Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

POV Outsider, Hotel Sex, Secret Relationship, Closeted Character, Hotels, housekeeping, Canon Compliant, Canon Timeline, Montreal, Implied Sexual Content, Near Discovery, The Room Numbers, Fifty Dollar Bills, Ginger Ale - Freeform, Josée Is A Habs Fan, Dramatic Irony, she figures it out, protective bystander, Humor, Missing Scenes, Time Skips, Getting Together, Bilingual Character(s), Quebecois French

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-10-19 Words: 2,388 Chapters: 1/1

Fifty for Whoever Strips the Bed

Summary

Josée has cleaned the eighteenth floor of the Hôtel Montcalm for nineteen years. She knows what hockey players leave behind. She doesn’t know who Lily Jane is, or why somebody keeps folding the pillowcases.

February 2011

The bed in 1822 is already stripped when Josée gets to it.

That never happens. She has done the eighteenth floor of the Hôtel Montcalm for nineteen years, long enough to have a cart with a wobble she knows by name, long enough to know what men leave. Hockey men especially. The visiting teams stay here, and the visiting teams are the worst: wet towels in a pyramid, pizza crust floating in the toilet, a used condom tied off and dropped into the ice bucket like a goldfish somebody won at a fair. Whole rooms that smell like a gear bag left in a hot car.

1822 smells like soap. The sheets are balled on the bathroom tile. The pillowcases have been taken off and folded, actually folded, edges matched. The duvet hangs over the back of the desk chair the way her father used to hang his coat at mass.

On the nightstand, under the TV remote, there's a fifty.

Red. Mackenzie King looking constipated about it. Josée stands there in her rubber gloves and stares at the prime minister for a long time.

*

"Booked by Lily Jane," Manon says at the front desk, scrolling. She has new nails, little gold moons on them, and she taps the screen with one like she's killing a bug. "Paid cash. One night. Why, she steal the bathrobe?"

"She stripped the bed."

Manon makes a face like Josée has told her the guest left a kidney. "Weird."

"She folded the pillowcases."

"Okay, that's a psycho."

Josée doesn't tell her about the fifty. She puts it in the Tim Hortons tin she keeps in her locker, the one that used to hold maple cookies, and on the bus home to Saint-Léonard she builds Lily Jane out of what was left behind. A nice girl. A girlfriend of one of the Bruins, probably, since the Bruins had all of sixteen and seventeen that night and somebody had to be visiting somebody. Tidy, raised right. She drank ginger ale; there was a Canada Dry can in the bin. Her Bruin drank Coke. He'd left his can on the windowsill with the tab worked back and forth until it snapped off.

Under the bed, when Josée went in with the vacuum: a sweater. Navy cashmere, Holt Renfrew tag, four hundred dollars of sweater balled up like a dog bed. Too big for a girl. The Bruin's, then. She logs it in lost and found. Nobody calls.

After ninety days it goes home in her bag, because those are the rules, more or less, and because it's the softest thing she has ever touched that wasn't a baby.

*

October 2011

Lily Jane, 1814, cash, one night. The Bruins in town to lose.

The Do Not Disturb sign stays on the handle until 1:52 p.m. Josée does the whole floor around it. She does 1815 twice. When the sign finally comes off and she goes in, it's the same: the bed stripped, pillowcases folded, the fifty under the remote. Ginger ale. Coke, tab twisted off.

Different this time, the headboard. It's come off its bracket on one side and hangs crooked, a fat upholstered thing in hotel taupe, with a dent in the drywall behind it the size of a fist.

"Câlisse," Réjean says when he comes up from maintenance with his drill. He looks at the dent and then at Josée with his eyebrows up in his hair. "Elle a des cuisses, ta Lily."

"She's not my Lily."

"You blush, Josée."

"It's hot in here."

The room is the cleanest wreck she's ever walked into. There's a hotel pen on the desk with teeth marks dented into the plastic all the way around, like somebody held it in his mouth on purpose to keep quiet. Two condom wrappers in the bin, opened in a hurry. A little bottle of lube, the expensive kind with no flavor and no smell, nearly empty, cap screwed on tight.

Lily Jane screws on caps. Lily Jane bites pens.

The second fifty goes in the tin.

