Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Irina Rozanova, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Rose Landry

Additional Tags:

Irina Rozanova Haunts the Narrative, literally! she is a ghost, this is a ghost story, Ghosts, Established Relationship, Post-Book 2: Heated Rivalry (Game Changers), Getting to Know the Family, who is deceased and haunting ur bfs ice machine

Language:

English

Series:

Part 25 of my anonymous heated rivalry fic

Collections:

Anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-29 Words: 15,986 Chapters: 1/1

something annoying this way comes

Summary

“She likes to haunt my freezer,” Ilya says, as Shane shuffles out of his Reeboks and into a pair of Ilya’s house slippers.

It had seemed like a joke, when Ilya first brought it up. Their last morning at the cottage, dropped casually as they scrambled eggs together in the kitchen, a parting gag for the road. Oh, by the way, you know that dead mother I told you about? The one who killed herself and left me to find the body? Yes, okay, so, she is also a ghost and she haunts me. Well, my house, really. No, I am serious, Hollander! I am so serious, Russians do not joke, please! You do not believe me? You do not trust me? Fine. You will come over to my place some time and I will show you. She likes flowers, please bring daffodils.

Shane brought the daffodils.

Notes

“She likes to haunt my freezer,” Ilya says, as Shane shuffles out of his Reeboks and into a pair of Ilya’s house slippers.

Shane’s not sure what he’s supposed to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all. He trails Ilya into the open sweep of his kitchen, only glancing briefly at the crown molding and wood grain, even though he’d really like to take some more time to admire them, given it’s only his second time in Ilya’s house. It’s been two weeks since they left the cottage, and one week and six days since Shane said fuck it and asked his mom to reschedule his shoot with Reebok so he could stop in Boston for two days on the way to New York City.

It had felt important to come here—not just because Shane missed Ilya’s cock pretty much the second Ilya stepped out of Shane’s car at the Ottawa airport, but also because of this whole—thing. Whatever Shane’s supposed to call it. New-relationship hazing ritual, maybe? He’s not sure if that’s something your brand-new boyfriend is supposed to do, but it seems like the best description.

Because it had seemed like a joke, when Ilya brought it up. Their last morning at the cottage, dropped casually as they scrambled eggs together in the kitchen, a parting gag for the road. Oh, by the way, you know that dead mother I told you about? The one who killed herself and left me to find the body? Yes, okay, so, she is also a ghost and she haunts me. Well, my house, really. No, I am serious, Hollander! I am so serious, Russians do not joke, please! You do not believe me? You do not trust me? Fine. You will come over to my place some time and I will show you. She likes flowers, please bring daffodils.

Shane had brought the daffodils, purchased at an overpriced airport flower shop, because it had felt wrong to disobey even if the whole thing was a joke. Now, Ilya clutches the flowers in one hand while he approaches his stainless steel fridge. He pulls one door open and says, “Mama, I have gift for you, from Shane! Aren’t they lovely? Shane is here too, can he say hello?”

It looks like something straight out of a psychiatric ward. In fact, if this does not turn out to be a very strange and elaborate joke, it probably means Ilya should be in a psychiatric ward. Shane will have to try to persuade him to take medication and go to counseling, and if that fails he may need to involuntarily commit Ilya, and all of it before they’ve hit their three-month anniversary. Of course Shane would do that, for Ilya. But he would really prefer it if he didn’t have to.

“Come here, Shane,” Ilya says, crooking a finger at him. “Come say hi to Mama.”

Shane’s not sure what he expects to see, when he looks in the fridge. A big sign that says gotcha! maybe, or the decapitated head of a mannequin, or nothing strange at all.

“Fuck!” Shane yelps.

Inside the fridge is a clear ghostly apparition of a woman’s head, tucked neatly between a line of soda cans and a pale green cabbage. Her hair is greasy and lank, hanging loose around her blue-grey face, and there are deep furrows etched into her cheeks and forehead, dark as if they’ve been caked with mud. Maybe, at one point, she might have been beautiful, but right now, she bears a closer resemblance to an old leather boot.

“Grrrr-aaaaaarrr,” the ghost head says.

From beside Shane, Ilya beams. “Oh, good!” he says. “She likes you.”

—

One of the first things Shane asks, after he gets his breath back, is if ghosts are more common in Russia. Ilya raises his eyebrows at Shane the same way he did when Shane asked if Ilya liked chocolate or suggested that the rap songs Ilya listened to about fucking wet pussy were maybe exaggerating the pleasure to be found in the female vagina.

“Shane,” Ilya says. “Moya lyubov. What do you think Russia is, alternate dimension? No, ghosts are just as common here as anywhere else.”

But how Ilya knows this Shane can’t say, because there are certainly no credible online sources reporting about the phenomenon. Shane looks, very thoroughly, as he has a quiet panic attack in Ilya’s downstairs bathroom while Ilya, oblivious, chats away to his dead mother in Russian. 

The internet is bereft on this topic. Or, more accurately, scholarly publications are bereft on the topic, leaving Shane to sift through increasingly deranged blog posts from new homeowners who swear there is the ghost of a dead Civil War soldier haunting their downstairs bathroom, or–worse–two-bit psychics offering advice about which culinary herbs to burn to cleanse your house of malevolent spirits. Conveniently, they almost always sell their own bottled mix of these herbs, available to be shipped right to your door for the very low price of just $29.99. Is $29.99 too much to pay for your sanity? Shane would certainly pay it, if he thought there was any chance it wasn’t a scam.

“Shane?” Ilya says, knocking lightly on the bathroom door. Shane has been sitting on the toilet lid and scrolling frantically through Reddit for at least half an hour. “Are you okay in there?”

“Uh, yeah,” Shane says, voice squeaky. He clears his throat and tries again. “Yeah, I think I just had something bad on the plane, maybe.”

Ilya makes a sympathetic sound and spends the rest of the afternoon babying Shane as he lays on the couch under a soft blanket, ESPN on mute in the background. He brings Shane mugs of instant chicken broth and offers to order whatever he wants for dinner, which is nice except for the fact that a) the stomach bug lie completely eliminates the possibility of Ilya fucking Shane in the ass tonight the way that Shane really wants him to, and b) there’s something grey and shimmery hovering in the corner of Ilya’s living room that Shane has to try really, really hard not to look at.

Inevitably, though, Shane does look at her. The first thing he realizes is that she isn’t actually a decapitated head, even though she seemed like it at first. It turns out that, outside of Ilya’s fridge, she actually has a full-size human body, wearing full-size human clothes, though these clothes look just about as beat-up and rotted as her face. Her body, too, is clearly decomposing: half of her toes are missing, her right forearm and left shin are completely skeletal, and it looks like someone’s taken a massive bite out of her neck. The parts of her that remain semi-intact don’t look all that great, either: they’re bloated and shiny, leaking mysterious ghostly fluids like an overripe fruit that’s been too eagerly handled.

“When I was younger, right after she died, she used to look different,” Ilya says when he follows Shane’s gaze to where Irina’s ghostly figure hovers in the window, watching a squirrel run around the backyard. “More alive. But over time, it has changed. I think maybe the ghost matches her body. She was—what is the word—embalmed, yes? So it is slow.”

“I guess it’s a good thing she got embalmed, then,” Shane says, instead of what he wants to say, which is what the fuck what the fuck what the FUCK.

Ilya laughs like this is a very normal response. “Yes, she is much prettier this way, although I have told her before that it would be very cool to be skeleton ghost. She disagreed.”

Shane has no idea how Ilya is able to read these things from Irina. The sounds coming out of her mouth sound very much to Shane like the spitting gurgles of a broken-down car. He considers that maybe Ilya and his mother have worked out a system, after all these years, that allows them to understand each other. On the other hand, it’s possible Ilya is just intuiting really hard and convincing himself what he intuits is fact. Shane could ask Ilya, of course, but he’s not sure he’ll be able to sleep in this house if it turns out that Ilya is just blindly trusting that his mother doesn’t want to murder them with very large kitchen knives in the nighttime. So he doesn’t ask.

Of course, these are all very uncharitable thoughts to have about your partner’s dead mother, and Shane does feel vaguely bad about that. But also, it’s not like Shane is just working from blind bias. He’s seen a lot of movies in life, with all the air travel he’s done in his life, a lot of narratives about half-rotted gurgling ghosts. They almost never have good intentions.

So he can hardly be blamed for spending the weekend mostly trying to avoid her. It’s probably necessary for his sanity, anyway, because if he thinks too much about all of this he’ll lose his mind at the implications of it all and maybe end up checking himself into the psych ward, and who knows how long it would be before they’d let him back out to play hockey again. Not only would that be terrible for him, it’d be terrible for the Metros. He’s kind of a key player.

Anyway, it’s not as hard as he would have imagined, avoiding the ghost. By evening on his first day in Boston, Shane manages to convince Ilya that he’s recovered enough to at least exchange blowjobs between the new silk bedsheets Ilya has just purchased–to match the one’s Shane has at the cottage, he’s pretty sure, which makes his heart do complicated things that may or may not be a sign of a medical condition. The next morning, they do it again, and by the time they’ve showered the sweat off, they have to leave to meet Svetlana at her apartment.

It’s less terrible than Shane would have thought. They mostly talk about hockey, and how terrible Ilya has been trying to be subtle about his Montreal Jane over the years. At some point, Ilya disappears into Svetlana’s kitchen and comes back with a chilled bottle of vodka, and they get drunk enough that Shane and Ilya have to stay the night at Svetlana’s. By the time they actually make it back to Ilya’s house the next morning–Ilya probably still faintly drunk, Shane with the worst headache he’s had in a long time, already dreading his flight to New York City, even if it’s all of an hour long–Shane has just enough time to grab his bag before Ilya takes him to the airport.

