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

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Rose Landry, Hayden Pike

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe, Referee Shane Hollander, Hockey Player Ilya Rozanov, Oral Sex, Anal Sex, Ilya Rozanov is a Menace, Anxious Shane Hollander, Referee/Player, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Drug Addiction, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, Good Friend Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-02-11 Updated: 2026-05-31 Words: 102,322 Chapters: 18/21

Puck Interference

Summary

Shane has been working his entire life to finally, finally get a position as an NHL referee. But what happens when the attractive Russian he can’t get out of his head turns out to be hockey’s most chaotic captain?

Notes

Chapter 1: Sasha

Chapter Summary

Shane meets “Sasha” in a bar, looking to tune out the world.

Chapter Notes

This chapter is just a 6,000 word hookup.

A few updates made as of 4/25, with many thanks to Aphantastical for their expert help beta reading this chapter.

The Montreal referee seminar was a special kind of hell designed for people who loved rules and hated sleeping. For three full days, Shane had been trapped in the prison of a windowless conference room at the Fairmont, watching grainy overhead footage of skate blade-to-ice contact until his retinas felt like they were about to bleed. 

He was twenty-eight, and after years of grinding through three-game weekends and endless bus rides with the OHL and the AHL, he had finally received the call. He was going to be an NHL official this coming season. He had the crest. He had the career he had mapped out when he was nineteen. Right now, he had a headache.

For ten hours, he’d sat in a windowless conference room, part of a new hire cohort being grilled on the subtle difference between a clean hockey play and a two-minute minor for hooking. He had stared at so many replays that when he closed his eyes, he saw the ice in 4K resolution. He didn’t see faces. Just jersey numbers and skate-blade angles. He saw the game as a series of mechanical failures and successes. The league’s top stars were just lines on a disciplinary report. Names like Kent, Price, and Rozanov that came with high penalty-minute counts and reputations for testing the boundaries. He’d never stood on the ice with them, never seen their faces without a visor and three layers of sweat.

But now it was 9:00pm and they had been dismissed for the evening. He had slipped out of the hotel and hailed a cab to an address in the Village. He needed a few hours of being invisible. Le Prive was exactly what the name had suggested. It was quiet, tucked away, dark, and miles away from anyone who knew anything about professional sports. 

He wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, but he could potentially, maybe, be into a blowjob if one was on offer. But mostly, nobody in a gay bar on the East End was going to ask his opinion on the new icing regulations. He took a stool at the far right end of the bar, his shoulders tight.

“Can I get a beer?” he asked the bartender. “Whatever’s cold and on tap.”

Simple. Grounding. He watched the condensation form on the glass as the bartender slid it over, the amber liquid glowing under the low light. 

“Rough day?” 

The voice was low, vibrating with a thick, melodic Russian accent. Shane didn't look up immediately. He took a long, cold pull of his beer, letting the carbonation bite at the roof of his mouth.

"Too many hours spent looking for things that aren't there," Shane muttered.

"A philosopher?" He could hear the man grinning as he said it.

Shane finally glanced to his left. The man sitting two stools over looked like he’d been dragged through a very expensive hedge. He had a day of scruff and hair that was a messy, dark blond tangle. He was wearing a shirt that looked like it cost more than Shane’s first car. He was beautiful. And he was staring at Shane like a tiger that had trapped an antelope in a corner.

"Hardly," Shane said, setting his beer down. "I’m an accountant." It was a safe lie. Officiating was just a different form of accounting. Just measuring fouls and minutes in the box instead of dollars.

The man tilted his head, the smirk deepening. "An accountant. That sounds very...orderly. Quiet."

"It’s supposed to be," Shane said. He felt a strange, buzzy pull in his chest. Usually, he was the one keeping people at a professional distance, but the anonymity of the bar and the third day of mental exhaustion were making him reckless. "What about you? Are you the one making a mess I have to clean up?"

The stranger laughed, a rich, vibrating sound. "Something like that. Lots of travel. Lots of shouting. People expect me to have all the answers. I want to tell them to go away and let me work in peace."

"I can relate to that," Shane admitted. "No one ever likes the person who tells them the truth."

"No," the man agreed softly. He shifted, turning his hips toward Shane. The movement was fluid, athletic, and entirely too confident. "I am Sasha."

Shane took the offered hand. Sasha’s grip was firm. His palm was calloused in a way that didn't quite match his story, but Shane was too tired to be a detective. He just liked the way his hand felt. Solid and real.

"Shane," he said.

"Well, Shane the Accountant," Sasha said, his eyes dropping to Shane’s mouth for a fraction of a second before snapping back up. "Since we are both hiding from our lives tonight, perhaps we should talk about something that does not matter at all. No work."

"I'd like that," Shane said.

Sasha leaned in just an inch, bringing with him the scent of cold Montreal air and something expensive. "Tell me, Shane. Does the accountant ever lose count on purpose?"

"Never," Shane whispered, his heart hammering against his ribs in a rhythm that was decidedly not orderly. "But for tonight...I think I could be persuaded."

Sasha grinned, a flash of white teeth in the dark. "I am very persuasive. You have no idea." He didn’t wait for Shane’s response. He signaled the bartender with a two-finger gesture that spoke of someone very used to being served immediately.

"Two vodkas," Sasha said, his voice cutting through the noise. "Beluga. None of that freezer-burn ice."

Shane blinked, his hand still wrapped protectively around his half-finished beer. "I’m fine. I have an early morning."

“No, no, no,” Sasha shook his head. “No work.” He slid over to sit next to Shane, their shoulders brushing. The heat of him was immediate, contrasting the air-conditioned chill of the hotel Shane had spent the last days in. He took the two thick-bottomed glasses from the bartender, handing one to Shane. “Beer is…boring. Vodka is for..becoming someone else.” 

“Who am I becoming?”

“Whoever you are when you are not looking at numbers.”

Shane looked down at the clear liquid. He’d expected a shot glass. Something to be thrown back and forgotten, but this was a proper pour.

"Don't shoot it," Sasha warned softly, his eyes hooded and dark. "It is not for getting drunk like a little student. It is for feeling the world slow down. Sip.”

Shane hesitated, the ghost of his training manual whispering about hydration and professional conduct. Then he looked at the way the light hit the sharp line of Sasha’s jaw. He took a small sip.

It didn't burn like cheap vodka did. It was viscous and tasted like minerals and clean, biting wind. It hit his tongue and blossomed into a slow, spreading warmth that finally, mercifully, silenced the replay of the crease-violation footage in his head.

"See?" Sasha murmured, watching Shane’s throat as he swallowed. "Better."

“It’s smooth,” Shane admitted, feeling the tension start to uncoil from his shoulders. He took another sip, more confident. He wasn’t much of a drinker. “Are you from Montreal?”

“Boring question,” Sasha laughed at him. 

“I don’t know the nice way to ask if you’re from…Russia? Or maybe somewhere else...?”

“Yes, Russia. But now, not here. America. But hotels, planes, different city every three nights.”

“That sounds like a lonely way to live,” Shane commented. 

“Not if you go to nice bar, meet nice people,” Sasha’s grin widened. He leaned in closer, the scent of expensive cologne engulfing Shane. “It is only lonely if you do not find what you are looking for.” He reached out, his thumb tracing a slow, deliberate line over the pulse point in Shane’s wrist. Shane felt the touch all the way down his spine. The tiger hadn't only cornered his meal. He was starting to play with it. 

"And what are you looking for, Sasha?" Shane asked, his voice a little lower, a little rougher. He took another sip of the vodka, the warmth spreading through his chest, making the lights of the bar feel softer, the noise of the crowd more distant.

"Tonight?" Sasha’s eyes dropped to Shane’s mouth again, lingering there for a second too long before snapping back up. "A break. But I think I found something better. A nice man who is very good at following rules. Maybe he wants to see what happens when he forgets them.”

Shane’s breath caught in his chest. He should go back to the hotel. He should review the goalie interference clips one more time. He should be the professional he had worked ten years to become. Sasha’s thumb was still moving against his wrist, making the rest of the world feel like it was made of cardboard.

"It is too loud in here," Sasha said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly vibration. "The lights are too bright. The people..." He leaned closer, his lips brushing against the shell of Shane’s ear. He moved his hand from Shane’s wrist, sliding it up the length of his arm to grip the back of his neck. His thumb rested right under Shane’s ear. The possessiveness of the gesture was intoxicating. “We should go.”

"Where?" Shane asked, his voice barely a whisper.

"I have a room nearby," Sasha whispered. "High up. Quiet." Shane really, really, really should walk away. He never did this. He didn’t know what was going to happen when they went back to the hotel. He was so bad at hookups. He preferred doing it through the apps, where they could negotiate everything up front. 

Shane watched the beautiful, reckless man and felt the last of his resistance crumble. He didn't think about the OHL, the AHL, or the crest waiting in his suitcase. He just looked at Sasha and let go of the ledge.

"Okay," Shane said, his voice steadier than he felt. "Let's go."

The walk to the curb was a blur of neon and humid Montreal air. Sasha didn't let go of him, his hand warm on the small of Shane’s back, guiding him toward a black sedan that seemed to appear the moment they hit the sidewalk. As the door closed, sealing them into the quiet, leather-scented interior, Shane realized he didn't even know Sasha's last name.

And for the first time in his life, he didn't care.

The silence in the back of the sedan was heavy, pressurized by the sudden absence of the bar’s thumping bass. Sasha’s hand stayed on Shane’s thigh, a hard, steady pressure that felt like a brand through the fabric of his slacks.

Shane stared out the window at the blurred neon of Rue Sainte-Catherine, his mind trying to revert to its default setting. Calculating the risks, the timing, the potential for disaster. He needed more vodka. 

The car pulled up to a very fancy boutique hotel. It was exactly the kind of place a man who wore five-hundred-dollar shirts and drank Beluga Gold would stay. The doorman didn't even blink as they climbed out. Sasha swept past, his hand now firm on the small of Shane’s back.

They didn't speak in the elevator. The tension was so thick it felt like it was humming in the small space. Shane watched the floor numbers climb, his heart performing a frantic, irregular beat against his ribs. Sasha was staring at him in the mirror, not the lazy, hooded gaze from the bar, but something sharper. Focused.

The doors slid open on a high floor. Sasha led him down a plush, silent hallway to a corner suite. He swiped his key, the lock clicked, and the moment the door swung shut behind them, the mask shattered.

Sasha didn’t turn on the lights. The only illumination came from the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting the city’s skyline in jagged blues and whites across the room. He grabbed the front of Shane’s shirt, bunching the fabric in his fists, and hauled him back against the door.

Sasha kissed him, a hard and fast collision. It tasted like the vodka. Cold and clean and then suddenly, violently hot. He tasted of arrogance and hunger, his tongue demanding entry with a confidence that made Shane’s knees go weak. Shane reached up, his fingers tangling in Sasha’s messy curls, pulling him closer, needing to anchor himself against the sheer force.

“You are nervous,” Sasha murmured, his voice a rough growl against Shane’s throat. “Are you counting the seconds until you run away?” 

"No," Shane gasped, his hands coming up to grip Sasha’s forearms. Sasha’s muscles were like iron. Dense and far more powerful than they had seemed across a bar counter. "I’m not running."

"Good. But if you want to stop, you tell me and I will. Understand me?”

Shane nodded, a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold tracing his spine. "I understand."

Sasha leaned in, his forehead resting against Shane's for a heartbeat before he pressed a slow, lingering kiss to the corner of his mouth. "What do you want to do first? I have many ideas, but I want to hear yours."

Shane’s face heated. Being asked for his preference made him feel exposed. He wished he had a script for this. He looked at Sasha, at the messy dark blond hair, the broad shoulders, and the way he was truly waiting for an answer.

"I want..." Shane swallowed hard. "I want to suck your dick."

Sasha’s smirk was brief, a flash of white in the shadows, but his eyes flared. "Yes. I would like that very much."

He stepped back, pulling his shirt over his head. In the dim light, Shane finally saw the truth of him. Sasha was a map of discipline and power. He was gigantic. Huge, firm muscles that his shirt had been hiding. He had a gold crucifix that settled against a chest that looked like it had been carved from marble. He was also covered in bruises. Shane wanted to stop and ask, but it seemed like that might ruin the moment.

Shane sank to his knees, the plush carpet feeling like a luxury he didn't deserve. Sasha’s hands rested lightly in Shane’s hair as Shane unbuttoned his pants to free him. Everything about him was giant and expensive-looking. Sasha’s fingers curled gently in his locks as Shane took him into his mouth. 

"Is okay?" Sasha rasped, his breath hitching as Shane worked. "Shane? Is good?"

"Yes," Shane said, looking up. Sasha was looking down at him with a mix of hunger and absolute, unwavering focus.

He worked for a few minutes, Sasha moaning softly from above him. After a few minutes, he reached down, his hands firm under Shane’s armpits, and hauled him back to his feet. "Bed," Sasha commanded softly. "Now."

He stripped Shane with a speed that spoke of expertise, but he never stopped checking in. Is too fast? You like this? By the time they were both bare on the cool sheets, Shane felt the familiar prickle of anxiety.

He had only done the next part a few times. It had usually been awkward, a bit rushed, and left him feeling more like a failed math problem than a human being. He was nervous, terrified, really, that his body wouldn't know the right protocol. He was usually content to do a little reciprocal oral and then leave. But he didn’t want to leave. He didn’t think he ever wanted to leave.

Sasha must have felt the tension. He climbed over Shane, his weight a welcome pressure, but he didn't move to finish things. He pinned Shane’s hands to the pillow and looked him in the eye, their hips pushed tight against each other. 

"I want to be in you, Shane," Sasha whispered. "Can I do this? I want to fuck you."

Shane’s heart hammered. "I...I don’t do that much. I'm a little nervous." Shane braced himself for the rejection. For Sasha to laugh at him. But he…didn’t. He pressed soft kisses to Shane’s face.

"Is okay to be scared. We go slow. If you do not want, we stop. I am not in a rush. I have you all night."

Shane looked at him and decided, just for tonight, to let the anxiety go. The rules didn't apply in this room. "Okay," he breathed. "Yes. Please."

Sasha maneuvered with an athletic grace. It was a confidence that Shane recognized that came from a lifetime of understanding your body. He stayed on top of Shane, but he kept his weight on his elbows, framing Shane’s head. He reached over to the nightstand, his movements efficient. From the drawer, he produced a small, translucent bottle and a square foil packet.

Shane watched him, his heart doing that frantic, irregular beat again. Sasha didn't rush. He set the condom aside and flipped the cap on the bottle. He squeezed a generous amount into his own palm first, warming it between his hands. The scent was faint, something clean and expensive, clearly nicer than the cheap stuff Shane bought at Shoppers.

"You are shaking," Sasha murmured, his voice a low vibration that seemed to settle right in Shane’s marrow. "Is too much?"

Shane tried to swallow, but his throat was dry. "I don't do hookups. I don't know what to do. Not really."

Sasha’s eyes softened. The predatory gleam from the bar was gone, replaced by a focused, unwavering kindness. "We do whatever makes you feel good. I am going to touch you now. Just here."

He slid his hand, slick with the warm lube, down the center of Shane’s chest, over his stomach, and lower. When his fingers finally brushed against the inside of Shane’s thigh, Shane’s breath hitched in a jagged, audible sound.

"Still okay?" Sasha asked. He didn't move further. He waited, his eyes locked on Shane’s, holding him in place with his gaze as much as his touch. 

"Yes," Shane whispered. "Okay."

Sasha moved with agonizing, professional patience. He spent a long time just working the lubricant into the skin of Shane's thighs, his thumbs kneading the tension out of the muscles. He was thorough, meticulous in a way that Shane, the man who lived by the rulebook, could almost appreciate. Then he bent to take Shane into his mouth. Shane could feel himself falling apart, moans spilling out of his mouth. Sasha was good at this. Shane had the fleeting thought that maybe he was a professional and was going to demand payment afterward. He pushed the thought from his mind when he heard the rumble of Sasha’s voice again.

"Fingers now," Sasha said. "Slowly. You tell me wait or stop and it ends right there. Yes?"

"Yes," Shane breathed. He would do anything for this man to touch him more.

When Sasha’s hand moved to prepare him, he was incredibly gentle. He didn't rush. He used the lubricant to make everything easy, his movements small and circular around Shane’s entrance until one long, thin finger pressed inside. He watched Shane’s face for every flicker of a wince or a gasp, his own expression one of intense concentration.

“Breathe for me, Shane the Accountant," Sasha urged, his thumb stroking the back of Shane’s hand where it was pinned against the pillow. 

Shane tried to obey. He focused on the rhythm of Sasha’s breathing, on the gold crucifix that dangled just above Shane’s own heart. Every time the tension in Shane’s jaw tightened, Sasha would pause, pressing a soft kiss to his forehead or his temple until Shane uncurled again. Sasha was brushing inside him just perfectly and the sensation was almost too much.

"You are doing very well," Sasha whispered, a ghost of a Russian lilt curling around the words. "You were made for this."

He added a second finger, the pressure increasing just enough to make Shane’s hips lift off the bed instinctively. Sasha caught the movement, his hand on Shane’s hip grounding him, keeping him from drifting away into the panic. 

"Look at me, Shane," Sasha commanded softly.

Shane opened his eyes. Sasha was flushed, his own breath coming in huffed, jagged bursts, but he stayed still. He stayed patient. He stayed entirely focused on Shane’s comfort.

Sasha paused then, his own breath hitched. He reached for the bottle on the nightstand again, adding more of the slick, clear gel. He looked at Shane, his eyes dark and honest, filled with lust. Shane was certain he looked terrified. "I am...not a small man, Shane," he murmured. 

Shane nodded, his legs falling a little wider. Sasha introduced a third finger, moving with a steady, slow deliberation that felt like it was filling Shane’s entire world.

Shane's eyes flew open, his fingers digging into the plush mattress. "Sasha—"

"I know," Sasha whispered, his voice a low, gravelly rumble. "I know. Just breathe. Melt for me, Shane. Let it in."

He stayed there, his hand steady, letting Shane’s body accommodate the stretch. He didn't move until he felt the internal pull of Shane's muscles relax, accepting the intrusion. Sasha leaned down, his nose brushing against Shane's, his gaze unwavering. "You are doing so well. Look at me. Still okay?"

"Yeah," Shane gasped, the word barely a thread of sound. "Okay. I'm okay."

"Good." Sasha withdrew slowly, the absence of him feeling like a sudden, cold vacuum. He reached for the foil packet, rolling on the condom with a practiced, steady hand. "I am going inside you now. Only if you want?"

Shane felt a wave of terrifying, unmitigated trust.

"Yes," Shane said, his voice finally breaking. "Please. Now."

Sasha shifted his mass, moving to kneel between Shane’s legs. He settled against him, the tip of him brushing against Shane, a silent question. "Still yes?" Sasha whispered, his face inches from Shane’s.

"Yes," Shane gasped, reaching up to grip Sasha’s forearms.

Sasha entered him with a slow, relentless pressure that felt like it was rewriting Shane’s entire internal map. He went a fraction of an inch at a time, pausing whenever Shane’s eyes squeezed shut or his breath caught. "Take it. You’re okay."

When he was all the way in, Sasha stayed still, letting Shane’s body adjust. He reached down and laced his fingers with Shane’s, pinning his hands to the mattress. It was a dominant gesture, but he leaned down to press a soft, lingering kiss to Shane’s nose.

"Look at me," Sasha grunted, his eyes dark and dilated. "Is okay? No pain?"

"No pain," Shane managed, his voice a mere thread of sound. "Just...stay there. Just for a second."

"Of course," Sasha promised.

He waited until Shane’s hips began to move instinctively, a tentative, searching tilt. Only then did Sasha begin to move. He set a pace that was firm and rhythmic, taking complete control of the room. Every time he felt Shane’s focus start to drift, Sasha would shift his weight or change the angle, dragging Shane back into the heat and the friction.

Sasha tapped at his side. “On your stomach,” he urged. Shane did as he was told.

Sasha’s hands were on his hips immediately, a firm pressure as he guided Shane onto his stomach. The loss of Sasha’s heat was only momentary, but it made Shane’s breath hitch in a sharp, involuntary sound of protest. He felt a pillow being slid under his hips and then he was burying his face in the cool, silk-soft pillowcase, his senses narrowed down to the sound of his own frantic pulse.

“Still okay?” Sasha’s voice was right above him, a low, gravelly vibration that seemed to settle in the small of Shane’s back.

“Don’t stop,” Shane muffled into the pillow, his fingers curling into the sheets.

The re-entry was a slow, agonizing slide. From this angle, the fullness of him felt even more impossible, more absolute. Shane’s eyes squeezed shut as he felt himself being stretched, his breath coming in short, jagged hitches. Once he was seated deep, Sasha stayed still for a long heartbeat, letting Shane adjust. He pressed his face into the dip between Shane’s shoulder blades, his nose brushing against a skin that was flushed and damp. Shane felt the crucifix dangle against his spine, cold metal against hot skin. Then, Sasha began to move.

It was a different kind of intensity from behind. More primal, more focused. Every thrust was a deliberate, athletic movement that sent a jolt of pure, white-hot sensation straight to Shane’s brain. Shane’s head thrashed against the pillow, his moans no longer stifled but spilling out into the quiet of the suite. He felt completely overtaken, his orderly, rule-bound world dissolving into a blur of heat and the rhythmic, punishing friction of Sasha’s body against his.

Sasha’s hand moved from the pillow to the back of Shane’s neck, his thumb resting right at the base of his skull. It wasn't a hard grip, but it was possessive, a silent command to stay present, to stay here.

“You were made for taking cock like this," Sasha rasped, his Russian accent thickening until the words were almost melodic. Everything narrowed down to the sound of their breathing and the slap of skin on skin. Shane felt the world fracturing into microscopic pieces. He finally shattered, a violent, total-system failure. His back arched, his nails digging into the mattress as he cried out into the pillow.

Sasha followed him a heartbeat later, a low, guttural sound breaking from his throat as he shuddered, collapsing fully onto Shane as he found his own release.

The silence that followed was thick, broken only by the hum of the air conditioning and the frantic, slowing thud of two hearts. Sasha didn’t pull away. He stayed heavy, his forehead resting against the back of Shane’s head, his breath hot against Shane’s damp hair.

Sasha shifted, rolling off to the side to dispose of the condom, but immediately pulled Shane back against him, spooning him in the dark. He tucked his nose into the crook of Shane’s neck, his arm a bar across Shane’s chest.

“Good,” Sasha said, his voice dropping into a sleepy, satisfied rumble. “Stay. Is nice bed.”

Shane lay there, the gold crucifix cold against his back, staring out at the Montreal skyline through the floor-to-ceiling windows. He had an early briefing. He had a career to protect. He had a thousand rules to follow. And he didn't care at all.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you liked it! Comments and feedback always appreciated.

Chapter 2: The Morning After

Chapter Summary

Ilya never did this. Never handed out his number. Never asked for a repeat with a person who he picked up at the bar. But here he was, doing lots of things he never did.

A few updates made as of 4/25, with many thanks to Aphantastical for their expert help beta reading this chapter.

Chapter Notes

The light in the suite at five in the morning was a hazy purple, filtering through the floor-to-ceiling windows and casting cinematic long shadows over the rumpled sheets. Ilya woke up slowly, his body leaden. Usually, this was the part he hated. The inevitable, hollow emptiness of a hotel bed. Most people he brought back were gone before he even fell asleep, or he made it clear with a sharp shift in his posture that they should be. He didn’t do mornings after. 

He stayed still, his breath catching in his chest. Shane the Accountant was still there. Or was that some kind of weird, elaborate roleplay? No, who would pick accountant as their alter ego? It was too boring to be a fantasy. Shane was curled on his side, his back to Ilya, breathing in the deep, rhythmic cadence of someone who hadn’t slept this well in a decade.

Ilya propped himself up on one elbow, his messy curls hanging limply. He studied the line of Shane’s spine, at the way the muscles of his back, wide and surprisingly powerful, were finally, mercifully relaxed. The light was just strong enough now to catch on Shane’s shoulders, revealing a constellation of pale, brown dots across his skin. Ilya remembered tracing them in the dark, his hands discovering terrain he hadn't expected to find on a spreadsheet-bound professional.

Ilya reached out, his fingertip tracing a path from one to the other, moving from the nape of Shane’s neck down to his shoulder blade. He felt a sudden, sharp pang of an emotion he couldn't, or maybe didn’t want to, name.

"You have so many," Ilya murmured, his voice thick with sleep.

Shane stirred, a low grunt vibrating in his throat, and then he was turning over, blinking up at Ilya with eyes that were still clouded and soft. "What?"

"Freckles," Ilya said, his thumb coming up to stroke the bridge of Shane’s nose, where the marks were densest. "I did not see them in the bar. They are...beautiful. Like a map."

Shane flushed, the heat rising to his cheeks and making the copper dots stand out even more. He was remarkably easy to read, wearing all his feelings across his face. It was so different from the mask Ilya hid behind.

Ilya leaned down, pressing his lips to a cluster of them on Shane's cheek. "I think I could spend all morning counting them. It would be much better than going to work, yes?"

Shane’s eyes widened as the memory of the night hit him. He sat up, the sheet falling to his waist. Ilya could see him calculating the time. "I have...I have a briefing at seven. At the Fairmont."

Ilya reached out, his hand on Shane’s thigh, grounding him. "Fairmont is ten minutes away. Seven is so long from now. Stay for a minute."

Shane looked like he wanted to argue, like the rules were already screaming at him to find his socks and his dignity. But then Ilya moved. He didn't give Shane a choice to overthink it. He slid down the bed until he was kneeling between Shane's legs.

"Sasha, wait—" Shane started, his breath hitching as Ilya’s hands found his hips. Sasha. That’s right. Ilya had been looking for anonymity. He didn't think anyone in the Village would recognize him, but he hadn't wanted to tempt fate. He wondered briefly if Shane was a real name. He hoped so. He liked the way it sounded when he breathed it against Shane's skin.

"No work," Ilya commanded, looking up at him through the dark tangle of his hair. "Last night, you were very good to me. This morning, I am being good to you. This is a fair trade?"

"Yes," Shane gasped, his fingers tangling in the expensive sheets. "Okay."

Unlike the frantic, sensory overload of the night before, where Ilya had pinned him to the mattress just to see if he could make Shane scream, this was quiet and agonizingly slow. Ilya was meticulous. He didn't rush. He used his tongue to trace the line of Shane’s inner thigh first, watching how Shane’s skin flushed and his toes curled.

When Ilya took him into his mouth, it was with a steady, warm pressure that seemed designed to draw every thought out of Shane's head. Ilya's hands stayed firm on Shane's hips, anchoring him to the bed. He looked up, watching for the exact moment Shane’s eyes rolled back.

"Good?" Ilya grunted, the vibration of his voice rumbling against Shane's skin.

"God, yes," Shane moaned, his fingers digging into Ilya's shoulders, right over the dark, yellowing bruises Ilya had earned from a cross-check two nights ago. Shane didn't seem to notice the marks now. He was too busy losing his mind. "Sasha, please."

