Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Connors (Heated Rivalry), Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Rose Landry, Svetlana Vetrova, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Team Ensemble (Game Changers), Hayden Pike, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros Team Ensemble (Game Changers)

Additional Tags:

Grief/Mourning, Depression, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Homophobic Language, Racism, misogynistic language, Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros Being Assholes (Game Changers), Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Player Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov Needs A Hug, Hockey-Typical Violence, BAMF Shane Hollander, hockey is fun, said in ilya's canada is fun tone, Marriage, Fluff and Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort

Language:

English

Series:

Part 4 of all the stars aligned

Stats:

Published: 2026-09-07 Updated: 2026-09-14 Words: 26,879 Chapters: 3/4

the dominoes cascaded in a line

Summary

Ilya's been taking care of himself for so long, and not always doing a very good job of it. It would be understandable, Ilya thinks, if Shane didn’t really know how to do it yet. Not when they’re only a month into being married and three months into being honest and less than a year since that hotel room in Tampa, where Shane had climbed into his lap and let Ilya cry into his shoulder and held him like no one had held Ilya since he was very small.

Notes

Hello again. In the time since I wrote and posted none of it was accidental I: got a new job, moved 400 miles for said new job, started the new job, finished grad school, and got another dog. I'm honestly astounded I also found time to write.
For those of you new to me and/or this series, typically I write a whole installment of the series and post it over the course of a week or so, and then disappear again to write the next installment. So, expect chapters 2-4 to be posted over the next few days.

Everyone shower LeahKnox with gratitude and praise. Without her beta work, this fic would likely still not be written and would also include many comma-related atrocities.

Keep an eye on the tags as we go, I will be updating some of them chapter-by-chapter to avoid spoilers.

I have attempted the coding for the hover-over translations for anything in Russian this time around, and now that I've posted it didn't work. So...troubleshooting that. Also, translations come from Google translate, which I'm SURE is not accurate or getting the nuance right, so I welcome feedback on those.

And, as an evergreen reminder, I do not use genAI and never will. The fun part of this for me is the actual writing, so using AI would really spoil the fun.

Chapter 1

Ilya wakes on the fourteenth anniversary of his mother’s death in a hotel room in Calgary. Shane is still asleep next to him, and Ilya reaches to trace the edge of the bruise on Shane’s cheekbone with his thumb, the result of catching the butt of someone’s stick with his face a few nights ago against Detroit. It had started out a dark purple, but it’s fading already, going greenish-yellow in the middle and almost pink around the edges. 

Today’s game is an afternoon game, so no morning skate, and Shane hadn’t put up much of an argument last night when Ilya suggested not setting an alarm. This is their fourth away game in a five-game stretch, Shane’s first longer road trip as a Raider, and Ilya can tell he’s starting to itch to get home. Ilya is too. He misses their house and their bed and not sneaking between hotel rooms late at night. They’re being careful on the road, because even though the team knows, hotels still feel risky with so many cameras and strangers. It’s almost enough to make Ilya miss the seasons when he was still on his ELC and had to share a room. It would be easier if he and Shane were just assigned to be roommates, but it’s been years since sharing’s been a requirement for him and he’d already told their travel coordinator he wasn’t going to share rooms this season when he thought he and Shane would be spending the year apart.

He hasn’t been able to tell Shane what today is. Every time he’s tried, the words get caught in his throat. There’s no casual way to bring it up, no way to say it without Shane’s eyes going soft and wet in sympathy, and there’s something about trying to tell him in a hotel room in Calgary that feels all wrong. It’s the sort of thing he wishes he’d thought to mention at the cottage, where they got used to telling each other hard things, or that he’d said something when they were home in Boston before this roadie started. 

Two years ago, Ilya had to reckon with the fact that every day of his life now brought him further away from her, that once it became twelve years since she died he had begun living a life where he hadn’t had a mother for more time than he’d had one. 

Last year, he had spoken to Alexei on the phone, mostly to hassle him about their father but they’d taken a few minutes to talk about her, something they started doing when Ilya was thirteen and Alexei was eighteen and never quite grew out of, even as everything else about their relationship fractured. They won’t speak on the phone today, because Ilya hasn’t answered a phone call from Alexei since he left Moscow after their father’s funeral, and sometime over the summer the calls stopped coming. 

This year, Ilya has to play a hockey game which was true last year and the year before and probably most years but this season they’ve played eight games so far and haven’t lost one yet. It isn’t a record but it’s creeping closer to Toronto’s ten-game opening streak in 1993. Ilya didn’t know that off the top of his head but Shane obviously did, nodding along as one of the reporters asked him about it during postgame media two nights ago when they beat Vancouver 3-1. 

He fiddles with his cross, sliding it back and forth on the chain, listening as it clinks against his wedding ring. Now that they’re into the season, their rings spend more time on the chains around their necks than on their fingers, and Ilya is considering buying one of the silicone rings some of the other married guys on the team wear during the season. He thinks Shane would probably wear one too. They’ve been married a little over a month now and Ilya’s finger feels naked when he’s not wearing his ring. 

He’s having a hard time picturing them winning today. Or, more accurately, he’s having a hard time caring enough about hockey to be particularly concerned about whether they win or lose.

Ilya’s phone buzzes on the nightstand, and Shane shifts next to him. Ilya grabs the phone quickly before it can wake his sleeping husband. It’s a text from Sveta that says to call her if he needs to and Ilya locks the phone without replying and drops it next to him on the bed. 

Shane mumbles something unintelligible, and then he’s blinking slow and sleepy up at Ilya. It makes Ilya’s heart do a complicated flutter in his chest. 

Это мой муж, мама.

“Morning,” Shane says, in the low, rumbly voice that means he’s not really awake yet. 

“No,” Ilya says. “Still sleep time.”

Shane huffs a laugh and slings an arm around Ilya’s waist, pulling him closer. Ilya complies, tucking his face into Shane’s neck and grabbing a handful of the t-shirt Shane is wearing (one of Ilya’s, although Ilya’s not sure how much that distinction really matters anymore) to keep him close. 

Ilya thinks he falls asleep again, because the next time he opens his eyes, Shane is sitting up against the headboard with his glasses on, watching game tape on his iPad. The room seems brighter and Ilya’s phone is buzzing again somewhere on the bed behind him. 

“Hi sleepyhead,” Shane says to him, reaching and threading his hand into Ilya’s hair. “Team chat is blowing up. Hammer is trying to get everyone together for lunch, some Italian place Owens recommended to him.”

Ilya groans and shifts closer to Shane, pushing his head into Shane’s hand. Shane gets the message and starts stroking his hair. Ilya doesn’t even care that he’s frizzing it up; he’ll shower before they leave for the arena. 

“You can go,” Ilya says. “I will order something.”

Shane is quiet for a second, and Ilya wonders if he’s being too transparent, making Shane worry, by being clingy and turning down the chance to eat his weight in pasta. 

“Nah,” Shane says. “I’d rather stay with you.”

---

Ilya lets Marly run the locker room proceedings before the game. His heart isn’t in it today, and Marly used to play with Owens and Lundquist for a couple years of college in Minnesota before Boston drafted him, so he gets to tell the story about the three of them puking their guts out on the tilt-a-whirl at the state fair after eating too many deep-fried whatevers. Ilya has heard the story enough times he can laugh in the right places without really paying attention. 

Shane knocks his knee against Ilya’s, and when Ilya glances over, Shane is looking at him with the little pinch between his eyebrows that means he’s worried. 

“You’re quiet today,” Shane says. 

Ilya shrugs. “Tired.”

Shane nods, and presses his knee a little more firmly against Ilya’s. And then, slowly, his hand comes to rest on Ilya’s back. Ilya can barely feel it through the layers of his jersey and his pads and his compression shirt, but it’s there, and he leans back into the touch. 

Может быть, это и не выглядит смелым, мама, но это так. Он такой смелый.  

---

They lose.

Well, they tie and then they lose three minutes into overtime to a pathetic, bad bounce of a shot almost from the blue line that glances off of two Calgary players and Connors and maybe also Ilya before dribbling through Kohn’s legs. 

Ilya can’t look at Shane. He just keeps thinking about the streak, the record they weren’t chasing but were right on the heels of, about how much Shane has given up in the past two months to be here, on a team with Ilya, when Ilya couldn't even bring himself to care about today’s game. 

He has another text from Svetlana he ignores when he gets back to his stall after showering, and Shane is already dressed. Most of the team is already dressed. The locker room has the heavy, oppressive weight of a loss hanging in the air, as stifling as the clouds and humidity before a summer thunderstorm, and Ilya drags his suit back on, ignoring the way his shirt clings to his still-damp skin. 

They’re going straight from the rink to the airport to get on a flight to Ottawa for a game tomorrow night where Shane’s parents will be in the stands, wearing the jerseys Ilya bought for them. Yuna and David want to take them out to lunch tomorrow between morning skate and the game, because there’s a restaurant they always go to when Shane is in his hometown to play. Ilya agreed to this a week ago, when Shane had posed it tentatively, like he thought Ilya was going to say no. Ilya had said yes, obviously, even after Shane reminded him they were definitely going to get recognized, because Shane can’t go anywhere in fucking Ottawa without getting recognized (except City Hall, apparently), and Ottawa might not hate Ilya like Montreal hates Ilya, but they still fucking know puck. 

On the plane, Shane drops his stuff into a seat and then gets pulled into a conversation in French with Vic and Tremblay that takes them a few rows back, so Ilya takes the seat next to Shane’s stuff. 

He wishes he’d looked at a calendar before agreeing to lunch with the Hollanders, because as much as he likes them—loves them, really—the only feeling roiling around in his gut as he thinks about them today is jealousy. Stupid, useless, pointless jealousy over Shane’s parents who love Shane and love each other and are still fucking alive to take them out to lunch. 

мне жаль, мама..

He glances at his phone. There’s a stack of notifications on the screen, all from Svetlana. He shoves his phone into the pocket of the hoodie he changed into in the airport bathroom the second they got there. 

He rests his head back against the seat and closes his eyes, but the plane is so fucking loud. Jojo and Doozy and Caddy, the new defender up from the farm team, are making plans for when they land in Ottawa tonight. They’re idiots to do it in earshot of their captain, especially since they’ll land in Ottawa with about two hours to spare before curfew and their plans sound far more ambitious than what they can fit into two hours, but Ilya chooses to ignore them for now. Shug and Marly gripe about wedging their enormous bodies into the plane seats, like this isn’t something they do multiple times a week for at least twenty-eight weeks per year. Miller is on the phone with his wife in the seat directly in front of Ilya; she insists he call her before every flight takes off. 

Dima and Danya walk up the plane’s aisle arguing about Russian politics, which they do often, despite the fact that Dima is an American citizen with a Russian father like Sveta, but he spent even less time in Russia growing up than she did, and Danya was raised by what Ilya assumes are the most liberal Russian parents to ever exist. They have nothing to argue about, but they do it purely for sport. They settle in the seats across the aisle from Ilya, and at least drop their voices to a more normal volume when he glares at them.

Aud starts a game of cards that gets rowdy before they’re even taxiing for takeoff and it somehow increases the volume of everyone around them regardless of whether they’re playing the game. Ilya digs through his backpack for his headphones and can’t find them. He doesn’t remember if he had them on the plane from Vancouver to Calgary or from Edmonton to Vancouver. He definitely had them from Boston to Detroit, and he thinks he had them from Detroit to Edmonton. Did he leave them in the hotel room in Edmonton? They’d packed in a hurry that afternoon and had been almost conspicuously late for the team bus to the arena. Shane blamed Ilya and Ilya blamed the fact that there are few places he’d rather be than on his knees in the shower for Shane. He has the bruises to prove it.

“Блять,” he mutters. 

When Shane comes back, Ilya’s dumped everything out of his bag and onto Shane’s seat like that’s going to help him find the bulky case containing his headphones. 

“What’s wrong?” Shane asks. 

“Can’t find my fucking headphones,” Ilya says. Snaps, maybe. He winces, and glances up at Shane, who’s looking at him with the same slightly pinched expression he had on in the locker room before the game. 

“Pass me my bag,” Shane says, and Ilya picks it up (it’s so much heavier than he expects it to be, what the fuck does Shane have in there? A set of weights so he can get some reps in on the plane?), handing it to him. Shane balances it on Ilya’s armrest and unzips it, digging until he finds what he’s looking for and handing Ilya a black hardshell case. 

“These are your headphones,” Ilya says.

“Yeah. You can use them, I have earplugs in here somewhere.”

Ilya frowns. “But you always watch movies on plane.”

Shane shrugs. “I’ll read. You look like you need them more.”

Ilya is not going to cry about headphones. Not on the plane, in front of everyone. Maybe in the hotel room when they get to Ottawa, and maybe Shane will laugh at him a little. That will make it better, easier, Ilya thinks. 

Ilya sweeps all his shit back into his bag and shoves it under the seat in front of him before moving over to sit in the window seat so Shane can have the aisle. He puts Shane’s headphones on. He should’ve expected it, but the noise canceling is better in these than Ilya’s—maybe Ilya should buy himself the same pair to replace his possibly lost ones—and the noise of the plane settles into a dull, manageable hum. 

Shane doesn’t end up getting out his book, just reclines his seat once they’re in the air and shoves up the armrest between their seats so that Ilya can slump sideways against him. He rubs Ilya’s back, soothingly, and Ilya sinks a little heavier into him. 

The cabin lights dim, and a few of the players around them click their reading lights on, but the plane grows steadily quieter the longer they’re in the air, and eventually Ilya slides the headphones off to settle more comfortably against Shane’s chest. Shane is asleep, Ilya is pretty sure, because his hand stopped rubbing Ilya’s back about half an hour ago, and he hasn’t moved much since. 

Ilya lifts his head, just to peek at Shane’s face, and sure enough, his head is tipped back on the headrest and his mouth is slack with sleep. Ilya is used to all the ways Shane’s face holds tension and all the tiny movements that make up his expressions, maybe hard to read for someone who hasn’t spent the better part of a decade studying it the way Ilya has. In sleep, he doesn’t look more relaxed, he just looks less like himself. 

Ilya nods off too, and he wakes with a jolt when the plane lands. It takes him a second to remember: they’re in Ottawa now, they were in Calgary this morning, they lost the game, his mother has been dead fourteen years. 

Shane is texting, holding his phone at a weird angle to keep the light from the screen from shining directly into Ilya’s eyes but he pockets his phone again when he sees Ilya has woken up. 

“My dad will be here to pick us up by the time we get our bags,” Shane says. Ilya squints at him, the words not quite making sense. Every part of him feels heavy, even his eyelids, and his brain feels slow. Especially in English. “I have a thing in my contract,” Shane explains. “When we play in Ottawa, I sleep at my parents’, not in the team hotel. It carried over from Montreal. I wasn’t gonna bother with it this trip, since we’re getting in so late, but I forgot to tell my parents that.”

“We are staying with your parents tonight?” Ilya asks. 

“Yeah. Is that okay? I’m so used to it I forgot to tell you it’s a thing I do.”

The mattress in the guest room at Yuna and David’s is so soft Ilya will probably be sore tomorrow. He doesn’t care. “Is okay,” he says. Then amends, “is good. Better than hotel.”

“I think so, too.”

Ilya packs Shane’s headphones back into their case and slides them into his bag so Shane doesn’t have to rearrange everything in his own backpack again. The team shuffles off the plane, everyone wiped out except Caddy and Jojo and Doozy, who seem to have also lured Tremblay into their plans for the night. Ilya glares at each of them in turn. 

“Sleep,” he says, firmly. “There are no bars worth going to in Ottawa on a Sunday night anyway.” 

“Hollzy said—” Jojo starts, and then stops abruptly, wincing because Doozy stomped on his foot. 

“What did Hollzy say to the babies?” Ilya asks Shane as they wait for their bags to come off the plane. 

“They asked where they could go to meet girls.” 

“They asked you this?”

“I know,” Shane snorts. “That handful of dates with Rose a year ago is still apparently doing a lot of heavy lifting for my reputation. I gave them the names of a couple bars.” Shane’s lips twitch, like he’s fighting a smile. “They probably won’t ask me again.” 

“No?” There’s a joke here he’s not getting, Ilya thinks, from the way Shane’s smile is slowly overtaking his face. 

“They’ll figure out pretty quickly not to ask the one gay guy on the team—

“That we know about,” Ilya points out. He’s got some thoughts about the way Feller’s been eyeing both of them for the past few weeks. Maybe Tremblay too, although that could just be hero-worship, mostly directed towards Shane.

“—where to meet girls.”

It clicks, finally. “You sent them to a gay bar.”

Shane shrugs. “I gave them a list of bars. At least two of them are gay bars.”

“Ottawa has more than one gay bar?” Ilya asks, not even really trying to be a shit about it but Shane laughs anyway. 

“Apparently.” 

Ilya frowns. “You have not gone?”

Shane shoots him a sidelong glance. “When, exactly, d’you think I was going to gay bars? The last time I lived here I was eighteen. I wouldn’t have been able to get in.”

Ilya grins. Like Shane’s beautiful face and perfect hockey body wouldn’t have been enough to make up for being underage. “We will go. Next time we are here, maybe.”