“Thank you for coming,” Ilya says, before he and Shane pull out of his driveway and have to pretend to be just friends again. Irina is nowhere to be seen. “It was very important to me, that you meet my mama. And that you get along. You are—most important people, in my life. Well, you two and Svetlana. This was–very happy weekend, for me.”

Shane swallows hard against the sudden, bobbing lump in his throat. “Of course,” he says, reaching across the gearshift to squeeze Ilya’s thigh. “I love you.”

Ilya smiles at him, toothy and young. “I love you, too.”

—

Shane doesn’t come back to Ilya’s house again until early November, when he has an unexpected free weekend in his schedule. Normally, it would be filled up with sponsorship or charity obligations, but this is the one upside to getting involuntarily outed to your parents: Yuna knows, now, about the two of them, and she’s made it her mission to keep these sorts of days free, so Shane and Ilya can spend as much time together as possible. It’s still depressingly little time, when taken in the grand scheme of a year, but it’s better than nothing.

Shane has a home game in the afternoon, a 4-3 win against Detroit, and goes from the stadium straight to the airport, skipping out on the team celebrations. By the time he gets to Ilya’s house, it’s nearly midnight, but all the lights are on, casting a yellow glow out of the home’s many many windows, and when Shane unlocks the door—using the key Ilya had given him, punching in the security code he had shared last night over Facetime—Ilya is waiting.

“Hey,” Shane says. “I missed—“

Ilya pins him to the wall and kisses him. Shane’s bag falls off his shoulder with a thump; immediately, all thoughts flee his head except for this, the feeling of Ilya’s hands on him, the warmth of their bodies pressed together, the wet lick of Ilya’s tongue as he kisses Shane’s neck, the sparking friction of his cock as it rubs against Shane’s. Ilya is wearing terribly thin sweatpants, and probably no underwear, and he’s mouthing at Shane’s neck like he’s starving and Shane is a slab of beef.

“Wait,” Shane says finally, pulling back just slightly. “Your mom—“

“My mama knows better than to get in the way when I have guests,” Ilya says. “Is fine, is good, please let’s have sex now, yes?”

And there’s nothing Shane wants more in the world, really, so he doesn’t argue. Ilya hoists Shane in his arms, stumbling towards the stairs, the same way he had the very first time Shane came here. Ilya does let Shane down at the foot of them—it’s a lot, to carry a man as big as Shane, let alone to carry him up a precarious, slippery metal staircase—but he picks him back up once they get to the top landing, rushing him into his room and depositing him right in the center of the bed.

“I missed you,” Shane says again, now that his mouth is free. “I missed you so much, holy shit, Ilya.”

There might be tears in Ilya’s eyes, or maybe it’s hunger. Something is gleaming in the lamplight. “You are fucking mine,” Ilya says, plastering himself on top of Shane. “Mine, mine, mine.”

Shane sighs and tilts his head back so Ilya has better access to his chest. “Mine,” he agrees.

They can’t fuck right now, not the way Shane really wants to, because he had a game and then the flight and no time in there to get himself ready. That’s okay, though, because it’s been so long since Shane has seen Ilya that he’d probably be able to get off just by Ilya holding his hand, and it doesn’t take long of Ilya rutting against him, touching Shane in all these terribly soft, terribly sexy ways, before Shane is coming in his pants.

Ilya grins at him, so satisfied, while Shane is still panting hard on the come-down. “Such a slut for me,” Ilya says. “Come in your pants like a sixteen year old.”

“Shut up,” Shane says, face hot. He slaps Ilya’s ass. “Take your pants off, I can come again.”

Ilya groans, but heaves himself off the bed and shucks his sweats. He helps Shane take off his clothes, too, pulling off Shane’s wet jeans and underwear while Shane strips his t-shirt. He gathers the pile of all of their clothes and takes it to the hamper in the corner of the room, just like the one in Shane’s own bedroom. Last time he was here, Shane thinks there was an armchair or something there instead. His heart swells in his chest so suddenly that Shane almost feels like he’s choking.

“What do you want?” Ilya says, crawling back over the bed to press his naked body against Shane’s. “I could blow you, or I could fuck your thighs?”

“Whatever you want,” Shane says. “Whatever you want, Ilya.”

Ilya grabs the lube from the bedside table and slicks up the inside of Shane’s thighs, then nestles himself up behind Shane’s back and presses his cock into the space there. Shane squeezes his legs together to make it as tight as possible, and the sound Ilya makes when he fucks in—like the noise he makes on the ice after scoring a goal, or when he’s slammed into the boards—makes Shane feel hot all over. Ilya presses one hand low on Shane’s stomach, his pinky finger just brushing against the base of Shane’s cock, and his mouth is attached to Shane’s neck, probably halfway through forming the world’s largest hickey.

“Fuck, Shane,” Ilya says into Shane’s skin. “You are so perfect, so good—“

Shane closes his eyes. The slick slide of Ilya against him, his cock scraping against Shane’s balls sometimes and sometimes not, the uncertainty of it all. The sensitive skin of Shane’s inner thighs is on fire, and already his cock is wet and dripping against his stomach, bobbing and hard.

“Ilya,” Shane sighs, “Ilya, Ilya—“

Later, he’ll realize his first mistake was opening his eyes. If he had just kept his eyes closed, everything would be fine. But for some reason unbeknownst to him, he had opened them. His second mistake was looking down towards his own stomach, with the vague idea it would be hot to see Ilya’s cockhead poking out from between Shane’s thighs.

That’s when he sees it. A flicker of something dark near Ilya’s closet door, like there’s something living flashing through the air. Shane stilled, but Ilya didn’t notice, continuing to fuck forward into his thighs.

Shane squinted his eyes and watched, heart in his throat—and there it was again, although this time, it had a much clearer shape. Not like a bat’s wing, or a bird, but a hand, five distinct fingers, drifting through the air like it was conducting an orchestra.

Shane reached back and slapped Ilya on the hip. “Ilya,” Shane whispers. “I think she’s watching us.”

Ilya licks a line up Shane’s neck. “Who? Mama? No, Shane, she wouldn’t do that.”

Shane swallows nervously, eyeing the dark corner of the room. “I’m telling you, I saw her hand.”

“I am sure she is in the freezer, fucking with ice machine,” Ilya says reassuringly. “Come on, Shane. Focus on me, now. Just me. Close your eyes, yes, there you go—“

But Shane still feels the weight of her gaze on him. Maybe it’s his imagination, but he would swear she’s looking at his crotch. Like she’s evaluating the size of his cock.

“Ilya—“ Shane starts again, but then Ilya thrusts in a very particular way, hitting just the right spot along Shane’s balls, and he cuts himself off with a groan, eyes falling shut. After that, he mostly tries to focus on the feeling of Ilya against him, his strong chest against Shane’s back. At some point, Ilya’s hips start to stutter unevenly, a sure sign he’s getting close, but before Shane can reach down and wrap his hand around his own cock, Ilya is doing it for him, his hand slicked up with lube he’d taken from between Shane’s dripping thighs.

“Fuck,” Shane groans, and comes a few beats before Ilya, both of them breathing hard.

They laze in bed for a few minutes after that, and then Ilya gets up and bullies Shane out of bed and into a shower. “You’ll regret it if you don’t,” he says, which is true but dumb anyway, when all Shane wants to do right now is roll over onto the dry spot and sleep for the next twelve years. 

Instead, he dutifully rinses himself off, and while he’s standing at the vanity brushing his teeth with the spare toothbrush and toothpaste Ilya had bought for him, Ilya changes the sheets. Shane kisses Ilya to say thank you, and kisses him, and kisses him, and somewhere between one breath and the next, the two of them fall asleep like that, twisted under the covers, one bedside lamp still glowing.

—

The next morning, Ilya has mandatory practice from eight to eleven, and Shane seriously considers just going to hang out at a coffee shop while he’s away.

“Why would you do this?” Ilya says, when Shane tentatively asks if there are any nice cafes nearby. “You are not hookup, you are my boyfriend. You can stay in my house while I’m not here. I trust you not to steal the good silverware.”

Shane had rolled his eyes. “You don’t even have good silverware. The stuff in your drawer is stainless steel at best.” And while Ilya’s spluttering with mock indignation over that, continues, “But no, it’s—I just thought it would be nice to get out for a bit, that’s all.”

“Get out for a bit and risk getting papped in Boston,” Ilya says skeptically. Shane shrugs, and Ilya sidles forward so he can settle his big, warm hands on Shane’s waist. “Shane. I want you to be comfortable in my house. Are you not comfortable here? Is there something I could do to make it better?”

His eyes big and sincere, all trace of mockery gone from his face. It’s an expression most people would hardly believe him capable of, but then most people don’t know him at all.

“No, of course I’m comfortable here,” Shane says. “You’re right. I’ll just get a work out in downstairs while you’re gone.”

Ilya smiles and smacks a loud kiss on his cheek and the love bubbling in Shane’s chest is enough to squash the trepidation. Enough, at least, until Ilya is rushing out the door—five minutes late, of course, because he had gotten distracted watching Shane unload his dishwasher and tried to persuade him to fuck in the kitchen—yelling goodbyes over his shoulder as he goes.

The door slams shut behind him, and Shane is left alone in the house with the ghost.

Shane takes a deep breath and tells himself he doesn’t feel the back of his neck prickle. This is nothing. This is normal. Irina had been here all day yesterday and it hadn’t been a problem. There’s no reason it should be a problem now.

But Shane hasn’t seen her all morning, and he doesn’t know where she is, and that makes it worse, somehow. Like in his first condo, when he heard mice scratching around in the walls one night but wasn’t able to figure out where exactly the noise was coming from. He spent two hours tiptoeing around his apartment, pressing his ear to the drywall, unable to sit still without feeling like the mice were directly on top of him, liable to chew through the ceiling and collapse on him in a pile of tiny soft bodies like some kind of mammalian avalanche.