Ilya increased the pace, his mouth and tongue working with a practiced rhythm. He could feel the tension in Shane’s thighs, his body coiled like a spring about to snap. When Shane finally broke, he was loud, his head thrashing against the headboard as he found his release, his body shuddering under Ilya’s hands until he finally slumped back into the pillows, breathless. Ilya swallowed him down, pulling off to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand.

Ilya climbed back up, pulling a buzzy, limp Shane into his arms. He liked the weight of him. He liked listening to Shane’s heart hammering against his ribs, in a frantic, syncopated rhythm.

"You are very loud for someone who likes the quiet," Ilya murmured, pressing a kiss to the top of Shane’s damp head.

"I...that's not...l," Shane wheezed, looking genuinely embarrassed.

Ilya laughed, a rich sound that vibrated through both of them. "Relax. I am making fun. We should wash.”

Ilya walked to the bathroom, aware of the intense, analytical stare following his nude body. He turned on the rainfall showerhead to a positively scalding temperature, and the room filled with eucalyptus-scented steam. Shane followed him into the bathroom. Now that the haze of the night had left, Shane looked…different. 

They both stepped into the spray. Ilya leaned his back against the cool marble tile, wiping water from his eyes to get a proper look.

Shane didn't have the body to match a desk job. His legs were heavy with muscle, his glutes were tight, and his core was dense. He had the build clearly forged through hours in a gym, ready for something explosive. "You have very good legs," Ilya noted, his gaze trailing down. "Most accountants are soft, here,” Ilya grabbed his ass and gave it a firm squeeze. “Is a waste of such legs, sitting at a desk."

"I run. It helps with the stress," Shane said, his voice sounding small in the vast, tiled space. He reached for the soap, but his hand paused mid-air. His eyes were locked on Ilya’s ribs. "Sasha...your side."

Ilya looked down. The bruise was nasty, purple-yellow, and deep. A parting gift from Tuesday’s scrimmage. One over-eager rookie attempting to make a good impression on the veterans. His body was a map of ten seasons of professional hockey: lace-bite scars on his ankles, a jagged line near his collarbone, and the perpetual grinding ache in his joints. “I am clumsy,” Ilya said with a sharp, lopsided smile.

Shane reached out, his fingers hovering just an inch from the dark skin with a clinical, worried sort of intensity. "It looks like it hurts. You should have an ice pack on that."

"I have you instead," Ilya murmured, catching Shane’s hand and pulling him forward.

The steam made everything feel private, a world consisting only of the two of them and the roar of the water. Shane sank to his knees on the wet marble, the water cascading over his head and flattening his dark hair.

Ilya could see the cogs in Shane’s brain turning. He was approaching sex like a puzzle. Thorough. Focused. Determined to find the solution. His mouth was clumsy, but he was making up for it in enthusiasm. With a snap of jealousy, Ilya wondered how often Shane did this for other men. He swallowed the thought down. There was no room for thoughts like that during a hookup.

Ilya’s head lolled against the tile as Shane worked him with his tongue, his fingers burying in Shane’s wet hair. This wasn’t going to take long. He looked down through the haze of his own pleasure, watching Shane, really watching him, and felt that strange, dangerous pull in his chest again.

When the orgasm hit, it arrived suddenly, taking Ilya by surprise, leaving him breathless and reeling. His knees buckled slightly, moans echoing off the marble. He pulled Shane back up into a standing position, dragging him into a deep, wet kiss under the spray until their breathing synchronized.

The intimacy of the shower was rapidly overwritten by the reality of the morning. Shane dressed with practiced speed, his movements becoming more rigid with every layer of clothing. By the time he pulled on his jacket, he looked exactly like he had at the bar. Untouchable, professional, and perfectly aligned. He looked like he was already half-convinced the whole night had been a hallucination brought on by vodka and sleep deprivation.

"Where is the 'office' for you, Shane?" Ilya asked, leaning against the doorframe in nothing but a towel and his gold crucifix.

"Ottawa," Shane said, finally meeting his eyes. "But I travel a lot. You?"

"Boston," Ilya said. It was the truth, or as close to it as he could get without giving too much away. "I live in Boston. I work there. Lots of shouting in Boston, too."

Ilya walked to the desk, grabbed a piece of hotel stationery, and scribbled ten digits. “Here. Call,” Ilya said, pressing the paper into Shane's hand.

"I don't even know your last name."

"Just Sasha," Ilya said, his smirk slow and devastating. "If you are in Boston, or need some company...you call." Ilya never gave out his number to the people he met in bars. He was usually just a memory by sunrise, a name left behind in a bar. But there was something about the way the light hit Shane’s freckles that made him want a repeat performance. Maybe Shane would feel that way too.

Shane looked at the paper, then back at Ilya. For a heartbeat, the mask slipped. Shane was staring at him with a mix of lust and genuine wonder. "I'll call," Shane promised.

The door clicked shut, and he was gone. Ilya walked back to the window, watching a cab pull away from the curb. He felt a strange restlessness. He didn't know if Shane actually would call, but he hoped he would. He loved the way Shane had trusted him. Come apart for him. Let him explore every part of his body. He shouldn’t have given him the number. He knew better. In his world, people were either teammates, opponents, or a sporadic night or two of fun. There was no room for boring accountants with constellations of freckles and a way of making the world seem more peaceful.

Ilya turned away from the window, the towel hanging low on his hips. He turned to the rumpled bed, the sheets a messy testament to the last eight hours. He’d flown into Montreal two days ahead of the team for a marathon session with CCM. They were launching a new "Legacy" line of skates, and as the face of the brand, Ilya had spent fourteen hours under hot studio lights and on a private rink in the West Island.

The photographers had been relentless, demanding that specific blend of icy focus and predatory grace that sold high-end equipment. By the time they’d finished at 8:00 PM the previous night, Ilya had felt like he’d been hollowed out. He’d been too wired to sit in a hotel room waiting for the team plane to arrive the following day, but too tired for anything too strenuous. And mostly, he wanted to get laid.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand. Cliff Marleau. Ilya swiped to answer, his voice dropping back into the bored, arrogant drawl the world expected.

"What do you want, Marley?"

"Good morning to you too, sunshine," Cliff’s voice was far too energetic for 6:00am. "Just calling to let you know we’re taking off. Coach is already reviewing the lines on his tablet, and Carmichael is trying to sleep on my shoulder. It’s touching, really."

"I will meet you at the team hotel. The Fairmont, yes?" Ilya said, walking to the mirror. His hair was a disaster, still damp from the shower and the phantom weight of Shane’s fingers. 

"Yeah, the Fairmont. Getting a head start on the Montreal nightlife, were we?" Cliff’s tone turned suggestive, the familiar, locker-room innuendo of a man who had spent ten years at Ilya's side. "So, who was she? Model? A high-end boutique owner? Please tell me she has a sister who likes mediocre wingers." Wasn’t Shane going to the Fairmont? Maybe they could…no. No, they could not.

Ilya felt a flicker of heat in his chest. Cliff didn't know. Nobody knew. To Cliff and the rest of the league, Ilya was the ultimate bachelor, occasionally stepping out with stunning women and saying nothing about it. His private life was a fortress.

The truth was a much more dangerous ledger. Ilya saved men for rare treats. Women were safe. They were expected. But men...men were a risk. One wrong person, one cell phone camera in the wrong bar, and the Ilya Rozanov brand would shatter. He only indulged when the pressure became too much, when he needed someone who didn't know who he was.

"Nice accountant," Ilya said, the words feeling like a private victory. "Very thorough audit."

Cliff barked out a laugh. "An accountant? That’s cold, even for you, Ilya. Picking up a girl who works in finance? Was she at least wearing glasses? You have a thing for the smart ones."

“Yes, very smart," Ilya muttered, grabbing his watch. Shane didn’t have glasses, but Ilya bet he would look stunning in them. "I will see you at the Fairmont at two. Tell Coach I am already in the city and ready for practice."

"Will do, Boss. Oh, and hey, try to look at least a little bit tired. It makes the rest of us feel better about our lives. Especially after Tuesday. My shoulder is still killing me. You sure you’re good to go for the exhibition opener tomorrow night?"

"I am fine, Cliff," Ilya said, his eyes on the purple bruise. "I am always fine."

Ilya hung up. The notepad was still on the desk. He’d given Shane his real number. His personal cell. It was a reckless move, a crack in the high-security walls he’d spent years building. He regretted that there wasn’t any vodka in the room. He didn't even want it, but the burning in his throat was better than the strange emptiness he suddenly felt.

He looked at the bed one last time. He could still smell the eucalyptus from the shower and the faint, clean scent of a man he was trying to solve like a puzzle. Last night was a special treat. Ilya could dine on the memory for months. He grabbed his suitcase, his movements efficient and cold, He walked out of the suite without looking back. He was Ilya Rozanov again. He had a team to meet, a pre-season tour to survive, and a target on his back. Shane the Accountant was a phantom he’d likely never see again. Because in the NHL, the only thing that mattered was winning. And being a winner didn’t leave room in his mind for constellation freckles.

After the game, the locker room was a mess. The Raiders had lost in OT, and the mood was sour, but Cliff Marleau was already thinking about the after-party. Ilya was in a foul mood. It was pre-season. It didn’t count but he was still furious.

"Let’s go!” Cliff shouted over the music, slapping Ilya on the shoulder. "Montreal nightlife, Roz. Let’s get out of here."

They hit a high-end club near Crescent Street. The air was thick with expensive perfume, sweat, and bass that rattled Ilya’s ribs. He stayed at the bar, working his way through his glass of vodka, not the good kind, while Marleau worked the room. The alcohol didn't make him happy, but it turned the volume down on the restlessness.

"There," Marleau nudged him, nodding toward a blonde girl in a tight dress leaning against the VIP rail. She was a classic puck bunny, lingering near the hockey players. She’d been staring at Ilya since he’d walked in. Ilya looked at her. She was stunning. Polished, perfect, and exactly what he was supposed to want. He walked over, the Ilya Rozanov charm sliding into place like a well-oiled machine.

"Ilya," she purred, her eyes raking over him. She wouldn’t call him Sasha. She knew exactly who he was. "Great game tonight. You deserved better than that loss."

"It is just pre-season," Ilya said, leaning in. He could smell her perfume, something floral and expensive, but it didn't trigger a single nerve in his body. He brought her back to the hotel. It was what she wanted, and maybe what he did too.

In the dark of the suite, Ilya went through the motions. He used her body to try and find the same spark he’d felt twenty-four hours ago, but the math was wrong. This was transactional. She wanted to tell her friends she’d been with him. 

He pinned her to the mattress, his movements fast and uncompromising, but his mind was five miles away. When he closed his eyes, he didn't see her. He saw the copper dots on a man’s shoulder. He felt the weight of a gaze that was looking at him, not his jersey. He was in a bed with a beautiful woman, but he was more alone than ever.

"Ilya?" she whispered, sensing his distraction. "You're...you're very quiet."

"I am fine," Ilya grunted unconvincingly.

He finished quickly, the release bringing none of the peace he’d found in the boutique hotel. The girl, Ainsley? Ilya didn’t remember, was getting dressed and pulling on her coat. After she left, Ilya stayed awake, staring at the ceiling. He felt the familiar, hollow ache in his chest. The one he usually drowned with more booze or another body.

He was one of the best players in the league, surrounded by everything he was supposed to want, and he was starving for a boring accountant who didn’t even know his name.

Chapter End Notes

Next up: Shane refs in Boston for the first time.

Chapter 3: The Drop

Chapter Summary

Sasha is proving to be Shane's biggest distraction. A distraction that's now facing him down on the ice. Can he remain the impartial ref when all he can think about is what his skin looks like under that jersey?

Chapter Notes

A few updates made as of 4/25, with many thanks to Aphantastical for their expert help beta reading this chapter.

The six weeks since the Montreal convention had been an internal battle. Shane had spent a decade refining his discipline, turning his life into a series of predictable, orderly processes. Suddenly, the memory of his night in a ritzy boutique hotel had blasted through his brain like a virus in his software. He had slept with men before, albeit not frequently, but those encounters were always careful and transactional. They were physical therapy sessions that added up to nothing. 

Sasha had been a total sexual awakening. He was a force of nature that stripped away Shane’s anxieties until he was nothing but raw sensation and an impossibly scary, unmitigated trust. If he focused, he could still feel the thick weight of Sasha’s fingers in him, or hear the low tilt of his voice asking if the way he was exploring every inch of Shane’s body was okay. It was a distraction Shane could not seem to shake, a phantom itch that couldn’t be scratched, and one he definitely could not afford during his first month on the NHL circuit. He had carried the ten-digit number in his pocket like a talisman, waiting for his first assignment to Boston.

The day had come. Shane checked into his hotel with the other refs who would be working the next few games with him. He liked that he got to work mostly with the same guys. His partner, Hayden, was a linesman from Quebec. Maybe a friend in the making. They had gotten some food and hung out for a bit, but Shane couldn’t avoid the itch anymore. He finally sent the text, his heart hammering in an intense rhythm against his ribs.

Marriott Copley Plaza. Room 1128. 11:30 tonight. No work talk.  

Please, he added.

The reply came back in less than three minutes.

I will be there.

The air inside TD Garden was crisp. Shane pulled the striped jersey over his head, the fabric feeling abrasive against his skin. His stomach was a tight knot of nerves and lingering heat from the morning’s anticipation. He had refereed a few games already, but the jitters hadn’t settled yet. Tonight would be a big one. Detroit at Boston. He had spent the flight obsessing over the rulebook to drown out the memory of Sasha’s mouth, and the possibility he might get to have that mouth again tonight. As he laced his skates, his mind kept drifting to 11:30 PM.

"Hollander, you’re on the dot for the opening," McInnis, the veteran lead official, grunted while checking his whistle. "Don't let the crowd get in your head. They’re intense here."

Shane followed the crew through the tunnel. The transition into the blinding white light of the arena floor hit him abruptly. The roar of nearly eighteen thousand fans was a tidal wave of sound. Shane skated to the center ice circle, his blades biting into the fresh, glassy surface. The tight muscles of his calves felt coiled like springs as he took his position.

Shane reached into his pocket and gripped the puck, the chilled rubber a sharp reality against his palm. He turned from the Detroit bence to face the home team. The Boston Raiders skated out in a blur of black and gold, the crowd’s roar reaching a deafening, chest-rattling crescendo.

Shane watched the starters approach the circle. The Detroit center, a veteran with a scarred chin, took his stance. Then, the Raiders' captain skated up to take the draw. 

Ilya Rozanov. 

He moved with a terrifying, effortless grace, skating like he was born on the ice. He was encased in carbon fiber and armor, a "C" stitched prominently over his heart. His helmet was snapped tight, his visor reflecting the arena lights, his eyes fixed forward with the icy focus of a predator. This was the league’s most chaotic, brilliant, and penalized superstar. The player whose highlight reels Shane had spent three agonizing days analyzing during the seminar because of his reputation for testing every boundary of the game.

Shane’s breath caught in his chest with dawning horror. The puck nearly slipped from his numb fingers. He knew the name, but now he knew the face. Ilya Rozanov, currently taking his place on the dot, was the same person Shane had invited to his hotel room in less than four hours.

“Sasha?” Shane whispered in disbelief. It was a mistake, a violation of every professional boundary, but the word left him before he could choke it back.

Rozanov looked surprised for a fraction of a second before his face rearranged itself back into a lopsided, arrogant smirk. “Not an accountant?” Rozanov whispered back. Shane noticed how wide his pupils were. Rozanov’s gaze raked over Shane with a look that wasn’t for a game official, but for someone who had come undone under him in a hotel bed. 

"Line up, Rozanov," Shane snapped, the professional reflex finally kicking in through the blinding terror.

The puck hit the ice before Shane was even conscious of dropping it. Ilya won the draw by sheer muscle memory, but neither of them was truly in the game. Shane turned to follow the play. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else. His mind was screaming, the carefully ordered rules in his brain spiraling out of control as he realized the magnitude of the disaster. Shane had spent the past six weeks reliving every instant of their time together. But now he just had to forget. He had to be impartial.

The play moved with staggering speed. Rozanov was fast. Maybe the fastest skater in the league. Detroit intercepted a pass and transitioned back toward the Boston zone. Shane skated hard, trying to get into position, but his eyes kept drifting toward the #81 jersey. Rozanov was playing with a wild energy, his usual fluid movements replaced by a frenetic, uncharacteristic edge. He was gorgeous. A lethal vision of power and precision, and Shane was struggling to stay focused.

"Offside!" the Detroit bench screamed.

Shane's eyes came up, but his brain was three seconds behind the action. Cliff Marleau, Ilya’s perpetual wingman, was streaking down the right wing. He was a full two feet over the blue line before the puck even reached the neutral zone. It was a blatant, amateur-hour offside that would have been obvious from the nosebleed seats. In the neutral zone, a Detroit defenseman reached out and tipped the puck. It was a last-ditch deflection that didn’t change the puck’s direction, but created a nightmare of a judgment call. The linesman on the far side was blocked by a defender. It was Shane’s call. He had a clear line of sight. He saw the tip. He saw the puck follow. He should have blown the whistle immediately. But his eyes were on Rozanov. Rozanov was looking right at him, his face quirked in curiosity. For one fatal second, Shane didn't see the hockey player. He saw the vision of the rainfall shower, water beading down his perfect chest. Shane’s breath locked up, and the whistle stayed silent. 

The play continued. Marleau snapped a shot that beat the Detroit goalie clean on the glove side. The red light flashed. The horn wailed. It was a deafening, abrasive sound.

The Detroit bench exploded. Their coach was halfway over the boards, screaming profanities.

"He's a mile offside! Are you blind, Ref?"

Shane stood there, the cold air biting at his lungs, realizing he had just committed the ultimate sin. Missing a call happened sometimes. It was an inevitability, but the reason he had missed it made his blood run cold. He’d missed it because he was thinking about how the Boston Captain’s skin felt under his hands.

McInnis skated over, his expression grim. "Hollander? Did you see the line?"

Shane looked at the scoreboard. 1-0 Boston. He looked at Ilya, who was being mobbed by his teammates. Ilya wasn't celebrating. He was looking at Shane with an expression that was half-pitying, half-smug, and completely dangerous.

"I..." Shane’s voice failed him. "I missed it."

The boos from the few Detroit fans in attendance started to rise, but they were nothing compared to the screaming silence in Shane’s own head. He had the rest of the game left to survive. And then…after. Fuck, was Rozanov going to try to come to his room after this? He wouldn’t be that stupid, would he? Was he so arrogant to think they were still going to do this?

The Detroit coach challenged for offside. Shane stood by the headsets, his hands shaking, while the room in Toronto reviewed the footage. Because of that tiny, inconclusive tip from the Detroit defender in the neutral zone, the review came back as call on the ice stands.

The goal counted. The blame was 100% Shane's.

McInnis didn’t say anything else to him, but the way he spat on the ice before skating toward the Detroit bench was enough for Shane. He had to manage the fallout now. Shane stood in the neutral zone, the white light feeling like a spotlight on a crime scene. This was his moment. His season to make an impression. And he was fucking blowing it. He looked at the Raiders’ bench. Rozanov was sitting at the far end. His helmet was off and he was pouring water over his face. He looked like a god in black and gold. And Shane was the idiot who had handed him a gift-wrapped goal. 

The rest of the first period was pure psychological warfare. Every time Shane was near the Boston bench, he felt the weight of Ilya’s gaze. Was it real? Or was he just imagining it? Sasha, soft, tender, and curious about his freckles, was gone. In his place was this asshole. 

Midway through the period, Shane blew the whistle for a high-sticking minor on a Detroit defenseman. As he skated toward the penalty box to report the number, a shadow glided up beside him. "Very good call, Mr. Accountant," Ilya’s voice was a low, raspy vibration, cutting through the stadium noise. He didn't look at Shane. He kept his eyes on the scoreboard, but the smugness was palpable. "Very…deep observation."

Shane didn’t look at him. He couldn’t. "Back off, Rozanov."

"Is that how we talk now? So professional," Ilya chirped, doing a slow, deliberate circle around him. "Maybe you were just...distracted? Thinking about something else?”

"One more word and it’s an unsportsmanlike minor," Shane hissed, his heart hammering.

Ilya let out a short, sharp laugh. "That goal was very beautiful. Marley says thank you. I can thank you later too if you want." 

The intermission had been brutal. In the officials' room, the video review was a digital execution. The screen showed Cliff Marleau offside. McInnis sighed, a sound that felt worse than a screaming match.

"Don't let him get under your skin, Shane," Hayden, the younger linesman, whispered as they headed back out for the second. "He's a head-case. He does this to everyone."

But Hayden didn't know that Ilya wasn't just in Shane's head. He was in his phone, his bed, and his skin. 

The second period was a blur. Shane tried to overcompensate, calling the game tighter than a drum. He caught a hook, a trip, and an interference, desperate to prove he wasn't biased. But Rozanov was everywhere. He was a demon on the ice, weaving through the Detroit defense with the kind of speed that made Shane’s head swim.

Every time Ilya took a hit, Shane’s stomach lurched. Every time Ilya delivered one, Shane’s whistle hovered at his lips, ready to punish him just to balance the scales. With five minutes left in the second, Ilya got tangled up with a Detroit winger along the boards. It was a messy play. Shoves, a gloved hand to the face, a clear provocation. Shane was right there.

"Break it up!" Shane yelled, wedging himself between them.

Rozanov pulled back, his visor smeared with sweat. He looked at Shane, and for a split second, Shane saw Sasha. He looked tired. He looked human. Then, he winked.

"You look tense, Shane," Rozanov murmured, his breath hot against the side of Shane’s head as the linesman separated the scrum. "You should relax. Have a drink. I know a good place." Shane’s face burned. “Or there are other ways to relax,” Rozanov continued. Shane skated away, his mind a chaotic mess of professional failure and sexual frustration. He had one more period to survive.

He looked at the clock. 8:45 PM. In less than three hours, he was supposed to open the door to Room 1128. He needed to tell him to fuck off. Not to come. He should report the conflict of interest to the league and accept the suspension. But as he watched Rozanov break away for a shorthanded chance, the raw power of the man, watching as he leaned into his edges, how he occupied every space like he owned the individual atoms within it, reminded him of why he’d sent the text in the first place. He’d never felt like that. He’d never been seen like that.

The horn sounded for the end of the second. Shane was the first one off the ice, his head down, trying to ignore the way Ilya Rozanov was watching his retreat with a dark, satisfied grin.

Chapter End Notes

Comments keep the WIP writers going! Thanks for being here.

Chapter 4: Adrenaline

Chapter Summary

There's no way that Ilya would go to Shane's hotel room after the game, right?

Chapter Notes

The post-game locker room was a sensory overload of victory. Pop music thumped through the speakers, everyone chatting animatedly. The Raiders had scraped out a 3-2 win, and the energy was electric. Ilya sat in his stall, his jaw tight enough to make the joint pop and click. He methodically unpeeled the tape from his socks, his movements mechanical. Usually, he was the one making the most noise, the one orchestrating the celebration. Tonight, he wasn’t feeling it.

"Hey, Rozanov," Cliff Marleau shouted, leaning against the neighboring stall while draining a protein shake. "You’re awfully quiet for someone who just got gifted a win by the most beautiful officiating error in NHL history."

"I am fine, Marley," Ilya said, his voice dropping into that bored, flat drawl he used to keep the world at a distance. "I am just tired."

Marleau laughed, heading for the showers. "Yeah, well, thank your lucky stars for that ref. I was offside by a zip code. It was like he just...froze." He chuckled. “You coming out tonight? Boys are hitting the Harp.”

“No, I have plans,” Ilya replied. 

Cliff stepped into his path, his eyes searching Ilya’s face. His voice dropped low, the locker room bravado disappearing. "Bullshit. You’ve been off, Roz. I’m worried about you. Are you spiraling again?"

Ilya felt a flash of white-hot irritation. "I am not fucking spiraling, Marley. I am tired.”

"Like hell," Marleau snapped, grabbing Ilya’s arm. His grip was a tight warning.  "Every time you get like this, you start hitting the bottle and fucking your way across Boston like it’s your job. You want to ruin your life? Fine. But don't screw the team over because you can't get your shit together. Fine line between a good time and being off the rails with you. Talk to me."

Ilya wrenched his arm away. "I'm fine,” he snapped, heading to the shower. 

He leaned his face against the tiles, the steam swirling around him. Usually on nights like this, when the world seemed too complicated, he’d use a bottle of vodka, cigarettes, or a warm body to drown out the feeling. It was a habit born of a childhood where numbing yourself was the only way to stay upright. It used to be chemicals. Lines of white on a glass table, or whatever pill could kill the static in his head. But he was careful. He’d traded the chemicals for anonymous skin a few seasons ago, but the goal was the same. Find a sensation loud enough to take him out of his thoughts. Tonight, the itch was different. The risk of what he was going to do, the plain stupidity of it, was starting to hum within him. It was a high-octane replacement for the wreckage of his past. If the league found out, he was dead to them.  The thought didn’t make him nauseous or panicky. It made his heart sing with need. It was a better fix than any bottle. And Shane was giving it to him.

He hadn’t been a pest on the ice just for the sake of the game. He had spent the last two periods harassing Shane, chirping him with calculated cruelty because he knew exactly how much of a disaster this was. Every time he whispered in Shane’s ear or brushed against his stripes, he was testing him. Trying to see if Shane would break, or push him so far away that Sasha in Montreal would finally die. If Shane were a professional, he’d have tossed Ilya out long before the end of the game. But Shane hadn’t. 

Shane Hollander.

He knew the name long before he had seen it on the officials' roster this afternoon. He remembered the scouting reports from his own draft years. A promising young center with a hockey IQ that made veterans look like they were playing checkers while he played chess. Shane had played just one season of professional puck, showing a vision for the game that Ilya respected. Then came the injury. A freak collision, a high-ankle sprain that turned into a catastrophic break. He’d felt a rare pang of pity back then. To have a mind like that and be betrayed by cartilage and tendons was a special kind of hell. Shane the Accountant and Shane the devastated nineteen-year-old looked extremely different. There was no chance Ilya would have recognized him from across a bar. Ilya assumed the same was true for himself. Sweaty, aggressive #81 was a different animal than the guy coming off an ad shoot.  

Seeing him in stripes today had been a shock, but as Ilya watched him move, how he tracked the play and anticipated the flow, it made perfect sense. Shane was too smart to stay away from the ice. He had just changed his outfit.

Ilya scrubbed the scent of the rink off his skin, his mind locked in a battle. He knew the risks. This was a career-ending landmine. If the league found out the Raiders' captain was sleeping with a referee who was already missing calls in his favor, they’d both be banned before the Zamboni finished its final lap.

He should stay home. He should go to his penthouse, drink expensive vodka, and delete Shane’s number. But as he remembered how Shane had looked at center ice. The glint of terror in his eyes, the way his pupils had blown wide when he realized they knew each other. Ilya knew he wasn't going home. He wanted to be in him again. He wanted to feel Shane giving himself over again. 

The drive to the Marriott was short. He pulled a hat low over his eyes and kept his hands steady on the wheel, though his heart was thudding against his bruised ribs. He bypassed the lobby, taking the stairs to the eleventh floor to avoid the elevator cameras. The risk of being spotted, the career-ending stupidity of seducing a ref in his own hotel room, sent a wave of adrenaline through his groin.

