Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

ilya's canonically weird instagram account, and ghosts, Non-Linear Narrative, Magical Realism, zero need to read other works in series

Language:

English

Series:

Part 10 of perfect from now on

Collections:

Anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-10 Completed: 2026-03-21 Words: 30,704 Chapters: 5/5

bright as ever

Summary

Ilya sees ghosts, Shane's fine with it. It doesn't come up that often.

Notes

Title from Daniel Johnston’s Some Things Last a Long Time because originally this was just going to be about photos I already forget where the ghosts came from. For my TV people not in the know, Ilya’s instagram is just full of pics of random things often with some oblique or secret connection to Shane. Part of what I like about it is that we learn this exclusively from other characters and there’s never an Ilya POV reference to this practice. Call that fic writer free rein baby!
CWs for death being as present in a story about ghosts as you might expect, and references to suicide being as present in a story about Ilya as you might expect.

Chapter 1

Present day

Ilya had started suspecting what hotel his manager had booked for him when his rental car was still ten minutes out from getting there; his memory was good like that, latching onto a bus shelter or a bench it recognized and filling out the pieces around it. It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. It would have been the same manager who booked it the first time round, seven years ago, when he was in Seattle for CBA negotiations.

But Ilya didn’t care for signs or symbols, and so he held out hope that just this once his memory was failing him. Even in the lobby, in the elevator up to his room, he hoped. Didn’t NHL players lament the impersonal indistinguishability of hotels? I don’t even know what city we’re in, man, his teammates would say, and Ilya would shrug his shoulders, unable to relate, his brain too tuned to details.

It was not the same room from eight years ago, but it was on the same side of the hotel and it looked out at the same tree, just from a different angle. Incredibly symbolic. He pulled the blinds.

He’d flown into Seattle that day because he hadn’t wanted to fly early the next morning, but it meant he didn’t have anything to do for the evening. Being married was weird. He could have gone to a bar or a club, but in recent years he only ever went with friends and he wasn’t sure he knew how to do it on his own when it wasn’t for the purpose of picking up.

He showered, but it was short. He had never figured out what people did to make showers long; were they just standing there? He ate down in the hotel restaurant, avoiding the hallway by the conference rooms, and people-watched the way he had in the airport and on the plane. Ilya liked people-watching, even on his own, but it was proving sadder than usual, the stories he was piecing together tinged with tragedy instead of humor. That was probably normal, considering somebody he cared about had died the night before.

He skipped dessert, texted Shane that he had skipped dessert, and Shane called him when he was back in his room minutes later. Ilya hadn’t been expecting it. Their goodbye had been unpleasantly hasty – Shane not able to drop him at the airport, because Shane was involved in some league-led community leadership program that was getting launched this week – and their promise to each other had been that they’d talk tomorrow, not that night.

“How are you?” Shane asked, when Ilya picked up, like it was an urgent question.

“Fine,” Ilya said, forceful and like the urgency was ridiculous. On the rare occasions anything like this came up for Ilya, Shane monitored him like he was on the brink of falling apart. It was a funny reminder that this wasn’t normal, as much as it felt that way to Ilya. The difference was this time there was a slightly elevated chance he actually would fall apart. 

"Is there a ghost in the bathroom?" Shane asked, a successful attempt to lighten the mood. Ilya smiled slightly.

"That is one of my demands." 

“How badly did you pack?” Shane asked next.

“I have my clothes and my wallet, so I packed fine,” Ilya said, and Shane tutted a little disapprovingly.

Ilya took off his shoes, laid out on the bed with a groan so Shane would know what he was doing, and asked, “How was your day?”

Shane’s day had been boring, obviously, and by Ilya’s standards unbearable, but in Shane’s relaxed, lulling tones the play by play was like Ilya’s favorite story. He used jargon Ilya didn’t recognize and didn’t care to learn, and complained about poorly coordinated events and incomplete comms plans, and Ilya smiled. It was more than just his most beloved white noise, it was reassurance. He was always relieved when Shane had distinctly Ilya-free parts of his life, because it meant Ilya hadn’t consumed him the way he wanted to, the way he’d been scared he would since the first time Shane had looked at him for a second too long and a second too softly. And because it made it fair – Ilya would always have a pretty distinctly Shane-free part of his life.

“And then I got home,” Shane said, and sighed. There was something to that sigh. Ilya sat up.

“What happened?” he asked.

“How do you know something happened?” Ilya picked up a note of frustration he didn’t understand.

“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said, placating. “Did something happen?”

“No,” Shane said. “Not really.”

Ilya waited him out.

“I was looking at some stuff online,” Shane said, and before Ilya could even breathe out a dismayed Hollander, Shane rushed to clarify. “Good stuff, Rose sent me an article, it was sweet.”

“Okay,” Ilya said, and leaned back against the headboard. “About us?”

“Yes,” Shane said, sounding embarrassed. “I mean, I know that’s a little self indulgent, but Rose had wanted to know if it was true, so I was checking for her.”

“About how big my dick is?” Ilya asked, and Shane hung up. Ilya laughed and called back and Shane picked up laughing a little too.

“Actually,” Shane said. “It was about your incredibly romantic instagram account.”

Ilya felt immediately caught out and a little embarrassed. That was – well. He hadn’t even known Shane was aware of that, so it being the subject of articles was a little disconcerting. He really thought of it as an inside joke with himself, one he just so happened to also share with hundreds of thousands of followers. So much of his behavior people didn’t bother to question; posting random, inane photos had been thoughtlessly accepted as part of his mystique. “Ah,” he said.

“Yeah,” Shane said. “Some fans apparently put together how some of the pictures are to do with me. Us. Like the puzzles you did with my dad and stuff.”

“You knew about this?” Ilya asked, because Shane didn’t sound like this was new information to him, but he’d also never brought it up before.

“Yeah,” Shane said, sounding affronted. Then he sighed again, that same put upon sigh. “Or, I mean, kind of.”

Enough beating around the bush, Jesus. “Why has this sweet article about how romantic I am made you sad.”

“Well, because there were ones I didn’t know about,” Shane said. “I only clocked that you did this pretty recently, and there are ones from years ago. And some random person online worked it out. Like that number plate one.”

Custom plate SHR, Ilya had seen it in LA. He frowned, not quite able to follow the train of thought. “You are mad I didn’t tell you?” he asked, tentative. Maybe, even now that they were out, Shane was resentful of any evidence that Ilya had taken risks while they were closeted.

“No,” Shane said, convincingly. “The opposite, almost, that I’d need you to tell me. That I didn’t just know. I mean, I had no idea.”

“Because you think social media is the devil,” Ilya said.

“No,” Shane said again. “Because…”

Ilya waited.

“I just worry,” Shane said, finally, a new approach. “You see everything. You know me better than my mom does, which is crazy to me. Remember when you changed dinner plans based on how long it was taking me to reply to texts?”

Ilya frowned, not liking where this was going. “You would do the same.”

“No, I wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t have noticed,” Shane said, firmly. And he was right, but Ilya liked it. Loved it. He loved that Shane didn’t spend his whole life scanning his peripheries, mapping exits and eyebrow twitches, that if someone had something Shane should know Shane expected them to just tell him. Ilya loved that the couple times he’d tried passive aggression on Shane Shane had only been confused. “And I didn’t notice the posts until this stupid fucking clickbait listicle pointed it out, and I still wouldn’t have noticed if Rose hadn’t sent it to me. And you do so much for me, you take such good care of me, and I’m scared I don’t see it.”

“You see it,” Ilya said, closing his eyes. If Shane thought a problem they had was Ilya not feeling seen, Ilya wouldn’t even know where to start.

“I’m scared I don’t see all of it,” Shane said. “I’m scared of what I could be missing.”

That was true in general, something Ilya knew well about Shane. It stressed Shane out that he didn’t have the time to watch every second of every game played across the season, and Yuna had stopped telling him about schedule conflicts because choosing between competing commitments sent him spiraling. Ilya just hadn’t thought to apply it to himself, that Shane would be scared he was missing parts of Ilya. Of Ilya’s love.

“You see so much of me it used to make me think I hate you,” Ilya said. “And you shouldn’t have to always be on the look out. I shouldn’t be so fucking tricky.” Ilya raised his eyebrows at himself, unsure where that had come from other than a general desire to assure Shane he wasn’t screwing up.

Shane just laughed, soft like rain on a window and desperately needed. “You’re so tricky it used to make me think I hate you,” he said. “But I like it now.”

“Yeah?”

“I like that you trust me with what’s behind it,” Shane said.

Ilya hummed. What a neat set up. “If you just saw everything, it wouldn’t be my choice, and it wouldn’t take trust.”

He smiled as Shane thought that through, because he could picture it so perfectly. Sometimes, with Shane, a video call felt superfluous. “Yeah,” Shane said, eventually. “Okay. Sorry. Fuck, sorry, this was such a lame freak out to have when you’re dealing with something so serious.”

“I am dealing with something serious tomorrow,” Ilya said. “Right now I’m trying to kill time in a hotel room. Your lame freak outs are way better than TV.”

Shane ignored the joke and hummed sympathetically. “If you’re still there, day after next, I’ll come out to you,” he said. “There’s a flight, I’ve checked, it’d get in in the morning.”

Ilya loved the idea of not being here the day after next, of getting this all dealt with tomorrow, but it seemed unlikely. “You’ll have everything wrapped up by then, there’s nothing you would be putting off?”

“Nothing,” Shane said. “I’d just be killing time. Let me come out there.”

“Please,” Ilya said.

The previous night

Ilya dreamed he was driving, which was not unusual. Nor was the feeling of being out of control, which was one of two ways driving dreams could go. What was unusual was that the car was a piece of shit, the engine complaining and the outside world not speeding by all that fast. It smelled bad, too, like old milk, and Ilya couldn’t usually smell in dreams. Oh, he thought. Oh, fuck.

The street outside was residential, dark and shuttered, nothing he recognized. Not Ottawa, he didn’t think, and held on to that. Most people he loved were in Ottawa. He looked down at himself, his arms. He was a man, age unknown but in pretty good shape, although the shapeless clothes made that less obvious. Not Shane’s arms. Ilya was so close to certain they weren’t Shane’s arms. There was a little felt dog hanging from the rear view mirror. There was a half empty bottle of gin on the passenger seat, strapped in, like a dumb joke. The kind Ilya would have made, years ago, and even now he couldn’t help laughing for a moment inside his head. This person’s head.

Ilya braced himself even if the body he was in didn’t, and wondered if this man could sense Ilya at all, the way Ilya could sense him. Ilya wouldn’t try to convince him of anything, wouldn’t tell him to pull over, because he knew it wouldn’t work and he couldn’t fail again, but maybe he’d try – comforting. He was better at that now than he had been the last time he’d had a dream like this. God, he’d been nineteen then. It had been a long time. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t manipulate the body he was wearing in any way, but he thought hard and loud, the way he sometimes did at Shane when they were out in public. He didn’t know who the driver was, even though it had to be somebody he knew, but he could imagine what it might help for them to hear. You’re okay, it’s okay, we forgive you, I know it’s so hard. It’s so fucking hard, and you can’t be expected to bear it all. Then the signpost and the wall, then all the noise, then just the ringing. No pain; the dreams spared Ilya that.

He woke up gasping, and moments later Shane woke too – gorgeous, breathing, living. Ilya was always impressed by how immediate the switch was for Shane, from sleep to wakefulness, no in between state, and Shane didn’t need a single second before he was sitting upright and framing Ilya’s face, making Ilya look at him, making him see the pillow creases on Shane’s cheek and his wide searching eyes, always so alive. “Ilya, it’s okay, what’s wrong?”

The contradiction made Ilya, somehow, smile. He shook his head, tipped it against Shane’s chest, and Shane combed through his curls, finding tangles that had no cause to be there. Ilya wasn’t a restless sleeper.

“It was just a bad dream,” Shane said, because he didn’t know any better. “Just a bad dream, baby.”

Ilya had told Shane about most things but not this. There hadn’t been any reason to – it had only happened twice before. His mom’s suicide and a coach’s heart attack, back when he was nineteen. He’d wondered at it not happening when his dad died. He tried not to interpret it as evidence that there really wasn’t any bond at all between them. Maybe it was attributable to the banal reality that his father had died while Ilya was awake. Anyway, he took it as a mercy; he wouldn’t want to spend a single second in his dad’s body.

For the first time he wondered if this talent meant he’d see Shane’s final moments, if he hadn’t already gone first. They’d talked about it a little once, drunk and by accident, and Ilya knew Shane wanted them to die basically at the same time, the way Shane wanted them to retire at the same time.

Shane’s fingers dug into his shoulders and Ilya dug his own into Shane’s sides, breathed him in. Shane kissed his temples and said, “Seriously, you’re alright, right? How bad was it?”

Ilya should tell him, and he would, but not yet. It would just freak Shane out. He’d wait until it became clear who the dream was about. Hopefully not someone Shane knew too. An old friend from Boston, maybe.

“You’re already making me forget,” Ilya said, and pulled away and smiled. Shane didn’t look that convinced, but was convinced enough to stop putting off his morning routine. He squeezed Ilya and kissed his nose and scanned him from head to foot, and then stood and stretched by the bed. Ilya watched lecherously, because that was part of the routine too and Ilya didn’t want to worry Shane, and when Shane left Ilya scrubbed his hands over his face and slapped his cheek.

He took a picture of Anya and sent it to the family group chat and then the Centaurs group chat and then the Boston group chat and then the Pike group chat. As he brushed his teeth and splashed his face and applied deodorant and pulled on shorts and a tank, he started checking names off his list – David alive and texting, five teammates-and-counting alive and texting, three former teammates-and-counting alive and texting, Jackie alive and texting which probably meant Hayden was fine too. Unless he started driving to people’s houses and knocking on doors he wasn’t going to get hard confirmations from everyone, and he knew there wasn’t really a point, even putting aside that it was the off season and people were all over the place, anyway. The dreams weren’t premonitions, they were real time, and they ended in death, not close to it, no chance for intervention. There wasn’t anything for him to do except wait around and hear about it like a normal person. He was still riding the relief of confirming it hadn’t been Shane.

He joined Shane in the home gym, and mustn’t have given the best impression of being together and unbothered, because Shane didn’t critique his form or his focus. Instead, once they were finishing up, Shane kissed him for a long time against the mirrored wall, stroking up and down his back and not once changing the tempo. Ilya almost forgot the dream.

They showered before taking breakfast out onto their deck, the morning sunny and warm the way every morning had been that week. It had been such a nice week. They ate mostly in silence, Ilya poking his foot at Anya’s belly and letting her nip his toes, Shane scrolling his phone. And then Shane grabbed Ilya’s forearm, held tight.

Ilya frowned, faced him. “What?” he asked.

“Oh, man,” Shane said. “This is so brutal. Nick Evans died. God, he was younger than us. You remember him, right?”

Seven years ago I

Ilya didn’t much like Seattle. He had no issue with it, and it had night life, which he would never begrudge, but there wasn’t anything about it that stood out to him. Of course whenever he voiced an opinion on any American city, Svetlana said some version of, I’m glad to know what you think of its airport and mid-range hotels.

But still, he had no special fondness for Seattle, and even less so when he wasn’t there to play hockey. He was there for a meeting in advance of negotiations for the new CBA, because he complained enough about his contract that his agent had suggested he join the executive board of the player’s association, and it had seemed a good idea at the time. He joined because he was a control freak, because he didn’t like decisions about his life being made in a room he was absent from, but he might have reconsidered if he put together that those decisions were being made in a room in Seattle on one of the precious few weekends off during the season.

There was a more pleasant way to frame it, if he let himself: another couple nights in the year with Shane Hollander. Because of course he was on the board, too, of course he had flown out to Seattle. One floor up from Ilya in this particular mid-range hotel.

The first day had largely been preamble, and only three hours. The second day started at nine in the morning and would go on as long as they could manage without violence breaking out, as far as Ilya could tell. Shane and Ilya came down to the conference room together, even though Shane had returned to his room at one in the morning, and Ilya had at this point stopped seeing things like that as coincidence. There was just some rhythm, some gravity he and Shane shared, for all the ways they had nothing in common, some internal force that brought them to the same place at the same time.

When they walked into the conference room there were only two other players there, Browne on his phone and Vries pouring himself a coffee. Neither of them looked up, as though already fed up and exhausted, starting as they meant to go on. Shane started angling right but Ilya nudged him left, because that side of the room was better air conditioned, and Shane redirected himself like he’d intended to all along. He sat down at the long conference table and Ilya sat beside him and put the upper limit at four hours for how long he’d last in Hollander’s proximity after fucking him last night without getting hard over something stupid. Like how naturally he’d gone left.

A half hour later it was still only Browne, Vries, Ilya, and Shane – incidentally the only four players staying at the hotel where the meetings were being hosted. According to the group chat traffic was at a standstill, some gruesome collision that Shane found local news coverage of. Shane also found the twitter account for Seattle traffic updates and was refreshing it every ten seconds, his finger tapping an impatient rhythm on the table’s yellowish wood. Ilya could only pray this wouldn’t be the thing that got him hard. His finger kept landing between two knots in the wood that looked like eyes, a photo of which Ilya had already posted on his story. Proof of his attendance at the league’s most boring event of the year.

Ilya went to the catering table and loaded up two plates with pastries before returning to Shane’s side. That they were still sitting right beside each other at a table that sat thirty and was currently sitting four was a little ridiculous, but Ilya was pretty sure in Shane’s head it had become a game of chicken; he wouldn’t be the one to move. Ilya sat the second plate of pastries in front of Shane with a flourish and Shane shot him a look like Ilya was a cat who’d just brought him a dead bird. A spiteful cat who knew what he was doing. The carefully balanced pastries dislodged, one bear claw falling off the pile, halfway off the plate. Ilya sat down and felt Shane’s leg jumping under the table. He dug his fingers into Shane’s thigh, stilling him. Quietly he said, “How are you willing to give up control to me but you cannot accept rush hour traffic.”

Shane glanced around, alarmed, like the other two occupants of the room might have closed the significant distance between them without his noticing. Then, through gritted teeth, he said, “How are you willing to give up control to rush hour traffic? You want to control everything.”