Just be normal. He just has to be normal for three hours, and then Ilya will be back, and everything will be fine.

In the spirit of normalcy, he changes into his workout clothes and heads down to the gym. It’s a leg day, but he always starts out with a bit of cardio, and anyway he thinks it’d be good for his anxiety today, so he hops on the treadmill and brings it up to speed. Exercise always makes him feel good, taking him out of his mind and putting him squarely within the confines of his body. He focuses on his legs, his lungs, and ups the speed so the burn is just high enough to capture all of his attention without exhausting him too much.

The machine beeps at him when he hits three miles, and he glances down at the screen to look at his time. When he looks back up, Irina is hovering directly in front of his face, her teeth bared in a gruesome smile, one hand stretched out as if she’s reaching for Shane with mummified fingers, filthy hair splayed up around her head like a beehive.

“Jesus fuck!” he shouts, and falls off the treadmill. He lands hard on his left side, shoulder flaring up with pain, but he manages to keep his head from hitting the ground. He wasn’t wearing the safety clip—nobody wears the safety clip, as he had learned when he was very young and working out with other boys in the gym for the first time and got mocked relentlessly for the way it displayed an apparent fear of gym equipment—so when he goes flying off the back, the treadmill doesn’t stop. The belt scrapes against Shane’s back as it whirs, an embarrassing indignity.

“Fuck,” Shane groans, and hauls himself to his feet. He looks around, but apparently Irina was only showing up to fuck with him, because she’s already gone.

—

He doesn’t bother to get back on the treadmill after that. He tries to move through his planned strength workout, but his hip aches and he can’t shake the feeling that Irina is standing right behind him, her ghostly breath gusting across his neck. He manages two sets of hip thrusts before he gives in and goes upstairs to shower.

When Ilya gets back, he finds Shane on the couch, hair wet and phone in hand, ESPN droning on the TV. Shane had only been half-watching it. Mostly, he’s been trying to find information online about how to communicate with ghosts. The advice is wildly contradictory and largely unhelpful. Just speak to them, they’re a person! one website says; whatever you do, do NOT speak to them, this will invite additional haunting! reports another.

Shane hastily shoves away his phone when he sees Ilya in the doorway. “Good practice?” he asks, as Ilya falls onto the couch and lays his head in Shane’s lap.

Shane automatically strokes a hand through Ilya’s hair, and Ilya sighs contentedly.

“Fine,” he says. “Working on some new plays. This is all I will say, I do not give secrets to the enemy.”

Shane rolls his eyes, tugging lightly at one of Ilya’s curls. “Yes, that’s why I’m asking, just to get secret information out of you.”

“Glad you are admitting it,” Ilya says. He smiles at Shane, one hand stroking up Shane’s side. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Shane says.

Ilya grabs Shane’s shoulder as if to pull him down for a kiss, but it’s unlucky: he grabs the shoulder Shane had bruised just this morning. Shane can’t hold back a wince, and Ilya’s expression flickers from relaxed to worried in an instant.

“What is it?” Ilya asks. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Shane says, shifting back as Ilya shoves himself up to investigate. “It’s nothing, seriously, just a gym accident.”

“A gym accident?” Ilya asks incredulously. “What did you do, drop a barbell on yourself?”

Shane hardly wants to admit it, but if he doesn’t, Ilya will keep stressing all morning. “Fell off the treadmill.”

Ilya’s eyebrows shoot up. “You fell off the treadmill. You?”

“Shut up,” Shane grumbles. “Something startled me, that’s all.”

“Oh my god,” Ilya says. Just as quickly as the worry had appeared, it’s gone, transformed into delight. It’s remarkable, the way that Ilya is able to feel all these things so quickly in succession, and most of all, the fact that Shane is able to identify them, just by a glance at Ilya’s face. Is there anyone in the world he can read as well as Ilya Rozanov? His parents, maybe. That’s about it.

“Shut up,” Shane says again, but Ilya is laughing now, flopping back down into Shane’s lap.

“This is amazing,” Ilya says gleefully. “I knew you were baby deer on ice but I didn’t know you were one off ice too! Oh, Shanya. Do you need lessons? Do you need your big Russian boyfriend to teach you how to use treadmill?”

“I know how to use a treadmill, dickwad,” Shane says. “And you’re not bigger than me.”

Ilya waggles his eyebrows at Shane. “You sure about that?”

Shane huffs. “Don’t tell me you actually want to do a dick measuring contest,” he says. 

“What, afraid you’ll lose?”

“Please. You know how big my dick is. We’ve been fucking for like seven years.”

Ilya tilts his head smugly. “These are words of a man who is afraid to lose.”

Shane squints at him for a long moment. Be mature, he tells himself. You are not a teenage boy anymore.

Then he says, “Where’s your tape measure?”

—

Shane leaves less than twenty-four hours later, off to meet his team in Washington D.C. for their next game. He and Ilya make out for a good ten minutes at the front door, until Shane’s taxi driver finally lays his hand on the horn and doesn’t take it off and they’re forced to break it up.

“I’ll see you soon,” Shane promises, walking backwards down the front path with his duffel slung over one shoulder. “I love you.”

“I love you more,” Ilya responds, and Shane can’t even argue with him because he has to go. He does shoot Ilya a glare, though, just to let him know he’s unhappy with the situation, and Ilya laughs.

At this point, it’s pretty clear to Shane that he needs a new strategy for addressing this whole thing. So he does what he pretty much always does when he needs strategic advice, and he goes to his mom.

Yuna is the sort of no-nonsense woman who doesn’t believe in anything even remotely spiritual—not Heaven, not a soul, not the vaguest sense that there might be something outside of the physical realm. When Shane was a kid, and his bachan had passed away, his teacher at school had patted his back and told him she was in a better place, now. Shane, baffled, had done what he always used to do when he was confused: nodded along agreeably, said nothing, and waited until he got home to quiz his mother about it. Mr. Masterson says Bachan is in a better place, he had told his mother. Is she on vacation, or something? It was a nice idea, mainly because Shane knew people came back from vacations. Maybe if she was just on a beach in Bermuda, or something, this whole situation wasn’t as permanent as he had thought? But his mother had pressed her lips together and shook her head. No, she’s nowhere, Shane. Mr. Masterson is wrong, She’s dead, which means she doesn’t exist anymore.

Hard for a kid to wrap his mind around, but Shane appreciates that at least she was straightforward with him. It makes it easy, now, to know what she’ll say, if Shane tries to tell her that his boyfriend is haunted by the ghost of his dead mother and that said mother is driving Shane up the wall: she’ll think he’s crazy. She’ll worry he’s had some sort of stress-induced mental break, and probably will try to commit him to the psychiatric ward. If that fails, she’d probably start grinding up lithium tablets and sneaking them into his oatmeal.

So, a bit of subtlety is necessary. It's not Shane's strong suit, so he times the conversation for a moment he knows his mom will be distracted: halfway through cooking family dinner, the next time Shane is back in Ottawa. 

Shane, hovering at her side with a glass of ginger ale and mostly not contributing to the work, waits until she looks really focused on dicing carrots to say, “So, you’ve never seen a ghost, right?”

Strategic miscalculation: Yuna immediately tunes all her attention away from the carrots and onto Shane. Her expression looks like one of the little cards Shane’s parents used to show him as a kid, to help him get better at naming emotions. Surprise. Maybe incredulity, at this point, though that word was probably too sophisticated to teach a seven-year-old. Yuna’s eyebrows are in danger of being swallowed by her hairline.

“Nevermind,” Shane hastily backtracks, “don’t worry about it, let’s just—“

“Since when do you believe in ghosts?” Yuna demands.

“I never said I believe in ghosts,” Shane says. “It was just something the guys were talking about at practice the other day, I was just wondering.”

“Ghosts aren’t real,” Yuna says. “It’s important to me that you know that. You know that, right?”

“Oh my god, Mom,” Shane groans, leaning away from her when she reaches for his forehead with one hand, as if to check him for a fever. “Why are you always so dramatic? It was just a locker room conversation, a bunch of guys had all these elaborate stories, I was just wondering if you had one, too. That’s it. Come on, we need to finish the carrots so we can add them to the stew.”

“Oh, we need to finish them, do we?” Yuna says, pointedly eyeing Shane’s empty hands, but she lets the conversation drop for the moment.

She sends him worried glances for the rest of the evening, though, as if she’s chronicling him for other signs of psychiatric delusion. Shane does his best to act totally normally, but Yuna might as well be waving a flag in the air that says I am concerned about my son!! because it only takes about twenty minutes of dinner for David, who tends to be more perceptive about this kind of stuff than either Shane, to flat-out ask what’s wrong.

“Mom is overreacting,” Shane says, which makes Yuna huff. “I asked her a question about ghosts because some guys were talking about them in the locker room, and now she thinks I’m going insane.”

“Oh, I see,” David says, taking a sip of wine. “I saw a ghost once, you know.” 

“David!” Yuna exclaims.

David shrugs. “You can believe what you want, Yuna. I know what I saw. It was in a picture, when I was on vacation with my family in Scotland, the year after we met, do you remember that?”

“Vividly,” Yuna scowls. Even Shane knows this story: David’s brother’s girlfriend, who he had been seeing for eleven months, was invited on the trip, but not Yuna, who had been dating David for fourteen months by then. David always maintained it was because Yuna had a full-time summer gig already planned and his family knew she wouldn’t be able to make it, but decades later Yuna is still insisting she should have been invited for fairness’ sake.

“Well, we went to tour this one big castle in the hills somewhere, and we got this family picture in this one really beautiful hallway. Later, we printed the pictures and there was a ghostly figure standing behind us. Just this perfect outline of a person. Spooky.”

Yuna makes a disgusted noise. “That’s just a trick of the light. A shadow.”

David shrugs again. “Believe what you want,” he repeats.