He stopped in front of Room 1128. He checked his watch. 11:30 PM. Ilya knocked three sharp, clean raps.

The door was yanked back with such violence it nearly rattled the frame. Shane stood there, his face flushed a deep, angry red, his eyes bright with a fury that Ilya hadn't seen even when Shane was being chirped on the ice.

"You," Shane hissed, his voice trembling. "You arrogant, selfish son of a bitch."

Ilya stepped inside, and the door slammed shut behind him. Shane locked it with a jerky movement before spinning around to face him.

"Do you have any idea what the fuck you just did?" Shane’s voice was a jagged whisper. "You walked onto that ice and ruined my entire fucking life!"

Ilya was taken aback, but struggled not to show it on his face. “You didn’t think I was ruining your life when you were moaning around my dick.” 

“Fuck off, I was not moaning around your dick,” Shane shot back. But they both knew that was a total lie. 

“We could try again and see,” Ilya smirked. He liked how Shane’s hands shook. He liked being the reason for the chaos. 

“Fuck off,” Shane repeated. “And why the fuck did you say your name was Sasha?” Shane stepped into Ilya’s space, poking a hard finger into the center of his chest.

“Is nice not to be recognized in hockey town. Sometimes puck bunnies are nice, other times looking for something else.”

"Are you comparing me to some puck bunny looking for a payday?" Shane’s voice rose, his face a mask of insulted fury. He shoved at Ilya’s chest again, but Ilya didn't budge an inch.

"I didn't say that," Ilya grunted, catching Shane’s hand before he could poke him again. He held Shane’s wrist in a grip that was firm, grounding, and entirely too familiar. "I liked that you didn't know. Sometimes I want to be a guy in a bar. Not hockey god.”

"Well, congratulations, Sasha. You got to be a guy, and I got a career that’s currently in a woodchipper," Shane spat, though he didn't pull his wrist away. "McInnis is going to watch the tape. Toronto is going to have a field day with the review. And you...you wouldn't shut the fuck up."

Ilya’s smirk didn't fade. It turned darker, more focused. "I wanted to see if you’d actually find your balls and send me to the box." He leaned in, his voice dropping to a raspy, dangerous hum. "You didn't. You just watched me. You let me get away with murder tonight. Why?"

“Are you out of your fucking mind? You walked out there and practically announced it to the whole building. Sorry if that threw me off my game a little!” Shane hissed. Ilya was still holding Shane’s wrist. His grip tightened. “I can’t believe you came here.”

“I was waiting for you to tell me not to.”

Shane’s breathing was ragged, the sound of it harsh against the silence of the hotel room. He looked down at Ilya’s hand on his wrist, then back up at his eyes, his pupils blown so wide they swallowed the hazel of his eyes.

"I didn't tell you to stay away because I thought you had a fucking brain," Shane spat, though he didn't pull away. "I thought you were smart enough to realize that if anyone sees you in this hallway, we’re both finished. I’m out of a job and you’re suspended for half a season. You think the league is gonna let it slide that the Raiders' golden boy is banging the refs?"

“Just one ref,” Ilya smirked. He stepped closer, forcing Shane back until his shoulders hit the door. Ilya used his free hand to catch Shane’s other wrist, pinning them both against the wood. “And that is what makes it fun, no? The secret?”

"You’re a psycho," Shane whispered, his chest heaving.

"And you're a liar," Ilya countered, his voice a low, raspy hum. "You let me walk all over you for sixty minutes. You wanted me to chirp you. You liked it." Ilya yanked Shane forward, closing the gap until they were chest to chest. The fury in Shane’s eyes was intoxicating. Ilya felt more alive than he had in weeks. 

"We can't do this," Shane groaned, even as his hands gripped the front of Ilya’s sweater, bunching the fabric. "Sasha, seriously. This is a disaster." Sasha. Ilya didn’t correct him. 

He leaned in until their faces were nearly touching, his breath hot against Shane’s lips. "Tell me to leave."

"I..."

"Say it," Ilya commanded, his voice dark and demanding. "Tell me to go and never call you again. Tell me to stop."

Shane’s head thrashed back against the door. His eyes were shut tight, his chest heaving. He was caught between his career and the most incredible, unbelievable feeling he’d ever had. How on earth was he supposed to turn down having that again? He opened his mouth to speak, but no command came out. His fingers tangled in Ilya’s hair instead, pulling him closer.

"I can't," Shane choked out, a sound of pure defeat.

"Then do not ask me again," Ilya grunted, pinning Shane to the door and finding his mouth. He was consuming Shane, a starving man finally reaching a feast.

The door became a blur as Ilya pushed Shane toward the bed, any doubts he had incinerated by the friction of their bodies. Ilya dropped him to the mattress. The springs groaned, a sound lost beneath the sound of Shane’s breathing. Ilya was over him instantly, a suffocating weight that Shane found himself desperately arching into. This wasn't the slow, exploratory grace of Montreal. This was an attempt to physically overwrite the professional disaster of the last three hours.

Ilya’s hands were everywhere, stripping away the grey t-shirt until Shane was exposed. He paused only once, his fingers brushing the surgical scar on Shane’s right ankle. He hadn’t noticed it last time. He regarded it with the grim reverence of a soldier acknowledging a comrade’s veteran status. He leaned down, his mouth hot against the irregular line of the scar, a gesture that made Shane let out a fractured sob.

"Sasha, please," Shane choked out, his fingers tangling in the black cashmere of Ilya’s sweater, pulling it over the captain's head with a frantic, uncoordinated energy.

“That’s not my name,” Ilya growled.

“Rozanov, please,” Hollander begged. Ilya growled, roughly pulling the last of his clothes off. He could tell that the reality of what they were doing hit Hollander. His eyes widened and his face flushed. They were two athletes in their prime, one a king of the league and the other his temporary judge, committing a crime against the game they both lived for. The risk was a live wire, sparking every time their skin touched, more addictive than any win.

Ilya pinned Shane’s wrists above his head, his large palms easily encircling them. He stared down, his pupils dilated so far that the hazel of his eyes had nearly vanished. He didn't look like the charismatic player the media loved anymore. He was a wild animal.

"Tell me to stop, Shane," Ilya commanded, his voice a dark, raspy growl. He shifted his weight, his knee wedging between Shane’s thighs, forcing them apart. "Tell me this is a mistake."

Shane’s chest heaved. Shane tipped his head back, his eyes avoiding Ilya’s. 

"I...I can't," Shane whispered, his voice raw.

He didn’t give Shane another instant to let the logic of his brain catch up to the heat of his body. He grabbed the back of Shane’s neck, his thumb hooking under the joint of Shane’s jaw, forcing his head back. Ilya’s mouth didn’t seek permission. It was a brutal invasion that tasted of adrenaline. Shane met him, hard. His fingers dug into the skin of Ilya’s back, nails scratching over the hard muscle as he pulled him closer. It was as if he was trying to crawl within his very skin. Ilya shoved his knee hard between Shane’s thighs, feeling the solid, heavy muscle. 

“You’re going to kill us both,” Shane gasped, his hands fumbling with the buttons on Ilya’s jeans. 

“Let them try,” Ilya snarled. Ilya knew he was being too rough. There would be marks on Shane later. The handprints from his tight grip, the gentle bites he’d been trailing up and down his chest. He did not care. He wanted to leave those marks. He wanted Shane to wake up and see the evidence that he was Ilya’s all over him. A reminder that he had been there. Evidence of the crime they were committing. 

Every time Shane tried to catch his breath, Ilya was there to take it. Biting the sensitive cords of his neck. Dragging his tongue over his pulse points. Grabbing. Touching. Squeezing. 

He flipped Shane over, shoving his face into the pillows. He wanted Shane blind to the world, only focused on the crushing weight of Ilya’s body and the pressure of his cock. Ilya moved down the bed, his palms dragging over Shane’s thighs. He saw Shane’s back arch, his spine a sharp, beautiful ridge under the hotel lights.

Ilya tore open the packet of lube he had brought, spreading Shane open, his fingers blunt and demanding as they pushed inside. Shane let out a choked, muffled sound against the pillow. A sob, a curse, both. Ilya leaned in, his tongue tracing Shane’s heat with a slow, deliberate focus that made Shane’s fingers dig deep into the mattress.

As Ilya worked him, pushing two fingers deep to stretch the tight, resistant muscle of the referee who lived by the rulebook, he kept his eyes on that surgical scar on Shane’s ankle. It was a reminder of what happened when you played by the rules and still lost. Shane was a riot of sensation beneath him, practically vibrating, his breath coming in short, panicked hitches. Ilya felt a surge of predatory pride. He was breaking Shane apart. "Ilya," he groaned, his voice barely audible. "Ilya, you’re...you’re going to—"

"I am going to make you only think of me when you are on the ice," Ilya grunted, his voice a low, animal vibration. He hauled Shane back, pressing down on his back with a large, strong hand and entered him with a sharp, driving thrust that tore a loud, uninhibited cry from Shane’s throat.

The sex was fast and uncompromising, a series of urgent, deep strikes. Ilya was relentless, his body a weight that Shane met with equal enthusiasm, his core tight, his breathing a series of uneven, rhythmic gasps. Shane’s face was a mask of raw sensation, his eyes rolling back as Ilya claimed the parts of him that didn't belong to the league. He was loud, unbecomingly loud, his head buried in the pillows as the friction reached a breaking point.

When the release hit, Shane’s body spasmed, a guttural sound escaping him as he came apart, his fingers clutching at Ilya’s arms. Ilya followed him seconds later, a low, animal growl vibrating in his chest as he collapsed against Shane, both of them drenched in sweat and the terrifying, electric reality of what they had just done.

They stayed there in the heavy silence of the room, the only sound the thud of two hearts trying to find a normal pace. Tethered together by the danger of the scandal they had just created. Once was an accident. A mistake. Twice? A disaster. Ilya rolled to the side, pulling Shane into his arms. He liked the weight of him. He liked the way Shane’s heart was still hammering against his own ribs.

"So loud," Ilya murmured, his voice a ghost of its usual self.

Shane didn't answer. He just stared at the ceiling, his chest heaving, looking like a man who had just realized he’d walked off a cliff and enjoyed the fall. The brittle silence that followed was the type that usually precedes disaster.

Shane sat up abruptly, the movement so quick it made the bed frame creak. He shoved his hair back with both hands, his fingers trembling. The post-coital flush was rapidly being replaced by a sickly, pale grey. He looked around the room. Discarded clothes, NHL official’s bag in the corner, the captain of the Boston Raiders currently taking up half his bed — and let out a sharp, gasping shudder.

"Oh god," Shane whispered, his voice rising in pitch. "Oh god, I’m fired. I’m actually, literally fired. I’m a joke. I’m a career-suicide statistic. They are going to use me as an example in the training seminars."

"Shane. Breathe," Ilya said, his voice a low, steady rumble. He didn't move, staying sprawled against the pillows, watching the back of Shane’s head.

"Breathe? Rozanov, I missed a goal! A clear-as-day, mile-offside goal for your team, and then I came here and let you...and we..." Shane surged off the bed, stumbling as his bad ankle twinged. He began snatching up his clothes with frantic, jerky movements. "The other refs are three doors down. If they saw you…if anyone saw you…I’m not just out of the league, I’m blacklisted. I’ll be back in Ottawa living with my parents by Friday."

"Nobody saw me," Ilya said, finally sitting up. He reached out, grabbing Shane’s arm as he tried to walk past. The grip was firm, grounding. "You are having panic attack. You will give yourself a heart attack before I leave for morning skate."

"I have a meeting at eight! I have to look McInnis in the eye and explain why I froze on the Marleau goal," Shane hissed, trying to wrench his arm away. "What am I supposed to say? 'Sorry, sir, I was busy thinking about how the Raiders' captain looks without his clothes on?"

Ilya pulled him closer, forcing Shane to look at him. "You say the Detroit defender tipped it in the neutral zone, and you misjudged the possession change. It happens to veterans every night. You're a rookie. You made a mistake. If you go in there acting like you committed murder, they will think you committed murder. Act like a professional who had a bad night. Go to sleep."

"I can't sleep! You're still here!"

"I will leave," Ilya grunted, letting go of his arm but not moving back. “Or we could…” he waggled his eyebrows. Shane shot him a dirty look. Ilya grabbed his phone from the nightstand. "Give me your phone."

"What? No."

"Shane. Give it to me." It wasn't a request. Shane, still half-panicked, handed it over. Ilya swiped through the calendar app with the focus of a scout.

Ilya’s eyes narrowed as he scanned the dates. "You have the Atlantic swing next week. Then New York. I’m in California." He kept scrolling, his thumb moving fast. "Here. Chicago. Four weeks."

"What are you doing?" Shane asked, hovering over him, finally dressed in his grey sweats but looking no less terrified.

"We are at the United Center on the 18th," Ilya said, tossing the phone back onto the bed. "The Raiders play Chicago. You are scheduled for the late game against the Blues the next night. You stay for two days, I stay for two days."

"Rozanov, we can't do this again. This was...it was a lapse in judgment. A massive, catastrophic lapse."

"Relax, Hollander. Is just plan to fuck. If you did not want, we would not have tonight," Ilya countered, standing up. He was fully aware of the landmine he was burying for them both, but couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt his mind feel so sharp. He reached out, his hand firm on Shane’s shoulder. "I will message you. You will come to my room. No chirping on the ice. No 'Sasha.' We do it right."

"There is no 'doing this right'!" Shane whispered-yelled. "We're a conflict of interest with a heartbeat!"

"Then don't get caught. You like to be bad," Ilya said, heading for the door. He paused, looking back at Shane—at the messy hair, the blown-out pupils, and the faint, red marks on his neck that would be a nightmare to hide at breakfast. "You will want to wear something with a high neck tomorrow.”

With a smirk, Ilya slipped out into the hallway, leaving Shane standing in the middle of Room 1128, clutching his phone like a detonator.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks for all the lovely comments. Let me know what you think of this one!

Chapter 5: Trial

Chapter Summary

Shane's officiating skills are put under a microscope, and he does a little research.

The air in the hotel's second-floor conference room was stale, smelling of burnt coffee and the cold, ozone scent of a high-end air purifier. It was exactly 8:00 AM.

Shane sat at a long table, flanked by his linesmen, Hayden Pike and another guy named Gallant. At the head of the table sat Gene McInnis, who had been a referee for longer than Shane had been alive. The NHL’s Director of Officiating, Greg Carlson joined them via video call. McInnis didn't look like a man who had slept. He looked like he spent his nights dissecting the mistakes of others, and right now, his eyes were fixed on the massive 70-inch monitor at the front of the room.

"Alright, Hollander," McInnis said, his voice as dry as parchment. "Let’s look at the three-minute mark of the first period. Boston’s go-ahead goal."

Shane felt a bead of sweat trickle down his spine. His dress shirt was starched to within an inch of its life, but the high collar felt like a garrote. Every time he moved his jaw, the fabric rubbed against the raw, red heat of the marks Ilya had left on his throat just hours ago. He felt like a walking crime scene. He pressed his knee hard against the leg of the table to stop it from bouncing.

The monitor flickered to life. Raw, high-definition broadcast feed. There was the Garden. There was the crowd. And there, streaking down the left wing, was Cliff Marleau.

"Stop," McInnis commanded. The frame froze. "Gallant, you’re the back linesman. You’ve got the trail. Pike, you’re at the blue line. Hollander, you’re tracking from the end zone."

McInnis tapped a button. The play crept forward in agonizing slow motion. Marleau’s skates kissed the blue line. The puck was still eight inches behind him. It was a textbook offside. A mile off. The kind of call Shane had been making in his sleep since the AHL. On the screen, the Shane in stripes didn't move his hand. He didn't raise his arm. He stood there and watched, his attention fractionally, fatally listing to the left.

To where Ilya Rozanov was circling the net.

"Explain the hesitation," McInnis said. He wasn’t angry. He was clinical. That may have been worse. 

Shane had rehearsed this. He had run through it in the dark of the hotel room after Rozanov left, when he lay staring at the ceiling, the smell of him still in the sheets. He had run through it in the shower at five this morning, and again in the elevator, and again in the thirty seconds he spent bracing himself outside the door before the meeting. His heart was hammering against his ribs, the rhythmic thud that felt like Ilya’s pulse. He looked at the screen and saw Ilya Rozanov in the corner of the frame, circling the net, waiting for the play to develop. The memory of Ilya’s hands, rough and demanding, flashed through his mind, threatening to drown out the blue light of the conference room.

"I..." Shane cleared his throat, his voice came out steadier than it should have. "I thought I saw a tip, sir."

McInnis looked at him curiously.

"In the neutral zone," Shane lied, the words tasting like copper in his mouth. He used the exact excuse Ilya had fed him in the dark. "The Detroit defenseman, #16. I thought his stick blade caught the puck just before Marleau hit the line. If it’s a defensive tip, the offside is waived. I hesitated because I was trying to confirm the possession change before I killed play.”

McInnis paused. He looked at Shane for a long, flat second, and Shane held eye contact with everything he had. "A tip."

“Yes.”

McInnis rewound the tape. They watched it again. Then again. Frame by frame. From this angle, #16’s stick was close, but it didn't touch the puck.

"It’s a phantom tip, Hollander," McInnis muttered, though he sounded less like he was accusing Shane of a crime and more like he was disappointed in his eyesight. "You misread the possession change."

"I did," Shane said guiltily. "I was trying to be precise and I froze. It cost me the call."

"Precision is the enemy of the whistle," McInnis grunted, finally snapping the monitor off. The room plunged into a duller, natural light. "Toronto is going to tag this as a 'significant miss.' It’ll affect your quarterly grade. But I’d rather have a ref who’s thinking about possession than one who’s just guessing. Don't let it happen again."

The meeting broke up. Shane stood, his legs feeling like lead. He gathered the tablet and got out of the room before anyone could look at him too closely.

Hayden caught him in the hallway.

"Hey.” He fell into step beside Shane, matching his pace with an easy loping stride. "You okay, man? That wasn’t too bad. Carlson has drawn blood for less and he didn’t even say anything this time."

"I'm fine," Shane snapped, more defensively than he intended.

“You feeling okay? You looked rough this morning.” He paused. “Actually, you still look rough. Did you sleep at all?”

"Not much. Just a rough night."

"Yeah, that hotel was loud. Thought I heard something in the hall around midnight,” Hayden said conversationally, like it wasn’t a question. Figured it was that couple in 1130. They had a whole thing going on Tuesday.” He gave Shane a sidelong glance. “You didn’t have anyone over, did you? I was going to knock and check in that you hadn’t died after that game, but I didn’t want to bother you.”

Shane’s heart performed a full, sickening stop, then restarted at double the speed. Shane kept his eyes forward. “I was on the phone with my dad,” he said. “Another time zone. Sorry, if it was loud.”

Hayden stopped walking, studying Shane for half a second too long. Shane felt the weight of his gaze, even without looking. Then Hayden shrugged, as good-natured, normal people shrug when they decide to believe you even if they shouldn’t. “Just making sure you’re alright. It was rough yesterday.”

He clapped Shane on the shoulder. “Flight's at noon. See you there.” Shane stood in the empty hallway until he was sure Hayden was gone. Then he let out a long, controlled breath. He felt physically filthy. This was the most lying he had ever done before in his life. And for what? For the chance at another hookup? There were plenty of men he could meet, right?

Shane walked out of the conference room and headed for the stairs, needing to move, needing to outrun the lie he’d just told. He found himself in the hotel’s small, quiet garden terrace. He reached up, finally unbuttoning the top two buttons of his shirt, and let the cold morning air hit his skin.

He pulled his phone from his pocket. He should block the number. He should delete the thread. But it was too late. He wasn't the impartial official who worshipped the rules anymore. He was willing to commit professional perjury to protect the Captain of the Boston Raiders. His hands were still shaking.

Ilya had taken his whistle. And now, he had taken his integrity.

He found a low bench and dropped into it, tablet open in his lap. He opened a browser.

Ilya Rozanov.

He told himself it was reconnaissance. Know your enemy. He was an official. It was practically professional due diligence to understand the psychology of the league's most penalized player. This was research. He was lying, again, to himself before the first result even loaded.

The page that came back was a wall of gold. Career stats that appeared computer-generated, they were so clean. Three Art Ross trophies. A Hart. Two All-Star Game MVPs. A century of points in four of the last six seasons. A highlight reel that someone had helpfully compiled into a twelve-minute YouTube video with four million views, set to a Russian rock song Shane didn't recognize.

He scrolled past the stats. He was looking for something else and he knew it. What was Rozanov like off the ice?

He found it three pages deep, buried under the official team PR and the CCM endorsement announcements.

Rozanov's Mystery Year: What Really Happened in 2019?

It was a hockey blog, not a real outlet, but the comments section was hundreds of entries long. Shane read it with the focused, sick attention of a man reviewing a document he already knows will ruin his afternoon. The post was speculative, careful, hedged, liability-aware, but it was clear enough. A season where Ilya's production had cratered by over forty points. A training camp absence explained as a "minor knee procedure" that no one in the medical community seemed to have any record of. Cliff Marleau quote from an interview that year: He's been through some stuff. He'll be back. He's always back. No elaboration. The commenter had gone looking for an elaboration and found nothing but closed doors. Ilya had missed the first few weeks of games, but then came back with a vengeance. He never addressed it, and the team was silent.

Shane read it twice.

He thought about how  Ilya had pressed two fingers of vodka into his hand and said, It is not for getting drunk like little student. It is for feeling the world slow down.

He thought about the bruises. Not just the cross-check on his ribs. The other ones. The ones that didn't quite line up with a hockey calendar.

He put the phone face-down on his knee. Picked it back up.

He searched Ilya's draft year next. He wasn't sure why, except that the 2019 article had made him want to see the beginning of the story. What came back was a different creature entirely. A seventeen-year-old Ilya Rozanov at the Combine in Buffalo, sitting in front of a team of scouts in a suit that was half an inch too short in the sleeves. Someone had uploaded the full draft-day footage. Shane watched thirty seconds of it. Ilya was angular and restless and burning with something that hadn't yet learned to disguise itself as arrogance. He kept leaning forward in his chair, like he was about to say something important and then deciding against it. His English was halting and careful, each word placed down like a chess piece. The scouts were watching him like people watched something rare and slightly dangerous that they very much wanted to own.

Shane had watched the first round from a hospital bed in Ottawa, his ankle in a cast, on enough painkillers that the television kept doing strange things at the edges. He remembered thinking, with the specific, ungenerous clarity of someone who had just lost everything, that it wasn't fair. Not Ilya specifically. Just the whole thing. The randomness of it. The way one body could be a vehicle and another could be a trap.

He hadn't thought about that night in years.

He closed the draft footage and sat for a moment with the strange, uncomfortable weight of the feeling it left behind. Then he kept going.

Ilya Rozanov wife.

Nothing. He tried again.

Ilya Rozanov girlfriend

The results were immediate and plentiful. A greatest hits collection of grainy nightclub photographs and breathless gossip columns. Rozanov and mystery blonde leaving Tao, NYC. A Victoria's Secret model at some charity function, his hand at the small of her back, his smile a masterpiece of performing for a camera. Another woman the following year, a film producer, three photographs and then silence. They were all beautiful. They were all brief. They were all entirely, unmistakably decorative.

Shane stared at one of the photographs for a long time. Ilya had his arm around a stunning redhead at some kind of gala, his head tilted toward her, laughing at something. He looked handsome and relaxed and completely, utterly absent. Like someone had cut his face out of one context and pasted it into another.

Shane recognized that face. He had watched it reassemble itself out of nothing the moment Ilya walked into his hotel room last night, the mask going on like a second skin, the arrogant smirk, the sharp, predatory distance, and then he had watched it come apart again in the dark.

He found the kind of thread he had really been hoping to find. It was linked in one of the gossip columns. Someone had posted it as receipts, a triumphant I told you so. The subreddit was a general hockey forum that had long since developed a dedicated subsection for this kind of encounter. The thread was titled Ilya Rozanov - Russia's Greatest Love Machine. It was four years old, but still incredibly active. It was upvoted enough times to suggest it was considered something of a community resource. Shane read it how he reviewed game tape. Methodically. Trying to find the patterns.

The top comment was from a user called PuckedBoston81. Subtle, thought Shane. They had written several careful paragraphs. She wrote with the earnestness someone writing online has when they want to be believed. Careful details, self-aware disclaimers, the deliberate neutrality of the poster considering how they would be perceived. A charity event in 2021. A hotel bar. How he looked at her like she was the only one in the world. 

He doesn't waste time, she wrote. Walked straight up, bought me one drink, and had me back in his room inside the hour. I'm not complaining. I'm really, really not complaining.

The replies underneath were immediate and enthusiastic. He was at a club on Crescent in Boston. Just looked at me and tilted his head toward the door. Several people had replied asking for more detail, and she had obliged them. Shane read it, then reread it, his jaw set. He kept scrolling.

There were dozens of them. Boston, mostly, of course, but Toronto, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. It was the geography of an NHL schedule, charted in hookups. Some posts were brief. A date and a place. Others were longer and incredibly, explicitly detailed. A user in the Boston thread described, with an impressive lack of embarrassment, being pulled into a back hallway of a club off Boylston while his teammates were still at the bar. Didn't even get his name until after, she wrote. Didn't need it. His hands were...anyway. The sentence ended there, to significant appreciation from the replies.

All of the posts shared a consistent texture. The same speed, the same confidence, the same perfect attention that felt total and consuming up until the moment it was over. He makes you feel like you're the whole point, one woman had written, matter-of-factly, in a comment that had been liked over four hundred times. And then he's gone and you realize you were one of about forty points that season. Another mentioned the cross. Shane's thumb stopped scrolling. He read that one again.

He kept the chain on, she'd written. Gold cross. It started swinging in my face and I had to move it which made him laugh. A few replies below, someone had responded oh god the crucifix, and then someone else, and then a third person, and it had briefly become its own appreciative thread-within-a-thread, a kind of informal registry of women who had found themselves personally acquainted with Ilya Rozanov's religious jewelry.

Shane was fine. He was being completely rational about this. He had known that Ilya Rozanov had a long and well-documented history with women. He had just seen the photographic evidence himself. This was simply more firsthand information. The thing getting under his skin wasn't the sex. It wasn't the numbers, although Shane was appalled by the sheer scale of how many lovers Rozanov appeared to have had. It was the consistency of the thing. Thread after thread describing the same thing. The walk across the room. The single drink. The movement to his hotel as fast as possible. Magnetic, predatory, focused. Making whoever was in his room feel like the only person who had ever been there. The same man who had spent the better part of an evening in a Montreal hotel asking is this okay and still yes and tracing the freckles on Shane's shoulders like he was committing them to memory. 

He wasn't special. He knew that. Of course he knew that. He had read the Wikipedia page, for god's sake. Knowing it and reading four years of annotated, enthusiastically upvoted corroborating evidence were, it turned out, different.

He closed the tab and opened a new one.

NHL referee player relationship rules.

Can an NHL official be suspended for a personal relationship with a player.

NHL conflict of interest officiating policy.

Sports referee fired for relationship with athlete.

