Rating:

Not Rated

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Coach LeClaire (Game Changers), Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Sebbin (Heated Rivalry), Ryan Carmichael

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Rivals to Lovers, Teammates to Lovers, Boston Bears | Boston Raiders Player Shane Hollander, Out shane hollander, POV Shane Hollander, Anxious Shane Hollander, Protective Ilya Rozanov, Hockey as a Metaphor for Sex

Language:

English

Collections:

Anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-08-11 Updated: 2026-10-14 Words: 19,957 Chapters: 3/?

Slide Rule

Summary

When Shane was outed half-an-hour before the NHL Draft, he thought it would be the worst day of his life. And when he proceeded to slide all the way into the third round, he wasn’t sure how he would survive. Then his new team banished him back to the OHL for two years until he aged out, and Shane burned at the humiliation.

On his good days, though, Shane could admit that it’d made him stronger. He was a better player now, and more comfortable in himself, and more ready to take the NHL by storm. Every time he’d thought that he was finished, he’d been wrong.

So maybe he’d survive playing on the same team as Ilya fucking Rozanov.

~ ~ ~

Shane is outed publicly 30 minutes before the first draft pick is announced. Ilya goes #1 overall to the Boston Bears. Shane is picked #65 overall in the third round… also by the Boston Bears.

Notes

I am intentionally starting this story in 2011, rather than at the canon-divergence point in 2009. The differences between canon 09-11 and this universe will be covered throughout the story. I’ve tried to be as hockey-accurate as possible but for those who don’t know: drafting a player doesn’t mean that player automatically gets onto the roster. It’s totally normal and expected for a kid to get drafted and then go back to play for his Major Junior team for a year or two. It’s NOT normal for a player of Shane’s caliber and accomplishments to play 2 more years in the Junior after being drafted.

The main differences between here and canon in 2009-2011 is that Shane plays for Kingston for those two seasons while Ilya plays for the Bears. Ilya doesn’t play in the 09-10 World Juniors, bc honestly it would be weird af for Boston to let him do that. The World Juniors are played in the middle of the NHL season. Ilya was the first overall pick. He’s gonna spend the 09-10 season in Boston, playing games for them. (Shane shouldn’t have played either, but at least there’s some Canada pride excuse that might get made). And neither of them would be in the KHL/OHL for the 2009-2010 season; they'd be on their NHL teams. It’s one of my big gripes from canon.

Also I’m surely flying too close to the sun with hockey terminology, and will make glaring mistakes to people who (unlike me) are more than just casual fans. Plz forgive.

Chapter 1

The first meeting of Shane Hollander's NHL career was not with a coach.

It was at eight in the morning in a conference room on the second floor of the practice facility, four days before rookie camp in summer 2011. Shane hadn't been at the Bears' rookie camp in 2009. He hadn't been there in 2010 either. Every other player that Boston drafted in June 2009 had gone to both camps. Except for Parker, drafted at two-hundred and nine overall, who had quit hockey to become a DJ. The front office had suggested that it might be kinder for Shane to avoid… the distraction. All parties had unanimously agreed, which was to say that Shane had known it wasn’t a suggestion, so he’d thanked them and went back to his OHL team in Kingston for two more seasons.

But now he was attending the Bears’ 2011 rookie camp, and his first appointment was with the PR team. The meeting was led by a woman named Dana Rossi who ran communications for the Boston Bears and had, on the table in front of her, a navy folder with the team logo stamped in gold.

There was a label on the tab. Someone had typed it and printed it and cut it to size.

HOLLANDER, S. — 2011–12 MEDIA PLAN

It was the comma that got him. Neat, clinical. He looked at it for a while.

"Water?" Dana said. "Coffee? We've got the terrible little pods."

"I'm okay. Thank you."

There was a second person in the room, a young man with a laptop who had introduced himself as Kevin and then said nothing else for the rest of the hour. And there was LeClaire, the head coach, standing against the back wall in a team shirt with his arms folded, not sitting, not participating, just present.

Dana opened the folder and turned it around so it faced him, and slid it across.

"So this is going to be boring," she said, "and I want you to interrupt me any time. Genuinely. If something in here doesn't work for you, we’ll change it. It's not a contract."

"Okay."

It was ten pages. The first was a calendar.

"Rookie camp opens Friday. Normally that's four beat guys and an intern and nobody publishes anything interesting. This year we've got fourteen credential requests as of yesterday and I expect it to be north of thirty by Thursday. TSN's sending a crew. Sportsnet's sending a crew. RDS is coming down. The wires will be there. There's a British paper that wants to do something about, I quote, the American hockey closet, which—" she made a small motion with her hand— "we're not doing."

"Okay," Shane said again. He felt a little bit like a recording rather than a person. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling.

"We're going to do one availability Friday morning, before you're on the ice, in the room downstairs, eight minutes. You, at a podium. Then nothing for the rest of camp except the normal post-skate stuff, which is a scrum at your stall, two minutes, and I will be standing behind them the entire time. If it goes somewhere it shouldn't I'll end it. You don't have to end it. That's my job. You never have to be the one who walks away. Okay?"

"Okay." God. Did he know any other word?

"Say it back to me."

He looked up. "You'll end it."

"Good." She turned the page for him. "Second thing. There's a school of thought that says we do one long sit-down early, on our terms, with somebody who'll be decent about it, and it takes the pressure off everything else because everybody's already got their answer. Our recommendation is the Globe. Williamsburg, not the columnist, the other one. Forty-five minutes, we see the questions in advance, we don't see the piece. Your agent likes it. I like it. It's your call and if you'd rather not, I'll go tell them no this afternoon and it'll be fine."

Shane looked at the page. It had a paragraph on it called RATIONALE.

"Okay— I mean, yeah, that sounds good."

"Great!" Dana smiled at him brightly. "Third thing, and this is the boring part."

Page four was a list. It had a heading — KEY MESSAGES — and beneath it, five bullet points, each of which was a sentence he could have written himself at fourteen. Grateful for the opportunity. Focused on earning a spot. Tremendous respect for the veterans in this room. Taking it day by day. This organization has been outstanding.

"You already talk like this," Dana said. "I watched about nine hours of you. You've been media-trained within an inch of your life since you were sixteen and you've got the best dead-eyes I've seen on a twenty-year-old. That's not a compliment, exactly, but it's useful."

"Thank you," Shane said, because at least it wasn’t ‘okay’.

"Page five is topics we'd steer you off. Contract stuff, obviously, roster projections, anything about other guys' jobs. Don't ever be the guy who says he expects to make the team. Page six is the part you're actually here for."

Page six had a different heading.

IF ASKED ABOUT JUNE 2009

He read the first line twice without any of it making it into his brain. Then he read it again. Dana let him. Kevin stopped typing. In the back of the room LeClaire shifted his weight against the wall, which made a small sound.

"There are four versions," Dana said, "long, medium, short, and hostile. Hostile is for when somebody's trying to get a rise out of you, and it's eleven words, and you say it and then you say it again if you have to. You can say the exact same eleven words nine times in a row. It looks bad on them and it looks fine on you. That's a thing people don't know."

"What are the words?" Shane hoped he didn’t sound as nervous as he felt.

"'I was eighteen. It's private. I'm here to play hockey.'"

He counted. It was ten words. He didn't say so.

"Jullian Sauvé," Dana said. She grimaced sympathetically at whatever was on Shane’s face. "If they bring up Sauvé. And they will, because somebody will decide that's a story…"

"I know what I can say."

"Tell me, so I know you know."

"Nothing." He'd had this conversation with two lawyers, his agent, his agent's lawyer, and his mother, and he could do it in his sleep. "I can say we were both eighteen. I can say it was private. I can say he took the photo. I can't say he sold it. I can't call him a liar, because he's given his version and I can't prove what happened, and if I say one wrong sentence into a microphone, he'll sue me. He'd love to sue me. It'd be the best thing that happened to him in a year."

Dana wrote something on her pad and underlined it.

"That's exactly right," she said. Despite himself, Shane felt a jolt of satisfaction at the praise.

The photograph had left Jullian Sauvé's phone at 6:41 the evening of the 2009 Draft, and then it’d been on a message board by 7:15 and linked all over Twitter by 7:30. Jullian had spent the rest of that summer giving interviews about how violated he felt that his privacy had been taken from him. He had been quite good at it. He'd turned it into a hundred and forty thousand followers, a column in a Montreal weekly that ran five months, one magazine profile that called him the accidental face of a movement, and finally, that spring, an agency in Paris. He'd posted a picture of himself at Charles de Gaulle with a caption about new beginnings, in French, with an accent circumflex in the wrong place.

Shane had checked once, at two in the morning in a hotel at an away game. Nothing since. No campaigns, no shows, no anything. He'd felt a hot little flare of satisfaction and then felt sick about the satisfaction, and it had taken about a year and one extremely direct conversation with his therapist before he'd been willing to let himself simply have it.

The name itself was nothing. Everyone thought he’d be afraid of hearing the name, but he wasn’t. He'd heard it maybe nine thousand times by now; Jullian Sauvé was written in the second paragraph of everything ever published about Shane. Somewhere in the middle of the ‘09 season it had stopped meaning anything at all to him. Sauvé. It was just a collection of phonemes, and it didn’t hurt Shane to hear them.

The only human being on the planet who never said it was his mother. Two years, and Yuna Hollander had not once let those syllables into her house. That boy, she said, if she absolutely had to. Mostly she didn't have to.

"There's a line for it, if they push," Dana said. "Bottom of the page."

"I wish him well," Shane said.

Dana looked up. "You've got that one down."

"Yeah."

"Do you? Wish him well."

"Does it matter?"

"No," she said, after a moment, and turned the page. "It's a good line. Keep it."

"Okay," he said. Again. Goddamn it.

"Great." She turned the page. "Last thing before Bill talks."

Page eight was a list of requests, and it was long.

A youth center in Jamaica Plain wanted him for a Saturday. A national organization wanted him on a board. A documentary crew had written four times. A magazine wanted a cover, shirtless, which Dana had annotated in pen with a single flat no. Someone in Toronto wanted him to speak in June at an event with the word Pride in the title, and someone else wanted a video message, and a woman in Winnipeg had written a letter, on paper, about her son.

"You're going to want to say yes to some of it," Dana said.

"I read the letter."

"I know you did. I sent it to you." She let that sit. "Here's the organizational position. This year, the answer to all of it is not yet. It’s not a ‘no’. Not yet. Next year we revisit."

Shane nodded, feeling relieved. He was a twenty-year-old rookie on a two-way-adjacent entry deal. He hadn’t played an NHL game and the first time he stood next to a rainbow flag, it would become the only thing anyone ever asked about. He just wanted to be a hockey player, not that-one-gay-hockey-player. Of course, he would do it, if that’s what Boston wanted from him. He wasn’t exactly in a position to refuse. But he was glad that they were on the same page. Except…

Shane looked at the letter, which was clipped to the page, third-generation photocopy, a mother's handwriting.

"Can I write back to her," he said. "Privately. Not— nothing public. Just a letter."

Dana looked at him for a second longer than the question needed.

"Yes," she said. "We’ll have her sign an NDA. Give it to me and I'll get it in the mail, and nobody will ever know it existed."

"Thank you."

She closed the folder. "Bill."

LeClaire came off the wall. He was fifty-three and built like a bulldog. He shook Shane's hand across the table with both of his, which made Shane stand up halfway out of his chair. The chair squealed when he sat back down.

"Hell of a player," LeClaire said. "Hell of a player. You know what I told them, two years ago, in the room, I said the kid's a hockey player, and everything else is everybody else's problem. That's what I said."

"Thank you, sir."

"Look at what you’ve done since the Draft." He tapped on a list of Shane’s achievements. "Two World Juniors. Two golds. Gold as a captain. Robertson Cup — that's three now, three?"

"Three, but two since the draft."

