at his sides as Hayden smiles widely, glowing from the candlelight. 

Shane takes a slice of cake and heads toward the front of the house to avoid eating it. There’s a formal sitting room there, one of those spaces no one uses, one that he himself has never actually sat in over his years visiting Hayden. Today, there are enough people that a handful of guys from the team have ended up there with their socked feet resting on the black glass coffee table’s untouched surface. As Shane walks to it, he passes the feature staircase with it’s yawning entrance to the basement where he can hear the clatter of a game of billiards breaking. Shane joins the crowd in the front living room, picking at the cake in his hand. They’re discussing the game in two days, the home game against Boston. 

“Another chance for you to beat Rozanov,” jokes Comeau. 

Wilson shoves him with his shoulder—whatever he says next, Shane misses because he spots Jackie walking Hunter heading to the door in a giant winter jacket. He is fishing his boots out of the messy pile by the front. 

Shane watches as Jackie gives him a half-armed hug, and says, “I never sent a note, but thank you Scott, for the Sophie Giraffes. Appreciate you getting two—the girls already can’t share.” 

Hunter smiles, says something Shane can’t hear and then, to the crowd nods, “Evening boys.” 

“Heading out early?” Stedlund calls. 

“Plans with a friend,” Hunter answers, shoving his feet into boots and straightening up. “See you at morning skate.” 

There’s a half pause when the door swings shut. Jackie takes one of the empty paper plates from the coffee table and disappears to the kitchen. Wilson asks, “How does he already have friends in Montreal? Dude just moved here like four months ago. Maybe some more nice guys?”

“He’s played for a million years,” Shane finds himself saying. “Probably knows players or whatever in every city.”

“Hey, he’s younger than me,” Stedlund says. 

Wilson opens his mouth to speak again. Shane stands and says, “I’m gonna play pool.”

He takes his half-eaten slice of cake with him and goes downstairs to the pool table. Hayden, JJ, and two of the non-hockey players Shane doesn’t know are there. They turn out to be Jackie’s brother and a friend of his. 

The previous game is wrapping up and Shane takes a cue off the wall, relieved to have something to do. He rubs chalk on the cue and takes his first shot. Shane is good at pool: he’s had lots of practice over the years at boring hotels and in basements just like this.

He’s paired up with JJ in the next round. They demolish Hayden and his brother-in-law. 

“Can’t even go easy on the birthday boy,” Hayden laughs as Shane sinks the eight-ball. 

“A game’s a game, Hayd,” Shane answers.

The party dissolves shortly after: a nanny comes down and says something to Hayden who disappears upstairs. The crowd in the front room has gone by the time Shane goes to the door—he can leave without fanfare. Shane walks to his car halfway down the block. Hayden’s neighbourhood is relatively new in this old city. The trees are young and shorn of leaves in the dead of winter and the trees are wide enough they provide no cover. Above him, night sky is dark and cloudy as he gets into his car. The door clicks, shutting him into the calm quiet of his own car. His pocket vibrates. 

[Lily]: see? easy

[Lily]: now you get what you want. 

Shane swipes to the TSN app. Boston played tonight. Rozanov’s stats for the season: 102 points, 48 goals, 54 assists. Shane closes the app, drives home, parks his car, showers,  and gets into before he answers. 

He wants, really wants, to put Rozanov off for another season. See if he’ll keep coming back. Prove to himself he doesn’t care. There is always another season, another chance. No reason to rush, in one sense. But then: another season of push and pull, of distraction. A voice from the white noise of an airplane reminds him: time without that he won’t get back. He’s sitting upright in bed, in boxers about to go to sleep. 

[Jane]: Maybe. 

The next morning, unspent adrenaline pushes him through practice. 

—-

As Shane does post-game press for their 5-3 win against Boston, he can feel the ghost of Rozanov’s check from an hour before. He slammed Shane with the full weight of his hips and shoulder, quick as anything, no time for anything but instinct and skill. Shane had turned with just enough time to see the side of the smirk on his face, just enough time to charge up the ice past Rozanov, put himself right where he needed to be when Montreal’s defense intercepted it. 

Shane scored twice—Rozanov once. Shane has every impulse, every thought to keep Rozanov waiting. He only said maybe. So: maybe this summer, the NHL Awards. Maybe when he’s on the safe side of the playoffs. He’s sure, confident in his choice, right up until they’re standing around afterward. Theriault announces that this game’s MVP is Hunter for a particularly impressive goal snapped under the stick of one of Boston’s defenders. The team whoops and hollers in unison for him. Shane watches Wilson and Comeau’s lackluster clapping. 

Minutes later, Shane is half undressed when he notices that Hunter is still wearing the decorative helmet and he’s taking a selfie on his phone, head cocked so the bottom of the paddle hits his shoulder. Press is over, everyone else is milling about getting changed, snapping each other with towels. Shane is frozen, watching Hunter across the room: he leans against his locker, smiling and texting rapidly. Shane picks up his phone and texts Rozanov his address. No further context. 

—-

Back in his condo, Shane has a sickening realization. He does not have any condoms. He would rather die than acknowledge this to Rozanov and ask him to pick some up. That’s not even close to an option. There are two deps within walking distance: the Couche-Tard is closer but is bigger and therefore more likely to have people in it. There’s also a smaller, independent one an additional block away. 

With no real choice in the matter, Shane puts on his jacket and heads out. It’s late February and it has been a few weeks without fresh snow, on the edge of sidewalks the remains of the last snowfall are crusted into hard, grey mountains. He keeps his head down through the biting frozen walk, the chill cutting right through his layers, solidifying the shower-damp locks of his hair. 

The depanneur is in the base of a modern condo building, but it has the same old yellow sheen as every dep in the province. The guy behind the counter doesn’t look up when Shane walks in. It is mercifully empty inside. Shane does a loop around, his anxiety mounting. The back corner is paneled with beer fridges, covered in signs for St-Ambroise. Shane doesn’t plan on drinking, but he pulls out a six-pack of the first thing he sees when he opens the fridge. Rozanov probably doesn’t drink beer, but Shane can’t bring himself to go to the counter with nothing but a box of condoms. He balances a carton of eggs on top of the beer, as well as a neon-yellow can of the Habitant soup that he sometimes eats as a comfort food. And then, finally, like an afterthought, a box of the only condoms they have in stock. 

At the counter, the clerk does a double-take before scanning everything in silence. Out of the corner of his eye, Shane notices a small TV behind the counter, playing TSN and the highlights of tonight’s game. The clerk doesn’t say anything, just takes Shane’s credit card, hands him a receipt and says, solemnly, “Bon match, on est en forme cette année.”

Shane smiles and says, “Merci, j’y crois aussi” 

He keeps the smile plastered on his face as he backs out of the store, only letting it relax and slide off when the door shuts behind him outside. He hurries back, texting Rozanov without gloves, balancing his purchases in one arm and his fingers stiff in the cold: Use the back entrance, off de la Gauchetière. 

He has just enough time to put everything away before he has to run down the back stairs to find Rozanov standing in the cold alley behind his building, parka and hood up. 

The first thing out of Rozanov’s mouth, the first time they have spoken since the pool twenty-stories up in Winnipeg, is: “No nice lobby, you want me to die of frostbite?”

“Aren’t you Russian?” Shane retorts, beckoning him inside. 

“In Russia, we do not let our guests wait outside in cold,” Rozanov answers, petulantly, stepping into the building and brushing past him. The door swings shut behind him. Standing in the stairwell, Rozanov shoves his hood off and says, “Especially guest who has been so, very, patient.”

With every word, he steps further into Shane’s space. Shane looks at him, evenly. All the anxiety he felt on the way back to his apartment leaches out of him. A pool of calm spreads like melting ice as Rozanov grins, inches from his face. Rozanov takes the final step, pressing the long line of their bodies together. 

Shane reaches up, grabs the back of Rozanov’s neck and kisses him, hard. Rozanov kisses back, opening his mouth and Shane’s with it. Shane melts into the kiss, the slowness of it after all that uncertainty. He is still water as Ilya—as Rozanov–fits a hand around his jaw, and presses a finger behind his ear, tracing a nail down the side of his neck. Shane mewls a low hum, fits a thumb into Rozanov’s back pocket and tugs. Rozanov responds by sliding a hand up the back of his shirt, pressing Shane’s chest forward so they are pressed tight together, no gap between them at all. Shane can feel the zipper of Rozanov’s parka pressing into his chest as their tongues slide together. He pulls back, off, and nips softly at Rozanov’s bottom lip. 

“So, first time right here in stairs? Mr. Hundred Points?” Ilya says into his mouth. 

“Fuck off. Don’t be a sore loser,” Shane grins, the smile easy. 

He takes Rozanov upstairs, where he gives in completely. He said no, kept him at arm's length, since their rookie year. Tonight, more than two years later, he kisses Rozanov again in the middle of his condo, the lights of Montreal dim behind the glass—making out standing in the middle of the room until he is panting, his hand twisted in Rozanov’s hair. They chase each other up the glass-paneled stairs that keep his bedroom out of sight of visitors. Rozanov is the first person to go up those stairs who isn’t a cleaner. 

All that time saying no to himself. Now, nothing but yes. A hum of affirmation as he runs his hands up Rozanov’s thighs, appreciating the sinew and muscle of him, the feeling of the fine hair against Shane’s cheeks as mouths against Rozanov’s cock and feeling its weight in his mouth. Yes again, out loud, when Rozanov asks if he’s okay before pushing Shane’s knees up and opening him with hands and tongue, lube-slick fingers breaching him and beckoning like a welcome gesture. Shivers of pleasure cascade through Shane’s whole body. Another yes when Rozanov asks if he’s ready before he slides inside him, careful and gentle. 

Shane melts beyond water, his body turned to air, lightless. He whimpers yes, yes, yes—an open invitation to anything—as Rozanov fucks him hard; Shane feels easy and open, made into something else entirely. The machine of his body resets in Rozanov’s hands. They fuck on his back until Shane pants, harder, more and they flip. 

Shane is on his knees, face buried in the crook of his elbow as Rozanov grips his hip with one hand, punishingly hard. He reaches around Shane's chest and grabs his nipple and asks, voice low in the dark, “Will you be good for me, Hollander?”

Shane’s whole body answers yes, and he comes so hard he sees white. 

After, Rozanov asks to shower. Shane sits, body and brain liquid. He rolls onto his stomach to open the blinds a few inches: it has begun to snow heavily in the unknowable hours Rozanov has been here. Rozanov comes back into the room, towel low over his hips. He has a smug, lopsided smile on his face as he crawls onto the bed, damp but not wet. He leans in and kisses Shane, slow like at the door earlier, lips soft, mouth closed. 

“How did you get here?” Shane asks. 

Rozanov rolls his eyes, collapsing onto the bed next to him dramatically, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. “Don’t be scared, Hollander. No one followed me.”

“No, asshole. It’s snowing outside now,” Shane says, waving at the mostly covered window.

“I walked,” Rozanov shrugs. “You live so close to Bell Centre, very convenient.”

“You walked here from the Bell Centre?”

Rozanov laughs. “No, I went to hotel to get pretty for you. Then I walked. Why do you care?”

Shane realizes that he wants Rozanov to stay, to get out of the cold. Worse than a bad idea. Shane already got everything he needed. 

“No reason,” Shane shrugs, standing. He pulls a sweater over his head. “Your leather shoes are going to get wrecked with salt.”

“Okay, I call taxi outside.”

He follows Shane down the stairs as Shane says, “Go up a block to Renée Lévesque and call a cab there. The like, strip clubs and stuff are that way.”

He turns and finds Rozanov staring at him from two steps up. Rozanov asks, “Do you go to these strip clubs?”

“What? No,” Shane licks his lips. His mouth is dry. “Someone would recognize me.”

Rozanov laughs as he slides his foot into a shoe. “You think your teammates do not go to strip clubs?”

Shane rolls his eyes. “It’s different.”

“Oh, yes. Very different,” Rozanov says as he ties his shoes. “If we do not face each other in playoffs… You will be in Vegas?”

“Yeah. I need to go to pick up my Art Ross.” 

“For me? No problem, I will be there, I can get it myself.” 

“Not fucking likely,” Shane says, opening the door and showing him to the stairs. 

Rozanov takes them two at a time, thundering down. Shane chases behind. At the bottom of the stairwell, Rozanov turns. Shane takes him in: the breadth of his shoulders, the angles of his mouth. Rozanov surges forward, kissing him again. The softness of it ripples out through his whole body. They break apart—a pause, a long moment with their faces a centimeter apart. Shane kisses him again, a dry peck, bringing his hands to Rozanov’s face; his hair is still wet from the shower. 

“You’ll get a cold, your hair is wet,” Shane murmurs, a curl around one finger. 

Ilya pulls back. His eyes scan Shane’s face, and he says, “Maybe I go to this strip club and warm up.”

Liquid chills to ice. “Oh. Yeah.” Shane says. 

“I have early flight tomorrow,” he shrugs. “And you kept me up so late. Too bad, would be fun.”

“Right,” Shane says. “See you in Vegas.”

“Goodnight,” Rozanov says, closing his jacket with a loud zip before he turns and leaves. 

Shane jogs back up the stairs. Back, alone in his apartment, he searches his closet for his sheets. He rarely changes his own bed. It takes a minute to find where they’re kept and another to drag the fitted sheet in place. It’s nearly two in the morning. He crawls into bed and sleeps like the dead. 

[🅢🅗]

Stedlund, who moved up from Miami, chose a Colombian spot for a team dinner the night before their game against the Miami Cougars. Scott is eating a third pan de bono, tearing it apart with his hands to mop up the last of his meal. Hollander sits across from him at the plastic table, not talking to him but not ignoring him. Since All-Stars a week ago and Wilson trying to prove a point in the locker room after, they have avoided each other as much as it is reasonably possible to do when you play hockey on the same line, travel in the same airplane, and attend any number of mandatory events together. 

Scott surprised himself with how little he cared about Wilson’s comment about nice guys. Maybe people know. Maybe they don’t. For the most part, it has not impacted the locker room or the ice. Without notice or sign, he’s ended up on the other side of something. The memory of Hollander’s face on the airplane, panicked like Scott has never seen it. And also, back in his apartment: someone waiting for him. He’s living between poles. 

Now in Miami—Scott doesn’t look at Hollander directly but he can see Hollander’s head move to track him when Scott stands up and says he’s going to walk the three long blocks back to the hotel. The truth is: you don’t get to where either of them are without a remarkable ability to carefully fold a secret in half and not look at it. Two years ago, game seven of the Eastern Conference Finals: Scott spit out three teeth on the ice. He went to the emergency dental room in the back of the arena, where he counted seven needles in his mouth to numb the pain. He only missed six minutes of playtime and scored two goals. Hockey is filled with ways to numb yourself enough to focus. 

Scott leaves the restaurant, crossing a wide parking lot to a barely used sidewalk surrounded by green manicured grass. It’s mid-February, still the depths of a dark winter in Montreal. Scott is far enough south that the sun sets nearly a full hour later here. He puts in his headphones to call Kip. 

“Hey,” Scott asks, glancing over as someone walks by him, smoking a cigarette and ignoring him completely.. “How’s it going?”

“Good, good,” Kip says absently. Scott hears crinkling in the background. “Can I use up this flour? I’m making banana bread.”

“Sure,” Scott says. “I didn’t even know I had flour.”

There’s a slight clatter and then the audio changes as Kip puts him on speakerphone. “Maybe I bought it.” 

“What’s the banana bread for?”

Kip tells Scott about the potluck he’s going to later, a friend who lives somewhere up near Scott. It’s been two months. Scott gave Kip a key and told him to use it anytime and he has. As Kip lists the friends attending, Scott carefully catalogues the names, the setting sun warm on his face. 

Later: post-game press, the same generic questions as always: how did you see Hollander for that pass? Scott shrugs and says, “Just looked for him and he was there.”