He read for twenty minutes. The picture that assembled itself was not complicated. There was no obscure loophole. There was no scenario in which two consenting adults made this acceptable. The league's officiating code of conduct was thorough, humorless, and unambiguous: any relationship that could be perceived as compromising an official's impartiality was grounds for immediate suspension pending review, and likely termination. The word perceived was doing a lot of work in that sentence. It didn't have to be proven. It just had to look like something.

He had already given them something. He had given them a missed call on national television.

He closed every tab. His browser history was now a perfect transcript of a man dismantling his own career in real time. He cleared it anyway, by reflex, like you cleaned up after a disaster that had already happened.

Heading back inside, Shane found a men's room off the lobby. Locked himself in the far stall. Pressed his forehead against the cold tile and waited for the spinning to stop.

It didn't stop. So after a while, he moved to the mirror instead. In the harsh fluorescent light, the marks were worse than he'd thought. A deep, bruised purple against the cord of his neck, and below it, a series of smaller impressions trailing toward his collarbone, deliberate, specific, spaced like punctuation.

Ilya had known. He'd known about the 8:00 AM meeting before he left that room. And he had done this anyway. He had pressed his mouth to Shane's throat with the full knowledge of what Shane would have to stand in front of in the morning, and he had left evidence that would force Shane to keep his collar high and his eyes down for the entire day.

He hadn't done it carelessly. He had done it on purpose.

Shane stared at his own reflection for a long time.

You like to be bad, Ilya had said, already halfway out the door, already gone.

The thing was, Shane thought he'd understood what he meant. He'd taken it as a taunt, a challenge, the smug exit line of a man who knew he'd won the night. But standing here now, in a men's room in Boston with a lie fresh in his mouth and the Director of Officiating's voice still echoing in his ears, Shane thought maybe Ilya had meant something else entirely.

Maybe Ilya knew, like people who have spent years in their own darkness learn to recognize it in others, that the rules had never been the point for Shane. The rules had been a replacement. A structure he had built over the ruin of the thing he actually wanted, which was to be on the ice, not beside it. He had dressed his injury in the referee's stripes and told himself it was the same. It wasn't the same. It had never been the same. Ilya was the first person in years who hadn't let him pretend otherwise.

Shane buttoned his shirt back up. Smoothed the collar. Looked at himself until he looked like the right person again. The careful one, the precise one, the rookie official with the high hockey IQ who had simply misjudged a possession change under pressure.

He opened the contact he'd saved as Sasha. His thumb hovered there. He opened the thread. Read back through it. I will be there, Ilya had written, three minutes after Shane sent the hotel and room number. Four words. No punctuation. Certain in the way only a man who had never once considered the possibility of no could be certain.

Shane typed: Chicago. I'll be there.

He stared at it for a full thirty seconds. Then he sent it before the reasonable part of his brain could convene a committee. The reply came back in under two minutes. Not words this time. Just a single grinning devil emoji.

You like to be bad. The words echoed in his head. Shane looked at it for a moment, then put his phone away and went upstairs to pack.

The flight to New York boarded on time. Shane would have preferred a delay. A delay would have given him something concrete to be frustrated about, something external and blameless. Instead, he was wedged into a window seat at 35,000 feet with nowhere to go and nothing to do but think, which was the last thing he needed.

Hayden was in the middle seat, asleep within twenty minutes of takeoff, his head lolling against the headrest with the boneless ease of a man who had nothing on his conscience. Shane watched him for a moment with something close to envy. Then he pulled out his tablet, opened the grading review software, and stared at it without reading a single word.

He pulled up his phone instead. The emoji was still there. He had looked at it six times since the lobby, which he was aware was not the behavior of a man who had things under control. He wasn't sure what he'd expected. A follow-up message, maybe, something more explicitly incriminating that he could point to as evidence of Ilya's recklessness. But there was just the one emoji, sitting there in the thread like a statement of fact. Outside the window, Boston shrank and disappeared under a flat shelf of cloud. Shane thought about the seventeen-year-old in the ill-fitting suit. He thought about the 2019 season and the closed doors and the careful, hedged language of a blog that was afraid of a lawsuit. He thought about how Ilya had considered his ankle in the shower, not with pity, not with the polished sympathy of someone performing the correct emotion, but with the recognition of one damaged thing appraising another.

The seat belt sign chimed off. Hayden didn't stir. Shane locked his phone and put it face-down on the tray table. He had three games between now and Chicago. Three chances to be the official he had spent a decade becoming, to call a clean game and let the quarterly grade recover and act like the last forty-eight hours had been a temporary systems failure, corrected and logged and filed away. He was good at that. He had been good at that for years.

He picked the phone back up, revisiting the message thread one more time. He was counting the days already.

Chapter 6: Nine Days

Chapter Summary

Three weeks, four cities, and one ref he can't stop thinking about. Ilya is losing the game.

Chapter Notes

I think this one makes Ilya seem a little more likable. Some discussion of addiction issues in this chapter.

The thing about being Ilya Rozanov was that silence cost money. Not his silence specifically, though his silence had certainly been purchased on occasion. He meant the silence around him. Empty suites, cleared hallways, the polite distance that earning millions of dollars a year carved out of the world. He had worked for it, wanted it, and, for most of his adult life, understood that the quiet was the reward. He was in his penthouse, Boston spread out below him in the cold, all lit pathways and dark gaps. There was a can of Coke on the coffee table. He’d pulled it, frosty and perfectly crisp from the refrigerator, pointedly not looking at the cabinet above it. Marleau had texted at seven asking about dinner. Ilya had said no and sat here since, his phone face-up on the cushion beside him.

He picked it up. The thread with Shane was still open from eleven minutes ago. His own devil emoji at the bottom, and above it: 

Chicago. I’ll be there. 

Four words. Ilya had read them forty times in three weeks, and they still landed somewhere behind his sternum in a way he hadn’t gotten used to. He hadn’t messaged Shane since Boston. He’d picked up the phone maybe a dozen times, typed something, deleted it. He hadn’t gone looking for a body to crowd it out either, which was the more unusual fact. Three weeks. He hadn’t wanted to, and the not-wanting was its own kind of information he was leaving on the table for now.

He’d stood in the doorway of Room 1128 and watched Shane button his collar over the marks on his throat, marks Ilya had put there knowing exactly what Shane had at eight in the morning, and felt something that wasn’t the usual clean spike of a risk well taken. Deeper than that. It was still sitting there now, three weeks later. Things didn’t usually follow him home.

His first season in the league, a teammate had shown him that certain substances could reach into your skull and turn the volume all the way down, the grinding noise of expectation and performance going briefly, mercifully still. Ilya had taken to it with the same total focus he brought to everything else, which turned out to be the problem. For almost three full seasons, he’d kept the two versions of himself separate. Sharp and ruthless on the ice, and off it, chasing the sensation of his own brain going quiet. He’d been good at it until he wasn’t, and then very bad at it very quickly, and then there had been seven months the team called a knee procedure. The GM had a number he called when he needed things handled quietly, and he’d called it. Three days later, Ilya was on a private flight to a facility outside Duluth that had nothing around it but pine trees and frozen ground and the suffocating quiet of a place designed to give you nothing to do but sit with yourself. He had hated it with a focused, total intensity for the first two months. By the third, he had mostly just been bored. He’d learned to sleep without chemical assistance, his body remembering how, slowly and badly, and he’d come back to Boston in October and found the noise in his head still there, waiting, patient as ice.

He’d managed it differently since. Two drinks instead of the bottom of the bottle, a warm body in his hotel room instead of whatever else had been on offer. He controlled all of it. The bar, the pace, the exit. Nothing followed him home. It was a clean system and it had worked, for years, right up until a man in a bar in Montreal had looked at him with that expression of letting go of the ledge. Ilya had felt the floor shift under him in a way that no amount of vodka had ever produced. On the ice, though. On the ice was different.

He was having the best season of his career and everyone knew it and nobody could fully explain it. Twenty-nine goals and twenty assists in the first twenty-two games. His skating had changed. Faster, more deliberate, half a second ahead of everyone else on the ice in a way that was becoming its own kind of problem. The rookies gave him a wider berth at practice now, not out of deference but how you give space to something moving too fast to predict. Carmichael had mentioned it to Marleau, who had mentioned it to Ilya, who had shrugged and gone back to the drill. He didn’t know how to explain that he was running the whole season on a single fixed point, the thought of Shane opening a door in Chicago, ten days away, and the attention Shane gave to everything.

The pills were done. Done since Minnesota, with one bad night last year he didn’t count because he’d flushed the rest before morning. The vodka he hadn’t touched in three weeks, the longest stretch since before the league. He didn’t need it. The thought of Shane was quieting the noise more effectively than anything he’d put in his body, which he understood, distantly, was not the most stable foundation for a career year. He was choosing not to examine it closely.

He thought about the freckles. He did this frequently and with a level of involuntary detail that was starting to genuinely irritate him. Eleven on Shane’s right collarbone. He knew this because he had counted them at five in the morning in Montreal with the city going pale in the windows and Shane breathing slow beside him, and the number had apparently just taken up residence in his head. He picked up his phone.

Ilya: I watched the Pittsburgh game. The powerplay call in the third. You were right.

He’d pulled up the Pittsburgh game two days ago to scout a defenseman and watched the officiating crew instead. Shane making six calls in forty minutes, skating hard to get position, his bad ankle carrying him without complaint. The Pittsburgh winger was good at embellishment, good enough that most veterans would have let it go. Shane hadn’t hesitated, had already turned away before the bench erupted. Watching it, Ilya had felt something warm move through his chest that had nothing to do with the defenseman.

He sent the message and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. The cabinet was in his peripheral vision and he looked at it directly, how his counselor in Minnesota had taught him. Acknowledging the thing instead of orbiting it. The bottle had been there three weeks. It could stay there. He went back to the couch.

Shane: I’m surprised you know what embellishment looks like. Given your track record.

The grin moved across his face before he could stop it, a real one. 

Ilya: My track record is very good. I am sometimes the victim. 

Shane: You have seventeen embellishment calls in the last six seasons. 

Ilya: I was acting.

Shane: You’re a menace. 

Ilya: And yet you are counting my career statistics. Interesting hobby.

 A pause, the typing indicator appearing and disappearing twice. 

I was doing research, Shane wrote. Professional due diligence. Knowing the psychological profile of the league’s most penalized player is practically required reading. 

Ilya typed: And what did you learn? He stopped watching the screen and turned to the city instead, a plane crossing slowly overhead with its patient blinking lights. 

That you were seventeen once, Shane replied. And it showed.

Ilya sat with that. It was bad enough the footage existed, worse to know Shane had found it. He’d been so certain of everything at seventeen and wrong about most of it — the suit half an inch too short in the sleeves, the English placed down carefully like he was afraid of dropping it, scouts watching him how people watched something rare and slightly dangerous they very much wanted to own. 

I am better dressed now, he typed. 

Shane: Marginally. 

He typed: The ankle. In Pittsburgh. It looked fine. A longer pause. 

It was fine, Shane wrote. It’s always fine. 

Ilya: That is not the same thing. He’d moved to the edge of the couch without noticing, elbows on his knees. The typing indicator appeared and stayed. 

It aches sometimes, Shane wrote finally. After long games. Cold rinks. I’m used to it. 

Ilya: Do you ice it? 

Shane: Are you my mother? 

Ilya typed, Just need you to be flexible for Chicago. He set the phone down. He’d looked up the draft footage two weeks ago, late, the apartment dark, and found the coverage of Shane’s injury a few clicks deeper than he’d meant to go. He remembered it vaguely from the time, the bottom scroll on SportsCenter, a name he didn’t know yet. He’d been twenty that season, still certain his body was a permanent condition. He knew better now. He knew what it looked like when someone rebuilt themselves around a loss and didn’t quite admit that’s what they were doing, because he had done it, was doing it still in various ways, and Shane in his referee stripes had the quality of someone very committed to a story they were telling themselves. Ilya recognized that from the inside.

Shane: Why are you still awake? 

It was 12:37 AM. 

Ilya: I am always awake, he typed. Why are you? 

Shane: Flight to New York in six hours. Couldn’t sleep. 

Ilya: Nervous. 

Shane: No. 

Ilya: Liar. 

Shane: …Maybe a little. New York crowd is brutal. 

Ilya: They are brutal to everyone equally. Is democratic. He could feel Shane almost laughing somewhere across the distance between them. Get some sleep, Hollander. 

Shane: You first. 

Ilya wrote, I will try, which was honest, put the phone on the nightstand, and turned off the lamp. The city threw pale light through the glass. He pressed two fingers against his ribs where Tuesday’s hit had left its mark and breathed against the ache. The cabinet was on the other side of the wall. He didn’t think about it. Sleep came, eventually. Lately, it sometimes did.

The next afternoon, Marleau knocked before practice. “You coming to Toscano’s tonight? Carmichael’s paying, don’t ask me why.” 

Ilya said, "Sure," and Marleau’s expression shifted in slight surprise. He leaned in the doorframe with his arms folded, the locker room bravado gone. 

“You’ve said no to everything for three weeks.” A pause. “I’m not trying to start something. I just want to know if you’re okay.”

Ten years of standing next to each other gave Marleau a particular vocabulary. He’d used it in 2019, showing up at Ilya’s apartment in February with takeout and not mentioning the bottles on the counter, the curtains closed at noon, the particular smell of a place where someone had been not-coping for a while. He hadn’t asked then. He’d just sat on the couch, put the game on, and stayed until Ilya ate something. It was a language with very few words in it.

That afternoon, Ilya had run the same power play drill four times because the second line couldn’t get the timing right, and by the fourth attempt, the rookies on the perimeter were exchanging glances. The wide-eyed look of men in the presence of something operating at a frequency they couldn’t track. Coach had watched from the boards without saying anything. Marleau had watched with a different expression, more personal, doing the calculation he always did.

“I am okay, Marley,” Ilya said. Water glass on the coffee table, cabinet closed for three weeks, two points off the league scoring lead in November, sleeping through the night. Whatever this was, he was okay inside it. “I am actually okay.” Marleau held the look for a moment, then pushed off the doorframe. “Seven o’clock. Don’t be weird.”

Toscano’s was loud, the team taking over the back corner the way they took over most spaces, too many large bodies and not enough restraint. Carmichael was holding court at the far end, working through pasta and a story that kept requiring him to stand up. Marleau had found a woman at the bar within twenty minutes. Ilya sat with his Coke, ate his steak, and watched the room.

There was a woman two tables over who had been watching him since they arrived. Dark-haired, composed, aware of exactly what she was doing. She caught him looking and held it, a small, deliberate smile. Ilya had engineered this exact evening more times than he could count. He had, in fact, structured entire evenings around engineering this exact moment, because it was reliable. It delivered what it promised, the noise in his head going quiet for a few hours, no residue in the morning. He looked at her. She was beautiful. He felt nothing that required him to do anything about it. He turned to his plate and finished his steak.

Marleau caught him on the way out, materializing at his elbow with the radar he had for Ilya leaving rooms early. His eyes moved to the woman’s table, then back. He didn’t say anything. “Good night, Marley,” Ilya said and left.

The apartment was dark when he got back. He didn’t fill a glass. He sat on the edge of the bed and checked his phone, nothing from Shane, who was hopefully asleep somewhere in New York, and put it face-down on the nightstand. He lay back and looked at the ceiling and let his mind go where it had been going for three weeks anyway, because there was no reason now to redirect it.

He got his hand around himself and didn’t rush it, letting the memory unspool properly. Shane’s shoulders under his palms, the dense muscle he hadn’t expected. The sharp involuntary intake of breath when Ilya had found the right angle and held it there, Shane’s whole body going taut and then, slowly, giving. The noise of him when he’d stopped trying to be quiet, and he had tried, right up until he hadn’t, right up until the composure cracked and what came out of him was unguarded and a little desperate and nothing like the careful, buttoned-up official who’d dropped the puck at center ice twelve hours earlier. Ilya worked himself slowly, how he’d learned to draw things out when he had time and no reason to hurry. He thought about the weight of Shane under him, the way Shane’s fingers had dug into his back and pulled rather than pushed, and the sound he’d made when Ilya had bottomed out and stayed there, not moving, just watching Shane’s face until Shane had said please in a voice that had very little of his usual composure left in it. Ilya thought about that please and his hand tightened. His hips pushed up once, involuntarily, into the grip.

Eleven freckles on the right collarbone. He knew it was eleven. This was apparently just a thing he knew now.

He came with his jaw clenched and Shane’s name somewhere in the back of his throat, not said aloud, just present, and lay still afterward with his chest heaving and the city light moving across the ceiling. The apartment was quiet. The liquor cabinet was on the other side of the wall, and he hadn’t thought about it once.

Nine days, he thought, and reached for the box of tissues on the nightstand.

Chapter End Notes

A quieter chapter this time. I wanted to give Ilya some time to think about his feelings for Shane, and maybe for them to talk a little. Something is shifting and he's just starting to notice. Chicago is coming.

Thank you so much for all the comments on Chapter 5, they genuinely make my week every time.

Chapter 7: Penalty

Chapter Summary

Shane arrives in Chicago with a text in his pocket and a plan to call the cleanest game of his career. Ilya asked him to. Ilya is also making that very difficult.

Chapter Notes

The text had come at 7:14 AM, while Shane was still in bed staring at the ceiling of the ninth-floor room with the parking structure view.

Ilya: Tonight. Call everything. Do not let anything go.

Shane had read it, his thumb hovering. Then, before he could respond —

Ilya: Do not miss anything by the time the game is over.

Shane understood what he meant. He understood the architecture of it. There was a logic that said if Shane called the Raiders' captain for every marginal infraction, held the line so visibly that anyone watching saw only a referee doing his job with perhaps excessive thoroughness, then the text became simply a text. A professional decision, made in a hotel room somewhere across the city, by someone who understood how exposure worked and had thought it through before Shane was awake. Unconnected. Shane lay there with the phone on his chest and looked at the ceiling and thought about the way Ilya had worked it out, quietly and practically, in whatever hours he'd had since the team landed, turning the problem over until he found the shape of a solution.

He typed: Understood.

Then, after a moment, Don't make it easy for me.

The reply came back in under a minute. A single checkmark emoji. Not the devil. Shane stared at it for a long time.

He had been nineteen when the ankle went. He remembered the sound it made, how the ice had come up to meet him, and then the long white ceiling of the Ottawa hospital and a television in the corner showing the first round of the draft while the painkillers did strange things to the edges of the room. He had spent the next eight years building a life out of the wreckage. The referee's certification, the AHL grind, the OHL weekends, the endless bus rides. He had told himself, and believed it, that it was the same. That being on the ice was being on the ice. That the stripes were close enough.

The thing was, Ilya had looked at the ankle scar with the quiet recognition of someone who knew what it meant to rebuild yourself around a loss and not quite admit that's what you were doing. Shane had felt seen in a way that was deeply inconvenient and hadn't been able to unfeel it since. He understood, also, that this was probably the mechanism. That the consuming attention was the whole point of Ilya Rozanov, reliably delivered, and that knowing it was a mechanism didn't make it stop working.

The United Center felt like every arena Shane had ever worked. Cold air and the mineral sharpness of fresh ice. He had been in buildings like this since he was a teenager, first as a player and then, after the ankle, as something else, and the smell still hit the same place in his chest every time. Not grief exactly. More neutral than that, worn smooth by repetition.

He dressed in the officials' room with Hayden, who had arrived with coffee for both of them and the easy, loping energy of a good night’s sleep, who hadn’t spent his morning staring at texts from professional athletes. Shane accepted the coffee and said thank you and did not think about whatever room number Ilya was in.

"Raiders are physical tonight," Hayden said, dropping into the chair beside Shane's and working his laces with practiced speed. "Rozanov especially. He's been having a season."

"I've noticed," Shane said.

Hayden glanced at him sidelong, brief and calibrated. It was the same glance from the Boston hallway. Not accusatory, just attentive, the look of someone filing information away for later without yet knowing what file it belonged in. "You okay? You seem—"

"I'm fine," Shane said. "Early morning."

"Yeah." Hayden finished his laces, sat back. "For what it's worth, I thought Boston was handled well. The quarterly grade was rough but Carlson's graded worse for less. You came out of it clean."

Shane thought about the men's room off the lobby. The mirror. The collar. Clean was doing considerable work in that sentence. "Thanks," he said.

"Don't let Rozanov in your head tonight," Hayden said, standing to test his edges. "He's very good at it."

"I know," Shane said.

Hayden looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone deciding whether to say the next thing. He decided against it. "Good. Then we'll have a clean game."

Shane pulled his jersey over his head and felt the fabric settle. He reached into his pocket and gripped the puck. Cold rubber, sharp at the seams. He held it for a moment, then let go.

Rozanov was already on the ice when the officials came through the tunnel, running a figure eight in the neutral zone with the loose grace of a body that had been doing this since before it was fully formed. He didn't look at Shane. Shane noted this with the careful, lateral attention he had developed for exactly this purpose, aware without looking, tracking without watching, and took his position at center ice.

Chicago's center took his position on the dot, home team's prerogative. Ilya skated in across from him, the visiting captain, his visor throwing back the arena lights. He looked at the ice. Shane looked at his hands.

He dropped the puck. The first period was eleven minutes of uneventful hockey followed by Ilya Rozanov deciding, with apparent calm, to test the terms of their agreement. It was a small thing. A forecheck along the left boards, Ilya angling a defenseman into the glass with his hip, his elbow rising on the follow-through in a way that was technically controllable and practically wasn't, a move Shane had watched him make in two separate highlight reels and four quarters of game tape. The defenseman stayed up. The puck turned over. The play continued. Shane blew the whistle.

The arena noise shifted. Not loud, not outraged, just the low murmur of a crowd recalibrating. Ilya turned. He looked at Shane with an expression that was composed and attentive and gave nothing away.

"Elbowing," Shane said. "Two minutes."

A beat. Ilya tilted his head a fraction of an inch, like he did when he was making a decision. "Was borderline," he said. His voice was even, conversational, making an observation rather than an argument.

"Penalty box, Rozanov."

Another beat. Something moved at the corner of Ilya's mouth. Not quite the smirk, something more private than that. He skated to the box without another word. Shane turned away before his face could do anything it wasn't supposed to.

The Raiders killed the penalty. Marleau, working the far wing with the blameless efficiency Shane had come to associate with him, tipped a clearing attempt wide and bought them the final forty seconds. The bench was loud. Shane watched Ilya come back over the boards and take his shift, his stride unchanged, his expression the flat, resting focus of having already moved on.

He hadn't moved on. Shane knew this because four minutes later, deep in the Chicago zone, Ilya took a hit along the near boards from a defenseman with thirty pounds on him and came out of it holding his elbow at an angle that made Shane's stomach clench. Ilya shook it off in the same motion, was already turning up ice before the defender had fully disengaged. Shane tracked the puck. He did not skate over. He had decided not to skate over, in advance, as a matter of policy.

Hayden materialized at his shoulder during the whistle, quiet and even. "He okay?"

"Looked fine," Shane said.

Hayden watched Ilya take his next shift from the bench, the elbow apparently functional, his stride unaltered. "Yeah," Hayden said. He skated away to set up for the faceoff. Shane watched him go and felt the specific, crawling discomfort of lying by omission to someone who hadn't done anything to deserve it.

The second period was where the agreement started to show its seams. It was not that Ilya was doing anything wrong, exactly. That was the problem. He was playing within the boundaries of what Shane had already called, absorbing the standard, adjusting his game with the intelligence of understanding systems and had simply updated his model. He was not retaliating. He was playing clean, controlled, perfect hockey, two assists in seven minutes, and every time Shane was anywhere near him on the ice, Ilya did not look at him.

The not-looking was its own kind of communication. Shane was aware of this. He was also aware that being aware of it was not the same as being unaffected by it, and that the gap between those two things was where most of his problems lived.

Midway through the period, a scrum developed in front of the Chicago net. Marleau and a Chicago winger going at it over a loose puck, the kind of grinding, inconclusive wrestling that refs let breathe for a few seconds before stepping in. Shane moved in to separate them. As the linesmen got between the players, Ilya appeared at the edge, not involved, just present, his glove resting on the boards, watching Shane work.

"Good call earlier," Ilya said. Quietly, pitched below the crowd noise. His eyes were on Marleau, not on Shane. "The elbow."

"Don't," Shane said, equally quiet.

"I am just saying." A pause. "Very thorough."

"I said don't, Rozanov."

Ilya looked at him then, directly, for the first time since the opening drop. His expression was composed, but underneath it something was running that Shane didn't have a clean word for. Not the predatory calculation of the bar, not the easy confidence of the hotel room. A condition that lived between those two things and was harder to look at than either.

"I know," Ilya said simply. And skated away.

Shane stood in the neutral zone for a moment, the crowd noise washing back in. Hayden was twenty feet away, watching the benches. He didn't appear to have heard. Shane pulled his focus back to the ice and kept it there.

The Raiders won 4-1. Ilya finished with his two assists, and twenty-four minutes of ice time, two of which he had spent in the penalty box on a call that every broadcaster in the building had spent thirty seconds debating before moving on. Shane had called four penalties in total. Three of them were perfectly unambiguous. The Raiders' coach had not challenged any of them. The quarterly grade, when it came, would be fine. Shane was the last one off the ice.

He stood at the tunnel entrance for a moment, the arena emptying around him, the Zamboni making its first slow pass across the far end. The United Center lights were coming down, the ice going from white to grey in the lower register. He looked at the center dot, the faceoff circle, the boards along the left side where Ilya had taken the hit in the first period and shaken it off in the same motion.

Don't make it easy for me, he had texted. Ilya hadn't. He had done something more difficult than that. He had played the exact game Shane needed him to play, within every line Shane had drawn, and made it look like nothing, and Shane had stood on the same ice and called it clean and felt the whole complicated weight of what they were doing settle more firmly into his chest.

He went to the dressing room. Hayden was already changed, his bag packed, his jacket on.

"Good game," Hayden said. He was looking at his phone, not at Shane.

"Yeah," Shane said.

A pause. Hayden put his phone in his pocket. He looked up, and the expression on his face was careful in a way that was different from his usual careful — more deliberate, like he had decided something on the way in.

"Shane," he said. "I'm going to ask you something and I need you to just hear it."

Shane's hands went still on his skate laces.

"Are you doing okay?" Hayden said. "And I don't mean the game. I mean — are you sleeping? Eating?"

Shane looked at his laces. "I'm fine," he said. "It's just been a long stretch. I'm not sleeping great."

Hayden looked at him for a moment with the expression that said he was deciding how hard to push. He'd been here before with people he cared about, Shane could see it in the manner he was holding himself, the careful stillness that said he had learned that the wrong question closed a door permanently.

"There's nothing in your room I should know about," Hayden said. Not an accusation. Almost gentle.

Shane thought, briefly and sideways, about a blog post he'd read in a hotel garden in Boston. Closed doors and careful language and a season that cratered without explanation. "No," Shane said. "Nothing like that."

Hayden held the look one moment longer. Then he nodded, picked up his bag, and clapped Shane once on the shoulder on his way past. A brief, careful touch that said he wasn't sure what kind of support was wanted but wanted to offer something.  “You up for dinner tonight?”

“No, I’m just going to the hotel. I had a big lunch.”

"Get some sleep," Hayden replied. "Real sleep. See you tomorrow."