That’s the problem, though, Shane thinks as he stabs at his stir fry with irritation. He doesn't want to believe any of this. He would remain in blissful ignorance for the rest of his life if he could. But he had to go and fall in love and get himself saddled with a ghost. Fuck. Can nothing be simple?

—

At that point, Shane figures his best bet is just to try to ignore the ghost entirely. Sure, maybe he could try some of the stuff he found online to try to get rid of her—there are women on Etsy who call themselves witches, and lots of advice on how to use sage to smoke out malevolent spirits—but Ilya would be very depressed if his beloved mother disappeared on him after a fourteen-year haunting, and the last thing Shane wants is to make Ilya unhappy.

So willful ignorance it is. If Shane just pretends he doesn’t see her, then she can’t bother him. It’ll be a good exercise in selective attention, or mindfulness, or something. If nothing else, learning to ignore the specter of Ilya’s dead mother watch them fuck should make Shane better at tuning out taunts not he ice.

For Christmas, Shane’s parents book themselves a Caribbean cruise and Shane goes to Boston. It’s the first time Shane hasn’t spent the holiday in his parents’ home, and it makes him feel strangely adult, this shifting of allegiances. His family is, first and foremost, Ilya, now. Ilya is his priority.

Shane drives down to Boston on the evening on the 22nd, trying to minimize the risk he’d be spotted. He needn’t have worried: late on a Thursday night, the roads are all but empty and the border security guard barely gives his passport a second glance before he’s waving Shane through.

Shane’s got a full four days in Boston with Ilya, which seemed pitifully little when they were mapping out their season together, back in the luxurious sunny days of the cottage, but which feels decadent now, when they haven’t spent more than two consecutive nights together since September. 

For the first day, Irina seems to make an effort to stay out of their way, or maybe Shane is so drunk on Ilya that he just doesn’t notice her. They pretty much spend twenty-four hours straight fucking and eating and sleeping, and then eventually Shane has to tap out for the sake of his anal health, at which point Ilya goes downstairs to put on a movie and order pizza and Shane hops into his fourth shower of the day.

He’s just soaping down his pubes—wondering, vaguely, if he’s stripping his skin’s natural oils by washing himself this often, and if there is a solution to this problem other than cutting down on the orgasms, which isn’t an option—when there’s a terrible rattling sound from the pipes and all of the sudden Irina comes flying up out of the drain: just a hand first, like she’s wriggling the rest of the way through, and then the rest of her all at once, like a cat contorting itself into and out of its vertebrate status. She reassembles in her usual form in front of Shane, hands on her hips and chest thrust forward as if she wants to show off the part of her funeral gown that has decayed and fallen off her chest, revealing one limp white breast, half-chewed away by what might have been maggots.

Shane doesn’t scream, because he’s a grown man. He does, however, make an undignified squeak and stumble backwards, sending every one of Ilya’s forty-five haircare products tumbling to the ground.

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Ignoring her. He is ignoring her.

He bends over to right all the bottles, but then he is suddenly very aware of the ways this might expose his asshole to sight, and he has to hastily scuttle around on the wet tile like a crab to try to best hide himself. When he stands back up again, he realizes his balls have retreated farther back into his body than they have been since they dropped for the first time, and Irina is eyeing him with something like extreme judgement in her eyes. What is it with this woman and the size of Shane’s dick? It feels kind of racist, honestly. Shane is well above average.

He rinses himself off quickly, after that, and in the bedroom he puts on the thickest pair of sweatpants he owns, in an effort to obscure as much of his dick as possible. He’s moving so fast that he doesn’t realize they’re on inside out until he’s downstairs with Ilya—who has some cheesy ‘90s rom-com queued up on the TV—and Ilya teases him about it. “Were you in that much of a rush to see me again?” he asks, and Shane says yes, because it’s easier than saying no, I wanted to get away from your creepy dead mom.

Shane has a little bit of an easier time ignoring Irina during the movie, when Ilya’s got an arm wrapped around Shane’s shoulder and Shane is focusing on trying to figure out what the fuck is going on on screen. But he can’t fully relax, not really, not when Irina is drifting around the ceiling fan like a bird trapped in an airport, the moth-wing rags of her dress flapping at her feet.

At one point, Ilya tries to fondle Shane’s cock and Shane slaps his hand away so hard that he leaves a red handprint.

“Stern Shane,” Ilya says approvingly, tilting his hand back and forth to admire the mark. “I feel like I am back in school again. I like.”

But maybe Irina doesn’t like, or maybe Irina just doesn’t like that she only got to watch Sleepless in Seattle with them for two hours before they retreated upstairs to bed, because she makes a racket all night long, moaning and smashing things in the living room until Ilya finally goes downstairs and turns the TV back on. Shane hears Ilya speaking to her in Russian, and when Ilya comes back upstairs and crawls into bed beside Shane at—Jesus, three in the morning—he mumbles, “I showed her how to use remote, she should be quiet, now.”

And she is, but the TV is not. Shane wakes up three more times in the night to the sound of swelling orchestral music coming from the television. Finally, at six, he decides it’s a lost cause to try to sleep, and instead goes to the guest room overlooking the garden to try to do some yoga. He gets into a good, centering flow, and is halfway through his vinyasa when he tips into downward dog and sees, out of the corner of his eye, something grey wobbling in the air beside him.

He pauses, and squints, but—no, yes, that’s Ilya’s mother’s ghost, all right, doing yoga next to him. The position is probably not good for her, because when her hair tips forward it reveals the bald spot on the back of her scalp where her hair has rubbed off from laying in her coffin in one position for all these years, and she probably shouldn’t be putting so much weight on her left hand when her pinky and ring fingers look liable to fall off at any moment, but it is what it is.

Tentatively, Shane shifts from downward dog into warrior one, and she follows neatly. He goes through the next two warrior poses and she follows those, too. Shane accelerates into harder material—pigeon pose, crane, firefly, two-limbed plank—hoping something will shake her, but she follows him through every one.

By the end of Shane’s flow, he’s sweating hard, breath heaving in his chest, full of irritation as Irina sits, cross-legged and placid, behind him. He closes his eyes and tries to focus on his usual five-minute ending meditation. This, at least, she shouldn’t be able to interrupt. He takes a deep breath in, then exhales into an ohm. 

“Grrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh,” Irina groans beside him.

Shane flops back onto his mat, defeated.

—

The rest of the break goes pretty much the same way—everywhere Shane goes, here is Irina. Here is Irina, rattling around like a genie inside the bottle of Shane’s protein powder. Here is Irina, swinging from the chandelier and moaning along to the classical music Shane put on as accompaniment to a romantic dinner. Here is Irina, making faces at herself in the bathroom mirror when Shane needs to take a shit.

By the time the four-day break is over, Shane is feeling almost excited to get out of Ilya’s house. It makes him feel terrible: when he’s away from Ilya, he spends all of his time thinking about how long it’ll be until he gets back into Ilya’s arms, and now, here he is, safely enclosed in the cocoon of Ilya’s body, eyeing the clock on the bedside table and trying to come up with an excuse to leave half an hour early, just so he can get a few minutes of peace away from the hideous moaning sound Irina is making in the hallway.

He manages to hold out, but only because Ilya starts playing around with Shane’s asshole and then Shane manages to convince him that he’s interested in trying fucking to the beat of some music. “You?” Ilya says skeptically. “You want to listen to music?” To which Shane responds with a light slap on the shoulder and a genuinely irritated, “What do you think I am, another species? I’m a human being, too, I like what other people like.”

Which is wrong, in the end, because Shane can’t help but focus all his attention on trying to match his hip thrusts to the beat, and it really doesn’t work, the pace of this playlist that Ilya has set, or maybe it’s just that nothing quite so metronomic really works for sex. In any case, the sex is on the less satisfying side of things, when it comes to what Shane and Ilya normally do, but at least Shane is so caught up in trying to decipher the lyrics coming out of the singer’s mouth that he doesn’t really think about Irina.

On Shane’s way out the door, Ilya kisses him and says, “I will see you here in three weeks, yes? For game?”

Montreal is playing Boston January 18th, leaving two days for them to spend together before Shane has to head home for practice. The time together had been planned months ago, back in July, back before Shane had met Irina or knew how much she would drive him fucking insane. 

“About that,” Shane says, and Ilya’s face falls. “Hey, no, no, I don’t mean it like that,” Shane rushes to assure him. He drops his duffel bag, cupping Ilya’s face in one hand. “I was just thinking. I was looking at our schedule. And I think—if you came back to Montreal with me, instead of us staying here, maybe we could get a bit of extra time together.”

It’s not a total lie, because Shane had looked at that schedule recently, and it’s true that if Ilya catches a commercial flight to Montreal while Shane is on the private jet with the Metros, they’ll get about twelve more hours together, total. But it’s twelve hours they’d mostly spend sleeping, because of the schedule, and it’d require Ilya to do a round-trip flight to see Shane right before he sets off on a road trip, whereas Shane is spending the next week playing at home.

It doesn’t make sense, and clearly Ilya remembers it doesn’t make sense, because he frowns, swaying back, away from Shane’s touch. “I thought we already talked about this,” he says. “Is little more time, but is harder for us.”

Shane shrugs, offering a weak smile. “I know,” he says. “I just—I don’t know, I guess I just feel like maybe the extra time is worth the difficulty. I miss you a lot, you know.”

None of it is a lie, not really, but Shane’s stomach still twists with guilt when Ilya’s face softens and melts. “You are so romantic, Hollander,” he says, slipping a hand onto Shane’s waist and up his back. “We should tell the world about this. That you are secret sap.”

Shane rolls his eyes, but leans into Ilya’s touch. “You’re a romantic, too, asshole.”

Ilya scrapes his teeth across Shane’s neck, making his breath catch in his throat. “See? You even have petnames you use just for me. So romantic. We should tell the tabloids.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Shane grumbles, and kisses him.