And then it’s mid-February and Scott is in Newark, across the river from his former home. Overlapping stories like a song sung in the round. The Cours lost by two points to the New Jersey Angels, but they’re leading the Atlantic division by six. Another thing he has learned to appreciate on this side: Montreal fans travel. He is used to playing for a popular team with dedicated fans, but there’s no comparison. Half the crowd tonight was in Cours blue and instead of Angels yellow. The chants of olé, olé carried him through all eighteen minutes of ice time and one goal. 

He closes the curtains in his hotel room, shutting out the view of streetlights on steel rolling gates that cover the stores of downtown Newark. Kip calls him from his walk from school to his apartment, wind whistling through his headphones. Scott stretches on the hotel carpet as Kip tells him about some studio drama over resources. When Kip gets back to this apartment, they switch to a video. Kip massages hand cream into his knuckles and asks Scott if things are still tense with Wilson. Scott answers honestly—yes, but also, he’s been playing like shit and becoming less of his problem. Wilson was a healthy scratch tonight. As they talk, Scott peers hungrily at the details of Kip’s apartment behind him.

Two days later, still mid-February, home game; he’s focused on a pre-game speech from Theriault, who is pacing back and forth across the locker room floor. Theriault says, “We’re going to get on top of their asses,” he thwacks his rolled up notebook on his palm, and continues, “You’re going to pound them back to their net.” 

Scott catches Hollander’s eye. No reaction, but Scott tilts his head a fraction of a millimeter to the right. 

Later, in the showers after the game Scott turns the spray up and notices out of the corner of his eye, Wilson turning his own shower off and moving three over. 

It’s mid-February and Scott leaves Pike’s birthday early, driving across Van Horne in the dark to his apartment, where Kip has arrived from an art opening which he calls a vernissage in his bad French. It’s a milder evening, just above freezing: warm enough to stand in the doorway of his balcony but not warm enough to enjoy it yet. The family across the courtyard’s windows are dark. 

Scott stands with the doorjamb pressing into his back and Kip smiling like a shark, holding a joint between thumb and forefinger. Kip tells him about some in-fighting about signs at the gallery, but Scott is too tired to follow. The cherry blooms bright and red in the dark. The weed hums calmness into his skin soothing all the panic out. They fall asleep on the couch, Scott’s television playing an old episode of The X-Files, his hand pushed under Kip’s shirt. 

He wakes up with a crick in his neck and goes to practice. Hollander is in a visibly good mood. They play Boston tomorrow. Hollander sneaks a particularly tricky goal past Comeau, who shouts, “Impossible!” Hollander hums the Mission Impossible theme song, loud enough for Scott to hear, as he skates back up the ice, his blades moving in time with the beat. 

A day later, Scott is doing post-game press after their game against Boston. Scotts answers one of the generic questions with the phrase, “We’re just, uh, nailing consistency.” Kip texts him a photo of the TV at a bar, those words as the subtitles under Scott’s sweaty face, Kip’s text: talking about me in public? And then a follow-up: only shower from the waist down, thx in advance. 

Kip shows up to his house laughing, smelling like stale beer and fried food. He puts his nose, mouth into Scott’s armpit and says, “What the fuck are you doing to me?”

Scott can recognize a question with too many answers. He responds by grabbing Kip by the hair and running his mouth and teeth into the coarse stubble of his jaw. 

The next day at practice, Scott watches Hollander only when he’s sure Hollander isn’t looking. He’s worse at hiding his emotions than Scott ever realized. How could he ever have doubted? Hollander is skating by himself while Scott and an assistant coach chat at the other end of the ice. Hollander is skating backwards in lazy loops, doing idle trick shots, bouncing the puck on his stick and sending it into the net. Selfishly, horribly, Scott thinks: whatever risks I’m taking are not half as bad as that. It is not reassuring. The idea that it is a risk at all fills him with a white blade of anger. But, he once scored two goals after a mouthful of needles. He folds the anger in half and pockets it. 

“Sorry,” Scott says, dragging himself into the conversation he left. “Could you repeat that?”

March inevitably drags out winter. The snowbanks around his neighbourhood melt all at once on an unseasonably hot day, revealing piles of soggy cigarette butts in the sludge left behind. The city is at its ugliest as Scott discovers how terrifying happiness can be. 

Kip asks little of him: he shows up at his apartment, stays for days at a time, and then disappears back to his own world on the other side of the mountain. The great slope of Mount-Royal rises in the heart of the city, and Scott lives on its northeast corner. To get to practice, he crosses behind the hill’s back, where the cemetery hides the graves of prime ministers and hockey players, out of sight from downtown. The Bell Centre sits below the mountain’s face. Kip lives in the southwest, as far away as possible, no easy way to get to Scott’s except for a forty-minute bus ride. Scott tried to call him a cab one time, early on, and Kip said: “Don’t make it weird.” 

Now it’s March, and Scott is absolutely making it weird. Scott knew how to live with fear and he has learned to digest anger. Happiness terrifies him. He wakes up one morning in early March, and Kip is there, asleep with a quarter-sized spot of drool on the blue pillow under his head, proof of life. Scott watches Kip sleep for unknowable minutes.

When Kip wakes up, he smiles sleepily and says with a yawn, “I had a dream I was flying.”

Scott keeps watching from bed as Kip changes into a pair of Scott’s boxers. He started doing this without asking, maybe the third or fourth time he spent the night. It makes something primal and hot turn over in his stomach to think of Kip in his underwear all over the city, of the half dozen pairs that are probably in Kip’s unseen apartment right now. Kip, meanwhile, is lost in thought, wandering blearily to the kitchen without his contacts in. He has been here often enough that he doesn’t need them to make coffee. Scott finds him in the living room, sitting on the couch with his laptop. Without saying anything, Scott gets on his knees, sinks his face into Kip’s crotch in the boxers, clean laundry and musk. He mouths at Kip’s cock through the cotton until he’s wet the fabric with saliva. He gets a mild carpet burn on his knees. 

The team has won six games in a row. The media engine of the Cours’ fanbase has revved into gear. Between a bad bet and a good investment, the press has settled on the hope that he is the latter. The way they talk about Hollander, on the other hand, is next level: the second coming, a promised king, the franchise saviour. They used to talk about Scott that way, and he spent years putting those expectations as a yoke around his own neck. 

All it took was one season to undo it. 

Here in Montreal, his clumsy French has won over the francophone press and the anglophone media has stopped referring to him as the Voyageur’s new Yankee right-winger. 

The regular season is drawing to a close, and it is clear they are going to make the playoffs this year. The difference in playing hockey in New York and Montreal is clearer by the day. More simple differences: in New York, he played in Madison Square fucking Garden, a building with the tagline the world’s most famous arena. Arriving on game nights to see the Garden ringed in red lights made him feel like a rockstar. 

Meanwhile, the fan entrance to the Bell Centre is on a street named Avenue des Voyageurs de Montréal. The city’s devotion to hockey is etched into the map. There is a permanent Voyageurs logo, the heart at its centre lit up. Scott and the team pose in front for a charity event. The arena doesn’t have the enormous changing lights of the Garden that glow for different events. It has huge, storey-tall banners outside promoting the team that hang year round. 

Uphill, in what is increasingly his neighbourhood, far from the cement and skyscrapers of downtown, it is late season, schedules busy and bodies exhausted. Scott walks to the coffee shop across from the one Kip works at, which he has been avoiding. This one is larger, an institutional Italian espresso place with a large side patio and a dozen regional Italian flags hanging from its pressed tin ceiling. Scott joins the line that snakes up by the high wood counter. Even here, which is decorated in football pennants, gear from vintage leagues, there is still an enormous blue, red and white Cours logo flag hanging in pride of place: over the door, like a talisman that everyone must pass under. 

Scott snakes up the line. He’s come here a few times now. The barista, a guy not much older than him who wears his hair pushed back with a plastic headband, nods solemnly at him when he sees him in line. The first time Scott came in, the barista greeted him not with hello but just with: “I heard you were in the neighbourhood.”

People leave him alone with an almost religious fervour. But he’s never anonymous. He wondered who told the barista about him moving to this area and then realized: probably a dozen or more people. 

Today, he gets a cappuccino. The barista refuses to let him pay, hiding the entire payment processor under the counter.  

—

As they roll farther into March, they haven’t secured a playoff spot, but it is all but set in stone. Still, Scott is too paranoid to jinx it. The locker room is full of that nervous excitement. After a particularly good practice, one where everything goes right and well and he can feel them moving perfectly in sync, most of the team sticks around in the practice facility for half an hour longer just shooting the shit and goading each other into taking longer and longer recovery ice baths. The warmth of a good mood where none of them want to acknowledge the reason. 

Hollander is gritting his teeth as Pike, Stedlund and JJ count down the seconds, loudly. The baths are lowered into the floor. Hollander grunts, “Ten more seconds. Count me down.”

When they hit zero, Hollander throws himself out of the water, gasping, onto the rubber mats. 

“Time?” he asks, sprawled on the floor. 

“Three minutes, nineteen,” answers JJ. 

“Fuck yeah,” Hollander says. He looks up from the floor, making eye contact with Scott and asks, “Can you beat that?”

Scott descends into the icy, numbing water and closes out every other thought but the chanting of his teammates powering him through.

He brute forces his way to three minutes and thirty seconds. As he lays soaking on the floor, JJ laughs over him saying, “Osti de crisse de tabarnak, Hunter.”

“Yeah, yeah,” is all Scott can manage. 

Hollander is sitting on a wooden bench with a towel around his neck, water dripping in rivulets, watching him. It’s been two months since the last time they spoke alone, a month since they played Boston, and another month until the regular season is over and whatever they’ve built this season will be put to the real test—hopefully. Maybe. 

The middle is a messy place to be. 

Scott’s grimace is something close to a smile as he pulls himself to stand, dry off, and go home, where Kip is waiting. By the time he gets there, the good mood of the locker room has faded. That feeling of brotherhood, one of the best parts of hockey, is always whisper-thin. 

Half an hour later, he’s sitting on his couch with Kip, lying lengthwise with Kip sitting up right, his feet wedged under Kip’s thighs. 

“It’s weird,” Scott is saying. “We made the playoffs five out of nine years on the Admirals. Made it to the conference finals twice. But… this feels so different. The stakes are so high, y’know?”

“I know, but… it’s not, y’know, real-real,” Kip says, somewhat distractedly as he flicks through channels with the remote. “It’ll be okay no matter what way it goes.” 

“What do you mean?” Scott says, idly running a hand up and down his own chest. 

“Like, it’s sort of pretend? It doesn’t really matter, in a year or two who wins,” Kip pauses and turns off the TV.  “A hockey team is sort of… a construct? Literally playing a game.”

Scott stares at him. He uses the counterbalance of his feet under Kip’s legs to pull himself upright quickly. “Well,” the words feel clipped. “It’s extremely real to me.”

“I know that,” Kip says, splaying his hands. And then, a little drily he repeats, “I know it matters to you.”

“It doesn’t just matter to me,” Scott says. He pivots off the couch to the coffee table, where there’s a pitcher and water sitting. His hands are steady as he pours himself a glass of water from the jug. “It matters to a lot of people. Your art is—what did you say—a construct too. It’s just an idea that some people go see.”

Kip’s jaw flexes and he brings his knee up, wraps his arm around it. The fox tattoo flexes, the circle around his wristbone bobs as he rubs his knee.

“That’s different. Art is different, Scott. Art lasts a hundred years. Who even knows who won the Stanley Cup in like, 1998 or whatever.”

“Detroit.”

“What?”

“Detroit won the Cup in 98. Just because it doesn’t matter to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. Or,” Scott runs a hand over his face and tugs on his hair and doesn’t continue. 

“Okay, whatever,” Kip says. “Just because only some people go to art galleries and this whole fucking city worships the ground you walk on doesn’t make hockey matter more.”

“I didn’t say it mattered more,” Scott replies through gritted teeth. “You said that.”

“What? I,” Kip makes a noise in the back of his throat like ugh, “Fine. Sure. It’s not a competition. It’s just… it’s just fucking hockey, Scott. You’re not running an election. You’re not doing brain surgery or landing a fucking airplane.”

“Fine,” Scott agrees. “No, it’s fucking not. But it matters to a lot of fucking people and, it is my whole fucking life.” 

“Well,” Kip says, tight and mean. “Have you considered that it’s making your whole life miserable?”

Scott recoils and says defensively, “I’m not miserable.”

“I…Maybe it’s not my place,” Kip says flatly. “I have no idea what we’re doing here but. Babe, you are one of the saddest people I have ever met, and everyone I know are miserable broke artists. I’m supposed to be the expert.” 

“No,” Scott clarifies, and his voice catches. He clears throat. “I meant I haven’t been miserable since we met.”

Kip closes his eyes and says softly, “Scott. That’s a lot of pressure on… evenings and weekends.”

“I know, but I’m—we’re keeping it easy. Uncomplicated,” Scott answers, those words from three months ago feel like a shaken can of Coke. Three months bubbling up and fizzing out. 

“Are we?” Kip asks. “I’m here three nights a week and we’ve never left the house together.”

“It never seems like you want to,” Scott says. “Is that why—is that what you’re asking?”

“I guess. But, well. No,” Kip finishes resolutely. He turns and looks at Scott and says evenly and seriously, “If the Cours lose the playoffs someone will fucking … firebomb my apartment. You know how your fans are.”

Scott blinks, taken aback. His anger bubbles back up to the surface. “What do you want me to do about that?”

“I’m not asking you to do anything,” Kip spits back, hands up in surrender. “I’ve been very good about that.”

When Scott moves his hands to his hair, he realizes it is standing on end from tugging at it unconsciously. They’ve talked in a circle and he feels dizzy. 

“I feel like you’re angry with me,” Scott says. “And I don’t know why.”

Kip is looking away, staring at the blurred view out of the stained glass window. 

“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at myself. At the situation. I like you a lot. I guess—I know you haven’t really dated, but it fucking sucks out there. Dating. And you just walked into my life, and you’re hot and nice and you give head like it’s a religion and I feel fucking insane about you, actually. I feel totally insane.”

“Maybe this,” Kip continues, taking his hand off his knee and waving it between them emphatically. “Makes sense to you. But me, I have no frame of reference for it, it doesn’t make any sense. I come here and I spend time in your apartment and it’s, it’s perfect.” Kip’s words have come out as a long rush of words, a chant. 

He’s still looking out the window, now blinking back tears. Completely unexpectedly, Scott finds himself thinking of Shane Hollander and his big wet eyes in an airplane over the prairies, on the cusp of saying and asking so much more, pointing out the obvious to him: that Scott moved back here, his mother’s hometown and the seat of hockey culture, to get the time back. Scott wants to slap his own forehead, like a slapstick comedy, to still be running in fucking circles after ghosts and possibilities. To be so close to happiness and unable to hold it still long enough to have it properly. 

Kip finally continues, “It’s totally perfect, here. But your life has all these… limits to them.”

Scott rubs his lips together and presses, unconsciously, on a bruise on his ankle. It doesn’t hurt so much as feel at a deeper register. “Are you, do you want to … stop? Is that where this is going?”

Kip laughs wetly. “No. That sounds worse. And. We don’t need to change anything because—fuck, I was supposed to be reassuring you about the playoffs.”

“Well,” Scott takes his worrying hands away from the deficiencies of his body and runs his fingers along the seam of the couch to ground himself. He wants to grab Kip by the collar and demand reassurance, climb in his lap and cry, run out of this apartment and straight down to the canal and let the current take him to Lake Ontario. Maybe wash up outside of Rochester and start over again. The question—what do you want from me, dies on his lips. He likes having answers, finding and accepting fixes. But the answer to that question scares him, it looms over that terrifying happiness. “I haven’t thought about the playoffs for at least ten minutes.”

“You’re welcome,” Kip says, dryly. 

“I like you too,” Scott says. “I assume that’s obvious.” 