He left. Shane sat alone in the dressing room and finished unlacing his skates and did not move for a long time after that.

The stripes, the whistle, the quarterly grade, the careful lie he'd told McInnis in Boston sitting on the record like a hairline crack in ice. Everything he'd built in the eight years since the ankle was threaded through with the same thing, the same structural need to stay close to the game because without it he didn't know who he was. He had never let anything threaten that. He picked up his bag. His phone buzzed as he pushed through the arena doors into the cold.

Ilya: Room 611. When you are ready.

Shane stood on the sidewalk for a moment, the November air hitting him after the warmth of the building, the city loud around him. He read it once. Then he flagged a cab.

He knocked. The door opened almost immediately. Ilya was in dress clothes from the post-game media availability. Dark trousers, a white shirt with the top two buttons open, the gold cross catching the hallway light. His hair was damp and his jaw was unshaved and he looked at Shane in the doorway with an expression Shane couldn't immediately categorize. Not the smirk. Not the bar assessment. Something that had less performance in it than either, and Shane felt it land in his chest and stayed very still about it.

"Come in," Ilya said.

Shane dropped his bag by the door. He looked at Ilya, at how he was holding his right arm just slightly away from his body, the angle loose and careful in a way that had nothing to do with how he was standing.

"The elbow," Shane said.

Ilya's expression didn't change. "Is fine."

"You were guarding it on the bench. I saw you." Shane had told himself, skating off the ice, that he wasn't going to say anything. That it wasn't his place. That the team had medical staff and Ilya had been playing through worse since before Shane knew his name. He crossed the room anyway, stopping in front of him. "Let me see it."

"Shane—"

"Let me see it, Ilya."

A beat. An expression of defeat moved across Ilya's face, brief and unguarded, and he extended his arm. Shane took it carefully, his fingers closing around the joint, and felt Ilya go very still under his hands. The swelling was already there, a tight, hot pressure along the side, the kind that meant ice and rest and almost certainly a conversation with the team physician that Ilya was going to delay as long as possible.

"This needs ice," Shane said.

"I know."

"Tonight. Not tomorrow."

"Yes, doctor." The smirk was back, but it was thin. Shane didn't let go of his arm. He turned it slightly, tracking the line of the swelling with his thumb, and felt the small, involuntary tightening of Ilya's hand into a fist.

"Does it hurt?"

"Everything hurts," Ilya said. "This is hockey."

Shane looked up at him. Ilya was watching him with that expression again, the one with less performance in it, and the proximity of it was inconvenient to Shane's ability to maintain the detachment he'd been attempting. He was still holding Ilya's arm. He was aware of this.

"I'll get ice from the machine," Shane said. "Before anything else."

Ilya looked at him for a moment. "Okay," he said, which was not the argument Shane had been bracing for, and was somehow worse.

Shane found the ice machine at the end of the hall, filled the bucket, wrapped a generous handful in the spare hand towel from the bathroom. When he came back, Ilya was sitting on the edge of the bed, his shirt untucked, the gold crucifix swinging forward as he leaned his elbows on his knees. He looked up when Shane came in.

Shane sat beside him. He pressed the wrapped ice carefully to the joint and held it there. Ilya hissed once through his teeth and then went quiet, his jaw set, his eyes on the city through the window.

They sat like that for a while. The ice machine hummed somewhere down the hall. Shane kept his hand steady and did not say anything, because everything he might have said felt like too much or not enough, and the silence was easier.

After a minute, Ilya reached out with his free hand and pulled Shane's shirt loose from his waistband. Not urgent, just deliberate. Shane let him, lifting his arms while Ilya worked it over his head and dropped it onto the bed beside them. The room was warm. Ilya's eyes moved to his collarbone and stayed there for a moment, unhurried, with the specific quality of attention that Shane had by now learned to brace for.

"Still eleven," Ilya said. Quiet, almost to himself. “Freckles,” he clarified.

"You could have just asked me to take my shirt off," Shane said.

"I could have," Ilya agreed, entirely unrepentant.

Shane looked at him. "How long have you been thinking about them."

"Since Montreal." A pause. His mouth curved slightly, self-deprecating. "I have not been… I have been less busy lately. More time to think about things." He said it casually, like you'd mention you'd taken up reading. "It is your fault, probably."

Shane looked at him for a moment. The admission was clearly meant to land as a joke, a deflection, the kind of thing Ilya said to take the weight out of a room. Ilya wasn’t sleeping with other people? Impossible. The thought landed quietly, something true that hadn't been meant to sound true, and Shane felt the floor tilt very slightly under him. The ice was melting against his palm. He was still holding it to Ilya's elbow.

"Pike, the linesman, asked if I was okay tonight," Shane said. It came out before he'd decided to say it. "Not about the game. He looked at me like he was worried about me."

He felt Ilya go still beside him.

"Should he be worried?" Ilya said.

"I don't know," Shane said honestly.

Ilya reached up with his good arm, his hand curling around the back of Shane's neck. Firm. His thumb moved against the short hair at Shane's nape. Shane let him.

"You called a very good game," Ilya said.

"That's what you were going to say."

"Four penalties." A pause, almost rueful. "Very mean."

"You asked me to."

"I know." The thumb, steady. "I watched you. The second one — the interference in the neutral zone. Was good." He said it how he might note a good line change, observational, and then seemed to decide that was insufficient. "You are very good at this."

Shane looked at him. There was no performance in it. That was the problem with Ilya up close. The smirk and the chirping and the calculating distance were all clearly load-bearing, and then occasionally, without warning, he set them down. The city was quiet outside. Shane thought about saying I know what this is. He didn't say it. He'd said it enough times to himself that it had stopped meaning anything, worn smooth like the inside of a pocket.

"Ilya," he said.

"I know," Ilya said. He didn't move his hand.

Then he kissed him.

It was not gentle. That was the first thing. Ilya kissed him like nothing else mattered, one hand at Shane's jaw and the other fisted in his jacket, and the unhurried quality of it was not softness. It was control, the same control he used on the ice, deliberate and total. Shane grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him back and didn't think about Montreal or Boston or the threads he'd read in the hotel garden.

Ilya pushed him onto the bed without breaking the kiss, steering him with a firm spatial authority, like Shane was an opposing force on the ice. He pulled back enough to look at Shane on the mattress. His shirt was half untucked, his hair pushed back, his necklace swinging forward. He looked at Shane with the flat, focused assessment he used for everything he was serious about, and Shane felt it like he always did, like being the only thing in the room.

He was aware, in some functioning corner of his brain, that this was the thing. The mechanism. This was what all of it had described. The columns, the forum, the breathless gossip, every account written in careful self-aware paragraphs. The total, consuming quality of Ilya's attention, how it made you feel like the only thing in the room. He knew it was a feature, not a distinction. He knew that and was lying here anyway. But maybe, maybe it was different. Maybe Ilya really had stopped sleeping his way through Boston. Maybe this was special.

"Still yes?" Ilya said.

"Still yes," Shane said.

He wasn't gentle. That remained true throughout, which was what Shane had needed, the aggressive physicality of it overwriting the day. The game, the dressing room, Hayden's careful face. Ilya was efficient and focused, each adjustment made with the precision of reading Shane’s in real time. When Shane's hands got restless Ilya pinned them, not hard, just decisively, and Shane tested the grip once and then stopped testing it because the alternative was having to think, and he didn't want to think.

He worked Shane open with the same unhurried focus he'd used in Montreal, but there was less ceremony to it this time. Less caution, more like he’d had been paying attention and remembered what he'd learned. Shane's head went back against the pillow. His fingers found Ilya's wrist and didn't push, just held on.

When Ilya finally moved over him, he lifted Shane's legs and settled them over his shoulders in one smooth motion. The angle was immediate and total, and Shane made a sound that he would have been embarrassed about if he'd had any remaining capacity for embarrassment, which he didn't.

Ilya went still for a moment, looking down at him. Then he turned his head and pressed his lips to the inside of Shane's ankle. It was not the scar specifically, just the thin skin above the joint, a brief, unhurried pressure, and then tilted further, mouth finding the scar itself, the irregular raised line of it. A beat. Matter-of-fact. Like noting something he'd been meaning to come back to. He didn't say anything. He looked at Shane once, checking, and then began to move.

It was a different kind of intensity from this angle. More focused, more complete, each movement carrying the full weight of him. Shane's hands found the sheets and then found Ilya's forearms instead, gripping the dense muscle there, needing some physical piece to hold onto. Ilya worked him with the same relentless attention he brought to everything. Not tender, exactly, but precise in a way that was harder to dismiss than tenderness, tracking every response and adjusting, not missing anything. Every time Shane's breathing changed, Ilya registered it. Every time the tension in his body crested toward the end, Ilya held the angle and stayed there, patient and absolutely certain of himself, until Shane stopped trying to rush it. When his hands weren't pinning Shane down, they were not entirely controlled. That was the part Shane kept noticing, in the spaces between not thinking.

"Look at me," Ilya said. His voice was lower than usual, rougher at the edges. Shane looked. Whatever was on Ilya's face in that moment Shane looked at and then looked away from, because it was more information than he knew what to do with.

"No," Ilya said. Quietly. "Look at me. I want to see you.”

Shane looked. Ilya held his gaze. The composure that Shane had been maintaining since 7:14 AM, through the run and the game and the dressing room and the cab across the city, finished coming apart in a way that was neither orderly nor quiet, and Ilya took it all without comment, like it was something he'd been expecting to receive. Shane nearly wept in relief as he finished, splattering his own chest, Ilya following quickly after, calling out his name.

Afterward, Ilya didn't make a production of Shane staying. They hadn’t discussed it before hand. Shane was ready to flee. He had come here. He’d let Rozanov into his body. But somehow, staying over, again, Shane reminded himself, felt like admitting defeat. Ilya rolled to the side and pulled Shane against him with the same practical authority he did everything, his arm settling across Shane's chest like a fact. It was warm and comforting. Shane lay there and listened to his own heartbeat slow and looked at the city through the window and did not examine what the not-leaving meant. The silence ran for a while. It was not uncomfortable. Shane thought about eleven freckles and less busy than usual and the floor tilting slightly under him, and then he stopped thinking about it, the way you stopped pressing a bruise once you'd confirmed it was there. Shane closed his eyes.

Ilya lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and did not sleep. This was not unusual. Sleep had been a negotiation since Duluth, his body having apparently decided to treat unconsciousness as a privilege rather than a default. He had learned to lie still and let the hours pass and not reach for the things he used to reach for when the ceiling got too loud. The Coke he'd had after the game instead of the minibar. He was managing it.

Shane was asleep against his side, breathing in the deep, even rhythm of having been running on adrenaline for sixteen hours and had finally run out. His weight was solid and warm and lovely. So, so lovely. Ilya was aware of it with a precision that was starting to annoy him.

The system required not counting freckles. He had said it out loud tonight, which he hadn't planned to do, and Shane had gone still in the particular way he went still when something had landed in a place he hadn't left open, and Ilya had felt the floor shift under him and recognized the shift and still hadn't taken it back. He'd meant it as a joke. He had delivered it as a joke. It had not functioned as a joke. 

In Minnesota, the counselor had told him he needed to find something to move toward rather than away from. Ilya had nodded and understood intellectually but had gone back to Boston and found the nearest available away. A warm body, the bottom of an expensive bottle, the clean controlled spike of a risk well taken. It had worked. He was good at finding away.

The thing was, he'd sat in Toscano's three weeks ago and looked at a beautiful woman looking at him and felt nothing that required him to do anything about it, and had understood, on the drive home, that the away wasn't working anymore. He hadn't needed the fix. He hadn't wanted to. He'd been running on a single fixed point. A door in a city, the thought of Shane opening it, and the game had been sharp and clean and the best forty minutes of hockey he'd played in years. That was useful information. He was choosing not to examine it closely.

Shane shifted in his sleep, some minor adjustment, and his hand found Ilya's forearm and stayed there, just resting, the unconscious gesture of someone who had decided, somewhere below the level of thought, that this was a safe place to put his hand. Ilya looked at it. He had met a lot of people in bars. The number was not something he tracked, but it was not small. He had not been thinking about any of their collarbone freckle counts four months later. He had not been thinking about any of them at all.

This is the same as the others, he thought.

He was aware this was no longer a conclusion. It had become a question he was asking with decreasing confidence, and at some point, he wasn't sure when, the question had started to sound like the thing itself. Outside, a siren moved through the city and faded. He lay still and let the hours pass and thought about fixed points, and the difference between moving toward something and simply not being able to stop.

Chapter End Notes

Hey hey, thanks as always for reading. I am taking a short break from uploading to head to the frozen wilderness for a week, so it will probably be two weeks until my next upload. See you soon!

Thank you for the kind comments. They make my week!

Chapter 8: Tuna Melt

Chapter Summary

Montreal, December.
Shane makes two mistakes before the puck even drops. Only one of them was wrong.

Chapter Notes

There was always going to be a tuna meltdown.

We're also going in un-beta'd this week. I'll give it another look with fresh eyes later, but I apologize if there's anything off. I was impatient in getting things updated.

The text came three days before the game, late, while Shane was reviewing tape in a Pittsburgh hotel room.

Montreal. Tell me you are not thinking about it.

Shane had put the phone face down and left it there until morning. Boston at Montreal. He had known about the assignment for two weeks.  He had not slept properly since he saw it. The morning of the game, he ran eight miles along the canal before the city woke up, his breath coming in white bursts, his bad ankle carrying him without complaint like it always did. When he got back, he stood in the shower for twenty minutes and then opened the database and watched Rozanov clips until he had catalogued every version of the elbow, the hip check, the forecheck angle that looked clean until it wasn't. He logged each one in the careful, clinical part of his brain that still functioned like the official he had trained to become.

Another text. 

I am at the Fairmont. Room 412. You could come now.

Shane sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it. He thought about Pittsburgh and Chicago and the quarterly grade and Hayden's careful face in the corridor in Boston. He thought about the tone Ilya had said, still eleven in the dark of the Chicago hotel, like a man reciting something he'd memorized without meaning to. He should not go. Before a game? He picked up his jacket.

Ilya opened the door before Shane had finished knocking. He was in track pants, no shirt. His feet bare, his hair still damp from the shower after his morning skate. He looked at Shane in the doorway with an expression that had none of the usual bravado or performance.

"This is a terrible idea," Shane said.

"Yes," Ilya agreed, and stepped back to let him in.

It was different from Chicago. Less urgent, less about overwriting anything. Ilya was unhurried in an almost unbearable way. He kept looking at Shane with that expression that had less performance in it than anything Shane knew how to handle, and Shane kept letting him look, which was its own kind of answer to a question neither of them had asked out loud. Afterward, they lay in the thin light coming through the curtains. Shane stared at the ceiling. Ilya was on his back beside him, close enough that Shane could feel the warmth of him without them touching, and for a while neither of them said anything. 

"You are not relaxed," Ilya said.

"I'm relaxed."

"You are staring at the ceiling like it has done something wrong."

Shane said nothing. Ilya rolled onto his side. Shane felt the mattress shift, felt the weight of the look without meeting it, and focused very deliberately on the ceiling. There was a small imperfection in the plaster near the light fixture. He found it and held onto it.

"Shane."

"Don't."

"I did not say anything."

"You were going to say I'll be fine."

A pause. "You will be fine."

"I missed the call in Boston," Shane said. It came out flat. Clinical. The tone he used when he was trying to keep a minor issue from becoming large. "I lied to the Director of Officiating about why I missed it. I committed professional perjury to protect you." He paused. "And now I'm in your hotel room in Montreal before I'm supposed to drop a puck at center ice and call your penalties." He stopped. "I am not going to be fine."

Ilya was quiet for a moment. "The Boston call—"

"I know what you're going to say."

"The tip was real enough to—"

"Ilya." Shane finally turned his head. "I know what you're going to say, and it doesn't help."

Ilya looked at him steadily. His expression was doing the thing it did when he had decided to let something be true instead of managing it. "No," he said. "It does not help." He reached out and put his hand flat on Shane's sternum. Not a gesture of comfort exactly. More of the gesture of someone taking a reading. "What do you want to do?"

"I want to go back in time and not get injured at nineteen. I want to be someone else, so when I went to your hotel room, it didn’t ruin my life."

Ilya's hand didn't move.

"I want to call a clean game," Shane said, quieter. "I want to call the cleanest game I've ever called, and I want it not to matter that you're in it."

Ilya’s face shifted. He looked at Shane with the flat, serious honesty he used for things he actually meant, the smirk entirely absent. "Then do that," he said. “Do not let anything go. Not even me."

Shane turned to look at him.

"Especially me," Ilya said. "If I give you anything, you call it. Every marginal play. You do not give a warning, you call it immediately, and you skate away." A pause. "Make it impossible to question."

"You're telling me how to referee you."

"I want you to relax." He said it without heat, just the plain delivery of a fact. "Much more fun to fuck you when you are not so tense. And I am telling you I will probably give you something to call, because I am me."

Shane looked at him. The full, focused honesty of it. The care underneath the practical language that Ilya was clearly not going to name, and Shane was not going to name, and both of them were simply going to leave sitting there on the mattress like a third person in the room.

"Okay," Shane said.

Ilya took his hand back. He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. His gold cross lay flat against his chest, glimmering in the light from the window. After a moment, he reached over, not looking at Shane, and laced his fingers through Shane's hand on the mattress between them. Just that. He didn't say anything. Shane looked at the joined hands for a moment, then back at the ceiling. The room was quiet for a while.

Then Ilya said, "Are you hungry?"

Shane looked at him, dubious.

"Food," Ilya clarified, with the mild expression of finding this clarification unnecessary. “Not dick.”

"I..." Shane thought about it. He had not eaten anything since a protein bar at six-thirty. "Yeah. Actually."

Ilya reached for his phone on the nightstand. He dialed room service without sitting up, the phone tucked between his ear and the pillow, and spent a moment in silence while presumably someone answered. Then he ordered. Shane caught the word omelet, and what sounded like egg white, and then a pause, and then something longer that Shane didn't catch, finished with a tone of mild satisfaction.

He hung up and put the phone back.

"Twenty minutes," he said.

"I'm not here when they knock," Shane said immediately.

Ilya looked at him. "I know."

"I mean it. I will be in the bathroom with the door closed."

"Shane." The mild expression again. "I know."

Shane looked at the ceiling. "What did you order?"

"Egg white omelet for you."

"Thank you."

"And a tuna melt for me."

Shane turned his head. "A tuna melt."

"Yes."

"You're ordering a tuna melt."

Ilya looked entirely untroubled by this. "They have it on the menu. I looked last night."

"You looked at the room service menu last night specifically for tuna melts."

"I always look," Ilya said, stating a fact about himself he had never once questioned. "Most places do not have them."

"There's a reason for that," Shane said.

"What reason?"

"They smell. They're messy. They're a lunch item at best and a bad idea at worst and no self-respecting hotel kitchen wants to be making them at—" Shane gestured vaguely at the window, "—whatever time it currently is."

"Eleven fourteen," Ilya said.

"Exactly."

"This is why they are rare," Ilya said patiently, as though Shane had just proved his point for him. "Something that is difficult to find is worth ordering when you find it." He got up out of bed, pulling on his track pants - no underwear, Shane noticed. He grabbed a Coke from the minifridge. "Also I like them. Ginger ale, right?"

"You're going to smell like tuna for a three o'clock skate. And yeah, that’s great, thanks."

"I skate next to Marleau. He smells like a gym bag left in a car. Nobody will notice."

Shane looked at him for a moment. Then he looked at the ceiling. He could feel the gravitational pull of an argument he had already lost, which was its own kind of information about the last four months. "Fine," he said. "Order the tuna melt."

"I already did," Ilya said.

When the knock came, Shane was in the bathroom with the door pulled shut, sitting on the toilet lid. He listened to the brief exchange at the door, the soft sound of the tray being set down, and the door closing again. He waited another minute and came out.

Ilya had moved the tray to the small table by the window. Two plates. Shane's egg white omelet was neat, pale, and completely inoffensive on one side. On the other side, Ilya's tuna melt was on toasted bread with melted cheese and, yes, an immediate, assertive smell that filled approximately a third of the hotel room.

Shane sat down. He looked at the tuna melt. He looked at Ilya, who was already pulling his chair in, rubbing his hands together like a cartoon character about to dig into a feast. 

"You're really doing this," Shane said.

"Sit down, Hollander."

Shane sat. He ate his egg white omelet, which was fine, perfectly fine, exactly what it was supposed to be. Across the table, Ilya ate his tuna melt with evident and unhurried satisfaction. The room smelled like a deli, and the grey December Montreal sat outside the window, and it was so profoundly strange that Shane had to look at his plate for a moment to collect himself.

"You head to Toronto after this road swing?" Ilya asked. The same tone as asking about the weather. As if he didn't know the answer, or as if knowing it was just a thing that had happened, unremarkable.

Shane looked at him across the table. "How do you know my schedule?"

Ilya picked up his coffee. "I pay attention."

Shane looked at his omelet. He thought about the forum threads. They played in his mind constantly. The geography of an NHL schedule charted in hookups, Boston and New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. He thought about the economy of Ilya's attention, which he had catalogued and returned to as a known mechanism, a feature not a distinction, and which was currently sitting across a hotel table from him, eating a tuna melt and asking about his schedule because he had paid attention to it. Four hundred likes on a comment. He makes you feel like the only person in the room.

"Toronto," Shane said. "Then home for a few days. You?"

"California swing. Then back east." A pause. "We will not see each other again until the end of January, probably."

Shane looked at him. Ilya was looking at the window. He said it how he said everything he actually meant, the performance stripped out of it, just the plain fact lying there on the table.

"I know," Shane said.

Ilya looked at him then. His face moved, brief and unguarded, and then he picked up the last piece of his tuna melt and the moment closed.

Shane finished his omelet. He pushed his plate back and drank the rest of his ginger ale. He looked at the grey Montreal morning through the window, and thought about January, and the stretch of the weeks between now and then, and the feeling of the last four months. How it had started as a bad decision and had kept being a bad decision and had somewhere along the way become a bad decision he was counting the days toward.

He thought about Hayden. Are you sleeping? Eating? The careful face of someone trying to be a good friend and unsure how. He should go. He had two hours before he needed to be at Centre Bell. He should go back to his hotel and review his notes and arrive early and be the professional he had spent a decade becoming.

He looked at Ilya across the small table. Ilya looked back. The easy, unhurried patience of him, not pushing, just present. Shane stood up. He reached across the table, took Ilya's Coke out of his hand and set it down. He pulled him up out of the chair and kissed him.

"You taste like tuna," Shane murmured against his mouth.

"You love it," Ilya said. Shane kissed him again deeply. Ilya made a low sound of surprise that became something else almost immediately, his hands finding Shane's hips, and Shane walked him backward toward the bed.

"We do not have time—" Ilya started.

"We have time," Shane said.

He pushed Ilya down onto the edge of the mattress and pulled his own t-shirt over his head, dropping it to the floor. He looked at Ilya. The broad shoulders and the bruises that were a permanent feature of a body that played like Ilya played, the necklace swinging forward as he leaned back on his hands and looked up at Shane with those dilated eyes. Shane held his gaze. He climbed onto the bed and swung his leg over Ilya's lap, settling his weight down, and felt Ilya's hands grip his thighs immediately, firm and certain. Shane reached between them and got his hand around both of them through the fabric and Ilya sucked in a breath.

"Shane—"

"Shut up," Shane said, pressing hard kisses all over Ilya’s face. Weeks. Weeks until he could do this again.

He worked them both free and took them in hand, and Ilya's head dropped back, his hands sliding from Shane's thighs to his hips, gripping hard. Shane watched his face. He did this, he had noticed, whenever he had the angle for it. He watched Ilya's face, how the composure stripped away layer by layer until there was nothing left. It was the most honest thing he had ever seen and he did not examine why he sought it out. He just did.

Ilya looked back up at him. His eyes were very dark, the hazel nearly gone. He was flushed, his breathing coming in the short deliberate bursts as he tried to hold back, and Shane tightened his grip and watched him abandon the effort.

"Da," Ilya rasped, his Russian thickening like it did when he had stopped managing himself. His hips pushed up into Shane's hand, once, involuntary. His fingers dug into Shane's hips. "Yes. Like this. Don't stop—"

Shane didn't stop. He braced himself with his free hand on Ilya's shoulder and worked them together. He watched Ilya's face come undone and felt the consuming satisfaction of being the one doing it. He loved that he could do this to Ilya. Ilya's hands were on him and his breath was hot against Shane's jaw. Shane felt his own edges start to blur, the carefully managed distance dissolving the way it always dissolved, faster than he intended, in ways he couldn't seem to stop. Ilya pulled him closer, forehead dropping to Shane's shoulder, and Shane felt him shuddering, close, the tension in his whole body cresting, and then:

"Are you going to come for me, Rozanov?"

Ilya's jaw tightened. His hands gripped harder. He looked up at Shane with his eyes blown dark and said, like a challenge and a surrender at the same time, "Fucking make me, Hollander."

Shane's hand went faster. Ilya went rigid and then shattered, pulling Shane over with him as the two of them spilled together across his chest. For a moment, there was nothing but the two of them breathing hard in the hotel room.

Then, with his forehead still against Shane's shoulder, Ilya said, "I don't want anyone else."

Shane pulled back, making eye contact with Ilya. There was something in those eyes. Ilya kissed him. Warm and tender and like nothing else mattered. 

It was too much. All of it was too much.

Shane went very still, pulling away again. Ilya lifted his head. His face shifted. Not panic, not quite, but the expression that comes after saying something that he had not planned to say and was now watching Shane process it in real time.

"Shane—"

Shane got off his lap. He did it quickly and without grace, his foot catching on the sheet, and he was standing on the other side of the bed, retrieving his shirt from the floor before Ilya had finished saying his name. His hands were not steady. He was very aware that his hands were not steady and he put his shirt on anyway, his back to the room.

"Shane." Ilya's voice was even. Careful.

"I have to go." Shane found his jacket on the chair. "I told Hayden I'd be back before noon."

"You did not tell Hayden anything."

"I have to review my notes."

"Shane. Look at me."

Shane looked at him. This was a mistake. Ilya was sitting on the edge of the bed, his chest still painted with the two of them and his expression was doing the thing it did when he had decided not to manage the room, and Shane's chest performed a complicated and unwelcome operation that he did not have time for today of all days.

"It was just—" Ilya started.

"Don't," Shane said.

Ilya held his gaze for a moment. Then, quietly, "Hollander."

Shane picked up his phone from the nightstand. He did not look at the bed. He did not look at Ilya. He moved to the door. Ilya didn't try to stop him. Shane heard the quiet creak of the mattress as Ilya lay back. The giving up of the room, the settling back into the bed alone. The sound followed him to the door. He thought about it for one full second and then opened the door.

"Hollander."

Shane stopped in the doorway. He did not turn around.

"Call everything," Ilya said. Quiet. Even. "Especially me."

Shane left.

In the elevator, he pressed his back against the wall. He looked at the floor panel and breathed. The building was very quiet. It was 12:31 PM. He had three hours and twenty-nine minutes before he needed to be at the arenal.

I don't want anyone else.