It’s a good thing Shane is driving himself back today, because it takes him a good thirty minutes longer than it should to actually get out of the house. Ilya stands in the doorway and waves as Shane is pulling out of the driveway, and Shane grins and, feeling ridiculous, waves back.

“I love you!” Ilya calls.

“Love you, too!” Shane returns out his half-open car window. It’s letting in the frigid December air, but Shane must be a romantic, because he can’t bring himself to close it before he needs to.

“Drive safe!” Ilya yells, louder now, as Shane nears the gates.

Shane opens his mouth to respond, but his voice cuts off in throat when he sees a grey shadow hovering over Ilya’s shoulder in the doorway. Irina’s expressions are hard to read, what with the decay that’s set in over a good chunk of her cheeks, but Shane could swear she’s glowering at him right now. Shane swallows hard and forces the smile back on his face. He waves one more time, and then he focuses on the road until Ilya’s house is out of sight.

—

Shane spends a lot of time over the next few weeks thinking about what he has privately dubbed The Irina Problem. The thing is, Shane prides himself as a good problem-solver, someone who doesn’t give in easily to defeat. He figured out how to wrangle Korhonen, the Finnish rookie the Metros brought out in 2015 who had such a severe coke problem he was often snorting three minutes before the start of a game. Shane wrangled Ilya, with nothing more than the power of his body and a lot of well-timed insults. Surely Shane can also figure out how to wrangle Irina.

It occurs to him, sometime on New Year’s Eve, as he’s watching the various Metros and their family members mingle at the team party, that he might be going about this the wrong way. Treating Irina as a ghost—maybe that’s the problem. Maybe this problem has as much to do with the fact that Irina is Shane’s quasi-mother-in-law as it does with the fact that she’s dead.

With that in mind, he turns to Reddit, which provides him with a very long list of ways to charm one’s in-laws. The first suggestion is to ask Irina questions about her life, her hobbies, her interests; even better, Reddit suggests, is to ask her for her advice. That one’s out, on account of the whole dead-and-unable-to-speak-intelligible-language thing, as is the second suggestion, to keep her updated about your and your partners’ life through regular texts and calls.

Third is showing your mother-in-law appropriate physical affection, which is hard, for a non corporeal being. Similarly, taking her out on the town for one-on-one time would be pretty difficult when she mostly stays within a two-hundred-meter range of Ilya’s ice maker. 

Just about the only thing that Shane finds that he feels like is workable is sending Irina flowers, so he does, with a nice card about how much he appreciates her. He figures Ilya will read the card aloud to her, or something, and if nothing else, the gesture of very pretty flowers seems obvious enough, no matter what language you speak.

He gets a call from Ilya, a few hours after they’re scheduled to arrive. “Shane,” he says, his voice full of joy. “Did you send these?”

Shane smiles into his phone. “Yeah,” he says. “Are they nice? Obviously I couldn’t pick them out in person.”

“So nice,” Ilya says. “Very beautiful, expensive. You are sweet, to send lilies to your lily.”

It takes Shane a second to realize what he means. “Lilies for my lily?” he repeats, in case he misheard.

“Yes,” Ilya says. “You know, white lilies are funeral flower in Russia, but I will forgive, because they are very pretty. I liked your card, too, but phrasing was a little weird. Was it pre-written, or something?”

Shane tries very hard to remember what he had written on the card. Something along the lines of I appreciate you and your perspective and what you have dealt with. I respect you a lot. We are lucky to have you. He had looked for advice on complimenting mother-in-laws online, but now that he thinks about it, he’s not convinced he remembered to actually write Irina’s name on the card.

“Er,” Shane says, hastily pulling up the order form in his email inbox. Sure enough: no name.

“I will put them on my nightstand,” Ilya says. “Along with your card with your weird, professional Canadian love declaration. I wish I could bring the flowers in to locker room. Everyone would be very jealous of me and my thoughtful girlfriend Jane. Shane? Are you okay? You are being very quiet.”

“Yeah,” Shane says, closing out his email inbox. This is probably the part where Shane should fess up, but Ilya just seems so happy, so instead he says, “Yeah, I’m good, sorry, I got a weird text from one of the rookies, all good. I’m glad you like the flowers.”

“I love you,” Ilya says. “You are very good boyfriend, moya lyubov.” And Shane is so overwhelmed with love and affection that for a moment, he forgets what landed him here in the first place. “Now switch to video and take off your pants.”

—

In January, Boston beats Montreal 4-3, and for the first time in a long time, Shane gets on the plane home right away. “Not seeing Boston Lily?” Hayden asks, with a waggle of his eyebrows, and Shane huffs and shoves him lightly.

Ilya’s flight still has an hour and a half left on it when the Metros’ plane lands, so Shane kills time in his car. It’s late, and it’s dark in the parking garage, and he ends up falling asleep in the driver’s seat. He’s woken by rapping on the window, and when he startles up there’s a buff, fluffy-haired Russian peering at him through the tinted windows.

Shane throws his door open. “Hey, I missed—“

If Ilya could climb onto Shane’s lap, he probably would. He manages to get halfway there as it is, so aggressively does he plaster himself to Shane’s front. “It has been six hours since game and I still have not fucked you,” Ilya declares, leaning back. “This is unacceptable. Give me keys so I can drive us.”

Shane refuses, and Ilya refuses to round the car to the passenger seat, which starts a ten-minute stalemate which finally ends when Shane agrees to order McGriddles to the house for breakfast the next morning, at which point Ilya practically catapults over the car to the passenger door. Shane, in deference to his cock, goes the speed limit instead of five under for the whole drive home.

The night is normal, from Shane’s eyes: they fuck on the couch, they shower, they fuck again in the bed, they shower again and get off a third time in the shower to avoid having to towel off another time. Then they plaster themselves together in bed and, around three in the morning, finally fall asleep.

Shane wakes up at eight to the bed cold and empty beside him. He normally wouldn’t worry too much—it’s eight, that’s a normal human time to be awake—but Ilya likes to sleep in on his days off, especially when he was up late the night before. Sure enough, when Shane tiptoes downstairs, he finds Ilya sitting on his back deck, wearing pajama pants and a thick winter jacket, a cigarette in one hand.

“You’re up early,” Shane says, sliding the glass door open.

Ilya turns his head and says, “Why did you really want me to come here, Shane?”

Shane stops, one hand still on the door handle. “What?”

Ilya turns, waving a hand at Shane’s green lawn, the hedges carefully manicured by a team of gardeners hired by the previous owner and retained by Shane when he bought the house for simplicity’s sake. “Montreal. Instead of Boston. Why?”

Shane swallows hard. “We—I told you. We get a few more hours together here, and—“

“And I get a few hours less sleep,” Ilya says. “And I take two extra flights. And I miss out on optional team practice. You know, my third-line right-wing, Chesney, his wife is having baby shower this weekend. I am missing it.”

“I didn’t know that,” Shane says. This is a bad time to be having this conversation. Shane hasn’t had his morning green tea, yet; he only had five hours of sleep last night. He’s not really awake. “You didn’t tell me, that, Ilya, how was I supposed to know—“

“Ok, baby shower, yes, this you do not know.” Ilya takes a puff of his cigarette. “Fine, whatever. But extra flights, this you know. Bad sleep, this you know. And I can’t understand it.”

“Like I said,” Shane says. “The extra time—“

“This is bullshit,” Ilya interrupts. His voice is tight, his shoulders tight, his whole body wound up like a coil before it springs. Shane’s not sure where this coil will send Ilya flying to, but he’s worried it’ll land him outside of Shane’s reach. “I thought at first was true. But I think more about it, and I don’t think I would ask you to do this, Shane. For few more hours. I know you like your routines. Your sleep, your gym, whatever. So then I wonder, maybe you just don’t want to interrupt your routine. Is that it? Is it too hard for you, to change your plans for me?”

“No,” Shane says. “Ilya, what—no, of course not. Come on. Would I be here right now if that was a problem?”

“I don’t know,” Ilya admits. He ashes his cigarette on Shane’s deck. “I want to think no. But then I think, maybe you want to be with me, but you don’t want to upset routine. You are only happy with it if I am the one changing things. If this is true, you need to tell me. I will—I will do it, but I need to know, if that is how it is.”

Shane has no idea what to say. He feels like he just got dropped from a helicopter in the middle of the ocean and told to swim in dry land. He’s not even sure what direction he’s supposed to be going. He doesn’t know how long it’ll take to get there, if he can even make it.

He starts with the basics and sits down next to Ilya on the deck steps. “That’s not how it is,” he says. “It’s—I don’t know. Maybe I am struggling, a bit. With the change. But it’s just because I don’t know how to—do this. To be in a relationship. I’m—you know I’m a pretty rigid person. I’m not good with change.”

Beside him, Ilya snorts. “Oh, believe me, Hollander, I know.”

Shane huffs and knocks their shoulders together. “Shut up. I mean—don’t shut up. I guess. I want you to tell me when these things are bothering you. Because—because I do love you. And I want to make changes for you. I’m just. Not good at it. Like I said.”

Ilya sighs, listing over so he can rest his head on Shane’s shoulder. Something in Shane’s chest pulls tight and releases. “Okay,” he says. “Sorry for being dramatic. I think I am in bad mood.”

“Yeah?” Shane wraps his arm around Ilya’s shoulder. “Something going on?”

Ilya shrugs. “No, is—I don’t know. I am tired. Didn’t sleep well.” Shane gets the sense he has more to say, so he waits, and sure enough, after a moment, Ilya continues, “And I am thinking a lot, lately. This is my last year in Boston. Last Boston New Year’s party. This baby shower might be last I am invited to, and I am not going. Is hard. Especially when the boys don’t know I’m leaving. I think they will be very upset with me, when I go.”