Kip doesn’t answer, he just lurches slowly across the couch, pivoting on his knee into Scott’s lap. They make out for a long while. None of their problems have a solution. For just a few hours, before he has to go back to the rink and win, while he’s still inside his apartment, Scott can make them small enough to pocket. 

—-

As far as Scott’s concerned, there’s no specific inciting incident. 

Scott has met the General Manager of the Montreal Voyageurs only a handful of times. Robert Bouchard fits the bill of most GMs: a scout turned assistant turned GM. A professional suit, a man of operations, trades, and phone calls taken behind a closed door hundreds of feet from the ice and the bodies that sweat on it. A reminder that Theriault, his coach, is one cog in a grinding machine. Bouchard tells Scott, by way of Theriault, to come by his office before a mid-morning voluntary practice in mid-March. 

With no idea what to expect, Scott sits delicately into the office chair. Wooden arms squeeze his large frame into place. The last time he was called into a meeting like this, he was shown a very neatly printed photo and given a neatly framed threat. Luckily for Scott, Bouchard cuts straight to the chase, no preamble. 

“Michel tells me there is some désaccord in the locker room,” he says. “Do you agree?”

Scott blinks. It takes a moment to remember his coach’s first name. “Oh,” Scott says. “I think the team is rowing in the same direction.”

Bouchard nods sagely. “Good to hear. Michel was skeptical to trade for you. But, you have a proven record to keep a room in line. And given the situation in New York last year, we as an organization assumed you are interested in,” he pauses and rolls his hands one over the other like a water wheel, “Rowing in the same direction.”

“Yes,” Scott says. He can feel his heart beginning to race, trying to find the shape of the threat under the words, to see if it is sharp enough to cut. 

“We have no issues with players who are working well together,” Bouchard. “T’compris?”

“Understood,” Scott lies. 

“Excellent,” Bouchard says. He taps his index finger twice on his desk. “That’s it. Thank you for stopping by.”

Scott stands, nods, and shakes Bouchard soft hands. His office is a long walk back to the practice rink, where Scott suits up and does enough practice laps at a fast enough speed that his heart rate is justified. He is stirring around the rink in circles, thinking in equally fast loops. His goal, in many ways, in moving to Montreal, was a fresh start, a new means to the same end. Shake out the dust and put himself at a new start line. 

He loops back and sees Hollander hitting the ice, minutes before anyone else. Hollander’s face is its usual mask of concentration, hidden behind a plastic visor and shaped around a mouthguard. Looking at him skating toward Scott, gaze down but still nodding as he passes, reminds Scott that he is nowhere new, not really. They are both absolutely right in the middle of it, with no sign of land. 

It’s a voluntary skate. Scott goes home early, begs off with a headache. Kip is in class, his apartment is empty. He sits quietly in the dark for long hours before a scheduled call with one of the philanthropic organizations Todd set up for him. He joins it with half a brain.

The next day is the trade deadline. Scott sits, refreshing the news, secure with his no-move clause. Just before noon, he sees that Wilson has been traded. 

Chapter End Notes

A dep/depanneur is a corner store in Quebec. Like many cities, they are the backbone of day-to-day life. 

Montreal-knowers may recognize Scott at the iconic Cafe Olimpico. They’ve renovated to gentrify along with the neighbourhood, but the Habs flag is (was) real. 

As a reminder, since it has been a while since chapter one: the Cours is a nickname for the Voyageurs, their practice facility is where the Hippodrome was. This chapter was delayed in no small part because I am trying to conceptualize winter in the high heat of summer.

If you're following along, Shane has stopped putting Ilya off a year and change earlier than canon. Hurray.

I'm on tumblr, sometimes. Comments greatly appreciated for the summer heat demon that is parched between my ribs.

Chapter 7: riotous

Chapter Summary

End of season: fans rioting, promises made, Vegas shimmering, lake swimming.

Chapter Notes

Upped the rating to explicit. Whoops.

Your rails have always outrun mine, so I
Picked them up and crashed them down
In a moment close to now

Neko Case - This Tornado Loves You 

When the Montreal Voyageurs tie up the first round of the playoffs, taking them to game seven, Kip sends Scott a photo. They pushed back against Detroit in their own arena: a resounding 4-0 victory for Montreal. 

By the time Kip’s photo reaches him, Scott has already seen photos from the Cours press team of thousands of blue bodies packed into downtown Montreal. He has already answered questions in both English and French about stakes and expectations. The mood in the locker room has improved, at least for Scott, since Wilson was traded weeks ago. Combativeness transformed into playoff drive. 

He is on the airplane home when he looks at Kip’s photo. It is taken from the balcony at the front of Kip’s apartment, where Scott still has not been. The photo is a wonky panorama, showing a wide angle of two bars that are around the corner from one another, visible from this balcony. People spill out of both bars. Along with it, Kip has texted: I could hear the score out of both ends of my apartment. 

By the time Scott lands and gets home, it is too late to call Kip and ask: but did you watch the game?

Two days later, the Voyageurs lace up at home for game seven. Over the season, the team has ground furrows into the earth of rituals and order. Hollander is not a speech-maker and the playoffs are not a time to start new habits. 

Hollander stands up—his voice is not loud, he never shouts from the chest, but when he speaks like this, everyone tilts to listen to their captain. A few weeks ago, Hollander hit a franchise record-breaking number of points for a single season. Last week, someone taped a photo of Hollander in a Rolex ad torn from some magazine to the wall of the locker room with a heart drawn in Sharpie around his face. The gulf between captain and team widens. Scott is relieved that the campaign he shot with Under Armour back in December will be going up in the off-season. He wants the money, but a season in Montreal has proved something: he doesn’t want to be the face of anything anymore. 

Hollander stands at the top of the room. The room stills to listen to the face of their franchise. He hits a fisted, bare hand against his chest. 

“Okay boys,” he calls. “Tonight is another game. Another win. Same as this whole season. One foot in front of the other. Consistency.”

That's the difference this season—consistency. Scott remembers his conversation with Hollander months ago during preseason about marching twenty miles a day, every day. They did that, basically. Nothing skipped, nothing missed. 

Scott has been more consistent in hockey while being less consistent than he’s ever been in his life. And the least consistent thing: Kip finally agreed to come to a game. Scott skates by during warm-ups, scanning the crowd. There, halfway up: Kip. Scott’s second seat—which probably costs several thousand dollars—is empty next to Kip. The playoff excitement means the stands are already full and a fever pitch of noise. When Scott stops on a dime and waves, several heads whip around. 

Kip, reticent, lifts his hand a fraction of an inch in acknowledgment. He drops it as the person two seats down leans over to see who Scott Hunter is waving at. 

Stedlund skates up to Scott. “Got someone here for the game Scotty?”

Scott nods, “Yeah. A friend.”

Stedlund glances at the filling seats. Scott does not point Kip out. Stedlund says, “Could have given him tickets to the family box.”

Scott shrugs and says, “Last minute invite. C’mon, we’ve got a game to win.”

The game is a knockdown, drag out one, going into overtime at 2-2. A pile of penalties and power plays on either side. And then a narrow window: Hollander sends him an assist and Scott scores a big beautiful goal that advances them to the next round.  

The stadium erupts. The sound of the Bell Centre celebrating a playoff win is deafening. Scott has won a playoff round on a home game victory before but here in Montreal it is the sonic equivalent of being inside the mouth of a hundred-foot giant while it is screaming. The fans are so loud they drown out the goal horn. Holy shit, Scott thinks. Maybe, just maybe, it’s fucking happening.  

Back in the locker room, the energy hasn’t died down. Pike looks at Hollander and yells, “One step forward!”

Several others join in. The mood in the locker room is jubilant as they shower and undress, conduct their post game rituals. Slowly, news starts to trickle in: a small riot has started. Outside the walls of the arena, the fans in the streets—not the ones inside—have escalated. 

Scott is still wet from his shower when Pike shows him a picture on Twitter: just two blocks away a police car is on fire. 

“Typical,” Pike says, a wide grin. They caused that—Scott scored a goal and now someone is throwing a brick at a cop car in a video on Pike’s phone. “Thank god we booked a nanny for the whole night because Jacks says they’re stuck here while the cops clear the area.”

Scott’s stomach lurches. He walks over and pulls down his phone to find a text from Kip: hey, stayed too long and now they aren’t letting us out. have they told you guys when we’ll be let out?

Kip’s jokes that were never jokes rattle around in his head. Scott pictures him in the stands, stranded, well-founded fears proven correct. Scott flags down Joselle, a member of team services. 

“I have a friend in my seats. Section 113. I don’t know the seat number. Can he be brought to the family box?”

She stares at him for a moment and then at the phone in her hands. “Building ops is quite busy at the moment.”

“Right. Well—I’d really appreciate it.” For emphasis, he adds, “A lot.”

“I’ll make it happen,” she acquiesces. “Has he been cleared by security?”

Having never needed to know before, he has no idea what that entails. “No, but. I vouch for him? He’s a friend of mine.”

The smile twists into a tighter line, and she nods. “No problem, Scott. We’ll make it happen.”

He picks up his phone and texts Kip: someone is coming to get you. There’s not much else he can do, so he tries not to spiral as he yanks on his post-game sweatpants and t-shirt. 

Slowly, like a train coming into the station at a low speed: he has just invited a man, a man he is sleeping with, who, well, comes across as gay because he is gay and not ashamed of it at all, not even a little bit. That’s one of the things Scott likes about Kip: the unambiguity of him. The lilt of his voice and emphasis of his gestures. The roll of his eyes at suggestions otherwise. That man is being brought to the family box as Scott Hunter’s guest. 

He scrolls on his phone as everyone around him does the same, stuck in a holding pattern. Hollander is doing an interview a few feet away, carefully not answering questions about the small riot outside. On his phone, he reads some commentary already pouring in. They’re saying that it’s pent-up excitement because the Voyageurs haven’t had a season this strong since ‘93, coupled with the protests last year and the mood in the province overall. Reading it, Scott remembers the argument about how hockey isn’t real. A kernel of defiance twists like a weed: it’s real enough to riot over. 

When he glances up, the press has left the locker room. The mood in the room is jubilant. They can’t admit it on camera, but the truth is that it does make them feel like kings. He walks by Hollander, who is on his phone and refreshing Twitter, looking at the photos and the news, over and over again. Scott is confident that Kip does not feel this way, and he has no idea what to expect when they’re told that they can go to the family room. Normally, Scott skips this part entirely—anything family-related is his time to find an exit. 

Finally, they’re ushered up from the locker room to the back room where the families are waiting. Kip is standing in the corner in a black t-shirt, his jean jacket folded over his arms, held tight. He is not talking to anyone. Back in New York, this would have been notable—there, people knew him well enough to know that his seats are only ever taken by charity raffles or the one cousin he speaks to. They knew him well enough to ask questions about having a guest. 

The only person who has asked him any real questions this year is Kip, whose mouth is set in a frown. 

“Hey,” Scott says as he approaches. They don’t touch. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Kip says. “I think we were about to start getting let out, but then a security guard found me—took me a second to realize what was happening.” 

“Thank you for coming tonight.” Suddenly shy, Scott adds, “Did you enjoy the game?”

“I liked watching you,” Kip answers. 

Scott glances around, feeling Kip’s eyes follow. No one is paying attention. No one knows him well enough to want to meet his friend, and everyone is too caught up in this high velocity moment. Playoff win, riot. A few feet away, Stedlund is talking quietly to his girlfriend, his arm around her. Scott’s arm aches like a phantom limb.

Kip’s expression is unreadable, his smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes when he says, “This feels like a dream.”

One of Kip’s hands is dangling by his side. Scott reaches out and carefully grabs Kip’s pinkie between his index finger and thumb and squeezes hard. “Nope. Real life.” 

The smirk lights up his eyes. 

Scott turns and stands next to him, facing the room, close enough to feel the radiating warmth between their arms. Scott scans the crowd. The only person he makes eye contact with is Hollander’s dad. Scott has met Yuna Hollander, but the dad is a mystery. He smiles at Scott and lifts a single hand to wave. It makes Yuna turn and look, and she does the same, her eyes flitting to Kip and back. Between them, Shane Hollander is staring straight at him. Scott tracks Hollander’s eyes moving to the left, to Kip, and then darting to the ceiling like they’ve been scalded. 

Scott does not look at Kip directly for nearly a minute, scared his face will give himself away. Looking out at the milling crowd, Scott asks, “Did you talk to anyone?”

“Was I not supposed to?”

“No,” Scott says, but part of him wants to admit: yes. “Did anyone welcome you? Say anything?”

He feels Kip shrug in the fraction of space between them. “No. I wasn’t here long.”

Scott’s relief tastes harsh, like the bitter tang of a pill coating. Just then, Joselle arrives. She shakes Kip’s hand, introducing herself. Kip introduces himself as Christopher. 

“So Scott, things are clearing up out there. But there’s still some, um, activity moving along Sherbrooke. We’re advising all the players and staff who live in that direction to expense a night at the Sheraton. The SPVM say it’ll be cleared up soon, but we assume you want to get to bed asap.” She delivers this with the same plastered smile as before. 

She turns to find someone else to deliver this news to. Whatever pecking order there is among the players who live north of the arena, Scott is at the top. 

Beside him, quieter than before, Kip whispers: “You could come to my place.”

They’re cleared to leave a few minutes later. The ten-minute drive to Kip’s neighbourhood takes twenty. The front door of Kip’s apartment opens into what is presumably meant to be a living room. There’s a small loveseat, and the rest of the room is Kip’s art studio. 

There’s so much to look at it makes Scott dizzy: an enormous painting in mid-progress on an easel; finished and blank canvases leaning against another wall in rows on the floor; a desk, mostly empty except for an open sketchbook. The large wall opposite is covered in paper printouts taped to the wall—reference images, he realizes. Low-resolution printer paper images of bodies, pools, bizarre things. Scott has a dozen questions. It’s like stepping inside Kip’s mind. His own bare-walled apartment embarrasses him. 

“Beer?” Kip asks over his shoulder. The yellow light from the fridge glows in the dark, small kitchen as Kip grabs them. 

“Yeah,” Scott calls. “I started a riot to get an invite here.” 

Kip cracks a beer and hands it to him. “You invited me ... backstage. I didn’t expect that.”

“I didn’t expect it either,” Scott admits. 

“It was weird, being back there and no one knowing why. I felt like an intruder.”

“You were my guest,” Scott says quietly. 

“I’m your secret,” Kip says. His voice is soft, not an accusation. 

“Have you told any of your friends about me yet?”

“No. I assumed that was—off limits.”

“What would they say?” Scott asks, guessing the answer.

“They’d think I was fucking with them, probably.” He levels Scott with a stare. “That I’m too old to mess around with a closet case.”

“We’re not just messing around,” Scott responds, petulant. 

“We’re not,” Kip agrees. 

It’s late, late at night. A streetlight shines through the curtains. The game-day adrenaline has not worn off. Kip crosses to where Scott is standing. They don’t talk much after that. Once their mouths meet, it moves from tenderness to heat almost instantly, Kip moving fast and decisive, like he has something to prove, walking him back into the desk. 

Kip bends Scott over his desk and strips his pants down around his ankles. Scott is exposed and vulnerable, while Kip takes his time, getting him off with just two slick fingers inside him, another hand flat against the bruise on Scott’s hip, pushing softly and evenly on it. The fingers beckon and Kip’s mouth is on his back, claiming bruises onto the skin. Scott comes with a whine, spilling onto the desk—something he didn’t even know he could do until Kip, because it takes a while and Scott gets embarrassingly squirmy and desperate first. 

He catches his breath, panting into his forearm on the desk. He stands and steps out of his pants properly. Kip looks hungry. Scott scoops him up and carries Kip back to the bedroom, knowing how much Kip likes how easy it is. It’s his first time in Kip’s bed. He drops Kip there carefully, tipping him onto the low mattress. Kip, still dressed, in the middle of grey sheets. Kip crawls up and turns on a lamp sitting on a chair that is acting as a nightstand. Scott crawls up the bed to him. 