Shane slips an arm around his waist, squeezing once. “Maybe at home instead.” 

It takes Ilya a second to realize Shane means Boston, because even though they’re standing in his hometown airport, Boston is his home now. With Ilya.

Теперь мой дом — с ним, мама. Надеюсь, ты сможешь простить меня за это — за то, что я ушла. Я туда больше не вернусь.

They get their bags, finally, and haul them out to the curb where David is idling in his Volvo. He presses the button on the inside of the car that opens the trunk for them when he sees them come through the doors of the airport, and they throw their bags in the back. Ilya climbs into the backseat and Shane takes the passenger seat. 

“Thanks Dad,” Shane says. “We could’ve gotten a cab.”

David says something in reply that gets stuck in the part of Ilya’s brain that does the translating. The part that’s almost entirely automatic now, except when he’s drunk or tired or sick or, as the case apparently is today, feeling increasingly disconnected from everything happening around him.

Shane glances back at him, so probably David asked him a question. Ilya tries to smile and definitely fails at it. 

His phone buzzes again. Probably more texts from Sveta. She’s going to kill him the next time he sees her. 

He felt like this, a little, at his father’s funeral: his body moving from place to place while his head was somewhere else. Or nowhere, maybe. He doesn’t remember the funeral itself, remembers the dinner afterwards only in snapshots. Vivid in his memory are arguing with Alexei and leaving to walk for hours, his phone pressed tight to his ear, talking to Shane, like a lifeline, a tether. Keeping him grounded, present, even though present was the last thing Ilya wanted to be. 

It was like this the day she died, too. And for months afterward. Years? The time between twelve and fifteen is a blur, especially once he discovered alcohol and drugs and sex. After that, it’s mostly hockey, because somewhere around his fifteenth birthday Ilya realized the only way he’d survive was if he got out of Russia, and the only way he was getting out of Russia was hockey. 

His mama had wanted him to do ballet, like she had done. She insisted he could be the next Baryshnikov, and Ilya’s never been sure if that’s because all parents think their babies are exceptional in some way, or if there were already indications then that he had potential as an athlete, any kind of athlete. It never occurred to him to ask when he still could, because of course it didn’t. These are the kinds of things he’s only started to wonder about as an adult and now there is no one to ask. 

He’d gone to two or three ballet classes, maybe. He doesn’t really remember, because he started learning to skate that same winter, and hockey had won out over ballet. He doesn’t know whose decision that was, his own or his mama’s or his father’s. He has his suspicions, though. 

It is a shorter drive than Ilya expects from the airport to the Hollanders’. They can see the flickering of the TV in the front room when David pulls into the driveway, and Ilya’s almost certain it’s game highlights from all of today’s games. He hopes Yuna doesn’t try to talk to him about this afternoon’s game. He won’t be able to answer any of her questions, won’t even really be able to talk about Shane’s play. Ilya’s stomach twinges with guilt. 

They grab their bags from the trunk and trudge up the front steps and into the house. Yuna is waiting for them in the entryway in her pajamas (an old McGill hockey shirt that was probably once David’s, worn sweatpants, thick socks on her feet), and she hugs Shane and then Ilya. Ilya doesn’t know what perfume she wears, or maybe it’s her shampoo, but she smells like citrus. 

“Are you hungry?” she asks them. “We have some leftovers from dinner.” 

Ilya shakes his head. “Just tired.”

“I’m gonna eat something,” Shane says, “but you can go upstairs, baby.” 

“I will shower, I think,” Ilya says. 

“Okay.” Shane kisses his cheek. “I’ll be up soon.”

He’s halfway up the stairs when he hears the murmur of voices, but the words are either too quiet or he’s too tired to parse what they’re saying. He does hear Shane say, flat and maybe a little annoyed, “Mom, no.”

He drops his bag in the guest room and crosses the hall to the bathroom. He twists the tap in the bathtub, and leans against the counter, waiting for the water to warm up. The last time he was in this bathroom, he was fixing his hair for their wedding. 

Надеюсь, ты это видела, мама. Это был лучший день.

He fiddles with his necklace while he waits, sliding the pendant back and forth on the chain absentmindedly, feeling the light tug of the chain against the back of his neck. He almost doesn’t notice when the tug disappears, when there’s more slack in the chain, except his hand keeps going and his wedding ring clatters onto the tile of the bathroom counter. Ilya blinks, startled, and looks down into his hand, where the cross is still between his fingers and the chain is draped over his palm. 

The clasp is broken. 

“Fuck,” he says, twisting to set the chain and the pendant next to his ring on the counter. And then his world tilts, and Ilya finds himself sitting on the floor, his back against the tub, the water still running and probably hot by now. 

This is not even the first time it’s broken. He’s had the clasp repaired twice (in Moscow) and the chain itself repaired once (in Boston), because he plays hockey and it’s easy for a necklace to get caught on things, and even though they’re not supposed to wear jewelry on the ice for this exact reason, many of them still do. For it to happen today, of all days, though… 

He has carried her with him every day since she died, most times intentionally and sometimes because how could he not, has had her crucifix as a tangible reminder the whole time. That she’s in his heart, always. That when thinks about her, he isn’t just doing that into a void, that she’s listening, somehow. 

“Ilya,” Shane’s voice carries through the door. “I’m coming in.”

He doesn’t wait for a response, just turns the knob and then the door swings open, a blast of cool air coming in from the hallway. The mirror is fogged with steam and the air is humid, so Ilya thinks he’s probably been in the bathroom longer than he realized.

“I am okay,” Ilya says, trying to preempt Shane's worry. It’s futile, of course. 

“Kind of a hard sell when you’re sitting on the floor.” Shane shuts the door behind him and leans over Ilya to twist the water off. Then, he sits down on the bathmat next to him, close enough for their shoulders to touch. “What’s wrong?”

“I broke my mother’s necklace,” Ilya says, like that’s the whole problem. 

“During the game?” Shane frowns. 

Ilya shakes his head. “Just now.”

“We’ll get it fixed.”

Ilya nods. “Yes. Has happened before.”

“So what’s been wrong all day, then?” Shane asks. “And don’t say ‘nothing’. I can see that something is wrong.”

The lump is back in his throat and the words won’t fit around it. He swallows hard. It doesn’t help. 

“Please, baby,” Shane says, turning and pressing his lips to Ilya’s shoulder. “I want to help.” 

“There is nothing you can do,” Ilya says, and doesn’t look to see the worried pinch come back between Shane’s eyebrows. He doesn’t need to see it to know it’s there. It’s been there on and off all day. 

“Okay. Tell me anyway.” He takes Ilya’s left hand between both of his, running his thumb back and forth over Ilya’s knuckles. “You can say it in Russian, again, maybe?”

Ilya shakes his head. “English is not the problem. Words are hard in Russian too. In every language, probably.”

“Do you want me to guess?” Shane asks and Ilya thinks of him in that Tampa hotel room. Sick like crazy? Sick like cancer? 

“No,” Ilya says. “I will try.” He rubs his nose. “My mama…today is—was—the day.”

“Oh,” Shane says softly. “Ilya.”

“I knew it was coming. Not the kind of day you forget, yes? But I do not ever talk about it and then it was here.”

Shane kisses his shoulder again, and then wraps his arms around him, holding him tightly. Ilya lets his head drop to rest on Shane’s shoulder. “Is there anything you usually do today?”

Ilya sighs. “Alexei and I used to talk. But…not anymore.”

“Svetlana?” Shane asks.

“Has been texting me all day. Is probably worried about me too.”

“I’ll text her in a minute,” Shane says. “I’ll tell her I’ve got you, okay? I mean, she probably already knows that, but if she’s worried…it might help.”

Ilya nods. Squeezes his eyes shut. Keeps talking. “A few years ago…2015? I got very drunk on this day. Too drunk. She found me, called ambulance.”

“Ilya,” Shane says, and Ilya feels him flinch. “An ambulance?”

“I know. Someone leaked I was in the hospital—”

“I remember,” Shane says. “The Raiders put out a statement that you had complications from the flu. I was worried. I almost called you.”

“I wish you did.”

“Me too.”

“I would have been asshole, though. If you did call.”

“Well, that’s nothing new,” Shane says, squeezing Ilya tightly again. “Was it…did you mean to? Were you trying—” Shane cuts himself off, his mouth closing with a click of teeth. 

“No.” Ilya says. “Not like that.”

He wasn’t, not really. He was just so sad, and lonely, and he lost track of how much he’d had to drink. He’d felt stupid and embarrassed and a stinging, sharp relief when he woke up in the hospital the next morning with Svetlana wan and furious in the chair next to his bed.

Shane pulls his phone out of the pocket of his hoodie and swipes into his messages. He doesn’t have to scroll very far to find his thread with Svetlana, and something about that makes Ilya feel soft and warm. Shane and Sveta are becoming friends, like he knew they would, like he wanted them to. He doesn’t bother trying to read the thread over Shane’s shoulder; he’s sure it’s mostly just about hockey. 

Shane types a message and shows it to Ilya before he sends it. Ilya’s okay, I have him. He’ll call you tomorrow. 

He nods. “Is okay.” 

Shane sends the message, and the typing bubbles appear immediately, despite the late hour. Shane’s phone buzzes a few seconds later, and they read the message together.

Thank you, Shane 💛 Is he letting you take care of him?

Ilya wants to bristle at that, a little. Shane types out he is now and sends it, before putting his phone back in his pocket. “C’mon, baby, up. Let’s shower and get some sleep.”

Shane turns the faucet back on and starts to peel Ilya out of his clothes. When the water is hot again, he pulls up on the diverter to switch the flow to the showerhead and herds Ilya under the spray, before he strips out of his own clothes, stacking them folded on the counter next to Ilya’s, and climbs in after him. 

“C’mere,” Shane says, pulling Ilya close. “When’s your mom’s birthday?” he asks. 

“July,” Ilya says. “The twenty-sixth.”

“We were at the cottage.” Shane comments. “You could’ve told me.”

“Her birthday is easier. Not as sad. Or different kind of sad, maybe.” Ilya figures this is because, as a child, his own birthday always seemed so much more significant than his mother’s. He doesn’t think he even really understood how old she was when she died (too young, of course, but shockingly young now that he’s old enough to understand. She turned twenty-one just before Alexei was born and was nearly twenty-six when Ilya was born and only thirty-eight when she died) until he was an adult himself.

“We’ll do something next year.” Shane promises. Ilya believes him. Shane’s not going to forget today or her birthday. He’ll put them in the calendar on his phone and set reminders as they approach, even though the dates are already locked into his perfect, obsessive brain.

Shane soaps Ilya’s body with soft, gentle hands, then picks up the showerhead to rinse him off, even though it leaves Shane standing in the cold side of the shower without any hot water for the time it takes to send all the suds down the drain. 

Later, when they’re dried off and changed into clean sweats and old t-shirts and they’re lying in the too-soft guest room bed, Shane on his back with his legs spread enough for Ilya to lie between them, his head on Shane’s stomach, one of Shane’s hands stroking his hair, Ilya says, “I didn’t tell her about you,” and he feels like he’s choking on the words, “when I went to her grave, the last time I was in Russia. I had already told you, on the phone after the funeral, that I loved you—”

“You did?”

Ilya nods. “I was worried after I hung up, that you had recorded it and were going to translate it.”

“I don’t—I wouldn’t do that.”

“I know. Was stupid of me.” Ilya rubs his cheek against Shane’s stomach. “But I had told you already and then I was there, at her grave, and I just…couldn’t say anything.”

“What would you have said?”

Ilya smiles a little in the dim room. “I would have said, ‘Mama, when I was seventeen, this very beautiful boy shook my hand, and nothing has been the same since’. I would tell her about your freckles, obviously. And the way you look like a frog when you smile—”

“A frog?”

“Yes, is very cute. I would tell her that you are stubborn and also polite, and very stupid people are tricked by the polite into thinking you are not scary. Which you are. Especially on the ice. And I would tell her how brave you are, and how good you are, that I will marry you and raise babies with you and when we are very old I will still be with you. But I did not tell her any of that because I was too afraid then, and now I won’t go back to Russia again and that is good but it is also—I feel like I left her behind.”

“Do you want to go back?”

Ilya lifts his head to prop his chin on Shane’s stomach so he can see his face, startled. 

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want to go back? Visit her again? I bet Farah or my mom could find a legitimate reason for you to go, especially since they’re working on winding down your Russian endorsements. One last vodka ad, or whatever.”

“Shane, no.”

“Don’t say no just because you’re worried or afraid. Do you want to?”

Ilya frowns. He is worried and afraid and those are reasons to say no. “Even if I want to, which I do not—I was sure it was the last time, Shane—is too risky. My PR card application says we are married. They will see that, now, at passport control.”

Shane’s mouth turns down in the corners, the opposite of his little frog smile. That part didn’t occur to him, clearly. On a different day Ilya might laugh at Shane, stymied by the simple logistics of it. 

“Is okay, sweetheart. Today is hard, always. But that is not a reason to get on a plane.”

“I didn’t mean, like, fly there tomorrow,” Shane grumbles and Ilya shoves his t-shirt up, suddenly desperate to feel Shane’s skin under his hands, warm and real and alive. 

“I know,” Ilya says. “I think she would not want me to choose the past over our life together.”

“I don’t want that either, obviously. I just…hate that there’s nothing I can do.”

“Yes. You like to solve things. Fix them.”

“Yeah.” Shane pets the back of his head. Ilya settles more of his weight onto him. “Do you want to go to sleep like this?” 

Ilya nods. “Yes. Is okay?”

“Very.”

---

Ilya wakes up to Shane’s alarm, even as Shane scrambles to turn it off. They’re in pretty much the same position they fell asleep in, and Ilya has some regrets about it from the way his neck twinges as he sits up, sore from using Shane’s stomach as his pillow. Shane groans a little, trying to stretch his back.

“I’m ordering a new mattress for this bed right now,” Shane complains, and then does, right there from his phone and adds white glove delivery and removal of the old mattress when he gets to the checkout. “We should get a new one for home, too.”

“I love you so much,” Ilya says.

“Is that a yes to a new mattress at home?” Shane asks, setting his phone aside.

“Whatever you want, любимый.” 

Shane smiles. “You look a little better today.”

Ilya nods. He feels better, his brain not so slow and his body not so heavy. “Practice?

“Practice,” Shane confirms. “Oh,” he says, reaching up and unclasping his chain, sliding his ring off it and handing the chain to Ilya. “Use this one for your cross until we can get your mom’s chain fixed. I’ll figure out something else for my ring in the meantime.”

Ilya takes the chain, feeling the lump come back to his throat as he threads the cross and his wedding ring onto it. 

“Perfect,” Shane says, smiling, when Ilya puts the chain on. It’s longer than his mother’s, and it’s a little strange to feel it sitting lower on his chest, but the chain is warm from Shane’s skin and Ilya feels a little better, wearing the cross again. Shane reaches, cupping his hand around Ilya’s cheek.

“I love you,” Shane says, and Ilya tips forward, resting his forehead on Shane’s shoulder and looping his arms around Shane’s waist lightly. Shane’s hand slides from Ilya’s cheek to the back of his neck, holding him gently. 

Ilya wishes he had better words, wishes he knew how to tell Shane what it means to him, to be cared for like this. He’s been taking care of himself for so long, and not always doing a very good job of it. It would be understandable, Ilya thinks, if Shane didn’t really know how to do it yet. Not when they’re only a month into being married and three months into being honest and less than a year since that hotel room in Tampa, where Shane had climbed into his lap and let Ilya cry into his shoulder and held him like no one had held Ilya since he was very small. 

Он так хорошо ко мне относится, мама. Надеюсь, ты это видишь.

“I am glad we are here and not in hotel,” Ilya says. 

“Yeah,” Shane agrees. “Maybe after the Montreal game in November, we can stay at the condo.”

“I think this is a good idea,” Ilya says, nodding. “Let’s not sell it. Is investment, yes?”

“I mean, yeah, that was always the plan.”

“So we keep,” Ilya says. “Sell the house we never spent any time in.”

“Sounds good,” Shane agrees. “I’ll get my mom on it.”

Shane gets them out of bed and into sweats and hoodies. They’ve pretty much slept through breakfast; at this point it makes more sense to just grab lunch at the rink with the rest of the team before practice, and then have their second lunch/early dinner with Yuna and David after practice. 

Shane borrows the keys to David’s Volvo and drives them, quiet and focused in the driver’s seat the way he usually is on game days, although he holds Ilya’s hand on the console between them. 

They find the rest of the team in the conference room the Centaurs’ management sets up for the visiting team’s meals, and Ilya follows Shane down the buffet line, filling up his plate dutifully. He doesn’t feel hungry, really, but he also can’t remember the last time he ate. Dinner after yesterday afternoon’s game, probably. 

“Roz!” Marly calls, waving him over. The Canadian Raiders are trying to get Shane to sit with them, and he glances at Ilya. 

“I’m fine,” Ilya insists. “I will go sit with Marly or he will cry.”

Shane rolls his eyes, but he takes the seat next to Aud. 