Shane tightens his grip around Ilya’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I—I didn’t realize you guys were all so close.”

Ilya offers a half-shrug. “You know, I move to Boston, I have no friends there. Svetlana moved later. So for long time, team was only people I knew.”

“Yeah,” Shane says softly. It’s hard for him to imagine. The Metros are such a fractured team: there’s not really a group spirit, at least not one that Shane is part of. He has Hayden, and J.J. There was an older defender, Wilson, who retired two years ago, that helped Shane when he was a rookie. That was about it, though. Shane wouldn’t care about missing most of his teammates’ baby showers or bachelor parties or weddings. He wouldn’t care about missing anything but hockey games. But Ilya was a different person than Shane, and it shouldn’t surprise him that this was different, too.

“Do you—are you rethinking the plan?” Shane asks tentatively. “Because I would understand, if you were. Ottawa will be tough—“

Ilya shakes his head, resolutely, pulling back from Shane so he can meet him in the eye. “No. Is good plan. I want to do it. I am missing you all the time when you are not with me. Being closer to you, is worth it. I would do anything to see you more. I just—is just tough. Is all. Right now.”

Shane kisses him. His lips are cold. “Come on,” Shane says, hauling himself to his feet and offering Ilya his hand. “You need to get inside and warm up. I can’t have you freezing to death on my doorstep. What would the police reports say?”

Ilya smiles faintly. “Police reports would say is very effective sabotage,” Ilya says, but obediently stubs out his cigarette on Shane’s deck. He takes the offered hand.

—

Small mercies: Shane doesn’t come back to Boston until April. He does offer, in March, when Montreal plays Boston at home, to fly out with Ilya and spend a few days in Boston as payback for the January trip. Ilya just rolls his eyes at him over FaceTime and says the only thing stupider than one unnecessary trip is two. 

“Get me Frosted Flakes for breakfast and we will be even,” Ilya says. And even though it goes against every belief Shane has, Shane buys Ilya the Frosted Flakes. In the end, Shane thinks it’s worth financially supporting Big Sugar, because when Ilya finds the box in the pantry his mouth falls into a surprised O and he ends up blowing Shane right there on the kitchen floor. Right there on the kitchen floor with no ghosts watching. What a win.

Still, the return to Ilya’s Boston home is inevitable, and Shane ends up there for the night a couple weeks before playoffs. Montreal is having an off year and is vying for a wildcard slot, but Boston is pretty locked in. Secretly, Shane hopes that if Montreal fails to make it, this might be Ilya’s year. He deserves to leave Boston in a blaze of glory, given all he’s sacrificing for them. Of course, that’s only if Montreal doesn’t make it. If Montreal does make it, Shane is going to destroy them.

This time, Shane does his best to be nice to Irina. He tries to catch her eye, even though he hates eye contact; and whenever he looks vaguely in his direction, he always tries to paste a smile on his face, even though he’s often a beat too late for her to actually see it. Ilya shoots Shane an odd glance, here or there, but he mostly doesn’t comment.

In the evening, Ilya makes popcorn for them to eat in front of Sixty Minutes, and Shane suggests, tentatively, “Do you think your mom wants to join us?”

“Ah, I don’t think so, she doesn’t like thinking about death,” Ilya says. “Anyway, if she wants to join us, she will.”

It’s such an absurd statement that Shane has absolutely no idea what to say in response, so he says nothing. In the end, Irina never manifests to join them, which is all for the best given that Ilya starts working his hand down from Shane’s shoulder to his cock sometime during the third commercial break. When the credits roll, they’re both already halfway to coming in their pants, and Shane barely manages to fumble to turn the TV off before they’re stumbling upstairs.

They have a game tomorrow, and Ilya knows Shane’s rules. He blows Shane instead of fucking him, and he times it so they’re showered and comfortably under the covers by ten p.m. He smacks a kiss on Shane’s cheek and reclines to scroll on his phone while Shane pulls on his eye mask and conks out.

But while Ilya is aware of Shane’s rules, Irina apparently is not. It’s only one a.m. when Shane wakes up to a ruckus of grinding that makes him think, for a moment, that there is a bulldozer outside about to knock the house down. Then his sleepy mind catches up and he realizes it’s Irina turning the ice machine into a giant frozen maraca.

Shane groans, pulling his pillow up over his ears. It does very little to muffle the noise. Shane keeps earplugs in his bedside table for this purpose, but he can’t remember if he ever brought any to Ilya’s, and when he fumbles through the drawer beside him searching, all he comes up with is a remote for the ceiling fan and some old, discarded lip gloss that probably belongs to Svetlana.

Shane flops over and tries to think positive thoughts. The mind is a powerful thing. Shane’s mind is an especially powerful thing. He can talk himself into believing this isn’t a problem. He can talk himself into believing this bedroom is an quiet and serene as the Japanese garden he visited once, in Vancouver, with the perfect whorls etched in sand, the nice, smooth grey stones scattered through the river. Shane thinks of the nice, smooth grey stones. Shane thinks of how they would feel under his hands, how perfectly cool and still they are—

The ice machine grinds out a beat that’s suspiciously similar to the Sixty Minutes theme song. For the first time in his life, Shane actually contemplates suicide.

The racket continues all night. He eventually manages to fall asleep about three hours before his alarm goes off, which leaves him criminally bereft of rest before what is, for him, one of the most important games of the year. He considers waking up Ilya and asking him to control his mother, but all the online forums about dealing with your mother-in-law had agreed on one thing: never complain to your partner about their parent. Doing so will only drive a wedge between you. So Shane had gritted his teeth and pulled the comforter over his head and counted his breaths so he didn’t go downstairs and try to do something stupid, like murder a ghost.

In the morning, Shane is crabby and Ilya clocks it immediately. Irritatingly, he’s perfect at managing it, giving Shane space, not commenting when Shane snaps at him for offering him eggs on game day. “Sorry, I forgot, you need protein shake, my bad,” Ilya says, even though it is not his bad for being a good boyfriend and offering to make Shane a nice hot breakfast. Shane feels bad about it for about three seconds, and then he remembers how exhausted he feels and how shit he’s going to be on the ice, and then he’s pissed all over again.

It’s not Ilya’s fault, really: he’s not the one banging around at all hours. But also, it is his fault, because if it weren’t for Ilya and his stupid perfect cock and handsome face and kind, gentle heart, Shane would have been sleeping at the Marriott downtown instead of here, with a dead woman who’s apparently decided the afterlife is the perfect time for her to pursue her ambitions as a fucking drummer.

“I love you,” Ilya says, as Shane tightens his laces. “I would say good luck but we are going to crush you.”

“You wish,” Shane snaps, then sighs. He takes a deep, slow breath “I love you too.”

The Metros lose. It’s not a terrible loss, 2-1, and that’s as much because of a bogus call by the refs as anything—Marleau was clearly offside, the favoritism is fucking blatant in this stupid goddamn city—but it stings Shane nonetheless. He can’t shake the feeling that if he had slept better last night, he would have played better. There were a couple shots on goal where he was just a skate-length away from where he needed to be, where he just missed the right angle on a pass. If he were better rested—

Theriault chews them out in the locker room and they all duck their heads and nod along, Shane included, even though he’s not really listening to whatever Theriault has to say. He’s thinking about Irina. What will happen when Ilya moves to Ottawa? She’ll move with him, just like she presumably moved to Boston with him from Russia. 

And what happens then? What happens when Shane is staying at Ilya’s house a few times a month instead of a few times a year? How much will she be allowed to affect his hockey before Shane calls foul?

He can’t let this go on. All the websites about dealing with mother-in-laws said the same thing—that you simply have to be nice to them; that you can simply never complain—but Shane is a hockey player. Shane is made for conflict. He can’t sit here on the bench watching the action. He needs to do something.

He texts Ilya that he’ll meet him at his house, and then he calls an Uber. He leaves the arena when most of his teammates are still sliding on their post-game suits, determination heavy as a rock in his stomach. 

—

Shane gets back to the house before Ilya, who’s stuck at the arena doing press. He drops his bag by the front door, shucks his shoes, and immediately goes on a hunt for Irina. It’s time to address this head-on. After all, he’s an adult; she’s an adult, if ghosts can be classified as adults; she may understand English, and if she doesn’t, she probably at least has some ability to read facial expressions.

He finds her in Ilya’s office, pulling books from the shelves at random and tossing them onto the floor like used napkins.

“Irina,” Shane starts, jaw set, anger simmering and twisting into determination in his chest. He had resolved, on the car ride home, not to let her dissuade him or distract him. It doesn’t matter if her arm detaches from her body entirely and starts crawling to Shane’s feet like a lizard: he will be present and stay focused. He needs to set boundaries. He needs to make her understand—

Irina turns to look at him. She’s looked at him before, of course, but something about this time is different. It’s like her gaze is some kind of tractor beam and Shane has been swept up in it. It’s like she’s transported him, all at once, from the balmy spring of Boston to the frigid water of Hudson Bay. Shane’s throat seizes up as if from cold, his chest as tight as a full balloon. 

He feels, all at once, sadder than he has ever felt.

He blinks quickly against hot tears, his breath stuttering in his chest. His whole body feels abruptly heavy and hard to move. He presses the heel of one hand against his collarbone but the pressure does little to dissuade the feeling. Shane has the strangest urge to lie down on the ground. Maybe he can curl into a fetal position, there. Maybe he can just die of this sadness, so he never has to get up.

In front of him, Irina cocks her head like a dog, studying him. Her grey eyes glimmer in the evening light. Shane had thought, before he met Irina, that she would have had blue eyes like Ilya’s. He assumed that she would resemble Ilya in many ways: she’d have the same curly hair, the same wide smile, the same confidence in the way she moved. But in truth, Shane has come to the realization that Ilya must take after his father in looks, because most of the time he has a very hard time looking at Irina and seeing any of the cheerful vivacity that bleeds through Ilya’s every pore. In every way that Ilya is full of light, she is so full of death that it is overwhelming, blatant, like being slapped in the face repeatedly with a rotting fish.