They make out lazily, simmering in the spring warmth, Kip undressing along the way, until Scott is half hard again. He’s more interested in the familiar fit of their bodies as they grind together. Kip, half a foot shorter with ropey muscles from a different kind of work, fits between his arms like the other half of a lock, springing something open in Scott’s heart like a hammer to the cylinder. 

He pushes Kip up against the radiator on the other side of the bed, against its sloppily applied layers of paint. A paperback that was balancing on it falls with a slap onto the bed. It goes unnoticed. As much as he likes it, deep-throating strangers was always dangerous, a trust he couldn’t give. Now, he takes Kip in his mouth to the hilt, and surrenders again. Kip runs a hand gently down his jaw and then fucks his face in a now familiar pattern—slow and careful, building to hard and fast. He pulls out and comes all over Scott’s mouth and chin. Kip rubs it into Scott’s beard with his thumb, looking down with a sly grin. The bed is new, the choreography of the way they have sex is not. 

They rinse off in the shower together. Kip warns him not to stand in the back corner because the foot on that corner of the claw foot has sunk into the wood. The plastic curtain sticks to Scott as he showers for the third time today. 

Finally, in the late dark night, all the lights out, they arrange themselves for sleep, Scott nestling himself into the curve of Kip’s body. When he’s seen this moment in movies, it always has been a dramatic climax, the answer to a problem or the start of one. So he doesn’t know if it’s the correct time to say it, but it does feel like the truthful one. 

“I love you,” he says into the dark. 

“Oh,” Kip answers. The arm across Scott’s chest loosens for a moment and then slides down, grip vice-tight, and Kip says, “I love you too.”

In the morning, Scott is still a hockey player on a team heading to the second round of the playoffs, living in a city that was once a distant childhood memory and is still beating at the bloody heart of hockey. In the bathroom he twists to see a Rorschach of bruises from Kip’s mouth, two unevenly spaced on each scapula. With the battery of bruises elsewhere, they could be anything. 

He checks his phone: sixteen police cars burnt. An estimated half a million dollars in damages. But no one was injured. Happiness and damage twine together. 

—

Two and a half grueling weeks later, the Montreal Voyageurs lose the second round of the playoffs in game six. The mood in the visiting team locker room in Raleigh is dour, intense. Losing the playoffs feels like the end of the world. The balloon of hope that takes a good team there deflates instantly. Scott should know—he’s done it for nearly a fucking decade straight. 

Hollander is sitting on his bench, towel around his waist, dripping from his shower and staring at the floor like a statue from a book labelled Tragedy, his phone face down next to him. 

It feels like the world is ending—but they’ll do it all again in a few months. For the first time in his life, Scott wonders how many more times he will. It used to feel impossible that the ride would ever end. Ten seasons in, he can remember so acutely looking at the vets and thinking ten, fifteen years is a lifetime. It passed in a flash. This time last year he was in New York, carrying a franchise like a yoke. He’d known the ride would stop one day, but until this year, there was no life outside the carousel. Everything else was a blur. Now he can feel the creaks. 

Someone suggests they go out. Scott looks over at Hollander, who is now most of the way dressed. 

“Joining us?” he asks. Hollander looks up at him and nods. 

Scott joins, because the only people in the world who know the pain of losing are the men in this room. Scott’s misery is usually too big to share, but tonight he has company. 

Scott checks his phone: Kip has texted to check in. He checks the news as well. Montreal is quiet: police lined St-Catherine for twenty blocks straight standing side by side on one of the city’s main shopping streets. The disappointed crowd at a sold-out watch party at the Bell Centre dispersed without incident. It is a relief, in a way, to be down here in Raleigh for this. There will be celebrations in sports bars, but they won’t hear any fireworks for a second-round playoff win. The stadium tonight, fifteen hours from Montreal, was filled with Cours blue. 

Someone orders taxis—it’s past midnight and nothing near their hotel will be open. They end up at a dive bar, a sprawling open room with cheap tables, dart boards and the set up for a live band not currently in use. Enough space to accommodate twenty rowdy, depressed men looking for an outlet. There’s a nearly wall-to-wall surface of TVs. Every time it shows the hockey game they boo. 

The mood of the evening shifts from funereal to celebration. They made it farther this year. Next season is a blank slate for them to carve. This is not the tremulous end of season during his last few years in New York, which felt like holding onto a wet rope sliding out of their hands. This night is led by Hollander, excitable rookies, the team is mostly young. Optimism alive and fluttering.  

Scott is halfway drunk, shooting the shit with a handful of people when Drapeau arrives with a slam on his left side. Scott moves over. The conversation is stupid and light—the elaborate what-ifs of the season behind them. What if this injury, what if that goal. 

“We’re gonna win next year,” stumbles Pike to his left. 

Scott loses the conversation until he realizes they’re talking about him. 

“It’s still crazy,” Greeny is saying. “Scott fucking Hunter.” 

Drapeau says, “Hunter, even if you take it up the ass if… you keep playing like tonight, je m’en fous, we win the Cup.” 

The world feels sluggish as he turns his head. “Uh,” is all that comes out. “Great.”

“Off the ice, is your business,” Comeau adds with a serious nod. 

The slowly spreading oil in his mind leaches out, and he thinks: but I’m gay on the ice too. 

After the last two years, this is the best he can wish for. What Scott gained from Wilson’s problem with him is his team’s begrudging acceptance. As long as he doesn’t change anything, doesn’t rattle any feathers, stays as one of the top twenty players, above 675 players who would probably spit in his face, then maybe, maybe, he can keep whatever ground he has gained. 

He glances around and realizes he’s looking for Hollander. He spots Hollander playing darts with a group of guys, shaking his head at a joke, challenged by some strangers at the bar. Scott is glad he’s not in this conversation. What version of this is available to Hollander? Less or more? 

The night spirals on, an oil spill that pours into the early morning. Players peel off with girls. Someone shows up with coke. Scott does a single line for old time’s sake. It’s just past two in the morning and he’s far from home. A spike of energy eclipses whatever feelings are left. He checks his phone: it’s a three-hour walk back to the hotel or a fifteen-minute drive. When he leaves the dark of the bar, he’s surprised to remember he’s in a strip mall dive bar, far from anything. 

He jogs to the curb, knees screaming for a brief bright moment. Looking glassy-eyed, exhausted and holding his phone, is Shane Hollander. The loud energy of the bar is gone, replaced with the sound of cars, rolling by like an ocean tide. 

“You heading back?” Scott asks. 

Hollander spins, looking at him. He answers, “Yeah.”

“You good? You’re not normally out this late.” 

“Yeah yeah,” Hollander says, “”M a square, I know.”

Scott scratches his forehead and says, “Hell of a season.”

“Not good enough.”

“No.” 

A car passes through the parking lot; its headlights sending an eerie streak of light up a tree. With anyone else he’d make a promise about next year and the future. But Hollander also knows that blind hope is for other people. 

“I’m calling a cab,” Scott says instead. “You heading back?” 

Hollander nods, looking at his phone.

“My mom says Rolex wants us to wear similar pieces for the MLH awards,” he says without looking up. His words slur together a little.

Scott looks up from his phone. “Oh.” 

Hollander is staring at his phone, but what Scott can see from his angle is that his eyes aren’t focused and his hands aren’t moving on it. Shane says, “Is that a good idea?”

“Well. We played well together this year. Hollzy and the Huntsman,” Scott says.

The three hour walk back to the hotel is starting to appeal to him. He could probably run it in half the time if his knees weren’t shot at the moment. The dark gathers close around them, artificial spotlights of light and no stars. The bar’s muffled noise. Hollander is quiet, now looking up at the trees across the road. The hotel, rink, and bar are all on the sprawling edges of Raleigh, neither nature nor city. Hollander’s expression is a complete, unreadable blank. 

“Looking forward to the awards in Vegas? Pick up another trophy or two?” Scott asks to break the silence.

Shane shrugs noncommittally. He’s a little green when he finally turns to face Scott and says, “They’re kind of… boring. The ceremony itself. I’m not supposed to say that.”

“Yeah. Got bored after my first few. For sure,” Scott responds, and hops a few times, light on his toes, glancing down the street. 

What do they look like from a distance, his brain buzzes. Scott not standing still, Hollander barely moving. Unable to stop himself, Scott asks, “What about the awards after party?”

Hollander’s jaw tenses a fraction of an inch. Another car whizzes by. “What do you mean?” 

“Sometimes the fun part is after the awards. What happens in Vegas. Etcetera,” the last word is fun to say. Scott hits all the Ts with emphasis. 

Hollander stares back at him, the blankness dissolving into thoughtfulness, like he’s making a decision. Hollander shrugs, big and emphatic. “It’s usually kind of … overwhelming after the boring parts. People asking for stuff. Networking. Does that part get better?”

“No,” Scott laughs. “That always sucks. But hey, if you ever need… an escape or a cover. I get it.”

“I mean,” Hollander sways, just a little. “It’s fine most of the time.”

“Most of the time,” Scott repeats back. His phone buzzes again. “Car’s almost here.”

“Is your friend coming to Vegas? The one in the family box?”

No one has mentioned Kip since the chaos of that night. Another big maybe: who noticed, who cares. 

“Probably not,” Scott says. The car pulls up and Scott adds, “I can tell Rolex no.”

In the back seat of the car, Scott rests his face against the cool glass for the short ride. In his hotel room, excited for the prospect of a home, he stays up for another half hour, rolling every article of clothing into perfect tubes and then taking out and rinsing the items of his toiletry bag, a little grimy from more than forty hotels this year. 

—

Off-season has arrived, with its sudden empty days. He still has obligations and meetings to fill them. The playoffs are flickering past on his TV day in and day out, other teams making it farther. It’s nearly the end of May, when it is finally, reliably, spring when Kip arrives by bike to Scott’s back door. He hoists his bike on one shoulder to bring it up the few steps from the courtyard to the long narrow porch. 

Kip steps inside and Scott looks at the bike: it’s a heavy steel-framed thing with worn, pink tape on its drop handles. There’s a ratty-looking red square hanging from the top tube and a half-peeled sticker of a cat staring up at him. Scott can’t remember the last time he rode a bike. 

When he turns Kip is watching him with a look on his face like he has news. Scott has learned the expressions of his face. 

“I got the residency in Ontario,” Kip says. 

“Congratulations,” Scott says, pulling him into his arms. “Remind me of the dates?”

“July to early September,” Kip says, muffled into his chest. He pulls back and adds, “Funded. Well, a little. But high profile. Solo exhibition at the end. I’m staying with my friend Shawn.” 

Kip is doing him the favour of filling in details that got lost in the playoff blur. Scott knew these facts. He lets Kip go and turns to the window. 

“I was going to ask if you wanted to go on vacation with me this summer,” Scott admits. 

“I… don’t want to go and play pretend boyfriends somewhere on your dime,” Kip says gently, retreating to the living room. “I mean. Part of me really, really does. But I want to keep—building this, whatever this is, here. So, you should go without me. And still sleep with other people like you always do.”

Scott has been honest with Kip, and part of that honesty has meant detailing that sex for him up until this winter has been a summer activity with strangers. He has also been honest about how much better this is. 

Scott’s heart twists, daggered. He follows Kip to the living room. “How is me sleeping with someone else building with you? What the hell?”

Kip shakes his head. “Because you’re going to come back to me after the summer. And I’ll come back to you. Because you love me and I love you.” Kip grins that little mean smile Scott has come to love. “You’ll tell me all about it and then I’ll fuck you properly, because,” and here, Kip steps toward him and says with teeth, “You’re all mine. Fans can burn down a fucking building and other men can suck your cock but you’ll keep choosing me.”

“I will,” Scott promises. 

“I want you to prove it,” Kip shoots back. 

“I will,” Scott repeats. He clears his throat and continues, “Give me a few days, at least. I want to wake up with you every day for a week without some reason for one of us to leave. I’m going to New York for some work, we could go upstate. Or I’m going to Vegas, come after the awards and we can see the desert. Then we can… do that.”

Kip surveys him and says, “Okay. Vegas. I’m paying for my flight and I’m not staying at whatever hotel they put you up at. I’m not your mistress.”

Scott agrees and leans in to kiss him. Before he can reach, Kip says, “I have always been a gambling man.”

[🅢🅗]

Everything in the MGM Grand is gold. There’s a warm sheen to the lobby where lights bounce off an enormous lion. So many surfaces have gilded edges that the whole place feels cheap, like glamour passed through a game of broken telephone to end up here. 

Shane is in Las Vegas to be celebrated for a season he did not win. He’s up for MVP but he doesn’t think he’s going to win that either. He is definitely going to win the Art Ross for scoring the most points during the regular season. He edged out Rozanov by three points. After Boston’s last regular season game, Shane checked his phone on and off for three days for a text that never came about their scoring competition. 

The playoffs came and went like a tornado ripping through the last of his hard-earned bulk. Now he’s waiting in line to check-in, shifting to take weight off the knee that he has a long list of daily physio exercises to heal once he gets to his room. 

It’s Shane’s third award show, and the first time he’s convinced his parents not to come. The venue has changed to a new Las Vegas hotel every time, and like every past venue there is so much walking there to do. The hotels are all shopping malls unto themselves, with kilometres of hallways from room to venue to casino and back. Not that Shane has spent much time on the casino floor himself. The past few years, he hasn’t known anyone well enough to want to join them there and he has no interest in this kind of gambling. 

He’s flown in the morning of the awards and spends the day in his room. After all those months, years of dodging Rozanov, here they are in the same city, and Shane has not heard a word from him. Maybe they both got it out of their systems. 

He’s wearing a brand-new suit. He bought it and had it tailored midway through the season and now it sits loose across his chest. He has a long summer ahead to reset and return to the body that hockey needs him to have. There are instructions waiting for him somewhere about this. 

The awards are long and boring: a comedian he’s never heard of is the host. Shane watches a lot of movies but not a lot of TV. The celebrities are from shows he’s never watched, making jokes he doesn’t think are funny. 

After the ceremony, he’s buffeted between sponsorship obligations. They all want to shake his hand and talk about the season. Take photos to send to their kid, wife, someone who did not merit an invitation but you’re their favourite player. 

Shane is a fixture in an arcade game. 

Part of the way through the evening, he’s beckoned over by Theriault. He’s standing with men that Shane recognizes from meetings Shane does not speak at: the GM, some of the owners. Executives. 

Shane still does not like wearing watches, but he’s wearing the make and line Rolex had him model for. He’s learned a little bit from meetings and PowerPoint slides over the last six months. It opens a world to him: the watch they lent him for the evening is more expensive than Theriault’s. Shane’s watch is only a loaner, but his body and face are valuable enough that a whole team of people had a meeting about which watch he should wear tonight to be photographed in. Shane Hollander can sell the glamour of a watch worth thirty-five thousand dollars. Theriault’s is an entry-level model worth half that. 

As Shane shakes hands with the men in the circle, their wrists clink with models that Shane is not familiar with. The kind that are not sold retail, that are sold by invitation only to select few. The kind of men who believe these watches are worth something, as promoted by people like Shane. 

The last man to shake Shane’s hand smiles broadly and says, “There’s my best investment,” while gripping Shane’s hand like a vice, grinding the bones together. 

He continues without introducing himself, “Good season. Huge turnout at the end. We’re not supposed to say riots are a good thing,” he chuckles. “But let’s be honest, that’s PR other teams would kill for.”

“Luckily nobody did,” says a man with a red wine stain on his shirt.  

“Never know with those Frenchies,” chuckles another.

“Ay,” says Bouchard, the GM, one of the few men that Shane recognizes by face alone. “That’s your ticket-buyers you are talking about.” 

“That’s why we’ve got our investment here,” the first man says, clapping a hand on Shane’s shoulder. “French speaker to boot.”

“Couldn’t believe it when Scott fucking Hunter started yapping in French in interviews too,” adds wine stain. 