"Three Robertson Cups. Two scoring titles and two Memorial Cups. MVP of the OHL last year, the Eden Powers, and I looked up who's won that thing, that's— that's a list. That is a list." He seemed genuinely delighted, and it was the first pleasant thing that had happened. Shane felt himself warm toward him despite everything, cautiously optimistic. "You did all that in the O. I know you wanted to be here in the NHL with us, kid, but—"

And here it came. Shane watched it with a kind of professional interest.

"—well, we wanted to give you a chance to get over— to get past all that draft-day unpleasantness," LeClaire said. "And I'm glad we've got it behind us. All right? Behind us. Now we play hockey."

Unpleasantness.

He had a list. He'd started it in Kingston, in a notebook, and then he'd stopped writing it down because writing it down made his therapist ask questions about why he was collecting them. The situation. The circumstances. The distraction. Your personal life. The whole thing in Montreal. Everything that happened. Off-ice matters. That business at the draft. A GM on a conference call in 2009 had said the optics issue four times in three minutes while Shane sat on his mother's couch in a suit he hadn't taken off since the night before.

Unpleasantness was new. It went in the list.

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," Shane said, like being sentenced to two extra years in the OHL was a great favor Boston did for him, to help him get over that unpleasantness. Like they weren’t contractually obligated by the CBA to either sign him this season or let him walk to another team. "I'm excited to get to work."

That was a key message. It was on page four, not that he’d needed to read it. Yuna Hollander had drilled the line into his head obsessively.

Downstairs, Dana walked him to the doors and handed him one more thing: a laminated card, the size of a credit card, with the four versions printed on it in a font small enough that he had to hold it at an angle.

"For your wallet," she said. "You will never need it, because you'll have it memorized, I’m sure. But some guys like having it."

He put it behind his health card. It stayed there for a long time, and got soft at the corners, and he never once took it out.

~ ~ ~

Rookie camp opened on a Friday with forty-one players and thirty-eight credentialed media, which was more media than rookie camp had ever had, in Boston or anywhere. Everyone in the building knew exactly which of the forty-one they were there for.

The eight minutes went fine.

He wore a suit. He said grateful twice and day by day once and tremendous respect for the guys in that room once, and when a man from a Toronto radio station asked him whether he thought his presence would be a distraction, Shane said he was here to earn a spot like everybody else. When the same man asked it again with different words, Shane repeated the same answer with slightly different words as well. Then Dana said, "Last one," from the back wall, and someone asked about his summer training, and it ended.

Then he got on the ice, and it was easy.

The ice was so easy it was almost funny. He was twenty years old and in the last two OHL seasons he’d scored two hundred and sixteen points. He’d been the best player in the CHL for years, and he had the trophies to prove it. He had one World Junior silver medal and two golds, and he was going against kids with less pedigree, less experience, and less talent. There were some older guys who’d come out of college, but even seasoned D1 athletes couldn’t compare to him.

The other guys were skating for their lives, and it wasn’t close. It was obvious from the first drill. They were doing a simple three-man regroup, D to center to winger, up and back, a drill for warming up hands, and by the third rep the coaching staff at the blue line had stopped talking to each other.

What Shane was thinking about, on that third rep, was this: his first touch had come off the heel.

Not badly. Nobody in the building would have seen it. He'd taken a flat pass off the right D, three strides into the swing, feet still going, and received it about two inches too far back on the blade, so it caught in the heel and kicked instead of rolling up to the sweet spot. Which meant walking it forward before he could do anything with it, which meant that for a stride and a half he'd been carrying instead of moving. If there'd been an NHL-caliber defenseman in the neutral zone instead of a cone, that stride and a half was where he'd have lost it. It was nothing. It was two inches. He rode the turn at the far boards and got back in line and ran it again in his head — heel, kick, carry — and did not think about anything else for the next four minutes.

"Watch Hollander's feet," one of the development coaches called out, at some point, to everybody. "Watch how he never stops. Boys. Watch his feet."

Shane got to the front of the line and took the pass on the middle of the blade. Good. Now he needed to focus on the angle of his hips.

By the lunch break the story had already gotten around: Hollander was the best player at Bears rookie camp, which surprised no one, and which was — depending on the outlet — either a redemption, a vindication, a headache, or an inevitability. One of them called him a preseason Calder favorite, which was insane, because he hadn’t even made the team yet.

By the lunch break, also, the other rookies had worked out where they stood, which was behind him, and some of them had begun to have feelings about it.

That was fine. It was just math. Between rookie camp and then training camp the following week, there were maybe two roster spots up for grabs in the Bears lineup. The rest of the prospects would go to Providence, or be sent home to their junior teams, or they’d go nowhere at all, NHL dreams finished before they’d even started. It did not require any special explanation for why a nineteen-year-old fourth-rounder from Minneapolis resented the twenty-year-old with the media scrum at his stall.

The gay-thing just happened to be available, as an outlet for their frustrations. That was all. There was a thing available to say about him that wasn't available to say about anyone else, and so when they wanted to say something, that was the thing.

Shane heard it on the second day, in a line, waiting for a rep in the corner.

He didn't hear it, even though he heard it. It was hard to explain, though he'd tried with Dr. Mireault once. Obviously, the sounds made it into his ear. There were two guys behind him, centers who’d be lucky to make it to Providence, whispering back and forth about cocksuckers in a voice loud enough to reach Shane but quiet enough not to be heard by the coaches. There was a certain physics to it. The syllables were vibrations in the air that reached Shane’s ears, and that’s where they stopped, because his brain was too busy rewinding the rep before.

He had come out of the corner with the puck on a half-wall battle drill, beaten the first guy with a quick inside-out, and made a backhand pass up the wall to a winger who hadn't been looking. The pass had been perfect. That was the problem. He'd made a perfect blind backhand pass into a spot where a good player would have been and a nineteen-year-old with tired legs wasn't, and it had gone off the boards and out of the zone. The coaches would score that as the winger's mistake; an NHL player would’ve been there, and the coaches would know it. But Shane should’ve known better. Hockey was a game of mistakes. There was no should-be on the ice. Things went wrong, and Shane should’ve looked. He made a mental note to write the observation in his Notes app when he got back to the locker, on a running list of hockey critiques.

Look first. You are not so good that you don't have to look.

That’s what he was thinking about, instead of the words being whispered at him behind his shoulder. However, for a moment, he was in the arena in Kingston, up 6–1 on Belleville with eleven minutes left in the third, with a defenseman's glove pressed under his chin at the whistle.

That one he'd heard. That one had been delivered at conversational volume, six inches away, with the referee close enough to have heard it too and choosing not to. The word had been faggot, and the sentence around it had been about what Shane apparently did in the shower. The whole rink had been chanting his name eleven seconds earlier because he'd just set up his winger for the sixth goal.

And what Shane had thought about, with the glove under his chin — what he had actually, genuinely been thinking about, while a nineteen-year-old from Cobourg explained to him what he was — was the pass.

It had gone a centimeter behind the tape. Monty had still scored, because he had good hands, and the crowd was standing, and the assist was going in the book, and it did not matter at all. But it had been a centimeter behind the tape, and Shane had made that error on his forehand-side seam pass eight times that season and had a drill for it and had done the drill that morning, and here it was again, in a 6–1 game, a centimeter, and the fact that it hadn't cost anything didn't mean it wasn't there.

He'd said nothing. He'd skated to the dot for the faceoff. Everyone said afterward how well he handled it, and the Whig-Standard ran a piece about his composure, and his mother framed it.

In the present: "Hollander. Hollander. Go."

He went.

~ ~ ~

Casey Doyle was fascinating to Shane. He had absolutely nothing to lose, and it made him the most restful human being in the state of Massachusetts.

He was twenty-three. He had gone undrafted out of Thayer, played four full years at Harvard, captained them for one, put up thirty-one points as a senior on a bad team, and graduated in May with a degree in government and a thesis about cost overruns on the Big Dig. Doyle had signed a contract with Providence, not Boston, and there was no chance he was making the Bears’ roster this year.

He knew all of this. He said all of it out loud to Shane, within four minutes of meeting him, cheerfully, while cutting the tape off a stick.

"I'm here because maybe in a couple of years if I last in the AHL, I could get called up to fill for an injury," Doyle said. "No hard feelings here. You gotta understand, man, this is the best week of my entire life."

"Yeah?" Shane was honestly just grateful that someone was talking to him. Doyle could be narrating his entire undergraduate thesis and Shane would be smiling and nodding.

"I'm at an NHL rookie camp. My mother told everyone at her church. Everyone. There’re people taking communion in Milton, Massachusetts, right now who know my ice time." He shook the tape ball off his hand and it stuck. "Where's your stuff, Kingston?"

"Ottawa."

"Where's your stuff, Ottawa."

Doyle set up his stall next to Shane, willingly, and Shane was so grateful he could cry. He didn’t, of course, because that would be pathetic. Doyle asked him about the Frontenacs, actual questions, about actual hockey, about whether the Memorial Centre was as bad as people said, about a defenseman he'd played against in a summer league. Doyle didn’t ask him about anything else for most of the week.

It wasn’t careful avoidance, that was the part Shane noticed. He’d learned how to read the little swerve in the sentence. Doyle just wasn't interested. He was twenty-three and from Milton and had lived four years in a Harvard dorm. The fact that Shane slept with men was, to him, roughly as interesting as the fact that Shane was Canadian, which is to say it came up exactly once, on Wednesday in the shuttle van, when Doyle said, "Hey, the guy in the thing, in ‘09. Did you actually know him or was he just some guy?"

Shane looked out the window.

"He was just some guy," he said.

"Huh," said Doyle. "Yeah, no, that's worse." And then he spent nine minutes on whether the van driver was taking the wrong exit.

He called Shane kid, with a kind of warmth that Shane hadn’t expected. Doyle was three years older and about four hundred spots worse and he called him kid, and Shane found that he liked it so much it embarrassed him. Doyle clapped him on the back or nudged him in the ribs, without ever seeming like he was afraid of catching the gay. Shane would’ve made it through rookie camp without all that; he’d been ready for what this was going to be like. But having a friend made it a million times easier.

They got coffee twice. They played a small-area game on Thursday where they were on the same side and Doyle scored on a rebound and celebrated like it was Game 7 and then apologized to the goalie, an eighteen-year-old who was almost crying. Doyle talked to him at the bench for a full minute in a low voice with a hand on his neck.

On Friday, the last day, they made the cuts.

Doyle got the tap at 11:20 in the morning. Shane watched him come out of the office, and Doyle put both fists over his head in the hallway like he'd won something.

"Providence!" he said. "Baby!"

"Doyle—"

"No. No, don't." He was actually grinning. It wasn't a brave face; Shane had seen a hundred brave faces and this was not one. "I got a full week. I got a full week and I got two goals and Bill LeClaire knows my name. He said 'Doyle' to me. He said, 'Doyle, good hustle.' I'm gonna have that on a— I'm putting that on a plaque, kid."

He wrote his number on a strip of stick tape and pressed it onto the front of Shane's phone.

"Providence is an hour," he said. "That's nothing. That's nothing at all. You call me when the big room is weird."

"It won't be weird."

Doyle looked at him for a second with an expression Shane couldn't parse and didn't like.

"Sure," he said. "Call me anyway."

He drove home to Milton with his gear in the back of a Corolla, and Shane went to the players' lot and sat in his car for fifteen minutes without starting it. He realized that he had just lost the only person in the organization he actually liked, on the last day of the easiest week he was going to have all year.

Then he started the car, because his mother was calling.

"How was it," Yuna said.

"Good. Fine. It was fine."

"Fine." He could hear her doing something in a kitchen four hundred miles away. "Fine. Did you eat?"

"Yes."

"Did you eat properly?"

"Mom."

“Did I tell you the rumor that Montréal is going to put Johnson on their roster this year?” she asked. “They took him at sixty-two." There was a pause with a great deal in it. "He had twenty points in the AHL last year. Twenty. In a year."

"Mom."