Now, though—Shane forces another breath around the shape of the aching sadness, holding her gaze. Now, he can see that Irina has the exact same eyes as Ilya. A little desaturated, yes, but maybe that’s just the death: they’re the exact same shape, the same hue down to the dark flecks in the irises. 

Once he notices one thing, he can’t stop noticing more of them. Irina has a mole on her face just like Ilya, although hers is on her chin, not her cheek, and it’s half-hidden by what might be an overgrowth of slime mold. When Shane evaluates the creases of her forehead, the way her skin hangs just a bit loose around her jaw, he can see where the laugh lines might have once lived on her forehead. Underneath the pallor of her skin, coated grey like a car driving on a long gravel road, Shane swears he can see the slightest hint of freckles.

Irina glides towards Shane, pausing just in front of him, close enough that Shane could reach out and touch her if she were real. She makes a quiet grumbling noise in her throat, not unlike the rocky tumbling of the ice machine, and it sends shivers through Shane’s bones, pulls another retching gasp from his throat.

Eventually, Shane manages to speak. “Irina,” he croaks.

She smiles, reaching out with one hand. Her fingers ghost over the top of Shane’s head, like she’s trying to fix his messy hair. A cold breeze blows across Shane’s face, and then she’s gone.

—

Shane sits in the leather swivel chair behind Ilya’s desk, chest burning like he’s just finished a bag skate, and calls Rose.

She picks up after three rings. “It’s two a.m. in Thailand, what the fuck,” shew says, instead of hello, at which point Shane remembers she’s currently on location, filming for some ‘90s lesbian love story, and he is a horrible friend.

“I’m so sorry,” Shane says. “Fuck, I completely forgot, I’ll let you go—“

“Shane,” Rose groans, and there’s the shuffling of sheets. “It’s fine. I wasn’t really sleeping, anyway. We’re on this remote little island where there’s, like, no lights or electricity or anything, because it seems more authentic or whatever, and it’s beautiful, it’s great, the movie will look spectacular, but there’s no air conditioning in my room and I think I might actually be sweating to death. Is it possible to die of sweat?”

“Yeah,” Shane says, settling back in his seat. Washington D.C. inches by outside the window; traffic jam at two in the afternoon. God, sometimes Shane hates cities. “It’s called overheating. Pretty common way to die, actually.”

Rose huffs. “You’re such an asshole. I don’t know why I was ever surprised about you and Ilya.”

Shane must hesitate for a moment too long, because she says, “Shane? Are you okay?”

“I wanted to talk to you about him, actually,” Shane says. “It’s—this stays between the two of us, okay?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Rose assures him. “Is everything all right? Did you two have a fight, or something?”

“No, no, nothing like that, it’s—Ilya’s great. I love him so much, he’s the best thing in my life, it’s just—“

“Just?”

“He has this aunt,” Shane lies.

Rose makes a noise. “Okay?” she says. “Not seeing why having an aunt is problematic, Shane.”

“Fuck off,” Shane sighs. “His aunt is—living with him, right now. And he doesn’t have a problem with it. Which is fine, I mean, it’s good, he’s generous and he loves her and he doesn’t have much left of his life in Russia, so I’m glad he has that connection, that she’s there for him—”

“But you hate her,” Rose interrupts.

“But I hate her,” Shane groans. “She keeps, like, jumping out of nowhere and scaring the shit out of me, and I swear the other day she was listening to us having sex, and also she’s just kind of, like, gross. Like, unhygienic, I guess. And I swear, it’s fucking with my hockey. Like, I stay here and all my routines are messed up, and I play like shit, and I just don’t know if it’s sustainable.”

“Okay,” Rose says. “First off, take a breath. Second off, how long is she going to be living there?”

“Indefinitely,” Shane says, because that sounds less depressing than forever. She is going to live with him forever and if I ever get to a point in my life where we get to live together then she is going to live with me, too. Her and her weird wrinkly grey hands that look like rat’s tails.

“Jeez, okay,” Rose says. “Maybe that’s a Russian, thing, I know Europeans are all in on that family stuff. And it’s not an option to have her live on her own, or something?”

Shane shakes his head even though Rose can’t see him. “It’s—no,” he says. “You don’t know the full story of his family, but, no. She can’t be on her own and she’s kind of. The only family he has left.”

Rose whistles. “Shit. You’ve got yourself in a tough situation, haven’t you, babe.”

Shane groans, slumping down so his forehead rests on the desk. “Please help.”

Rose sighs. “I feel for you, Shane. I do. I just—I don’t know if there’s much you can do here. All relationships have trade-offs. Everyone you date is gonna have some weird thing going on. In the grand scheme of things, being committed enough to your family to let a weird aunt live with you is probably one of the more manageable issues to have. What did Ilya say, when you talked to him about it?”

Shane is quiet.

“Shane Hollander,” Rose says, voice low. “Please tell me you talked to him about it.”

“Er,” Shane says.

“Shane!”

“Look, look! All the advice online says never to complain to your partner about their family,” Shane defends. “It just drives a wedge between you! And the last thing I want is a wedge. He’s moving to Ottawa for me, Rose, I can hardly complain to him about his annoying aunt.”

Rose sighs. “Shane.”

Shane chews his lip. “I’m right,” he says. “Right?”

“God, you know, sometimes I see the two of you and how you look at each other and I wonder how it took you so long to get together,” Rose says. “And then you open your mouth and tell me about your relationship and I realize it’s a miracle you got together at all.”

Shane waits, but no more is forthcoming. “I don’t know what that means,” he admits.

“It means that you need to talk to your boyfriend about what’s bothering you,” Rose says. “I’m not saying give him an ultimatum or tell him his aunt needs to go or something. That’d be terrible. I’m just saying, maybe tell him what’s bothering you? Maybe he’d be willing to compromise?”

Shane swallows. “I’m not sure I want him to compromise,” he admits. “He’s already giving up a lot for me, Rose. It doesn’t—I’m not sure I actually want him to give up anything else.”

Rose hums. “Well, then tell him that,” she says. “But at least then he’ll know she bothers you and won’t get worried if you’re in a pissy mood with her or something. Communication. It’s this thing that’s kind of important in relationships. I’m not sure if you’re heard of it?”

“You’re such a bitch,” Shane grumbles.

Rose laughs. “Yeah,” she agrees. “But somehow, I think that’s kind of your type.”

—

Shane doesn’t want to have this conversation within Irina’s hearing—well, he doesn’t want to have it all, but he definitely doesn’t want Irina to be part of it. So he waits until the next morning and convinces Ilya to drive him to the airport in his least ostentatious car. Ilya looks faintly dumbfounded that Shane is willing to take the risk of being seen with him in public—an expression that sends an equal and opposite ache through Shane’s chest, thinking of all that Ilya is giving up for Shane, a person who won’t even let them drive around Boston together—but he agrees readily enough. The car is not actually very subtle, a massive black BMW, but there are plenty of BMWs in Boston, even if there are relatively few with the vanity license plate HCKYSTR. 

They’re almost at the airport when Shane spots a carpool parking lot and asks Ilya to pull over. 

“Something wrong, you feel sick?” Ilya asks, frowning.

“Just pull over.”

As soon as Ilya has stopped the car, Shane reaches over and grabs Ilya’s right hand in his. “Ilya,” he says. “There’s something I need to talk to you about. Something serious.”

“Oh, god,” Ilya says faintly, under his breath.

Shane barrels forward, certain that if he doesn’t get it all out now, he’ll never say it. “This last year together has been really—great. I know it’s been hard, with the distance, but, um, being together more, and—“

“Just do it,” Ilya interrupts.

Shane finally looks up from where they’re hands are linked together and realizes that Ilya is rearing away from Shane, his body all but tilted directly out the driver’s side window. “What?”

“You are breaking up with me, yes?” Ilya says. “Just say it, I do not need a speech.”

Shane gapes. “What? Ilya, no—I’m not—no.”

Ilya’s mouth twists. “No?”

“No,” Shane insists, squeezes Ilya’s hand so tight in his own that he might be causing minor damage to the capillaries. “What the fuck, why would you think I’m breaking up with you?”

Ilya waves a loose hand in Shane’s direction. “I don’t know, Shane! You wait until we are going to airport, you start to have very serious conversation, you sound like you are gearing up to give bad news, what am I supposed to think?”

“Not that I’m breaking up with you, what the fuck,” Shane says. “Ilya, I love you. You know that, right? I love you.”

“I know,” Ilya says. Shane glares at him, and Ilya raises a hand in the air. “Really, I know, I know! But people who love each other break up all the time, Shane.”

“Not us,” Shane says stubbornly. “I’m never breaking up with you, and you’re never breaking up with me, so get used to it.”

Ilya huffs, lightly. “You are so demanding, Hollander.”

“You call it demanding,” Shane says. “I call it—knowing what I want.”

Ilya shakes his head, but he’s smiling. He rubs his free hand over his face. He looks very tired, all of the sudden. “What is the problem, then?” he says.

“It’s not really a problem,” Shane hedges. Ilya shoots him a look, and he caves. “Okay, it’s maybe a small problem. It’s—look, I want to be clear, I don’t expect anything to change, okay? It’s not, like, the worst thing in the world. But I talked to Rose—“

“You talked to Rose Landry about this before me?”

“I talked to Rose,” Shane repeats, “And she pointed out that communication is kind of important in relationships. Which we’re in. A relationship, that is. So, I, um, I thought I should try to be better at that. Communicating.”

“And you’re going to do that by saying…”

Shane swallows hard. Here goes. Deep breath— “Your mother is driving me crazy,” Shane blurts.