“I knew,” says the first man smugly. “One of the reasons we put feelers out after Hunter’s shit-show last year—figured we could get a deal. With Kalinsky retiring early, we didn’t know how the market would take the kid here.”

All season long, Shane has wondered why his team wanted Scott Hunter, but he has never been in the room with the people who made that decision. Here they are, and the answer is stupid and simple—a hedged bet, a movement of pieces. For the team owners, the Voyageurs players are a line item among many. Part of a calculation about profits and losses. For everyone else in the circle, the executives and managers, Shane pays their salary. 

“Seems like the locker room has fallen in line, eh?” asks wine stain, directly to Shane. “One of the things the Cours have going for them, now. Not a lot of big personalities to manage. Orderly room.”

“Yes,” Shane agrees, assuming he is supposed to, nodding and sipping at the water growing warm in his hand. 

The conversation spins back to the firmer ground of actual hockey. They ask about the last games, missed chances, and enthuse over his last goal of the season. Shane starts to zone out, the gold light of the room reflects sharply in bright spots off the watches he can’t help staring at. The one on his own wrist feels heavy, its links somehow too tight and too loose at once. He wants to take it and the rest of his new suit off. 

“How has it been,” the first man says, conspiratorially to Shane, “With Hunter on the team? No flamboyance in the way?”

He says the last part with a loose flap of his hand. Shane swallows and says, honestly, “No.” 

“Great. Solid season. Solid year. Good outlook, numbers-wise. You’re getting Cours fans out across the continent. The whole team here, y’know, the team behind the team, sees a big future for you,” he says, smiling wide. Shane knows fake teeth even better than he knows Rolexes. The man’s mouth is filled with them. 

“Thank you, sir,” Shane says. “I have big plans for the future.” 

The man laughs and claps Shane’s shoulder again. Across the room, Shane sees Hunter. They make eye contact for a long moment and Hunter nods slowly. Shane lifts his glass to him and Hunter walks over. 

“The devil himself,” the man says to Hunter. When Scott’s arm extends to shake his hand, Shane sees that he is wearing a Cartier watch. 

Scott’s smile is close-lipped, and he says, “Sorry, can I steal my captain away? Someone at Pepsi was looking for us for a photo.” 

The group waves them away, and Shane follows Scott. Once they fall away from the crowd, Hunter’s plastic smile drops. Shane asks: “Is there a photo?”

“No,” Scott says. “I just assumed you were going to be too nice and wind up stuck there until they got tired trying to tan themselves in your reflection.” 

Shane laughs and says, “Thanks.”

“I expect you to do the same, someday. Easier to sneak away if someone drags you out,” Scott shrugs. Scott flags down a server and asks for a glass of water. 

“No shots for old time’s sake?” Shane asks. 

“Hm?”

“You bought me a shot. My rookie year. I was too young to order for myself.”  

“Well fuck, I forgot about that,” Hunter chuckles. “Sadly, I’m heading out shortly.”

“Oh, uh. Cool.” 

Hunter chugs the water and says, “If anyone asks, I got a stomachache, or whatever you want to say. I doubt anyone will ask. I’ll see you at training camp.” 

Shane watches as Scott heads in the opposite direction of the elevators. Shane is left standing in an enormous, red-carpeted room. Not a lobby or a hallway, something in between. People are milling about, suits and gowns, photos taken. He could go back to his room. He could keep waiting for a text. He hates the feeling of could, could, could. 

Shane suddenly, inexplicably remembers the abbreviated award ceremony after the playoffs of his triple-A team at fourteen years old. That was the turning point, when it went from just scouts watching his team like they do everyone at that level, trying to find their next meal ticket, to scouts watching him, specifically, and then hockey reporters starting to show up, sensing a story in the making. His team came in second place by a single point, but Shane scored a record-breaking number of points in the tournament. 

Back then, as a kid, hockey took him to far-flung places. The tournament was a long way from the thousands of gold lights in Vegas, a long way from the suits and celebrities. The tournament was at a small rink in New Brunswick. His mom was still working then, so only his dad came with him. His dad wore a golf shirt. No one wore a suit. 

Outside of the hockey itself, what Shane remembers is bleaching his hair with his team in their hotel rooms before the playoffs started. It ran orange streaks down his back, his hair so dark it wouldn’t take the bleach. Everyone had the same hair for the playoffs, more or less. They left discoloured blotches on the hotel carpet that Shane had stared at nervously every evening, terrified about the trouble. 

And then, Shane’s team lost in the finals but he won MVP. It was the first time he competed at a national level. The award ceremony was right after the final game, on the ice, no pomp, no circumstance. The officials conferred, and Shane was given a gold medal on a wide blue sash. 

Afterwards, everyone returned to the Best Western where they had dyed their hair. What Shane remembers so clearly from that evening was standing in his hotel room and seeing a handful of other players—not everyone, but a few guys from each team—outside in the dark parking lot standing around in circles. They were too young to drink, then. He remembers feeling so thoroughly exhausted and wondering how they had the energy, that maybe that was why his team had lost, saving stamina to stand around in the dark for no reason. 

He didn’t have a cellphone, no way to text to ask to join them or to be invited, but he had watched them and wondered if he should go down or if he wouldn’t be welcome. He didn’t. He had—and it embarrasses him to remember this now—fallen asleep with his medal around his neck. In the years since, he won so many youth, Junior, and now real fucking NHL trophies that he has no idea where that early one is—probably somewhere in his parents’ house.

The memory feels small and meek, his hands feel grimy from the evening. He wants to be elsewhere, to feel new again. As Shane stares at the doors that Hunter just left through, the only way out is clear. As obvious as a riot, as obvious as a strange man standing in a corner next to Hunter in the family box. To want something for himself. 

He picks up his phone and texts from the corner of the lobby. 

[Jane]: See you in Vegas?

Shane scans the room. He hasn’t seen Rozanov since the ceremony itself a few hours ago, when he’d been an indistinct blur far across on the other side of the room in his tux. He appeared once on screen when someone made a joke about him. He wonders if Rozanov even remembers their conversation about Vegas back in January. Maybe he is off gambling, or he has left for a club or found some—Shane’s phone buzzes in his hand. 

[Lily]: Yes I saw you on stage 

[Lily]: I will be free at midnight 

Shane checks the time. It’s quarter past eleven now. He sends Rozanov his room number and begins the trek back to his room: through the vast halls of the hotel, the shopping and the people, everyone milling around. The longer he walks, the stranger he feels. An out of body sensation, like each step is taking him out of the noise and the crush of his real life into another night entirely, somewhere far away. 

He spends so much of the year inside: rinks, rooms, cars, hotels, and planes. He suddenly wants to be outside, even just for a second. He has to check maps on the walls along the way and nearly gets lost, but finally he finds his way to the main entrance where there’s a valet stand under a massive awning. There is so much going on in Las Vegas that the NHL Awards are just one part star in the cosmos: Shane sees signs for other shows and mainstay attractions on his walk. 

Shane crosses under the awning and steps out into the night, where the spectacle is over. It’s late, and the desert wind has swept the heat of the June day out. Shane crosses the asphalt, still warm from the day, until he’s at the bottom of the decorative palm trees planted in a row along the wall of the hotel. Each tree is several feet wide. There is no one around as he steps into the landscaping, carefully climbing up a low stone wall to be next to the tree. He places the flat of his hand on the surface of its bark. He runs his hands around its bulk. His nails are bitten down to nubs and the tree scratches against the soft skin at the tips of his fingers. 

He turns and rushes back to his room. 

When Rozanov knocks on his door half an hour later, Shane is careful to check in the peephole for him and quick to shuck off the travel slippers before Rozanov saunters in. 

Rozanov looks like he always does: bored and assessing. His tuxedo is half off: bow tie gone, the buttons are open at the collar showing a mole right by his clavicle. He wastes no time, Shane barely gets a word out before Rozanov hums a noise and then presses him, bodily against the wall. His mouth tastes like cigarette smoke and vodka. Shane shoves back with force. He pushes Rozanov to the other wall of the room’s entryway. Rozanov hits it with a huff of air that satisfies something in Shane; he grins into the kiss, their mouths still together. Rozanov’s hand is suddenly at his jaw, big and present. 

The complete unknown usually terrifies Shane. He’s elite, a level above, in a game that chews up failure and spits it out. Rozanov is the play he can never guess. 

Shane slides to his knees and unbuckles Rozanov’s pants right there in the doorway. Rozanov isn’t even hard yet; it is another novelty, to dive in and feel Rozanov harden in his mouth. The smell and heat of him, how much Shane wants, salt and musk. The whole evening before happened at a remove, and now he is here, present: his knees dig dully in the hard carpeted floor as he gets lost in the rhythm of it: heavy on the tongue, ache of a wide jaw, the slide of skin in his mouth. He feels like he could do this forever. Lavishing. Suddenly Rozanov’s hand in his hair yanks him off, not hard but unambiguous.

“Is there a rush?” Rozanov asks, his words broken by pants. “You already won trophy tonight, are you going for dick-sucking trophy now?”

Shane rolls his eyes and rocks back to stand. He says, “I’d win that one too.”

“My right-winger was injured for ten games. I was handicapped,” Rozanov snipes back. “Let us see who is winning other awards.”

Rozanov steps out of his pants properly and walks Shane back to the bed. He doesn’t even fully take Shane’s pants or boxers off, just digs his fingers demandingly into Shane’s pants and boxers and tugs them down. Rozanov sucks him off with such a ferocity that Shane thinks for a second he’s trying to punish him: suction, intensity, hand making up for the length Rozanov can’t take without gagging. After just a few moments of this, or maybe several minutes—he can’t be sure—Shane is overwhelmed, whimpering. 

“No, wait, I want,” he whines. He stops as Rozanov pulls off with a pop of suction and looks up at him expectantly.

“What do you want?” Rozanov asks, breath warm and wet. 

Shane shoves his hips toward Rozanov and says, “You know.”

“Tell me,” Rozanov entreats, mouth close but not close enough.

Shane feels his cheeks pink and hot at having to ask. Rozanov is looking up at Shane through his lashes, hand unmoving, his lips shining with spit. 

“Fuck me again,” Shane says. 

Rozanov complies. He preps Shane with his fingers, just enough so when Rozanov turns him over and arranges Shane on hands and knees with a pillow under his hips, he can breach Shane in one long slow push. Shane gasps with the stretch of it. He puts his hands forward onto the upholstered hotel headboard. His hands dig into the golden brocade when Rozanov bottoms out, his hips press firm against Shane’s ass, his hands dig into Shane’s hips to hold them close together, joined. An experimental feeling, like being tested. Shane is still not properly undressed: his boxers are wrapped around one ankle. It’s hot, quick and dirty and rewiring his brain. Shane rocks just slightly back: the desire he was chasing with his hand against a palm tree surges into life. 

The noise drowns out. 

Rozanov fucks him hard and fast, everything about it new and intense. Last time they built to this, had gone slow. Now, Shane surrenders, chest into the mattress, letting the glowing pleasure arrive in welcome waves. Rozanov maintains a fast pace, letting out a litany of what Shane assumes is Russian but maybe is just sounds. 

The waves grow, and Rozanov hooks a hand into Shane’s mouth. Shane bites down, hard on Rozanov’s index finger. When Shane starts to come, Rozanov hauls him up with force, pulling one long arms around Shane, his back is against Rozanov’s chest and he is pinned in place. The hair on his arm stands, his toes curl tight enough to cramp, he feels it from his nipples to his hairline, a current of hot pleasure that crackles like static, his body wholly his own, wholly Ilya’s, wrapped in his arms. 

The feeling lingers, aftershocks of the same pleasure. He feels the slow slide of a single drop of sweat trailing its way down the space between their bodies. He pants for a second, collapsing forward, released. Rozanov pulls out, and then the feeling of Rozanov coming on his lower back, ass. It’s so hot Shane feels his face burning with it, embarrassment and arousal twist together scorchingly. 

Practical reality comes back quickly: the pillow under him and his back are equally sticky. The mix of sweat and more. 

Minutes later, when they have cleaned up and Shane leans back into the headboard he was gripping moments before and Rozanov is grabbing his boxers, he asks, “If I make you come like this three times. Is that a hat trick?”

“Shut up,” Shane groans. Then the thought about the next time. A third, new time. Giving in and making this decision once again. Other than this year, they have not hooked up during the regular season. He’s not sure how that would work, if it’s a good idea. Calling more attention to himself, given everything—all the attention, what he can see happening with Hunter on the sidelines. 

Rozanov snaps his pants with a flick before putting them back on. The sound snaps him back, and the thought of a new season prompts Shane to say, instead, “You guys look strong. For next year.”

Rozanov looks up from where he is tying one of his shoes and says. “Yes. So do you.”

Rozanov hunts for his other shoe and finds it across the room, wedged between the desk and extra chair. 

“How has it been,” Ilya asks, his back turned. “New line. Having Hunter on your team?”

“He’s kind of intense, but the team likes him.” 

“And you?” Rozanov prods, “You like him? Having one of your posters come to life and play with?”

Shane furrows his brow. “What?”

“You had poster of Hunter in childhood bedroom, no?” Rozanov is grinning as he laces the other shoe. “You said this in interview with both of us. Rookie year.”

Shane blinks. He does not remember ever talking about this. In fact, it has not come up once, even in the scrutiny of Hunter joining his team. 

“Oh,” Shane starts. “I think so? I forget. I had a lot of posters… Maybe he was one of them. Why are you even asking?”

Rozanov shrugs, bored. He is dressed from the waist down now, leaning against the glossy TV stand. He says, “For months everywhere I look, the two of you. Interviews with old man talking. And then he plays better in Montreal.”

“Yeah, well,” Shane starts, “Anyone would play better on my line.”

Rozanov grins, delighted. “Without cameras, Hollander you are not so—what is the word. Pretending.”

Shane shrugs. Rozanov stands and reaches for his undershirt from the floor near the bed, from where it lay twisted into a rope. Shane asks, “What posters did you have in your room growing up?”

Rozanov’s expression changes. Then he pulls the shirt over his head and when his face emerges, the grin has curled back across it, “No need for poster when I have mirror.”

Shane rolls his eyes and says, “Oh fuck off.” 

Rozanov is fully dressed now. Shane asks, “Do you, like, go to that home when you go back to Russia?”

“Yes. Home is Russia.”

“No, like… your house. My parents redecorated their place so it always feels weird going ‘home,’ when the house is all different,” Shane says. 

Rozanov is pulling a cigarette out of his pocket. He sniffs, “Poor Hollander.”

Chastised, Shane tilts his head back against the headboard. He wants to know: is Moscow like that? Familiar and unfamiliar all at once? Are your posters gone? 

“It’s gross that Vegas lets you smoke inside,” he says instead. 

Rozanov turns on his heel, saying, “See you next season, Hollander.”

—

Three days later, back in Montreal, Shane searches for the interview Rozanov mentioned, where Shane said he had a poster of Hunter. 

It takes a while because at first all the search results are about this year, but he finds it after trying many different combinations of keywords and going back many pages in the results. The quote is not from a magazine or press that Shane remembers doing at all. It’s from a small fan blog, someone’s unformatted Blogspot website. It hasn’t been updated since 2011, two years ago now. On the third page is a Q&A with both him and Rozanov. Whoever ran the site must have asked them the questions separately, who knows when. They aren’t particularly interesting or ground-breaking questions. 

The blogger asked Shane, what players are you looking up to this year. Shane’s answer off-handedly mentions the posters in his room, listing Scott Hunter among the rest. It’s barely half a sentence. Shane reads Rozanov’s section and doesn’t see the same question—either because he didn’t answer it, or because Rozanov wasn’t expected to be anyone’s role model. 

Shane scrolls up and down on the blog. It has three comments which have since been deleted. He searches the post title (Q&A With 2009 Top Draft Picks: Hollander and Rozanov) but he can’t find the post linked or mentioned anywhere else. It’s just a dead-end artifact of that first whirlwind year. 