"I'm only saying what's in the paper." Yuna Hollander hadn’t watched a Montreal game since the twenty-seventh of June, 2009, but two years later she could still tell you the point totals of every single player Montreal had drafted ahead of Shane. "Training camp is Monday?"

"Yeah," Shane said, like his mom didn’t have the schedule printed out and highlighted, probably in triplicate.

"Call me afterwards." There was a brief hesitation; Shane could hear the anxiety that she tried to hide from him. “I love you, honey.”

"I'll call you Monday. Love you, too."

~ ~ ~

Training camp opened on Monday with fifty-eight players, and Shane had spent a decent portion of the weekend failing to be casual about a PDF.

It had been emailed out on Friday afternoon: two columns, Group A and Group B, which was the professional way of writing the team and everybody else. Group B skated at seven and dressed in the auxiliary room, where rookie camp had spent the week folding forty-one bodies into twenty-six stalls, guys taping sticks on the floor with their backs against the wall and their gear in the shower. Group A skated at nine and dressed in the main room.

He was in Group A.

Nobody mentioned it to him, and the not-mentioning was extremely loud. There was no call from the GM, no line from LeClaire, not a word from Dana, who told him about things far smaller than this and who had certainly known. Somebody upstairs had made a decision about Shane Hollander and communicated it by printing his name in the left-hand column, and that was how this was going to work.

There were two ways to read it.

The generous one was that they thought he was going to make the team, had thought so for some time. In fact, they thought it was so obvious that he was going to make the team that there was no point making a big deal out of it. His records spoke for themselves. No other rookie — hell, no other training camp prospect — had a meeting with LeClaire on their first day. This was the option that his mom would insist was the truth. After all, anyone else with Shane’s list of accomplishments and stats would be a clear lock for the roster.  

But Shane wasn’t anyone else, and so that brought him to the second possibility. He wasn’t only being put in Group A’s practices. He was being put in Group A’s locker room. The coaches would get three weeks to decide whether the stars could handle sharing a shower with a— with Shane. Who would have an issue with it? Someone would, Shane knew, but what mattered was whether the homophobe was a fourth-liner easily replaceable by a promising prospect, or a veteran with two years left on their contract and a no-trade clause.

For two years he had known exactly what was being asked of him, to the decimal point. Score. Win. Be excellent, be boring, be no trouble to anybody. It was a brutal arrangement and he had become extremely good at it, and the thing nobody understood was that he preferred it to almost any alternative, because it was legible. Success had been entirely within his control. Play well enough, and he’d be allowed to keep playing. But now… his future hinged on whether the right people would like him in the locker room, and being well-liked had never been Shane’s strength.

So Shane controlled what he could control. He got there at 7:40 on Monday morning, safely after Group B had started, but well-before Group A should begin. He’d get in and out of the locker room before any of the veterans, so that the first time they’d see him would be on the ice, where he could excel.

But Shane had made a critical error: this was the NHL, on the first day after the off-season. Four guys were already there. He'd been beaten to it by four guys, because of course he had, because NHL veterans were ready to get the season started. Shane stopped in the doorway for about a second and a half.

Shane had a second and a half to catastrophize everything that could possibly go wrong, and none of it happened. A guy on the far side kept taping. Connors, who Shane recognized by sight, looked up and nodded, then looked back down. Somebody's music kept playing. The room didn’t exactly go quiet, but the sound in the room dropped by a couple of decibels before picking back up. Shane forced himself to walk inside.

His stall was in the second corner, between Marchetti and an empty one. His name was on white tape above it, block letters in black marker. HOLLANDER. Down the far wall the veterans' names were on small brass plates screwed into the wood.

He sat. He unpacked his bag. He started retaping a stick he had already taped.

The room filled over the next thirty minutes, and it was survivable. Shane recognized everyone in the room; he’d studied their tape and theorized a thousand different ways he could fit into their playing styles. There were a few nods and one handshake from Marchetti, who was thirty-one and had a kid and said, "Welcome, bud," with a decency so plain that Shane had to look at his laces for a second. Nobody said anything hostile. Nobody said much of anything. The conversation in that room was going around Shane the way it always did.

Fifty minutes to ice, the door banged open.

"Where is he."

Every head in the room went up. Ilya Rozanov came through the doorway backward, still talking to someone in the hall, dropped his bag in the middle of the floor where it was in everyone's way, and turned around.

Shane hadn’t seen him in person since the Draft. He’d watched Rozanov’s games, obviously, but—

"Shane Hollander." Rozanov said it like an announcement, to the whole room, arms out. "Finally. Finally is someone else on this team who knows how to put puck in net."

Sebbin groaned. Marleau threw a roll of tape at him.

"Fuck off, Roz," Carmichael grumbled.

"So sorry that not all of us can get twelve goals in our last ten games—"

"Thirteen," Rozanov said smugly.

"You had twelve."

"Was thirteen, one was disallowed. Was very bad call, everyone knows this, they still talk about it—" he pointed at Shane without looking at him, sweeping the whole room in. "You ask him. Hollander. Ottawa. Was goal, yes?"

Shane knew exactly which goal Rozanov was talking about. He’d watched every single Bears game for the last two years. He knew what he should say. Somehow, inexplicably, Rozanov was being nice to him. There was absolutely no reason for him to open his mouth and—

“You made contact with the goalie, Rozanov. That’s always gonna be called,” Shane heard himself say.

Rozanov scowled, but his eyes were bright. “Matthews pushed me into goalie, after puck left my stick. Contact initiated by defender—”

“That’s not what happened, Rozanov.” Shane could feel himself go into hockey-robot mode. He tried to stop it, but if it was something he could just stop, well, he’d probably be a lot more popular. “The push only counts if it’s what put you into him. Your left skate was in the blue paint before Matthews got a glove on you. You went in on your own and then he shoved you, and once you're in there under your own power the contact's yours. Sixty-nine-point-three."

“Yeah, Rozanov,” St-Simon said with a grin. “Trying to inflate your stats to impress the rookies, now?”

Rozanov grumbled good-naturedly as he was chirped all the way to his own stall, which of course had a brass plate. He shouted at Feller about a golf bet, and Feller laughed about Rozanov being poor for one more year on his ELC, and the room came back to life.

And that was it.

That was all of it. The whole room reorganized itself around a joke about goal totals, and by the time Shane got his skates on there were two guys asking him about the Robertson Cup final and one of them was telling a story about his own junior coach. Conversation in the room was going through him instead of around him, and he could not have said precisely how it had happened except that everyone in there had been waiting to be told how to behave and the best player on the team had walked in and told them, in a sentence, without saying anything at all.

It had cost Rozanov nothing, Shane knew. It had cost him absolutely nothing. He hadn't said a single word that could be quoted anywhere; he hadn't said tolerance or teammate or proud to have him. Rozanov had just said he can put the puck in the net and made a joke at his own expense and left, and it had been the most effective thing anyone had done for Shane Hollander in two years.

Shane hadn’t exactly been hoping for Rozanov to be a homophobe, or anything like that. But it would’ve made it a lot easier to ignore the enormous, inconvenient crush he’d had since the ’08-09 World Junior tournament.

It didn’t matter. Shane would handle it, just like he handled everything else.

~ ~ ~

Practice was two hours and it was the fastest ice he had ever skated on.

And, blessedly, it was hard. For the first time in twenty-six months, hockey was hard. He was not the best player on the ice. He was maybe the fourth. Guys closed on him a half-second earlier than he expected. Marleau took the puck off him using nothing but his stick and an angle, and Shane wanted to go find a wall and do it four hundred times.

He was so happy he felt sick.

At the end they ran a shooting drill, the mindless kind, the kind you do at the end. Walking down the wall, one-timer off a pass, next guy. The goalies had gone in at that point, so it was just an empty net and forty guys and a bucket.

Shane came off the wall, took the pass, and had the entire net open in front of him from twelve feet. It was, in every sense that mattered, not a shot. It was a gimme; you tap it in and skate away. He rolled it back to his backhand, opened his hips, and picked the far top corner on his off-side.

The puck went in. He kept skating.

Behind him someone said, "Christ, kid," in a good way. Shane was already three strides gone and thinking about his release point, which had been maybe a centimeter too far out from his body, which was the exact flaw that made his backhand a weakness since he was twelve. Over the past two years, he’d shaved it from two centimeters to one during games nobody had cared about the score of, because they’d been blowouts anyway.

He didn't notice Rozanov until the last player had gone through. Shane was on the ice by the door bending to grab his water bottle, and there was a pair of skates in his field of vision that hadn't moved for a while.

"Why did you do that?"

Shane straightened up. Rozanov had his helmet off and his hair was flat and dark with sweat. He was looking at Shane with an expression that Shane tried very hard not to overanalyze.

"Do what?" Shane said, instead of thinking about the drop of sweat working its way down Rozanov’s temple.

"Backhand. Was empty net, you are on top of it." He mimed it, one-handed, ludicrously. "Tap. Is nothing."

"My backhand's weak," Shane said.

Rozanov's eyebrows went up. "Is better than half the guys on team. Half the guys in league, maybe."

"It's weaker than my forehand. My release point's too far out so I lose maybe six, seven miles an hour and it telegraphs to a goalie who's reading my hands." He heard the intensity in his voice, the kind of hockey-obsession that made guys grimace at him before wandering off. "So if the shot doesn't matter, I take it on the backhand. That's— a free rep. Until I get it right."

Rozanov looked at him for what felt like a considerable length of time. But he didn’t grimace, and he didn’t walk away.

"First practice," he said. "New team. Big story, all the cameras, everybody in building watching Hollander." He shrugged. "You are on ice one hour fifty. You barely look at anyone."

"I was working."

"Mm."

"There's no point in looking around."

"Twice," Rozanov said.

"What?"

"You looked up twice." He held up two fingers, unhurried. "Once at clock, forty minutes. Once when Marleau took puck off you at half-wall. You looked at your own stick, then at him, then—" Rozanov flicked his fingers. "Gone. Back to hands. One hour fifty minutes. Twice."

Shane opened his mouth and found there was nothing obvious to say.

Of course Rozanov was watching him. Everyone watched. That was the entire condition of his life now: thirty-eight reporters, a satellite truck, a folder with his surname and a PR strategy. Being tracked was simply what happened to him in a hockey rink. Somebody was always keeping tabs.

It did not occur to him, standing there with his water bottle, to wonder why the best player on the team had spent his practice tracking a rookie.

"Anyway," Rozanov said, "you shoot backhand like baby."

"I just explained the — "

"Yes, yes. Release point one centimeter off. Very sad, very small." He reached out with his stick and hooked a puck off the ice from four feet away, one-handed, without appearing to aim, and it landed flat on his blade and stayed there. "Tomorrow, watch me in practice. I show you real backhand."

Shane blinked, nonplussed. “During— Rozanov, I need to focus in practice.”

“I am best player in National Hockey League, no?” Rozanov leaned in the tiniest bit too close. It would be entirely normal for anyone else, any other player. But with Shane… “Watching me is practice. You will learn more that way.”

Shane knew he should just be grateful that Rozanov was even talking to him. He should say something gracious, something measured. But Rozanov had been raising his hackles since he was seventeen years old.

“Second-best,” Shane said.

“What?”

“You’re the second-best player in the NHL. I’m the best.”

For a second, Rozanov just stared at him, before he threw his head back and laughed. Shane tried very hard not to look at the long line of his neck. When Rozanov’s head came back down, his eyes were dark and intent in a way that, in another context— No. Shane wasn’t going to let his traitorous brain take him there.

“You wish, Hollander.” Rozanov was grinning now, and he looked… delighted. He left the ice, walking away from Shane. Halfway to the door, Rozanov turned over his shoulder and called back to Shane: “Watch me tomorrow, Hollander.” Then he winked.

The tunnel door swung shut and Shane stood there and watched it. It was the longest he'd looked at anything all day.

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Rozanov's release point on his backhand was about three inches tighter to his body than Shane's, and as far as Shane could tell, he had no idea.