*

March 2012

9:10 in the morning and one of the Bruins is walking eighteen in a hotel robe, banging on doors with the flat of his hand like he's trying to wake the dead.

"Roz! Roz, bus is at ten! Roz, I swear to God!"

She knows this one from television. Marlow. The big one who falls down a lot and smiles about it, all neck, blond and pink like boiled ham. He's got a Gatorade in his other hand and he's slopping it on her carpet.

"Monsieur," she says. "Please."

"Sorry, sorry." He reads her name tag, mouths it wrong. "You seen Rozanov? Russian guy? Curly? Kind of an asshole?"

She has. On RDS, scoring on the Canadiens in the third, then skating past the Montreal bench with his tongue out. She has said things to her television about him that she would not say in church.

Behind Marlow, the sign is on 1818. Lily Jane's room.

"He went to the gym," Josée says. She doesn't know why she says it. "Early. I saw him."

"Gym." Marlow nods like this is the wisest thing anyone has ever told him. "Respect. Okay. Merci! Merci beaucoup!" He pads off toward the elevators with his calves showing, fat and hairless as two salamis.

The door of 1818 opens.

Ilya Rozanov steps into the hall in a ball cap and yesterday's suit, the jacket over his arm. He looks at her. She looks at him. He's much better-looking up close, which she resents. His nose has been broken more than once. His mouth has a bitten look.

He puts one finger to his lips.

Then, very low, in an accent like a villain in a movie her grandson would watch: "Thank you. Lily is sleeping."

He takes the stairs.

Josée stands with her cart and thinks: Rozanov. Rozanov. The Russian with the tongue, with a polite girl who folds.

At 11:40 she goes in. The bed is stripped. The fifty is under the remote.

She is a little disappointed in Lily Jane.

*

January 2013

The sign isn't on. That's the only defense she has, after.

She knocks the way she always knocks, two and then one, says "Ménage!", puts her card in. The lock flashes green.

The curtains are open. The room is full of white snowlight. On the bed there's a broad naked back, gold from somewhere that isn't Boston in January, a spine that goes all the way down into a sheet. Curls. A noise in the room, not a big one, a wet held-back noise coming from under him.

A hand gripping the headboard, white at the knuckles.

A big hand. Square. Speckled across the back with freckles.

Josée shuts the door so fast it doesn't latch, then shuts it again.

In the hall she puts both palms flat on top of her cart, on the little soaps, and breathes. Okay. Okay. Lily Jane has big hands. Lily Jane is a sporty girl. A goalie, maybe. Girls play now; her granddaughter plays ringuette, there are girls with hands like that all over Quebec.

Behind the door the headboard knocks the wall, slow, like somebody who's been told to be patient.

She does 1820.

*

April 2013

She starts at six. The 32 bus being the 32 bus, she gets in at quarter to and takes the staff elevator up to change.

It stops at eighteen.

The man who gets on has a ball cap pulled down and a hood up over it. Nice grey coat. He smells like hotel soap and, under that, something sweeter and dirtier that she remembers from her own marriage, a long time ago. He nods at her without looking. Then he does look, because she's staring, and she's staring because she has seen that face every Saturday night since he was nineteen years old.

Shane Hollander. Le petit Hollander, her team's golden boy, freckles across his nose like somebody flicked a paintbrush at him.

There's a bruise on his neck, purple, fresh. It goes down under his collar.

He sees her see it. He tugs the collar up.

"Bonjour, madame." His French is perfect. Montreal French, not France French, the French of a boy whose mother grew up here.

"Bonjour." Her voice belongs to somebody else. "Bonne game, hier."

He scored two. One of them was the prettiest thing she's seen all season, a backhand, top shelf, Rozanov on the ice for it, Rozanov breaking his stick on the boards after.

"Merci," Shane Hollander says, polite as a priest. "Merci beaucoup."

The doors open on the ground floor. He goes out the side exit into the slush, past the dumpsters. He doesn't look back.

*

In 1818 the pillowcases are folded.

The fifty is under the remote.

Josée sits down on the bare mattress, which you are never supposed to do, and holds the fifty in both hands. Mackenzie King. Constipated.

Ginger ale. Coke.

The pen with the teeth marks. The headboard. The goalie's hand.

A sweater too big for a girl and too nice for a Bruin.