“Hey, man,” Marly says, when Ilya drops into the empty seat to Marly’s left. “You feeling better today?”

He shrugs. “Yes.” Because he does feel better, even if he doesn’t feel his best. Days like yesterday leave a fog over him, sometimes, dulling his senses until it lifts.

“That’s good. Hollzy said you had a migraine. Fucking sucks, dude.”

Ilya darts his eyes across the room to Shane, who’s already looking at him. Ilya rolls his eyes at his husband and Shane turns back to his own food and to Aud, who Ilya can’t hear but can guess is jabbering in French about the ongoing misery of his divorce proceedings. It’s been pretty much the only topic he’s been able to talk about since last spring, and Shane keeps getting caught listening to it, more polite than any of the rest of them are. Ilya, perhaps a bit evilly, is waiting for the day Shane tells Aud to get the fuck over himself like the rest of them have had to do, because what the fuck did he think was going to happen when he married a Czech underwear model after dating her for all of two weeks? Aud doesn’t speak Czech, Marika doesn’t speak French, and neither of them speaks English if they can avoid it. Marika also primarily lives in LA, hates Boston, and is deeply allergic to the two Bernese Mountain Dog puppies Aud got her for their first Christmas together. He’s a fucking idiot.

“Yes,” Ilya says again. He wonders when Shane told the migraine story. On the plane, when Ilya had Shane’s headphones on and his face in Shane’s neck? In the group chat, last night, after Ilya fell asleep? Or earlier in the day, when Shane knew something was wrong but hadn’t worked out what yet? 

It used to scare him so much, the idea of Shane knowing him. Of Shane seeing him. Those early years, Ilya spent so much time dodging being seen. He’d sneak in and out of the back stairwell of Shane’s condo. He’d book hotel rooms in Boston blocks away from where Montreal was staying, checking in early in the day and then sneaking in a side door after the game. He’d slip out of bed as soon as he could, while Shane was still fuzzy and relaxed in the afterglow, and Ilya would spend ten minutes in the shower putting his armor back on, hiding all the soft parts of his face and his heart before he went back out into the room to say good night to Shane like it didn’t matter at all, like nothing that had transpired between them felt any different to Ilya than the parade of random people he went home with in other cities. Women whose phone numbers he never saved, men who never even offered theirs. 

Marly launches into a rambling story about his older brother and a house at the Shore that’s turned into a total fucking money pit, because Jack has never met a bad idea he hasn’t liked, and Ilya feels a sudden burst of affection for Marly. He’ll talk about this for the next twenty minutes while Ilya eats and he won’t expect Ilya to say or do anything beyond listening, because listening is about all Ilya is capable of today, and Marly knows because Ilya never really tried to not let Marly see him. Thank god.

He would have moved here, to Ottawa, next year if they were still sticking with the original plan. He would’ve done it happily, willingly, without bitterness, because it meant being one step closer to the life he wanted with Shane. But it wouldn't have been easy, and he thinks the version of himself who agreed to it so quickly and without any reservations in July was being a little lovedrunk and naive. Because Ilya doesn’t know what days like this feel like without Marly next to him or without Svetlana being able to drop in on him unexpectedly, only that they have the potential to be so much worse.

So he eats his chicken and rice and the vegetables that have gotten overcooked sitting in the buffet line in their steambath, and even goes back up for a second helping. 

---

They beat Ottawa. Of course they do. It would be fucking embarrassing if they didn’t. Playing against the Centaurs always feels like preseason or an exhibition game. No stakes. 

Ilya’s never really paid attention to much in Ottawa anytime he’s played here, not since the first time, back at his second World Juniors during that interminable year after he’d been drafted by Boston but was still in Russia. He saw a movie once, on a plane, where Gwyneth Paltrow missed a train and it split her life into two parallel universes, and Ilya wonders if there’s a universe where he’s in his last season in Boston and getting ready to move to Ottawa but hasn’t told anyone yet besides Farah, and holding his relationship with Shane close to his heart, still keeping it a secret from everyone he knows. He hopes not. Besides, Ilya hadn’t liked the movie very much; she’d died in one universe and had a miscarriage in the other and the moral of the story seemed to be that life sucks no matter which train you get on. He doesn’t need a parallel universe to know that this version of his life is already far better than the one he and Shane tried to dream up this summer at the cottage.

They go straight from the rink to the airport again, and the plane is marginally less annoying tonight. He still hides in a window seat with Shane on the aisle, and he accepts Shane’s headphones again, blocking out the chatter around them. The flight is short, at least, made shorter by Ilya falling asleep almost immediately after takeoff and once again being woken as the plane lands on the runway in Bedford. He’s still mostly asleep, he thinks, as they wait for their bags. He leans heavily against Shane while they wait, his arm slung around Shane’s waist. It’s late enough that they have the private terminal to themselves. 

“I’ll drive,” Shane says as they walk out to the parking lot, and Ilya doesn’t put up any argument, just fishes the keys to the G-Wagon out of the front pocket of his backpack and hands them to Shane. Ilya generally doesn’t like being a passenger, would much rather drive when given the choice, but he’s never minded with Shane. Even so, he's glad it’s late and they’re all so exhausted from so many days on the road that nobody notices or cares enough to give him shit about handing the keys to one of his precious cars over or chirps him about being a passenger princess now.

Shane is relaxed behind the wheel, unfazed by the traffic (although there isn’t much, as late as it is) and the highways that are still new to him. Shane likes driving differently from the way Ilya likes driving, Ilya has noticed. Ilya likes brightly-colored cars that can easily hit a hundred miles per hour, likes finding stretches of open road to push his foot to the floor and test the limits of the engine and his own reflexes. Shane likes sensible SUVs (he’s coming around on the G-Wagon, even if sensible is probably not an appropriate adjective for a car that cost Ilya over a hundred thousand dollars) in boring fucking colors and he likes to drive because he doesn’t have to think about it, it’s just something he can do. 

“Meal delivery came yesterday, right?” Shane asks.

“Yes,” Ilya says. “Cleaning service would have sent message, if not. You are hungry?”

“No,” Shane shakes his head. “Mostly just thinking about tomorrow, whether we need anything.” They have a rest day tomorrow: no morning skate, optional or otherwise, no film review, no conditioning, no requirement to be at the practice rink at all. “Would be nice to just chill and not have to run errands or go anywhere.”

Ilya hasn’t done errands in years. His phone solves those problems for him; there’s an app for anything he might need, if he’s willing to pay enough. He has three different apps for food and grocery deliveries. His cleaning service has an app. His laundry service has an app. The mechanic who services all his cars has an app, although it’s terrible and much easier to just call him. The nutritionist who makes their meals doesn’t have an app, yet, but he can text her. 

“I will bring my necklace to the jeweler. Is where I bought our rings, they have fixed it before.” Ilya says. “Maybe run there. You could come, if you are willing to sleep until a civilized time first.”

“Oh,” Shane says and Ilya glances over at him. He’s looking at the road, but Ilya can tell from the softness of his mouth that Shane’s expression is the fond one he gets when Ilya surprises him. “Yeah, okay. That sounds good.”

“At least nine,” Ilya says.

“Nine,” Shane agrees. 

“Nine-thirty,” Ilya negotiates.

“Nine was your first offer, you can’t go up now.”

“I can do what I want, Hollander, and I want to sleep in with my hot husband. It has been very long week and I deserve it.” 

“Fine,” Shane sighs, “nine-thirty. But we’re setting my alarm. That fucking duck quacking is going to give me a heart attack someday.”

Ilya snorts. “So dramatic, my husband.”

“Pretty sure that’s you, actually,” Shane says, pushing the button on the remote clipped to the sun visor for the gate across their driveway now that they’re a few houses away.

He does the same for the garage door when they’re through the gate, and once he pulls into the garage and the car is in park, he lets out a relaxed little sigh Ilya thinks was probably unconscious. 

“Want to just deal with our bags tomorrow? I’m so fucking tired.” Shane asks, and it’s so un-Shane that Ilya agrees immediately, so they walk to the garage man door empty handed. Shane thumbs in the code (still 1410, because they hadn’t been able to figure out how to change it when they changed all the others. They had what Ilya considers their first married fight when he admitted he’d thrown away the box of instruction manuals the previous owners had left him when he bought the house. Shane had to look up online how to change each of the codes for the security system and the door locks, and the keypad for this door has been completely discontinued and not even Reddit had a PDF of the manual.) and Ilya follows him into the dark house. 

The house smells different now that Shane lives here. He’d switched out some of the products the cleaning service uses, and now instead of a sort of artificial citrus smell, the house always smells like the oil soap Shane prefers for the wood floors when they get home after the cleaners have been there. (The laundry smells different too. Lavender for their bedding, unscented for their clothes. Ilya doesn’t care beyond the fact that it makes Shane happy.) 

Their mail is piled neatly on the end of the dining table—two large cardboard boxes Ilya is sure are for Shane from Reebok or the stupid sparkling water company with the wet t-shirt commercials that Ilya once watched on repeat for an entire miserable summer in Moscow; a stack of envelopes that’s probably mostly junk and/or addressed to the previous owners—and Ilya ignores it for tomorrow.

Shane opens the fridge, probably checking their meal delivery is there. 

“Want anything?” he asks.

Ilya shakes his head. “No. Just sleep.”

Shane lets the fridge door swing closed, a few of the condiments in the door rattling as it does. “Sleep,” he agrees.

In their bedroom, Ilya peels off his airplane clothes and drops them in the laundry hamper before crawling beneath the lavender-scented cotton percale sheets Shane brought with him from Montreal. Shane hated Ilya’s silky, slippery black ones, he admitted a couple weeks after moving to Boston, and Ilya can admit Shane was right. The cotton ones are crisp and cool and feel a little bit like sleeping in a fancy hotel, in the best way. 

Shane takes what Ilya estimates to be a four minute shower, enough time for him to mindlessly scroll Instagram and watch the video of their power play goal celebration in Edmonton that’s been making the rounds for a few days now. Shane’s shot hits the back of the net, and Ilya collides with Shane with enough momentum that it spins the two of them in a circle, both of them grinning. 

they’re definitely fucking, right? 👀 one of the comments reads. 

Find a man who looks at you like Rozanov looks at Hollander says another. 

Someone else just comments a string of heart-eye emojis. 

Ilya considers reposting the video to his own story, but downloads it instead to add to their shared photo album. 

Shane comes out of the bathroom, his hair just wet at the ends, so he’d really only rinsed off under the spray, enough to get the feeling of the recycled airplane air off his skin, probably. Ilya watches him pull on a pair of sweats before he crawls into bed next to Ilya. 

“C’mere,” he says, reaching for Ilya and Ilya leans into him, letting Shane pull Ilya’s back to his front, his chin hooked over Ilya’s shoulder. “I love you.”

“I love you,” Ilya says back. He never wants to take this for granted, falling asleep with Shane’s arms around him. “I am very happy I am not in Ottawa.”

Shane hums in agreement. “You’d still be in Boston, at this point, but I know what you mean.” Shane kisses his bare shoulder. “Get some rest, baby.”

Видишь, мама? Со мной всё будет в порядке.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Thank you, everyone, for your kudos and comments on chapter 1. I'm hoping to have some time to reply to comments this weekend!

At one point in this chapter, I mention the Raiders taking the team bus to games in NYC and New Jersey. IRL, this wouldn't happen, they would fly. But I think that's dumb and a terrible use of time, money, and jet fuel, and since this is fanfic and I can do what I want, I get to fix that. 😂

They were in Edmonton, the first time it happened. Shane didn’t even really process it at first, because he’s used to locking all the shit he hears on the ice in a box and fucking lighting the box on fire in his brain after the game. But it had been different, that time. Not just an insult or a chirp designed to distract him from the faceoff. It was a little too…knowing. 

“Heard you like to suck cock, Hollander,” said Edmonton’s third-line center, a guy Shane didn’t know and had never played before, maybe called up from their farm team this summer. 

Shane won the faceoff, and they won the game, and he didn’t think anything of it after that. 

 

In Calgary, during the third period, Peters skated up to Shane with the smug grin that had annoyed Shane when they were on an All-Star team together a few years ago and said “never guessed you were a fag, Hollzy, but you probably didn’t have much choice, right? Chicks aren’t really into your whole thing.” He’d waved his hand in the general direction of Shane’s face, just in case Shane hadn’t understood. 

But in Calgary, Shane was more worried about Ilya than anything else, and he wasn’t about to waste mental energy on the homophobic and racist shit Peters had to say.

 

In Ottawa, nobody said anything, but Shane wasn’t surprised by that. He and Boodram have always gotten along when they’ve crossed paths. Plus, the guys in Ottawa generally know where they stand and don’t seem all that interested in talking shit just for the sake of it. 

 

They’re playing at home against Philly, the first time Ilya hears it. 

“So does your boyfriend take it up the ass or do you, Holly?” Klein asks. “My money is on you.”

Shane wins the faceoff, and passes the puck to Ilya, who deposits it neatly in the net not ten seconds later, ending the power play. He slings his arm around Shane’s neck in celebration, reeling him into a hug. 

“I will deal with Klein,” he says darkly, the cheering crowd drowning him out for anyone farther away than Shane is. 

“No,” Shane says. “Ignore him.” 

Ilya doesn’t, but whatever he says to Klein makes him drop gloves and earns them another power play. Shane scores this time. 

 

The next night, New Jersey’s backup goalie point blank asks Shane when he’s going to come out.

“I think Montreal are running their mouths,” he tells Ilya that night, tucked up against Ilya’s side in the hotel bed. He snuck in here after they got back from the game, after making a cursory stop at his own room, for the sake of anyone who might be paying attention. The sneaking around is wearing thin, already, only a few weeks into the season. Shane wonders how long they’re going to keep up this particular charade, given that there are very few people online who have followed the breadcrumbs he and Ilya have been dropping to their only logical conclusion. Short of making out with Ilya at center ice, Shane is pretty sure they can get away with just about anything. It will get written off as two hockey guys being bros, as far as the general public is concerned. 

He continues, “It seems like a lot of teams know I’m gay.”

Ilya frowns. “Or a lot of teams have homophobic assholes on them.”

“I mean, yeah. But this feels different. It’s…specific, you know? I told Comeau I’d rather suck my boyfriend’s dick and now I’ve got what’s-his-face in Edmonton asking me if it’s true, and that asshole Peters in Calgary…” Shane trails off, scowling.

“What did Peters say?” 

“Nothing worth repeating.” 

“Shane.”

Shane ignores him. “And then Klein—”

“He will not say anything next time,” Ilya says, smug. 

Shane rolls his eyes. “And tonight, Olsson asked me when I’m going to come out.”

“This is a bad chirp, but he is a goalie, so…”

“That’s what I mean. I don’t think it was a chirp. I think he was genuinely asking.”

“So you think Montreal has made it so you cannot say anything but they are all talking?”

“I mean, yeah. Does that surprise you?”

“No.” Ilya sighs heavily. “What do you want to do about it?”

Shane rolls onto his back, staring up at the hotel ceiling. There’s a water stain near the window that’s sort of shaped like Italy. “I don’t know,” he says. “This is part of not hiding, right? People knowing.”

“No,” Ilya says. “This is gossip. Assholes spreading stories from the locker room, which they should know better than to do.”

Shane sighs. “Yeah, but I don’t see how to shut it down without denying it, and I’m not going to do that, so…I think I have to just let it go.”

Ilya snakes his arms around Shane and pulls him close again. “We will send them home crying when we play them in a few weeks.”

Shane doesn’t really want to think about it. He’s not looking forward to being back in Montreal, aside from maybe seeing the Pikes and/or J.J. if they can fit it into their schedule. He’s going to be booed in the city he called home for almost a decade, is going to have to play against guys he thought were his brothers until they made it clear they never were. 

“Yeah,” he agrees, knowing it comes out hollow. 

---

Bethany sends them a weekly email with what she calls “the highlights”. Ilya is more online than Shane is, so he’s usually already seen them, but Shane appreciates having his social media consumption curated into bite-sized pieces, videos and images downloaded for him to look at without any comments, aside from a note from Bethany on which things are trending positively and which aren’t. 

So far, pretty much everything is trending positively, although Shane feels bad for the handful of people on Twitter and Instagram and apparently Tumblr who have put the pieces together exactly right and are getting lambasted by homophobes and standard dudebro hockey fans (and Bethany insists that’s more of a Venn diagram than just a circle, so at least that’s something, maybe.)

The press video from Columbus was great, today’s email from Bethany says, and Shane doesn’t bother to watch the included video. He was standing right next to Ilya when they asked him—like every press scrum has asked them since the season started—what it’s like playing on the same team as his rival. Ilya had grinned and said “being teammates is better than being rivals, right Shane?” and Shane knows the look he’d given him was too fond, but he’d nodded and said “right”. 

Let’s aim for something similar in New York, the email continues, and Shane’s actually planning on aiming a little higher in New York. Probably he should tell Bethany. He’s still getting used to having someone other than his mom working on his media strategy. 

He swipes from his email to his messages and nudges the bottom of Ilya’s foot with his toes. Ilya looks up from his own phone. 