Shane spent the second day of training camp watching him, trying not to feel guilty even though Rozanov had literally told him to do it. The infuriating thing was that Rozanov's backhand wasn’t technically better. His hands weren’t quieter. His weight transfer was, if anything, sloppy; he shot off the wrong foot constantly, he opened his hips late, he did a thing with his top hand at the end of the follow-through that no coach in the world would have taught him. By any framework Shane had ever been given, it should have been a worse shot.

It wasn’t.

He needed video. He needed it in slow motion with a frame counter, and he was going to have to either ask a video coach for footage of the team's franchise player's backhand on the second day of camp, or find it himself on the internet like a person with a problem.

He found it himself on the internet, obviously.

~ ~ ~

On the third day Rozanov came and stood next to him during the water break with his helmet pushed up and said, "So?"

"So what."

"So. You watch. You are watching me since yesterday, this is not subtle, Hollander, my grandmother could see it—" He was cheerful about it, loudly, in a room where six other people could hear. Shane flagged it but had no idea what to do with that. "So what do you learn?"

"Your backhand's a mess."

"Ah." Rozanov put a hand on his chest. "You wound me."

"You shoot off your back foot maybe forty percent of the time. Your follow-through's got a flick in it that shouldn't do anything. It's not a technique. It's just—" Shane stopped, because the honest end of the sentence was it's just you, and he did not want to say that out loud in this room, or at all. "It's not repeatable. I can't take anything from it."

Rozanov looked delighted. He always looked delighted when Shane criticized him, and it never made any sense.

"You are trying to copy me," he said. "This is your mistake. You cannot copy. You are too—" He made a squared-off gesture with both hands, like he was setting a box down. "Like this. Everything, angles, degrees, sixty-nine-point-three." He said the rule number in a flat robot voice that Shane recognized, with a small internal lurch, as an impression of himself. "Is very good. Do not change. But you cannot copy me, you will look stupid, and then everybody laughs at you and I have to defend you, and I am busy."

"Then why did you tell me to watch?"

"So you would watch," said Rozanov.

He drank his water. Shane stood there with his mouth slightly open and no available response.

"Okay. Real thing." Rozanov held up his stick, one-handed, halfway down the shaft, and turned it so the blade faced Shane. "You take backhand from here." He tapped the middle of the blade. "Every time, always, middle. Because you are careful boy and middle is safe. Because you treat backhand like forehand. Tight. Fast. Very clean, very nice." He shook his head. "Backhand is not that shot. Backhand has less power, so you need more… hm. How you call it? Leverage! You think heel side of blade is bad, but look at length.” Rozanov swept a finger from the heel of the blade out toward the toe.

Shane looked at the blade.

"Start it back," Rozanov said. "Heel side. Let it run the whole blade. Then is not a shot, it is…" He searched for the word, but he apparently didn't find it. Instead, he made a sound, a short shhk of something sliding fast off something else.

It was, Shane understood with a hot rush of annoyance, completely correct. The puck would leave later — there was no way around that, it had further to go — but later was not the same as worse, and he’d been confusing them for years. The problem with his backhand had never been that it was too slow. It was that his consistency made him predictable. The puck had always gone off exactly the same two inches of blade, so a goalie who’d seen it once had seen everything; Shane had tried to compensate by making his shot faster, when he actually needed to make it less readable. If he ran the puck the length of the blade, the release stopped being a point and became a window. Early off the heel or late off the toe, same sweep, same speed, and the only thing that changed was where it went. There'd be more on it, too: more blade to accelerate against. He’d have more speed and less predictability, and the only tradeoff was—

“It’ll be less consistent,” Shane said.

Rozanov groaned. “Consistency is boring, Hollander.”

“I’d be more likely to make mistakes,” he continued undeterred. “Longer time on the blade means a higher likelihood of having it come off wrong, like…” Shane furrowed his brow. “Was that what happened to you last year in San Jose? The commentators couldn’t figure out how you made that angle, but your celly was— off.”

“Mistake! I am Ilya Rozanov, I do not make mistakes.”

But there was something assessing in Rozanov’s gaze that told Shane he was right. That was the trade, then. The same extra half-second that made him unreadable to a goalie was the half-second where it could go wrong, and there was no version where he got the first without the second. Rozanov had just decided he didn't care. He'd take the bad ones. He'd been taking them for years, apparently. Someday, if Shane perfected his release, he might be able to get the same speed and power of Rozanov’s unorthodox technique without sacrificing shot control.

Shane should stick to his process. He’d been coached on his backhand by four skills consultants, two of whom had current NHL contracts, and he was improving. He’d cut his average error in half, from two centimeters to one.

But there was something in him that just knew that if he said that, he’d lose Rozanov’s attention. That was fine. Shane didn’t need Rozanov’s attention. It was the coaches he needed to impress, not the young-and-cocky star. There were a million reasons why he should refuse, why he should focus on what worked best for his game.

"Okay," Shane said, instead of any of those reasons.

"'Okay,'" Rozanov repeated, in the robot voice.

"I'm going to try it."

"Yes, you are." He knocked his stick against Shane's, once, the way you'd tap a goalie's pads, and walked off toward the tunnel yelling something at Feller about a car.

Shane stayed where he was for a second.

Then he went and got a bucket of pucks and did it four hundred times. By the end of it the shot came off the blade with a noise it had never made in twelve years, and he stood there in an empty rink at nine at night feeling something that he couldn’t put into words. He made himself put the pucks away instead of thinking about it.

~ ~ ~

Shane had been approached by eleven closeted hockey players in twenty-six months. He was reasonably confident about the number, which was not something he'd ever said out loud to Dr. Mireault, because saying I have a count to your therapist invites a whole conversation.

Some guys just wanted to confess to Shane, and they were the most common and the worst. Confessions always happened late, in a hallway or a stairwell or once in a laundry room at a tournament hotel in Saskatoon. It typically started with a long approach of small talk that had nothing to do with anything, and it ended with a person telling Shane their deepest, darkest secret. Sometimes they cried. Shane had learned to be very still and very kind and to not, under any circumstances, touch them. Confessors didn’t want to sleep with him. They just wanted to be witnessed, once, by the only person in the sport who couldn't judge them for it. And then afterward the dude would avoid Shane's eyes for the remainder of their natural lives.

Then there were the hook-ups, which was cleaner and which Shane, God help him, preferred. These guys usually thought about it in advance and had a room number. Twice it had been a guy Shane had never spoken to before in his life, which was almost restful: no preamble, no story, just a transaction between two people who both understood the terms. Twice more it’d been people whom he’d known well. Of the four, Shane had only said yes to half of them.

The worst kind of closeted hockey player was the gay homophobe. That was the guy who was worst to him in public. The gay homophobes ran their mouths in the handshake line and chirped him about it on the ice with the ref right there, and then two months later found Shane alone at a summer skills camp and stood a foot too close with bated breath. Shane had gotten three of those. He had said no to all three, not out of any principle but because he wasn’t desperate. He spent two years as an openly gay athlete in a university town. He’d had plenty of non-hockey-related hook-ups.

Regardless, all three species of closeted hockey player had the same thing in common: they all did it in the dark. Every single one, eleven for eleven, no exceptions. They’d approach him in the hallway, the stairwell, the empty room. They’d text at one in the morning saying hey and nothing else for nine minutes. They all built themselves an exit. Every approach was constructed so that if Shane reacted wrong, the whole thing could be quickly repackaged as something else entirely, and the guy could walk away and be normal. That was the tell. It wasn’t just the looking. Everyone looked at Shane, since the draft. The tell was what they did around the looking.

And they were all, always, kind of terrible to him in public afterward. Or at best neutral. The distance was load-bearing. You could not be seen liking Shane Hollander too much if you were also going to find him in the dark.

So.

So Ilya Rozanov had, in eight days, done the following: Announced to a full locker room, at volume, with his arms out, that he had been waiting for Shane. Watched him for the entirety of a two-hour practice and then told him, out loud, the exact number of times Shane had looked up. Instructed him to watch him back. Fixed his backhand in a hallway in front of three witnesses. Stood too close on a bench on Thursday for about nine seconds while explaining something about a Detroit defenseman that could have been explained from a normal distance. Called him Hollander in a way that Shane had started to hear as its own separate word, unrelated to his name.

And he’d done none of it in private. Not one time. Not once in eight days had Ilya Rozanov been alone in a room with Shane Hollander, and Shane had begun, around day six, to suspect that this was not an accident. He didn’t have a mental model for this, for someone who was warm in public and unavailable in private, and never, ever mentioned Shane’s sexuality. Shane did not have a category for that and it was making him insane.

The obvious answer, which Dr. Mireault would have arrived at in about four seconds, was that Ilya Rozanov was a straight guy who liked teammates who were good at hockey, and Shane was the second-best player on the team. Dr. Mireault might also remind him that Shane was twenty years old and lonely, and he’d had a crush on Rozanov since the World Juniors, and he was looking for evidence where no evidence existed.

That was probably it.

Shane wrote it down in his Notes app, under the hockey stuff, in a way that would have been completely deniable to anyone who found the phone.

Not everything is a signal.

~ ~ ~

The first thing happened on the Tuesday of the second week, and Shane didn't see it start.

He was at his stall with one skate on when he registered that the volume in the room had changed. Krishnan — a twenty-two-year-old forward on a two-way deal who had been extremely normal to Shane for nine days and was fighting for the same roster spot — had said something. Shane had missed the sentence. He got the shape of it from the pause afterward, and from the way two guys laughed and one guy didn't, all three of them carefully not looking in Shane’s direction.

Shane's hands kept doing the skate.

He was thinking, with about eighty percent of himself, about a rush he'd botched at the end of practice. He'd carried too wide, and he'd known he was carrying too wide while he was doing it, which was a new and worse category of mistake—

"Krishnan." Rozanov had not raised his voice. He was sitting down. He didn't get up. "How many goal you score last year, in Providence?"

The room went a loaded kind of quiet.

"...Nine," Krishnan said.

"Nine." Rozanov considered this with enormous seriousness. "Okay. So. Here is the rule in this room. Hollander is second-best player on this team as a rookie, and he had almost more trophy last year than you have goal. So when you win World Junior, and MVP, and OHL tournament, and Memorial Cup, and point-score-trophy, and blah blah blah, then you say anything you like about anybody. Yes? Then I will listen to you all day, is my honor."

Somebody made an oooh noise.

"Until then," Rozanov continued, pleasantly, "you have nine goal, so you have nine words. Spend them careful."

The room detonated. Marleau was hitting the wall. St-Simon shouted something in French that Shane didn't fully catch but that involved counting. Krishnan went the color of a stop sign and laughed along with it, because there was nothing else available to him. By the end of the week nine words had become a thing people said in that room, generally to Krishnan, occasionally to anybody, entirely detached from where it came from.

And the thing that Shane noticed, the thing he took home with him and turned over, and over… Rozanov never once looked at him. Not during. Not after. He said all of it to Krishnan and to the room, and he never checked Shane's face, not even in the fast reflexive way that people did when they were being decent about him and wanted the credit.

It had been about Shane's point totals. It had been an argument about seniority and production, in a room that ran on seniority and production, and it had not contained a single word that could not have been said about a straight rookie whom somebody had insulted for some other reason. There was nothing in it about LGBT rights. There was no indication at all that Rozanov approved or disapproved of Shane’s sexuality. And Shane’s traitorous brain grasped at the fact that it had walked right up to the edge of what Rozanov could say without contradicting the various anti-“propaganda” laws making their ways through the Arkhangelsk and Kostroma legislatures.

Shane finished tying his skate. He wondered at how quickly the rebuke had rolled off Rozanov’s tongue. He’d constructed it in advance, probably.

Then he folded that thought tightly, and shoved it down into a dark corner of his mind.

~ ~ ~

The press learned Rozanov's angle soon thereafter and could not get him off it. Shane read all of it, which he had promised his mother and Dr. Mireault he would stop doing and had not stopped doing.