He looked at his hands. They were shaking. He pressed the lobby button and watched the floors descend and thought about the forum threads and the four hundred likes and the geography of an NHL schedule charted in hookups, Boston and New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, and thought about whether I don't want anyone else was something you said in the heat of it, a thing that came out in the dark and meant nothing in the light, the kind of sentence that evaporated by morning. Except it was the light. It wasn’t two in the morning after some drinks in a bar. It was the day. He was stone sober. They both were. 

He walked out into the December cold and kept walking until he had enough city between himself and the Fairmont to breathe properly. He found a bench near the canal and sat down and looked at the water and gave himself ten minutes. 

I don't want anyone else.

Ilya Rozanov made everyone feel like the only person in the room. Shane had read that, returned to the thought enough times it had worn smooth. He had been living inside it since Boston and it had been, if not comfortable, at least load-bearing. But the sentence had come after. Not in the heat of it, not said into the dark where you could claim the dark as cover. After, in the quiet of two people catching their breath, in the register Ilya used for things he actually meant. Shane did not know what to do with this information. Shane sat on the bench for eight of the ten minutes. Then he stood up and walked back to his hotel.

He stood in the shower for a long time. The water was too hot and he left it that way, standing in the steam with his face pressed against the tile and the morning running through his head in the unbidden loop his brain had decided to process whether he wanted it to or not. The tuna melt. I always look. The hand laced through his on the mattress, not looking at him. We will not see each other again until the end of January, probably. The way he'd said it to the window.

Shane turned the water off. He stood in the steam for a moment. Then he got dressed, ordered a coffee he didn't want from the hotel restaurant, and opened his laptop.

He had time. He reviewed his notes. He watched the morning's Rozanov clips again with the sound off, his face neutral, logging the tendencies and the tells and the angles how he had been trained to log them. He was very good at this. He had been good at it for years. He watched Ilya Rozanov's body on the ice and thought about nothing but where the puck would go next. When the two hours were up, he closed the laptop, put on his coat, and went to the arena. 

He arrived early. Already dressed before most of the crew had come through the door. He sat in the officials' room with the puck in his hand, turning it over, the cold rubber familiar and grounding, and stared at the middle distance and put everything that had happened before noon in a box and closed the lid. He would think about all those things later. He had been not looking at things for four months and he was very practiced at it. Later was a real place. He would go there. But not now.

Hayden found him at twenty past five. He came in and dropped his bag and sat down beside Shane without ceremony, with the easy calm of deciding to be present without making a production of it. He didn't say anything for a moment. Just reached into his bag and started working his laces. The fluorescent light was the same in every officials' room in every arena in the league. Shane had been staring at a lot of fluorescent light lately.

"You okay?" Hayden said.

"Fine," Shane said.

Hayden nodded. He kept working. He didn't push, didn't fill the silence with the cheerful ambient noise he was capable of when the situation called for it. He just sat there, and after a while Shane felt the muscles across his shoulders come down about half an inch. He was not certain Hayden hadn't engineered this deliberately, and it did not matter either way.

"Good crowd tonight," Hayden said eventually.

"Yeah," Shane said.

"Rozanov's on the league scoring lead."

"I know."

A pause. Hayden finished one skate and moved to the other. "So you've been doing your homework."

"I always do my homework," Shane said.

"You do," Hayden agreed. He tugged the lace tight and sat back. He looked at Shane then, briefly, with the expression he'd been wearing since Boston. The one that said he had assembled a picture and was deciding, with care, how much of it to name. He decided against naming any of it. "You'll be fine," he said instead.

He picked up his helmet and stood. Shane sat alone in the fluorescent light with the puck in his hand and the box closed and the lid on, and thought about nothing except the ice.

The arena was loud how Montreal was always loud, something older and more personal about it. Shane came through the tunnel and felt the cold of the ice hit his face and for a moment, thought of nothing at all. Just the mineral clarity of a surface waiting to be used. He pulled the feeling around himself like equipment. He was good at this. He had been good at this for years. He took his position at center for the opening drop.

The Raiders came out in their road whites. Marleau on the right side, his stride purposeful and blameless the way it always was. Carmichael. The defensive pairs. And then Rozanov, taking his place at the dot with the ease of someone returning somewhere familiar, his gloves loose, his stride unhurried, and Shane looked at the ice and dropped the puck and did not look at his face.

The first period was excellent. Shane called a tripping minor on Marleau at six minutes, clean and immediate, before the Montreal bench had finished drawing breath. He caught a hold in the neutral zone at eleven, a Boston defenseman's hand closing on a Metros’ winger's elbow, the kind of grab that disappeared in the speed of the game and usually required a second look. Shane didn't need a second look. He was running at double speed tonight, every receptor open, his body fully consumed with the work. 

At every faceoff, Ilya was there.

He didn't say anything at first. He took his position on the dot, chin down, visor throwing back the arena lights. Then, midway through the period, after Shane had called the interference and skated away before the Boston bench had time to organize a response, Ilya was there again.

"Very good call, Hollander." Low, below the crowd noise. "Very precise."

Shane looked at the ice.

"You are working very hard tonight." A pause, something almost admiring in it. "Is tiring, no?"

Shane moved to set for the next drop. Ilya circled him at the dot with a patient, unhurried arc, not like he had anywhere else to be. His skates were quiet on the ice. Everything about Rozanov's movement on the ice was quiet. Shane had noticed this over months of game tape and was noticing it now with the unwanted acuity of someone who had spent the morning watching him up close. He put the thought away.

Shane dropped the puck and skated away.

"Very impressive, the focus," Ilya said at the next faceoff, continuing a conversation Shane had not been participating in. "Very professional."

"Line up," Shane said.

A beat of silence that felt like the smirk. Ilya lined up. Shane did not look at him. He called the game and tracked the puck and stayed in position and told himself, at every interval when the noise dropped enough to think, that the box was closed and the lid was on and he was a professional. The box held. Barely. In the way a thing holds when too much has been packed into it and the pressure is already building against the lid. But it held.

The second period was tighter. Montreal pressing, the Raiders adjusting, the game taking on the grinding attritional quality of two well-coached teams who had done their homework on each other. Shane called it as he saw it, and what he saw was close and difficult and occasionally genuinely ambiguous, and he made the calls and absorbed the bench noise and kept his focus on the lines and the bodies and the puck.

He caught Ilya's voice during a scramble in the neutral zone, not directed at Shane, just his natural on-ice volume, a short instruction to Marleau that carried across the ice. Shane processed it as sound and moved to the position. He did not think about what that voice sounded like in a quiet hotel room. He was not thinking about that. Ilya took a two-minute minor for slashing at fourteen minutes. He skated to the box without argument and sat and looked at the ice and not at Shane. Shane set up for the power play and ran the familiar calculus of position and angle and did not look at the penalty box.

At the second intermission, Hayden filled his water bottle and said nothing about the game. Shane drank his water and watched the clock and thought about three periods being a finite and therefore survivable unit of time.

Late in the third, Boston down one, Ilya cycled hard into the left corner. The Montreal defenseman came off the boards. It was a tight space, two bodies competing for an outcome, and the hit was the ordinary violent currency of the game. Ilya came up with his elbow high.

Shane saw it. He saw the follow-through, the angle, the trajectory that didn't stop when it should have stopped. The defender's jaw caught the last two inches of a movement that had started as a puck battle and ended as something else. He had seen this in the database this morning, catalogued it in the careful clinical part of his brain. He knew it how you knew something you had studied until it was inside you forever.

He also knew, and this was the knowledge that lived somewhere deep in his mind, that the follow-through had been a choice. That Ilya's body knew exactly where the line was. That he had crossed it on purpose, in the third period of a game he had been playing with controlled and brilliant precision for fifty-two minutes, because he had said he would.

Especially me.

The defender stayed up. The crowd noise shifted, that sudden upswing. Shane's whistle was in his mouth before he finished making the decision. He knew what he was going to call. He knew what it cost. He called it, the sound filling the arena before the play had fully registered, cutting through eighteen thousand people with the flat authority of a thing that was simply true.

"Game misconduct. Number 81."

The crowd erupted.

Marleau was at his elbow in seconds. "Come on, ref, that's a two-minute play." Calibrated, reasonable, the voice of someone who had done this before and knew which arguments worked. "He was going for the puck, the defenseman ran into his follow-through—"

Shane looked at him. Not a long look. Just a sharp one. Marleau stopped mid-sentence. He held Shane's gaze for a moment. He had the expression of picking up a frequency he couldn't identify. He held it for one more second. Then he stepped back. Across the scrum, through the bodies and the noise and the Montreal crowd already on their feet, Ilya was watching him.

His expression was unreadable from this distance. But he had gone very still, not the stillness of anger, not the stillness of someone preparing an argument, the stillness of understanding the cost of this decision. He knew what Shane was doing. Shane held the look for exactly as long as it took to confirm that Ilya understood. The cost had been calculated and paid. That this was the only honest thing left that belonged entirely to Shane. Then he turned away to manage the fallout.

In his peripheral vision, Ilya skated to the tunnel. He didn't argue. He didn't look back. His stride was absolutely unchanged, the same fluid unhurried efficiency he brought to every movement on the ice, and the tunnel door opened and closed. The ice became a place where Ilya Rozanov wasn't, and Shane felt the difference in the back of his chest and skated to set up for the penalty and let the work of it cover everything else.

Boston killed the penalty. The game ended 3-1 for Montreal.

Shane was the last one off the ice. He stood at the tunnel entrance and looked at the center dot and the left boards where the follow-through had happened. He thought about nothing with the enormous, exhausting effort that comes after trying his hardest to think about nothing for three hours straight.

The officials' room afterward was filled with an impossible still silence. Shane sat in front of his stall and worked his skate laces with hands that were not quite steady. Hayden came in. He sat across from Shane and looked at him with that careful, precise expression he had been wearing since Boston.

"That was the cleanest game you've ever called," Hayden said.

Shane looked at his skates.

"The misconduct was right," Hayden continued. Evenly. "I had the same read. Angle, follow-through, intent. It was right."

"I know," Shane said.

A silence.

"I don’t think I would have made that call," Hayden said.

Shane looked up. Hayden held his gaze for a moment, not long, just enough. His face was not accusatory, not pitying. He picked up his bag. "Get some sleep," he said. "Real sleep."

He left. The door closed with the quiet click of a well-fitted thing. Shane sat alone in the fluorescent light. His skates were off. His whistle was on the shelf. The grade on this game would be very good. Every call would hold up. Every decision was defensible. He had called the game misconduct because it was the right call. Ilya had handed it to him deliberately, and accepting it was the only honest thing either of them had managed all day.

He picked up his phone. No messages. He had not expected one, and the absence of one was itself communication, in the private vocabulary they had been building without his consent since the first time he had stood in a bar in this city and decided to let go of the ledge. He opened the thread. Scrolled through it. The devil emoji, the Pittsburgh embellishment exchange, still eleven, I know, after the Boston game. Four months of a thing they were both maintaining didn't exist.

I don’t want anyone else.

He thought about Ilya's face in the half-second before Shane got off his lap. 

He typed: I was right to call it. 

He sent it. He put the phone face down on his knee and looked at the ceiling.

The phone buzzed.

I know.

Two words. No emoji. Shane read them twice and then a third time. He sat with the fluorescent light, the empty room, and the box in his mind, one he was going to have to open now. He thought about everything the two words were standing in for, and thought about everything he was going to have to stop pretending not to know.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you so much for the comments on the last chapter. Happy to be back from my little break. Happy to be posting again. Happy to have a little dialogue about the glory and disgusting nature of the tuna melt.

Not happy to finally drop the tuna melt chapter.

Thoughts? Feelings? Let me know!

Chapter 9: Severing

Chapter Summary

Shane has a speech prepared. He's been rehearsing it for months.

Chapter Notes

There is, in fact, no hockey in this chapter.

He didn't go back to the hotel right away. He sat on a bench in the empty arena, flipping a puck over and over again.

I was right to call it.

I know.

Two words that were doing the work of about forty, and he had read them eight times since sitting down, and they meant something different each time. He put the puck in his pocket.

He picked up his phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.

Loading dock. Ten minutes.

He stared at the message for a moment after sending it. He told himself it was because Ilya deserved an explanation. A real one, face to face, not four words in a text thread that had already said too much. He told himself he owed him that much. He was aware this was not the only reason.

He was going to end it. He had been telling himself this since Boston, through Chicago, through weeks, months of messages that had started careful and become something else, through this morning in the Fairmont with the tuna melt smell still faintly clinging to his jacket. He was going to say the words out loud in a real place to a real person, and then they would be true. That was the theory. He pulled on his coat and went.

The loading dock was behind the arena, concrete and cold, lit by a single overhead fixture that cast everything in the flat yellow of a space not designed to be looked at. Delivery bays on one side, a row of dumpsters on the other. The kind of space that existed purely to move things from one context to another and had no opinions about what those things were.

Ilya was already there. He was leaning against the wall beside the service entrance, changed out of his kit and into his suit, his hair damp from the post-game shower. He had his hands in his pockets. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the game. When he saw Shane coming through the door, he straightened, just slightly, and watched him approach with the expression of someone trying to understand something they hadn't been given enough information to comprehend yet.

Shane stopped a few feet away. The cold was immediate, a sharp contrast after the arena warmth, and he could see his own breath.

"You didn't have to come," Shane said.

"I did." Ilya looked at him steadily. 

A beat of silence. Somewhere down the alley, a door opened and closed. The city was doing its usual indifferent city things on the other side of the building. Shane had been rehearsing this. Not in the rote, clinical way he'd rehearsed the McInnis meeting, but in the ongoing, ambient way you rehearsed things you didn't want to say but knew you were going to have to. He had been rehearsing it for months if he was honest. In the car, in the shower. He had the logic of it. He had four months of evidence, a grade that would never fully recover, and a colleague who had looked at him tonight with the careful face of someone who had assembled a picture and was choosing, for now, not to describe it out loud. He had a game misconduct call that had been right, and Ilya had handed it to him deliberately. He had all of it. He started talking.

"Montreal was a mistake," he said. His voice came out flat and professional and he pressed into it. "Not just today or tonight. All of it. Every time I've been in a room with you, it's been a mistake. The risk. It's just too much. The missed call, my lineman isn't stupid, and the Director of Officiating who is going to look twice at every game I work with the Raiders for the rest of my life because of a single moment where I wasn't doing my job." He paused. "This is a stain. On both of us. On the sport. Every call I make in your games is going to be scrutinized, and I don't get to have bad nights the way other officials get to have bad nights, because my bad nights have some shitty narrative attached now." He looked at Ilya's face. Ilya was very still, listening with the focused, unhurried attention he brought to anything he took seriously. "I've been telling myself this is manageable. That we've been careful enough. But we haven't been careful. We've been lucky, and luck runs out, and when it does, we're fucked. Both of us."

He stopped again. He had more prepared. But Ilya was looking at him with an expression that was not anger and not argument and not the smirk. Shane could not meet his eyes if he was going to get through the next part.

"So this is the last time," Shane said. "I'm not–" he paused, taking a deep breath. Ilya's arm twitched, as if he was going to reach out to touch Shane, but he firmly crossed it in front of his body instead. "I'm not saying this because I want to. I'm saying it because it's the only way we both still have careers in five years. And I know you know that. You know it now. You gave me the misconduct call tonight because you know it. And I–I don't have anything without hockey." Shane's voice was tight. He hadn't meant that last part to sound so sad. So desperate.

He looked up. Ilya was watching him. A long moment passed.

"Say it like you mean it," Ilya said quietly.

Shane's jaw tightened. "I mean it."

"I don't think you do."

"I mean it, Ilya. I don't want to see you again."

Ilya looked at him for another moment. Then he stepped forward, closing the distance between them in two large strides. He took Shane's face in both hands. Not demanding, not grabbing. Just his palms, large, calloused, and warm against the cold of Shane's jaw, and he tilted Shane's face up and kissed him.

It was not a hotel room, nothing urgent or aggressive about it. It was slow and deliberate and thorough. His thumbs rested against Shane's cheekbones. His mouth moved like he had time, like there was no arena behind them and no city and no league, like the loading dock was just a place where two people were having a conversation that required more precision than words could manage. It made Shane feel like he was the only person in the world. He felt that terrifying liquid heat that threatened to dissolve every reason he had just given. He could have kissed him forever. No, no, no.

Shane gripped Ilya's wrists. He did not pull them away. He held on, his fingers closing around the bones of Ilya's forearms, and for thirty seconds he did not end anything. Then he stepped back.

"What the fuck?" Shane said. His voice broke on the last syllable, a small, structural failure he hadn't prepared for. "Someone could see. Anyone could see. Are you fucking insane?"

Ilya's hands fell. He looked at Shane for a long moment. His expression was very still. Not wounded exactly. It was something more contained than that, absorbing information he had been partially expecting and which had arrived, finally, in its confirmed form. He nodded once. A small, terrible acknowledgment. The kind that meant yes and I understand and something else that Shane didn't have a word for and couldn't look at directly.

He reached down and picked up his bag from where it sat against the wall. Shane hadn't even noticed it there. Ilya slung it over his shoulder, and he looked at Shane one more time, briefly, and then he turned and walked toward the far end of the loading dock. He pulled out his phone as he went, his thumb moving across the screen. He didn't look back. Shane heard the door at the far end open and close. A minute later, from somewhere around the front of the building, the sound of a car pulling away. 

Shane stood in the loading dock and listened to the engine sound until it was gone. The overhead light buzzed in the cold. Down the alley, a second door opened and closed. He stayed where he was for another minute, maybe two, the cold seeping through his coat into his bones. He had done it. This was what he told himself he wanted. He wanted to feel something that resembled relief. It didn't come. What came instead was the airless silence left behind after Rozanov had left. Just a loading dock in a city, indifferent.

He moved eventually. His feet decided before his brain had fully engaged, carrying him through the service entrance and back into the building and toward the elevator. He pressed the button for his floor. The doors closed. He watched himself in the mirrored panel, his face pale and composed under the fluorescent light, collar straight, coat buttoned. He looked like the right person. He was very good at looking like the right person.

His phone was in his hand. He wasn't sure when he'd taken it out. The thread was open, like it was always open now, the two words sitting at the bottom of it. He looked at them one more time.

I know.

He went to Ilya's contact. His thumb hovered for a moment, like it had hovered in the hotel garden in Boston, like it had been hovering for four months over various actions he kept not taking.

He blocked the number. It took three tries. His hands would not stop shaking.

He sat on the hotel bed in his coat until four in the morning. He didn't take the coat off. It felt like removing it would mean deciding something about whether this was a temporary stop or whether he was actually here, in this room, in this city, in the version of the night where he had done what he'd done, and he wasn't ready to decide that. So he sat on the edge of the mattress with his coat on and his bag still by the door and looked at the wall.

He was aware of the things he had lost. Not the career risk, which was still present and unchanged, and would still be there in the morning. It was the pieces that would only be memories in the end. The way Ilya texted in bursts of four words, no punctuation. The ice machine, pressing the ice to his injured elbow. Moonlight spilling in the windows of a shared hotel room. The tuna melt.

He got up at four-fifteen and went to the bathroom and ran cold water over his wrists how he'd done as a teenager before important games, an old coping mechanism he'd mostly forgotten, when his nerves were getting the better of him and he needed to slow down. He looked at himself in the mirror for a while. He went back and sat on the bed. He did not sleep.

At six, his phone lit up with the alarm he'd set before the game. He turned it off. He sat with the grey light coming through the curtains and felt the specific, quiet weight of having done the right thing for the right reasons, which felt, this morning, almost indistinguishable from having done something he was not going to recover from quickly.

He picked up his phone. The thread was gone from the recent list, which was what blocking a number did. He knew this. He had known it would do this. He sat with the absence of it for a moment. Then he opened his contacts and looked at the empty space where Sasha had been saved since the morning after Montreal, four months and several cities ago, when he had stood in a hotel lobby and typed the name because he hadn't known the real one yet. He put the phone face down on the pillow.

He got up. He made himself go outside, because the room was too quiet and the phone was face down and he needed to be somewhere, anywhere, that didn't remind him of Rozanov. Hayden had asked him twice in two weeks if he was eating, so he was going to eat. That was the logic he used to get his shoes on.  

It was frigid outside, but the cold's sharp clarity made him feel focused and renewed. It gave him something to think about that wasn't Ilya. He walked a few blocks until he found a coffee shop on the corner. It had steamed-up windows and a line forming, half the clientele looked like college kids still running on the fumes from last night, and the other half, professionals in their business clothes. He ordered a coffee and a far too expensive avocado toast that he didn't particularly want and turned around to find the space completely full.

Every table was occupied. He stood there with his tray like an idiot. 

"You can sit here, if you want."

The woman at the nearest table was gesturing at the empty chair across from her without looking up from her laptop. Shane thought for a fraction of a second about it. She looked nice enough. He could share a table with her for a bit. Red hair pulled into a clip, a coffee that looked like it had been there for a while and a chocolate muffin with a bite out of it. She had that slightly harassed energy of someone on a deadline.

"Thanks," Shane replied, sinking into the chair across from her.

She glanced up briefly to acknowledge his presence before heading back to her screen. He nibbled at his toast. The coffee was good. He hadn't realized how badly he needed to be somewhere with other people until he was somewhere that had other people.

"Hockey fan?" she said, without looking up. 

He looked at her. How did she know that? "What?"

She nodded at his jacket, where his officials' credentials were still clipped to the zipper. He'd forgotten about that. He unclipped it and slid it into his pocket.

"Sort of a professional requirement," he said. "But yeah."

That made her look at him properly. She had round blue eyes that took inventory of him. "Did you work the game last night?"

"I did."

"Tough one to call." She said it neutrally, not a complaint so much as an observation. "The misconduct in the third. I had people in my ear about that one."

Shane went still. "You cover hockey?"

"Sports broadcasting." She extended her hand across the table. "Rose Landry, TSN." Shane suddenly knew why she looked so familiar. He didn't recognize her off-camera, out of context, without a microphone glued to her hand. 

He shook it. "Shane Hollander, official."

Something shifted in her expression. Recognition without the face to go with it. The look of placing a name from a totally different context. "Huh. You're cute. Cuter than I would have guessed, refs are usually–" she clapped her mouth shut suddenly. "I'm talking too much."

"I don't mind. I know what refs usually look like," Shane replied.

"No offense. Really. None."

"None taken."

She picked up her long-cold coffee. "The call was right, for what it's worth. I watched the replay four times."

"It was right," Shane agreed.

"You don't sound thrilled about that."

"Just tired," Shane said.

She looked at him over the rim of her cup with the measured attention that comes with a career around reading people. It was a warmer version of the usual scrutiny than he had expected. It looked like genuine curiosity. She looked away, back to her laptop. "Long night?"

"Long few months," he said. He hadn't intended to say anything like that. 

She didn't push it. She typed something, frowned at the screen, then deleted it. He ate the rest of his toast. The coffee shop filled up a little more around them, someone dragging a chair over from another table, a college student with a backpack squeezing past.

"Can I ask you something?" she asked.

"Shoot," he said.

"Do you actually like it? Officiating?" She glanced at him. "I've interviewed a lot of refs over the years, and most of them either love it or just barely tolerate it."

Shane thought about it. About the puck in his pocket, and the mineral cold of the ice last night, and how the game had narrowed to something clean and manageable and entirely his for three hours. "Yeah," he said. "I like it."

"Which one? Love it or tolerate it?"

"Love it? Maybe?"

She smiled at that. It was a good smile, immediate and real. "Good," she said. "The tolerators always come across on camera." He laughed and felt some tight band across his chest loosen a fraction. She asked him something else, the Pacific division schedule, whether he had a preference for the buildings, and he answered. She had opinions about the buildings, strong ones delivered with the authority of someone who had been in all of them many times, and they talked for twenty minutes like you talked to a stranger in a coffee shop when everything else was too much, effortlessly, about nothing that mattered.

At some point, she closed her laptop.

"I have a segment at nine," she said, gathering her things. She paused, pulling on her coat — expensive, well-cut, the kind that belonged to someone who traveled constantly and had figured out how to look put-together in every city. "I'm doing a piece on officiating culture in the new year. The league's been stonewalling me for six months." She said it without rancor, just the plain statement of someone used to doors being closed and finding other doors. "Would you ever talk on the record?"

Shane looked at her. "Probably not," he answered honestly.

"Off the record?"

He considered it. She had spent twenty minutes asking him questions and actually listening to the answers, which was rarer than it should have been. "Maybe," he said.

She pulled out her phone. "Give me your number. No pressure. If you ever want to talk hockey with someone who actually understands it, I'm easy to reach." A beat. "Also if you want someone to complain to who won't tell anyone. I'm good at that too."

He took the phone and typed in his number. She sent him a text immediately, just her name, no message, so he'd have hers.

"Rose Landry," he said, reading it back.

"In case you forget," she said, already turning toward the door. She wrapped her scarf with the brisk efficiency of someone who had grown up somewhere cold and never lost the habit. She paused with her hand on the back of her chair, looking at him with the appraising, direct attention that had been making athletes spill their secrets on camera for years. "You're going to be okay, you know," she said. It wasn't a platitude. It sounded like a fact. "Whatever those long few months were." Shane looked at her and didn't respond. "Just my read," she said, and left.

He watched her go and sat for another few minutes with the dregs of his coffee and the noise of the shop around him. He felt, not better exactly, but less alone inside whatever this morning was. Like there was still a world out here that had nothing to do with loading docks and quarterly grades and the weight of a nod he couldn't stop replaying. He looked at his phone. Rose Landry. He saved the contact and put it in his pocket. He left a decent tip and went back to the hotel to pack.

Hayden was already at the gate, two coffees, an expression that had something careful in it that Shane did not address. They sat together in the plastic chairs and did not talk about hockey for forty minutes. On the plane, Shane opened his tablet and pulled up the grading review software and actually read it this time. He made notes. He was thorough and clinical and focused, the way he had been trained to be. He was good at this. He was going to keep being good at it. That was what the last eight years were for. That was what any of this was for.

He closed the software. Outside the oval window, Montreal disappeared under clouds. He was not going to look at his phone for the rest of the flight.

He looked at it three times.

Chapter End Notes

I have been dreading writing this chapter since approximately chapter 2, which is when I knew it was coming. I also feel like writing fics makes me realize I have no idea how to describe what color anyone's hair is. Who counts as a blond(e)? I'll never know.

Thanks for reading, please leave me a comment if you want to...I'll read it, and I'm always interested in what you see or have questions about.

See you soon! Probably an update coming midweek next week.

Chapter 10: Coping

Chapter Summary

Ilya knows what to do with anger. He takes it to the ice, takes it to the bar, takes it to bed with women who have dark hair and the wrong number of freckles.

Chapter Notes

Content Warnings

This chapter and next are the heaviest, I think. Content warning for unhealthy coping methods in the form of alcohol and drug abuse. It's not particularly graphic, but take care of yourself if this is a sensitive subject.

Ilya is furious. Angry did not seem like a sufficient word. But it’s fine. He knows what to do with anger. He takes it to practice, putting every last ounce of it into his skating. Carmichael pulls Marleau aside after and says something Marleau won’t repeat to him which means it must be a compliment. He does not think about Shane Hollander except when he decides to, which he has determined must be never.