“I don’t know what to say to Scott Hunter.”

Ilya blows out a sigh. “Nothing. He probably lost his reading glasses in couch cushions and won’t be able to read message anyway.”

“Ilya,” Shane frowns, “we agreed.”

Ilya drops his head back on the pillow behind him, groaning.

“Don’t be a baby.” Shane pokes Ilya’s foot again. “I think it would be good to have him on our side, is all. I know you agree, or you wouldn’t have talked to him at the MLH awards. And my mom agrees, too.”

Yuna and Farah think it would be good to hear how the league has handled Scott coming out, what conversations might’ve happened behind closed doors, and, with the benefit of hindsight, whether Scott would do anything differently. Shane figures Scott’s not really obligated to tell them any of that, but he can’t deny that he’s curious, not when they’re inching closer to being fully out. Especially with the rumors about him that seem to be wending their way around the league, no doubt originating in the Metros’ locker room. There’s the potential for fallout, and at this point it might just land on him, but if Shane gets outed, he worries it will become some kind of witchhunt, and it will be all too easy to connect the dots to Ilya, now that they aren’t hiding.

“Unless you’re worried about Scott knowing,” Shane offers, tentatively. 

Ilya frowns. “If Hunter does not already know about me after our conversation in June, he is more infirm than I thought.”

“You told him?”

“Implied,” Ilya shrugs. “I assume he knows bisexuals exist, he does keep putting the whole alphabet in all his tweets. Fine, we will tell him.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Great, so what should I say?”

“You want to tell him over text? Good, saves us having to pay for overpriced drinks in his shitty bar. Say ‘hello, Mr. Dinosaur, are you sitting down? You should sit down before this news gives you a heart attack.’”

“Very funny. Obviously I’m not going to tell him we’re married in a text.”

“Ugh, so we will have to go for drink shitty, overpriced drinks with him?”

“Fucking hell, Ilya, I’ll pay our bar tab. Just tell me what to say!”

“Okay,” Ilya says, finally relenting. He sits up and scooches closer, hooking his chin over Shane’s shoulder to see his phone screen. “Why do you have him saved as Mr. Hunter in your phone?”

“I’m respecting my elders, obviously,” Shane says and Ilya snorts a laugh. 

Shane’s last text to Scott is from two years ago, when they were on the same All-Star team and Scott had coordinated a dinner out for the team. He’d texted Shane the name of the restaurant, and Shane had replied with a thumbs up.

He kept meaning to reach out this summer after his email in June that said basically nothing (although, maybe like Ilya’s conversation with him in Vegas, implied plenty), but never figured how to put anything of substance into words. 

“Okay,” Ilya says again, “Say: Drinks after Boston destroys you next week? Rozanov and I have something to talk to you about.”

Shane types this out dutifully, and even though he’s tempted to type Ilya instead of Rozanov, he decides to stick with Ilya’s suggestion as-is. Shane sends it, and his message gets marked as read almost immediately. 

“Eager,” Ilya says. “I do not know how I feel about this.”

Shane laughs. “Maybe he was already on his phone.”

The three typing dots appear and disappear a few times before a few messages come through. 

 

Mr. Hunter

Fuck off, we’re going to 

crush you guys

And also…ominous

But yes, I can do that

Do you want to meet at

my bar? 

 

“Ugh, I told you so.”

“Meeting him at the bar was your idea,” Shane says, poking Ilya between the ribs and making him squirm away. 

“I like it less now that he wants us to.”

“So, what, you’d rather meet at his house?”

“Definitely no.”

“Okay, then bar it is. 

Shane

Sure

Sounds good

Roz is excited

Ilya gasps, betrayed. “Delete it!”

“Too late,” Shane grins, “he already read it.”

 

Mr. Hunter

I know you’re lying but

somehow that makes it 

even more unsettling

What are you guys plotting?

Ilya grins, clearly delighted at Scott’s unease. 

Shane

You’ll see 😈

 

“We have two days off after the Admirals game,” Ilya says. “Maybe we stay in New York an extra day? Get fancy hotel room, let Yuna and Bethany pick some restaurant for us to be seen in?”

“Are you going to tell me I’m boring if I say I don’t want to spend our time off in another hotel room? Even a fancy one?”

Ilya smiles. “Yes.”

“Sorry, baby, you knew I was boring when you married me.”

“I knew you were boring many years before that,” Ilya teases.

“Exactly,” Shane says. “I just want to come home.” 

Ilya’s eyes go soft. “Yes. Okay.”

Time together used to be their rarest commodity. The first few years, Shane could count the number of times they saw each other off the ice on one hand. Later, as they got to know each other more and wanted each other more and were pretending not to, Shane would hoard time with Ilya, would do everything he could to stretch every minute as long as possible and it was never enough. He thinks he’ll be trying to make up for that deficit for years. 

“We can let Mom and Bethany pick some restaurant here for us to be seen in,” Shane suggests. “Or we can go somewhere you like.”

“Maybe we should go out when Rose Landry comes to visit. Bring Svetlana.”

“You can just call her Rose, you know,” Shane says. “And yeah, we could do that, if you want. Svetlana would like it, I bet.”

Ilya grins. “Yes, but she will pretend not to while insisting on picking the restaurant.”

“Should we let her?” Shane asks. “Or do you want to pick?”

“No, let Sveta. She is used to wining and dining for work. She knows someone in every good restaurant, probably.”

Rose is supposed to come to visit in November, now that reshoots are finally done on the X-Squad movie and she has a little time before she starts filming a rom-com in London. Shane thinks Ilya is more nervous than he wants to admit, and figures inviting Svetlana will help. He wants to tell Ilya there’s nothing to be nervous about, that Rose is the easiest person in the world to get along with, except that he doesn’t know how to say that without making Ilya all shifty and jealous like he got at the cottage that first night.

“Okay,” Shane says. “She can choose. D’you think we need to tell Bethany we’re going to a gay bar in New York?”

Ilya laughs. “Probably. Should we make Connie and Marly and Carm and Vic come along and see how long it takes them to notice it’s a gay bar?”

Shane snorts. “Wanna bet it takes them longer than it took Jojo, Doozy, and Caddy in Ottawa?”

“Yes, I bet you fifty dollars and two blowjobs.”

“I was thinking fifty blowjobs and two dollars, but okay.”

“Wait, no, this is better offer. We swap.”

“Too late,” Shane says, laughing. “Fifty bucks and two blowjobs it is.”

“Maybe I can get advance on my winnings now.”

“Definitely not. Because I’m going to win.”

---

They take the team bus to New York instead of flying, which obviously makes sense. They did the same for New Jersey. Shane’s more used to flying everywhere; except for Ottawa, Montreal is far enough away from most cities in the league to justify flying. Occasionally the Metros would take a bus between closer cities on roadtrips, but the schedule didn’t often work out that way. 

Shane doesn’t love the bus, if he’s honest. The seats are less comfortable than the plane and it’s almost always too hot, plus it doesn’t have the soothing, white noise roar of the jet engines. Shane’s considering getting a white noise machine, he sleeps so well on planes. 

Ilya ends up in the back of the bus with Shug and Marly for a captains’ meeting, so Shane sits with Vic before Aud can trap him in another rant about his divorce. (Shane was too sympathetic the first time, and accidentally gave Aud the impression that Shane is on his side, when Shane’s actually pretty sure the whole thing is Aud’s fault.)

Vic is a good bus companion. He wears his headphones while he talks to his wife on the phone, and Shane puts his own headphones on so he doesn’t accidentally eavesdrop on their conversation, which is mostly in French. 

He swipes into his text thread with Rose. She’d messaged him while he was packing this morning and he hadn’t had time to reply yet.

Rose

I think I should book a hotel

for November

Shane

We have 3 guest rooms

You can stay with us

Rose

I like Humble-brag Hollander

Shane

Is it a brag if it’s just a fact?

Rose

🤣🤣🤣

Yes

That’s literally why it’s a 

humble-brag 

Shane

Seriously though

You can stay with us 

It won’t be weird

Rose

I mean

Yes it will

You’re MARRIED to your

cottage boy!!!!

Who I’ve never met!

But that’s not why I think

I should get a hotel

Shane

Why then?

Rose

Shane

You’ve been on the same

team and living together 

for like 6 weeks

And somehow nobody has

figured out the living 

together part. I would hate

myself if they did because

I got papped at your house 

and the whole world figures 

out it’s his house too!!

Shane

Oh

Yeah

I guess

But part of the reason

nobody has figured it out

is that it’s super private.

There’s a gate and no close

neighbors.

Rose

It’s cute that you think that.

My fans found me in RURAL

NEBRASKA, Shane. There 

were more cows than people. 

I’m booking a hotel. 

Shane

Was that for the Twister 

rip-off movie?

Rose

How dare you suggest the

cinematic masterpiece

Cyclone starring Greg

Kinnear was not an original

idea! 

(Also I don’t know why I’m

still surprised you’ve seen 

all of my terrible movies.)

Shane

Yeah, me either

Rose

🤣

Shane

Ilya thinks we should go

out for dinner with his friend

Svetlana when you’re here

Rose

Like a weird double-beard

double-date?

Shane

🙄

No

Just dinner

Honestly I think he’s nervous

and having Sveta there will 

make him feel better.

Rose

Wait that’s kind of cute

And we like Svetlana, yes?

Shane

Yes

We like Svetlana

She’s Ilya’s best friend

And she’s very scary

And also very hot

Rose

You’re gay

Shane

I still have eyes

Rose

Dinner it is 

(But also send me a pic of 

Svetlana so I know how 

much I need to prepare for 

her level of scary hotness)

 

Shane switches to Instagram and finds Svetlana’s account, sending it to Rose.

 

Rose

Jesus

Fuck 

🥵

I was doubting you

because of the gay thing

But you sure do have eyes

Now I’M nervous

Shane

You’ll like her

Rose

That’s not what I’m worried 

about…

Is there a hockey equivalent

to the prettiest girl in school

who is way too cool to be your

friend but one time she smiles

at you and compliments your 

shirt and it’s almost the same

thing? Because that’s totally

Svetlana’s vibe.

Shane

Yeah, the hockey equivalent is 

an opposing captain who is so

fucking annoying and also so

fucking good that you can’t help

but marry him.

Rose

Yeah I think that’s a different

thing

Shane

Seems like maybe not 👀

Rose

I regret teaching you how to use

that emoji

Shane

😈

Rose

That one too 💀

 

---

They beat New York, 3-1. 

“What was that about crushing us?” Shane asks Hunter as the horn blows, signaling the end of the third. 

“Don’t make me drop gloves after the horn again, Hollander.”

“Pretty sure it was you who made me drop gloves last time.” Shane grins.

Scott rolls his eyes. “It doesn’t matter. You guys still coming to the bar?”

“Yeah.” Shane nods. “Give us a couple hours, Ilya’s on media availability.”

Scott’s eyebrows rise. “Ilya, huh?” Shane doesn’t say anything else, and Scott shrugs. “See you then,” he says, before skating back to his bench and clomping down into the tunnel.

“Were you going to fight him again?” Ilya asks when Shane gets to where he’s waiting at the boards to send the team down into the tunnel. 

“No!” Shane huffs, rolling his eyes. “I was just confirming plans.”

Ilya kisses his helmet. “I love you,” he says, like he says to all the Raiders after every game. “Good game.”

“You too, Captain.” Shane grins. “See you down there.”

It’s Shug’s turn with the aux cord, so the speakers in the locker room are blaring EDM. Shane is pretty sure it’s some kind of practical joke and nobody actually likes this (or even considers it music), but he can tune it out easily enough. 

“Where are we going tonight, boys?” Connors shouts over the music and the general locker room din. 

“Hotel,” Carm says firmly. “Gonna FaceTime Cayla and crash, I’m beat.”

“More like whipped,” Connors says. 

“Fuck off, Connie.”

“I will go to the hotel too,” Vic says. “Cami is not feeling well, I promised to check in again.”

“Ilya and I have plans,” Shane says. 

“Lemme guess, also at the hotel?” Connors groans. “Why are you all so lame and married?”

“Like you wouldn’t be going back to the hotel if your Cape Cod girl told you to,” Marly ribs him.

Connors pouts. “Her name is Maddie. She’s maybe not my girl anymore. I don’t know.”

This is news to Shane, and clearly to Marly and Vic too, who exchange a look.  

“Ilya and I are going to Hunter’s bar. You can join if you want.” Shane offers. He doesn’t really think Connors will take him up on it, but he brightens. 

“Really? Maybe Vaughny and them will go. Let me text him.”

Shane also didn’t realize Connors and Vaughn were friends, and he’s not sure who the ‘and them’ might be referring to, but he figures it’s probably a safe bet that a handful of the Admirals will be at The Kingfisher. Or at least willing to turn up. 

“I’ll come too,” Marly says, shrugging. “I don’t like the clubs in New York.”

“More like you don’t like that nobody here recognizes you,” Connors says and ignores Marly flipping him off. Clearly he’s cheered up now that he has plans that don’t include moping about whether or not Maddie is still his girl. 

Shane goes to take a shower, and by the time he gets back Ilya has returned from doing press and has amassed a larger group of Raiders who want to go to The Kingfisher. 

“Is you, me, Connie and Marly, and then Feller, Tremblay, and Danya.” Ilya says, while Shane pulls on jeans. “Is okay?”

“Sure,” Shane says. It’s a weird combination of guys, but if anything that gives them a little bit of cover. “Connie thinks Vaughn and a few of the other Admirals will be there.”

Ilya nods. “Bennett probably,” he says, knowingly. “Feller and Tremblay asked specifically if they could join,” he adds, a smirk tugging up at the corners of his mouth. 

“Nice of them,” Shane says, mildly, knowing it will annoy Ilya that he doesn’t immediately take the bait.

“Or maybe you make them curious,” Ilya says. 

“Or you do,” Shane shoots back. “Or Scott.”

“Hmm, I think it’s definitely you,” Ilya says, leaning close enough to brush their shoulders together.

“Okay, well, I told Scott we’d get there in about an hour.” Shane fishes his wedding ring out of the inner pocket of his bag—Ilya’s chain is still getting repaired so he’s wearing Shane’s—and slides it on. “You gonna shower?”

“I will be quick,” Ilya says, and smacks a loud kiss to Shane’s cheek. Shane shakes his head at Ilya as he heads towards the shower, fond and amused.

The team filters out to their various plans for the evening, although most of them are just going to the hotel. They have to be on the bus by six tomorrow morning. 

Once Ilya is out of the shower and dressed, they take two Ubers to Brooklyn. Feller, Marly, Connie, and Danya take the UberXL, and Tremblay rides in the passenger seat of the regular Uber Shane and Ilya climb into, although after a few silent minutes he twists around in his seat to talk to them over the center console. 

“I haven’t met Scott Hunter before,” Tremblay says. 

“This makes sense. You have met no one,” Ilya says, grinning. 

Tremblay rolls his eyes. “Is he nice?”

“Hunter? He is old. Very dull. Like talking to your grandpa.”

“My grandpa is cool. He coached my minor hockey team.” Tremblay says. “And Hunter must be okay, if you guys are friends with him.”

“Hunter wishes we were friends,” Ilya scoffs.

“But…” Tremblay frowns. “We’re going to his bar? Why do that if you’re not friends?”

Shane laughs. “Roz is just being an asshole. Don’t worry about it. 

“And it’s definitely cool that I’m tagging along?” Tremblay asks, his eyes flicking nervously between Shane and Ilya. “I, like, don’t have to.”

“Relax,” Ilya says firmly. “Or Scott Hunter won’t think you’re cool.”

“Felly wanted to come,” Tremblay says. “But he didn’t want to come alone. I feel kinda bad he ended up in the other Uber.”

“We will be there in twenty minutes, he will be fine,” Ilya says, before shooting Shane a smug look when Tremblay turns back around.

The drive takes closer to thirty more minutes, traffic crawling across the bridge. They get there before the second Uber.

“Is it weird if I wait outside for Felly?” Tremblay asks. 

“Yes,” Ilya says.

“No,” Shane says. “Ilya, stop harassing the rookie.”

“But he makes it so easy.” Ilya pouts and Tremblay rolls his eyes. 

“Fuck off,” he says, with a little more bravado than he might’ve managed a few weeks ago. Ilya and Shane both grin. 

“See you inside, rookie. The gays only bite if you ask them to, we promise.” 

“Ilya,” Shane groans, and grabs the sleeve of Ilya’s denim jacket, hauling him over the threshold and into the bar. 

The Kingfisher isn’t what Shane expected. It’s a bit divey, and all the TVs are tuned to various sporting events. The highlights from tonight’s game play on the TV behind the bar. Then again, he’s not really sure what he expected from a gay sports bar owned by Scott Hunter. 

The bar is pretty quiet, and that makes sense considering it’s a Wednesday night. Scott isn’t here yet, from what Shane can see. 

“You can get seats,” Ilya says. “I will get drinks. Ginger ale?” 

“Yeah,” Shane says. “Thanks, baby.”

Shane picks a booth along the side of the bar away from the pool table and the TV playing tonight’s Metros’ game against Colorado. He sits with his back to that TV for good measure. 