“Not things that cannot be controlled,” Ilya said, a little insulted Shane hadn’t picked up on that nuance. He had always known not to do that, had always known how to live around those forces greater than him. Traffic, ghosts, his mom’s sadness, his dad’s anger. And he’d always known he wasn’t special, that everybody was subject to something untouchable – Svetlana subject to having been born a girl, Sasha subject to hockey. Ilya had thought that meant that everybody learned to accept it, but apparently not Shane Hollander. And, Ilya found himself thinking, if anyone could turn back the tides it would be Shane. Maybe he really would will himself into wanting women.

At ten the door burst open and slammed shut behind Nick Evans, who stumbled into the room blanched and wide-eyed. Browne laughed, Vries said, “What the fuck, man,” and Shane made a little distressed noise in the back of his throat, which might have been the thing that got Ilya hard if he wasn’t so distracted.

Evans stared at them one by one, said, “Sorry,” and nearly tripped over himself getting to the coffee station, not at all like a professional athlete. Ilya stared at his back. One of the English idioms he enjoyed was you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Evans looked like he’d seen a ghost, and as it happened there was one right outside the door. A woman who’d worked as a cleaner here, which Ilya could tell from her uniform, and he felt very bad that her last stretch of consciousness would be of that windowless carpeted corridor. Bad enough he couldn’t really look at her. Coming down that morning Shane had walked right through her, which had almost made Ilya laugh. Some people shivered a little, looked around a little, in the presence of a ghost. Most subconsciously avoided the space ghosts took up. Not Shane. If he couldn’t see it, it wasn’t there.

Evans returned with a shaking cup of coffee, and once he sat down, Shane asked, less like small talk and more like he was strategizing, “How’d you beat the traffic?”

“The crash?” Evans asked, sounding distracted. “I was coming from the other side of town.”

Evans had grown up in Seattle, and was probably staying with family. Ilya knew that because Evans hadn’t shown up at all yesterday, and Shane had found this extra objectionable because it was Evans' hometown, a logic Ilya couldn’t quite follow. If Evans was from here then presumably he had better things to do on a trip home. Ilya was surprised Evans was involved in the players’ association at all; he wasn’t the league pride type. But, then, people thought the same about Ilya.

It didn’t take long for Evans to glance his way, and Ilya was ready to catch his gaze. He raised his eyebrows, like I know your secret, kind of how he had at a bar during Evans’ sole all star appearance a couple seasons ago, when they’d gone up for drinks at the same time and slotted in beside each other, but not quite the same. Evans seemed to know the difference, because instead of going all soft around the mouth he frowned and looked down at his coffee. Ilya’s back straightened. Apparently Shane Hollander was not the only worthwhile diversion in this Seattle mid-range hotel.

Fourteen years ago

When the NHL draft started feeling real, not something Ilya would last minute get kicked out of, Svetlana told him to wipe his instagram. Americans care about character, she said, and they won’t want to see you drinking underage. Such shitty alcohol, too. He’d obliged, because Svetlana giving him advice always came as a relief, the one voice in the cacophony that he knew without a doubt he could trust. The only person who both cared about him and knew what they were talking about.

She told him to save the photos somewhere first, and even though he usually was thoughtless and careless and would need things like that explained to him, he hadn’t this time. Ilya cared about photos. He transferred all of them to a memory stick, even the stupidest, blurriest, most embarrassing ones, and put it where he hid his cigarettes. Svetlana had been in at least half of them, and it crossed his mind that even though she knew what she was talking about and cared about him, she had an admirable sense of self-preservation, too, and maybe she didn’t want herself, back to the age of fourteen, available for anyone curious about Ilya Rozanov.

Soon after that he got set up with a proper agent and manager and he was made to delete the account entirely, in place of a shiny clean one, ilyaroz92 – they wouldn’t let him use 81 because they said people might think it was his birth year, which he’d thought was a joke at first, and then he’d received what he considered his first ever solemn American talking to, about how often international prospects were suspected by fans of lying about their age. Given how he was particularly well-developed for someone so young, he was at particular risk.

It was probably the combination of these two things – Svetlana’s caution and the dawning realization that people would interpret him in wild and unpredictable ways – that made him wary of social media. For his first few years in the league, he never posted anything of substance.

Twenty two years ago

Ilya couldn’t possibly remember the first time he saw a ghost, because presumably it had been happening his whole life, but he remembered the first time he realized what he was seeing. He was walking to school, trailing a few yards behind Alexei and Alexei’s friends, and he saw his neighbor Dmitry with his hands on his hips contemplating his failing strawberry plant, and Dmitry had died last week. If Ilya didn’t look closely, Dmitry looked human, three dimensional and full color, solid and detailed and moving. But he was almost too bright, and his edges were a little fuzzy. Less the misty apparition ghosts were often depicted as, more like someone on a VHS tape.

Ilya was very young, but smart enough to keep quiet. He hurried past Dmitry and caught up with his brother.

Dmitry was still there when Ilya went home that evening, this time kneeling by his patch of violets. He was there the next day, and the next, and the day after that Ilya took his mom’s hand and brought her down the street, stood her in front of Dmitry’s house. “Do you see?” he asked.

“See what, darling?” she asked, and she was really looking, because she took him seriously.

“Dmitry,” Ilya whispered, and she looked down at him sharply.

He watched her gather herself and then she said, “No, I don’t. Of course I don’t, he died, remember?”

Ilya nodded. “But I see him,” he said. “He’s looking after his garden. Or he wants to, at least.”

Her face turned anxious, and she stroked the hair off Ilya’s forehead. “Is this a game, baby?”

“No,” Ilya said. “I’ve been seeing him every day this week. Going to school and coming home.”

“Okay,” she said, and turned back to Dmitry’s house. Dmitry had been house proud, and after only a week of its owner’s absence it still looked lovely, smart and prim. “Have you talked to him?”

“No,” Ilya said. “I haven’t tried. I haven’t been looking too much at him.”

She nodded, then said, “Well, could you try?”

Looking back Ilya wasn’t sure what his mom’s angle had been, because he doubted she could have believed him already, but she was pretty enigmatic in general. At the time Ilya had assumed she did believe him, and confidently approached Dmitry’s gate. “Excuse me,” he said, and Dmitry didn’t react. Ilya raised his voice. “Excuse me.”

Dmitry did react, turning back sharply, his eyes widening at Ilya. Ilya – with a reputation for brazen recklessness, even then – was struck with terror, and hastily ran across the street back to his mom.

“He talked back?” his mom asked, pulling him against her side with her eyes still fixed on Dmitry’s house.

“No,” Ilya said. “But he heard me. He looked at me.”

“Did he look angry?”

“No,” Ilya said, frowning.

“Then why did you run off?” she asked. “Don’t you want to know if you can talk to a ghost?”

When she said it like that, the fear left Ilya’s body. It sounded fun, like something from a story book she’d read to him. He squeezed his mom’s hand and crossed the street again, put his hands on top of the gate to project confidence. This time Dmitry was already looking, his head cocked. Ilya hadn’t ever interacted with him in life. “Do you remember me?”

“Irina’s boy,” Dmitry said, which Ilya liked. Most of the time he was identified by his father.

Ilya nodded. “Do you know you’re dead?”

Dmitry laughed. “Obviously,” he said. “If I wasn’t dead my plants wouldn’t look like this. My sister promised me she’d look after them.”

Ilya couldn’t really care about that. “Have you talked to anyone else?”

Dmitry took a while to answer that. “No,” he said. “Just you. I hadn’t thought anyone could see me.”

Ilya’s mom called to him then. “Is he talking back?”

Ilya looked back at her and nodded, and she came to join him. She tweaked Ilya’s ear and said, “Ask him about my apricot tree.”

Ilya hadn’t known they had an apricot tree. He looked to Dmitry and opened his mouth and Dmitry said, “I heard her. And just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I’m going to start taking responsibility for your mother’s black thumb.”

Ilya relayed the message to his mom, smiling because even though he didn’t know what black thumb meant he could tell it was some kind of joke. His mom had looked shocked, and Ilya hadn’t ever doubted that she believed him, so it didn’t occur to him that this was the moment she accepted it wasn’t a flight of fancy.

Other neighbors started arriving home from work, and his mom brought Ilya back home too. She knelt before him in the hallway, stared at him wide-eyed and called him special. Then her face got a little sterner and she said, “This is just our secret.”

Ilya had sort of known that instinctively anyway, but he enjoyed hearing it. It was their secret. In hushed tones she’d ask him about Dmitry when he got home from school. When Dmitry faded away, six months later, she had cried. Years later Ilya wondered if she’d convinced herself that it might soften the blow of her suicide if Ilya could see her, talk to her, in the aftermath. It hadn’t worked like that, though. Not everybody spent time as a ghost, and Irina hadn’t lingered.

Five years ago

The last off season that Ilya spent in Russia, he came home to find Alexei had gotten rid of all the family photos. He said they just distressed their father, just confused him more, glimpses of these dead relatives, of himself younger. Maybe that was true, Ilya couldn’t really know. His father had deteriorated a lot since Ilya had last been in Moscow. And he couldn’t feel a sense of loss, because his father had gotten rid of nearly all the photos of Irina years ago, and the few that survived Ilya had already brought with him to Boston, him and his mom and his mom’s parents, his mom’s brother who’d died before Ilya was born, Ilya’s namesake. Still he thought it was wrong in some way, cruel. Ilya’s father was untethered, had such few signposts or benchmarks to ground him, and taking away the photos seemed like it would just serve to leave him more disconnected, stranded in his own head. That first day he didn’t have a single moment of lucidity. It always took a while for Ilya to readjust to this version of his father. To stop feeling nauseous.

Ilya’s reputation for brazen recklessness had only grown over the years. In America they marveled at his love of adrenaline, his willingness to get involved with any woman, his appetite for partying and how little it seemed to touch him, his risk taking on the ice. It all had a basis in truth even if it wasn’t entirely accurate – he was seen as bloodthirsty, for example, but Ilya didn’t enjoy fighting so much as he enjoyed getting someone to a point where they wanted to fight. The truth underscoring all of it was fearlessness. Lung cancer, car crashes, overdoses, concussions, angry boyfriends – none of it scared him the way he thought it should. Maybe when dead people were so accessible fear of death didn’t come as naturally.

But he was like a little kid when he was faced with his father’s disease. Ilya was quite convinced his father, the father that had once existed, would rather be dead than what he was. He’d wanted control of things too, and losing memories was losing control, was losing yourself. Ilya couldn’t think of anything worse. Alzheimer's wasn't hereditary, but Ilya believed in genetics less as a science and more as a poetic inclination of the universe, and he felt marked. 

When people he trusted but couldn’t tell about the ghosts asked why he took so many photos, and such weird photos, that was what he told them. He had a fear of forgetting things. The photos were aide-mémoires, for the little details that could slip away from someone. It was true, and people who knew him well knew about this fear of his anyway. Marlow and Svetlana both mocked him for his thousand and something day streak on a brain training game on his phone, but Ilya bought into the possibly dubious science that it would keep him sharp. He was just glad Hollander had never clocked it, because Hollander got too excited when he found something to make fun of Ilya for.

That first night back in Moscow he went to bed early and kept the streak alive. Tomorrow he’d go out, but tonight he needed to adjust, get himself on Russian time. That was what he told his people, but it was less the jet lag fucking him up and more his father’s inability to hold his gaze. Ilya went through Boston’s season from the final game to the opener, reciting in his head who the opponent was, whether it had been home or away, and what the outcome had been. He could make it all the way back to December before he started to struggle. Still sharp, still detail-oriented.

One of his Moscow friends texted, and the notification pulled up the message that had come in from Shane earlier too, to which Ilya hadn’t yet responded: Have a good summer :)

He swiped away the more recent text, kept Shane's. Ilya never knew how to handle Shane’s small talk – or he did, either mock it or ignore it, but he didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t know what Shane meant by it, why he hadn’t yielded to Ilya’s clear inability or unwillingness to entertain it, evidence of which dated back to their very first interaction. Maybe it was Shane’s own way of fucking with Ilya, or maybe it was him refusing to be changed. Maybe he just didn’t know how to not be polite, sweet. Ilya tapped out of the brain training app and navigated to a buried folder on his phone, pulled out the selfies he’d taken with Shane at the awards show.

When he looked at photos they often made him think more about the future than the past – he imagined what it would be like to look at them when he was older. In his forties, fifties, these selfies might elicit nothing but a general nostalgia for his youth. Shane’s guarded smile and dark eyes mightn’t seem greater than the sum of their parts. He took it a step further, that night, and imagined seeing these photos in a state like his father’s, when he’d lost himself, when memories and dreams blurred with each other, killed each other. He had to wrap up that train of thought quickly, the nausea that had been abating since he left his father rising again. It was, he assumed, the way a lot of people felt when they thought about suicide, but Ilya knew he’d much rather go out his mom’s way than his dad’s.

How long would he keep this stupid, embarrassing, dangerous folder on his phone? How long would he remain aware of its presence, how long would he care about its existence? Maybe he’d transfer it to that still hidden memory stick. He navigated back to the text thread with Jane. Have a good summer, because Shane had no reason to think that was all that big of an ask. Ilya imagined saying, just, You too. He couldn’t, and he couldn’t think of a way to mock it, so he ignored it, locking his phone and closing his eyes. He and Shane wouldn’t text again for a month.

Present day

Ilya went to bed at midnight, and when he picked up his phone to set an alarm for the next morning, despite the maybe ten minute long goodbye on their call earlier, he had a text from Shane. I don’t really know what you’re doing but I admire you for it. Have good dreams please.

Ilya smiled, responded immediately. Give me something good to dream about (send pix)

Chapter 2

Chapter Notes

Thirteen years ago

When he finally made it back to his hotel room on draft night Ilya still had obligations. He called Svetlana to debrief with her, giving her the requisite praise for getting the order of the top five picks exactly right and sharing the impressions he'd formed of the players and execs he’d met. He sent Sasha a photo of the minibar so if Sasha learned Ilya and Svetlana had talked he wouldn’t feel too left out. He responded to a welcoming text from a Boston vet he’d met when he’d been brought around the team facilities a couple weeks before. And he opened his instagram to post the statement that had been drafted for him, having been told he would be allowed to choose the photo himself, from the plethora that would be taken on the night.

It took him way too long to find a photo that was just of him. That had to be unusual, for the number one overall pick. He knew those pictures existed, but they weren’t the ones being shared in articles or on the accounts he’d been made to follow. Everywhere he looked Shane Hollander was right there with him. That felt worryingly like an omen. Playing in the NHL was supposed to be about untangling himself, setting himself apart from everything that had weighed him down, making himself untouchable. He considered posting the minibar picture, his reflection half visible in the glass door.

He hadn’t taken the rumblings about Shane Hollander seriously until he’d seen him play in person. Even still he’d beaten him, and tonight he’d gotten picked over him. But Ilya wasn’t stupid, and he definitely wasn’t stupid about hockey. He’d taken the first two victories but neither had been guaranteed. He had a cold premonition in that hotel room, before he was even used to hotel rooms: the high he was riding that night would never come easy, and he could never count on it lasting. There would always be another game, series, record, award, another chance of failing. He’d thought getting out of Moscow meant getting free, but he’d just found a whole new power struggle.

So it was pretty comforting, a very nice consolation prize, to learn that Shane Hollander couldn’t hold Ilya’s gaze, that he didn’t know what to do with his hands or his mouth when Ilya was within five feet of him, that it really didn’t take much to leave him tongue-tied, fluent in two languages as he was. They had bumped into each other at the bar and Shane had said sorry, looking down at his feet and sounding angry, like Ilya had made him say it. Ilya wanted to take the feeling that gave him as far as he could. 

The life Ilya had imagined for himself in America was very simple, very straightforward. Winning, being the undisputed best, getting everything he wanted. Probably that would have bored him, anyway.

Present day

Ilya went to the hospital that had been mentioned in the articles and had no luck, and he set aside the disappointment. It would make things easier for him if Evans had been there, but it would not have been so nice for Evans.

Nick Evans’ childhood home was charming, a messy house crammed into a street of messy houses, cars stretching the length of it. People were pouring out of it onto the lawn, which surprised Ilya, because Evans had always struck him as a loner. Maybe this was more for the family than for him.

Ilya had reached out to the one teammate of Evans he remembered Evans had been friendly with and been told about this reception in the family home. It’d be great if you could make it because I can’t get to Seattle in time for it. Someone from the league should be there. That was reassuring, made Ilya feel less like an intruder. He could count the number of conversations he’d had with Evans on one hand. It was just that they’d been pretty impactful conversations.

Ilya knew his hunch had been right as soon as he crossed the threshold. He just felt it, felt that energy, and he knew it was somewhere near.

The first member of the household he met was the dog, old and chocolate brown, with short legs and long ears. Ilya knew they belonged to the household because they looked exactly like the little felt dog that had been hanging from the rear view mirror in the car that Evans had died in. Ilya got to wander in the house a little, undisturbed, tilting his head sideways to read the book titles and trying to work out which little boy in the photos had been Nick. The hockey gear didn’t give it away, because all of the children, four boys and a girl, were wearing it. Then, from behind him, he heard, “You’re Ilya Rozanov.”

He turned and saw a woman, probably late thirties, whose primary physical trait was visible exhaustion. She had said his name like an accusation. “Yes,” he said.

She stared for a few more moments and then said, “Nick never mentioned knowing you.”

“You are his sister?” Ilya asked. “He mentioned you.”

That took her aback the way he’d known it would and he felt a little guilty. Evans had mentioned a sister literally once to Ilya, but Ilya should probably accept that he wasn’t going to be able to explain his presence without bending the truth a little. “Hanna,” she said, and stretched out a hand. Ilya shook it. She started thinking something, her face turning contemplative, but he didn’t know what. She said, “You’re in Ottawa now, right? You flew out for this?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m very sorry for your loss. I liked your brother a lot.”

That look deepened and Ilya put it together. If she knew his name, and knew he was in Ottawa, she probably knew he was into men. And who knew what she’d known about her brother. That would be a more straightforward explanation than the truth. “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m not sure many people did.”

Ilya glanced around him. “Lots of people here.”

“For my parents,” she said, with a level of resentment that hit Ilya somewhere deep down.

“I was hoping, maybe, I could see his room,” he said. “I was curious about it.”

She looked wary again, confused. “You mean his childhood bedroom?” she asked. “You know he hasn’t lived here since he was like, seventeen.”