"Is good. Finally is somebody here who can keep up with me. Two years I am waiting, I am asking, please, get me someone with hands, and they get me Hollander, so— okay. Fine. Was worth wait."

They asked if Shane’s arrival changed Rozanov’s role.

"Nothing changes. I am still best player in league. Hollander maybe someday is second-best player in league. Is good for him to have dream."

And the one that ran everywhere, from the Thursday scrum, when a guy from a national outlet had waded in with a long careful preamble about the dynamic in the room and whether there'd been an adjustment period, which was the polite way of asking it:

"Only distracting thing about Hollander is his weak backhand."

That was the whole quote. He'd said it and then talked about the power play for ninety seconds. Shane must have watched the clip fifteen times.

His mother called on Friday.

"He's very complimentary about you," Yuna said, sounding pleasantly surprised.

"He says I have a bad backhand."

"He says you're the second-best player in the league."

"He says I'm maybe someday the second-best player in the league, Mom. He's making fun of me. It's a whole—" Shane pressed his thumb against his eyebrow. "It's a joke he's doing."

There was a moment of silence on the line. Even from four hundred miles away, his mother knew what he sounded like when he was miserable. This wasn’t that.

"Is he kind to you?" his mom asked.

Shane looked out the window of his rented apartment.

"Yeah," he said. "He is, actually."

"Good," said his mother, in a tone that closed the subject, and then asked him whether he had eaten properly.

~ ~ ~

The thing that got him noticed in the preseason wasn’t the points. Or rather, points weren’t the thing that got him noticed by the right kind of people.

Shane had points, obviously, six of them in four preseason games, which was a rate that got him a graphic on the broadcast with his name on it. That wasn’t surprising; scoring had never been Shane’s problem. Those were the plays that the broadcasters noticed, that the fans noticed. Those were the plays that weren’t going to get Shane onto rosters, anymore.

The Shane Hollander of May 2009 had been a flashy, highlight-reel kind of player. He could put a team on his back and carry them past the finish line. But the Shane Hollander of the post-Draft era had quickly learned that flashy was exactly what he couldn’t afford to be, now. No matter how good he was, he’d never be good enough to win without his linemates. He needed to be the kind of player who commentators called humble, or unselfish. He had to make his linemates look good, and play to their speed, and to never, ever seem ungrateful about it.

In his second preseason game, Shane played on a line with a kid named Petit-Frère, a Q kid who wasn’t adapting well to the speed of the NHL ice. Shane sent him one perfect pass, right where Petit-Frère should’ve been able to take the puck in stride and shoot on-goal. Except the kid hesitated, collecting the puck rather than taking the shot, and the opportunity evaporated.

The assumed-to-be-straight version of Shane Hollander could’ve rolled his eyes and moved on, secure in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be playing with a sub-par call-up for very long. The coaches would know that he’d made the right pass and that was that. But now Shane’s perfectionism had changed targets. He needed to make Petit-Frère look good, so that people would want to play on Shane’s line, would call him a team-player rather than flashy.

So Shane stopped sending the kid perfect passes. He started putting it into Petit-Frère's feet, where a panicking teenager would find it. It was an objectively worse pass. It cost him half a second and any chance of a rush, and it worked. In the third period Petit-Frère scored a goal on a puck Shane had put into a place that no coach would have called correct.

Nobody said anything to him about it.

But he caught the coaches watching him on the bench afterward with an expression he recognized from two years of watching men look at him. He followed their eyes to a jubilant Petit-Frère, watched them watch Petit-Frère grab Shane in a quick hug, just like he would’ve hugged one of his straight teammates who’d assisted on a goal. Shane was a twenty-year-old rookie in a preseason game; most rookies would focus on padding their highlights. Most rookies wouldn’t downgrade their own game by ten or fifteen percent for the sake of the team’s success. Shane didn’t need to read their clipboards to know what they were writing: adaptable, mature, team-player.

When he skated past the bench, though, Rozanov met his eyes, unimpressed. Boring, he mouthed to Shane.

Looking at Rozanov’s lips, Shane felt a shudder go down his entire spine. When he thought back on the game that night, he didn’t remember the assist or even the goal he’d scored himself. No, all Shane remembered was the feeling of Rozanov’s eyes on him.

~ ~ ~

Anderson found him in the room after the fourth game with a bag of ice on his shoulder.

Trevor Anderson was thirty-five and had a C on his sweater and had once, in 2004, been the player everybody said Shane was going to be. He'd centered the Bears' first line for ten years. He had centered the second line since about November of last season, and everyone knew why, and he had never said a public word about it.

"You're getting away with murder on the dot," Anderson said.

Shane, who was 61% in the circle for the preseason and had been quietly delighted about it, said, "Sir?"

"Don't call me sir, I'm not your dad." Anderson sat down. "You're winning them on the draw. Hands. You're quick and you're strong and these kids are neither, so you just take it. That's fine. That works for eight more days."

"Okay."

"Then you're going to line up against a real vet, and he's going to know what you're doing before you do it, because he'll have watched you, and you'll go 3-for-14 and you'll want to die." He said this pleasantly. "Faceoffs aren't hands up here. They're paper. You want a guy's last two hundred draws against right-shot centers on the road? Ask. It exists. Nobody's going to hand it to you."

Shane got a pen.

Anderson watched him write it down and something moved across his face that Shane could not read.

"Yeah," Anderson said. "Okay."

~ ~ ~

In the second-to-last preseason game, LeClaire played Shane with the starters, third line center, with Carmichael and Sebbin on his wings. It was good news, genuinely. Third line meant LeClaire had last change at home and could keep him off the other team's top pair. It meant a matchup against the other team's third line defenders, which in this league meant a twenty-six-year-old with heavy feet instead of a Norris candidate. It also meant thirteen minutes of ice-time instead of nineteen, but it would be higher-value. He’d never played an eighty-plus game season before, and this would keep him fresher for longer. Carmichael and Sebbin were genuinely good, better than all of the prospect wingers he’d been playing with for the past month, lightyears better than guys like Petit-Frère.

It meant he was a center. It meant that whatever they thought about him, they had not decided to make him somebody's winger and hide him there.

Rozanov was centering the first line. He was the same age as Shane, and he’d been drafted the same year, and he was the face of the entire franchise, and it should’ve been Shane. It should’ve been Shane going first overall. It should’ve been Shane who the franchise was built around. It would’ve been Shane, if he hadn’t been so fucking stupid, if he hadn’t slept with a wannabe model, if he hadn’t—

Shane stopped that thought in its tracks, as easily as he stopped a puck on the ice. Dr. Mireault would be proud of him for not spiraling into a panic attack; they’d been working on that for nearly two years. He was lucky to be the third line center. He knew that. It hadn’t happened the way he’d wanted, but he was in the NHL. He was the first openly gay player in the league, and the Bears were giving him a chance to prove his worth. Everyone had to start somewhere; it was always going to be harder for him, but at least he didn’t have the burden of keeping his sexuality secret anymore. He was grateful to the Bears organization. They’d treated him well, and he was grateful.

~ ~ ~

Carmichael was twenty-seven and had fourteen goals in a season exactly once but never less than ten, and he’d made an entire career out of that consistency. Sebbin was twenty-five, played the wall like it owed him money, and was the only man on the roster who wore his socks over his shin pads like it was 1987.

Neither of them made a thing out of it. Carmichael said, "You gonna give me the puck?" and Shane said, "If you're there," and Carmichael said, "I'm always there," which turned out to be the single truest statement anybody made in that building all month.

They played almost twelve minutes together in the last home preseason game and generated four scoring chances. After the second one Sebbin skated past Shane and said, without any particular emphasis, "Yeah, that's gonna work."

Shane wrote it in the Notes app under the hockey stuff.

This line could really work.

He read it back later that night and understood that it was the first entry on the list that wasn't a correction.

~ ~ ~

Then they took him off his line for the last preseason game, in Buffalo.

MARLEAU — ROZANOV — HOLLANDER

On the wing. He hadn’t played wing in years. The logic was obvious. LeClaire wanted a look at them. There was a chance that Shane could make it onto the power play, eventually, where he’d almost certainly be on Rozanov’s wing. This was what the preseason was for. It meant nothing at all.

It was also going to be the easiest hockey he had ever played, and he knew that before he got on the ice. Playing on the wing wasn’t a demotion; it was a reduction. All the thinking Shane did in a shift — the low support, the first man back, the read on whether to leave the zone, the constant recalculation of where three people were going to be — was gone. He had a lane. He went up it. Somewhere behind him a Russian was doing all of the actual work.

It went like this: ten minutes into the first period, Shane took a puck off the wall in his own end and looked up, and Rozanov was already gone, not going, gone. He went through the neutral zone in a diagonal that made no sense at all until you understood that he'd left before the puck was Shane's, on the theory that it was about to be. Shane put it into a space between two Sabres, and it landed on Rozanov’s tape, and the whole building made a noise.

The goalie saved it. That didn't matter even slightly. When they got back to the bench, Rozanov’s eyes were enormous as he sat down next to Shane, which was not his seat.

"Again," he said.

"He was standing you up at the line, you're going to get—"

"Again, Hollander."

They did it again in the second period and this time the shot went in. Shane had his first assist as a first-line winger, even though it was the preseason. Suddenly, he knew two things: that goal was going to get replayed all week by commentators hungry for drama, and he was going to make the power play. Then Rozanov crashed into him, just like he would any other teammate on an assist, and Marleau hugged them both, and Shane tried to pretend that he couldn’t feel exactly where Rozanov’s arm had been around his neck, like a brand.

He was going to have to be extremely careful.

~ ~ ~

In the hotel that night, Rozanov knocked on his door. After looking through the peephole, Shane's entire chest went sideways and then reassembled itself, all in under a second, and he opened the door with his face completely blank.

Rozanov was in the hallway with Marleau and St-Simon. Marleau was holding a laptop.

"We are watching tape from second period," Rozanov announced. "Marleau says his stretch pass in first is better than yours. Marleau is delusional. You come, you tell him."

"I—" said Shane.

"He thinks his own is better, the cocky bastard," Marleau said. "This is a kangaroo court."

"Is not court, is review—"

They watched it in Marleau's room, four of them, for forty minutes. Shane's pass was better and everybody agreed except Marleau. Rozanov sat on the bed next to Shane, like it was nothing, just like he’d hugged Shane after their goal today, like it was nothing. They finished the film review and St-Simon complained about being hungry. Rozanov suggested room service.

“In my fuckin’ room?” Marleau scowled. “I’m not paying for your ass, Rozanov.”

Rozanov made a wounded noise. “I am poor, still on ELC, yes? You are vet with big contract, help out the young guys like us?”

He leaned into Shane’s side, and Shane’s breath caught. When Rozanov pulled back, he didn’t return all the way. Rozanov’s knee was just barely touching Shane’s thigh, and Shane had never been aware of his thigh like he was now. At least, not outside of a hockey rink.

“Fuck off, Roz. Everyone knows you’re getting a mega contract this offseason.” St-Simon brushed the fingers of his right hand against his left palm, like he was scattering imaginary dollar bills. “Your agent give you any hints? Eight mil AAV? Nine?”

“Ten!” crowed Marleau.

“Even Ilya Rozanov cannot get ten mil from greedy hockey bastards,” Rozanov grumbled in the third person. “And next year is not this year. Am playing for measly nine-hundred-K.”

“I weep for you, Rozanov. Nine-hundred-K base, plus a cool mil in bonuses, you lying bastard. So poor. No wonder you’re begging for food like an orphan boy.”

“Da. Tolstoy write about me. Or, what is English one?”

“Oliver Twist,” Shane said absently, ninety-nine percent of his attention still on the knee touching his thigh.

“Yes! Twist! Hollander is smart like…” Rozanov struggled for a second before saying something in Russian. St-Simon chirped him for his shitty English.