There’s a flurry of noise and activity at the door, and Shane watches an assortment of Admirals come through it, the second Uber of Raiders on their heels. Vaughn and Connors already have their heads thrown back laughing at something, Vaughn’s arm slung around Connors’ shoulders. Feller and Tremblay hesitate in the door and look around furtively, nervous maybe, before Marly comes up behind them, pushing them through. 

Ilya slides into the booth next to Shane, Shane’s ginger ale in one hand and a beer for himself. Shane knows what that means. 

“No good vodkas?” he asks. 

“No,” Ilya confirms. “Is embarrassing for Hunter. Surely there is one Russian on Admirals he could ask.” 

Shane watches as Feller and Tremblay make their way toward the bar and it occurs to him that neither of them is twenty-one yet. “Do we need to intervene there?” he asks, nodding toward them. 

“No. I think if they flirt with Kyle he will not card them.”

“Kyle?” It comes out sharply. “I didn’t realize you were already on first-name terms with the bartender.”

Ilya grins. “Do not worry, sweetheart, he doesn’t have eyes for me anyway.” Ilya nods toward the bar, where Feller and Tremblay are failing to flag Kyle down from where he’s leaning against the bar, deep in conversation with Eric Bennett.

Interesting. 

“I mostly meant do we need to stop the rookies?”

“Felly is not a rookie, and nobody stopped us drinking our rookie season.” Ilya shrugs. He picks up his beer and takes a long pull on it. Shane watches his throat bob as he swallows and forgets about the underage drinking happening fifteen feet from them. Ilya settles more comfortably in the booth, pressing his thigh against Shane’s. Shane’s considering whether he wants to lean in and kiss Ilya about it when he hears, “God this is so fucking weird,” and looks up to see Scott Hunter, freshly showered and dressed in jeans and a blue sweater, standing over their booth. 

“Hunter,” Ilya says. “I did not get a drink for you since it is your bar.” 

“Great,” Scott rolls his eyes, “I’ll be back in a minute. I suspect I’m going to need alcohol to get through this conversation.”

“Rude,” Ilya says to Scott’s retreating back. 

“Can we play nice?” Shane suggests. “Maybe remember that we wouldn’t be married without him? And we’re trying to find out some stuff he doesn’t have to tell us.”

“Yes. Okay. I will be good.” 

Scott doesn’t bother waiting on Kyle, just goes behind the bar to grab himself a beer and hands two to Feller and Tremblay, the latter looking at him with barely disguised awe. 

“Ha!” Shane says. “I told you it wasn’t me.”

“Maybe not for the rookie,” Ilya concedes. “But I am not counting Felly out yet.”

“Just checking…you want Felly to have some kind of crush on me?” Shane asks pointedly. 

“No,” Ilya says quickly. “But I am not stupid. I am married to Cosmopolitan’s hottest man in MLH, after all. I must get used to locker room baby gays lusting after him.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Shane says, laughing. 

“Yep, still weird.” Scott confirms, sliding into the booth opposite Shane and Ilya. “Also, you brought quite the entourage of Raiders with you. Should I be worried?”

“No,” Shane says. “Marly and Connors wanted to hang with Vaughny. The rest…” he shrugs, “have their own reasons, I guess.”

“And we do not mind blending in,” Ilya adds. “Seven Raiders in a gay bar…much less conspicuous than two.” 

“Blending in,” Scott repeats, cautiously. 

“I’m gay,” Shane says, figuring that’s the easiest place to start. (It’s kind of crazy, the way that’s true now, when barely three months ago saying the words felt almost impossible.) 

“If you did not figure out in Vegas that I am bi,” Ilya says, “I am concerned that the Admirals are committing elder abuse keeping you on the ice.”

“Ilya,” Shane groans at the same time Scott says, “Fuck off, Roz. Just because I didn’t want to make any assumptions in Vegas—”

“Assume,” Ilya interrupts. “Also, we’re married.”

Scott chokes on his beer. “We? As in you two? Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov?”

He glances between them with wide, shocked eyes before his expression shifts into something guarded, his mouth flattening into a thin, unimpressed line. 

Ilya sighs heavily. “Is not a joke. I would not joke about this.”

“Hard to tell, you fucking joke about everything else,” Scott says, a little sourly.

Shane puts his hand on Ilya’s thigh under the table, then changes his mind and grabs Ilya’s hand on top of the table instead. If he can’t do that here, of all places, where the fuck can he? “We’re not joking,” Shane says. “We got together in 2010—”

“Christ.”

“—and we got married in September.”

Scott’s eyes narrow. “Before or after you got traded to Boston?”

“Are you going to report us for collusion?” Ilya asks. “Oh, Hollander and Rozanov are too good to be on the same team, not fair to everyone else, so we must have colluded?”

There definitely was collusion, and Shane knocks his foot against Ilya’s under the table. 

“A lot of things happened at the same time,” Shane says vaguely. “It all moved pretty quick once I figured out staying in Montreal wasn’t going to be an option.”

“Yeah, uh. I heard some stuff,” Scott says, and Shane appreciates that he doesn’t pretend he hasn’t. “It sounds like it was bad.”

“Yeah.” Shane says. “It really fucking was.” 

“And Boston?” Scott asks, glancing between them again, this time with something closer to concern. “I haven’t heard anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s not—”

“It’s better,” Shane says. “Like you’ve got here, I think. Supportive team, supportive front office.”

Scott breathes out. “Good. I mean, I figured, since you brought five of them with you tonight. But good.” He frowns. “You should still loop in your agents and get a lawyer.”

Ilya frowns back. “We have same agent. She knows.”

“Then make sure she has a good employment lawyer in her office or knows one. If you get outed or decide to come out, Crowell is going to lose his everloving shit.” 

Shane feels a sudden shock of cold hit him, like plunging into an ice bath after a brutal game. Ilya squeezes his hand. “What happened? After you came out?”

Scott picks at the label on his beer bottle a little absently. “I was prepared for a certain amount of bullshit from the league, but Crowell straight up said to the Admirals’ GM that it might be time for me to retire a week after we won the fucking cup. Pete told him to fuck off, but I’ll be surprised if I get the call for All-Stars this year and I’m barely in any of the league promo for this season. One shot of me with the cup.”

“Fuck,” Shane says, glancing over at Ilya, who looks grim. 

“And Sherwood dropped me. Said I violated the morality clause in my contract.”

“For a little kissing?” Ilya quips, maybe an attempt to lighten the mood. “Was not even PG-13. Barely any tongue. Especially compared to Wagner eating his wife’s face behind you.”

“Yeah, my lawyer pointed that out too. Didn’t matter. We’re in negotiations with CCM now.”

“We should tell Farah and my mom about Sherwood,” Shane says to Ilya. “They probably already found that clause in your contract but…”

Yuna and Farah have been combing through all of their various endorsement deals to find the ones that could be a problem once they’re out and trying to renegotiate some of them, as well as diversifying into some newer brands. 

“Yes. I do not want their shitty sticks now.” Ilya scowls. 

“Do you regret it?” Shane asks, bluntly. He probably should’ve softened it a little, but he has to know.

Scott looks at him. “Do you? I heard you broke Comeau’s nose.”

Shane grins. “He fucking deserved it, so no, I don’t regret it. We wouldn’t be on the same team if I hadn’t done it. We’d be married, at least,” Shane glances at Ilya, who nods, “but we’d be in separate countries. We’re out to the team and the coaching staff. I never could’ve had that in Montreal.”

“I don’t regret it either,” Scott confirms, his grin matching Shane’s. “I maybe would’ve given our Comms people a heads up, if I could do it again. I didn’t mean to make their jobs harder. But…I think it had to be that public. Being first. Crowell would’ve found a way to shut it down, otherwise, I think. Would’ve sent me to fucking Ottawa or Arizona.”

“Ottawa are good guys, at least.” Shane says. “None of them said shit to me when we played them last week.”

“Yeah, they fucking suck at hockey though.” Scott looks at him across the table, sympathy all over his face. It feels like an itch between Shane’s shoulderblades, in the exact spot just out of his reach to scratch. “It’s Gagnon, Drapeau, Comeau, and Wilson telling everyone what went down in Montreal’s locker room, by the way.”

Ilya swears in Russian before saying in English, “I will kill them.”

“No you won’t,” Shane says firmly. “We’ll beat them just fine without needing to kill anyone.”

“Well, yes, obviously, sweetheart, but it won’t be as fun.”

Scott blinks at sweetheart and then laughs. “You know, from what I remember, you guys were more the cliche jock porn last names only type of guys. ‘Da, like that, Hollander’,” he adds, in a terrible but recognizable imitation of Ilya. 

Shane buries his face in his hands, trying to hide how red he knows it is. “I told you he could hear us, Ilya.”

“Eh,” Ilya shrugs. “It was many years ago. And never try Russian accent again. Horrible.”

Scott ignores this. “Yeah, you guys were what…eighteen?”

“Nineteen,” Shane says. 

“And it’s really been the whole time?”

“Yes,” Ilya says. “Not always exclusive, but yes. The whole time.”

“I’ve been wanting to thank you,” Shane says. “I was going to email you again but that seemed…lame or something, I don’t know. You came out, and Ilya and I spent the summer together, and I came out to my parents, and we got married and I don’t think any of that would’ve happened if you hadn’t done it. So…thank you.” 

“Yes,” Ilya says, his expression shifting into something serious. “It did not seem possible for us. And then you made it possible.”

Scott’s eyes look a little wet, and he clears his throat once before saying, “I appreciate that. Really.” He clears his throat again. “Just…maybe don’t spread that around too much. I don’t want the heat of being even partially responsible for you guys ending up on the same team.”

Ilya’s laugh is surprised and genuine, and Shane shakes his head. “I think we’ll have bigger problems if people start putting that together.”

Scott grimaces. “Yeah. True. Sorry. Is there a plan?”

“We’re waiting on my Canadian PR card. We will both feel safer when I have that.”

Scott nods. “Makes sense.” And then he grins, briefly, at Shane again. “Remember Vaughny in Sochi?”

Shane snorts. “Yes. Remind me to text him about that once we’re out.”

“What did Vaughny do in Sochi?” Ilya asks, glancing over to the table where Vaughn, Connors, Marly, Danya, and Jalo are having a rowdy conversation. Bennett is still at the bar, flirting with Kyle. Tremblay and Felly are at a table in the corner by the bar, just watching. Felly still looks nervous.

“We ran into Hollander getting ice cream—”

“Ice cream?” Ilya asks, grinning at Shane. “You?”

“I needed cheering up,” Shane says lightly, and squeezes Ilya’s hand to forestall any apologies. They’ve put it firmly behind them now. “Anyway, Vaughn and Scott came in and sat down with me and we got on the topic of men’s figure skating and Vaughn treated Scott and me to a speech about how brave the queer skaters were and Russia not being safe for ‘guys like that’.”

“Meanwhile, I’m sitting there thinking Vaughny has clocked me and was trying to be an ally or something—”

“Wait, really?” Shane laughs. “I was just sitting there worrying about Ilya.”

“You could tell him this now, if you wanted to,” Ilya says.

Shane shakes his head. “It’ll keep. Actually I think it only gets funnier with time.”

“So after you get your PR card?” Scott asks. “What then?”

Ilya shrugs. “We are already not trying very hard to hide. Maybe we post something on Instagram, maybe we say nothing, maybe we make out on center ice when we win the cup in June.”

Scott smirks. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’ve heard.” 

“Ah, no,” Ilya says immediately. “Is not imitation, is competition, and we will win.”

Scott rolls his eyes. “You would turn coming out into a competition.”

“I mean,” Shane says, “the shock value alone already puts us ahead.”

“You freaks deserve each other,” Scott says, and finishes his beer. “We have an afternoon game next time you guys are in town—”

“Not even Shane has our schedule memorized,” Ilya says. 

“—so you should come have dinner after,” Scott continues, as if Ilya didn’t interrupt. “Kip would love meeting you both.”

“That sounds nice,” Shane says. “Thanks.”

“Yes.” Ilya smirks. “I have many questions for Kip.” Regret flickers across Scott’s face and Ilya laughs. “Don’t worry, it will be fun.” 

Scott sighs. “I don’t believe you, but I’m also incapable of rescinding an invitation after I’ve already made it. Plus Kip will be disappointed if I do. He wanted to come tonight.”

“He could have,” Shane says. 

Scott shrugs. “I wasn’t sure what you guys wanted. I figured it wasn’t fair to spring him on you.”

“Will you tell us,” Shane asks tentatively, “if you get more shit from Crowell? Maybe we can help.”

“Even if you can’t help, yeah, I’ll tell you.” Scott hesitates for a second, before adding, “I’m sort of putting together this…group. Guys like us, a safety in numbers thing. Mostly hockey, but a couple of guys from some other leagues, too. Do you want me to add you to it? It’s just an email list right now,” Shane braces himself for Ilya to make a joke about Scott starting an email list instead of a groupchat, but Ilya is quiet, listening intently. “But I figure at some point maybe we can get on Zoom, or meet up at All-Stars, or something.”

“Yes,” Ilya says before Shane can say anything. “We will send you our emails.”

Shane asks, before he can really think about it or stop himself, “There’s enough of us for that?” He knows the math, obviously, knew that it was statistically unlikely that he and Ilya were the only queer players in the league, and Scott coming out in June helped make that feel a little more real. But Shane has always thought there couldn’t possibly be very many of them, because how many of them survived a locker room culture that made your very existence into a punchline, or worse? How many of them, really, would sign up for that day after day, season after season, if they weren’t fucking insane about hockey? Shane knows he’s insane about hockey. Ilya is insane about hockey, if in a slightly different way from Shane. Scott is definitely also insane about hockey in his own way too. Shane hasn’t ever wanted to think too much beyond that to try to figure out how alone they really are in this. He glances over at Felly and Tremblay again, now playing darts with a couple other guys about their age, maybe a little older. 

Ilya looks at him with soft, knowing eyes. He presses his leg a little closer to Shane and lets go of Shane’s hand on top of the table to wrap his arm around his waist instead. 

“Yeah,” Scott says. “That’s been kind of the best part of all of this. Well, second best after getting Kip back. The guys who have reached out. There’s been…I mean, not a lot. But more than I thought was possible. I felt alone for a really long time, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” Shane says and Ilya nods. 

---

Scott leaves not too long after, flipping Ilya off when he asks him if it’s past bedtime at the nursing home, and Shane and Ilya stay sitting quietly together in the booth while Shane sips his ginger ale and Ilya finishes a second beer Marly brought over to him. 

Shane types a quick note on his phone—all the stuff he wants to remember to tell his mom and Farah—and then slides it back into his pocket. 

“I want a cigarette,” Ilya says. 

“Can’t help you with that,” Shane says, meaning it as a joke but it comes out a little flat.

“I would be shocked if you could,” Ilya says, smiling softly. “Walk to the corner with me? There will be a store or something. We can go back to the hotel after.”

“What about the other guys?” Shane nods over to where Marly and Danya and Connors are still laughing with the remaining Admirals (again, sans Bennett, who is now behind the bar with Kyle. That’s probably at the very least a health code violation, even if all they’re doing is talking) and where Felly and Tremblay are now a little more relaxed, playing pool with the same guys they’d been at the dartboard with.  

Ilya shrugs. “They’ll be fine.” 

“Okay,” Shane says. “Store for one cigarette—”

“I will have to buy a pack, that is how it works—”

“—and then back to the hotel. Where are you smoking this cigarette?” 

“Sidewalk, probably. You could wait here instead, if you don’t want to come along.”

“No, I’ll come with you.”

“You must pay tab first,” Ilya says, grinning. “You promised.”

Shane laughs and goes to the bar where he manages to get Kyle’s attention by making intense eye contact with Bennett, who flinches. 

“Fuck, Hollander, you can’t wear your slapshot face off the ice, you’re gonna give me a heart attack. I’m not as young as I was.”

“I’m just here to close out,” Shane tells Kyle, sliding his credit card across the bar. Kyle goes to the computer and prints out his receipt, and Shane signs it and tips him twenty percent even though the service definitely didn’t merit it. 

Then, he goes back to Ilya who walks to the door with him with his hand on the back of Shane’s neck, steering him with the gentle pressure of his fingers. Shane wants to relax into it, but they’re outside on the sidewalk too quickly.

“This way, I think,” Ilya says, turning right and Shane follows.

There’s a bodega about five doors down from The Kingfisher, lighting up that stretch of the block with fluorescent light streaming through the front windows. An orange cat sleeps curled up on top of the magazine rack in the window. 

“You want anything?” Ilya asks, and Shane shakes his head. “Wait out here,” Ilya says. “Lights will give you a headache.” And then he presses his finger between Shane’s eyebrows, like he’s trying to smooth out the wrinkle from Shane squinting. Shane laughs, and Ilya grins at him. “Be right back.”

Shane watches Ilya make conversation with the cashier while he pays for his cigarettes and a lime green plastic lighter he grabs from next to the register almost as an afterthought. 