Ilya nodded, pretending this wasn’t an odd request.

“Upstairs is off limits,” she said, not unsympathetically. “Sorry. House rules.”

Ilya wanted to be a bitch about it, honestly, and not just because it got in the way of his plans but because he had a knee jerk reaction to phrases like ‘house rules’. Shane had house rules, when they had parties. Ilya reined in the instinct and said, “Hanna, could I take you to coffee?”

When she glanced down, he took his hands out of his pockets so she could see the ring. “It’s like you said, not many people liked him,” Ilya said. “I would like to spend time with someone who did. And you are busy right now.”

She switched her weight from one leg to the other. “How long are you in town?”

“I haven’t booked a ticket back,” Ilya said. “I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get what I needed.”

“I don’t know what he told you about me,” she said. “And I loved him. He was my brother and I loved him. But it wasn’t like we were close. If you’re looking for insight—he was a mystery to me, mostly.”

That made Ilya a little sad, the idea that he might have known Evans better than the sister he’d loved. “He told me that you wanted him to get out there and try new things,” Ilya said. “And he did, because of you. I would like to buy you coffee.”

“Okay,” she said. “Coffee with Ilya Rozanov. I’ll add it to my diary.”

They made arrangements and Ilya left. The old dog tried to follow him. Outside there was a discarded flyer on the sidewalk for a church that promised eternal life. Ilya took a photo.

Three years ago

The last time Ilya had really talked to Nick Evans was at a bar in Ottawa, after Detroit had trounced the Centaurs. In Boston, on the rare occasion that the two teams showed up to the same bar after a game, the etiquette was for whoever had lost to make a quiet exit. There weren’t enough good bars in Ottawa to allow for that, and anyway, nobody felt all that competitive or hostile toward the Centaurs. The opposing team was more likely to buy them drinks than start a fight.

Ilya kind of wanted someone to start a fight. It would be somewhere to put the energy another lackluster game had failed to burn. It had been a shit week, of losing at hockey and not seeing Shane and feeling a general undirected bitterness. He liked his team but they were all such good fucking people, upbeat and friendly, and very hard to be bitter around. Nick Evans would be a nice change. When Evans went up to the bar alone, Ilya followed, and asked, “You smoke?”

“No,” Evans said, and Ilya raised his eyebrows. Evans rolled his eyes, but when Ilya started walking outside, Evans followed. On the cold, icy street, Ilya lit up, and even though Evans didn’t smoke he didn’t step away from Ilya the way a lot of players would.

“I want to retire in Florida,” Ilya said, because he was trying his best to complain about every single thing this week. And Evans was a good audience for that, not an optimist or a fixer. “I would like at some point in my life to live somewhere fucking warm.”

“I don’t know, man,” Evans said, who had started his career in Dallas. “You grow up somewhere cold, you think that’s what you want, but we’re not built for the heat, not really.”

Ilya shrugged, not willing to cede the point.

“Anyway, I like Ottawa,” Evans said. “Quiet. I’ve never played somewhere quiet.” Between Dallas and Detroit, Evans had spent a season in Montreal, mostly rehabbing the injury that had made Dallas give up on him. Shane hadn’t mentioned him to Ilya once, during that time.

“Yes. Quiet city, quiet streets, quiet arena,” Ilya said, and Evans smiled.

“Is it nice?” he asked. “Being away from the pressure.”

Ilya raised his eyebrows. Evans was the first player he’d ever talked to about leaving Boston for Ottawa who seemed to see it as a wise decision. He didn’t know what pressure Evans could be familiar with, anyway. Detroit were a middle of the pack team, and Evans was a solid contributor but not expected to be the savior.

“No,” Ilya said, after a moment. He felt he owed Evans honesty, or he felt it would be strange to not be honest with him. Pointless, maybe. “Pressure is nice distraction.”

Evans huffed out a disbelieving laugh, his breath as white as the cigarette smoke. “I’m not built like you, man.”

That wasn’t entirely true. “What pressure is there in Detroit?” Ilya asked.

“Detroit’s fine, the team is fine,” Evans said. He looked around him, took a half step closer to Ilya. “Listen. Do you ever try to – help?”

“No,” Ilya said, firmly. “You cannot.”

“I know that's the general rule,” Evans said. “But I mean - can't you make exceptions, for some of them? Do you ever?”

“It is not good,” Ilya said, and didn’t know how to talk about it beyond that. Didn’t know how to go into detail. Maybe if Evans had given him a heads up, had texted him last week and said hey by the way when Detroit are in town I’m going to ask you about ghosts.

“They seem sad, though,” Evans said, and that was all. Like that was a whole argument, a complete reason for anything.

“There are sad people everywhere,” Ilya said. “You can help them. There are sad people on your team.” There were sad people standing outside the bar.

“I just feel like I should do something. I mean—”

“It does not make you special,” Ilya said, and then winced at how harsh that sounded. He tried to explain himself. “And it does not make you cursed. It is just – like being left handed.”

Evans nodded, but not like he agreed, and leaned against the wall. Ilya watched him out of the corner of his eye. Exclusivity was still relatively new to Ilya, and he thought about it, sometimes, the people he would fuck if he wasn’t loyal to Shane. It wasn’t desire, it was just an awareness of what he would have done differently not so long ago. Evans was looking for something from Ilya, and Ilya couldn’t give it to him in conversation, and sex for a long time would have been his next bright idea.

Except that he already knew he wouldn’t sleep with Evans, because he’d had that chance at Evans’ sole all star call up, the year Dallas had been injury plagued and Evans’ defensive stats had been pretty impressive. Ilya remembered that as the first time he’d ever decided against sex with someone else because of Shane Hollander. It wasn’t that Shane wouldn’t want him fucking another guy, or that he wouldn’t want him fucking another guy who he knew, it was that Shane might genuinely never forgive him for fucking a player so undeniably and categorically worse than them. It had, of course, made Ilya deeply resentful toward both himself and Shane at the time, but now he looked back on it fondly. The point at hand being that sex with Evans had always been off the table, and if Ilya was ever in a position to hand out sage advice he definitely wasn’t that week. He said, “Do you want to get drunk?”

Against all odds, that night Ilya proved to be a happy drunk. They ended it back at Ilya’s, drinking good gin on the kitchen floor. Ilya didn’t remember much beyond the feeling, but he did remember Evans saying, “I just feel like, I don’t know, like everything sucks. And that’s how I felt when I was sixteen. And it’s the kind of thing you expect to grow out of, you know?”

And Ilya said, “It doesn’t take much. You just need to find maybe two, three good things. You find them and you keep them and then you have a good life.”

Evans said, “I do like hockey.” Ilya nodded approvingly. 

He really believed that. He hoped that it was part of the night that Evans remembered too.

Twelve years ago, six years ago

Shane had asked Ilya if he’d been with a guy before, and Ilya had said yes, and that was true. If Shane had changed the question slightly, asked if Ilya had done what they were doing before, Ilya would have still said yes, and meant it, but it had swiftly started seeming like that wasn't quite true. Ilya had had more sex than anyone he knew his age, and it rocked him how new what he was doing with Shane still felt. Ilya only had to apply the slightest pressure, offer the merest hint of what he wanted, and Shane opened to him, gave it to him on a silver platter, without warm up or cajoling or a play of resistance. It was like he was trying to call Ilya's bluff, except Ilya was never bluffing. It had Ilya feeling simultaneously God-like and virginal.

What he and Sasha had done was something entirely different, Sasha didn’t just – surrender, like that. Ilya couldn’t fathom it. Power was a fight, it was hockey, it was something everyone wanted. If someone didn’t want it, it made no sense for that someone to be Shane Hollander, the most furiously competitive person Ilya knew other than himself. Ilya began to feel like what he was doing with Shane was far bigger than he could fathom, was something he wasn’t yet worldly enough to really understand. Something it had been irresponsible for the universe to entrust to two dumb kids. 

On that old instagram account and now on that still hidden memory stick, there were photos with Sasha too, the purpose of which had been to dare people to wonder, and Ilya hadn't known if he’d keep feeling that desire away from Russia, in the NHL. Safer in some ways, less safe in others.

Ilya found himself looking at those photos when he got home after his second hook up with Shane, and they filled him with breath-taking nostalgia. He didn’t know that he missed Sasha – he’d been so busy he’d barely missed Svetlana – but there was an appealing simplicity in what they’d had. Danger was simple, desire was supposed to be simple. They’d known exactly what they were to each other, and what to do to each other. He had been assuming they would fuck again, when he was back in Russia over the off-season. He worried, now, that he would be comparing it in his head to Shane Hollander the whole time. It was probably a good thing that he and Shane didn’t see each other all that often. He couldn’t let himself start thinking sex with Shane was what sex was normally like. He couldn’t let himself forget what sex was normally like.

Six years after that, Shane laughed at the action movie paused on Ilya’s hotel room TV. Ilya took it as a compliment that Shane was only noticing it now, wrapped up in Ilya’s sheets, coming down from his orgasm. “This is like, I think, genuinely the worst film I’ve ever seen,” Shane said.

Ilya shrugged. “But you have seen it.”

“On a plane, against my will,” Shane said, smug like that was an achievement. “You didn’t even turn it off. You paused it.”

Honestly Ilya hadn’t paid attention to a single second of it, just needed to at least pretend to be doing something other than sitting and waiting for Shane to show up. “The lead is hot, I was getting myself in the mood,” he said, and nodded at the screen, where the lead in question was bloody, sweaty, and shirtless.

For a moment Shane looked frozen, then visibly forced himself to relax, then shrugged, like he neither agreed nor disagreed.

“Jealous?” Ilya asked, because that was the easy joke, but he knew what jealousy looked like on Hollander and it wasn’t this. Shane, despite being naked in bed with Ilya, was uncomfortable with the possibility of attraction to men being named.

“Fuck off,” Shane said, and made as though that was all he was going to say. Then shifted and asked, “Were you ever scared?”

Ilya raised his eyebrows, shook his head, asking for elaboration.

“Like, about being into guys,” Shane said, through gritted teeth. “Were you ever in denial?”

“Ah, no,” Ilya said, almost feeling guilty, like he was letting Shane down. It was just that wanting to suck dick couldn’t come as much of a surprise to a kid who’d been routinely and authoritatively called a faggot by his brother since the age of ten. He’d been called it for brushing his mom’s hair, for liking his space clean and making his bed, for preferring to spend time with Svetlana rather than the boys on their street. If those things made him a faggot, then being a faggot couldn’t be all bad. If being a faggot wasn’t all bad, then neither was sucking dick. Anyway, it wasn’t like he had given himself much time to agonize over it. The time between it first occurring to him that he wanted it and him getting Sasha alone in a bike shed clocked in at under five hours.

“Oh,” Shane said, and stared forward, which incidentally made him look very interested in the shitty action movie.

Ilya felt weirdly – he didn’t know. Protective, maybe. Like he wanted to make Shane feel better, but he couldn’t fuck him because he just had. “If I was smarter it would have scared me,” he said. “I am, you know. Reckless.”

Shane laughed a little, but shook his head. “No, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s nice. I’m, like, happy for you.”

Now it was Ilya’s turn to stare at the sweaty man on the screen. He could hear Shane breathing. He wanted to unpause the movie and listen to explosions instead. Shane said, “Does what we're doing scare you?”

Ilya reached for the remote. “Yes,” he said.

Present day

Ilya left the hotel early to pick Shane up at the airport. He had plans to meet Hanna in the afternoon, but that gave him six hours with Shane first. It was a little ridiculous that he hadn’t dropped the habit of measuring out his time with Shane, now that they lived together in wedded bliss.

Ilya was antsy in the arrivals lounge. Before they’d lived together in wedded bliss, he’d always wanted to be the one making the trip, not the one waiting. Even when they were a couple, when he wasn’t so deathly terrified of Shane knowing what was going on in his head, of Shane realizing how much power he had, Ilya wanted to be the one traveling down to Montreal, instead of Shane coming to Ottawa. He just wasn’t built for waiting.

When Shane appeared, Ilya shot up into standing. He was so beautiful, even in his slobbish travel clothes, even with his cap pulled low and his stupid roller suitcase that a maybe two day trip did not justify at all. Ilya didn’t understand how everyone wasn’t staring. And then Shane saw him, and his face lit up, and his back straightened, and his gait quickened. Ilya started to sweat as Shane neared. It had been less than forty eight hours, but Ilya had been needing him. Shane hugged him, fitting himself as close as possible to Ilya. Ilya picked him up off his feet a little and swung him in place. Shane laughed as Ilya put him back down and said, against Ilya’s cheek, “You’re like Anya with a toy.”

Ilya liked that idea. “My chew toy,” he said, and bit Shane’s shoulder.

Shane hummed, which made Ilya bite harder. Then Shane said, “Okay, enough.”

Ilya wasn’t convinced. He pulled away to get a look at Shane, flushed and trying to seem stern. “My pretty boy,” he said, and Shane screwed up his mouth.

“Take me to the hotel, please.”

Ilya squeezed his cheek, and Shane slapped his hand away, and Ilya pinched his side and Shane slapped that away too, rolling his eyes but smiling. “Okay,” Ilya said. “Let’s go.”

Shane held his hand the whole drive, wouldn’t let him pull away.

The heavy Seattle rain was a nice excuse to waste the morning in the hotel room. Ilya ordered up room service, and when he turned back to the bed Shane was scrolling on his phone with a divot between his brow that meant trouble. “What are you looking at?” Ilya asked, sprawling diagonal across the bed, digging his chin into Shane’s ribs.

“I’m trying to see if anyone got a picture of you biting me at the airport,” Shane said, in an accusatory tone.

“Nobody would care,” Ilya said. “Everybody already knows I can’t keep my hands off you. It is old news.” Shane had set pretty specific rules for public displays of affection, banning many kinds of touch, but he had failed to set limits on duration or frequency. If they were in a setting where Ilya was allowed to hold his hand, Ilya was never letting go of it. Ilya pushed up Shane’s sweater and mouthed at his chest, hoping to distract him from revising the rules.

“This was your mouth. You’ve never bit me in public before,” Shane said, and Ilya couldn’t help smiling, even though he knew Shane would be able to feel it.

“I will have to make up for lost time, then,” Ilya said, and the phrase sent a chill through him, took him for a moment offline. He wasn’t quite sure how it manifested in his body, but Shane noticed.

“What?” he asked, all concern, his hand in Ilya’s hair, but Ilya could feel him where he’d started to get hard against Ilya’s forearm.

“What?” Ilya repeated, because often that annoyed Shane enough to leave it, and got his mouth on Shane’s nipple.

Shane hooked a finger in Ilya’s mouth and pulled him away. “Seriously, what was that? You good?”

Ilya sighed and collapsed beside Shane on the bed. Shane immediately moved to lean against him, his leg hitching over Ilya’s. “Yes, just,” Ilya said. He looped his hand under Shane's knee, pulled him more firmly against him. “I feel guilty.”

Shane nodded, and Ilya marveled at his calmness. Earlier in their relationship, even in their boyfriends-in-love relationship, that revelation would have freaked Shane out. He had so much confidence in Ilya now, never thought Ilya could have fucked up that bad. “Why?” Shane asked.

“I just have so much time, we have so much time,” Ilya said. A lot of people would have been able to put together what he meant from that alone, and maybe Shane had, but he’d still want Ilya to say it, just to be sure. And that was a good thing, probably, for Ilya. “And Evans has none.”

“Oh,” Shane said, his face crumpling with pity, whether for Ilya or Evans Ilya couldn’t tell. He nosed against Ilya’s collarbone. “Did he – the reports didn’t make it clear. Do you know, did he kill himself? I mean, on purpose?”

“I don’t think so,” Ilya said. “I think maybe he just didn’t care as much as you’re supposed to.”

Shane swallowed. “You said he was like you,” he said. “And I know what you meant, but is it more than that? I mean, how alike were you?”

Ilya took a while to respond. “I don’t think he had a good relationship with his family,” he said. “I don’t think they were fair to him. He had a sister he loved, though, which is nice.”

“Like Svetlana?” Shane asked, and Ilya made a dubious noise.

“Not really,” he said. He and Svetlana loved each other, but he was pretty sure he valued the way they understood each other more. Shane made him explain himself, and that was good for Ilya, but there was a lot of relief in never having to at all to Svetlana. He didn’t think Nick and Hanna had anything like that. “They loved each other but they weren’t very involved in each other’s lives. I think – the things that are hard or painful about my life, we had in common, and the things that are good about my life, we didn’t. Except hockey, we both had hockey.” Even then, Ilya had been treated better by it. Ilya looked at Shane and said something he’d felt for years, but never so acutely as in that moment. “It doesn’t feel fair, that I get to have you. It feels like I’ve stolen something.”

Shane looked genuinely taken aback by that, frowning like it didn’t make sense. “Nobody else could ever deserve me.”

Ilya kissed him. it wasn’t Shane’s fault that that didn’t reassure Ilya. It was an impossible situation, because the sweeter and more loving Shane was, the more unbelievable it became that he was Ilya’s. The closest equivalent in Ilya’s life was the money, how guilty he’d felt about all the money he had and the people he’d left back in Russia without it, but money could be shared, it could be given away. The happiness he had with Shane he had no way of dividing or disowning. It was all his, only for him, and that felt like a betrayal, like he’d broken a promise. What that promise was and to who he wasn’t sure. To stay miserable, maybe, made to all the other miserable people.

Chapter End Notes

my interpretation of prospect/rookie Ilya is so directly informed by

the domovoy by citrusses

that it would feel inappropriate not to shout it out :)

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

Eight years ago

“Rozy was fucked up worst of all, anyway,” Mark said. Ilya never really liked when non-hockey friends used his hockey nicknames, and Mark was barely a friend at all. Ilya probably shouldn’t be that disdainful considering Mark and his girlfriend Emma had let him and Svetlana crash at their place, after Svetlana shamelessly reneged on her promise to be Ilya's designated driver.

Mark was clearly looking for a response, looking for someone to set him up for whatever he wanted to say next, but Emma was showering and the only punchlines Sveltana and Ilya set up were each other’s. They said nothing. They were not good guests. Probably nobody should ever let them into their home, like vampires. If Emma was there they’d be nice to Emma. They liked Emma, although that was annoying too, because Mark didn’t like that Ilya liked Emma, and Ilya had fucked too many people’s girlfriends to have any right to find that insulting. Ilya wished things could be simpler.