The fact that Rozanov remembered this interview or found it recently makes Shane’s stomach squirm. 

—

There’s a cottage for sale just down the road from his childhood cottage. It’s on the next lake over, but an easy twenty-minute drive. The actual cottage itself is from the 70s. It has electricity, technically, and water. He feels less bad about tearing it down when he sees it. As his agent explains, it’s a tale as old as time: family infighting means no one maintained it over the last few years. Damp crept in through the roof, leaving coffee-coloured rings on the ceilings. Wildlife was recently cleaned out of the screened-in porch. The furniture has been cleared out.

But it is a large plot with year-round road access, electricity and running water. If he wants to build something new—and he does—he won’t have to clear any mature trees. 

After visiting, he goes back to his family cottage and tells his parents. His dad is on the phone with someone for work, so Shane goes and takes the canoe out by himself. He portages it cautiously down to the water, relishing the ache across his shoulders. He takes it out for a quick paddle, just around the bay, not even to the next dock, the Grahams, those childhood neighbours he has not seen since last year. His dad mentioned inviting them over at some point, but Shane is too busy this year to stay long. He will keep himself busy. 

Out on the lake, the wind bounces the canoe gently, a comforting rock. He’s in a narrower part of the lake. He knows exactly what would be around the corner if he kept canoeing. He turns the boat around, and paddles back. 

When he gets back, he calls his agent and instructs her to put in a cash offer, rushed close. He wants to get started on the project right away. When his dad gets off the phone and his mother comes back from town, he tells them.

They celebrate with ciders, his mother squeezing his hand when she tells him how exciting it is, what a good idea. Waterfront property is always a good investment, that it’ll be something just for him. His dad is already talking about groundwater and septic systems. 

Shane goes back to Montreal the next day. He has a charity event at the children’s hospital, some in-person meetings with his financial advisors, and an appointment with the personal doctor he keeps to cross-reference with the ones paid by the team. 

He does his due diligence. The administration to be and stay Shane Hollander. 

At the end of the week, he drives back to Ottawa and picks up the keys to the cottage he is about to tear down. When he arrives and tours it alone, the building is mustier than he remembers. The smell reminds him of a night sometime this past season, when he returned late to his hotel room and found it flooded and wet. Standing there in the bright summer sun, Shane cannot remember what city it was in. He tries to remember, but his life is completely unmoored from geography. 

He walks now down the hill to the lake, to the waterfront that belongs to him. 

The old dock is rotting. He toes the wood cautiously with a toe. Some of the planks have gone soft with age. He walks carefully to the end of the dock. He’ll have to scrap this as well. But first he’ll get to oversee an entire building project. Make all the decisions on design and details himself. The current building is low-ceilinged with small rooms paneled in knotty pine. He wants wood and sweeping ceilings. Something with as many windows as possible to see the water from every angle. Like his condo, but green from every angle. 

He’s distracted by these thoughts when his foot goes clean through a board. He stumbles dramatically: his foot sinks into the lake water below, and he goes down hard onto his knees and hand. Luckily there’s no one there to see. He rolls over, cautiously threading his foot back out through the board. His foot is soaked. He peels off his shoe and sock, lying back on the dock. 

The boards burn hot through his shirt. Shane takes off his other shoe, peels his shirt off and folds it onto the dock. He takes his phone out and folds his shorts. He stands alone in his boxers in his new quiet bay. He wants to dive straight in, but he can’t remember the depth of the water from the extensive binder sitting in his car with all the metrics and dimensions that catalogue every detail to learn.

The lake is quiet. Just the familiar wind and lapping of water. There are no boats out as Shane dangles his feet off the end of this rotting dock into the dark green water. He pushes off carefully, sliding into the water in one quick movement. He feels nothing beneath his feet as he treads: it is not shallow. 

He exhales the air from his lungs and sinks down, propelling himself down into the black, dark water. It’s an icy cool where summer warmth cannot reach. His lungs burn distantly, a nag to return to the surface. The bottom of the lake when he reaches it is soft silt that falls away under his feet. He spins, slowly in the water and looks back up at the surface. The sun slants in bright, welcoming rays through the water high above him. The world is quiet and close. Small and beautiful. He closes his eyes and feels it all, the way he so rarely does: the promise poised on the edge of everything. Finally, when the burn turns to brightness in his chest, he shoots up, cresting with a gasp. 

With his muscle mass and low body fat, he doesn’t float well. His body was hewn for other purposes. He has to tread with his arms in wide arcs to float on his back, like he’s making snow angels, to stare up at the sky. The sun is behind the clouds, crepuscular rays glow at the edge of them. His field of vision is the vast sky and for this fleeting moment, Shane feels calm. A mote of potential, hopeful. 

This tornado loves you
What will make you believe me?

Neko Case - This Tornado Loves You cont.

.

Chapter End Notes

How and why is this 10k words?

This particular riot is based off (one of many) the 2008 riot when the Habs tied up the playoffs against, ironically, the Bruins. The damage described is accurate, as well as the twenty blocks of police afterwards. Kip's bike has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it red square.

Where is Shane's cottage? This question haunts me. I'm not going to think about that too much.

Comments are greatly appreciated, encouraged, begged for. They arrive like a beam of light in a lake. I'm over on tumblr if you want.

Chapter 8: olympic

Chapter Summary

Olympics, and other events.

Chapter Notes

It is hot outside in July when Shane is pulled to the centre of the photo as Team Canada lines up, shoulder to shoulder, on an ice rink covered in wood planks. He was looking forward to the chance to play with the best of the best in this off-season, pre-Olympics camp. And then, a few days before they were due to arrive in Calgary, the insurance fell through. 

Skating is not just skating: there is no playing hockey without a series of approvals and complex calculations by the institution that signs their paycheques and insures their bodies. There are too many high-value limbs on too short notice. In an office in Toronto, NHL’s actuaries calculated the insurance to protect their contracts at $1.5 billion dollars just for a three-day event. 

Over 40 players have been invited to the training camp to test out lines, have strategy meetings. Build camaraderie. The top six on the roster were actually confirmed in a big splashy press event where Shane has been named the youngest ever Olympic hockey captain. All that, and they aren’t even allowed to play hockey.

Instead, they’re in the back rooms of a rink they are not allowed to use, posing with red and white t-shirts printed with Hockey Canada logos right in the centre of the chest. Shane’s shirt, red the colour of a maple tree in fall and tight across his shoulders, has a black C screen-printed on the top. After the camera stops clicking, he taps the plasticky letter with his fingers for good luck. 

—

Shane spends most of the off-season dealing with the logistics and breaking ground at his new cottage. After the Voyageurs’ first pre-season practice, Shane is walking down the hall in his post-practice sweats, reading his dad’s thoughts on the designs, the options they have to not have to blast too much Canadian Shield, the plateau of granite that covers most of the country and makes it impossible to build without dynamite. Shane is flitting between options when Theriault waves him over. 

Theriault lets him know that ops has made a quick change to their travel schedule. Hayden is now rooming with their recent trade, an American up from LA, Jensen. More depth at centre, shoring up their offense. Theriault lets him know: this season, Shane will be rooming with Hunter. 

“First road trip starts in San Francisco,” Theriault says. They’re in an alcove, out of earshot. Theriault pauses as he consults the creased notebook from his shirt pocket. Shane shifts, unsure if there’s more to be said. Theriault continues, looking at his notebook, “City of temptation for guys like him.” 

Shane swallows. “Oh. Hunter never goes out with after games, really.” 

Theriault puts down the notebook, and Shane looks back up at his face. He’s looking at Shane appraisingly, an expression Shane knows well. “Good,” Theriault says. “This season you’ll have a close eye in case any of that changes. This is our season to win. And we don’t want a whole… comme on dit, mishegas with the press.” 

Shane is looking at Theriault’s throat, the spot where the collar of his zip-up sweater is accidentally folded in against his neck—he has not noticed, or no one has told him it’s stuck. His coach dictates and structures so much of his life. He’s leading the team to victory and has led them well so far. The conversation with executives in Vegas echoes back—he does not have a lot of personalities to manage. Montreal is an orderly room. 

Shane looks into his coach’s eyes, arranges the shape of his mouth into a smile, and responds, “Of course not, coach.” 

—

In San Francisco, Shane realizes how much he has gotten used to Hayden’s patterns. He is used to putting his headphones in during Hayden’s nightly call with Jackie and the baby, used to  Hayden’s chaotic side of the room—Hayden always leaves their room first because he throws everything in his suitcase without folding it or organizing his things. He was also a good roommate: he never complained about Shane’s white noise machine or and he never told the guys about his travel slippers. 

They arrive in San Francisco, and Shane takes a call in the lobby to delay the inevitable. When he wraps up and heads to their room, Hunter is in bed reading a book with a giant skull overlaying a man’s face on the cover. He nods at Shane, “Evening, roomie.”

Shane returns the greeting and goes about his unpacking process: hanging up his suit, putting his toiletry bag in the washroom. He is used to just seeing Hayden’s toothbrush and deodorant in a ziploc bag—Hayden kept spilling hotel shampoo inside his toiletry bag, or forgetting it entirely and Jackie made him switch—instead there’s a black leather bag, zipped closed and embossed with the letters SAH. Shane places his own nylon bag next to it. When he steps into the room, Hunter is still reading, totally zoned out. 

“I use a white noise app,” Shane says, holding up his phone. “Too many years of snoring roommates.”

“No problem. I got used to earplugs years ago.”

Hunter has a slight lisp, the sound of someone speaking with a night guard in. Shane thinks of Theriault’s words, and he wants to laugh, if he could. 

They win their pre-season exhibition game the next day against the Mission. Shane scores a satisfying goal that bounces off the goalie’s skate, which pulls them ahead after two dead-even periods. The satisfaction sends him careening into Hunter’s side, Hayden not far after. One of their hands thunks his helmet. 

It’s a mid-afternoon game, and their flight is not until early the next morning. Once press and management clears out, the locker room has the elastic joy of brotherhood. Someone puts on loud pop music as JJ shouts restaurant names from his phone: there are too many options here in San Francisco, and everyone has specific types of food they do or do not want to eat. Some guys decide they want to go ball out, there’s a long back and forth about Michelin with a Quebecois accent, as some guys try to get a last-minute reservation for a prix-fixe menu that will cost over $300. Another group just wants to find a burger place. 

Shane opts to go with a small group to a seafood restaurant near the hotel. 

He spends the meal hip-to-hip with Stedlund, hearing about the sommarstuga he is renovating back home in Stockholm. HIs teammates knock hands, elbows with him. 

He is still buoyant with victory and laughter, excitement, when he returns to the hotel room and finds it empty. It is just past 10pm. Shane tries not to think about it. He is not entirely sure which group Hunter left with. Did he go to the fancy restaurant? Shane’s stomach swoops unexpectedly at the question. 

He has the vague knowledge that San Francisco is a city of temptation: the sudden mental image of Hunter out somewhere. A club, dancing, or something. A writhing mass of anonymous bodies, of men, sheen from sweat. Shane’s stomach turns again, sharp. 

To distract himself, he turns on the TV, flipping until he finds an old Batman movie. He doesn’t realize he’s fallen asleep until the sound of water running in the bathroom wakes him. He glances at the clock by his bed, which reads 11:08 PM. 

“Good night?” Shane asks when Hunter returns to the room. 

“Yeah,” Hunter answers, crossing his bed. 

“Was the $300 meal worth it?” Shane asks, hopeful. 

Hunter shakes his head and says, “Didn’t go to that. There was a gallery my friend wanted me to see. So I went.” 

“A gallery? Like… art?”

“Yeah,” Hunter laughs. “It was closing by the time I got there. I didn’t stay long.”

“Open late,” Shane says. 

“I went out. After,” Hunter says. His back to Shane as he pulls his t-shirt up and off. 

Shane doesn’t realize he’s going to say it until the words come tumbling out, surprising him: “Theriault wanted me to keep an eye on you.”

Scott stops what he’s doing and says only, “Oh. Huh.” He sits down on his bed.

“He’s worried about… media. You know.” 

“He’s worried about me being obvious.”

“I guess so, yeah,” Shane says. He rolls the edge of the sheet in between his fingers. 

“I went to a gay bar after the gallery,” Hunter says. 

Shane’s stomach, which had mostly settled, lurches. Fear is clear and easy, amidst the storm. 

“Is that a good idea?” Shane says, urgently, “I thought you had a… boyfriend.” 

They aren’t looking at each other: the TV is still on. It’s an ad break.

“I do. It was just a bar. Like. A regular bar where everyone was gay, I guess. I had a drink and then I left.” They sit in silence, watching as the end of the Batman movie fills the screen. Suddenly, Scott adds, “I had never been to one, here, in the US.” 

This is suddenly, unambiguously more than Shane wants to know. The idea of it is so beyond imagining. He wants to leave the room, but there is nowhere he could go. He does not want to know what led Scott there, why he went, what it was like, felt like, sounded like. Writhing bodies flash again in his mind’s eye. 

“Did anyone see you? Recognize you?” He asks instead. 

“There’s nothing to tell coach,” Scott answers. “I wanted to see what it was like… before the season started. I had a single drink and then I left. I’m focused on the team, Hollander. Don’t worry about it.”

“Right,” Shane says, worried. 

“Besides,” Scott says, his voice floating from the other side of the room, cutting through the churn of Shane’s stomach. “It’s good news for you. That Coach thinks you’re his eyes and ears.” 

Shane falls into an uneasy sleep at the thought. 

The next day on the plane, Shane sits by himself. He stretches out, his feet pressing into the empty seat ahead of him, his foot tapping rhythmically on the leather. He searches Hunter’s name on every social media platform. There’s nothing but predictions for the season ahead. 

Deplaning in Montreal, Theriault is sitting by the exit door, nodding as his players pass. They have a day off tomorrow, a brief break at the start of the season. 

Shane is the last to leave. As he rolls his suitcase past him, Theriault says, “I’ve scheduled some 1:1 time with you, Pike and Lalonde, Friday. Keep that sync going.”

“Looking forward to it,” Shane nods. The idea of spending the next practice with just Hayden and one of the assistant coaches sounds incredibly appealing. 

“Good time in San Francisco?” Theriault asks.

“Totally,” Shane answers. 

—

The season begins in earnest. The damp leaves of October turn to brown paste in gutters. The crisp cut of wind blows out the lingering humidity of Montreal summer. Shane does a last-minute photoshoot for a Thanksgiving turkey sandwich at Tim Hortons. They work the filming around his schedule, renting out one of the Tim Hortons near the practice facility. The cleanest Timmies he’s been in a while, for Shane to walk back and forth pretending to eat a turkey sandwich. 

He gets the final shots to approve a week later.

“A key difference, now,” Yuna tells him on the phone in some airport in some city in a grey hallway, pacing back and forth to shake out the restlessness of a lost game. “Brands are coming to you, honey. They’re working on your schedule.” 

“You call the shots,” Yuna adds. 

Shane looks up: their flight is leaving early, which means Shane gets home with twenty extra minutes to reheat his dinner before bed, a little extra rest before mandatory practice in the morning, and two hours of tape review in the afternoon. 

A few days later, back in Montreal, he hosts a season kick-off party in his own condo this year. He has lived there long enough to feel some claim over it, to feel comfortable inviting people in. He schedules cleaners the day before and makes sure to check every inch of the upstairs himself before anyone arrives, even though there’s a guest bathroom downstairs. 

It’s a mid-afternoon party: Shane has someone from Schwartz’s come and carve smoked meat in person, along with a stack of two-fours nearly to the ceiling.

At one point, Shane has to stop three of the rookies up from training camp or newly signed from doing shot accuracy drills with one of Shane’s hockey sticks, crushed beer cans, and the narrow strip of his balcony that overlooks a busy street. Shane turned 22 years old in the spring, and he is the adult in the room now. 

He wakes the next morning on his couch with a pounding headache and sticky floors, nearly slipping on a crushed Molson Cold Shot as he rolls off the couch to let the cleaners in. 