They’ve been married for a little over a month and it hits Shane sideways, sometimes, like a surprise check into the boards. Ilya is his husband: the boy he went out of his way to meet on a freezing day in December when they were seventeen; the boy he couldn’t stop thinking about, obsessing about (and yes, jerking off about); the boy who kissed him for the first time in a hotel room in Toronto, both of them pretending it didn’t mean anything; and now Shane’s standing on a sidewalk in New York, watching that boy buy cigarettes. 

Ilya is already opening the pack as he comes back through the door and onto the sidewalk. He shakes one out into his palm and puts the rest of the pack in his jacket pocket. 

“You shouldn’t smoke,” Shane says, like a reflex, even as Ilya is clicking the lighter. Ilya laughs, and the end of the cigarette catches, and he inhales. When he releases the smoke from his lungs, he blows it up and away from Shane. 

“I have mostly quit,” Ilya insists. 

“There are at least two packs hidden at home that beg to differ.”

“I only smoke one at a time, and only sometimes. When I am sad or need to think or,” Ilya makes the face Shane figured out a few years ago means that Ilya is trying to find a way to explain an abstract concept with insufficient English words at his disposal. Shane wishes there were a way to snap his fingers and just understand Russian. Not even speak it. Just to be able to understand Ilya in his native language so he can say exactly what he means without needing to filter it through layers of translation and explanation. 

“You can say it in Russian,” he offers, but Ilya shakes his head and takes another drag on the cigarette. Neither of them has called an Uber or made any other decisions about how they’re getting back to the hotel.

“I was upset when everything seemed impossible for us,” Ilya says, and Shane knows they’re both thinking about that Tampa hotel room. “But now I think maybe I was not upset enough, because we did not want anything really impossible.”

“I know,” Shane says. “We just wanted to be together and safe.”

Ilya nods, relief breaking over his face like Shane has understood perfectly. “And I am sad for Hunter’s email list.”

“Because they’re like us? Wanting something that shouldn’t be impossible?”

Ilya nods again. 

“Yeah,” Shane says again. “I know.”

Shane doesn’t have the words yet, really, to talk about what that list makes him feel. 

They call an Uber when Ilya finishes his cigarette, and they don’t touch in the back of the Uber for the whole ride even though Shane’s hand is centimeters from Ilya’s on the seat. They don’t touch in the elevator up to their room or in the hallway outside it. But Shane doesn’t bother with the charade of waking away from Ilya to go to his assigned room for a few minutes, he just follows Ilya over the threshold. 

Both of them are quiet as they change clothes and brush teeth and it’s only when they’re in bed, Ilya’s arms around him maybe a little tighter than normal, that Shane says, “I’m so glad I have you. That I had you for all of this.”

“Yes,” Ilya breathes. “‘Me too.”

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

Thank you to everyone commenting and kudosing and following along! The aforementioned new job is slowing me down on replying to comments, but know that I am reading them all and they are brightening my day every time.

Major shoutout to LeahKnox for talking sense into me when I was spiraling about this chapter. It would be such a hot mess without her help.

“Rose wants to come to a game while she’s here,” Shane says, the week before Rose Landry is coming to visit, to see Shane and meet Ilya and probably be very likable and easy to get along with in ways that will make Ilya feel a little insane, because there’s something about the way Shane says Rose’s name that burns like acid in Ilya’s chest. 

“Will she wear your jersey?” Ilya asks, and it comes out sour. 

Shane looks up from his phone, across the kitchen island from Ilya, both of them quiet while the espresso machine hisses out a double shot. “No,” Shane says. “Not if I tell her it bothers you.”

Ilya resists the urge to scowl at being understood in this way. He rubs his nose. “Why would it bother me?”

“I don’t know,” Shane sighs, “but it clearly does.” 

Ilya shakes his head. “We can give her my seats and she can bring her slutty friend who had his hands all over you in the club.”

“Ilya.” Shane’s voice is flat, and his face is flat, and if Ilya didn’t know him so well, hadn’t spent years decoding every flicker of Shane’s eyelids and tilt of his mouth and twitch of his jaw, Ilya might get away with thinking he’s indifferent. 

But indifference on Shane is a little shrug of his shoulders, maybe an eye roll if he thinks Ilya is being silly or dramatic. 

Shane is angry, and that rankles Ilya too. “What?” he says, as lightly as he can manage. “Is generous offer, I think. It will be good, too. Your ex-girlfriend shows up at a game right after we’re seen at a gay bar. Closet door firmly shut again.” 

“Fuck this,” Shane says, with more venom in his voice than Ilya has heard from him maybe since that bathroom in Vegas, so many years ago. “I’ll see you at practice.”

And Shane stalks out of the kitchen, grabbing his keys from the table by the door. Ilya doesn’t fully believe Shane’s actually going to drive separately until he hears one of the garage doors judder open. He goes to check, and when he gets to the doorway, Shane has already backed the Land Rover out of the garage and is executing a textbook perfect three-point turn in the driveway. 

Ilya watches him go, feeling some mix of righteously angry (walking out on a brewing argument is just so classically Shane) and guilty over picking a scab that could be healed by now if Ilya would just leave it alone. He’s ruined an otherwise nice morning, pretending they weren’t both a little rattled by how quickly the internet figured out they were all of fifty feet from Hunter’s bar from one photo of them on the corner while Ilya smoked. There aren’t any pictures of them from inside the bar, but someone did tweet about the high percentage of Admirals and Raiders in attendance that night, and there’s a picture from after they left of Marly and Connie and Vaughny staging some sort of arm-wrestling competition at the bar. Neither Bethany nor Yuna is worried, but neither Bethany nor Yuna are the ones slowly inching their way out of the closet, knowing that it could bring their entire lives down around them. 

Really, though, this isn’t why Ilya picked the scab today. He knows it isn’t. He doesn’t really give that much of a fuck about being seen standing next to Shane on the sidewalk, and he knows Shane isn’t actually that bothered about it either. Neither of them is happy about feeling surveilled, but that’s nothing new. And New York is always fucking like that; there’s always somebody ready to make a quick buck selling a picture of mildly famous people doing something incredibly mundane. 

But Rose Landry is more than mildly famous. There will be photos and articles and podcast episodes and blind items and Reddit posts and fucking print magazine spreads about it if she turns up to her ex-boyfriend’s game, wearing his jersey and smiling like America’s sweetheart. 

And Ilya will have to watch the entire fucking world talk about how perfect she and Shane are together. 

Again.

Only this time Shane is his fucking husband, and Ilya is waiting on the slow, methodical plod of Canadian bureaucracy to be able to shout from the rooftops that he locked Shane Hollander down before anybody else even looked his way. (It’s Ilya’s greatest achievement, probably. Even winning the cup in 2014 comes second to figuring out how to get Shane alone in 2010. Maybe he can get a trophy made and put it in the guest room next to Shane’s Rookie of the Year.) 

He dumps the shots from the espresso machine into the sink, knowing the coffee will just roil in his stomach, and he grabs the keys for the yellow Ferrari. If they’re not driving together, he doesn’t need to worry about trying to fit two gear bags in the back of the car.  

---

Practice is obnoxiously normal. Of course it is. Shane has always been able to set aside whatever is going on between them once they’re on the ice, and Ilya’s willing to bet nobody notices the clipped way Shane says Roz and Cap when he has to talk about or to Ilya. And that’s good, because they agreed to be professional on the ice (to a certain degree of professional because it’s fucking hockey, not finance or law or medicine), and if they went through practice glaring at each other and not talking, it probably wouldn’t meet even hockey standards of professionalism. 

Although, Ilya once went an entire season managing not to speak directly to Platt, the piece of shit backup goalie who got traded to Arizona, and nobody had been worried about his professionalism. 

Shane goes up to the cardio room to run on the treadmill after practice, and Ilya goes to the locker room. He wants to follow Shane, wants to get on the treadmill next to him and set his machine to a tenth of a mile faster than Shane’s. He doesn’t know what the rules are when they’re fighting, though, and he suspects that going and trying to get into a treadmill race with Shane while they’re in the middle of an argument is probably against the rules.

The locker room is loud, per usual, and Ilya swipes idly through his phone, half peeled out of his gear and not really in any hurry. Maybe if he goes slow enough, Shane will finish on the treadmill and the endorphin high will be enough for him to let this morning’s tiff go. 

This is a silly hope. Shane will spend the whole run spiraling on what to say to Ilya next. He can’t let it go, not once he’s planned out the whole thing in his head. Ilya probably should think about what he’ll say too, otherwise he’ll say more stupid shit he doesn’t really mean just for the sake of being the one to say something that hurts first. 

Marly claps him on the shoulder. “You good, bro?”

No, Ilya wants to say. He isn’t good. He’s the worst. “Yeah,” he says. “Fine.”

“Hollzy let you oversleep this morning or something?”

We are fighting, Ilya almost says, because it’s just Marly. But he thinks about Shane telling the team Ilya had a migraine on the flight from Calgary to Ottawa. Covering for him, for them. Making the next day easier for Ilya.

“Ferrari has service appointment this afternoon,” Ilya lies. “We drove separately.”

“She running okay?” Marly asks. 

“Yes, just regular service,” Ilya says. “No reason for you to offer to take her off my hands.”

Marly huffs out an annoyed sigh. “It’s not the fucking Ferrari I want, and you know it.”

Ilya has a burgundy 1970 Corvette Stingray that Marly has offered Ilya just about everything but his firstborn child for. One of Ilya’s first thoughts, when he and Shane decided on Ottawa, was that he could give Marly the Corvette and maybe it would soften the blow of his departure. 

The idea of giving it away was clearly because Shane accosted him at three in the morning with a multi-year plan and forever hidden inside it like a matryoshka doll, and Ilya’s brain was a mushy, loved-up mess at that point. Sleep and coffee made him realize he was being insane, and also that Sveta would literally murder him if he gave the car away. To anyone, but especially to Marly who drives a stick shift like a fifteen-year-old who’s never driven faster than ten miles an hour in a parking lot with their grandma in the passenger seat. 

“Keep dreaming, Marly,” Ilya says, grinning, as Marly flips him off. 

The locker room has mostly cleared out by the time Ilya finishes showering and dressing, although Doozy and Jojo and Tremblay are gathered around Jojo’s phone in the corner. Ilya lingers, mostly in the hope that he’ll still be here when Shane comes down from the weight room, pink and sweating from his run. It only takes a couple seconds of eavesdropping for Ilya to figure out that Doozy and Tremblay are trying to coach Jojo through flirting with a girl. 

“Guys, she’s like, smart. She’s in college and shit. Some pickup line you used in high school isn’t going to work here.”

“Ask Cap,” Tremblay says, and Ilya grins. 

“Uh, Cap?” Jojo says, tentatively. “What was, like, your opening move with Hollzy? Because this girl is so hot and smart and kind of out of my league, but you locked down Hollzy, so maybe you’ve got advice?”

Ilya is relieved no one is here to witness this. Marly and Connie would piss themselves laughing over the fact that the youngest guys on the team know him only as the guy who (apparently inexplicably?) locked down Shane Hollander, and not Ilya Rozanov with a girl or three in every city. It isn’t that surprising, he supposes, given that he and Shane have been exclusive and serious for almost the whole time Jojo and Doozy have known Ilya, and Tremblay never knew either of them before they were married. Still, it’s a hit to his reputation.

“Maybe you should ask Miller how he locked down his wife. Have you seen her? And he looks like a potato,” Ilya says, mostly joking, although Miller’s nose has probably been broken four times now, giving a certain…lumpiness to his face. 

“He knocked her up,” Jojo says, glumly. 

“Efficient,” Doozy says. 

“Do not do this,” Ilya says firmly. “Babies are not a solution. Also, Miller is exaggerating. He looked less like a potato when they got married.” Ilya thinks he did, anyway. He went to a lot of team weddings in his first couple seasons, and they all sort of blur together in his memory. 

“Okay, so what did you do to get Hollzy, then? You met at your draft, right? Was he impressed you were first?

“This is a stupid question; obviously he was pissed. And we met before. At World Juniors. He came to introduce himself and shook my hand. Like little old man.” Ilya says this fondly, and all three of them squint at him with identical looks of confusion on their faces. 

“So…Hollzy made the first move?” Tremblay says, after processing this.

“Saying hello in a parking lot isn’t making the first move,” Ilya insists. 

Jojo frowns. “It kind of is, though. If he didn’t say hi, would you have said hi to him?”

No, probably not. Ilya would’ve chirped him on the ice, but he wouldn’t have gone out of his way to introduce himself. Until their first meeting behind the practice rink, Shane Hollander had only been an opponent, the name he heard held up alongside his own as they became more and more known for their hockey. 

“I asked him out.”

“Like a date?” Doozy asks, skeptical. “Or just hooking up? Because Jojo wants to take this girl on a real date. Somewhere with, like, tablecloths.”

“And a wine list,” Tremblay adds. 

“So then Jojo should say ‘Can I take you out for a nice dinner?’ to this girl, yes? And then at dinner you ask her many questions about herself and listen to her answers.”

“Well, duh,” Jojo says. “If I do all the talking she’ll find out I would’ve flunked most of my classes at Avon if I wasn’t on the hockey team, and then she definitely won’t want to date me.”

“Does she know you play hockey?”

“Yeah,” Jojo nods, “but she already told me she won’t sit in my seats or wear my jersey because she’s a Buffalo fan.”

“I thought you said she is smart. Smart people don’t root for shit teams.” Jojo scowls and Ilya grins. “No, this is good news. If she is Buffalo fan she is used to disappointment. It can only improve from here.”

“We should ask Hollzy, maybe,” Tremblay says. Doozy and Jojo nod. 

“Ask Danya,” Ilya suggests, mostly to spare Shane from needing to give these idiot boys advice about picking up girls. “His girlfriend is in medical school.” 

---

Considering he left the practice rink before Shane, Ilya obviously isn’t surprised to come home to an empty house, but it turns out he hates it after only a couple months coming home with or to Shane. It’s Tuesday, so the cleaners were here while they were at practice, and everything smells like the soap Shane likes. Ilya likes it too; it always reminds him of his first time going to Shane’s Montreal condo.

He flops onto the sofa and considers turning on the TV, but the remote is on the shelf by the TV instead of on the coffee table, and Ilya doesn’t feel like crossing the room to go get it. 

He scrolls through his phone instead. He skims an annoying article about Shane’s trade, and the cap regulations, and whether there was some way to prevent the two of them ending up on the same team. Ilya resists reading the comments. It’s not Shane or Ilya’s fault that Montreal is run by idiots who agreed to a trade that eats up their cap space for two more years all because they feared a lawsuit. And they don’t know Shane at all, obviously, because he would’ve gone to Buffalo before he’d sue, before he’d lay bare on paper all the ways Montreal hurt him. He scrolls through his Instagram DMs, deleting messages from women he hasn’t seen in years, most of them hinting or outright asking if he wants to meet up when the Raiders are in their city. On Twitter, he swipes through to the #Hollanov tweets; the little group of these people are all speculating about the photos of them on the sidewalk in New York. 

It’s so obvious, one of them tweets. I know, says another. You can literally SEE their wedding rings. Also…hickey? 👀

Ilya zooms in on the photo. He knows it’s not a hickey on Shane’s neck because if Ilya’s going to mark Shane up he does it in places that are just for him to see, but from the photo it’s not too much of a stretch to think it might be. 

Maybe Rose Landry should wear Shane’s jersey. His stomach turns at the thought, nervous and guilty and angry and sad all at once. It’s not unlike how he feels about Scott Hunter’s email list of other closeted players. They are balanced on a tightrope, he thinks, trying to keep from veering too far to one side or another: not lying but not giving away too much, wanting to be safe and wanting to be free. One misstep could tip them too far, send them plummeting. 

Before he can think much more about that, he hears the mechanisms of the garage door start to whir and then the door begin to open. 

Shane’s hair is still damp from the shower when he comes through from the garage. Ilya watches him take his shoes off and line them up neatly on the shoe rack, and then put his keys back in the wooden bowl on the table. His shoulders are rigid, and when he turns to face Ilya, his jaw is set. He fidgets a little, his hands disappearing into the pocket of his hoodie and then coming back out, then hooking his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. Ilya sees the moment Shane tries to force himself to relax, his jaw unclenching minutely and his shoulders lowering. 

“Can we talk?” he asks, and Ilya nods. Shane stands awkwardly for a few more seconds, before he crosses the room and climbs into Ilya’s lap. Ilya startles, but he puts his hands on Shane’s hips. “I just—” Shane says and pauses, frowning. “I think it’s easier to talk like this. Close.”

“Yes,” Ilya says. “Okay.”

Shane settles his weight more fully into Ilya’s lap, and Ilya tries not to think about the day of the tuna melts, because this is different, obviously. They’re married. This is their home. Shane isn’t going to leave. This is more like the hotel in Tampa. Being close so they can be honest. Ilya hopes it is, anyway. 

“I was being a dick,” Ilya says. “I am sorry.”

“Why?” Shane asks, his eyes sad. 

Ilya frowns, confused. “Why am I sorry?”