Mark didn’t need the set up anyway. After a pause he said, “You freaked Emma’s friend out bad, man.” He was gleeful about this, and Ilya felt sick and off-kilter in a way that had been common in recent months. He didn’t think he’d blacked out last night, was pretty sure he hadn’t blacked out since he was twenty, but he didn’t remember Emma’s friend. He’d been cross-faded and it had been a rare good night, the drugs making him happy and fun the way they should have, not miserable and unpredictable the way they had been. When had he freaked someone out?

He looked to Svetlana, to see if she knew what Mark was talking about. She said, an obvious attempt to even the playing field between Ilya and this woman he had no memory of, “She was all over you, it was embarrassing.”

“You don’t remember, do you?” Mark said, looking at Ilya, still smiling. “She said you asked her how she died.”

Ilya went to the bathroom and threw up. It was an easy way to get kicked out quick, because the only bathroom he knew in that house was the one Emma was showering in, so now he’d freaked out Emma and her friend both. Svetlana brought him home and put on hockey and didn’t ask him about it, because Svetlana was the perfect woman.

There’d been a ghost last night. Ilya had been certain there’d been a ghost. But, he supposed, a club girl covered in glitter and standing under strobe lights would shimmer the way a ghost did when he was rolling. Objectively it wasn’t that bad. How he’d handled the news was worse than the news itself. It was a weird thing to say, but it was entirely attributable to the drugs, and was really just a funny story.

The inverse of this had happened when he was a teenager, before he learned to hold his liquor. He and Sasha and Svetlana and some other kids whose names blurred had gotten wasted at a street festival, and then he’d seen this little girl, probably eight or nine, standing on her own and watching, and she was there for a good forty minutes so he felt moved to check she was okay, that her parents or someone was nearby. He had crouched down in front of her and she’d seemed so happy he was talking to her, and then Sasha started laughing at him for talking to a wall. That had freaked him out bad too, and Svetlana hadn’t asked him about it either.

Hours later, while they ate dinner, Svetlana said, “I think maybe I’ll cut back a little.”

“You didn’t have fun last night?” Ilya asked.

She shrugged. “There'll always be more fun. I just want to take a break for a while.”

“Sounds good.”

“Anyway, I need to dial in,” she said. “We have a championship to win.”

Ilya kept his relief internal. He’d gotten needy with Svetlana – and he knew Svetlana knew, because before they went out last night she’d said he should try fucking someone who wasn’t her or else she’d start getting the wrong idea. Ilya didn’t really want to go out so much right now, but outside of his team Svetlana was the only person whose company he could handle, and Svetlana had been going out.

She left soon after, kissing him on the forehead on her way out. He went to bed early because he had a game tomorrow and needed to recover. He could still bounce back pretty impressively from nights out, but the lack of sleep had been getting to him. He’d known, obviously, that Svetlana had proposed cutting back largely on his behalf, but it wasn’t the kind of thing they acknowledged.

When he was setting his alarm for the morning he pulled up the texts from Shane, the last one from three days ago. Did you see the Toronto Denver overtime? Some of the craziest hockey I’ve ever watched. The one before that was a week earlier: your record was nice while it lasted, because Shane had scored the quickest goal that season, beating out Ilya’s best by two seconds. Ilya’s had been the home opener, though, so he still thought it was cooler, even though this was a record that nobody cared about or even knew about other than the two of them. He didn’t say any of that, just like he didn’t say what he thought about the Denver Toronto overtime, which had been crazy, and which he’d been texting about with Svetlana when Shane’s text had come through.

They’d never actually had a real conversation about hockey, but it made sense to Ilya that it was how Shane was trying to reach out now, the only thing they had in common other than sex and a lot easier to make seem casual, incidental. Ilya had never known Shane to express sexual desire without seeming ruined by it.

He was glad Shane wasn’t going down the sex route because it would have made the ways Ilya was failing more acutely obvious. Hockey texts were easy to justify dismissing. Ignoring flirtation from someone as hot as Shane would have been a red flag, and Ilya had had his fill of those already.

That was the optimistic way of looking at the non-sexual nature of the texts. The less nice way was that Shane had stopped finding Ilya attractive in Sochi, because Ilya had let him down on the most fundamental part of the unspoken agreement between them, which was being a worthy competitor. Shane wouldn’t give power to someone pathetic.

If that was true, fine. Ilya would fix it the way he’d fix his head and his reputation, which was still weighed down by the Olympics. He’d been on the right track recently – he’d been winning, and one of the few American sports aphorisms that rang true to him was that winning fixed everything. Shane was part of his motivation. Ilya would be a winner again, and then he could fuck Shane again. And, maybe, text him about hockey.

Thinking that girl was a ghost had been bad. It had been really bad, made him feel as helpless and clueless as he’d felt at the Olympics, but it was one night. It was over, it was done. They were playing LA tomorrow, and they would beat LA, and they would keep beating teams, and Ilya would stop feeling uncomfortable with the idea of fucking anyone other than Svetlana, and he would stop drinking, too, or at least getting stupid drunk. And he’d be himself by the time he made it back to Russia again.

It was another three months before Ilya saw his next ghost. From his distinctly unscientific studies, the average life span of a ghost was around six months; some were gone within the week, and very few pushed past a year. It was good for the ghosts and it was good for Ilya. It wasn’t like the world was crawling with them; so long as he avoided hospitals, he didn’t see them all that often.

This one was in an airport lounge, the kind of place Ilya wouldn’t mind haunting if he became a ghost, filled with people, different people every day. He hated seeing ghosts in largely uninhabited places, for their sake as well as his. If they were somewhere crowded, sometimes they didn’t notice how his eyes caught on them. This one, an older man reading the newspaper over someone’s shoulder, didn’t look Ilya’s way once. The person with the newspaper kept shrugging like there was a fly buzzing around them. Ilya kept his eyes down, and when he next glanced up the ghost had wandered over to stand in front of a sign on the wall that said safe trip! in dozens of different languages. Ilya wondered how long he’d been dead, if he hadn’t gotten around to reading it yet.

From a distance, the glint faded. The ghost looked indistinguishable from the people around him. Ilya began to doubt himself. He still wasn’t out of the habit of doubting himself, wasn’t as confident as he should have been that his team was on track for winning the cup, and wasn’t as sure in his ability to tell the dead from the living. Coaches, teammates, commentators always said he saw everything, and he knew he was supposed to. He’d once been told about a guy who died from a bad trip months after the fact. Ilya wasn’t sure that was true, but he also wasn’t sure how long drugs stayed in his system.

He pulled up the camera on his phone and zoomed in, held it up and snapped, without looking at his screen, in the direction of the safe trip sign. Inhaled, exhaled, re-centered his crucifix, and looked down. The view of the sign was unimpeded, nobody in front of it. It was a ghost, Ilya had been right, he could trust himself.

Across the aisle from him Marlow kicked his shin, grinned in a distinctly familiar way, and Ilya realized he must have been making a face at his phone like a favorite hook up had just come through. He kicked Marlow back and returned his gaze to the photo. Sometimes he hated not having anyone to talk to about this. Without really thinking, he opened instagram and posted the photo there, captioned it safe trip! in Russian, which was one of the languages included in the sign but not visible in the picture. It felt like some version of telling someone something. It was the first photo he’d posted in months. He pocketed his phone, tuned back into his teammates’ bullshit.

Two days ago

“Oh, man,” Shane said. “This is so brutal. Nick Evans died. God, he was younger than us. You remember him, right?”

Ilya stood up and walked inside, pressed his palms into the edge of the kitchen counter and put all his weight on them, closed his eyes. After only a few moments he felt Shane’s hands at his shoulders, and he stayed there for a while before straightening up.

“I had forgotten he was younger,” Ilya said. Drafted the year after them, he’d forgotten.

Shane shook his head, and Ilya didn’t want to make him have to figure out what question to ask, but he also wasn’t sure how to preempt it. He attempted, “We were…”

“What, friends?” Shane asked.

Ilya made a face like not exactly. He didn’t know how to explain it, didn’t know where to start. He pulled out his phone and opened his DMs, found Evans and showed it to Shane. Their last exchange was from the day Ilya and Shane had released their statement after being outed, part of the avalanche of outreach. Fucked up what happened but happy for you and Shane. He always seemed like a really decent guy. Congrats for real man. Hope Ottawa stays quiet. Ilya hadn’t had the time or capacity to work through all those messages, but he’d made the effort to respond to Evans, albeit three days later. I appreciate it. Fucked up but I am happy, just a few good things right. Evans had sent a heart and a salute.

Shane squinted at it like it was a math problem. “So you knew each other?” he asked. “From where?”

“League stuff, playing each other,” Ilya said.

“Right, but…” Shane shook his head. “I mean, he and I played on the same team for a year. I don’t think he reached out to me. Which is fine, obviously, I just mean that I would have thought, between the two of us, I’d spent more time with him...”

Shane probably had spent more time with him, but maybe not one on one. “We had things in common,” Ilya said. “We were alike.”

“He was a defenseman,” Shane said quickly, and on a different morning Ilya would have laughed. Instead he raised his eyebrows, and Shane grimaced. “Sorry. What, was he bi?”

Ilya shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “He was into men, I don’t know about women. But that is not really what I meant either.”

“Oh,” Shane said. “Could he see the things you see?”

Shane refused to say ghosts in serious conversation, the way he wouldn’t say lovers. He didn’t think it was serious enough to describe what Ilya saw. Two years ago they’d spent Halloween day with the Pikes and watched a marathon of Caspar cartoons, and Shane had kept giving Ilya significant looks, raised eyebrows like what did I tell you. Of course that would be what North Americans thought of when they thought of ghosts.

“Yes,” Ilya said. “Not as well as I could, but yes. He is the only other person I’ve met who could.”

“Oh, Ilya,” Shane said, and hugged him. That was when the guilt started, Ilya getting comfort from the love of his life while Evans lay dead. Ilya had said they were alike, but maybe that was an opinion he hadn’t bothered to update in a while. They’d been on pretty divergent paths in recent years. He pulled away.

“I should go to Seattle,” he said.

“Yeah, of course,” Shane said. “We’ll keep an eye out for the funeral announcement. It might be a little while, it often is with an unexpected death.”

“This is not what I mean,” Ilya said. “I should go to see him. I will get next flight.”

Shane’s jaw ticked, never entirely uncomfortable with last minute plans. “I thought you said only some people stick around after dying. How do you know he will?”

“I don’t,” Ilya said. Even the dream wasn’t proof, because he’d dreamed about his mom and she hadn’t turned up as a ghost. He sort of had a feeling about Evans, but that was not the kind of answer that would satisfy Shane. “But I will check.”

“Where?” Shane asked. “It can be anywhere, right? Like, what if it’s the Dallas locker room?”

“Then I will go to fucking Dallas,” Ilya said, impatient in a way that he knew was unfair. He forced his body to relax. “He will not be in Dallas, though. He did not like it there.”

“People go places they like?” Shane asked. “That’s nice.”

Ilya kissed Shane, brief, then pulled out his phone to book a ticket to Seattle. People didn’t always go to places they liked. There wasn’t much of a system to it as far as Ilya could tell, though he had half a theory that they went to the last place they thought of, which was often but not always the place they had died. He had to hope Evans hadn’t thought about Dallas in his final moments.

Ilya booked the flight and texted his manager, more likely one of his manager’s assistants, to arrange a car and a hotel. He had to be out the door in fifteen minutes. He went to his room to pack, Shane following behind, not looking all that sure of himself. Ilya had too much on his mind to work out what was going on in Shane’s, and that made him feel bad all over again.

From the doorway Shane asked, “How did you know he was into men?”

Ilya almost said same way I knew you were, but that wouldn’t help whatever was happening in Shane’s head. “I could just tell,” Ilya said. “Sometimes it is—not obvious, but if you are looking…” He shrugged.

“Why were you looking?”

“Shane,” Ilya said, a little less tolerant than usual. Evans was dead.

“Sorry,” Shane said, not sounding that sincere, his one track mind hard at work. “Is it bad if I feel weird that you’ve never mentioned him to me before?”

It was a genuine question. Ilya really didn’t have much time. “No,” he said. “But it was not – secret. By the time you and me were good, were happy, and I would tell you things, I didn’t think about him much.”

And that seemed to do a decent job at reassuring Shane, so it was worth it, really, how it turned Ilya’s stomach.

Present day

Ilya met Hanna at a coffee shop of her choosing, a basement space with local art on the walls, lots of lamps and lots of cushions, reminding him of the places in Ottawa he and Shane went with Shane’s parents. After they were outed they stopped having to have all their family meals at home, and they’d gone to the kind of restaurants the Hollanders had gone to before Ilya had been in the picture, and those weren’t really to Ilya’s taste. Formal, upmarket, swanky, not the kind of luxury he had gotten used to, neither old world nor sleazy. He’d played along as best he could, but after a few weeks they’d started looking, to quote Yuna, to mix it up. They’d landed on a few nearby joints like this, still stylish but a little more casual, more geared to comfort. Nobody had ever said it was for Ilya, but Ilya had known it was.

This was the kind of reflection that should have put Ilya in a good mood. Instead he twinged with guilt, like he’d forgotten to invite Evans to a party. It occurred to him he was definitely going to try to pay for Hanna’s coffee. He joined her at a low table with five unlit candles on it, her fingers scraping at the wax of the one closest to her. Her satchel was on the chair beside her, and a little felt dog key ring hung from the zip. Ilya had to assume it wasn’t actually the same one from the car, but it was identical, and it sent a chill down his spine. He pinched his knee to snap him out of it, looked at her, and said, “Thank you for meeting me.”

She shrugged, said nothing. Her brother had died two days ago. It was really good of her to go for coffee with a stranger. “He was a very good person,” Ilya said. “I cared about him. I have been feeling bad that I have not talked to him recently.”

She looked at him, skeptical. He could tell she was less touched that he had liked her brother and more confused as to why. “Were you and he together?” she blurted out. “Sorry, I mean, obviously not now, not when he died, I know you’re married, but at some point.”

Ilya glanced around them, but nobody seemed to be paying attention. The background music and the coffee machines were loud enough. “No,” he said, and for some reason it sounded almost apologetic, like he felt bad for it. Maybe that he was cutting down an easy explanation.

“Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed too. “But do you know – was he into men?”

Ilya had no idea what the ethics would be of outing a dead guy to his loving sister. Probably his failure to deny it was confirmation, anyway. “You don’t know?” he asked, to give himself some plausible deniability.

“No,” Hanna said, a little defensively, which Ilya understood. He hadn’t phrased that quite right. “I just always thought maybe. It would explain some stuff. But then he’d had a girlfriend for a while and seemed to really care about her, so.”

If Shane was there he’d have said that didn’t mean Evans wasn’t into men, because Shane was very defensive about bisexuality these days. “I did not know this,” Ilya said. “When?”

“His first few years in the league,” she said. “It was probably when he was happiest. Even then it wasn’t perfect.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” she said, and looked like she felt guilty for it. “His girlfriend was a drinker, and it’d been causing problems basically since the start. I always figured it hit its breaking point, but he never said anything specific.”

“He would have been good to someone like that,” Ilya said. Remembering how he’d wanted to help the ghosts. “To someone troubled.”

Hanna nodded, then swallowed and said, “I’m gonna use the bathroom.”

Ilya discreetly ignored how her voice broke, pretended it wasn’t obvious she wasn’t going to cry. His eyes went back to the felt dog. If she knew the car her brother had died in, had she put together that that was one of the last things he’d seen? Ilya took out his phone and took a photo of it, and saw a text from Shane. It was just his location, where Ilya could find him once he finished up with Hanna, not a check in or words of comfort, but it still soothed Ilya’s nerves. He pocketed his phone as Hanna returned, but he must have been looking at the dog again, because as she sat she said, “His girlfriend made that. She was into crafts. Probably is, I guess. Did you meet Max yesterday?”

“This is the dog?” Ilya asked. “Yes.”

She nodded. “Nick loved Max. He was really good with animals. I always wanted him to get a dog.”

Ilya didn’t know what to say.

“So,” Hanna said, voice firm, clearly initiating a change in subject. “What do you want? Not being rude, but just. Is there something you want?”

Ilya nodded. “I know it’s strange, but I would like to see his childhood bedroom,” he said.

“That is strange,” she said.

“I am trying to find somewhere to feel close to him, and he told me about his childhood.” Neither of these things were lies. “I know there are house rules. I assume from your parents. If you could explain to them, even though I don’t have a great reason—”

“You don’t need a reason,” she said, sounding a little bitter about it.

“What?”

“You’re Ilya Rozanov,” she said. “They’re hockey fanatics. You could ask if he could be buried in your yard and they’d say yes. They don’t even hold it against you that you’re gay.”

Ilya’s eyebrows shot up, and she went pale. “Sorry,” she said. “That was fucking awful, all of it.”

“I’m bi,” he said, after a pause, the only thing he could think to say.

“Sorry again,” she said, putting her hand through her hair.

Ilya shrugged. “I say stupid shit when I’m feeling fucked up too,” he said.

“It wasn’t anything against you,” she said. “It’s my parents. I hate coming back here.”

Ilya nodded, and she kept going. “My mom is – it was her car. That Nick died in. And it was totaled, obviously. And she’s mad at him for it. She hasn’t said it outright but it’s so fucking obvious, she’s making it obvious, and it makes me so mad. Like even in death she can’t give him the slightest grace. I mean, all his money is going to go to them, because he didn’t have a will, so it’s not like she’ll struggle to replace it.”

Ilya nodded. “What do you think he would have done with his money if he did have a will?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But he wouldn’t have left it to our parents.”

“To you?” Ilya asked.

“Maybe,” she said, sounding a little uncomfortable. “And his ex, maybe.”

Ilya said, “Even if your parents would let me go up to his room, I do not think I want to meet them. Is there a time you could let me up?”

“Sure,” she said. “I don’t know when, exactly, but I can text you some time when they’re out. It’ll happen over the next couple of days.”

“Thank you,” Ilya said. They finished their coffees and made to leave. On the street, about to part ways, Ilya said, “I did not do right by your brother, but I know he cared about you. So if you need anything, you can ask me.”