“Anyway, is not point. I do not like talk of money like this. It makes me, ah, I don’t know word. But my agent loves to tell me all the ways I can fuck it up, never get paid a buck.”

The other three guys went through increasingly ludicrous scenarios for how Rozanov could screw up his payday, and Shane’s mind drifted instead of hearing them. His negotiation on his ELC had taken nine days, and his mom had been vicious about the two-way numbers and games-played thresholds, because those were the only things they could actually control. She had fought over each of them like they were the deed to the house. Shane was lucky to have Yuna Hollander on his side, but even then, negotiating with an NHL team as a gay player had been… unpleasant.

Rozanov's knee was still touching him.

At the end, Rozanov left first. He clapped his hand on Shane’s shoulder, and it might’ve lingered a half-second too long. He said “Was good pass, Hollander” into Shane’s ear and Shane was so focused on the whisper of breath against his skin that he almost forgot they were nominally in Marleau’s room to look at Shane’s film. Then Rozanov was gone.

Shane somehow made small talk with Marleau for ten minutes before he went back to his room and lay on top of the covers with his shoes on.

Eleven for eleven, he thought. They all do it in the dark.

And then, staring at a hotel ceiling in Buffalo, New York, he finally got there, and it was so obvious that he almost said it aloud.

They all did it in the dark because dark was where you went if you were afraid of being seen. But if a man wasn't afraid of being seen… if a man was afraid of being alone with you, specifically, and had spent a month arranging for it never once to happen, in a building where the two of you were on the same team and it would have taken him no effort at all—

That was a man who was more afraid of what he’d do with Shane alone than what people would see them do in public.

Shane very carefully stopped that thought before it could go any further. He pulled out his phone. He sent an email to Dr. Mireault, asking her if she could make some time for him this weekend.

Chapter End Notes

Shane is more aware of the anti-LGBT situation in Russia currently than he was in canon. That’s intentional, because he’s now an out gay athlete who plays in a sport with lots of Russian representation, and he’s not desperately in self-denial about his sexuality.

Chapter 3

The first one was a bad goal.

Shane knew it in the half-second between the release and the net, which was long enough to be certain and much too short to do anything about it. Nine minutes into the home opener, Carmichael chipped the puck off the right wall and sent it to him. Shane took it in stride, cut inside the defenseman’s near shoulder, and shot from a spot where every percentage he had ever been taught said pass.

The goalie saw him going for the shot, read it somehow on Shane’s body, and he went down. It was a good guess; Shane had been planning to shoot low, but he saw the movement of the goalie and the defender out of position, and on reflex Shane’s hands went high instead of low. It wasn’t planned and Shane would probably never be able to replicate it in practice, which meant it was a lucky shot, not a good one. It went in anyway.

Then, the noise struck him like something physical, before Carmichael hit him from behind and Sebbin hit them both and somebody’s glove was in his ear. Above all of it nineteen thousand people were cheering for Shane. He had been through this before. The home crowd at Boston was loud, but the Canadian fans at World Junior Finals were at least as loud, if not louder. Shane waved to the crowd because that’s what they expected from him. Then he tapped Carmichael’s shin pad twice and went to the bench.

Rozanov leaned forward from three seats down, past Marleau, with open interest.

“You are angry,” he said.

“Why would I be angry?”

“Wow. You are extremely angry. First NHL goal. Terrible night for Hollander.”

“It was a fluke,” Shane admitted. “He went down early.”

“Ah.” Rozanov sat back, satisfied, as though he’d already known. “Yes. He did.”

~ ~ ~

By American Thanksgiving he had twenty-four points in twenty-two games and Shane was the runaway favorite for the Calder.

The reason was boring and Shane had known it since September. He was good enough to play on the first line, but he was playing on the third. Boston's depth at center was genuinely terrifying: Rozanov might win the Art Ross this year, and even at thirty-five years old Anderson was still better than some NHL first-line centers, so putting Shane third made the Bears a matchup nightmare. It wasn't easy, by any means. Even a third-pair NHL defenseman was head-and-shoulders better than anything he'd faced in the CHL. Shane was playing the best hockey of his life against the best opponents he'd ever seen. Still, it was almost unfair, having a player of Shane's caliber in the spot they had him.

The downside was the press podium.

Dana's original plan had been to keep him away from it: one availability a week, scrums at his stall, nothing live. That plan had lasted until the Bears worked out that every reporter in the league wanted to ask Ilya Rozanov what it was like to play with a gay man, and that Rozanov with a microphone was a ticking time bomb. So they stopped putting Rozanov out and started putting Shane there instead. Shane, who was in the Calder race, which was a good enough excuse. Shane, who never said anything. It had taken him about three seconds to understand that his job at the podium was to stand between the press and Ilya Rozanov.

He was good at it. He hated it, of course. He’d hated it before the draft, and he’d hated it even more afterwards. But it was a part of hockey, so Shane studied reporters like he studied opposing defensemen. He practiced and trained and perfected. Shane had never done anything where he wasn’t the best.

Tonight, he gazed out on the twenty-two reporters in the room, and he knew what most of them were going to say before they even opened their mouths. The exact words would be different, but they always asked variants of the same questions.

Picard from TSN, front row, would open with the stat line and then pivot into something else. Nobody here would say the word gay out loud, which happened less than people assumed. Shane wished they would. At least the straightforward ones committed. Instead, somebody would ask about distractions: is it a distraction for the room, do you worry it's a distraction for the room, has anyone said anything. Probably Gagnon, who’d written a piece in French about how the league was getting less tough, less masculine. That one hadn’t even bothered Shane, who’d been amused by the irony of Gagnon being too cowardly to publish it in English.

Yost was in the second row with her recorder already up. She had a gay brother; Shane knew because she'd put it in the op-ed she wrote in October about how he was changing the sport, which his mother had emailed him and which he had not been able to finish. Yost would ask something intending to be nice about it. Maybe the role model question. That one he'd been answering since he was twelve; the slant of his eyes had made it inescapable, and the only difference was that the NHL at least pretended to want Asian guys in the league.

Anderson sat down beside him and put his elbows on the table, settling in easily. He'd been at these for over a decade. He took a bottle of water off the table, unscrewed it, did not drink from it, and set it down. He rarely looked over at Shane at these things, and rarely jumped in to take questions for him, which Shane thought was trust and not hostility.

"Hollander. Picard, TSN. Great goal in the first. That's eleven and thirteen, puts you six up on Skinner."

Shane smiled and nodded like Picard had told him something he didn’t already know. The lights were hot on his face and he hadn't showered and there was still tape residue on his wrists.

"Bit heavier on the assists. Any thoughts on why that is?"

"That's a credit to my linemates. Carmichael and Sebbin are fantastic wingers and they're the reason I'm anywhere near that list."

Humble. Always humble. Shane remembered a nineteen-year-old Rozanov telling a room full of reporters that he intended to score fifty goals in his rookie season. They would eviscerate Shane if he was arrogant enough to say that.

"Follow-up. There's a line of thinking that your totals are inflated by the depth of this roster. Third-line minutes, favorable matchups. What would you say to that?"

In other words: is it real, or did you luck into it. Dana had asked him this one in her office in September, phrased as cruelly as she could manage, twice, until his answer stopped having any edges. The whole hockey world could not stop talking about it, whether he'd do this anywhere else, whether he'd do it without the scheme. They'd put his projection up next to Rozanov's and note that Rozanov did it on a worse team, and never once mention that a worse team meant more ice, more power play, more rope. Then they'd smile at each other and say that Hollander was pretty good, but, well.

"Every point in this league is hard to get," Shane said. "I'm just glad to be a part of it."

“Speaking of linemates — Crimme, from Versus — how are you getting along with the team at this point in the season? Any trouble fitting into the locker room?”

Anderson picked at the label on his water bottle.

Hm. Shane had been sure that Gagnon would be the one to ask the distraction question. He was more annoyed about getting it wrong than he was about the question itself.

“The guys are great,” Shane said guilelessly. “There’s no better locker room in the league.”

"Hollander. Michelle Yost, NBC. There was a scuffle with Samson in the second. It looked like he was saying something to you, but the broadcast didn't catch it. Would you like to clarify?"

She asked it gently, with real warmth in her voice.

Yost was one of the good ones. She thought she was giving Shane a chance to tell 'his side of the story'. What she was actually giving him was an invitation to make a I-said-you-said accusation about a man who would deny it. He got these questions all the time, and it was worst from people like Yost, who thought she was helping. At least the homophobes were trying to end his career.

He leaned into the mic.

"I think Samson's exact words were 'give me the effing puck, Hollander’."

The room laughed. Yost laughed. Anderson's mouth moved about a millimeter. Shane held the pleasant face until it was over, and it was over fast, because they had what they came for.

"Hollander. Trent Boyce, uh, Coast to Coast Hockey, it's a site, we're— sorry." Somebody in the second row exhaled heavily through his nose. "On your zone entries. You're carrying in on the left almost every time against teams that press, but in Ottawa you dumped and chased four times in the first, and I couldn't tell if that was the matchup or if that was you."

Shane put both forearms on the table.

"That's the matchup and me. Their left pair stands you up at the line, so if I carry it I'm giving it away at the blue with three of us already past it, and that's the wrong side of a two-on-one going the other way. If I put it behind them, their D has to turn and I've got Carmy first man in."

"So the read is on their gap, or—"

"The read's on their weak-side D's feet, actually."

He talked for four minutes. He gave Boyce the thing about walking the puck too far into the zone against a stand-up pair, which he had never said to a national panel and never would, and then the correction he'd made about it in October, which was on his phone in an app under a list of other corrections. At some point Boyce stopped writing and just listened, wide-eyed.

"Last one," Dana said, from the back wall.

"Hollander. Colin Tollridge, Sportsnet." Shane braced without moving. Tollridge always wanted a scoop, and there was one kind of question that no one had asked yet tonight, the most dangerous one. "There's legislation that passed in Arkhangelsk this year, and similar bills moving in other regions. Have you and Rozanov talked about that at all? Any thoughts on what it means for the room?"

The most dangerous questions were about Rozanov, and about politics. How’s the chemistry with Rozanov? What’s it like playing behind him? Last game it had been: He’s been very vocal in his support — has that meant something to you? And Shane had replied Playing with Rozanov is incredible. That goal in the third was a work of art. Bland, boring, nothing. It was practically Shane’s specialty.

Rozanov, of course, had chirped him about it for two days straight. Oh, my goal in the third period was like artwork, you say? and so Shane gave him back dry pointers about how his back skate had been a couple centimeters too far forward on the hitch, and Rozanov had made that noise where— Anyway. The point was that Shane absolutely could not give the media a single soundbite here. His job in this room was to protect Rozanov. That was the organization’s priority, and Shane knew it.

"I don't really follow Russian politics," Shane said, like Russian politics was an abstract concept and not a matter of anyone’s personal safety. "Rozanov and I mostly talk about film. He's got a great eye for how other teams defend the rush; he called the Ottawa gap before I did, actually, which he'll tell you about at length if you let him."

Two or three of them laughed. Anderson wasn’t picking at his water bottle anymore. Despite himself, Shane felt a thrill of satisfaction, like he did after a perfect drill in practice. It was another skill mastered. Anyone looking in from the outside would think it was effortless. The hundreds of hours of practice that had gone into this were invisible, exactly like Shane wanted.

Shane spent ninety more seconds filibustering with the Ottawa gap thing, before Dana cut in.

"That's all we've got, folks," Dana said.

In the hallway she walked next to him for about fifteen steps without saying anything.

"That was good," she said. "Do not get better at that."

"What?"

“The pivot to hockey was great.” She was writing something as she walked. “It’s not going to get better than that, so don’t get creative. The best possible outcome is that—”

“They get bored, I know.” It was on page eight of Dana’s intro packet. The best thing Shane could do was bore reporters enough that they stopped asking the questions. “I’m good at boring. Rozanov tells me so, all the time.”