“No, why were you being a dick? What is it about Rose that makes you do that?” Shane fiddles with the neck of Ilya’s t-shirt, smoothing out a wrinkle. “It’s just…you could’ve married Svetlana, and I’ve only ever been nice to her and about her, and she and I are friends now, and I think you and Rose could be too, but it fucking sucks that you get to have Sveta and me being friends with Rose is some kind of problem.”

“Shane—”

Shane interrupts him. “Are you jealous? Like actually jealous, not just joking? I couldn’t even get it up with her, Ilya. I had to think about you to even get close, but it was so obvious I wasn’t into her that she sat me down at dinner and walked me through coming out to her. But even if it hadn’t been that way, even if she and I had a sex life that wasn’t a disaster…we’re married, baby. I would never do that to you.”

Ilya presses his face into Shane’s neck. “I know this. Is not jealousy like that.”

Shane slides his hand into Ilya’s hair, holding his head gently. “What’s it like, then?”

Ilya huffs out a sigh against Shane’s neck and feels the shivery twitch that runs through Shane’s body in response. He hates the reminder of those awful, dark, miserable months. His father was dying and his brother was being worse than usual and everywhere he went there were pictures of Shane with Rose. There was so much enthusiasm for what a perfect couple they were. He couldn’t escape it; even his teammates gossiped about them; even Svetlana talked about Rose and her good style and her beautiful face.

“It looked so easy for you, then. Such a perfect solution.”

“It wasn’t,” Shane says, and turns his face to press a kiss to Ilya’s cheekbone, then the edge of his jaw. “The only good thing that came out of that time is that Rose and I are friends now.”

“I know,” Ilya says. “But you did not have to hide with her.”

“Of course I did,” Shane says, and then he’s leaning back so he can look at Ilya, can make Ilya look at him, which he does with a featherlight tug on Ilya’s hair. “But it was so much worse, because I was hiding from myself. Pretending I was someone else.”

“Oh,” Ilya says softly. He hadn’t thought of it that way. 

“I don’t like that people took pictures of us outside Scott’s bar.”

“Me either.”

“But it’s not because I’m ashamed of you or of us, you know that, right?”

“Yes. And it is the same for me.”

“I’m just really scared something could go wrong before all the legal stuff is settled. Especially after talking to Scott.”

Ilya nods, and hides his face back in Shane’s neck. “Yes. Me too. But I also hate the idea of Rose wearing your jersey and letting people think you are back together again.” 

“Even though you want to go out to dinner with her and Svetlana?”

Ilya nods. “Feels different.”

“Yeah, okay,” Shane agrees. “Kind of like bringing all the guys to the bar with us. Just an easy cover, not trying to lie.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll ask her not to wear it. She won’t mind. Not if she’s going to sit with Svetlana too. She’s already freaking out about how hot Sveta is.”

Ilya lifts his face to arch an eyebrow at Shane about this.

“I know.” Shane laughs. He pets the back of Ilya’s head, his expression shifting to something serious again. “I’m sorry I stormed out this morning. I got really angry, and I didn’t want to say something I couldn’t take back.” Ilya is morbidly, stupidly curious about what Shane might’ve said, even if no good would come from knowing. “Growing up,” Shane continues, “when I was angry or annoyed or whatever, my parents always sent me up to my room or on a walk to calm down. And then we’d talk about it later. But I sort of forgot you don’t know that that’s what I do.”

“I know now,” Ilya says, easily. “Did you spend your run on the treadmill planning what you would say?”

Shane’s mouth curves slowly into a smile. “Fuck off,” he says. 

“So, yes?” Ilya grins.

“It just…helps. To think about it first.”

Ilya kisses Shane’s forehead. “I love you, sweetheart.”

“I love you too. So much.”

---

Rose Landry answers the door to her hotel room wearing a bathrobe and hot pink Crocs, and Ilya has seen approximately seven million pictures of her, at least three million of them next to Shane, and he’s seen her in person (granted, across a dance floor with the strobe lights going), but he thought she was taller. 

Maybe she’s just loomed so large in his head he added a good six inches to her height, because when she lets them into her room and then immediately flings her arms around Shane and then turns to hug Ilya, her face is somewhere in the vicinity of Ilya’s collarbone.

“You’re hotter in person,” she says bluntly, standing at arm’s length from him, her hands on his biceps, assessing him in his silk shirt and black jeans and the leather jacket that’s technically Shane’s. “Shane, you should’ve prepared me for that.” 

Shane shrugs. “I haven’t ever had objective proof. Obviously I agree, but he’s my husband, so I think I’m supposed to find him hotter in person than when stalking his Instagram.” 

Ilya is caught between wanting to preen because yes obviously he is hot, he knows this, and wanting to be annoyed that she thinks his carefully curated Instagram thirst traps (most of them chosen specifically to get Shane’s attention, he can admit) don’t do him proper justice. He knows that they do, or he wouldn’t post them. 

“You’re shorter in person,” Ilya says. Shane lets out one of his little huffs of annoyance, but Rose laughs. She is an easy laugher, Ilya thinks.

“I get that a lot. I’ll look more like you’re expecting once I put heels on.” 

They’re going to dinner at a fancy seafood restaurant Svetlana chose, and Shane had suggested meeting Rose at her hotel first as a way of breaking the ice before they all had to sit at a table with one another. Breaking the ice is always awkward, though, and it’s made more awkward by all just standing in the foyer of Rose’s hotel suite. Rose seems to realize this too, because she releases Ilya’s shoulders and squeezes Shane’s arm before waving them further into the suite. 

“Sorry that I’m not ready yet,” Rose says, heading towards a clothing rack in the corner of the little living room, heavily laden with garment bags, and starting to flip through her options. “You guys can sit, raid the minibar, whatever. It won’t take me too long, I promise.”

“You mean you aren’t going to wear this to dinner?” Shane jokes, gesturing to the bathrobe-and-Crocs combo. He takes Rose up on the offer to sit, and Ilya is very tempted by the minibar, but it feels rude to run up Rose Landry’s hotel room tab on their first meeting. He normally might not be too bothered about being rude, except he’s trying to be good. For Shane. So he ignores the minibar and sits next to Shane. The couch is uncomfortably firm, like every hotel couch Ilya has ever sat on. 

“You’re the one who skeeved me out about hotel carpets,” she says, glaring at Shane. 

“Yeah, I don’t think I made you wear Crocs as the solution though.” Ilya can’t help laughing at this; it’s so rare that he gets to see Shane this comfortable with anyone.

“That’s a whole lotta judgement from a guy who I’ve only seen wearing variations of the same three outfits, even after he paid someone to buy him new clothes,” Rose shoots back. Shane grins. She unzips one of the garment bags on the clothing rail, shakes her head, and zips it back up, moving on to the next. She’s in Boston mostly to visit them, but is then tacking on a weekend in New York for something actressy Shane hadn’t been able to fully explain to Ilya, and from New York she’ll go to London to start filming her rom-com. Shane had relayed this all to Ilya on the drive over like Rose was going to quiz them about her itinerary. 

“How much attention are we aiming to get tonight?” she asks, holding up a glittery, sequined minidress that reminds Ilya uncomfortably of the one she was wearing in the club. This one is pink, not silver, but Shane is already shaking his head.

“Never that much attention.”

“Boo,” Rose says, but hangs the dress back up. “I feel like I should ask Ilya his opinion, not you.”

“Yes, I am much more fashionable,” Ilya says, grinning at Shane.

“You own thirteen pairs of Adidas track pants,” Shane protests. 

“Better than a closet full of Reebok sneakers.” It’s not really a fair jab, considering Shane never even wears the Reeboks. They’re too narrow for his feet, he’d told Ilya once when Ilya had been teasing him about all of the ads he’s been in and the pristine condition of most of the shoes. Shane’s feet are a half-size bigger than Ilya’s, otherwise Ilya would probably be able to wear the Reeboks (not that he really wants to; they aren’t his style at all). Every year, Shane boxes up the pairs he hasn’t worn and quietly donates them. And then he signs with Reebok all over again and ends up with another twelve pairs of sneakers, one for every month of the contract. Ilya wonders if he can casually hint to Yuna that Shane ought to try to get a deal with a shoe brand he actually likes. 

“That’s a sponsorship, you know I don’t pick them out. And you’re literally wearing my jacket right now, asshole.”

“So you would not wear it with jeans and a white t-shirt.”

Rose lets out a laugh that’s more of a cackle. “I feel like I should pop popcorn.” 

“You both suck,” Shane says, pouting a little dramatically, and Ilya grins. He’s pretty sure Shane isn’t actually annoyed, but he reaches out to hook an arm around him anyway, pulling him close to kiss his forehead. 

“I am joking, sweetheart,” Ilya says, “I like this jacket very much.”

“Which one?” Shane grumbles. “The one I’m wearing or the one you stole from me?”

“Both,” Ilya says honestly. The jacket Shane is wearing is dark green, a few shades darker than all his favorite pairs of running shorts, close to the color of their couch. It’s velvet, too, like the couch. It’s one of the things he picked from his stylist’s selections, but didn’t bring with him to Florida because it was wrong for the weather. It’s now far enough into autumn in Boston to wear it. 

Shane relaxes, leaning his body heavily into Ilya’s, so Ilya doesn’t let go. When he glances back at Rose, she’s grinning, and some of the sour roiling in Ilya’s stomach that has been there for a week settles. 

“Ugh, you guys make me want to puke, you're so cute,” she says. “I should’ve figured you would be, given that you’re basically childhood sweethearts.”

“I mean, not really,” Shane says. 

“You met when you were seventeen, that totally counts!” 

“I like this,” Ilya says. “We did grow up together, sweetheart.” He may have left childhood behind several years before he met Shane, but they spent those early years of their careers having an experience that only one other person could understand and relate to, and Ilya thinks even if they hadn’t hooked up in that first hotel room after the CCM shoot, they still would’ve ended up here. Maybe not as soon, but it’s hard to envision any world where he and Shane aren’t inextricably linked. 

“See!” Rose laughs. “Listen to your hubby.”

Shane wrinkles his nose. “I object to ‘hubby’.” 

“Ah, yes, me too. Husband is a good word,” Ilya agrees, and Shane smiles at him, eyes soft.

“Okay, I need to get dressed now,” Rose says. “Being in the same room as you two being adorable with each other is too much.” 

She eventually decides on a chartreuse jumpsuit (without input from either of them) that Ilya thinks is actually more attention-grabbing than the pink disco ball dress, but Shane doesn’t veto it, maybe because it doesn’t have sequins on it. 

As promised, the platform heels she puts on bring her closer to the height Ilya was expecting when she answered the door. It’s a little like a magic trick, the silly, grinning girl in a bathrobe and Crocs suddenly becoming the famous actress who haunted Ilya’s dreams (nightmares?) for all of last winter. 

People pretend not to watch the three of them when they cross through the hotel’s lobby, but Ilya can feel the eyes on them. Boston isn’t like Montreal or Ottawa or Toronto or probably even Buffalo. Hockey isn’t the most popular sport in the city, and there are other athletes who get more immediate recognition out in public. But being in Rose Landry’s orbit helps people connect the dots quickly, and Ilya hears his own name and Shane’s ripple through the hotel lobby in whispers. None of them react, and when they reach the vestibule between the lobby and the hotel’s grand main entrance, Rose sends Ilya a tentative little smile.

“Sorry,” she says, “it’s always kind of a circus.”

“Is okay,” Ilya says. “Not your fault.”

They ride from the hotel to the restaurant in the back of black Chevy Tahoe with tinted windows from a reputable and discreet car service, and it’s awkward. None of them feel comfortable speaking freely in front of the driver, who clearly recognized all of them immediately. He was a professional, and didn’t do anything like ask for an autograph or a photo, but they end up sitting mostly in silence for the twenty-minute drive. Ilya had almost offered to drive, except that he’d known parking would be a nightmare and it seemed wiser to leave his car (the Porsche, today) parked with the hotel’s valet. 

When they get to the restaurant, Svetlana is waiting at the table for them, a cozy booth curved around a circular table in a dim corner. Shane and Ilya slide to the middle of the booth with Svetlana on Ilya’s right and Rose on Shane’s left, the women across from each other. Rose blushes a little when Svetlana smiles warmly at her and compliments her jumpsuit, and Shane does such a bad job of hiding his own smile that Rose glares daggers at him the second Svetlana turns to ask their waiter for a bottle of champagne.   

“To celebrate the newlyweds,” Svetlana says, grinning, when the waiter leaves. 

“I thought that was what the vodka at the last dinner was for,” Shane says. “And the picture.”

Svetlana shrugs. “I do not think there is such a thing as too much celebration.”

“Yeah,” Rose agrees, her cheeks still pink. “Especially a secret wedding. I am going to get you a gift, by the way. It’s just hard to know what to buy two millionaires who already have everything. It’s not like you guys need a KitchenAid or a new blender.”

Ilya doesn’t ask what KitchenAid is, but says genially, “If you can find a blender Shane doesn’t kill the motor on after six months, maybe we do.”

“Shane! You’re killing Vitamixes? What the hell is in those smoothies?”

“Dirt, I think. Is what they taste like.”

“How do you know what dirt tastes like?” Shane asks, deadpan, and Rose and Svetlana both laugh. “You don’t need to get us a gift,” he adds. 

“I mean, I’m still going to,” Rose insists. 

Their waiter returns with the bottle of champagne and places it in one of those ostentatious buckets at the side of the table after opening it and pouring a glass for each of them. Svetlana raises hers to give a toast.

“Please don’t,” Shane says.

“Please do,” Rose insists. 

“Будь милым,” Ilya says.

“To the newlyweds,” Svetlana says, “who decided to get married without enough time to invite anyone and wore jeans and who are required to have another wedding we can attend.”

“Jeans?” Rose asks, once they’ve clinked glasses and each taken a sip. Shane sets his glass down with a wrinkle of his nose, and Ilya doubts he’ll finish it. 

“I know,” Svetlana says. “It’s embarrassing for them.”

“Are there pictures?” Rose asks. 

“Yes,” Ilya says, fishing his phone out of the pocket of his borrowed jacket. “Shane’s mom took many.”

“You’re underselling it. She took hundreds. Show her one of the ones where I’m not blinking, please.”

Ilya swipes through their shared album, which has tripled in size since their wedding, filled with photos from the team plane and the locker room and their house and hotel rooms and their honeymoon week at the cottage and then, finally, the slightly more curated group of photos from the wedding. He opens up one from when they were saying their vows, before he’d started crying. They’re smiling at each other like they can’t quite believe their luck, and Ilya’s not sure he’ll ever forget that feeling. Never wants to, maybe. 

He hands the phone to Rose. Her face lights up, and she zooms in on the picture. “Look how happy you are,” she says, and her eyes are wet when she looks at Shane. “It was almost a year ago—”

“I know,” Shane says, and he rubs at his eyelid in the way that means he’s also trying not to cry. Ilya wants to put his arms around him and hold him close, but he settles for holding Shane’s hand under the table instead. 

“And now you’re married,” Rose whispers. “It’s kind of insane.”

“I know,” Shane says again. 

“What happened a year ago?” Svetlana asks, even though Ilya thinks she has probably already figured out the general shape of things, if not fully put all of the pieces together. She spent a lot of time with him between the day of the tuna melts and the All-Star Game, after all, and once Ilya told her that Jane was Shane…surely she looked back at that time and understood the reasons Ilya had stopped wanting to go out, and only wanted to hang out with her in his house or hers (and want was a strong word, most of the time she had to cajole him or would just show up at his house and insist they were doing something. They’d fucked once during that time, and Sveta had looked at him with sad eyes after and kissed his forehead and neither of them said it, but they both knew that part of their relationship had come to an end. It’s only been Shane for Ilya since then, and will only be Shane for Ilya from now on.)

“Rose helped me figure some things out,” Shane says, squeezing Ilya’s hand. “And then dumped me.”

“I remember deciding we’d be best friends, actually.”

“Well, yeah, that too. But you did dump me first.”

“It’s how I make all my best friends,” Rose says, grinning.

Svetlana frowns. “This is a very sad joke.”

Ilya winces, because not everyone appreciates how blunt Svetlana can be, and he wonders if he was supposed to warn Rose about that. Shane’s eyes dart over to Rose, his mouth opening to say something but before he can, Rose is laughing. 

“I know,” she says, “but after your third boyfriend in a row turns out to be gay, you really have to start leaning into the jokes.”

“You never said we were in a row.” 

“Not you,” Rose pats Shane’s arm consolingly. “My gaydar got way better after theatre school. I mean, obviously with one exception.” She winks at Shane, who shakes his head at her even while his mouth quirks up in the corners, amused. 

Their waiter returns, and Svetlana orders several different appetizers for them all to share.

“Do you want a salad too, зайчик?” Ilya asks Shane. 

“Oh, that sounds good,” Rose says, and orders the wedge salad from the menu, but Shane shakes his head. Ilya squeezes his hand, and Shane squeezes back.

“Not very hungry,” Shane says, quietly enough that Ilya’s pretty sure he’s the only one who hears. 

“Nervous?” Ilya asks, just as quietly.