“What could I need from you?” she asked, frowning like she really wanted to know.

He shrugged, thinking of the non-existent will. “I am very rich. I like to have things to do with it.”

Seven years ago II

Eventually, in spite of Seattle traffic, the straggling players made their way to the hotel, joining Shane and Ilya and Evans and the others in the conference room. The rest of the day seemed unproductive. The biggest questions went unanswered, and people kept getting stuck on minutiae, and too many people talked for too long without being told to shut up. The old guy playing chair was doing a terrible job. Ilya considered filling that role, trying to get people in line, but he frankly didn’t care enough. Anyway, people had stopped listening to him because he kept suggesting a lockout.

It gave him time to think. He decided against thinking about whatever that had been with Evans earlier, and instead started planning the evening in his head, when he’d have Shane again. The first night had been a relatively standard fuck, even if nothing ever felt quite standard with Shane, and toward the end of it Ilya had been teasing Shane for coming so fast, which was also pretty standard, except that this time Shane had said that he just wasn’t so fixated on trying to last, because not everything needed to be dragged out. So Ilya made a plan, and explained it to Shane at lunch, in low tones that Shane would listen to but not respond to, too many people around. If Shane could last an hour, he could make Ilya come whatever way he wanted. This was a significant prize for Shane, who often had requests for where and how Ilya should come, which Ilya rarely granted. If Shane couldn’t last – Shane’s eyes had drilled into Ilya when Ilya left that sentence hanging. It was in part because he knew nothing worked Shane up more than not knowing, and in part because he didn’t want to commit to anything too soon, his best ideas always coming to him in the moment.

Ilya barely looked at Shane again, but Shane didn’t do nearly as good a job at keeping himself in check, his voice too distracted, his eyes always darting back to Ilya. If Ilya was more responsible he would have gotten Shane to snap out of it somehow, but he was too high on it, on the power that Shane was already slipping him. They were still sitting beside each other, but there were too many people around for Ilya to still Shane’s leg when it started jumping under the table. He was winding himself tighter and tighter, which was beautiful in its own right but would also obviously compromise his ability to last past the hour.

Despite this, when they found themselves in Shane’s room, Shane was apparently confident enough in his ability to say, “I’m gonna give you the weakest hand job of all time.”

“Nice smack talk,” Ilya said, advancing on him. “You should say this on ice sometime. Get in opponent’s head.”

Shane laughed, and Ilya kissed him. He’d gotten to kiss him while he laughed a couple times before, and he always liked it too much. He bullied Shane onto his bed, then held himself over him, surveying him, considering his options. Two paths appeared before him. He could try to get Shane to come as quick as possible, blow him and finger him and play with his balls all at the same time, or he could drag it out as much as possible, give Shane a fighting chance.

He figured he’d start at the latter and take it from there. He had plenty of time to break him. He started massaging his hands down Shane’s sides, and Shane said, “Wait.”

Ilya looked up, and Shane fumbled for his phone. “Timer,” he said, and Ilya laughed, held his hands up as Shane set it. As soon as he had Ilya was on him again, pressing up his shirt as he stretched to lay his phone on the nightstand.

Ilya was greedy; he’d barely been at it a minute before he started wishing he’d given himself longer than an hour. Two, three, five. He knew Shane’s flight wasn’t until noon tomorrow, and Ilya’s wasn’t much earlier. He pushed it from his mind; he could fill this hour up until it was as good as a whole night. He kissed down Shane’s ribs, pulled his waistband down half an inch and kissed there, Shane hardening against his shoulder. He could feel the war going on in Shane, the usual impatience and instinct to hurry Ilya on and the knowledge that he had a better chance of lasting if Ilya stayed slow like this. His hips would twitch then still as forcefully as if Ilya had held them down. He kept mouthing at Shane’s skin, too soft to leave marks, and then pulled the waistband down a further inch, so the base of Shane’s dick was just visible. Ilya kissed it, and then kissed around it, mouthing over Shane’s neat pubes, pushing them against the grain the way he always felt a need to, a subtle work of vandalism. Shane’s hands went in Ilya’s hair, not to direct him but just to feel more of him. He pulled, more forceful than anything Ilya was doing with Shane, and Ilya held back the smile Shane would be able to feel. He didn’t pull Shane’s pants down any further, but he did fish out his dick, and he started licking up and down the sides, tonguing at the head, never any real pressure, just getting it wet. It was almost impressive that Shane was staying hard, but the way he was reacting Ilya might as well have had him at the back of his throat. Slight noises were making it out through his gritted teeth, his hands clamped in the sheets. But then, frustration and arousal could look pretty similar on Shane.

Ilya didn’t lose track of time during sex; if anything he became more primally aware of it, like how he felt on the ice, the clock in his head in perfect sync with the game clock, down to the millisecond. He knew not even five minutes had past when Shane, who fantasies never did justice, said, “You don’t have to go easy on me.”

Ilya lifted his head up and raised his eyebrows at Shane, who was leaning up on his elbows, and Shane got this look like he was trying to work out which rule he’d broken and how to make up for it, and then Ilya took Shane’s dick to the back of his throat. Shane flattened himself against the mattress and cursed. Shane had said he usually wasn’t trying to make it last, but maybe he didn’t realize that Ilya usually was, that Ilya’s usual intent wasn’t making Shane come as quick as possible. Ilya didn’t let up the pressure, never pulled off that far, only ever paused to tongue firmly at the bottom of Shane’s head. Then he got his hand on Shane’s balls, held them and thumbed over them and Shane keened, his legs kicking on either side of Ilya.

Ilya let up. He wanted to play with his food a little longer. He pulled off, spit keeping him connected to Shane and said, “Get me lube.”

Shane didn’t move, was gasping down air, and Ilya smacked his hip. “Lube,” he said.

Shane grabbed it from the nightstand and threw it at Ilya, which made Ilya laugh, ducking to the side so it just hit him in the shoulder. “Ungrateful,” he said, and pulled Shane’s pants the whole way off. He lubed up his fingers and then pressed Shane’s thighs open, because Shane got huffy in that put on way of his if Ilya got lube anywhere beyond an inch diameter of his hole.

It was only when Ilya pressed his finger to Shane that he realized he was hard too. It had been entirely irrelevant before. He had enough time to get himself off and then go again if Shane made it the hour. Technically compliant with the rules, and it’d make Shane feel all complicated. That would be what he’d do next, jerk off onto Shane, once he was done down here.

It was back to his initial strategy, touch so soft he marveled Shane could stay hard. He circled around Shane’s hole, rubbing over it, never dipping in. He’d taken it slow with Shane’s hole before, but usually while he was sucking Shane off. Shane’s dick was red and shiny and neglected against his hip. Ilya leaned up to breathe on it, and it twitched. Ilya was really very hard.

“Rozanov,” Shane said, going for reprimanding and missing badly. Almost everything that came out of Shane’s mouth sounded like begging when he got like this. “Roz.”

Ilya could never tell if Shane was using a shortened version of his name purposefully, like a nickname, or if he just got choked off in the middle of it. Both appealed to him, albeit in quite different ways.

“Yes?” Ilya said, letting the tip of his finger press into Shane, the give easy and immediate.

“Fuck you,” Shane said, and Ilya laughed again. Shane, whose internal clock was as impressive as Ilya’s, reached for his phone, and Ilya knew it was because he wanted to check the timer, like he didn’t trust himself. But instead of dropping it to his chest as soon as he got a glance, he leaned up on his elbows again and frowned at the screen. Ilya frowned too, and slipped the finger in fully. Shane dropped the phone and made a new kind of noise, which was gratifying but only for a moment, and then he was picking up the phone again.

“Stop,” Shane said, without looking at him. “I need to think.”

Ilya pulled out, sat up on his knees and looked down at Shane. He had his bottom lip caught in his teeth, which Ilya usually found hot. Ilya couldn’t take it. “What?” he said.

“Fuck,” Shane said, looking at his screen for another long moment then finally turning his gaze to Ilya. “I gotta go. You gotta go.”

“Where?”

“You back to your room,” Shane said. “Me to Montreal.”

Ilya stayed on the bed and so did Shane, like he was finding this as hard to adjust to as Ilya. Ilya, testing the possibility that this was malleable, stroked his hand up Shane’s thigh.

“Rozanov,” Shane said, a little sharply. “Game’s over.”

There was something about that particular phrase that got deep under Ilya’s skin, that felt almost cruel. It didn’t hurt at first, wouldn’t hurt for hours. Right then it just shocked him. Shane stood up, grabbed his pants from where they were tangled at the bottom of the bed, having to yank them out from under Ilya, and started pulling them on. Ilya watched. “What is going on?”

“Nothing,” Shane said, all defensive, like Ilya was being unjustifiably nosy. It was crazy, the rules Shane had for what Ilya was and wasn’t allowed.

“You don’t make me stop fucking you for nothing,” Ilya said. “Hollander, what is going on?”

“Oh,” Shane said, turning to him with a look of surprise. “Sorry, I just realized this could seem – it’s nothing bad, nothing serious. It’s not a family emergency or anything. It’s just work.”

If Ilya was a better person, that would have come as a relief. Actually he wasn’t willing to accept anything less than Shane’s house being on fire as an explanation for this. “Montreal suddenly have hockey game?” Ilya asked.

“No,” Shane said. Whatever regret or distraction he’d felt earlier, however hard he’d found it to adjust to this news with Ilya’s spit still drying on his dick, he was over it now. He would have been able to step out of this hotel room and do a press conference. He was totally in control of himself. “It’s to do with a sponsorship deal I’ve got lined up, someone’s in town but only for twenty four hours. I’ve gotta get home, maybe hopefully get a few hours sleep, shower, eat, get changed.”

He wasn’t talking to Ilya any longer; that list was for his own benefit. It did answer Ilya’s next question, though, which was why Shane couldn’t just leave in the morning. And show up to a meeting straight from the airport, he imagined Shane saying, and was glad he was spared the indignity of asking.

Shane, fully dressed, turned to Ilya. “This is my room,” he said, like maybe the reason Ilya hadn’t moved was that he’d forgotten, and Ilya stood up. He didn’t have to get dressed, he was already dressed. He left without saying anything further, too in shock, and he’d later regret this, how obviously effected he must have seemed. He stood in the hallway for longer than he should, long enough it’d piss Shane off to know. Then he went back to his room.

He didn’t like his room – it was why they’d switched up since last night, why they’d hooked up (or started to) in Shane’s room this time around. There was a ghost outside Ilya’s window. It was weird, ominous if he believed in signs, for the hotel to have two ghosts. This one, a middle aged woman in work out gear, lingered by the cherry tree, looking lost, sometimes swiping at the blossoms. It was nice, he thought, that she got to be there while the tree was in bloom.

Ilya’s perfect internal clock failed him, and he must have been standing by that window for an embarrassing length of time. His phone lit up with a text from Shane, who had sent a screenshot of his timer app going off, cute as anything, and said this counts as lasting the hour :)

Like it was no big deal. It wasn’t a big deal – they fucked when it was convenient, and tonight it had stopped being convenient for Shane. Annoying, yes, but it shouldn’t mess him up this bad, especially not when he’d gotten to fuck Shane last night. It scared him that it messed him up this bad. He’d thought he had it under control; this was his way of asserting control over this rivalry he’d been thrust into. He’d made it about sex, the safest thing he knew. He felt conned – this was what con artists did. They made their marks think they held the power, and then they left them stranded and broke and hopeless and unsure about exactly how it had happened, if it had happened at all.

And Ilya couldn’t even learn a lesson from it, couldn’t put his guard up, because the thing with Shane was that there was always another round. Shane had said the game was over, but it wasn't. Ilya didn't think it ever would be. 

Chapter End Notes

thank you for reading! <3

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

Seven years ago III

The morning after Shane cut their game short, Ilya found Nick Evans in the hotel lobby, which confused him. “You did not stay here, did you?” he asked, and Evans only took a moment to adjust to the lack of pleasantries. It was one of the reasons Ilya liked him.

“Nah,” Evans said. “I just left something of mine here, I’m checking lost and found.”

It was a lie, for some reason. Ilya surveyed him for a moment and then said, “I am going out to smoke. Come with me.”

Evans followed. On the way outside, Ilya asked, “Why are you involved in this? It does not seem like you.”

“It’s not like me,” Evans said. “I’m regretting it, too.”

“So why did you sign up?”

“My sister told me to,” Evans said, sounding a little embarrassed. “Not exactly, but she was on me to put myself out there more, I guess. With people. And I said I don’t really care about getting involved in anything other than hockey, so she said I should do something that’s not hockey, but hockey-adjacent, so I still give a fuck. It sounded like it made sense at the time.”

Ilya nodded. “You are close with your family?”

“Sure,” Evans said, the kind of lie Ilya told when he didn’t care if someone believed it or not.

“You like being back home?” Ilya wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. It wasn’t like Evans would accidentally let seeing ghosts slip in the course of small talk.

“Uh, it’s interesting,” Evans said. “It’s always interesting. I stay in my childhood room. I kind of feel like my child self is still there, it’s like there are two things happening at once. Me as a kid thinking about being a hockey player, and me as a hockey player thinking about being a kid.”

Shit like that was probably why Evans struggled to fit in with hockey players. He was weird, but Ilya liked weird. “Like a ghost,” Ilya said, because fuck it and because that was genuinely what it sounded like. He couldn’t imagine staying in his childhood home, his childhood bed, when he went back to Moscow. Evans looked down and said nothing.

Ilya led him to the cherry tree. He’d decided yesterday to leave whatever was up with Evans alone, but he couldn’t remember the reasoning behind that decision now, and more than anything he just needed a distraction. He wanted to see Evans react to the ghost. Evans didn’t, but did go out of his way to stand with his back to the tree, which was just as good.

“You see her?” Ilya asked. “The woman by the tree?”

“What woman?” Evans asked.

“The ghost,” Ilya said, and nodded his head in her direction. He felt pretty confident saying it, even if he was somehow wrong about Evans. It would just land like an inscrutable joke, Ilya being the weird asshole he was known for being. If he wanted to he could go around telling everyone his secret and it wouldn’t really change anything. In fact he had said it to someone once, on the ice, that he saw ghosts. It had made sense in the context of whatever ridiculous shit talk he’d found himself in the middle of, and it wasn’t like there’d been consequences. Ilya very rarely faced consequences.

He watched Evans weigh his options, eventually give in. “Shit man, are you serious? You see them too?”

Ilya nodded.

“Fuck,” Evans said. “You’re the first person I’ve known who does. That’s why I came back this morning, I had this feeling that maybe you did, but I thought I was being crazy.” He moved to turn around, and Ilya kicked at his shin.

“Do not look at her,” Ilya said. “She’ll notice us, she’ll talk to us.”

And the excited understanding on Evans’ face morphed. “Wait,” he said. “You can talk to them?”

Ilya paused. “Yes,” he said.

“Like, and they talk to you?”

“Yes, this is what I said,” Ilya said, impatient to cover his discomfort. “You cannot?”

“No,” Evans said. “I mean they’re not – how clear are they to you?”

Ilya shrugged, wasn’t sure if he was missing an English idiom. “They’re as clear as people.”

“Shit,” Evans said. “Not for me, man. I only ever see them in, like, the corner of my eye. If I try to look straight at them they basically disappear.”

Ilya couldn’t tell if that would be better or worse. From his perspective it was disappointing. He’d liked the idea of Evans, of anyone, being in the same boat as him. Similar boat would have to be good enough.

“Your whole life?” Ilya asked.

“Yeah,” Evans said. “You?”

Ilya nodded.

“You ever told anyone before?”

Ilya clenched and unclenched his jaw, couldn’t believe he was saying it. “My mother,” he said.

“Me too, but she didn’t believe me,” Evans said. “I was like, six, at the time, so fair enough. I hadn’t even realized they were dead people yet. I never tried again, though.”

Ilya didn’t know what would have happened if his mom hadn’t believed him. Probably nothing really would have changed, it would have just sucked a little harder.

“Wait, why do you not want them to talk to you?” Evans asked. “Isn’t it kind of cool? I’d like to be able to talk to them.”

“You would not,” Ilya said. “They are just – themselves, just people. They don’t know the secrets of the universe, or anything. And sometimes they are very sad, and they want you to do things for them, and you can’t, really.”

Evans frowned. “Things like what?”

The words were coming freely, like Ilya had been waiting to tell someone about this. “Give messages to their family, or make sure their dog is okay. I mean, sometimes it is stuff you can do, but sometimes not. Sometimes you meet them in Vancouver and their dog is in Atlanta. Maybe I am asshole, I don’t know. But it would take over your life.” Ilya had too many things already threatening to take over his life, and hockey was the only one he felt at all good about.

Evans nodded. “Don’t they ever just want to talk? I always feel like they’re lonely, I don’t know.”

“Yes, sometimes they just want to talk,” Ilya said. “But even then. You talk to them once, they might still be ghosts for months after that. You can’t go to see them every day. And sometimes you can’t talk to them because there are other people around, or cameras. It is easier, to just never do it.”

“Yeah,” Evans said, slowly. “I get all that. But – you can talk to ghosts, man. Feels weird to be able to talk to ghosts and just. Not.”

Present day

Ilya showed up at the Evans’ home at 11am the morning after coffee with Hanna, and she let him in. It was just her and Max. She stayed in the living room, Max followed Ilya up the stairs. Max struggled, took them slow, and Ilya tried to not get impatient with an old dog. It just had all been built up way too much already. He pushed open the second door on the left, which Hanna had told him had been Evans’ bedroom.

Had been, he realized, might not only have reflected the fact that Evans had died. It might have stopped being his bedroom a while before that. There was a bed, and there were hockey posters on the walls and faded crumbling dinosaur stickers on the window, but it was mostly more of a storage space. There were shoulder-height towers of cardboard boxes, creating a maze in the small room. Evans stood among them, glowing and staring wide eyed at Ilya.

Then his eyes fell to Max and he grinned. He navigated the boxes and dropped to his knees in front of the dog, stretched his hand out like he could pet it. Ilya tactfully closed the door behind him, and distracted himself by reading the text on the cover of the comic books visible in an unsealed cardboard box. FATE IS IN HIS HANDS!