Dana huffed out a laugh. “Keep going like this, kid, and you’ve got a real future here.”

~ ~ ~

The other teams weren’t really much of a problem.

This was the part that nobody believed and that Shane found difficult to explain. The overwhelming majority of professional hockey players in North America responded to the first openly gay man in the sport by playing hockey against him at a high level and then getting on a bus. There were two hundred faceoffs where the other guy said nothing, looked at the puck, and went about his evening. People said shit to get under his skin, and when it became obvious that it wouldn’t get under his skin, they stopped.

There were maybe six men, over three months, who did something quietly decent. A thirty-four-year-old defenseman in New Jersey said “play well, kid” at a stoppage, once, without turning his head, and then cross-checked him in the kidneys eleven minutes later, just hockey, no more and no less. A goalie in Carolina came out of his crease at the end of a whistle to tell him his stick was cracked. Nobody made a thing of any of it.

Then there were the chirpers, who were tedious and unimaginative and who Shane genuinely did not think about. There was a version of this that people wanted to hear about, and Shane was constitutionally unable to provide it. Somebody said a slur in the second period of a Tuesday game in Long Island and Shane’s honest, complete, unedited reaction was that he had walked the puck too far into the zone before releasing it and had therefore turned a two-on-one into a two-on-two with a delay of about a third of a second.

The buildings were worse than the players, and even the buildings were mostly fine. There was a sign in Philadelphia, and a chant in one section in Ottawa that got shouted down by the rest of the section, which had been the strangest ninety seconds of Shane’s professional life. There was an away team fan at a Boston game who leaned over the glass in warmups with his mouth working, and a kid of about nine standing two rows behind him in a Hollander jersey, watching the man do it, learning something.

Shane had been prepared for all of that. What he hadn’t prepared for was what his own team did.

In Winnipeg, in the first period, a winger named Devlin checked Shane into the boards, just on the wrong side of dirty, and barked out a string of slurs that should’ve gotten him penalty minutes but which the refs ignored. Then Kohn, who was twenty-six and had four hundred and forty career penalty minutes, took his gloves off and threw Devlin down onto the ice.

It wasn’t much of a fight, a winger versus an enforcer. Kohn got hit twice and put the guy down with a haymaker that knocked out two of Devlin’s teeth and split the skin on Kohn’s knuckles. Probably someone from Winnipeg should’ve gotten between them. But Kohn had gotten there too fast, and Shane realized that Kohn had been waiting for this. Then Shane saw the satisfied look on LeClaire’s face and realized that they’d all been waiting for this. LeClaire usually put Kohn on defense when Shane’s line was out. Kohn had probably been watching every check that Shane took the whole season, looking for the one that went too far, for the guy who was going to say those words.

Shane sat on the bench with his stick across his knees and felt himself go completely cold.

Afterward, Shane found Kohn and said: “Hey. You don’t have to do that for me.”

Kohn squinted at Shane, nonplussed. “Okay, rookie,” he said, and went away.

Shane sat there and understood that he had done it wrong, and he didn’t know why. He spent forty minutes drafting a text to Doyle that he did not send.

Anderson found him at the gate with two coffees and did not offer him either one.

"You told Kohn not to fight."

"I don't want guys getting suspended over me."

"Mm." Anderson sat down one seat over, leaving the gap. "How many career points has Kohn got?"

Shane knew. He knew everybody's. "Seventeen."

"And penalty minutes?"

"Four hundred and forty."

“Uh huh.” Anderson looked at him. Shane looked back, uncomprehending, and Anderson sighed. “You’re smarter than this, Hollander. But you’re self-obsessed, just like every superstar rookie I’ve ever known. Not everything is about you, kid. What happens to a guy like Kohn if he doesn’t punch the asshole who got too chippy with his center?”

Oh. He’d get cut.

Shane didn’t answer Anderson’s question, but the captain must’ve known that Shane got it, because he handed Shane the second coffee cup. Shane took it.

“You’re the one who wanted to play this game, Hollander, even with all the other stuff.” Anderson didn’t bother explaining what he meant by the other stuff. “And you’re good at keeping it off the ice and out the locker room. Really. It’s impressed the hell outta everyone. But this whole thing? Acting like you got something to prove so you gotta do it all yourself? That’s you letting the other shit onto the ice.”

Shane took a sip of coffee to hide his grimace. “Understood. Thanks captain. Won’t happen again.”

Anderson studied him for a heavy moment before nodding and standing up. He stopped, and for a second Shane thought there was something else. Whatever it was, he seemed to think better of it. "Get your bag. They're boarding."

Shane added it to his list: Don’t try so hard to avoid it that you make everything about it anyway.

The Bears were professionals. They weren’t doing Shane any favors. They supported Shane because Shane helped them win games, just like every other player. It was exactly what he’d wanted from them. It was exactly what he’d dreamed about, a league full of people who took the game as seriously as he did, who’d look past his transgressions because what happened on the ice was the most important thing. Kohn wasn’t being an ‘ally’ or whatever. He was being an enforcer, the job he was being paid eight-hundred and fifty-thousand dollars this year to do.

Shane didn’t need allies or pride parades or any of that. He was an NHL center, and he needed defensemen who’d have his back. And that’s what the Bears had given him, nothing more, nothing less.

~ ~ ~

He made sure to call Doyle every time the guy got a point, which meant that he’d called four times. It seemed like the kind of thing that friends did. Shane watched all of Providence’s games anyway, because someone would eventually be called up this season to fill in for injury. If Carmichael or Sebbin missed a game, there was a decent chance that the call-up would play on Shane’s line. So of course he watched the Providence games. And Shane secretly hoped that Doyle would get called up someday, though almost certainly not this year. Shane would slit his own wrists before admitting that he needed someone supportive— Anyway. The Bears were great, but Doyle was the first actual friend Shane had made since the draft.

Doyle answered on the second ring, in a car, delighted.

“Hollander!”

“Doyle. Nice assist.” Shane resisted the urge to tell Doyle how he could’ve gotten the pass better. Even he knew that most people wouldn’t appreciate that.

“Thanks, buddy!”

They chatted for a while about their games. Doyle had thirteen minutes of ice in his last match because Kowalchuk got the flu. He had four points in fifteen games, and he’d played on the last shift of a one-goal game, and he was thrilled about it. Their worlds were so different that sometimes it made Shane’s head spin, but he was happy for Doyle, genuinely. Doyle was getting real ice time as a rookie, and he was turning his opportunities into highlights. He was on track to score over twenty points this season, which was the kind of solid first-year overperformance that would make him a lock for Providence’s roster next year, maybe even get him up to the second line if he kept improving at this rate. Shane was trying to work himself up to inviting Doyle to his parents’ cottage so they could train together in the offseason.

“Hey,” Doyle said, interrupting Shane’s thoughts. “Did you ever call Brian?”

“Uh,” Shane said. Brian was one of Doyle’s former classmates at Harvard. He was twenty-two, had swum for the Crimson, and had hopes of making it to the London Olympics this summer. He was a couple centimeters taller than Shane, with broad shoulders and long arms, and his hair was always a little bit dry from all the chlorine.

The thing was, Shane had no trouble finding a guy to sleep with. Boston had dozens of universities and like, a hundred-thousand undergraduates. The city was also sports-obsessed. Shane probably had twenty dick-pics right now waiting for him in his Twitter DMs. He was discreet about hooking up; even though he was out, he knew he still couldn’t be too in-your-face about his gayness. His focus this year was on hockey, not relationships. But yeah, he got laid every week or so. Twice by Brian.

“No pressure, man. I’m just being nosy,” Doyle said.

“Uh, no. I mean— Yes, I called Brian.”

“And?” Doyle sounded eager.

“It was, uh, fine.”

“Whoof. Fine, he says.”

“It was good, I mean. Shit. Please don’t tell him I said ‘fine’.”

Doyle laughed. “Yeah, I’m not an idiot. Don’t stress, kid. You don’t have to keep seeing him if you don’t want to.”

“No, he’s great.” And it was true. Brian was great. He was good-looking, and he understood what it was like, being gay in sports. He was happy to be discreet, because he was trying to make his own career and wasn’t interested in ending up on the news as Shane Hollander’s beau. Brian was dedicated to his Olympic training, and so he didn’t mind that Shane’s priority was hockey. “I’m just focused on my game, you know? We’ve met up a couple times, but both of us are pretty busy. Maybe after I’ve got a season under my belt and London’s over.”

Doyle agreed easily, because it made sense. It was the same excuse he’d used his entire life: I’m busy with hockey had gotten him out of tons of unwanted matchmaking attempts. It was just annoying that he was still lying, even though his sexuality was out in the open now.

Because, yeah, he was focused on hockey, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was Rozanov.

~ ~ ~

The… thing with Rozanov was threaded through the last twenty-two games, through the practices and the hockey and the points.

LeClaire ran battle drills on Tuesdays and everybody hated them, except Shane, because— well. Battle drills were physical, man-on-man, exhausting. The first time Rozanov made a point of pitting himself against Shane, it was the third Tuesday of October, early in the season. It was just the two of them, in the corner, fighting over the puck. This was one of the least technical aspects of hockey. The whistle blew and you had to come out of the corner with the biscuit. There was no scheme in it and nowhere to hide. But of course, like all things in Shane’s life, he had a list of rules and tips for how to go about it.

The whistle blew, and Shane reached out with his stick. He knew that Rozanov liked making body contact in these situations, muscling players out of the way. So Shane absorbed the contact, tapped the puck off the wall, and then spun around his back shoulder. Rozanov was so focused on jostling Shane that his weight took him a step out of the way, which was unrecoverable at this level. Shane’s spin had already taken him back towards where he’d tapped the puck, and he came out of the corner a second later with it on the blade of his stick. He resisted the urge to tap it into the empty net, because that would just be gloating.

It was pretty. Perfect. Exactly how he’d been coached to deal with aggressive players in that situation. Somewhere behind him, guys were hollering and chirping Rozanov. LeClaire was smiling as he wrote something down on his clipboard.

And Rozanov… he didn’t even need to say anything. Their eyes met, and Shane already knew exactly what he was thinking. Boring. It was sitting between them, the pent-up energy of the physical drill, that Shane had dodged out of instead of meeting head-on. Rozanov had come straight at him and Shane had danced away. And he’d won.

It didn’t feel like winning.

Next week, Rozanov didn’t let him win cleanly. And, if Shane was being honest, he let Rozanov catch him, because part of him wanted it too.

Rozanov put his body between Shane and the puck. Shane came in underneath him and got a shoulder into his ribs and lifted. They were pressed together shoulder-to-hip, but that was just the drill. It was ordinary. Shane had done it a million times with hundreds of guys throughout his career: sticks, edges, an elbow, weight. Rozanov’s forearm came across Shane’s back and pinned him to the glass at the shoulder blade and held him there, which was legal and correct and precisely where a forearm goes. Shane’s face was against the boards, and he could feel the man behind him breathing.

He got half a stride. He kicked the puck onto his own backhand and Rozanov’s hand landed on his hip.

That was the drill too. You put a hand on a guy’s hip in a corner because your eyes are on the puck and your hand tells you where his weight is, and everyone in the National Hockey League does it four hundred times a season, and Shane had done it himself to a winger in New Jersey on Saturday.

The whistle went at eight seconds. Neither of them stopped.

Shane always stopped when the whistle blew. He was a team-player. Even before the draft— even before, he’d been a perfect, obedient kid, always listening to his coaches. But the hand on his hip tightened, and Shane knew that Rozanov was daring him to stop. So instead, Shane got an edge and turned into him, all the way into him, chest to chest, and Rozanov made a low sound that was mostly effort, and they went along the wall like that for another four or five seconds with the puck somewhere under their skates and the next pair waiting at the line.

LeClaire blew it again, twice, annoyed.

Shane came off the boards with the puck. He was aware that he had the puck. He was not aware of anything else in the building, because his heart was beating fast and his skin was flushed and it was all just hockey. You sweat when you play hockey.