He goes home. He eats. He sleeps without difficulty. He has been angry and understands what that looks like, how to carry it without spilling over. Shane Hollander called off whatever this was and Ilya was allowed to be angry about it. How dare Shane decide what is best for them, without consulting him. He is angry about it, but cleanly, without the drama. The way you’re angry at someone who checks you during a game. Noted, moved through.

He plays Ottawa on Thursday and scores twice and takes two roughing minors that no one mentions to him because the team kills both penalties and wins by three. He hits a defenseman into the boards in the second period with more force than strictly required and stands over him for just a moment too long. It wasn’t meant to be threatening, just present, and the bench went far too quiet. Ilya didn’t care. He went back to the dot and won the next faceoff. 

After, a reporter asks him what's changed this season and Ilya says everything is clicking in the flat, pleasant way he has been saying things to reporters his entire career. He doesn’t mention the roughing. Neither does the reporter. He showers. He goes home. He eats. He sleeps.

He does this for two weeks. It is not a problem. It is fuel. He is one of the best players in the league and he is running on something clean and cold and he can feel it in his soul when he’s on the ice, in the moment of vision he has on everyone else, in the way the game is slowing down to a speed he can read like text. Carmichael tells Marleau the team hasn't seen skating like this in five years. Marleau tells Ilya over dinner and Ilya says the conditioning has been good and eats his steak and does not mention Shane Hollander, who is not relevant to this conversation. 

Ilya watched Columbus play Buffalo on a Tuesday night, sitting in front of the warm glow of his television. He was due to play them Thursday and wanted to get better information on the left wing’s backhand. And there’s Shane Hollander. Ilya watches the first period. He watches Shane sprint the line on an icing call, full commitment. The call is correct. He’s fast, and this call took a lot of nerve. Ilya replays it three times. He closes the laptop. Opens it again. He watches the rest of the game and doesn’t look at the left wing even once.

He picks up his phone. He types Good call in Columbus. Deletes it. He sits with the phone for a moment. He does not like sitting with things. 

He dials the number. 

Your call could not be completed as dialed. 

He checks their thread. The read receipts are gone. The delivery confirmation is gone. What the fuck. Shane Hollander blocked his number. 

He slams his phone down on the coffee table. He had wanted, he realized, a fight. He had been carrying these weeks of anger like something he was owed. Something Shane would eventually have to receive. And Shane had backed out of the fight. The block is Shane deciding that they never existed. Ilya didn’t exist. The hotel rooms and the mornings and the squeeze of him around Ilya’s cock. All of it never existed. It was all finished. Gone. Packed away and moved on. Ilya goes to bed. He is still furious.

But he keeps pulling up the footage. He tells himself it is a professional habit. He watches everything, always has. His preparation is part of what keeps him at this level. If he stops, he won’t be the best anymore. This is not unusual behavior for a man with his career statistics. He watches Shane work a game in Pittsburgh. Then Philadelphia. Then the neutral site game in Seattle where the ice is bad. Shane is on it for three hours and Ilya can see, in the set of his shoulders at the end of the third, that the ankle is hurting. He should ice it. It is not Ilya’s concern. But has watched Shane's ankle long enough to know what carrying it looks like versus what managing it looks like. 

He is not keeping a record. He is not doing anything. He is watching game footage, which is his job, and Shane Hollander is sometimes in the game footage, which is just incidental and he is certainly not seeking out that footage. 

At practice he is exceptional. The rookies have started giving him a wider berth, not out of deference. He's always commanded deference, but how you give space to something moving faster than you can predict is new. Carmichael has stopped commenting on his performance and started just watching, which Ilya recognizes as a particular kind of professional respect. He is running the best hockey of his life on something he is choosing not to examine closely. The system is working. He goes home and watches the footage and goes to bed.

Marleau skates beside him after Thursday's practice, matching his pace on the cooldown lap without being asked. He doesn't say anything for half the rink.

And then, "The Vancouver game. The hit on their third-line center."

"Was clean."

"It was legal," Marleau says. "That is not the same thing."

Ilya finishes the lap. "I am fine, Marley."

Marleau looks at him with the expression he has been wearing since Ottawa, the one that means he has assembled more of the picture than Ilya has shown him. "Okay," he says. Just that. He peels off toward the tunnel and doesn't push. He is counting, though. Ilya knows this. He has always known when Marleau is counting.

The anger starts going thin around week four. He can feel it happening like you feel a cold front moving through. It’s not the cold itself yet, just the pressure change, the air shifting. He is still sharp at practice, still producing, but he comes home on a Wednesday night and sits on the couch and realizes he is not angry anymore, and what is beneath the anger is something terrifying.

It’s the hotel room going pale at five in the morning. Shane breathing slow beside him, one arm loose across Ilya's chest, his comfortable stillness. Not performed, not managed, just genuinely at rest in a way Ilya had not seen him be at rest before. Ilya had lain there and counted eleven freckles on his right collarbone because there was nothing else he wanted to do and the number had apparently taken up permanent residence in his skull. It is Shane's voice saying I know what this is in a tone that meant he had decided to do it anyway. It is the look on his face in the loading dock. Not the nod, but the second before the nod, when something moved through his expression that Ilya had seen and then watched him close off, a door swinging shut from the inside. It is the blocked number.

Ilya sits on his couch in the dark for a while, staring upwards. The ceiling is just a ceiling. He is not, at this moment, in any danger. He is sitting in a dark room missing something he really only felt like he owned for one night and probably never fully understood. This is a normal human experience, and he is going to be fine. He has the tools. He spent seven months in the woods in Minnesota getting the tools. He gets up, gets his coat, and goes out.

He meets her at a bar off Boylston. Dark hair, a soft laugh. A scatter of freckles across her collarbone above the neckline of her dress. She knows who he is and doesn’t care what that means. They talk for over an hour. She follows hockey and has opinions, real ones, not performed for his benefit. Under different circumstances, he might find her really, truly interesting. But she’s not Shane. He is attentive. He is present. He laughs at the right time. He is charming the way he always is when he wants something. 

In his bed, he is deliberate with her. Turning her just right so the freckles are visible in the low light. He puts his mouth there, but the sound she makes is all wrong. The wrong tone in the wrong voice, and he moves on. He takes what he came for and she is generous and willing and it is, in the very technical sense, everything he wanted. He made sure she had a good time. A good story to tell her friends. And it was a good time. But it wasn’t enough. Afterward, he lay in the dark. His first thought on the loading dock had been that he would never get to count the freckles again. He calls her a car.

He does this three more times over the following two weeks. He is methodical. The bar, the right kind of attention, dark hair where he can find it, freckles where he can find them. None of them is quite right. None of them has the right number or arrangement, none of them makes the specific sound Shane made at five in the morning when Ilya had pressed his mouth to the eleven freckles on his right collarbone and Shane had laughed, low and private, like it surprised him. Ilya takes what each of them offers and lies in the dark after and the ceiling is always just a ceiling, and he is always thinking about Montreal. He knows what he is doing. He does it anyway, because the alternative is lying in the dark alone.

Marleau starts inviting him to dinner in week five. Ilya goes twice, which felt like the right amount. At the table, he is good company. Answering the questions he wants to, deflecting those he doesn’t. Marleau lets himself be deflected. He watches Ilya across the table with the patient, unhurried attention of a man who has decided not to say the thing he's noticed yet and is taking notes in the meantime.

He goes home after the second dinner and pulls up the Nashville game. Shane is working the line through three periods on an ankle that Ilya can tell is bothering him. Shane doesn't let it into his calls. His calls are crisp, decisive. But the stride gives it away. Or at least it gives it away when you’re paying the kind of attention Ilya is paying. He watches the final five minutes twice. He closes the laptop. He pours two fingers of vodka and sits with it until it's warm and then pours it down the sink and goes to bed. This is management. He knows what management looks like. He has been doing this for years.

The women stop working in week six. He goes out twice more and both times sits at the bar and starts the opening movements. Both times finds he cannot finish them. Not for any moral reason. Something more useless than that. He sits there next to a beautiful woman. She is laughing and he is watching her laugh. So beautiful and funny, exactly what he likes. But his mind is in a hotel in Chicago today. Ilya pays the tab. He goes home alone. He pours three fingers. He watches the footage until his eyes ache. He closes the laptop and lies in the dark and the ceiling is louder than it was last week.

He recognizes the frequency. He is not alarmed. He has the tools. His counselor in Minnesota had a word for this period. The window. The time after you removed the thing you had been using to cope, before you had built anything to replace it. Ilya had not called his counselor since Montreal. He had been meaning to. He had picked up the phone twice and put it down. He was not sure what he would say. I was using a man to keep the noise quiet and now he is gone and I do not know what to do with myself was true but felt insufficient. He will call next week. The week after. Maybe.

He goes to practice in the morning and is first on the ice and last off. In the afternoon, Ilya watches the Denver game and tracks Shane's ankle through three periods and feels something he cannot name move through his chest, heavy and persistent, nothing like the clean anger he started with. He pours four fingers. The ceiling goes quieter. He sleeps. He is managing. The cost is higher every day, but it’s holding. It is holding.

Week seven is when he starts to feel it going. Not dramatically. Not how it went before he ended up in Duluth. That was a fast, total slide he hadn't seen coming because he'd been too inside it to see anything. This is slower, and he can see it, which he tells himself is the difference. Seeing it means controlling it. He is still going to practice. He is still producing. He is eating and sleeping and showing up for every obligation on the schedule. From the outside he is, objectively, fine. His stat line is the best of his career. The team is winning. Nobody who matters can see what the nights are costing.

But he is going through half a bottle of vodka on a good night and three-quarters of a bottle on a bad night, which is a different number than his very strict two-drink limit and he knows it. He is coming home and sitting in the dark for lengths of time he doesn't account for. He is pulling up footage he has already watched three times and watching it again not because he is learning anything but because Shane is in it and it is the closest thing available to the actual thing, which is not available, which has been blocked from him forever. He is lying in the dark thinking about freckles with a level of involuntary detail that would embarrass him if there were anyone to be embarrassed in front of, and there is no one, which is its own problem.

He goes to the bar off Boylston on a Thursday and sits there for an hour and drinks two drinks and goes home alone. He is not interested. He is tired of the feeling of failure from failing to find what he’s looking for. But what he’s looking for is not there, and will never be there. He pours a heavy drink and watches the footage and the Nashville game comes up in the queue and he watches Shane's ankle carry him through the third period again and thinks about a man who decided a long time ago that the thing he loves is worth what it costs him, and feels the floor shift under him in a way that no amount of anything has ever resolved. He pours another drink.

He knows what he is doing. He is not out of control. He is having a difficult month, which is a normal human experience, and he has the tools, and the tools include knowing when you're in trouble and he is not in trouble, he is in a difficult month, and there is a difference. He falls asleep on the couch at two in the morning with the laptop open.

Week eight, he stops pretending it’s working. He doesn't decide to stop pretending. It just becomes true. He wakes up on the couch on a Monday and the laptop is open to a paused frame of the Nashville game. Shane mid-stride, third period, the ankle at its worst. There is an empty bottle on the coffee table that was not empty when he sat down, and his mouth tastes gritty. 

He showers. He goes to practice. He is first on the ice. He scores on a wrist shot from the circle that the whole bench reacts to before it's in the net, and he skates back to position and feels nothing. He is performing excellence on a delay, some automatic system running the hockey while the rest of him is elsewhere. Nobody can tell. This is the useful thing about being so good at something for long enough. The competence becomes structural, load-bearing. It holds up even when the person inside it is not. He goes home. He sits on the couch in his coat for twenty minutes without taking it off.

Marleau texts about dinner. He says no. Marleau texts the next day. He says no again, and the day after that, and after the fourth no Marleau stops texting about dinner and starts texting just to check in. Small, undemanding things that don't require anything from Ilya except a response, and Ilya responds to all of them, one or two words, because Marleau has earned that much and Ilya is not, whatever else is true, going to disappear on the person who has never once disappeared on him. But he doesn't go to dinner.

He is going through a bottle every day now. He buys them at different places so no single clerk is keeping count. This is a behavior with a name, and he names it to himself in the dark, like his counselor taught him to. The first of twelve steps. He names it and opens another bottle anyway, because the ceiling is very loud and the bottle makes it quieter and he is going to deal with this properly next week, after Tampa, after he has slept enough to think clearly. He just needs to get through Tampa. Then he’ll have a week off and can reset himself. 

He doesn't mean to watch it. He has the pregame coverage on in the background, sound low, not paying attention. He’s eating standing up at the kitchen counter how he does now because sitting at the table feels like something a person with a functioning life does. Rose Landry appears on screen with a guest and Ilya's eyes go to it before his brain does. It happens before he can make a decision about what he's going to do with his face or his body or the fork in his hand.

Shane is sitting across from her. Somewhere with low light and good furniture, not a rink or a typical interview setup. It’s the kind of production choice that signals this is a conversation. Shane is in a grey shirt with the collar loose and he looks relaxed in a way Ilya only rarely got to see him. He is comfortable. Rose is leaning forward slightly with her chin in her hand and saying something that makes Shane laugh. Not the polite laugh. The real one. That short, unguarded laugh that Ilya heard twice in Montreal and has been trying to stop thinking about every day for months. Ilya puts the fork down.

Rose says something else and Shane tilts his head and responds. She laughs this time, and there is something in the way she looks at him that has nothing to do with journalism. Ilya has spent enough time in enough rooms to know the difference between a woman who finds a man professionally compelling and a woman who has been in his bed. It is not a complicated read. It lives in the angle of her body toward his. The attention she’s paying him. How she touches his forearm once, briefly, when she's making a point. It’s not flirtatious, too comfortable for flirtatious, the touch of someone who has already crossed every distance and is now simply at home there. Shane lets her.

The thought rears its head, ugly and brutal. He’s fucking her. Someone else has gotten to see Shane the way only I should be able to. She has gotten to count his freckles and hear the sigh he makes when he comes.

And that is the thing. That is the thing Ilya cannot look away from. Shane sitting in the soft ambient lighting looking back at Rose Landry. He’s giving her the easy, open attention that Ilya wanted. That he had that morning in Montreal and then didn’t eight hours later. Ilya knows what Shane sounds like when that openness goes all the way down. He knows exactly what Rose Landry is hearing at night in whatever room she has access to, which is apparently every room, Shane’s room. Has she gotten to go to his home? What would Ilya give to get to be in Shane Hollander’s home? In his bed? Rose gets to keep him. That's what the forearm touch means. She gets to keep all of it. Ilya turns the television off.

He stands in the kitchen in silence for a long time. He is holding the remote and his hand is very still. He is thinking about nothing, carefully, on purpose. Deliberately, absolutely nothing. He is not going to do anything about this. There is nothing to do. Shane made all the decisions. Shane took him to the loading dock and blocked his number and found someone better suited to him, someone whose life does not require hiding, someone who gets to sit across from him in low light and touch his forearm and hear every sound Ilya heard in that hotel room and more. This is correct. This is the right outcome. This is what is right. This is the right choice. He knows it is the right choice, logically. But it is killing him.

He goes to the cabinet and looks at what's left in the bottle, which is not enough, and he thinks about going out to get another one. He thinks about Marleau's number in his phone, and the specific cost of what comes next, which he knows, which he has always known. He stands there long enough that the city outside goes fully dark. 

The envelope is on the counter. It has been there since Thursday. He carried it inside the day it arrived and set it on the kitchen counter, and hasn’t touched it since. But it’s been waiting. He knows what’s in the envelope. Someone at the bar knows someone. Someone can get him what he needs. Cash passes hands, and an envelope arrives. 

He picks it up, turning it over in his hands. He thinks about Minnesota. The pine trees, the frozen ground, the weight of seven months of absolute boredom that happens when a team of counselors demand you rebuild yourself from the inside out. The parts the team's press release doesn't mention. He thinks about his counselor's voice saying you'll know when you're in trouble and you'll have a choice, and the choice is everything. He thinks about the bad night in 2022 and flushing the rest of the pills before morning and deciding not to count that night.

He thinks about eleven freckles on a right collarbone that belong, apparently, to someone else's mouth now. 

He opens the envelope.

Just one, standing in the kitchen at midnight, his skull going quiet. The grinding frequency he has been carrying for two months stops, like a sound you didn't know was constant until it isn't. He stands in the dark kitchen and breathes and thinks, it’s just through the weekend. Just until I've slept. Just enough to get level.

He misses the team flight to Tampa on Saturday morning.

Chapter End Notes

Big ol' doozy to write this one. Things get worse before they get better.
Is this when I promise that there's a happy(ish) ending on the way?

Thanks for reading. I really, truly appreciate it. Comments/feedback always welcome.

Chapter 11: Marley

Chapter Summary

Ilya is pretty sure this is rock bottom. Who he really wants with him is Shane, but who he gets is Cliff Marleau.

Chapter Notes

Typos are all my own, and I get a little over-zealous with the em dash and am not going to apologize for that.

Content Warnings

Ilya's coming off a bad stretch of days that could have ended very poorly. He's in not-too-graphic rough shape this chapter. It's mostly just two dudes being bros. Marleau is a good friend. Ilya discusses his mother's death and his own struggles with substance abuse.

Marleau had a key. He used it at noon on Saturday when his sixth call went unanswered.

The apartment was dark. Blackout curtains, which Ilya never closed. That was the first thing. The second thing was the smell. Stale air and something sour underneath it, the smell of a place where someone had been sick and the windows hadn't been opened after. Marleau moved through the living room without turning on lights, past the kitchen counter where an envelope sat torn open, past a glass on the coffee table that had been knocked over and left, the water long dried into the rug. He found Ilya on the bathroom floor, back against the tub, legs out in front of him at the loose angle of a body that had lost the ability to decide where its limbs went. There was dried vomit on the front of his shirt. He was still in the clothes he had been wearing on Monday.

"Ilya." Marleau crouched down fast, expecting the worst. Ilya's eyes were closed. "Ilya." He put two fingers to his throat. He waited. It was there. Slow, too slow, but present, a pulse doing the absolute minimum. He was breathing in the shallow, effortful way of a body running on fumes, each breath a small, separate decision. His skin was cold and damp. Marleau put his hand on Ilya's face. "Rozanov. Open your eyes."

Ilya's eyes opened on command. Barely. Half-mast, the grey unfocused quality of having been somewhere else for a long time and had not fully made it back. They moved, eventually, and found Marleau's face, and something shifted in them. Sluggish, like a bird flying through heavy wind. 

"Marley," he said. Almost no voice behind it. 

"Yeah." Marleau kept two fingers on his throat. He was counting. He was also looking at the dried vomit on Ilya's shirt and at the pallor of his skin under the harsh bathroom light. He had seen the torn envelope on the counter. The empty plastic baggy. His other hand was already on his phone. He looked at Ilya's chest rising and falling. He looked at his eyes, still open, still tracking, barely. He pulled the phone out.

"No." Ilya's hand came up. It moved slowly, imprecisely, and landed on Marleau's wrist rather than finding it. His grip was almost nothing. "No hospital."

"Ilya—" Marleau's voice was soft, soothing.

"No." Something sharpened in his eyes, the effort of the word pulling something up from wherever he'd been. "No. Marley. Please. No hospital."

Marleau looked at him. He thought about what the drive to the hospital looked like and what the waiting room looked like and what the alternative to that looked like. He sat with all of it for a moment that was longer than he wanted it to be.

"Tell me what you took," he said. "And how much. Right now, before anything else."

It came out slowly, imprecisely, Ilya's words running together at the edges, but it came out. Marleau listened to all of it without moving. When Ilya finished, his eyes had slid half-closed again, the effort of it costly.

Marleau looked at his phone. He did the math. He had done this math before, in a different bathroom, in a different city, and he knew the variables and he knew what the numbers meant and he sat with the result of them for another long moment, his thumb not moving.

"If I take you to the hospital—"

"It is over." Ilya's voice was rough, slow, but the words were right. Something underneath them pressing and specific, finding its way through. "Marley. Is over. It will be out before we are through the doors. Someone sees the car, someone has a phone—" He stopped. Swallowed. It looked painful. "Team took a chance on me. After last time. One chance. Everyone said it." His eyes found Marleau's, the focus in them effortful and deliberate. "I walk into a hospital. I am done."

Marleau looked at him for a long time. The pulse under his fingers. The eyes open and tracking. The words coming out in the right order, slow but right. He looked at the phone. He thought about what done meant. The press, the GM's office, the conversation that ended careers.

"I know what I took," Ilya said. "I know where I am. I will be fine. I do not need a doctor."

Marleau looked at him for a long time. He was doing the calculation again. The pulse, the eyes, the words coming out in the right order, the way Ilya was gripping his wrist, weak but deliberate. Present. 

"If anything changes," Marleau said.

"I know."

"I mean it. Anything—"

"Marley." Ilya met his eyes. "I promise."

"You promised last time."

"I know."

Marleau put the phone back in his pocket. He reached in and turned the shower on. Cold.

"Up," he said.

"Marley—"

“Up, Ilya.”

He got Ilya off the floor without ceremony and onto the tile and closed the shower door. Ilya sat down because his legs made the decision before he did. The cold water hit him and he started shaking. He heard Marleau's shoes come off, his jacket, his watch, down to his undershirt and boxers. Then the shower door opened again and Marleau stepped in and crouched down on the tile beside him without a word, his back against the wall, shoulder pressed to Ilya's shoulder, both of them sitting in the frigid water like it was an ordinary place to be.

Marleau started working at Ilya's shirt. Buttons first, then pulling it off his shoulders, dropping it in a sodden heap on the tile. Socks, jeans, all of it peeled off and piled against the drain. He'd seen Marleau do things like this before. Hold a towel around a teammate getting stitched up on a bench, hold someone's head over a toilet in a hotel after a night out in Nashville. The matter-of-fact way of men who had been in each other's physical space for years and had no awkwardness left to navigate. 

Ilya thought, with the blurred and sideways quality of a mind still coming back to itself, Shane would never do this for him.

It wasn't an accusation. It was just true. Shane, who managed everything from a careful distance, who had constructed a castle of deniability around every moment they'd shared. Shane would not be here. Could not be here. Told Ilya he would not be here. Blocked his number. Shane would not be in this apartment, on this floor, in this shower getting soaked with no calculation running about who might find out. That was not what Shane was to him or could ever be. Shane didn't love him, didn't have the ability, the capacity to love him. Ilya had understood this and had gone ahead anyway and was now sitting on the bathroom floor of his own life, which told him something about his own judgment that he didn't have the bandwidth to examine yet.

He was glad Marleau was here. He was glad it was Marleau. He just also, underneath that, in the part of himself that was still running the inventory of everything it wanted and couldn't have, wished it was someone else. He let himself have that feeling for as long as it took the cold water to bring his body temperature down, and then he put it away.

His stomach suddenly felt like it woke up. He got onto his knees and vomited into the drain. Bile, mostly, nothing in him to bring up, while Marleau held the back of his neck with one hand, steady and without comment. Ilya stayed there for a moment afterward, forehead nearly touching the tile, breathing.

"Okay," Marleau said.

"Yeah," Ilya said.

Marleau reached up and turned the shower a little hotter.

He stayed there. He didn't say it's alright or take your time. He waited. Ilya breathed. The tile was cold under him and the water was not, and after a while the shaking slowed to something that was almost manageable, almost his.

"When did it start to get bad again?" Marleau said.

Ilya looked at the water hitting the drain. "Few months. It was slow and then not slow."

Marleau nodded. He'd seen that before. "The pills. How long ago did you get those?"

"Thursday."

"Thursday three days ago or Thursday last week?" Marley asked. Ilya didn't answer, which was enough of an answer in itself.

Marleau absorbed this. Ilya watched him do it and waited for something to shift on his face, for the renegotiation, the recategorization, the subtle movement behind the eyes that meant a person was quietly reordering years of information. It didn't come. Marleau sat there in his soaking wet boxers on Ilya's bathroom tile and nodded once, slowly, like Ilya had told him the score of a game he'd already expected to go that way.

"Okay," Marleau said. "Tell me what you need."

The most important sentence anyone had said to Ilya in about ten years.

What he needed was dry clothes and a spot on the couch and nothing required of him for the next several hours. Marleau supplied all three. He found Ilya some clean clothes without being told where they were, which was either good-friend intuition or the result of nearly a decade of visiting this apartment and paying attention, and he ordered food while Ilya was still getting changed.

"I ordered from that Thai place on Newbury," Marleau said when Ilya came out.

"I don't like that place."

"It was close."

"Their pad thai is bad, Marley. The noodles are—"

"It was close," Marleau said. "Sit down."

Ilya sat down. The food arrived and the pad thai was, as expected, not good, and neither of them mentioned it. Marleau ate like he had grown up eating whatever was in front of him and never developed opinions about it. Ilya ate because Marleau was watching him eat in the peripheral, patient way that showed he was keeping track without making it into a thing.

They watched tape. No commentary, just footage. Marleau found the Pittsburgh feed from Wednesday on Ilya's laptop and they put it on the television, and after a while it started to feel something like normal. Two guys on a couch finding mistakes in other people's defense pairings, which was as close to meditation as either of them got.

"Their left D keeps cheating to the strong side," Marleau said.

"I know. Has been doing it for three games."

"You want to run something on that in Tampa?"

"I already told Carmichael."

Marleau made a sound that meant of course you did. He finished his food. Outside, Boston was doing its December thing, all grey water and grey sky, the harbor indistinguishable from the clouds.

After a while, Marleau said, "You're not going back to rehab."

Ilya looked at him.

"I can see you waiting for me to say it," Marleau said. "So I'm saying it first. You're not going back."

"Good," Ilya said, with more force than he intended. "Because I'm not."

"I know."

"Marley, I am not going to sit in a group session and do worksheets with nineteen-year-olds who got caught with coke at their frat party and now mama is worried. I know what I did wrong. I know what I need to do differently. I don't need forty-five days in a room with a motivational poster to tell me what my own brain is doing."

"I said you're not going," Marleau said calmly.

"And the pine trees." Ilya pointed at him. "Seven months in Duluth, Marley. You know what's in Duluth? Nothing. They took us on a weekend trip to a maple syrup farm. There wasn't even maple syrup at the end. Pine trees. Just pine trees – and the group therapy —"

"Ilya."

"I'm just saying—"

"I said you're not going. Are you going to let me say that, or are you going to keep arguing with the thing I already agreed with?"

A pause. "Fine."

"Good." Marleau picked up the remote. "You're going to call Brennan before the end of the day tomorrow." Ilya looked at his hands. Brennan was his outpatient counselor. The one he'd been assigned when he came back from Minnesota, the one the team had made him agree to as a condition of return, the one he'd been seeing weekly for two years and then monthly and then, in the last six months, not at all. The one he should have called in October.

"Yes."

"Not next week."

"I said yes."

"Tomorrow, Ilya. I will call him myself if—"

"I know, Marley." Ilya leaned his head back against the couch. "I know. I was going to call him anyway. I've been—I kept picking up the phone, not knowing what to say. How to start it."

Marleau was quiet for a moment. "You start it the same way you started everything today. Wrong order is fine. He knows how you talk."

Ilya looked at the ceiling. "Yeah," he said. "Okay."