Ilya didn’t think Max could see Evans, but he had some sense of something. He barked and it seemed to take a lot of energy. “Oh fuck yeah, Max,” Evans said, and finally glanced at Ilya, and it was clearly mostly for Ilya’s benefit when he said to the dog: “Who’d have thought you’d outlive me, huh?”

“Max will live forever,” Ilya said. “So. How have you been, Evans? Get up to anything recently?”

Evans stood up straight, smiled slightly. “Call me Nick, man. I think I’ve officially retired.”

Ilya nodded.

Evans – Nick – said, “Did you break into my childhood home? I’m touched.”

“Hanna let me in,” Ilya said.

Nick’s face twisted. “How’s she doing, did I fuck her up bad?”

“No,” Ilya said. “She is very, very sad, but it is normal grief. She seems strong.”

“Yeah, the strongest,” Nick said. “You’ve spent time with her?”

“I went for coffee with her yesterday,” Ilya said. “Made my case for visiting your room.”

“And what case was that, assuming you didn’t tell her I was a ghost?”

“I told her I wanted to be somewhere I’d feel close to you,” Ilya said.

Nick grinned, shit-eating. “Romantic.”

“Better romantic than crazy,” Ilya said, and to take the heat off himself said, “Speaking of romantic. She told me you used to have a girlfriend. It was serious.”

“Yeah,” Nick said, frowning. “She’s not here, is she? I wouldn’t want her to come. My parents didn't like her. I assume you’re here for the funeral, has it happened yet?”

“No, not yet,” Ilya said. “I am here because I thought you might—” He gestured at Nick, to get his point across. Become a ghost.

“Oh,” Nick said, looking surprised by that. “Well, I hope she doesn’t come. Will you look out for her a bit, if she does?”

Ilya nodded. He didn’t know her name, but he figured she’d be easy enough to spot, if she did show up. “Hanna said your parents are hockey fanatics,” he said. “But they were not nice to you, they were not proud of you?”

Nick laughed a little. “No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because hockey was the only thing I was good at, and I wasn’t that good at it,” he said. “Maybe they’d be proud if I was racking up awards and all, you know. But even then I’m not sure.”

Nick had won a ring, back in Dallas, his second year. It wasn’t like he’d been MVP, but he’d contributed to that team’s success. Ilya cared deeply about hockey, and worked harder at it than many people worked at anything, but he couldn’t act like that was all there was to his greatness. A lot of it was luck, genetics, the shape his body had taken, the way his brain processed information. That was true for any athlete at his level. And it was much more the distinguishing factor between him and non-star players than work ethic. Work ethic was a prerequisite for professional athletes. Discipline could be taken for granted. What was above discipline, what was not a given, was obsession, and Nick was obsessive. He took hockey seriously, the way a lot of players like him did; the ones who weren’t exceptional at anything but still stuck it out in the league. The ones who didn’t treat tape reviews like a kid treated homework. The kind who became coaches, after retirement. They always made Ilya’s favorite teammates. “You were very good at hockey,” Ilya said, and the past tense made him uncomfortable. “I’m sure you are still very good at ghost hockey.”

“I was no Ilya Rozanov,” Nick said, shrugging. “Or Shane Hollander.”

“In a way this makes it more impressive.” Ilya really did mean that.

“Don’t sweet talk me now,” Nick said. “I’m finally at peace with things.”

“Really?” Ilya asked, and before Nick could answer they heard banging from below, like kitchen cabinets slamming shut.

Nick grinned. “Hanna wants you to leave.”

“What?”

“Yeah, she’s pretty passive aggressive.” Nick said it like a compliment. “She must think you’ve been up here too long.”

It hadn't been long at all, but maybe he wasn’t entitled to much. Not if he was believed to be standing in an empty room. “Okay,” he said, a little unsure. He wasn’t ready to go. He’d wanted to ask Nick what had happened that night, if it really had been an accident, and how much of an accident. Even if he hadn’t wanted actively to kill himself, had he wanted to live? But he didn’t want to bring it up out of nowhere, and the conversation was no longer building toward it.

“I appreciate you stopping by, though,” Nick said. “Really. You’ve always been a good guy.”

Ilya made a non-committal noise. “I will come back,” he said. “I will be in town until funeral.”

“Oh,” Nick said, looking surprised by this. “You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” Ilya said, which wasn’t quite right. He felt compelled to. Nick might be here another six months, maybe longer, with nobody to so much as make eye contact with him. Ilya was his only connection to humanity right now, and he couldn’t just leave because it was inconvenient. He was considering staying beyond the funeral, depending on whether or not Shane would lose patience with him.

And after that six months – Ilya had an old fear that when ghosts faded they hadn’t, like, transcended to the afterlife, but instead just grown too weak for him to see. They were still there, they were there forever, just without his, or anyone’s, eyes on them.

But of course he couldn’t say any of that, not now, not to Nick.

“I have, um, little tradition,” he said. Nick raised his eyebrows. “I take pictures, of ghosts.”

Nick looked shocked. “They show up for you?”
“No, this is why I take the pictures,” Ilya said. “Do you mind?”

Nick shrugged, then straightened up and smiled like he might actually be visible in the photo after all. Ilya took it, looked down at the screen, saw the dinosaur stickers on the window. Nick looked too, craning over Ilya’s shoulder. When ghosts got close, Ilya could feel static electricity. “This looks like those weird pictures you post online.”

Ilya raised his eyebrows, and Nick smiled. “Damn,” he said. “You said ghosts don’t know the secrets of the universe, but I know a couple.”

Max didn’t follow him down, and Ilya was glad for that. Maybe Max would start keeping Nick company, and Ilya would have done at least one good thing for Nick. Hanna was sitting where he’d left her, on the overstuffed couch in the front room, now with a cup of coffee. “Thank you for that,” he said.

She looked at him appraisingly. She said, “I heard you talking.”

Ilya froze.

“Not what you were saying, or anything,” she clarified. “Just that you were talking. That’s okay, I get it. It must have been nice, to talk to him.”

“It was,” Ilya said, cautiously. “Would you be okay if I came back?”

“You have more to say?” He was confusing her again.

Ilya shrugged.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll text you if there’s another good time for it.”

He nodded. “I think, while you are in Seattle, you might like spending time in there too,” he said. “You might feel closer to him.”

Six years ago

Shane and the ghosts were really quite separate, almost diametrically opposed. Ilya kept them apart in his head and they rarely crossed paths in reality, either. There’d been one on the balcony the night Shane won rookie of the year, some guy from the eighties who’d overdosed on coke, one of the oldest ghosts Ilya had ever met and who’d only served to depress him further. It had depressed him, but it had been easy to manage. Ilya was, most of the time, good at ignoring ghosts. But it had felt weird, closer to lying than denying ghosts usually did, to dismiss Shane's anger at how easily someone could have seen them kiss when someone had, in fact, seen them kiss. 

In the early days of booking rooms for him and Shane when Montreal came to Boston, Ilya would choose a different hotel each time. He knew himself, and any kind of familiarity in a hook up became off-putting and distinctly unattractive. Then Shane had really liked the fourth hotel, liked the sheets and the shower and the complementary shampoo, and Ilya stuck with it. By then he’d realized familiarity, for some reason, was not something that turned him off Shane, that in fact it worked the other way, that the more of a shared language that emerged between them the more it all went to Ilya’s head. He didn't want to try to make it feel like the first time every time. He liked reminders that it wasn't an isolated event, that Shane was choosing to sleep with him again and again and again.

It was a very nice hotel. Shane never asked to contribute to the cost, a request Ilya was always half waiting for, because Shane needed as much as possible to be even between them. No debt, no obligation. But Shane acted like the hotel rooms were Ilya’s property, and Ilya liked spending money on him in this one way. It had been the form of care he had become most familiar with, as an adult, spending his money, and he rarely got to apply it to Shane. It wasn’t like he could buy him presents or bring him to restaurants or get him into exclusive events.

It was always the same hotel but not always the same room. Having a room, their room, would be a bridge too far. The line they weren’t crossing was microscopic, acceptable and unacceptable wedged right up next to each other. They could have a shared history with a hotel, not with a hotel room.

One January it was room 208, and Ilya arrived first. He closed the door and jumped in a way that made him very glad Shane wasn’t there yet when he heard someone behind him say, “Holy shit.”

A ghost behind him say it. Ilya spun to face him, where he leaned against the desk, or did an impression of someone leaning against the desk. Ilya was too in shock to control himself, locked eyes with the ghost before he could help it. The ghost’s eyes widened. “Holy shit, you can see me. You’re Ilya fucking Rozanov and you can see me.”

Ilya had never been recognized by a ghost before. This would be the guy to do it – college aged and wearing a Tom Brady jersey, like half the Massachusetts sports fans Ilya had ever met. “You want a picture with me?” Ilya asked.

The guy laughed. “Is that a joke? A joke about how I’m a ghost? Fuck you, man.”

Ilya glanced back at the door. He never had to wait that long for Shane. “Can you get in the bathroom, do you have range to there?”

“Yeah,” the guy said, slow. “Why?”

“I need you to hide.”

“What?”

Ilya didn’t really have to be all that discreet with a ghost. “Why do you think I have hotel room in Boston, where I live?” he asked. “I am here to fuck someone. I do not want you watching.”

The guy shrugged. “Could be my last chance to see some action.”

“You are in hotel room, I doubt this,” Ilya said. “I can put porn on TV once I’m done, if you would like.” The guy clearly understood he held the power, and said nothing. Ilya grimaced. “And if you have message for someone, or unfinished business, I will do it.”

“Will you give my mom a hundred grand?”

Ilya sort of loved the nerve. “Yes, fuck you. I swear I will do that if you stand in the bathroom until I come get you.”

There was a knock on the door, and Ilya made an impatient gesture toward the bathroom.

The ghost looked indignant. “I can’t even get a glance at her? Come on, man. I don’t have a lot going on right now.”

“It is a him,” Ilya said, hoping shock would work, and it did. The ghost retreated.

Ilya took a breath, shook himself into steadiness, and opened the door. Shane pushed through, pissed off at being kept waiting for five seconds. “Were you on a call?” he asked, like that was a mortal sin. He must have heard voices. No, right, voice.

“Yes,” Ilya said. “Telling reporters about my plans for the evening.”

“Fuck you,” Shane said, but stepped right up to Ilya. Ilya rested a hand on the small of his back and felt Shane shape himself against it. And then, softer, “Plans?”

Ilya grinned, pushed lightly at Shane’s chest to get him against the wall and went slowly down on his knees. Shane’s breath picked up, his hands pushy on Ilya’s shoulders even though he knew that never worked. Ilya pushed his pants down his thighs, pushed his shirt up to mouth at his hips, and then licked at his hardening dick. He held it on his tongue, his lips soft around it, and as soon as they tightened Shane made a noise. Too loud. Ilya pulled off, kept close to his dick, and held a finger to his mouth, like ssh. Pinched Shane’s thigh so he’d look down and see.

Shane took a couple breaths then nodded. It was easy to pass off as one of their games. Ilya took him back into his mouth, sucked until Shane was resting his whole weight against the wall, legs unsteady. Then Ilya pulled off, stood and put his hands on Shane’s hips, walked him back to the bed. Shane’s eyes stayed on Ilya the whole time, not glancing back at where Ilya was making him go. His eyes were wide and almost wondering. Not almost, actually. They were wondering. It was unbelievable. It wasn’t like Ilya didn’t get his ego flattered by most people he hooked up with, but with Shane it was so earnest, so real. Not a performance, and not easily handed over. Shane didn’t want to want Ilya, which made it pretty hot how badly he still did.

Shane threatened to get loud again when Ilya fingered him open, and Ilya stilled his hand and made a disapproving sound. “Quiet, Hollander,” Ilya said. “That is the rule. I know you want to scream my name all the time but tonight you stay quiet.”

“Fuck you,” Shane said, but it was undercut by the fact he was almost whispering.

“Good,” Ilya said, and got back to work. Shane was good at following rules, always, enthusiastic about it basically irrespective of what the rule was. He wasn’t even thinking, was he, why Ilya would want him quiet, Ilya who almost always tried to get him louder. He just wanted to do well. And he did, kept his whimpers and half-words low as Ilya finished working him open, as Ilya got him on his knees and slid home. And those bitten off, pained sounds started getting to Ilya, how hard Shane was working to keep them in, the evidence of what he could get Shane to do. He leaned over Shane, straining forward, to hear them clearer, to hear his name breaking in a whisper. “So nice and quiet, so good,” Ilya said, and Shane was entirely silent for the next five seconds, like he was breathless, or like he was trying even harder.

When Shane’s shoulder muscles started bunching in the way Ilya recognized, and he reached around to take Shane in his hand, Shane’s moans rose. Ilya reached his free hand forward to get it on Shane’s mouth, but before he could Shane was dropping his head down, biting into the pillow, letting it soak up his noises. Ilya was a lost cause then, stripped Shane mercilessly until Shane finished, and came himself only moments later. He held himself over Shane, inside Shane, until Shane rolled them onto their sides, and over his shoulder shot Ilya a reproachful look. It was a little undercut by how he was pushing back into Ilya’s chest, so Ilya smiled when he asked, “What?”

“You didn’t stay quiet at all,” Shane said, like it was the first time the rules had only applied to him.  

“You didn’t tell me to,” Ilya said instead of the truth, which was that he didn’t give a fuck about a ghost overhearing him, but in the impossible world where Shane found out about it it’d probably freak him out. Shane scoffed, like the idea of him telling Ilya what to do was ludicrous. Ilya kissed his shoulder.

“Okay,” Shane said, stretching against Ilya, and there was no real chance of making Ilya hard again so soon so he mustn’t have been doing it in a deliberately seductive way. “I gotta shower.”

Ilya made a panicked noise in the back of his throat, and Shane immediately pulled away to turn around, frowning. “What?” he said.

Shane loved the showers in this hotel, that was part of why Ilya kept booking here. They had never fucked here and not showered after. Ilya was fucking stupid. “No,” he said. “You cannot shower.”

“I can’t go back to my team smelling like sex,” Shane said, smiling like it must have been a joke he hadn't figured out yet. 

Ilya didn’t know what the ethics of this were. A lot of people must have gotten naked around ghosts without knowing. But it felt weird to let it happen, especially when the ghost in question likely knew who Shane was. Ilya probably wouldn’t be able to forbid Shane from using the bathroom entirely, not without getting a lot meaner than he wanted. “Whore’s bath,” he said.

“What?” Shane said.

“Wipe yourself down in the sink,” Ilya said. Maybe he could go in with Shane and like, block the ghost’s view. There’d be no way to pull that off inconspicuously.

“The English you know is fucking unbelievable,” Shane said. “I’m fucking showering. What, you’re in a rush to get me out, you got another guest lined up?”

He wasn’t frustrated or confused, he was angry. He could get there quickly. “Shower is broken,” Ilya said. “Lady at front desk told me.” It wasn’t at all a believable lie, because they’d have been moved to a different room, obviously. Probably Ilya should have just tried to get a different room.

“Is she who taught you whore’s bath?” Shane asked, without looking at him, as he stood from the bed. Ilya liked the little ways he let himself lash out. Shane walked toward the bathroom door, entirely naked.

“Put clothes on first,” Ilya said, and Shane spun around.

“Oh my God, you really are trying to get rid of me,” he said. Maybe Ilya should just let this happen. It wasn’t like Shane would ever know. Ilya wasn’t sure why exactly he absolutely could not let this happen.

“Fine, yes,” Ilya said. “I have plans. Not another hook up, but I am captain, and my team won, and I have to make appearances.”

“And you can’t wait an extra twenty fucking minutes?” Shane asked. His tone was vicious, his eyes glimmering. Ilya’s post sex glow had never faded so quickly.

“No,” he said. “They are already waiting. Hollander, smelling like sex is good thing. They won’t be able to tell it was gay sex.”

Shane bristled at the word like he always did, then pulled on his boxers. Ilya relaxed, slightly. Shane treating these rooms like Ilya's territory was coming in handy again; he accepted Ilya claiming jurisdiction on the shower.

“This is fucking unbelievable, even for you,” Shane said, as he pulled on his jeans too. “Can I at least wash my fucking hands?”

It was sarcastic, but Ilya still nodded.

When Shane came out of the bathroom again, Ilya was standing. They wouldn’t see each other again until all-stars, and Ilya didn’t want this to fester. There could be consequences, with Shane.

“I’m sorry,” he said, approaching Shane slowly. Shane’s mouth shifted, still unhappy, but he didn’t walk away from Ilya. Ilya’s hands landed lightly on his arms.

“Uhuh,” Shane said. “For what, exactly? What the fuck is going on?”

“I don’t have time, like you said,” Ilya said, because he couldn’t think of a better explanation. It had been true before, that he’d had plans for after Shane, but he’d never rushed Shane because of it.

“Right,” Shane said, but Ilya not being a complete asshole about it did seem to be making a difference. It wasn’t like they owed each other much more than that. Shane softened beneath Ilya’s grip, and Ilya relaxed slightly too. He squeezed Shane’s arms then stepped aside, watched as Shane sat on the edge of the bed and started pulling on his shoes. Ilya wanted to bite his shoulder, or something, but things were still a little tenuous.

Then the ghost appeared. “Holy fucking shit,” he said. “You’re fucking Shane Hollander? That’s fucking crazy. Man, it sucks I can’t tell anyone. This is so fucking crazy.”

Ilya turned resolutely away.

“Don't be pissed. I know you said you’d come get me, but I figured it was done with, and I mean, I already saw who it was, so.”

Ilya took his phone out, then turned back and took a photo, zoomed in on a blurred neon sign visible through the window. He knew it belonged to a liquor store.

“What are you doing?” It wasn’t the ghost, it was Shane.

“Taking a picture,” Ilya said, and turned his phone around for Shane to see. The green sign, no ghost visible.

“Jesus, Rozanov,” Shane said. “Who’s that for?”

“All my followers,” Ilya said, and posted it to instagram.

“What the fuck,” Shane said, and Ilya could hear the tension in his voice. He looked up from his phone, frowning.

“Hollander, you are not in it,” he said. “They cannot tell you are in the room, that is not how photos work.” But he would know that Shane had been right there when he took it, he realized, and that made the photo even more valuable. Not just a reminder that the ghosts were only real to him - a reminder of the other thing that was only real to him.