—

The end of October brings their first game against Boston in the middle of back-to-back travel bouncing them back and forth in the northeast: Toronto, Boston, New York. They fly to Boston straight from Toronto, arriving just after 9pm. The season has started strong even without the looming spectacle of the Olympics and Shane feels invincible. 

Going from Toronto to Boston is a high energy back-to-back against both of the Cours’ longest rivalries, some of their most passionate away-game crowds. 

They win against Toronto 2-0, and Shane relishes the shutout, the sneer on Dallas Kent’s miserable face at the end of the game. Shane is grateful for the direct flight, to not return to his room with Hunter, to avoid thinking about the stupid shit Kent said at the face-off. They have finished demolition at his cottage, and he’s checking on the progress reports when he gets a text, the first in four months.  

[Lily]: we will not go so easy on you

Shane wants to send Rozanov a link to his highlight reel from the Toronto game, the goal he scored in the second period, but that would be incriminating. Instead, Shane texts: What about after the game?

[Lily]: i will definitely not go easy on you 😈

It is just past 11 pm when Shane taps back into the hotel room after their game against Boston. Montreal won. A mean 4-3 win, frustrating the local fans who booed in a loud, long chorus every time Shane hit the ice. The sound sings in Shane’s ears, their disappointment curling into a smile he hides on the bench, a smile that is still on his face when he opens his hotel room door hours later, that burns his cheeks with victory.  

He and Hunter have fallen into a routine over the first weeks of the season. He knows to expect Hunter already in bed, reading his book or texting rapidly—two activities Shane has decidedly not asked questions about. 

As anticipated: Hunter is up, reading a book balanced on his knees. Shane is wearing his post-game suit, which is too obvious to leave the hotel in. He needs to change—he stands in front of his suitcase, which sits open like a book on a luggage stand by the window, blackout curtains gently wafting over it. 

He touches the zipper, not sure what to say. He wants to come up with a good excuse to leave, to not give into what he is pretty sure Hunter suspects. The thing with Rozanov—a magnetic force, the rope of an anchor he can pull on at will or push off into dark, unknowable water. This thing has existed discreetly: a weight that belongs to Shane alone. His. The idea that Hunter, that anyone could know, reveals it for what it is: a dangerous dead weight that could sink him. 

He turns and opens his mouth. Hunter is already looking at him. This mirrored moment: a month ago in San Francisco, Hunter’s recklessness was lost in the waves that came after: games, meetings, travel. It doesn’t really make what Shane is doing better or worse, he decides. He has it under control. 

“I’m going to get a drink at the hotel bar,” Shane says, his rehearsed line. “A friend from my Juniors team is staff at BU.”

“Sounds good. I have an early meeting tomorrow. So. I’ll have my eye mask on anyway,” Hunter says, waving the mask like a flag, an offering. 

Shane nods and heads out into the night. 

Rozanov’s condo is a wall of glass overlooking Boston. One of many differences between the cities: no building in Montreal is allowed to be taller than Mount-Royal, which would hide the cross at the top of the mountain. Shane’s own condo is in a tall glass tower on the 18th floor. When he walks into Rozanov’s place on the 32nd floor, the difference is striking: up here the view is of a very distant city cast in glittering miniature, all the details lost. 

Shane is looking out of the window when Rozanov hands him the glass of water he asked for. 

“Is Mr. Real Estate here for the view or to fuck?” Rozanov asks as he snakes a hand up under Shane’s t-shirt. 

Shane takes a sip of his water before he turns, glass still in hand. Rozanov presses him against the window, the other hand coming up to Shane’s mouth. Shane opens his mouth and closes his eyes. He feels the thick pad of Rozanov’s thumb as it hinges his mouth open. It’s heavy on his tongue. 

He opens his eyes. Rozanov stares at him and Shane feels the temporary harbour of it. The whole world narrowed down to the weight in his mouth. He pitches the anchor overboard: sliding his tongue against the ridges of Rozanov’s thumb, the flat nail, in his mouth. He hollows his cheeks and sucks. 

Rozanov takes the glass from his hand, and leads him to the couch. 

They fool around in the living room: Shane perched half off the edge of the couch as Rozanov stands before him, pants around his ankles and cock in Shane’s mouth. Shane strokes himself off while Rozanov uses his mouth, Rozanov’s hand the side of his face. His wet thumb is pressed possessively into the hinge of Shane’s jaw when Shane comes, overwhelmed, into his own fist. 

He’s embarrassed, momentarily, as post-orgasm clarity washes in, but Rozanov looks hungry and he asks, tapping his cock on Shane’s flushed cheek with a smear of pre-come, “Can you do this again? Come again tonight?”

“Yeah,” Shane asserts. “If you. Give me a minute.”

Rozanov does and does not give him a minute. The look on his face is feral, a hunting animal as he hooks a strong hand around Shane’s wrist. Some of Shane’s come gets on his hand and he grins, leading Shane down the hall and licking his fingers. 

He leads Shane to a nondescript bedroom, two pillows and dark sheets on a department store stock bed frame. Rozanov pushes Shane down onto the bed. The evening whirrs out like the line going out after the anchor: Rozanov everywhere. Shane on his hands and knees, gripping the headboard; on his back with his hair pulled back, Rozanov’s face buried in his neck, panting, their mouths meeting. The pulse inside of him as Rozanov comes. Shane comes again, seemingly hours later, Rozanov biting his left thigh hard, one hand holding his right leg open, the other hand around his cock, Rozanov looking up at him with that same hunger. 

After, Shane feels slow and syrupy, like a knot undone, laying in Rozanov’s bed. He isn’t even aware he’s falling asleep, it just slides up and over him, easy as a wave coming up onto a beach, pulling him down into the deep dark. 

He wakes slowly, an unknown amount of time later. His brain and body are together in their slow resurfacing. It is dark. A light glows behind him, just barely illuminating the view of an empty bedside table. 

His brain swims lazily to the surface, feelings arrive before thoughts. Shane is nestled like a spoon in the warmth of another body. He is never the smallest guy in the room, he is used to being and feeling big. There’s the tactile scrape of leg hair against the back of his thighs, the harsh weight of an arm heavy on his hip. 

He feels like a candle held close against the wind, cupped in a welcome hand. 

Then his brain kicks online: he has accidentally fallen asleep in Rozanov’s bed. He has to go. That cozy, good feeling is a lead blanket he’s fighting against. He realizes what woke him: Rozanov; fingers tap his hip again. 

Rozanov’s voice is creaky with sleep, his accent a little heavier. “You will miss curfew.”  

“No curfew on travel days,” Shane answers. Rozanov is kicking him out. The thought tugs him awake. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I fell asleep.” 

He twists and Rozanov sits back with his curls plastered to his forehead. Rozanov says, “It will give roommate heart attack if Shane Hollander is not there in morning.”

“Hunter won’t say anything,” Shane says dismissively. 

Rozanov’s whole face shifts, unreadably: his sleepy eyes focus, his mouth goes from relaxed and open to sharp, held. He sits up on an elbow. It reminds Shane of the conversation from months ago: his stupid teenage poster, the fact that Rozanov remembered it from such an obscure source. That feeling of warmth earlier boils hot in his chest. 

“What’s your problem with Hunter?” Shane asks, awake and clear. 

“No problem.” Rozanov shrugs. He is looking out the cold glass window. “Montreal is full of boring players. Is good you have someone to do crossword game at night before bed.”

Shane snorts and says, “Fuck off, we don’t do crosswords.” He can’t help himself, he adds, “He wears a night guard and goes to bed before me.”

“To protect his dentures?” Rozanov asks. 

“Oh, like all your teeth are real,” Shane laughs. 

“Only one crown,” Rozanov grins, tapping his front left tooth. 

Shane rolls his eyes, but he is smiling back at him. 

Reality rushes in: the warm light of the bedside table behind is making Rozanov’s curls glow. Too much and too far. Shane has to go. Pull the anchor back up and take himself back to safer shores. 

He stands, and Rozanov doesn’t get out of bed. Shane’s clothing is mostly in the living room, he realizes. He lingers by the door, naked in the dark and unsure of what to say. 

Rozanov glances at him, looks at the time and says, “No one will be on elevator so late.” 

Shane hears the dismissal and leaves. 

When he gets back to his hotel room, Hunter is snoring loudly. In the bathroom, the light around the small side mirror is on like a night light. 

Hours later, in the morning on the flight as the team fills into the cabin of their charter flight, the guys are going back and forth talking about their night at the hotel bar, about some guy who wanted them to invest in parking lots. 

“You want his number, eh, Hollzy?” asks JJ. “It’s a good investment.” 

“He doesn’t need it—he’s got that turkey money coming in from Timmies,” Pike says. He’s standing with his elbows on the top of the seat in front of him. Shane is next to him, he rolls his eyes. 

“Gobble gobble,” someone calls behind him. 

Hunter is at the next four-seater, leaning against the leather side. He asks, “Some guy came up to you all at the hotel bar, and you started writing cheques?”

“Wait, hear him out,” calls Mitty, pulling out his phone. “Some of these lots pull in $12 an hour, per spot.”

“Sounds like Hollander and I missed out, skipping out on the bar.”

Shane belatedly remembers his lie about his friend at BU. Hunter is shaking his head at whatever is on Mitty’s phone. It feels easy to joke, to nod across the plane and say to Mitty, “Keep blocking shots like last night and we can call you the parking spot.”

Comeau leans across and plucks the phone out of Hunter’s hand, asking for details. 

[🅢🅗]

Scott is finally able to go to the gallery where Kip had his residency and now a solo show at the end of October. He has a morning off in Toronto, and he takes the long taxi ride there, along a highway tucked between towering skyscrapers that then curves into a green river valley and back out to concrete as Toronto thins to endless strip malls and gas stations. Finally, out in the wide-open skies of the suburbs, is a gallery full of Kip’s paintings.

It’s a continuation of the work Scott has been admiring for nearly eight months: pools, light and bodies. 

Pride of place is a diptych of paintings of blue tiles, like an empty pool seen from above, rippling and abstracted. Out of the light reflecting in the water, a body just barely takes shape, white edges blurred and indistinct. The body in it is Scott’s, referenced from a selfie Scott sent from Greece. The picture was tame: his bare torso and thighs in a bathing suit he’d bought for the trip, slightly contorted because Kip had sent a reference photo and said, “pose like this for me.” Like most things Kip asked for, Scott obliged. It was one of a dozen photos he sent in his two weeks away. None had his face in them. 

The other painting is Kip, recognizable to Scott from the white line that cuts through the ghostly shoulder. A tree-planting scar. None of Kip’s tattoos are in the painting. They were visible in the original photo that Scott took of Kip on the lounge chair of their vacation rental, sitting out under the stars in the Nevada desert. 

Looking at the pair of paintings now, months later, it feels true: want, dissolving at the edges, clear into blue. The painting is titled Having (Holding Water) 2013. 

When he gets back to Montreal, it is Halloween, the anniversary of his parents’ death. The universe conspires in his favour and he doesn’t have a game on the day. For the first time, he does not spend the day alone in a crowded room pretending to forget the date. He does not tell Kip what day it is—it’s too big an ask for a gift so delicately built. He just requests company with the warning that he is in a weird mood. 

Kip arrives, dressed as Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park, with a pocket full of stolen cheese and a bottle of cheap wine from a school event. 

“Not that you need free food,” Kip says, cubes of cheddar tumbling out of a paper towel onto the coffee table. He plops his hat onto Scott’s head. “But it’s the spirit of getting away with something.”

Scott hooks two fingers into the bright red necktie, reeling Kip in. That’s what it still feels like: getting away with something; the luckiest orphan in the world. As of tonight, it has been nineteen years. His grief is old enough to drink across Canada, and he has, tonight. He shoves the memory of that Halloween away, and says instead, “I loved the paintings.”

“My muse approves,” Kip grins as Scott begins to unbutton Kip’s jean shirt. 

—

In November, Scott flies into New York a day early, before a game. His second season on the Voyageurs makes it feel real. Not a one-off: the city of Montreal has accepted him with the scalpel it brings to all its players, every move he makes sliced through to the muscle to see the white bone underneath.

He has a meeting with his agent, Todd. The sun is bright in his office with an unobstructed view of Manhattan from floor-to-ceiling glass windows. As they’re wrapping up, after nearly an hour of signing, discussion, and negotiations for boring things that promise to make money, Todd clears his throat from across the desk. 

“You know, kid. That I’m a straight-shooter. I got wind last week. You were supposed to be Captain of Team USA this Olympics.”

Scott was looking out the window at the vast panorama of the city to the grey wall behind Todd’s head. 

“Oh,” is all Scott can think to say. “Huh.”

“Can’t bring in the same Wheatie box endorsements as Alternate,” Todd says. He looks at Scott over the gold of his wire-frame glasses. “They want a certain kind of man on a cereal box.”

There’s a brass letter opener on the edge of the desk, sitting on a wood stand whittled just for the purpose. All these desks over the years that Scott has been invited to sit opposite have these inscrutable displays. Scott picks the letter opener up, weighing its heaviness in his hand, rotating it once and then putting it back.  

“I’m not really a cereal guy. Too sweet.” 

“Yeah, yeah. It’s beautiful that the world takes all kinds,” Todd answers, leaning forward and picking up the opener himself. He points the blunt end at Scott. “Cereal sells because it’s consistent. You know what to expect when you open a box.”

Scott has lost track of the conversation. Is he the cereal or the guy in the box? All he knows is that the paperwork on the desk includes several TV spots for the Olympics, whether or not he’s the captain, a renewal of the Under Armour, and a bunch of promotional material for the Cours outside the press already mandated by his player contract. 

He made a decade worth of decisions based on potential opportunities, and not one of them felt like a real choice.  

—

The hockey season spills on: travel, practice, games. They are building consistency. In New York, it felt like he, the team, were focused on the end goal—playoffs, the cup. In Montreal, Theriault has been emphasizing the day-to-day process. The next practice, training session, play. The next, tomorrow, and no further. 

Somewhere in November, Hollander adds yoga to his own personal training regime. They have a trio of rookies who are called up sporadically from the AHL team in Laval and they follow Hollander around like ducklings. In the middle of a conditioning session during practice, Hollander brings out a laptop and starts playing some woman on YouTube. The rookies pull up to the mat and join him. Scott watches from across the room, a band around his thighs as he does squats. If it were anyone but Hollander, they’d be made fun of before the yoga video even started. 

But it’s Hollander. No one laughs. By the end of the video, six guys are in butterfly pose, hip flexors so tight their knees are by their ears. 

Soon it is December, his least favourite month of the year. Cold and dark, his mother’s birthday, the misery of holiday season. Scott convinces Kip to come to another game, the first since the riot during the playoffs. It’s an eked-out win against Winnipeg. Another part of the process: Theriault names a player of the game, but before that, they play one of two songs. Tonight, they won, so Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball blasts through the locker room. JJ barrels in, wailing the chorus. 

“God, I am already sick of this gay ass song,” moans Pike. He glances up and sees Scott, a thought visibly flashing across his wide-open face. His mouth half opens.  

“Sick of winning already?” Scott asks, like the good team player he is. Ready to row in the same direction because part of the process is to swallow a little bile, the acrid taste he got used to somewhere around age 16. 

Somewhere, up in the distant stands, Kip sits among strangers. The distance between here and loneliness can be measured by the taste of swallowing another comment in a lifetime of off-handed comments which is easy from practice but harder than ever because he’s letting everyone off the hook—the hook he’s been on for years and now they can all see him hanging.   

Hayden laughs and then sings, loud with the song, near shouting into Hollander and Comeau’s nearby faces. 

It is a regular home game with minimal press after. Kip finds him in the depths of the Bell Centre’s player parking lots. This time, Scott has given Kip’s name to security. He wondered, vaguely, who Kip’s name was going to be passed around to. 

“I was on the Jumbotron,” Kip says when he gets in the car. 