“It’s just a drill, boys,” Feller said from the blue line.

The room laughed. Anderson grumbled something about hyper-competitive kids. Rozanov skated back to the line and took a water bottle off the boards and sprayed it in Marleau’s face, and Marleau shrieked, and that was the end of it.

But before he’d skated away, Rozanov smirked at Shane like he was the one who came away with the puck. Because Rozanov had won, really. Yeah, Shane had gotten the rubber, but there’d been nothing perfect or precise about it.

~ ~ ~

They took draws against each other in practice, because there were four centers on the roster and two of them were Rozanov and Shane. Flow drills, special teams, scrimmage: on an ordinary weekday morning they came down opposite each other twenty or thirty times.

It was, by an enormous margin, the thing the two of them did together most.

Here was how you take a faceoff. You come down into a crouch with your face about a foot from another man’s face and your stick crossed over his, and you look at his hands, because his hands tell you what he is doing a fifth of a second before his body does. That was the technique. Shane had been reading hands from a foot away since he was six years old, and there was nobody alive who could have said that he was doing anything except his job.

So he looked.

Rozanov set his top hand high on the knob with his thumb over the end, which was old-fashioned, and his bottom hand set further down than anyone else on the team. There were three centimeters of bare forearm above the cuff of his glove and the tendons in it moved when he changed his grip. He changed his grip constantly. He reseated his top hand a quarter-turn to the left about a second before any draw he meant to win clean, and Shane had known that since the fourth week of September and had never mentioned it to a living soul, including Rozanov.

By mid-October he could tell from the second knuckle of Rozanov’s third finger. By November, he could tell from the way Rozanov breathed.

Because that was the other thing. A rink is cold and men breathe hard in practice, and from a foot away Shane could see it and feel it, on his cheek and at the corner of his mouth, warm and then gone. Two short ones and then nothing meant Rozanov was going to tie him up. One long one out through the mouth meant he was coming forward. Shane didn’t even need to look away from Rozanov’s hands to get the hint, because he could feel the way Rozanov breathed, physically, on his own skin.

Rozanov didn’t look at Shane’s hands.

He looked at Shane’s face, instead, for some incomprehensible reason. Rozanov was an incredible player, so it wasn’t like his technique was often wrong or sloppy, even though it was far from the technical perfection that Shane preferred. But in this, he was completely insane. No one looked at their opponent’s face instead of their hands. Shane must’ve had a tell, but he hadn’t been able to find it, yet.

Regardless, while Shane was learning every detail of Rozanov’s grip, he could feel the man’s eyes on him like a brand. He wondered if Rozanov could draw his face from memory. He wondered if Rozanov was haunted by Shane’s face when he closed his eyes, if he dreamed about it the way that Shane dreamed about Rozanov’s hands. Shane knew every inch of the man’s hands, wrists, and forearms. Except that Rozanov wore gloves, and Shane couldn’t study Rozanov off the ice, and so his bare skin was left to Shane’s imagination, the knuckles, the pulse of blood through the prominent veins. He knew exactly how Rozanov gripped his stick, restlessly, like he couldn’t help but toy with it.

So, yeah, Shane dreamed of those hands. He dreamed about feeling Rozanov’s eyes on him while Shane watched Rozanov’s hands squeezing around—

Shane looked up, at Rozanov's face, because he couldn't look at his hands anymore and if anyone asked, he could say that he was trying out Rozanov's technique. Except their eyes met, and Shane could feel the heat in his cheeks, and to anyone else, he could lie and say that he was flushed from practice. But Rozanov's face was inches away from his own, and he could see every speck of color in Rozanov's eyes, and he knew that Rozanov could see what Shane had been thinking. And for a split second, Shane thought he could see Rozanov thinking it back, and Shane’s breath hitched, and Rozanov's eyes dropped down to his lips—

And then the puck dropped, and Rozanov swept it cleanly.

~ ~ ~

By the twenty-third game of the season, LeClaire had sent Shane out with the first power play unit five times. He’d gotten just over ten minutes of power play ice time and recorded one assist. Every time Shane came off the ice after the power play, he felt like a man dying of thirst, drinking only seawater. Each sip left him desperate for more.

Carmichael and Sebbin were good hockey players. Both were better than anybody Shane had played with in Kingston. Carmichael could kill a play at the blue line as well as anyone in the league, and Sebbin had scored seven times already off Shane’s assists. Shane liked them. He liked them a great deal.

They could not do what Shane could do.

If Shane made a certain kind of pass — a no-look that went through two sets of skates and arrived where a teammate was going to be in half a second instead of where he was standing — Carmichael would not be there. So Shane didn’t make that pass. He made the other one, to Carmichael’s stick, on his forehand, at a weight Carmichael liked, and Carmichael did something good with it, and the Bears’ third line was maybe the best third line in hockey.

It was a challenge, the second-best kind. Shane had to be perfect, and in being perfect, he elevated his linemates to the next level. He sent passes to where he knew that Sebbin was going to be, instead of where he wanted Sebbin to be. He skated perfectly around defenders to get exactly into the lane where Carmichael liked to send the puck. He deked right to pull an opponent a half-step off because Sebbin shot best on clean looks. He’d done this sort of thing in the O, too, but not against opponents as good as this, and not with linemates who were good enough to make it worthwhile. It was challenging Shane, and it was making him a better player, even though it was making him play smaller.

The power play was different, because on the power play he went out with Rozanov.

The first time, back in the second week of October, Shane had put a puck into a space where a player ought to be, and Rozanov had been there. Shane’s pass had set up Rozanov and Marleau for a two-on-one. Rozanov drew his stick back like he was shooting, made the defender bite on it, then sent the pass to Marleau for the goal. So Shane’s pass hadn’t shown up on the stat sheet, but he’d been a part of the goal, and it was because he was the only person who could put the puck where only Rozanov could get it, and everyone in the stadium had known it.

~ ~ ~

The penalty came at 8:51 of the second, tied at two. LeClaire looked down the bench. Shane was already standing, which he would think about later.

They ran a 1-3-1: Feller at the point on defense, Marleau at the right flank because he shot leftie, Rozanov left flank, Anderson net front, and Shane on the bumper. For the first eighty seconds there was nothing. No shots, no chances, the penalty kill doing its job.

They were also the best eighty seconds of hockey Shane had played all season.

He made a pass through two defenders and Rozanov was there. He passed again from the other side, harder, into a space that didn’t exist yet, and Rozanov was there before it opened. He faked a shot he had no intention of taking, and three men bought it, and he moved it down to the corner and had it back on his tape four seconds later without having to ask for it. Nobody needed protecting. Nobody needed the puck at a particular speed on a particular side. There was no version of this in which Shane had to think about what the other guy couldn’t do.

He had never felt like this in Kingston. In Kingston he had been the only one.

At 1:19 of the PP, Rozanov took it below the goal line.

You weren’t supposed to do that on a power play. There was nothing down there. The entire architecture of a man advantage was built on making four men cover five in the space above the dots, and taking the puck behind the net gave the kill a rest and earned you nothing.

Two of the four went with him anyway. They always did. That was what it meant to play on a team with Ilya Rozanov. That left two defenders on three attackers: Shane, Marleau, and Anderson. The two defenders couldn’t cover every angle, so they split the difference. One of them covered Marleau’s forehand. The other sat on Anderson’s hip, in between him and Rozanov, which also cut off the passing lane from Rozanov to Shane’s forehand. It was a smart defense. Rozanov had been chirping in pressers all season about how weak Shane’s backhand was.

Apparently the league had believed him, or at least believed that Rozanov thought it, because the defense, when faced with a choice, left Shane’s backhand open. Shane suddenly wondered if Rozanov had planned this, ever since their first conversation in training camp, ever since Shane had spent a night and four hundred reps on a shot that Rozanov had goaded him into learning. Shane wondered if Rozanov had pictured it, Shane scoring off his pass with his technique, like Rozanov’s hands were clutching Shane’s stick. He wondered if Rozanov was somehow as desperate for this as Shane was, if he couldn’t resist it either.

Rozanov looked at Shane and their eyes met. They were ten feet apart, nothing like a face-off, and yet Shane swore he could see the same look in Rozanov’s eyes as their last time across the dot, when something had passed between them.

He put the puck right on Shane’s stick, backhand, where Shane had to take it on the heel of the blade. The dare couldn’t have been clearer if Rozanov had whispered the words directly into Shane’s ear.

Shane shot. He let the puck linger on the blade like he’d practiced. He knew without looking that Rozanov’s hands were tightening on his own stick, a quarter turn to the left. Shane’s body was pointing towards the five-hole. The goalie dropped into a split to cover the gap, committing exactly when all of Shane’s game-tape would’ve shown his normal release. But Shane’s release wasn’t normal, this time. He kept contact instead, for as long as he could bear it, feeling Rozanov’s eyes on him. At the last second, Shane rolled his wrist, caressing the puck, which rose in time with Shane’s pulse.

Rozanov was looking at Shane’s face when the puck went into the net.

~ ~ ~

In the celly, Rozanov leaned in close, breath on Shane’s ear as he whispered: “Good shot.”

That was it. Good shot. He could’ve said it to any player in the NHL. There was nothing special about it. There was nothing special about any of it: the battle drills, the face offs, the looks. Every single thing, Shane could justify. In fact, he should justify all of it.

But he knew. Shane still felt Rozanov’s breath on his ear. He still felt Rozanov’s eyes on his skin. He could hear the taunt that Rozanov hadn’t said, when he’d passed to Shane’s backhand. Shane had never been good at words, but they weren’t using words. They were using hockey, and Shane had never once misunderstood hockey.

He and Rozanov were on the same page. And that was the worst possible outcome.

~ ~ ~

In bed, in the dark, Shane finally let himself think the thing that he’d known for years, now.

Ilya Rozanov was the reason why Shane had spent two years in the OHL. The fact of the matter was that first-overall draft picks would either make or break a GM. Rozanov’s success or failure would determine the careers of coaches, talent evaluators, and managers. As soon as the Bears drafted Rozanov, the whole goal of the organization was to ensure his success. Shane knew that; it was just hockey. And so, Shane had spent two years in the OHL to give Ilya Rozanov enough space to develop into a veteran presence on the team before Rozanov had to be confronted with the Big Gay Scandal. Shane knew very well that his presence on the roster this year was entirely dependent on the fact that Ilya Rozanov had scored over a hundred goals in his first two NHL seasons, and the front-office was ready to take gambles that would put them into Cup contention — gambles like calling up Shane Hollander.

And Shane couldn’t even resent it, because Ilya was also the reason that the Bears had drafted Shane in the first place. The Bears’ 2009 draft class would be judged entirely on Rozanov’s success in the league. If a third rounder with high-upside but off-ice problems happened to flame out? Well, that happened all the time. The Bears could afford to take a risk on Shane, because Ilya was their future and everyone knew it. Shane had a real shot here, in Boston. He was good enough to take the roster to the next level. The locker room was genuinely tolerable in a way that Shane hadn’t dared to even hope for. And all of it was contingent on him not fucking up Rozanov’s game. The instant it seemed like Shane’s presence could derail Rozanov’s career, Shane would be out the door. The one thing — the one thing — that he couldn’t afford was a locker room scandal with Ilya Rozanov. So, it didn’t matter that Shane and Rozanov were on the same page. Even if Rozanov was interested in a secret gay tryst, he was perhaps the one person in the entire world whom Shane absolutely could not sleep with.

Shane couldn’t afford to be the guy who ‘turned Ilya Rozanov gay’. It would make him worse than radioactive; he’d never get signed anywhere ever again. And between Russian politics and Rozanov’s ongoing contract negotiations, Rozanov couldn’t afford to be gay at all. So there was nothing else to say. They couldn’t be anything to each other, except teammates. Even that was almost too much. There was no them. There was no thing. There couldn’t be.

They had hockey. That was enough.