“But why would you post that at all?” Shane asked, standing up. “You’re in a fucking weird mood tonight. Winning usually makes you happy.”

If Ilya could get Shane thinking he was being weird, rather than an asshole, that was a kind of victory. He shrugged. Shane rolled his eyes, and left.

Present day

While Ilya was doing what he felt he had to do with Nick, Shane was out seeing the sights. They both always liked getting the chance to do that in a place they’d played a hundred games of hockey but never spent any real time in. After he left the Evans’ home, Shane summoned him to a massive sprawling park, and then a small Japanese garden within that. It wasn’t free entry and Shane let Ilya pay for the tickets, which Ilya appreciated.

Ilya had picked up on Shane’s distraction as soon as they’d met at the gates of the park. Shane had made a noise and smoothed his hands down Ilya’s lapels and said, “You look very handsome today,” but he was frowning. If Ilya ventured to interpret the exact nuance of that frown, he’d say whatever was on Shane’s mind was rendered more unfair or outrageous by the fact that Ilya looked very handsome.

Ilya didn’t want to confront him straight away, because Shane didn’t always appreciate being so easy to read. He said, “Thank you baby,” and kissed between Shane’s eyes and then let Shane lead him into the park.

They both remained largely silent on the walk, occasionally pointing out plants they recognized, Shane looking happy whenever Ilya contributed, largely with the ones that grew around the cottage, too. And their arms were brushing, knocking against each other every second step, so Ilya knew whatever was going on wasn’t to do with them, with Shane’s security in their relationship. It was only when they were in the Japanese garden, seated on a bench in front of a stream, Ilya working through a handful of pebbles, throwing them lightly into the water, that he raised it.

“You have been in a weird mood,” he said. Ilya had been in a weird mood too, but he had an excuse. He didn’t regret seeing Nick even slightly, but ghosts weren’t good for him. They made him morbid. This garden was feeling very funereal to him, and he doubted that was normal. 

“Yeah,” Shane said. “If I tell you why you’re gonna get mad.”

“Better to tell me in public, then,” Ilya said. “And I won’t make a scene.”

Shane smiled, sighed. “I’ve been going online,” he said. “The last couple days. Looking at stuff about Evans.”

Ilya already knew exactly where this was going. Shane had all the best intentions in the world, he was sure, of reading an obituary and keeping a tab on funeral details and maybe learning a bit more about Nick now that he knew he was important to Ilya. And then—

“People are saying fucking horrible things,” Shane said. “It’s so disgusting, I really can’t believe it. Which is maybe naive, but I guess I thought people would take a day off when someone had died. Even people who aren’t being deliberately gross, there’s all this speculation, about what he must have been going through to kill himself—” Shane turned to Ilya, frowning. “I’m sorry, a lot of people just seem to think it was suicide. Or at least recklessness, I guess. Anyway, it’s so entitled and voyeuristic and disrespectful.”

Shane was done, or at least waiting for Ilya to respond before continuing. Ilya worked through the rest of the pebbles, then turned to Shane. He accepted the wordlessly offered hand sanitizer to clean the pebble dirt off his palm, and said, “What is the name of Jackie’s friend? The one with the terrible child.”

“Laura,” Shane said. “Don’t call a child terrible.” Shane had said way worse things about that child. Shane had implied that child wouldn’t get into college. Shane was very good at hiding how cut throat he was.

“Last time I saw Jackie, last week, Laura stopped by,” Ilya said.

“I remember,” Shane said. He hadn’t been able to make it, but he’d gotten the obligatory play by play that evening.

“They were telling me about parental controls,” Ilya said. “Stopping their kids from doing things online.”

“Yeah, my mom had those on my computer when I was a teen,” Shane said. “They were really easy to get around though. Maybe the technology has advanced.”

“That would be good,” Ilya said, and when Shane raised his eyebrows: “I heard this and I thought, that would be good for me to do for Shane.”

“Oh my God.” Shane shoved him.

Ilya was only sort of messing with him. It made him sick how Shane tortured himself with the dregs of humanity. He had always been like this, it seemed, it was just that Ilya hadn’t always known. He suspected he was still the only one who saw the damage it did, because Shane’s friends sent him links to shit that kept him up all night and Yuna had set up a vast network of google alerts to capture the things, quote, that Shane liked to stay on top of. It seemed like trying to stem an endless tide, comforting Shane about whatever horrible shit he saw, because he always saw more later. Ilya didn’t know how to get to the root of it, had to just keep cutting off the shoots.

“Nick would not care,” he said. “He did not care about little distant things. Only the big stuff in his life. He definitely would not care now.”

Shane turned to him a little sharply, but his voice was casual when he said, “You haven’t called him Nick before, I don’t think.”

“He asked me to. Today.”

Shane nodded, stared ahead. “For some reason I feel like I can’t ask you about that,” he said. “Like it’s private.”

“Of course you can ask,” Ilya said, taking Shane’s hand and squeezing.

“Well, how was it?”

Ilya shrugged. “I did not do well,” he said. “I think Nick was happy to see someone, and I brought his dog and he definitely loved that. But I did not say the things I wanted to say. I am going to try to go back again.”

Shane nodded, frowning, thoughtful. Then he looked straight at Ilya and said, “I’m sorry, but I really can't not ask. Did you and he ever fuck?”

Shane often looked for information on people Ilya had slept with before, and Ilya had come to a decision pretty early on to not indulge him. It was because he could tell it was an unending want, that if Ilya gave him a ballpark number or an idea of the frequency or how many other people were repeat customers, then Shane would just switch to wanting to know about showering together and paying for cabs and sleeping over, and if Ilya told him that Shane would want to know about body types and inside jokes and contact names. Ilya liked, in many contexts, how hard Shane was to satisfy, how unrelenting he could be, but not with this. “You know there’s no one like you,” Ilya had said once, and Shane had said, “Yes, I’ve always known that.” And Ilya had smiled, pleased, and asked how, and Shane had said, “Well, none of them play hockey, do they? At least, they’re not as good at it as me.” And that sounded like Shane being obsessive about hockey, but really it was him knowing that Ilya was obsessive about hockey, that Shane being able to match it, being able to blur hockey and sex, was an insurmountable advantage he had over anyone else Ilya might fuck. Not the only insurmountable advantage, but the first one Ilya hadn’t been able to deny.

But this was different, it wasn’t abstract strangers, and anyway – he hadn’t fucked Nick. “No,” he said.

Of course that wasn’t the end of it. “Did you ever kiss, did you ever come close?”

“No,” Ilya said. “We flirted a very small amount years ago, once. That is it. And that was more testing each other, I think, rather than interest.”

“So you weren’t interested?” Shane asked. “You didn’t find him hot?”

Nick was decent looking, and bigger than Ilya, which would have been pretty novel. “I find lots of people hot,” Ilya said. “But not – urgently. It was very easy to just be his friend and not fuck him or flirt with him or anything.”

“Okay,” Shane said. “Thank you.”

Ilya kissed the side of his head. It wasn’t really jealousy or possessiveness, not straightforwardly. Shane just needed to know things, sometimes. It was why he spent hours on all that hateful shit online, and it was amped up higher when it had to do with Ilya. Shane had to know things about Ilya. Ilya had come to sort of enjoy the little interrogations he was sometimes subjected to.

“I know you care about Nick,” Shane said, and it pleased Ilya that Shane had made the switch to first names too. It made him feel very married. “But usually you find being around ghosts pretty hard, right? Or at least you try to avoid it. Is it different when it’s someone you care about, or does it still suck?”

“Both,” Ilya said. “I don’t like, with ghosts, how when they realize I can see them it can become – very important, to them. Even though we are strangers. It is very intense. But Nick, we were already important to each other, I think, so it feels more natural. To be there for him.”

“So how does it still suck?”

“It is still a ghost,” Ilya said. “It still makes me think about death. When I was younger this did not bother me so much. Now I do not like to always think about death.”

Shane frowned. Ilya didn’t think he thought about death much at all. When Shane had bought into Ilya’s house in Ottawa, their lawyer had made them make wills, which had almost sent Ilya spiraling but which Shane had treated very matter of factly. He seemed to really believe he and Ilya would die close together, neither of them having to mourn the other for long, because that was what he wanted. Ilya secretly thought it would be best for Shane to die first in case he spent time as a ghost, because he shouldn’t have to do that with nobody there to see him or talk to him. And Ilya knew, if he were to die first, that Shane wouldn’t be able to handle the possibility that Ilya’s ghost was right there without him being able to see or feel it. Not only did Ilya have to stay alive for Shane, he had to outlive him.

This was the kind of thing he meant. Seeing ghosts made him think about death.

Shane said, “It sucks you can’t talk to your therapist about this.”

Ilya laughed. “Yes, it does.”

"Oh, hey," Shane said suddenly, and slowly lifted his hand up between them. A green bug had landed on his knuckle, shiny and oval, its wings slowly rising and settling back down against its body.

"Do you know what it is?" Ilya asked.

"No," Shane said. "I'll look it up once it leaves. Take a picture, will you?"

Ilya did so, and they both watched until it flew away. Shane said, “How can you think about death in a place like this? It’s so full of life.”

Ilya put his arm around Shane, pulled him against him, suddenly overwhelmed with love. Full of life, he supposed. “If that was how it worked, I would never think about death around you, ever,” he said.

Shane leaned into him, smiling like he’d just solved Ilya’s problem. That was sort of the promise of Ilya's new life, in a way. Marry Shane, forget death.

Chapter End Notes

thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed!

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

had to delete and repost this final chapter for stupid reasons big sorry to anyone who got multiple notifications as a result and to the people who left kind comments. i hope it brings you comfort to know i screenshotted them all and created a whole new secret folder for them before deleting. and apologies to anyone assiduously monitoring the hollanov fic feed who saw this fic twice. okay enjoy!

Five years ago

Ilya’s track record of hospital non-attendance was pretty impressive considering he played a full contact sport. But Shane hadn’t been conscious, had been bloody and limp, and that being Ilya’s last memory of Shane until the next time Boston went to Montreal was a more nightmarish idea than going somewhere he was guaranteed to cross paths with at least five ghosts.

It was three by the time he’d made it to Shane’s room. He wasn’t being as careful as usual and at least two of them could tell he’d seen them. Shane was way too out of it to notice how shaken up Ilya was. He left with a much prettier last memory of Shane, took another route to the parking lot and saw four new ghosts. One of them was in the parking lot itself, must have wandered over since Ilya first arrived, and he watched as Ilya fumbled with the lock. He said, “Seeing ghosts must suck.”

That was new enough to Ilya to look up at him. “Yes, it does,” he said.

“I’d avoid hospitals like the plague if I were you,” the guy said, and smiled. A comedian.

“You do not always have a choice,” Ilya said, and finally got the door open. He sat inside as the ghost said, “So are you sick or something?”

Ilya laughed as he shut the door, turned the key. It really did feel like that.

Present day

Ilya went to see Nick three more times before the funeral. “You were right,” Hanna said, when she let him in the second time. “I went up to his room and I did – feel him. I think. I don’t know how to explain it.”

It obviously left enough of an impression on her that she was willing to let Ilya stay for longer. It nevertheless took a few visits before Ilya worked up the nerve to have the conversation he wanted, and even still it was mostly Nick who brought it up.

“How long are you in Seattle?” Nick asked. “You got business here or something?”

Ilya frowned, shook his head. He’d have assumed it was obvious. “I am here to see you,” he said.

“Right,” Nick said. “Sorry, how long has it been since you arrived in Seattle? Not being rude, but just. You have seen me, man.”

Ilya was surprised he had to explain himself. “You might be stuck here for months, Nick,” he said.

“Oh,” Nick said, like he was just realizing something. “You don’t want to leave me alone?”

Ilya shrugged. Instead of seeming sad or scared by the prospect of extended solitude, Nick smiled.

“You know, if you ever talked to ghosts you’d probably already know this. Being a ghost isn’t, like, the same as being alive except you’re invisible and stuck in the same place. If I was alive and I had to stay in this room and not talk to anyone for months, obviously it’d be hell. But I’m not alive, and that’s not how this feels. This feels… I don’t know, natural. I think it’s meant to give people time to process stuff, process their life.”

“That still sounds like hell,” Ilya said, as he wondered if his mom had not needed to process her life. Probably she already had.

Nick laughed. “No, it’s good. Time passes weird too. Sometimes it only feels like an hour has gone by between visits from you. I’ve liked talking to you, honestly, and I appreciate you giving me time, but I’m fine here on my own. It’s not, like, a punishment.”

Ilya hadn’t realized he thought it was until right then.

“Besides,” Nick said. “Max has started coming up, and that’s all the company I need.”

Ilya knew Nick meant all this as reassurance, but it made him feel worse. He’d thought he’d been helping. “Well, what else do you need?” he asked, trying to not sound frantic. “I will look out for Casey, if she is at your funeral.” By then he had learned the ex’s name. “Is there anything else? For Hanna, maybe?”

“No,” Nick said. “Hanna’s got her shit pretty under control. I can’t really think of anything else.”

“Hanna said you did not have a will,” Ilya said. “If there is something you wish your money could have gone to, someone, you could ask me—”

“With your own money?” Nick asked, wide eyed. “No, Jesus. Of course not. I mean, thanks, that’s, like, insanely generous, but no.”

Ilya threw a hand up. Sometimes when he was stressed he would open his banking app and just stare at the money transfers from his account to his niece's trust. It calmed him down. “So, fuck, what, I can do nothing?”

Nick’s face softened, and he tilted his head. “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” he asked.

Ilya shrugged, embarrassed at how desperate he’d sounded.

“Hey, I get it,” Nick said. “I get you wanting to help. I always thought the reason we could see them was that they needed something from us. Maybe it’s the other way around.”

Ilya turned to him sharply, eyebrows up, disbelieving. “You think I need something from you?”

“I don’t know, man, but you seem like maybe you’re looking for something. Do you know what it is?”

Ilya stayed quiet, and Nick said, comforting, “Most of the time I didn’t know what it was, either.”

Ilya didn’t like Nick making it seem like they shared common ground. Maybe just to take the focus off himself he asked, “Did you kill yourself?”

Nick’s jaw tensed. “Do people think that? Does Hanna, do you know?”

“I don’t know,” Ilya said. “I know it’s… out there.”

“I didn’t,” Nick said. “At least I think I didn’t, but I’ll be honest, it’s not all that clear to me. I was pretty wasted.”

Ilya nodded. He hadn’t told Nick that he’d dreamed his death, because there wasn’t any point, and Nick might have found it embarrassing, invasive. Ilya had to be very careful with Nick; they didn't have enough time for him to make up for any missteps. “Do you think you might have?”

Nick took a few moments. “I think if I really wanted to live I’d probably still be alive. Maybe. But it wasn’t like I really wanted to die, either. I was just…”

“Indifferent?” Ilya asked, and when Nick looked at him: “I get that.”

“Yeah?”

Ilya nodded, then felt guilt again, felt like he was lying to Nick. “Not so much recently.”

Nick smiled. “You really sorted yourself out, huh? You haven’t really talked about it, on your visits.”

That had been deliberate. Ilya shrugged.

“No, seriously, I want to know,” Nick said. “You happy, you good? Hollander make an honest man of you?”

Ilya looked at the window, at the dinosaur stickers and the trees across the street. “Yes, I am very happy.”

Nick snorted. “You don’t sound it.”

Ilya looked at him, raised his eyebrows. Nick said, “What, you don’t like being happy?”

“I think being happy makes you forget things,” Ilya said.

“Like what?”

“I was not a good friend to you,” Ilya said, and there was quiet after that. Ilya hadn't invited him to the wedding. Ilya hadn't invited him to the wedding because they had kept it small, had invited as few out of town guests as possible, and even as they made more and more exceptions he didn't make an exception for Nick. Ilya hadn't invited him to the wedding because he didn't want him there, didn't know how to do it, how to reconcile those two things, how to talk to Nick when he was happy, didn't know what he'd tell people about why Nick was worth being an exception. 

“Dude,” Nick said. “You’re in my childhood bedroom talking to my ghost.”

“I am trying to make amends,” Ilya said. “And it seems like I am not doing well at that. Which makes sense. It is a little late to do right by you.”

“You never did anything but,” Nick said. “We lived in different cities, we barely saw each other. You always checked in on me when we crossed paths. You were always decent.”

“I always thought you were like me,” Ilya said. “And there weren’t many people I felt that way about.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “I felt that too.”

“And then maybe we stopped being so alike,” Ilya said. “And I forgot about you. I should have reached out, or something.”

“I could have reached out too, if I needed to,” Nick said. “Jesus, Ilya. Do you feel guilty for getting your life in order?”

He said it almost rhetorically, like it was a ridiculous idea. “Yes,” Ilya said.

“Fuck,” Nick said. “That was like, the best thing you could have done for me. Honestly. It made me really happy see you make it out of the trenches. It made the world seem less fucked up. You out there living a fairy tale, somehow.”

Ilya looked at him, dubious. “I feel like I left you behind.”

“You wanted me to shack up with you and Hollander too? I’m touched.”

Ilya laughed despite himself. “Fuck you.”

Nick shrugged. “I’m sorry, I just don’t really know what you’re talking about. Like, specifically, I can’t think of much you could’ve done for me. I don’t think there’s anything you do that stops me from getting into that car.”

Ilya scrubbed a hand down his face. He was crying a little. “Did you feel more alone?” he asked. “Because of how I had changed.”

“No,” Nick said. “No. I don’t know how to convince you of that.”

Ilya nodded, pressed his fingers hard against his eyes, pulled them away and straightened up. “And you shouldn’t have to,” he said. “This is my mess. Sorry for disturbing your afterlife.”

“Don’t mention it,” Nick said. “You’re a good guy. Maybe just try being less dramatic.”

“So wise,” Ilya said, sarcastic except it was kind of wise. His therapist said he did that, read too much into things. Made things into symbols. “You said you were processing your life. Have you had any big realizations?”

Nick shrugged, but more like he didn’t want to share them than anything, which was fair. Ilya didn’t feel like he’d earned any secrets of the universe. He crouched down to pet at Max, who was lying before Nick. That had become a bit of a ritual, saying goodbye to Max before he started his goodbyes to Nick.

“You probably shouldn’t come back after this,” Nick said, his voice kind. “Leave me in peace.”