A thousand thoughts flash through Scott’s mind, but it’s not like the seats are labelled. “Oh,” is all that comes out. 

“Luckily, it appears,” Kip says, waving his phone, “No one in my cohort watches Cours games live.”

“What if someone does tomorrow?”

“It would probably answer a lot of questions,” Kip says off-handedly, typing on his phone as Scott navigates out of the garage. 

Scott twists his hands around the leather of the steering wheel. 

This time of night, it’s a scant 15-minute drive home from the Bell Centre. He drives up and around McGill’s campus, quiet with students leaving the library and then up Parc, the wide boulevard below the hill, dark in the dead of night. It has been more than a year since Scott ran up the mountain. More than a year of this, of having given up and having reached for something. He drives carefully, the prickling behind his eyes growing sharp. By the time they pull into the parking spot he is paying extra for, just behind his place, he is crying. Through his tears, he hears Kip say something like, baby? 

All he can say is the truth: “December is a bad month.” 

It comes out garbled, his throat caught with it. Kip’s hand rubs steady arcs on his back, leaning across the centre console. After all his years being careful, he has succeeded in giving himself something else to lose. 

Christmas comes and goes. Scott orders in a feast on Boxing Day and they eat it at the dining table still filled with chairs he rented for the team Christmas party he hosted the day before. They eat sushi, thick slices of salmon, side by side, laughing, as Scott roundly ignores the drumming beat of how much longer, how much longer. 

—

January snaps by in a blur of activity. Before he knows it, he’s filming a Team USA TV spot. He’s just one face out of a half dozen, camera spinning around him. 

On road trips, he and Hollander share a hotel room. When they play in Canada, Hollander’s face appears on every channel in every hotel room, no matter the cable package or set up—hockey ads, general Team Canada ads. 

Sitting on their separate hotel beds, Scott flipping through channels, Shane jokes, “I can’t believe they kept that shot.”

“Your form is weird,” Scott agrees.

“They wouldn’t let me skate properly,” Shane groans. “They said I looked too mean.” 

Scott laughs out loud. 

—

In late January, Kip is over. He is in the final semester of his program, working on his final exhibit and thesis, a continuation of the work he made during the summer residency. His paintings have grown even bigger in scale, so large that he has to paint them in the shared studio space at his school, not his apartment. He sent Scott a photo of this industrial space, enormous windows overlooking downtown Montreal with one huge canvas, nearly the size of two doors together which was ringed with reference photos. Kip’s previous paintings were simple: expressive colour fields and bodies. This enormous painting is filled with images that melt together. 

Sitting on a bus from Ottawa, Scott zoomed in on a photo inside the photo. A picture of Scott himself, printed out on a standard printer-sized paper in black and white, streaky and hard to distinguish is his own mouth, beard and hand. It’s a close-up, his pinkie finger slightly between his lips. 

He didn’t ask about it, the painting is another secret, unspoken but committed to canvas for his classmates and professors to see. 

Now, days later, Kip has come straight from the studio to Scott’s, foggy with distraction. Scott is carefully peeling scraps of paint off Kip’s forearm as the TV plays silently. Hollander is in one of the big banner ads for the Olympics. Every time Scott turns on the TV, there is his captain’s face, grimacing as he leans into an imagined face-off.  

Scott is in the middle of telling Kip about his lengthy travel delays the day before as he gets a fleck of paint off, when Kip interrupts him: “We haven’t talked much about the… uh, Olympics.” 

“We haven’t?” Scott asks. He’s sure they have: they talked about summer training, the phone calls, advertisements, the pressure. He distinctly remembers Kip telling him he’d wake up to watch the games. 

“I read another article today,” Kip says, slowly turning his arm over, out of Scott’s fingers. “About Russia.”

Scott furrows his brows. “What about it?” 

“The mayor said that there were no gay people in Sochi. A city of half a million people.” 

“Doubt that,” Scott snorts. 

“Are you worried?” Kip asks. 

“I don’t know, “ Scott shrugs. “A little. It’s my third Olympics, so…. I know what to expect, at least. Vancouver was different. I was, well, younger. God, I can’t believe that was just four years ago, feels like so much longer,” Scott rubs his hand through hair, thinking. “Yeah, Russia will be weird. It is way farther. The flight is over eleven hours. Vancouver I was really expecting to win, I guess. This time… if the team gels, maybe we can do it.”

Kip stares at him, his lips parted, not speaking. “No, I meant… Not the games. The news. Russia’s anti-gay laws? Aren’t you worried about your safety?”

“Oh,” Scott says. He remembers an Olympic committee official giving them guidelines for Russia, something about not “tempting fate” and avoiding rainbow decals. Scott has never even worn multi-coloured stripes. He did not need this warning. “Yeah, I mean. I wasn’t planning on coming out at the Olympics.” 

“Will you be safe?” Kip repeats, his voice soft. He tugs at the hem of Scott’s shirt. 

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Scott says with a shrug. 

“Okay, but have you been following the news?” Kip says with sudden urgency, “The articles I saw today said that someone was arrested along the torch relay for just waving a flag. Putin—”

“Kip,” Scott says, “I’m careful now. My whole life is being careful. You think I don’t know? I’ll be careful in Russia.”

Sadness creases Kip’s brow as he shifts on the couch to rest his head on Scott’s chest. Scott cannot see his face when Kip mumbles a low, “I love you,” with a resignation as if he is waving from a distant shore. 

—

In Russia, Scott delivers on his promise. He is careful. He shares a room with Carter Vaughn, dank with mold and walls so thin their laughter interrupts the people having loud sex in the room next door. Their own beds are barely two feet apart, covered in garish blue sheets. 

It is a surreal and strange experience. An arena half the size of the Bell Centre, broadcast to the whole world. As a team they are trying to get in sync in real time—patterns and movements of new players, habits. The US plays Russia early, and it is clear right away that Rozanov is good, but one man can’t carry a team. Half the Russian team was plucked straight from the KHL and are playing a completely different offensive style than Rozanov. Deep in the third period, Russia has the powerplay and Rozanov sends an assist straight into empty ice. Scott swipes it up and scores a short-handed goal through Russia’s messy defense.

Scott calls to Rozanov, “Gloves loose or something? Didn’t think you were just going to hand it to us.”

Rozanov looks over at him. The usual boyishness, the glint and ease, is gone. His eyes are flat as his lip curls. He says, flat and joyless, “Keep your gloves on.” 

Russia loses 4-1, ranking them 9th out of 12 in the preliminary round. 

The Olympic village is a strange place to be. It’s completely out of time, like summer camp. There is a constant stream of events, for hockey, for Team USA, promotion. Smiling and waving. 

Unlike the last two Olympics Scott attended, there are far fewer fans milling about. The village is populated by players, press, Russian officials, and official delegations. On the edges there are enormous fences and warnings not to enter marked off areas. The competition itself has the heightened stakes of the world’s attention, and the lowered stakes that it is not the league that matters, not really. 

During one of the brief windows of time he has alone, Scott walks a few blocks to the sea. 

Being careful has meant not texting anyone. The Wi-FI in the hotel doesn’t even work. It’s a rocky beach and he can feel the cold radiating off the sea as he stands there, sliced through with wind. To his right, the white gleaming curve of the skating rink.

Just over a week and a half in Russia, and it is the longest he has gone without speaking to Kip in nearly a year. He turns over the silent phone in his hand and imagines all the things he would like to say. He heads back to the village where some of Team USA are having dinner with their visiting families. There, in a hotel that seems to be only half-built around them, it is warm and bright with the excitement of the tournament. 

— 

He has not been avoiding his teammates Hollander and JJ, but he hasn’t sought them out. It’s Carter who sees Hollander sitting in a cafe, the day after Russia loses spectacularly to Latvia, and it’s Carter who says hello, who suggests that they go see figure skating, it’s Carter who jokes about balls of steel about being gay in Russia. Scott has played on Hollander’s line for a season and a half, and has now slept in the same room as him on the road for three months—maybe it’s in Scott’s mind, maybe not, when he feels without having to turn around Hollander’s shift of discomfort. 

And then later, that evening, he is sitting next to Hollander watching figure skating when he senses the tension and the movement in his captain. Hollander was sitting loosely, watching the ice and then Scott hears the change of breath, the twitch. Scott glances to his right. Shane, who is so in control, whose body is a product of training, precision and skill—his face betrays him every time. Shane’s eyes flit up to the rafters on the right. Once, and then again half a second later. Scott has to lean in his seat to follow his line of vision. There: Ilya Rozanov. 

It should not surprise him when Shane suddenly stands and mumbles something about the washroom. Scott half nods, trying to focus on the ice skating in front of him. A body in all black swirls on the ice to classical music, so different from the way he is used to seeing a rink. He can’t concentrate on it. Scott is a million miles away, on the promise he made to Kip, to be careful about being in Russia, to keep himself apart, to not involve himself. The movement on the ice is hypnotic and he lets himself be in a trance. 

Hollander is supposed to be watching him. Coach’s orders. 

He’s broken from the moment when the body comes to a stop and the crowd erupts in loud cheers. It is the Russian skater and the crowd is particularly loud, reminding him that he is in an arena of thousands. 

It is not a good idea. But it’s been a few long years of bad ideas, cascading Rube Goldbergs of impulse. He tells Carter he’ll be right back and goes to find Hollander. 

He’s not sure what to expect when he goes. He doesn’t think that Rozanov and Hollander would be foolish enough to hook up here, in an arena full of people. But they are what? 22, 23 years old and Scott remembers, distantly, what it was like to think he was going to live forever. 

He’s starting to feel foolish, wandering around the upper levels of the arena. He’s walking down the hastily built halls, blue linoleum squeaking under foot. The building smells newer, better than their hotel, of drywall and paint. He is starting to feel silly, reminded of when he accidentally walked in on them almost exactly a year ago in Winnipeg. He’s about to turn and go back when Hollander himself turns a corner. 

Shane looks disoriented, his eyes wide. He sees Scott and his eyes fall. Then narrow. He raises his hands slightly in the air and then drops them. 

“What are you doing here?” Shane asks, annoyance audible in the way that it so rarely is. All the good kid Hollander, the team player and the golden boy have fallen away. It is nice that Scott has earned Shane Hollander’s real, unguarded feeling. 

“Checking in on you,” Scott answers. 

“Why?” Shane says. He’s standing in the middle of the hall, arms crossed. Even in his fluffy white sweater, he’s broad, taking up space. 

Scott doesn’t really have an answer to the question. Worry, fear—projection?

“I didn’t want you to make a mistake,” Scott waves his hands. 

“What?” 

“You know. Here. In Russia. Something risky with—” Scott whips his head around. They’re alone in the hallway. The last word comes out in a whisper, the shape of the syllables lending themselves to it: “Rozanov.” 

Shane’s eyes widen, and then his arms, tight across his body, fall loose to his sides. 

“Nothing happened. He didn’t even—we’re not anything.” 

It’s Scott’s turn to stare. 

“Why don’t we,” Scott starts, and opens the first door he sees. 

It opens to another viewing box over the ice. If they stepped toward the edge, they might be visible. But there’s a half wall near the back with two leather chairs a couple of feet apart. If someone spotted them, they’re player on the same line, the same team catching up. The smell of paint is stronger here, nearly noxious, as Scott sits down. Shane has followed him, seemingly automatically—he glances at the distant ice and then flops into the chair. 

“You good?” Scott asks, cautiously. 

“I’m fine,” Shane answers, too quick. 

“You look upset.”

Shane has been staring at the wall behind him. His eyes whip to Scott’s and then away. “Seriously, man, I’m fine,” Shane repeats, but that pointedness has dulled. As always, his face gives him away again. Not teary-eyed, but steely.  

“I was worried,” Scott clears his throat, continuing. “That you and…” He nods back at the door, still hesitant to say any names. “Were going to do something foolish. And my—my friend, he asked me to be careful.”

“Like you’re one to talk,” Shane shoots back. 

“Can we just like, drop the fucking act for once,” Scott says. “I know you and—” Scott waves backwards, “You’re not rivals you’re not just friends, either.”

“We’re not anything,” Shane repeats, drily this time. “I told you, I’m not like you. I’m not—risking my career.”

“Is that what I’m doing?” Scott laughs. “I guess so, yeah. What are you doing?”

He doesn’t expect Shane to answer at all, he expects another rebuff. Shane’s expression twists and he says, “I’m just scratching an itch.” 

“You couldn’t find a less risky person to scratch it with? A … civilian?”

Shane looks definitively 23 years old as he slinks lower in the chair, despite the bulk of body. 

“That wouldn’t—be the same,” Shane says. And then, defiantly, he adds, “I don’t need a lecture.”

Scott surveys Shane and then asks, “Is everything okay? Did you two fight?” 

Shane shakes his head. “No. I wanted to check in. But he didn’t want to talk.”

“Yeah. Well, you saw those scores. Can’t imagine the expectations from uh, our hosts.” 

“Right,” Shane agrees. He is sitting like a deflated balloon with eyes angry like a weapon. Scott has learned that Shane likes asking questions but doesn’t like answering them. Scott has asked too much already. 

“Listen, Shane,” Scott says, delicately. The name is new and strange to say out loud. “Do whatever you want. If it’s just an itch, go for it. You could, y’know, scratch it elsewhere. Just don't make yourself bleed unless it’s worth the scar.” 

Shane rolls his eyes and for some reason, it makes Scott laugh. 

“Vaughny’s going to wonder where we went,” Shane says, still slumped, speaking mostly into his chest.

“Knowing him, he’s befriended some biathlete in the last ten minutes,” Scott says. He stands but Shane does not rise. “See you on the ice.” 

“Yeah,” Shane says. As Scott walks away, he hears distantly, “Thanks.” 

Scott takes the stairs two at a time, the sound echoing off concrete and metal, the cold interior of a shoddy building. 

They have an Olympic gold medal game two days later against each other. Scott isn’t captain here, nor is he captain in Montreal, but his competitive streak is still a mile wide. Moving to Canada he has learned the difference between a mile and a kilometre. A mile is bigger. 

The game crushes into overtime, a knockdown drag-out game of defensive scrambles in the middle of the ice. A true All-Stars game, the best the NHL has to offer, playing like they mean it. 

Scott will never watch the footage of the camera panning across himself on the bench while panes rattle with the full force of the Canadian team throwing their celebrating bodies around Hollander. He will never see the shot with his visor pushed up, staring up at the score with his mouth hanging open, pain visible in his eyes before the camera cuts back to the Canadians. 

Before then, Scott has his own obligations. The press is the usual generic platitudes. He is not captain: he answers a couple of questions about not getting it done tonight and not burying their chances. A lot of things they didn’t do. 

Someone else has to sit down at the press conference and answer the rest. 

He’s still in the locker room in Sochi, sweat drying on his face, his hands still feeling the weight of gloves when he takes out his phone. He will never watch the end-of-game footage of himself losing. He will, however, watch the press conference that is happening right now in which Hollander sitting sweat-soaked next to two men in suit. The boy who won the thing and the men who made decisions. Hollander sits between them, his hair pushed off his face with a red headband. The youngest hockey captain in Olympic history will smile when he talks about pressure making diamonds. Scott won't watch this clip for another few hours. While it's happening, Scott opens his phone. He deleted his entire text history with Kip before he got to Russia, out of an abundance of caution. But his background photo is a picture he took of Kip’s painting in October: the ghostly shape of a body, recognizable to Scott alone by the scar. 

As carefully as he can, he texts: Hey. Can I meet your friends? 

Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff

Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!

Anne Carson, Short Talks

Chapter End Notes

the problem with introducing "plot" is that these characters keep demanding to be outside of montreal. i have attempted to make up for this by restoring canada's 2014 olympic gold medal and quoting anne carson for the second time.

hockey players not being contractually allowed to play hockey inspired by real events. i have eschewed real-world hockey accuracy where it suits me, most specifically by making shane and scott road roommates. because, well. what fun!

i'm over on tumblr if you want.