She laughs, sitting there. It comes out of her like a sneeze. She laughs until she has to wipe her eyes on the back of her glove, which is not clean, which she knows, and that sets her off worse, alone on a bare mattress on eighteen with the bathroom fan going.

Then she gets up and does her job.

That night she watches the Canadiens on RDS with her sister, who talks the whole time about her hip. In the second period the camera finds Hollander on the bench laughing at something, his whole face scrunched, his ears pink. At the Boston bench, Rozanov is watching him instead of the play.

"Il est cute, le petit Hollander," her sister says.

"Mange," Josée says, and pushes the chips at her.

*

Nine fifties in the tin by the end of that season.

She doesn't spend them. She couldn't tell you why. You don't spend somebody's diary.

*

2013 to 2017

They stop coming.

The Bruins still stay at the Montcalm, sometimes on her floor, sometimes on Lucie's. Rozanov stays alone. He orders room service, a club sandwich and two Cokes. He smokes on the little balcony where you're not supposed to smoke, then puts the butts in his pocket instead of the planter, which is the only nice thing she can say about him. He leaves the bed the way a man leaves a bed. No fifties.

She misses Lily Jane like you'd miss a radio show.

She watches the games differently now. She can't help it. She watches faceoffs, who looks at who when the whistle goes. When Hollander gets hit, her eyes go to the Boston bench, and once she sees Rozanov stand up like he's about to go over the boards for the wrong team.

In 2016 Manon shows her a magazine at the front desk: Hollander with an actress, the pretty one from the superhero movie, the two of them leaving a restaurant.

"Finally," Manon says. "I was starting to wonder about him."

"Pfft," says Josée.

"What, pfft? Look at her."

"He folds pillowcases," Josée says, and goes back up to eighteen before Manon can ask what that means.

In June 2017 the Admirals win the Cup and their captain kisses a man on live television. Josée watches it twice on the news, then a third time on her granddaughter's phone at Sunday dinner while the boys argue about whether it's good for the league. She doesn't say anything. A square freckled hand on a taupe headboard. Rozanov taking the stairs.

They'd better have somebody to take care of them, she thinks.

*

November 2018

Rozanov plays for Ottawa now, which everyone thinks is insane. The papers do a whole thing about it, the friendship, the charity, the summer camps the two of them run with Hollander's mother. There's a press conference downtown in the morning. Josée watches it in the staff room with a coffee. Hollander talks in French and English, very correct. Rozanov goes off the paper and talks about his mother, and the room goes quiet. Hollander's face, standing next to him, does something she has seen it do only once, in an elevator, at quarter to six.

At two o'clock a booking comes through for 1126.

Jane Lily. One night. Cash.

Eleven isn't her floor. It's Lucie's. Josée buys Lucie a twenty-five-dollar Tim's card and a box of Timbits and trades her for the day. Lucie is twenty-three and already thinks Josée is a little crazy, so she doesn't ask.

Josée does 1126 herself. She asks Réjean to come up and check the headboard bracket. He looks at her a long moment over his drill and doesn't say one word, which is the kindest thing a man from Rosemont has ever done for her.

On her break she walks to the dépanneur on Sainte-Catherine. A can of Canada Dry. A can of Coke. Into the minibar, front row, labels out. Four extra pillows on the bed, because she's seen the size of that back. Two chocolates on the pillows, mint, the good ones from the second floor that are supposed to be for the suites. She hangs the Do Not Disturb sign on the inside of the door, where they'll find it, just in case.

She goes home. She doesn't sleep much.

*

The next day, the sign is on until 1:58.

When she goes in, the bed is stripped. Six pillowcases, folded. The duvet over the desk chair. Two cans in the bin, the Coke with its tab twisted off. The chocolates are gone. There's a smear of mint chocolate on the folded top sheet, and something else with it, and she doesn't look at that very long.

The headboard held. Réjean is a good man.

Under the remote, a fifty. This one is crisp, new from a machine, slick as a candy wrapper. Mackenzie King still looks like he needs a laxative.

She takes it down to her locker and puts it in the tin with the others. Twenty-two. Eleven hundred dollars of somebody's diary.

On her way back up she passes 1126. Nobody's in there. The room is clean.

She hangs the sign on the handle anyway. For practice.