Ilya stood up again, nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It wasn’t just me being dramatic. I like spending time with you.”

“Yeah, I like spending time with you too,” Nick said. “Just not as much as I like spending time with Max. And you probably like spending time with your husband more than a ghost.”

In the doorway Ilya said, "I should have invited you to the wedding." 

Nick's lip turned up and he said, "I was in Cancun." 

Four years ago

There was a ghost on one of the hiking trails near the cottage. An older woman with binoculars around her neck and a very kind smile.

Ilya had been pretty confident that these two weeks in the cottage would be ghost free, because Shane emphasized how few people he’d ever let into his space before. Nobody’s soul would spend their final months there except Shane’s. Maybe, now, Ilya's. Ilya hadn’t thought about day trips, but of course they weren’t actually going to be sequestered in the bedroom for two weeks straight.

The ghost was easy to ignore. Ilya had spotted her when she had her back to them, and he stayed staring straight ahead as they passed. It was a loop walk, so they only passed her the once. Then, a couple days later, Shane pointed to the top of the house visible above trees on the other side of the lake, the only sign of civilization.

“They’re the closest I have to neighbors,” Shane said. “Or – he’s the closest I have to a neighbor. His wife died recently. It’s awful, she was so nice. I’ve known her since I was a kid.”

Ilya held himself still. “What age was she?”

“Late seventies,” Shane said.

So Ilya decided to talk to the ghost after all. He’d never had someone to talk to about Shane, not openly, and that remained largely true even after he met Shane’s parents. Maybe they would get there eventually, but for the foreseeable future Ilya was planning on watching his words around them pretty carefully.

They’d been in the cottage over a week before they were up for spending any time apart, and that was so Shane could have a call with Yuna about how to start laying the groundwork for the narrative shift in the coming season. Probably Ilya should have been part of that conversation too, but he liked getting to leave it to Shane. He liked trusting someone that much. He told Shane he was going for a walk and Shane looked very pleased and smug about that, like he was a good influence.

It only took fifteen minutes to reach the ghost, who had her back to him again. He said, “Hi.”

She didn’t jump or startle, because some ghosts didn’t really act all that human. She turned around and smiled and said, “Oh! Hello! You’re Shane’s friend, I saw you earlier.”

Ilya smiled back. This was already worth it. “Boyfriend, actually,” he said. It was a little ridiculous that it didn’t occur to him that that might be received poorly, but anyway, it wasn’t. She looked a little surprised but her smile held up.

“How nice,” she said. “He always seemed so lonely to me.”

“You lived in the house across the lake, yes?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m Ruth, it’s lovely to meet you. What’s your name?”

“I am Ilya,” he said.

“And where’s that accent from, Ilya?”

“Russia,” he said. She’d done a decent job at pronouncing his name, which warmed him to her further.

“Oh, interesting,” she said. “I studied some Russian literature in college, but honestly I forget most of it now. Since I died I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve forgotten. How long have you lived in Canada?”

“I live in Boston,” he said. “But I will move to Canada soon. In a year.” That was exciting too, just saying that aloud to someone.

She nodded, then cocked her head. “Shane doesn’t know you see ghosts, does he?” she asked. “You acted like you couldn’t see me when you two walked by the other day.”

“No, he does not,” Ilya said, for some reason feeling a little guilty admitting it. “But I would have ignored you anyway, probably. I do not always talk to ghosts. But then I realized you were someone Shane knew, and that he had cared about you, and I wanted to meet you.”

“That’s very sweet,” she said. “So I can forgive you not always talking to ghosts. I’m glad to know Shane cared about me. Sometimes you worry the kids just find you boring.”

“Shane, I think, is like someone twice his age,” Ilya said.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “An old soul. That’s always been true. My husband fancies himself an engineer, he loves to fix things. He had this workshop in our garage where he’d take radios and electronics apart, then put them back together. Shane was blown away by it, he always wanted to come over and see. He’d be able to sit still watching for hours. That was before hockey fully took over, of course. But it was always so funny to see, a young kid going quiet like that.”

Ilya’s smile probably looked deranged. “This is why I knew I should talk to you,” he said. “Thank you, Ruth, very much.”

“Oh, it’s nice to reminisce,” she said. “You know he taught me to skate? Out on that lake. I mean, I already knew how to skate, and I thought I was pretty good, but not according to him.”

“Was he a good teacher?” Ilya asked.

“The best,” she said. “But I said that if he didn’t make it as a player he’d be a great coach, and he found that very insulting. I hadn’t realized how seriously he took becoming a professional player. He was probably twelve at the time, mind you. I really did get better.”

Ruth told him a little more about pre-teen Shane as a skating coach, and then Ilya had to leave. When he got back to the cottage he kissed Shane hard, like he’d just fallen in love with him all over again, a mirror of those moments from years ago when how he saw Shane would suddenly shift, like shaking a kaleidoscope.

It was difficult, the rest of the evening, not letting Shane know that he’d met Ruth, that he knew these things about Shane without Shane having told him. He hadn’t thought that far ahead, when he’d set out to meet Ruth. Shane had wanted them to be honest with each other. Ilya very rarely felt like he was actively lying to anyone about the ghosts, because it was just so second nature at this point to avoid the subject, to talk around it. But this felt more deliberate, and more personal.

He’d felt guilty when Ruth had said he hadn’t told Shane, like he’d been caught shirking his duties. Maybe he should tell him, maybe it was what a good boyfriend would do. Frankly, that wasn’t what mattered. He just wanted to tell Shane. He wanted Shane to know. Ilya had never wanted anyone to know. His mom had said it was just their secret, and Ilya still thought of it that way.

It was an entirely novel feeling, and it hurt not to act on it immediately. Ilya wasn’t good at letting impulses simmer, building them into plans, but he had to be careful about this. Shane did trust him, Ilya knew that, but maybe not so far as to immediately abandon his lifetime of skepticism and start believing in ghosts. Not without proof, and proof was hard to come by.

So the next morning he went back to Ruth. Shane didn’t have any phone calls planned, so he was a little confused and indignant about Ilya going for a walk on his own. Ilya said it was so he could get something for Shane, which was true in an abstract way, and it mollified Shane enough to let Ilya out the door.

“Back again!” Ruth said, when she saw him. Ilya liked her.

“Yes,” he said. “I am thinking I want to tell Shane. That I see ghosts.”

“Oh yes,” she said, like it was a given. “Can’t have a secret like that in a relationship.”

“Right,” Ilya said. “But it will be very hard to get him to believe me. You are the only ghost I know who knew Shane. I wonder if you can tell me something only you could know, so it will not seem so crazy to him.”

“Smart,” she said, and then frowned in thought. “Yes, I’ve got something. His family came over for dinner one evening and his mom brought this – I can’t remember what it was, now. It was a side, but quite fancy. A family recipe, I think. Shane must have been maybe ten. He was in the kitchen with me, because he liked being my sous-chef, and the dish his parents had brought was on the counter, and he knocked it off and it smashed. It was glass, you know, and the glass was in little pieces, all mixed in with the food. And he was just so upset, because his mom had spent a long time on it. This probably wasn’t good of me, but when his parents came into the kitchen because of the noise I just felt so protective of him and I told them it had been me. I wanted it to be a nice night, you know. I didn’t want Shane to be upset.”

“Oh,” Ilya said. “No, that was good of you.”

She smiled. “Children are supposed to learn that actions have consequences, but it did seem like Shane already knew that.”

“Yes, very much,” Ilya said.

That evening, out by the fire pit, Ilya asked, “Have you ever thought there is something going on with me that you don’t know? That I act weird, in some way?”

Shane looked at him, frowned, then snorted. “Well, yeah,” he said. “You are weird.”

Ilya smiled. “I mean something specific. I have had people who have spent time with me think there is something – secret, something I am not telling them. Have you felt that way?”

Shane stayed looking at him, on alert. “A little,” he said, sounding guilty about it. “Sometimes. But I’m not really sure why.”

Ilya nodded. “You know the walk you took me on where we had to climb over the big tree?”

“Yeah,” Shane said, smiling at just the mention, so Ilya let himself kiss him, briefly.

“Your neighbor Ruth, I saw here there,” Ilya said. “She has her binoculars, and she is standing to the side. Early on in the walk, before it gets steep. That is where I went, today and yesterday. To talk to her.”

He was glad he’d gotten through that without interruption, even if it was because Shane was staring at him in complete confusion. “Ruth,” he said. “Ruth who?”

“I do not know her last name,” Ilya said. “She lived across the lake, you taught her to skate. It hurt your little ego when she said you’d make good coach.”

“Ilya,” Shane said, a slight note of warning. “Is this a joke? Because I don’t get it.”

“Not a joke,” Ilya said.

Shane took a beat, and then apparently had to say it. “Ruth is dead.”

“Yes,” Ilya said, and stayed looking at Shane, steady.

“So, what, you can talk to the dead?” Shane said, nervous and sarcastic.

“Yes,” Ilya said. “And see them. Some of them. The ones that come back as ghosts.”

Shane stared at him. “This is really fucked up.”

“It is true,” Ilya said. “But I know you would not believe me, this is why I went to talk to Ruth today. I asked her to tell me something that only you and her know, so then you would have to believe me.”

Shane raised his eyebrows.

“The food your mother made,” Ilya said. “That you smashed, and Ruth took the blame. Because you were being all hyperactive and she didn’t want you to get in trouble. Ruin the nice night.”

Shane went quiet, and Ilya let him.

“Maybe she told dad, at some point,” Shane said.

“And David told me?” Ilya asked. “You can ask him if you want.”

Shane did. He took his phone out and texted his dad, Did you talk to Ilya about Ruth?

David texted back quick enough. Doug’s Ruth? No, why???

Shane went quiet again and after a while Ilya said, “I know about her husband’s workshop too. That you would go watch him work for hours.”

Shane wrapped his arms around himself.

“I am sorry,” Ilya said. “For putting this on you. I just don’t want to lie to you.”

For some reason that seemed to be what did the trick. “No, of course not,” Shane said automatically. And then: “That spot, where you say you saw her. She’d go bird watching there.”

“I think she is still doing that,” Ilya said.

Then Shane started asking questions. A lot of questions, far more than Ilya would usually tolerate, but he felt he had to go along with it on this. And anyway, it was invigorating, unbelievable, to be so recklessly open about a secret he’d been keeping basically his whole life. Shane wanted to know everything about how it worked, about what Ilya thought about it, about how often it came up. He would slip between sounding like he already believed and like he was trying to catch Ilya out. At one point he asked, “Have you told anyone else?”

“My mom,” Ilya said. “My mom and you, this is it.”

“Not Svetlana?”

“No,” Ilya said. “I think she knows something, but we do not talk about it.”

Shane nodded again, and it would be a long time before Ilya realized that that had been a lie, that he had told Nick Evans, too. It hadn’t been deliberate, it had just completely slipped his mind. Telling Evans had been something else entirely. Anyway, he couldn’t say Evans knew without saying why, and that wasn’t his secret to tell. So even when he realized his oversight, he didn’t feel guilty for it, not then.

Shane smushed up his mouth and asked, hesitant, “Was your mom a ghost?”

Ilya shook his head no, then said, “Well…”

“What?”

Ilya had barely let himself think this before. “I cannot know for sure,” he said. “She was not in our house, or the hospital or the graveyard or the park that she liked, and she was not in the house where she grew up. But ghosts can end up in many places, and I was a little kid, I couldn’t check everywhere. So I don’t know. I tell myself no, because that is easier.”

Shane looked at him, brow furrowed. “I think if she was going to be a ghost, it’d be somewhere you could find her.”

Ilya nodded, brushed at his eyes, made a desperate bid to lighten the mood. “Remember that time I wouldn’t let you shower?”

“Hey, yeah,” Shane said, upright like he was going to get mad all over again at just the reminder.

“There was ghost in the bathroom,” Ilya said.

Shane’s eyes widened. “Really? For real?”

Ilya nodded.
“Oh my God,” Shane said. “I thought you were being a dick, but you were like, protecting my honor. From a ghost I didn’t know existed. And you made me stay quiet! Was it a pervy ghost?”

“I had to promise to give money to his mom to get him to leave the bedroom,” Ilya said.

“Oh my God,” Shane said again. “How much? Ilya, how much?”

Ilya shook his head, resolutely.

“Did you do it?”

Ilya frowned, almost insulted. “Of course. He made me write down her details on the hotel stationery, after you left.”

Shane laughed, then leaned against Ilya. “You really love me, don’t you? To tell me all this.”

“Yes,” Ilya said. “You must love me a lot to believe me.”

Present day

Shane’s hand was a vice around Ilya’s all through the funeral service. They were sitting at the back, beside Casey, who Ilya had spotted in the crowd outside the church. A pretty woman their age standing alone, looking exhausted, with a felt dog key ring conspicuous on her leather black purse. She was surprised by but grateful for Shane and Ilya’s approach, glad to stick with them because she didn’t really know anyone else. She seemed sweet but they didn’t talk much. Ilya hated funerals, all of them an echo of his mom’s, his suit always feeling too small and the eulogies impossible to follow. Hanna spoke and he was sure she did a good job. It was a good showing, including a lot of other players, which was nice. Shane made sure to point that out to Ilya. Casey was white-knuckling the memorial card beside him, and Ilya knew how to interpret it, holding off shakes.

Outside the church Casey said she was getting a flight back to Dallas, she wasn’t staying. She said she had to give her condolences to the family first. Ilya asked if she wanted them to go with her, but she let him off. She hugged him tight, and he told her to reach out if she needed anything. He doubted she would, but he had to say. Shane rubbed his back as she walked away. "Have a good summer," she said, over her shoulder, and Shane wished her the same. 

Shane was bringing the car around when Hanna approached Ilya. “Casey said that you said that Nick had told you about her,” she said, her arms wrapped around her waist. “But when I mentioned an ex you didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.”

Ilya opened his mouth, but Hanna kept talking. “But it doesn’t seem like you were lying to Casey, because you do seem to know stuff about her. Stuff that I didn’t tell you.”

Ilya closed his mouth, not really sure what to say. This must look pretty bad, except Hanna didn’t seem mad. She looked at him and said, “It’s funny, I really can feel him in that room.”

Then the car was pulling up in front of him, and Hanna leaned in to hug Ilya, say goodbye with a kiss to the cheek.

They would leave Seattle in the morning. They had one more night in the hotel. They had dinner down in the restaurant where Ilya had eaten on his first night, and made up stories about the other guests. Back in their room they started pulling off their clothes, but just because they wanted to get comfortable. They grabbed at each other a couple times but it was mostly non-sexual. Ilya asked, “Do you remember this hotel?”

“Of course,” Shane said, smiling. “I thought you’d booked it on purpose.”

“Why would I do that? I do not want to remember that time,” Ilya said. “Worst blue balls of my life.”

Shane smacked at him. “You weren’t the one getting his dick sucked.”

“You do not get to complain,” Ilya said. “I would have sucked your dick all night long.”

Shane was bent down, switching out his socks, so Ilya couldn’t read his face when he said, “I was so proud of myself, that I was able to do that. Make you leave.”

“Fuck you, I was miserable.”

Shane laughed. “It wasn’t – I’m sorry. Obviously I didn’t want that.”

The conversation drew to a halt as they brushed their teeth, but Ilya did dig his elbow into Shane’s side. As Shane washed off his toothbrush, he laughed again. “That sponsorship didn’t even work out,” he said. “I didn’t think they were the right fit. It was a yogurt brand.”

“You are so cruel,” Ilya said, and once they walked back into the room he shoved Shane onto the bed.

Shane tugged him down after him. “I’m sorry,” he said again, his voice quiet. “I never want to hurt you.”

“Unless there is sponsorship opportunity,” Ilya said, and Shane laughed. Ilya kissed him, awkward against the open stretch of Shane’s lips.

“Seriously,” Shane said.

Ilya shook his head. “You are so good for me, nicer to me than anyone,” he said, and kissed Shane’s shoulder.

“That's not good enough,” Shane said. “I want everyone to be nice to you. Always.”

People had been pretty nice to Ilya recently. Nick had been really nice to him. And he’d successfully avoided Nick’s parents, who might not have been nice to him, and he wasn’t sure his instinct for self preservation would have always kicked in like that. It was a different kind of control. Softer, smarter. He put himself up on his elbows.

“I have basically only good people in my life,” he said. “It is crazy. And you are the best of all.”

Shane scrunched up his face. “I know I’m not perfect,” he said. “But—”

Ilya wasn’t all that interested in whatever self-deprecation Shane was about to work up. “I have not said thank you for you coming here. Thank you. And for being patient with me and for taking care of me. It had nothing to do with you but this would have sucked without you here.”

“Of course it had something to do with me,” Shane said. “But you’re welcome.”

Ilya kissed him, and kept kissing him until Shane started pulling at his hips. Ilya lifted his head from Shane to raise an eyebrow.

“As long as we’re still here it’s still about me taking care of you,” Shane said, in a tone like he was laying out a serious argument. “So let me take care of you.”

Ilya followed Shane’s hands until he was straddling Shane’s shoulders, fed himself into Shane’s mouth, locked his eyes on Shane’s. They'd been in a bed in a room in this hotel before, but it couldn't have felt more different. It wasn't stolen, anymore. It wasn't something he had to grip hard, it wasn't a fight.

On the flight home Shane fell asleep, although he unfortunately remained neatly in his own seat, not lolling over into Ilya. Instead Ilya reached over to hold his hand, and with his other he checked social media for the first time in at least a week. The top of his feed was taken up with statements from other players, from teams, about Nick. Ilya should have made one, but he couldn’t think of anything he felt comfortable sharing. He scrolled and landed on Shane’s – simple, short, referencing the year they’d been on the same team, and notably using ‘we’ more than ‘I’. From Shane and Ilya both, apparently.

Ilya switched over to instagram and posted the photos he’d taken over the last week, captioned it Seattle: the church pamphlet promising eternal life; the felt dog key ring; the cherry tree from his hotel window; that weird bug, as of yet still unidentified, on Shane’s hand. Not the dinosaur stickers, because it felt too private. Lol, Hayden commented, constitutionally incapable of reading a room, couldn’t just take a pic of the space needle?

Chapter End Notes

okay done thank youuu for sticking w it and i hope you enjoyed!