Ilya blinks at him slowly. He looks like a fish blowing bubbles in a dentist office tank. “What?”

“Your mother,” Shane repeats, because in for a penny. “Or, her ghost, I don’t know. It’s driving me nuts. I couldn’t sleep the other night because of the racket she was making, which threw my whole game off, and even when she’s quiet—it’s also bad when she’s quiet, because she’s just popping up everywhere. Everywhere! When I’m naked, when I’m in the shower, I can’t take a piss in peace because I’m worried she’s going to slide out of the vents and start looking at my dick, and when I was doing yoga the other day she was hanging around like a fucking cat, and—and—are you laughing at me?”

Ilya covers his face with one hand. “No, no,” he says. “Not laughing. Crying. This is definitely crying, I am so sad because you don’t like my mama.”

“You asshole, you are,” Shane says, disbelieving. “You’re fucking laughing at me.”

Ilya snorts, laughter hiccuping out of his chest. “I am sorry,” he says. “Is not funny. Really.”

“It’s not!” Shane insists. “It’s—this has been seriously bothering me, Ilya, I don’t know—I can’t believe you’re laughing at me!”

“Shane,” Ilya says. “Is just that I am relieved. I thought you had real problem. Like, something is very wrong problem. You are going to break up with me problem. And now it turns out you are just, what, you are annoyed by my mama’s ghost?”

Shane’s face feels very hot. He pulls his hand free from Ilya’s, crossing his arms over his chest, even though it feels kind of awkward, with the seatbelt. “That is a real problem, Ilya,” he says. “You live with her, I can’t—this is going to be more of a problem, next year, when we’re at your house more,” he says. “And I can’t—I don’t want to ask you to compromise more things for me, but I’m probably going to be kind of bitchy about it, and—“

“Oh, like you are not bitchy about other things?” Ilya laughs. “Shane. Solnyshko. Let me ask you something. Do you think I am not annoyed by my mama?”

Shane blinks. “What?”

“My mama drives me crazy!” Ilya says. “The ice machine! I can never have ice when I want ice! And she is always moaning to me and making me watch stupid Hallmark channel with the dumbest movies on Earth instead of Sixty Minutes stories about cops and murders. And the way she likes to pop up out of nowhere and scare me, oh my god, it took so many years before I got used to it.”

Shane’s mouth works uselessly. “But you—but you never said anything.”

Ilya smiles, reaching forward to grasp at Shane’s forearm. Shane lets his arms loosen a little, where they’re locked across his chest. “Shane, she is my mama, and you are my new boyfriend. I am not going to trash-talk her when I am trying to make you get along.”

“Oh,” Shane says, faintly.

“But yes, of course she is annoying,” Ilya says. “I love her very much, I am glad she is here, but yes, sometimes I want to rip my hair out with the weird things she does. Probably would be better if I could have conversation with her about things, but is hard to talk to her. Sometimes she seems like she is listening, sometimes not. I will try to talk to her again, though, when I get home.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Shane says, automatically, even though he would really, really like Ilya to do that.

Ilya raises his hand from Shane’s arm to cup Shane’s cheek, and instinctively, Shane sags sideways, pressing his face into Ilya’s palm. “I want to,” Ilya says firmly. “Like I say, she bothers me, too, but even if she didn’t—I want you to feel at home in my home, Shane. I want you to be comfortable.”

“But she was there first.”

“Well, I am not saying I am kicking her out on ghost ass to live in streets,” Ilya says. “I will just talk to her. Probably there is solution. Maybe I build sound proof room with ice maker and big TV that is always playing Hallmark and shopping channel. She would spend all her time there, and we would not hear her.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “That sound ridiculous,” he says, even though, actually, the more he thinks about it, the more he thinks there are some good ideas, there. A TV put in the basement, or the gym, far away from Shane and Ilya, that they could control from a distance on their phones? And maybe they can’t soundproof a room in the house for Irina, but if they manage to soundproof their own room, and if Shane makes sure he always has earplugs available to him at all times—

“I will do ridiculous things to make you happy,” Ilya says, which makes Shane feel like his whole body has dissolved into a puddle of goo, and almost makes him really really sad that he has to be at the airport in ten minutes if he wants to make his flight.

He wants to suck Ilya’s cock, or let Ilya fuck him over the gearshift, but he settles for kissing him instead. Ilya tastes bitter, faintly of nicotine. Had he been smoking? Shane pulls back, already frowning, and Ilya must see his expression because he admits, before Shane can even ask, “I snuck a cigarette while you were finishing packing. I could tell there was something bothering you, and I was—stressed.”

Shane’s frown deepens, and he rubs a thumb over Ilya’s lower lip. “I don’t like it when you smoke,” he says. “Talk to me next time, okay?”

Ilya raises his eyebrows and it takes a moment for Shane to realize. He huffs, shoving Ilya away. “Shut up,” he says. “I talked to you, okay! I did.”

“After Rose Landry told you to,” Ilya says. “What did she say? How did she convince you? Did she use her feminine wiles?”

Shane mouths feminine wiles to himself. “Her—no, you dumbass. She just pointed out that I love you a lot and it’s pretty stupid to love someone and refuse to be honest with them,” he says. “Also she called me an idiot a few times.”

Ilya sticks his lip out. “You are not an idiot,” he says. “What does Rose Landry know? You are the smartest hockey player alive.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Low bar,” he says, and Ilya offers an overdramatized, shocked inhale, pressing his hand to his chest.

“You insult me like this?” he says. “After I offer to evict my dead mother from her home for love of you? I am hurt, Hollander. Deeply hurt. Is good thing you are going home today, so I have time to cry all by myself.”

“Going back to Montreal,” Shane corrects. Ilya tilts his head like a puppy. “I’m not going home,” Shane says. He feels suddenly, deeply shy, but he forces the words out of his throat anyway. “My home is wherever you are.”

Ilya blinks several times in quick succession. He turns towards the front of the car, clearing his throat. “Wow,” he says. “I am really mad that we have to leave for airport right now. Are you trying to kill me, Hollander? Kill me with romance?”

“Eh, I don’t think so,” Shane says. “I wouldn’t want to have more ghost problems, would I?”

He laughs as Ilya, fake-glaring, throws the car into gear.

—

A few days later, Shane Facetimes Ilya while he’s lying in bed in his Montreal apartment. Shane has just returned home from a game against the Admirals, which Montreal won in overtime, 2-1. Shane is extra tired from the long game, and he had begged off the obligatory club celebrations to be here, on the phone with Ilya, resting his sore legs.

 On the other side of the line, Ilya is just climbing under the covers himself. Shane waits until Ilya’s flicked off the bedside lamp to ask, “What do you think is the weirdest thing about me?”

The timing is strategic, because Ilya is at his most honest when he’s sleepy. Here, in bed—even hundreds of miles apart—Shane can trust Ilya to tell him the truth.

“Mmm.” Ilya snuffles, shifting on his pillow. He’s so cute when he’s sleepy. Hair mussed, cheeks pink like a child. “This is strange question. Why do you want to know?”

Shane shrugs. “Just curious, I guess. Something someone said to me.”

It had been J.J.’s restauranteur friend, who Shane had reached out to about buying a commercial ice machine. When Shane had confessed to him that the machine was for his personal use—a lie he bolstered, stupidly, by saying he liked ice in his ginger ale, instead of going with the much more plausible explanation that, as a professional athlete, he took lots of ice baths—the restauranteur had paused for a long moment and then said, you athletes are so weird. But he had placed the order for the ice machine, which would be arriving at Ilya’s house next week. Shane hoped they would like the surprise.

“Mmm.” Ilya sighs. “Is hard to say. You are so weird as person.”

Shane wishes he could smack Ilya through the phone. He settles for rolling his eyes. “Shut up, asshole.”

“You asked!” Ilya insists. “Really, you are very weird. The way you organize your sock drawer, blyat. And your diet. I do not understand the rules at all. The way you hate hot baths, it is just not natural. How much time you spend each day, thinking about hockey statistics from, like, the dinosaur era. Before Hunter was born. So weird.”

“Don’t fluff my ego too much,” Shane says dryly.

“Mmm, no, is not insult, is—cute. I like these things. They make you special.”

It’s a nice sentiment. But—“There must be some of them that annoy you,” Shane presses.

Ilya sighs again. “This is a trap,” he mumbles, half to himself. “I know this is a trap.” Louder, to Shane: “I do not know what you want me to say, Hollander. Of course you are annoying sometimes. Of course there are things I worry about. But that is normal. Is good. I would not actually want to date hockey robot.”

Shane rubs his cheek against his pillow, considering for several long moments. 

“Now I want to know what you think is weirdest thing about me,” Ilya says.

From the background of Ilya’s call, Shane can hear the faint sound of voices on the downstairs television, probably blasting for Shane to be able to hear it over the line, undoubtedly showing a movie in which a city girl falls in love with a small town boy. The next time Shane visits Ilya’s house, Shane will wake up each morning to a grey figure in Ilya’s kitchen, moaning over the espresso machine. He won’t be able to get through a workout in Ilya’s gym without someone trying to spook Shane into dropping a barbell on his foot. He’ll lose at least three socks to ghostly interference with the washing machine. When Irina appears in the bathroom while they’re getting ready for the day, Shane will have to resist the urge to flinch away, while Ilya will beam and rub the sleep from his eyes and say mama, how did you rest last night? Like a child with a very ugly, very sick old dog which they’ve convinced themselves is beautiful, just for the way it’s kept them company, all these years.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Shane says now. “It’s definitely your toes.”

Ilya stiffens. Shane can see the way his jaw flexes, even over video. “What?” he demands, voice dangerous. He props himself up on one elbow, glaring at his phone. “What are you talking about? What is wrong with my toes? They are very normal toes. Hollander—Shane—stop it, tell me what is wrong with my toes—“

Punch-drunk, light as a feather, Shane laughs.