Shane shrugs, just a little lift of his right shoulder, barely noticeable. Ilya takes that as a yes. He thinks he underestimated how much Rose matters to Shane. He has spent the past few months assuming that they weren’t close the way Ilya and Sveta are close, but Shane wants this to go well in the same way that Ilya wanted Shane’s first meeting with Svetlana to go well, because there is something special about getting to introduce people you care deeply about to one another. 

“Are you excited to go to London?” Ilya asks, in the spirit of making things easier on Shane. “You are there after this, yes?”

Rose nods. “Next week. I’ll be in New York for a few days first, and then I’ll be in London for about three months. I am excited, I haven’t been there for this long before. The last time I was there, I was just filming a guest role on a TV show. It was like a three-day shoot.”

Svetlana asks Rose where she is staying in London, and then they start comparing notes on London boroughs and restaurants and shopping and theatre and museums. Shane lets out a little sigh and shifts in the booth, pressing his leg flush against Ilya’s. 

Appetizers arrive—oysters and shrimp and tuna tartare and caviar—plus Rose’s salad. Ilya orders a top-shelf vodka for himself and a ginger ale for Shane because neither of them wants more of the champagne.

“Has it been good,” Rose asks, once the waiter has disappeared again, “playing on the same team?”

“Yeah,” Shane says. “Really good. Boston has been great. And it would’ve been really hard to wait to be together like this until we retired.”

“Do you think you would’ve been able to do that?” 

“I mean,” Shane huffs out a sigh, “obviously not, since I couldn’t even handle one day in Montreal.”

“I burned my Montreal jersey,” Rose admits. 

“You burned it?” Shane asks, startled.

“Yeah, in my fire pit. It probably wasn’t great for the environment, those things are just polyester. It sort of…melted? It felt good though. They suck.”

“They are the worst,” Ilya agrees. “They deserve to have their star player leave them for the best team in the league.”

Rose laughs. “Hold on, just because I burned my Metros jersey doesn’t make me a Boston fan.”

“Do not pretend,” Ilya says. “You have already bought a Boston jersey, yes?”

Rose holds out for about a second, before she grins. “Fine, yes, you caught me. My brothers are pissed, they keep calling me a band-wagoner.” 

“This is perfect,” Svetlana says, and Ilya feels a sense of foreboding at the mischief in her eyes. “You will wear it to the game tomorrow night, and I will wear Ilya’s jersey, and they will put us on the screen because you are Rose Landry and I look like me, and it will shut up the idiots on the internet.”

“Please don’t,” Shane says quickly, darting a glance at Ilya. 

“I really don’t mind,” Rose says kindly, and Ilya grips his fork tighter than necessary.

“Sometimes it is good,” Svetlana says, “to let people believe the easy thing.”

“Coming to the game is enough,” Shane says. “If you wear the jersey it just turns into this huge thing—”

“I kind of think it’s going to be a huge thing either way.” 

“Yeah, probably. But it’s going to hurt more if you wear my name when my husband can’t.”

It hits Ilya right in the gut, how direct Shane can be sometimes. The sentiment hurts, in the way that secrecy will undoubtedly keep feeling like a thousand tiny paper cuts, but there’s something about the way Shane says it so plainly, for the sake of not stoking the acidic, chemical burn of jealousy in Ilya’s chest, that somehow eases the sting of it. Rose’s expression doesn’t change; she’s too good of an actress for that, has too much control over her face for even a micro-expression to give her away. But she meets Ilya’s eyes across the shrimp cocktail. 

“I didn’t think of that,” she says, softly. “I’m sorry.”

Maybe it is just that she is a good actress and that’s why Ilya believes her, but he thinks it’s more likely that she’s being genuine, because she’s friends with Shane and wouldn’t do anything that would hurt either of them. Not intentionally, anyway. “It is okay,” Ilya says. 

“Everyone is going to think we’re dating, again, though, Shane.”

“Yeah, and they’ll ask, and I’ll say that we’re not, and they probably won’t believe me. But that feels better than lying.”

“Has it been bad?” Rose asks. “The idiots on the internet? The other guys in the league?”

“I mostly stay off the internet,” Shane says, “now that we have Bethany doing our PR stuff.”

“Some of it is not bad,” Ilya says. “There is a hashtag and a group of people who have guessed we are together.”

“Some of the guys in Montreal have been telling guys on other teams about what happened between me and Comeau.”

“Блять,” Svetlana says. “Они знают о тебе?” she asks Ilya.

“Нет. Я в безопасности, Света.” 

“Shane.” Rose looks stricken.

“It’s fine. Really.”

“I mean, it’s obviously not,” she says.

“No, if we’re gauging off of the real world, obviously it’s not fine. But for hockey…it could be so much worse.”

“That’s really not very comforting,” Svetlana says.

“I know. Fuck.”

“We are okay,” Ilya insists. “We have good team. Once my PR card is here, everything will feel safer.” He hopes, desperately, that it’s true, that the thing he’s been pinning his hopes on for months now actually will make a difference to them once it’s real. 

Svetlana frowns. “And Scott Hunter? What did he say?”

“Nothing we did not already guess,” Ilya says. “Пожалуйста, не волнуйтесь.” 

“Let’s take a picture,” Rose says, a little desperately. “The four of us, here. I’ll post it over the weekend with a stupid caption. You all can share it to your stories. We don’t have to lie, but please let us help.”

Shane looks helplessly at Ilya. “What do you want to do?”

“What will your stupid caption be?” he asks Rose.

“I hadn’t gotten that far. Dinner with my favorite Boston boys, maybe?”

“Terrible,” Svetlana says. “No caption. A picture is worth one thousand words, yes?”

“Okay, fine.” Rose sighs. “No caption. No tags. Just the picture.”

“Yes,” Ilya says, even though agreeing is like pouring lemon juice directly into the thousand paper cuts. “Okay. We do this.”

They squeeze together in the booth, and Rose hands her phone to Ilya to snap the photo, since he has the longest arms for a selfie. Shane looks miserable on the screen, and Rose says something in his ear that makes him roll his eyes and then laugh, and Ilya hits the shutter button with his thumb just then. 

The resulting photo confirms nothing but implies plenty, with Shane and Rose laughing together and Svetlana leaning into Ilya’s side, smirking at the camera, Ilya’s face cool and inscrutable the way he turned into an art when he was a teenager. None of them really look like themselves, but that’s probably the point. 

“Good,” Svetlana confirms, and Ilya hands the phone to Rose.

“Yeah,” Rose nods. “Just tell me if you change your minds, okay? Posting this after going to the game is going to look like I’m confirming whatever rumors start circulating.”

It puts a bit of a damper on the rest of their dinner. Shane picks at his food, pushing it around his plate more than actually eating it. Ilya has one too many drinks and feels the way melancholy settles heavily over him. Rose and Svetlana try valiantly to carry the conversation, Rose entertaining them with thinly anonymized stories about her co-stars and Svetlana telling them about some of the more outrageous things her clients have done. Shane and Ilya laugh more or less in the right places, but both women keep casting sympathetic glances toward them that suggest they aren’t doing a very good job.

By the time dessert rolls around, Svetlana and Rose opt to share a creme brûlée, and Ilya starts to feel as if he’s third-wheeling a first date, although really he thinks Rose and Svetlana are now just allies in the war against Shane and Ilya’s lack of social skills tonight. 

“I’m sorry,” Shane says to Rose. “I wasn’t very good company. Let me at least pick up the check.”

Rose rolls her eyes. “I will let you pay because I know you’ll feel badly about it if you don’t, but it’s not, like, a requirement of our friendship for you to entertain me. I came to see you and to meet Ilya, and that means meeting you guys where you are. Literally and emotionally.”

“It’s been a weird week, I’m sorry,” Shane says again. “Come over after the game tomorrow? We’ll just hang out. You too, Svetlana.”

“That sounds good,” Rose smiles. 

“This is a ploy for Shane to show off the house like one of the architecture magazine house porn videos he is always watching,” Ilya warns, jokingly.

Rose lets out a cackling laugh. “Did he tell you about the time he and I watched hours of those videos instead of—”

“Nope!” Shane interrupts. “And we definitely don’t need to tell that story now.”

Tomorrow, Rose mouths at Ilya. 

Shane puts his credit card down when the waiter brings their check, and Rose and Svetlana disappear into the ladies’ room. 

“She is a good friend,” Ilya says, only a little grudgingly. Rose is like the alexandrite ring his mother used to wear, maybe. Changing in the right light, becoming something different depending on the angle you looked, and until tonight Ilya has been looking at Rose Landry from the wrong angle, in the wrong light.

“I know,” Shane says, sounding tired. “Too good, maybe. The rumors are gonna blow up her life again, too.”

“We do not have to do this.” Please, let’s not, he almost says. Shane would agree, if Ilya said it. 

“She’s my friend, and I want us to be able to hang out, so I think I’m just going to have to get used to people speculating we’re dating every time they see us in public together. Even though I hate it.”

“I hate this too.”

“I know, baby, I’m sorry. Someday we’ll get to tell them how wrong they all were.”

“That will be very fun, one day.” It’s a small consolation, but it’s something.

---

The Raiders are on the ice for warmups when the cheer goes up through the arena. Ilya doesn’t need to look to know exactly what’s on the jumbotron, but he looks anyway and he’s not sure if it’s because he’s a masochist or because everyone else is looking and it will be obvious if he doesn’t look. Probably the first thing.

So he looks, and there on the screen are Rose and Svetlana. Rose is in all black, and Svetlana is in a cream sweater that looks far too fashionable for a hockey game, but she almost always looks too fashionable for a hockey game, so this is nothing new. 

Shane skates up next to Ilya. “At least they aren’t wearing the jerseys.”

“Do you think that it will really make a difference?”

“No,” Shane says. “But it makes me feel better. Next season they can wear Hollander-Rozanov ones.”

“Rozanov-Hollander,” Ilya argues.

“We already agreed the other way sounds better. No takebacks!”

Ilya laughs. “Fine, fine. No takebacks.”

“Yo, Hollzy!” one of the Vegas wingers yells from across the blue line. “Since when are you back with Rose Landry?”

“Since when is it your fucking business?” Shane shoots back. 

Shane spends most of the game fielding similar chirps, and it’s no surprise that the postgame media is more curious about Rose Landry than they are about Boston’s win. 

“Shane, would you like to comment on the rumors that you and Rose Landry are back together?”

“No,” Shane says, his expression hard and closed off. 

It’s already trending on Twitter by the time they get home, and Shane’s flat no is on its way to becoming immortalized as both a gif and a meme. 

“Don’t post the picture,” he tells Rose. She’s sitting on their kitchen island, eating chips and salsa she and Svetlana stopped to pick up on their way from the Garden, a half-empty glass of wine on the counter next to her. 

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Shane says. “It’s already a thing.”

“Do you think that’s maybe because you reacted the way you did when they asked?” Rose prods, teasing a little.

Shane clearly isn’t in a mood to be teased about it, though. He scowls. “What else am I supposed to do? Ilya and I agreed we aren’t going to lie, and anything other than a direct no…it just feels like a lie.”

“Sweetheart,” Ilya says, softly. “Come here.”

Shane resists for a moment, but then he’s stepping into Ilya’s arms, letting Ilya pull him close and leaning against him. Ilya supports his weight easily. 

“Do you sometimes wish we’d just hard launched when the trade news came out?” Shane asks. 

“Wow, was that on the table?” Rose asks, eyes wide. “That would’ve, like, broken the internet.”

“Thank god you are paying someone to do this for you both now,” Svetlana says, digging through the bag of tortilla chips for a perfect, unbroken chip. 

“Yes, sometimes I wish this,” Ilya admits. “But I think it would’ve been a mistake. It is okay, right now, that some things are just for us.”

Shane nods, his face pressed into Ilya’s neck. “I know that. It’s just so fucking unfair sometimes.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees. It is unfair, and he hates it, and there is no way for them to make it less unfair. No way that anyone can. Not overnight, not quickly enough to take away the sickly, awful feeling of just wanting to be able to tell people they are married, of wanting it to just be normal and not some kind of internet-breaking, earth-shattering, history-making news. 

“It’s almost like it’s harder, with the team knowing. We get to have it sometimes, but then it makes all the other places we’re still a secret seem worse.”

“No,” Ilya shakes his head. “It is good that the team knows. We would be going crazy, I think, if they did not. And we have your parents—”

“And us,” Rose adds, nodding toward Svetlana, who smiles at her.

“Is so much better than it was when it was just a secret we were keeping alone, yes? No more crying in terrible Florida hotel rooms.”

Shane snorts a little laugh at that. “It wasn’t that bad of a hotel room. Definitely not the worst one we’ve ever been in.”

“Ugh, remember All-Stars in Columbus?”

“Yes,” Shane groans. “I bet that room had black mold behind the wallpaper.”

“Probably.”

Ilya reaches to grab a handful of chips from the bag, and Shane leans against the counter. Ilya throws a chip at Shane, and it bounces off his nose and lands on the counter, breaking into a few pieces. 

“Seriously?” Shane asks, but there’s a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. He grabs a chip and throws it at Ilya. It hits Ilya’s chin and somehow manages to slip down the front of his sweatshirt, scratchy and ticklish. Shane doubles over laughing while Ilya pulls the shirt away from his chest, trying to free the chip. 

“Not to rehash an old idea,” Rose says, and they both turn to look at her. She has her phone in her hand. “But maybe I can post this?” 

On her phone screen, Ilya is grinning and Shane is laughing, and Svetlana is just at the edge of the frame, leaning against the refrigerator, wineglass in hand, smiling indulgently at them. 

“Just to my story, not the grid.”

“Like that will make a difference.” Svetlana rolls her eyes. “I know how many followers you have.”

“It’s a different vibe, though,” Rose says. 

“I think yes,” Ilya says. They’ve never posted a photo from inside their house. It won’t take people long to work out that this kitchen is the same one in pictures posted to Ilya’s Instagram, and that other Raiders have posted in during and after team parties, and that Svetlana has definitely posted pictures in before. But Shane hasn’t, and Ilya hasn’t posted a single photo taken inside this house since Shane moved in. Has anyone noticed that? He’s not sure he wants to know if they have.

“You sure?” Shane asks. 

Ilya nods. “Is a better picture than you glaring at that reporter in the locker room.” And he likes that it doesn’t suggest anything about Rose and Shane except that they are hanging out with Ilya and Svetlana. 

“Fuck off,” Shane says, laughing. “And fine. But obviously don’t post it while you’re still here.”

“Shane, don’t mansplain social media safety to me,” Rose laughs, “or I’ll tell your very hot husband the Architectural Digest story.”

Shane immediately looks shamefaced. “You’re right, sorry. Please don’t tell him.”

“Nooo,” Ilya cries, “I want to know. Shane, tell her again how she shouldn’t post her real-time location on the internet.”

“Yeah, Shane, tell me why it’s a bad idea for strangers to know where I am,” Rose says. 

“Yeah, Shane, tell her about the stalkers and the unsolicited dick pics and the doxxing,” Svetlana adds.

“Oh my god,” Shane groans, “just tell him about the Architectural Digest night.”

“So on our first date,” Rose starts, grinning, and Shane hides his face in Ilya’s sweatshirted chest, already embarrassed. Ilya puts his hand on Shane’s back but doesn’t stop Rose, because he wants to hear the story. “We went out to dinner, and then I invited Shane up to my hotel room, but only for a nightcap, because I’m a lady.”

“Yes, of course,” Ilya agrees, and his chest doesn’t even burn with jealousy at the thought of Shane in Rose’s hotel room. Much. “Very classy.” 

“And it was a very nice hotel, which Shane appreciated, because he appreciates architecture and interior design—”

Shane lets out a groan into Ilya’s chest. 

“—which I learned because he started telling me all about the hotel’s architectural features, and then he pulled up the Architectural Digest YouTube channel on the TV to show me some ‘relevant videos’—” 

Shane makes another pained noise.

“And then we watched them. For two hours. Until I fell asleep.”  

“Sweetheart,” Ilya says, laughing, “did you not realize the nightcap was just an excuse?”

“Obviously I did,” Shane says, lifting his face to scowl at Ilya. “But given that I’m gay, I was trying to run down the clock a little. And then I got carried away. Those videos are really entertaining.”

“They actually are,” Rose agrees. “You guys should do one, once you’re out. This house is definitely nice enough.”

“The house porn video people are not allowed here,” Ilya says firmly, directing this mostly at Shane. 

“I didn’t ask her to say that,” Shane insists. “I’d actually be totally fine if we never talked about this ever again.”

“Give me your number, Ilya,” Rose says. “I’ll text you the other embarrassing stories.”

“I’ve made a terrible mistake, introducing you two,” Shane says seriously. Rose and Ilya just grin. 

---

Rose posts her picture the next day, once she’s in New York. Rivalry where? reads the caption, and Ilya shares it to his own story. He almost favorites a tweet from one of the #Hollanov people that reads so shane says no to dating rose, and then rose says no rivalry between shane and ilya…i’m connecting the dots. Nearly every reply says you haven’t connected shit. Ilya takes a screenshot, instead, and texts it to Rose. 

A few seconds later, he gets a notification that Rose Landry now follows him on Instagram, and his mentions start to explode almost immediately. 

Ilya

I hate you

Rose

No you don’t 😈