The next morning, Marleau stepped onto the balcony with his phone. Ilya sat at the kitchen island and could hear the low cadence of his voice through the glass, but not the words. He watched Marleau's posture. The set of his shoulders meant he was managing a conversation with someone of authority. Carmichael, probably. Or the coaching staff. When Marleau came back in he poured himself a coffee from the pot Ilya had already made and sat down across from him.

"Flu," Marleau said. "Bad one. Highly contagious, very unpleasant, absolutely not putting it on the team bus."

"Mm."

"I told them I ran into you at the pharmacy looking terrible and insisted on driving you home, because I am a good teammate and a concerned human being."

"You are a creative liar, Marley."

"I prefer thorough." He drank his coffee. "We fly Thursday morning, commercial, and we meet them in Tampa. You'll be on the bench for the Friday game."

"I'll be fine by then."

"I know you will. You're paying for the tickets." He said it like a fact, not a reassurance. It landed differently. "I told Carmichael not to worry. He's not going to worry because I told him not to."

"What did Carmichael say?"

"He said to tell you to eat something."

Ilya almost smiled. "Of course he did."

"I told him you were eating." Marleau looked at Ilya's mostly-finished bowl of cereal with the expression of a man making a note. "You're eating."

"I'm eating, Marley."

"Then Carmichael will be satisfied."

On the third afternoon, Ilya was half-asleep on the couch, the Tampa tape running quiet on the television, when his phone lit up. He almost didn't look. He had been deliberately not-looking at his phone for three days, which meant he'd been looking at it every forty minutes with the discipline of knowing exactly what he was afraid of finding, which was nothing. Just the continued silence, the world having correctly moved on. 

He looked.

It was Shane. What the fuck, Ilya thought. 

Heard you're sick. Hope it's not too serious.

Ilya read it three times. He turned the phone over. Turned it back. Shane had unblocked the number. Shane, who had walked out of the loading dock without looking back, who had said he was a stain on the sport. Shane who shoved him away. Shane was in Ottawa working a road trip and he had looked at the NHL wire and he had unblocked the number and typed those words. Careful. Clean. Deniable. Saying almost nothing, which in the frequency Shane Hollander communicated on was approximately everything.

Ilya put the phone face-down on the cushion. Then he picked it back up and typed: 

Fine. Don't worry. 

He put it face-down again. He did not do any of this fast enough.

Marleau was in the kitchen doorway with two mugs and he caught it. The look on Ilya's face, the phone turned over too deliberately, the peculiar stillness that followed. He had ten years of reading Ilya Rozanov across various kinds of ice and he missed nothing. He set the mugs down and looked at the phone and looked at Ilya.

"Who was that?" he said.

"Nobody." Wrong word. He knew it the moment it left his mouth, and so did Marleau.

"Ilya."

"Is not what you think."

"You don't know what I think."

"You think I'm texting my guy. I'm not."

Marleau was very still for a moment. Then, "You have a guy."

"I had a guy. And then I didn't. And then—" He stopped, knowing it was coming out all wrong. "Is complicated, Marley, it is not — this is not a drug thing."

"Okay," Marleau said, in the voice that meant he was moving on. He picked up the mugs and sat down and they watched the Tampa tape for another twenty minutes and Ilya thought it was over, that he'd successfully navigated it, that Marleau had decided that what happened was none of his business and let it go. 

Marleau had been his best friend for years and somehow Ilya still made the mistake. His phone lit up again. He reached for it fast. 

Not fast enough.

Marleau's hand came down on it first. He read the screen. His face did something Ilya very rarely saw it do. A slow controlled tightening that meant the temperature in the room had just changed significantly. He turned the phone around.

The thread read:

Heard you're sick. Hope it's not too serious.

And below that, Ilya's reply from ten minutes ago: Fine. Don't worry.

And below that, just arrived: Good. Do you need anything?

"That's not—" Ilya started.

"I am still here." Marleau's voice was very quiet. The quietest version of it, which was the one that meant he was holding his anger down with everything he had, "I have been here for three days, Ilya. I am sitting in your apartment. I lied to Carmichael, I slept on your shitty spare bed, I washed your gross body while you puked in the shower, and I have not left." He put the phone on the cushion between them. "And you are texting your guy while I am still in the fucking room."

"He's not my—"

"Do you need anything." Marleau's voice cracked off the word. "That is what they say. That is the exact language. Do you need anything. Ilya, I have heard this a hundred times, that is word for word what they say — do you need anything — and you are sitting there, while I am right here, while I am standing right here, you are buying more fucking—

"Marley—"

"No." He was not quiet anymore. "No, are you serious." His jaw was tight. "I spent three days — are you actually telling me — I pulled you off that bathroom floor while you looked fucking dead and you are, while I am still here, you are re-upping, you are just — are you fucking serious right now—"

"Stop." Ilya sat up. "Stop. It is not — he's not my dealer, Marley, look at the name, look at where is from—" He reached over and took the phone and pulled up the top of the thread and held it out. "Look."

Marleau took it. His jaw was still working. He looked at the number. He looked at the contact name. He scrolled up, reading, the tight fury in his face shifting. Still taut, but finding a different emotion. He kept scrolling. He stopped.

He was very still for a long moment.

"He is a referee," Marleau said.

"Yes."

Marleau didn't look up from the phone. He kept reading. The stillness in him was different now. He scrolled to Montreal. He read. He set the phone on the cushion.

"Ilya." He sat back down, slowly, and looked at him. "This man is an NHL official."

"Yes."

"He referees your games."

"Yes."

"He has refereed your games." Marleau looked at the phone. He looked at Ilya. The anger was gone, or not gone, but somewhere else now. Completely replaced by something that was alarming and trying not to show it. "Do you understand what happens if this comes out? Do you — this is not. Ilya, this is not a career problem for just you, this is a league problem. They will investigate the games. They will pull tape. Every call he made, every call he didn't make—" He stopped. "They could pull your stats. They could pull wins. There are people who spend their whole day looking for exactly this, and if they find it you will be looking at the longest suspension this league has handed out in twenty years, and that is before we even get to what happens to him."

"I know," Ilya said.

"Do you?" Marleau's voice was flat. "Because this is—" He gestured at the phone. "This is not a secret you can manage, Ilya. This is the kind of thing that ends both of your careers and it doesn't stay quiet, it can't stay quiet—"

"I know, Marley." Ilya looked at him steadily. "I know all of this. I knew all of it when it was happening. I understand what it is."

Marleau looked at him. He picked up the phone and looked at the thread again. He put it back down. He exhaled slowly through his nose, pinching the bridge.

"This is fucked. You cannot be with him."

"I know all of this. All of this."

"This is—" He looked up. Something had entered his voice that wasn't quite anything Ilya had a clean word for. A recalibration. "He's a man." Oh. Yes. Not the career part. The other part.

"Yes," Ilya said.

The word sat in the room. Marleau looked at him. Really looked at him, how he had been looking at Ilya for ten years across locker rooms and hotel lobbies, the look that had always meant I see you not the performance you're showing the room. He was quiet for long enough that Ilya's jaw tightened.

"Marley—"

"I'm not doing anything. I'm just—" He paused. "Not gay. No way. No chance you're faking all those women. Okay. So." He worked through it. "Both."

"Both," Ilya said.

"Women and also—"

"Yes."

"Since when."

"Since always."

Marleau stopped. His face moved through something. "Huh," he said.

"Huh," Ilya repeated flatly.

"I mean — okay. Yeah. That tracks, actually." He sat back. He looked at the middle distance. "The year in Montreal with that guy from the Metros' organization, what was his—"

"Marley."

"I always thought that was—"

"Marley."

"—more than just the networking, but you said—" He caught Ilya's expression. "Right. Okay. Not the moment." He straightened. "Are we — I mean. Are you—" He gestured vaguely.

"Am I what, Marley, use your words—"

"Are you okay? About that part? The—" Another vague gesture. "General situation."

Ilya looked at his hands. "I've had a long time to be okay about it," he said. "I am. I just — I don't talk about it. I've never talked about it."

"To anyone?"

"To anyone."

Marleau was quiet for a moment. Then he said, very simply: "Well. Thanks for telling me." It was such a Marleau thing to say that Ilya didn't have a response to it. He looked at the harbor. His throat was doing something he was not going to let become anything.

"I didn't really tell you," Ilya said. "You found it."

"Shit. I mean, fuck. I didn't mean to – nothing changes," Marleau said. "You know that, right? You're still the most annoying person I've ever played with. You're still going to make us all look slow at practice tomorrow." He paused. 

"Next week's practice," Ilya said. "My flu."

"Highly contagious." Marleau picked up his mug. "Now tell me about this. The actual whole thing. From the beginning."

So Ilya told him.

He told him in something closer to the right order this time. The bar and the Village and the freedom of being just another man in a bar and not Ilya Rozanov. How Ilya had looked at him and felt the floor move in a way that had nothing to do with the vodka.

He told him about skating out for warmups in Boston and looking up and seeing the referee's jersey. He told him about the missed call on the ice and the Chicago text and Shane skating out and calling him twice in the first period, choosing a career over everything else.

"He was trying to protect himself," Marleau said.

"Yes. He was right to."

"But."

"But it felt like—" Ilya stopped. "Like the ice fell out from under me."

Marleau looked at him steadily. "Yeah," he said. Quietly. Like he understood exactly what that meant.

He told him about Chicago, and Montreal, and the parking garage. He finished the sentence this time. Marleau listened to all of it without moving, and when Ilya got to the end, he sat with it for a moment.

"He unblocked you," Marleau said.

"Yes."

"After all of that. He looked at the wire and he unblocked the number."

"Yes."

"Ilya." Marleau looked at the phone on the table. "If he was really done with you, why would he unblock the number?"

"Don't," Ilya said.

"I'm not saying it's simple. I'm not saying anything about what you should do." A pause. "I'm just saying. It's something."

Ilya looked at the phone. He looked at the harbor. He looked at the Tampa tape, still running silent on the television, their left defenseman making the same mistake for the fourth time in four games.

"Look, Roz, I'm not your therapist here. But is this worth it?" Marleau said. "While it was — while you were talking to him. The noise."

Ilya considered this. The honest answer, not the managed one.

"He makes it quiet," he said. "And I could not stop. Worse than pills. I could not, even when I needed to. But I didn't need anything else."

Marleau nodded. He didn't say then it matters and he didn't say it's still too complicated, even though both of those things were true. He just nodded, slowly.

"Call Brennan," he said. "Tell him all of it. The actual all of it." He glanced at the phone. "Include this part. He needs to know what was keeping the noise quiet. So you can figure out what else can."

"I know how to talk to Brennan."

"I know you do." A pause. "I might give him a heads up that you're calling. So it's not cold."

"Marley—"

"Not to check on you. Just a—"

"Is completely to check on me."

"It's a courtesy call," Marleau said. "Between concerned parties."

Ilya looked at him for a moment. "Fine," he said.

Marleau nodded. He got up and took both mugs to the kitchen and started doing the dishes. After a moment Ilya got up and leaned against the counter beside him, which was not something he had planned to do. The harbor was grey in the windows. The Tampa tape was still running behind them.

"I don't want you to think I'm weak," Ilya said.

Marleau stopped. He set the mug he was holding down in the sink and looked at Ilya.

"My mother," Ilya said. He looked at the counter. "She died when I was twelve. They said it was an accident. It wasn't an accident." He could feel Marleau go very still beside him. "I look like her. Everyone always said so. Same eyes. Same—" He made a short movement with his hand. "She was sad. It would come down on her and she could not find her way back out. I used to think I was different. That what I have is different. Not the same thing at all."

He paused. The kitchen was very quiet.

"I'm not her," Ilya said. He said it like he had said it to himself many times, in the flat tone of a sentence being whispered in the dark. "I know I'm not. I'm going to call Brennan." He stopped. "But I need you to know that's what it is, when you find me like that. I'm not — I'm not being careless with myself. Is too much. That's different."

Marleau crossed the kitchen and put one hand on the back of Ilya's neck, the brief firm grip he had been using his whole career, and held it there for a moment longer than usual.

They stood there for a moment, Ilya leaning against the counter, Marleau finishing the dishes, the harbor grey and still in the windows.

"Get a new mattress in the guest room," Marleau said.

"After Tampa."

"This—" He stopped. "After Tampa is fine." He dried his hands. He picked up his bag from the couch and went to the door and paused with his hand on the frame and looked back at Ilya standing in the kitchen in his sweatpants with the cold coffee and the clean dishes.

"Answer his text," Marleau said. "When you're ready. Not tonight." A beat. "But answer it."

The door closed. Ilya stood in the kitchen for a long time. Then he picked up his phone and opened the thread and looked at those words sitting there unanswered, and the city was grey and cold outside and entirely fine.

He opened his contacts. He found Brennan's number. He stared at it.

Then he called. 

It rang twice. "Hey," Ilya said. "Is Rozanov. I know it has been a while." A pause. "I slipped. I have some things I should tell you."

He went to the couch and sat down, and outside Boston was quiet, and for the first time in four days the apartment didn't feel like something he was waiting to escape from.

Chapter End Notes

Sorry for the Duluth slander. It's really a lovely town.

Comments always appreciated. Aiming for a weekly upload, but suprises can happen!

Chapter 12: Feed

Chapter Summary

Shane just needs to hear from Ilya. That would solve all of his problems, wouldn't it?

Chapter Notes

Content Warnings

There's an on-ice injury in this chapter. It will be fine, scout's honor.

Ilya also discloses his addiction issues to Shane.

Also sex...but we're all here for that.

The travel manifest for Boston’s road trip came out on Saturday morning. Shane was in Ottawa, sitting at his kitchen table in the quiet of a day off he really didn’t need. He had his laptop open to his review software and a coffee he’d stopped drinking thirty minutes ago, and refreshed the league wire.

Rozanov, I. — Personal Leave. Illness.

He read it twice. Illness. It could be anything. Ilya Rozanov, who had played sixteen games last season through a Grade 2 AC joint sprain and scored a hat trick in the third game of that stretch, was not in the lineup due to personal illness. He didn’t believe a word of it.

Shane closed the laptop. He opened it again. He closed the wire tab and opened his review software and read the same sentence of performance notes without any of the words sinking in. He had a flight to New York on Monday morning. He had four games over the next eight days.

He pulled up the contact he’d saved as Sasha in September in the bathroom of a hotel in Montreal, that he’d blocked two hours after the loading dock, in the clarity of a decision he had already made and was trying to memorize. He looked at the blocked thread, the grey absence of it, the wall where the conversation used to be.

He thought about a blog post he had read in October, speculative and carefully hedged, about a season that had cratered without explanation and a training camp absence no medical record supported. He thought about the bruise on Ilya’s ribs in Chicago, and the other bruises that didn’t line up with a hockey calendar, and a way of talking about vodka that sounded less like recreation and more like something else. He had not named what he suspected. He was not going to name it now. But personal illness on a Saturday road trip, from a man who played through injury without missing a shift, had a weight to it that was sitting in his chest doing something he did not have permission to feel.

He unblocked the number.

Heard you’re sick. Hope it’s not too serious.

He sent it before the part of his brain that thrived in logic and reason could convene a meeting. Then he put the phone on the other side of the table and went to bed.

The reply came nearly immediately.

Fine. Don’t worry.

Two words. Shane read them and felt relief, and underneath it, the unease of not quite believing it. Ilya said it the way weather happened — automatically, in advance of available evidence.

Good, Shane typed. Do you need anything?

He set the phone down and looked at the ceiling. The question was doing a great deal of work. He couldn’t actually do anything for Ilya, but he hoped he knew the sentiment behind the words. He was tired of pretending the loading dock was where the story ended when Ilya had been consuming his thoughts for weeks. 

No reply came. Not in New York, not through Philadelphia, not through a game he called cleanly and without incident. He read the thread every day like you pressed a bruise, confirming it was still there.

Five days later, sitting on the tarmac in Toronto during a de-icing delay, the reply came.

Sorry. It has been a week.

Something loosened in his chest that had been tight since Saturday morning. Since the manifest, since personal illness sitting in a league wire like an alarm he had no authority to answer.

Don’t apologize. Are you okay?

A pause. The boarding announcement started. Shane ignored it.

Getting there. Marleau was here.

Shane thought about what it meant that Marleau had been there, what there covered. Cliff Marleau, ten years on Ilya’s wing, clearly some history there. 

I’m glad he was.

He is a good friend came Ilya’s reply.

Shane didn’t ask for specifics, though he had his suspicions about the shape of it.

Good was all Shane could manage in reply.

The boarding announcement started again. He got in line and kept the phone in his hand. It vibrated again when he was halfway down the jetbridge.

How is the ankle?

It was exactly the kind of question Ilya asked when he was not asking the thing he was actually asking. Care dressed as observation, attention that passed through the side door because the front door was complicated. His phone vibrated again. He expected a follow-up message, but that wasn’t it. There was a notification from the wire. 

Rozanov, I. - Activated from non-roster (illness).

He was going to be back on the ice tonight. Shane stood in the jetbridge and looked at the notification for a moment, then pocketed his phone and found his seat and did not think about anything for the rest of the boarding process, which took eleven minutes and felt longer. He had a game in New York. He had notes to review and a flight to get through and a professional obligation to be present for the next several hours. He was aware of all of this.

At the intermission, he found a corner of the corridor and pulled up the Carolina feed on his phone. It was a free stream, bad angle, crowd noise bleeding through the compression. He watched until he found number 81.

Ilya was on the bench, not the ice. He was clearly not in the first wave. Shane watched him track the play from the bench, upright, elbows on his knees, his eyes bouncing like they did when he was reading something three seconds ahead of everyone else in the building. He looked gaunt. Not dramatically, not how it would read in a photograph, but in the way you noticed on someone you had looked at closely enough to know the difference. His face was sharper than it should be. The shadows under his eyes were visible even through the bad angle and the compression artifacts. He looked like a man who had lost weight he hadn't had to spare and was in the early stages of putting it back.

He also looked, when the puck moved into his zone, completely and entirely himself. The focus was the same. The attention, how nothing on the ice escaped him. That was unchanged. Whatever had happened had not touched the part of him that lived on the ice. Shane found this disproportionately reassuring and did not examine why.

Ilya played nine minutes across the second and third. He didn't score. He set up a chance in the third that didn't convert, a clean and precise read of the play, the pass arriving exactly where it needed to be, just before the receiver expected it. Shane watched it twice on the replay. Then he locked the phone and went back into the officials' room and sat down and looked at the floor for a moment before Hayden came in.

"You good?" Hayden said.

"Yeah," Shane said. "I'm good."

He was, he realized. For the first time in two weeks, straightforwardly and without qualification, he was.

The reply to do you need anything came at eleven that night, after the Carolina game had gone final.

No. Thank you for asking.

Then, a minute later:

I played tonight.

I know, Shane typed. I watched.

A long pause. Long enough that Shane had put the phone down and was brushing his teeth when it came through.

How did I look?

Shane looked at the message. The gaunt face and the shadows and the nine minutes of careful, precise hockey.

Like yourself, he typed.

The reply was not a word. It was the checkmark emoji. Shane understood what it meant. He put his phone on the nightstand and let himself feel relieved, properly and without apology, for the first time since the manifest.

The call happened on a Tuesday night, four days later. Shane was in a Philadelphia hotel eating a salad he had bought from the restaurant downstairs. He was reviewing his notes and was lying on top of the covers with the television on and the sound off when his phone rang.

Not a text. A call.

He looked at the screen for two rings. He answered it.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," Ilya said.

His voice was different on the phone. Flatter, a little lower, stripped of the ambient texture of a shared physical space. Shane lay there and let the silence run because it was not an uncomfortable silence. 

"You called," Shane said.

"Yes."

"Not a text."

"Also yes." A pause, and something in the pause that was almost the ghost of amusement. "Is harder to say what I want in a text. I was going to type it out and it was — very long."

"Okay," he said. "Say it."

A longer pause. He heard Ilya breathe, slow and deliberate, the kind he used on the ice when he was resetting.

"I want to explain," Ilya said. "Why I missed Tampa." A pause. "I have a problem — it is not the first time I have had trouble with this. There was 2019. You probably read something, if you looked." He didn't wait for Shane to confirm that he had. "It was like that. Not as bad. But the same kind of thing." Another pause, shorter. "Pills. It got away from me and then Marley found me and now I am — it is being handled. I have someone I talk to. I have been here before and I know how to come back from it."

He said it like he delivered bad news on the ice. Direct, no performance around it, the information laid down clean. Not asking for anything. Not making it smaller than it was, but not making it larger either.

"I didn't want you to see it on the wire and think it was something else," he said. "Or nothing."

Shane was quiet. Now it was named, and it sat in the room like facts sat when they confirmed something you had known and been afraid to know. He let it settle.

"I'm glad Marley found you," Shane said.

"Yes," Ilya said. "Me too."

"And you have someone you're talking to."

"Yes. Brennan. He is — he knows how I work. We have history." A pause. "He was not surprised to hear from me, which was both good and annoying."

Shane almost said something and didn't. Then: "You don't have to keep it light for me."

A silence. "I know," Ilya said. "I'm keeping it light for me."

Shane understood that. He didn't push.

"I'm not calling to ask you to come back," Ilya said then. He said it cleanly, like he had rehearsed it. “But I wanted to hear your voice."

"Don't," Shane said.

A pause. Then, carefully, "I saw you. On the broadcast. With Rose Landry."

Shane said nothing.

"I don't — I'm not calling to make a problem," Ilya said. "I just. I hope you are happy. With her. I wanted to say that. I wanted to — get some closure, I think is the word." A pause, and something effortful in it. "You deserve someone who gets to keep you properly."

"Ilya," Shane said.

"I mean it. I'm not—"

"Rose is a friend," Shane said. "She's a colleague and a friend and that's the whole of it." He paused. "I'm gay. I haven't — there hasn't been a woman. Not for a long time. Not seriously, not for years."

The silence that followed was a different kind of silence.

Shane could hear Ilya breathing. He could hear, in the particular quality of the pause, something releasing — the specific sound of a tension going out of a room when the thing creating it turns out not to be real. Ilya didn't say anything for a moment. He didn't have to. Shane could practically hear the relief moving through the line like a change in air pressure.

"Oh," Ilya said. Very quiet.

"Yeah," Shane said. 

Another pause.

"I need to see you," Ilya said. "I know what you decided and I know why, and I am not asking you to undo anything. But I need to see you. Once. And then — whatever you decide."

"I'm assigned to your game next Thursday," Shane said. 

"I know," Ilya said quietly.

"I know you know." Shane looked at his hands in the low light. "I don't know what I'm going to do about any of it. But I needed you to know that I was watching. I texted you. I wanted to."

A long pause.

"Okay," Ilya said. Just that. Receiving it.

They stayed on the phone for another hour. They talked about Tampa's defensive pairings and whether Carmichael was going to try the strong-side play anyway and they talked about Shane's New York game and the Philadelphia interference call that the league had marked as reasonable disagreement, and they talked about Marleau saying something characteristically Marleau-ish about the guest room mattress that Shane didn't fully understand the context of but laughed at anyway, the real laugh, the short and unguarded one. He felt Ilya go still on the other end of the line when it happened, the silence shifting.

It was late when Shane finally said he needed to sleep, he had a flight in the morning, and Ilya said yes, I know, and the call ended.

Shane lay in the dark. He thought about the careful lightness Ilya had used to hand him the information. He was not protecting Shane from it, but protecting himself from having to watch Shane receive the worst version. He understood that. He wanted desperately to know if Ilya had done it on purpose, but he couldn’t ask. He filed it next to everything else he understood about Ilya Rozanov that he had no business understanding. He thought about oh. The single syllable, and what had been in it. He slept.

The texts after that were different. Longer. They arrived at irregular hours. Ilya sent him a clip of Marleau falling asleep at the pregame meal, face first into a bread roll, with the caption: He says he is fine. Shane sent back a photo of the Winnipeg arena at six in the morning, the ice alone and perfect under the work lights, no caption at all, and Ilya replied forty minutes later with: Yes.

Just yes. Shane understood what it meant.

Shane watched the Boston game on Wednesday. Ilya was himself on the ice. Not entirely, careful where he hadn't been careful before, but himself. He made two plays in fifteen minutes that reminded Shane why four million people had watched his highlight reel. He looked up from his phone at the departure gate. He had a flight to Calgary.

He texted: Good game.

The reply came from the visitors' locker room, probably, based on the timestamp.

You watched.

Yes.

A pause. Then: Boston Thursday.

I know, Shane typed.

On Thursday, he texted when his flight landed.

In Boston. Coming from the airport.

The reply came before he'd gotten his bag from the overhead bin.

I know. Take the Green Line to Kenmore. I'll send the address.

Shane stood in the aisle with his bag. He read the message twice. Not Room 611. When you are ready. An address. An apartment. The place where Ilya lived. The place where Marleau had found him. He thought about what it would have looked like if Marleau hadn't found him. He didn't finish the thought. He thought about Chicago and Montreal and all the variations of this same message going back seven months. All different rooms in different cities, the anonymous geometry of hotel furniture. He thought about what was different now, and he thought the difference was not small.

The building was on a quiet street two blocks from the harbor. Ilya had texted a code for the lobby, Shane making his way up to the penthouse. Ilya opened the door without a shirt on, standing in just his sweatpants, barefoot, his hair damp from the shower. He looked at Shane in the doorway.

He looked better. Not the performed fine, not the managed version, but actually better. There were still shadows under his eyes, and something cautious in his face that hadn't been there before. But his eyes were clear. He was present in a way Shane had not been certain he would be.

"Hi," Shane said.

"Hi," Ilya said. He stepped back. Shane came in.

It wasn’t a hotel. It was a whole home. The distinction registered on Shane in a way he hadn't anticipated. The accumulated weight of a life organized in space, a kitchen with actual food in it, books stacked on the coffee table with their spines broken, a skating bag by the door in a way that implied it lived there. Laptop on the desk, game tape paused showing Tampa's defensive pairings. A can of Coke on the counter. Shane's eyes stopped on the Coke, which was not vodka, and he did not say anything about it.

They sat. Ilya on the couch, elbows on his knees. Shane in the chair angled toward him.

"I talked to someone about you," Ilya said. "Brennan, my counselor. He was concerned." A pause. "He said something can be important to you and also not be healthy, but it might be worth figuring out what a healthy way could be."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know yet." He met Shane's eyes. "Sometimes the noise in my head is so loud and I need to stop. So I use things. Vodka, people, then other things. I'm figuring it out. Is slow. But I wanted you to know that I am figuring it out. Not just using it. You." He looked at the window. "I wasn't just using you.”

"I know," Shane said.

"You seemed like you didn't know, in the loading dock."

"I know now," Shane said.

A silence. Shane looked at the broken spines on the books. The skating bag by the door. The weight of a room that belonged to someone.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"Yes."

"You said you use noise. People. To not think." He kept his voice even. "Is that what this was. Is that what I was?"

Ilya was quiet for long enough that Shane felt the silence change. Not evasion. The opposite. The stillness of making sure he got the answer right.

"In the beginning," Ilya said, "I don't know. Maybe. You were loud, how I needed something loud." A pause. "But that is not — that stopped being what it was very quickly and I did not know what to do with that, so I kept doing the same thing." He shifted slightly. "You were never just noise, Shane. You were the problem. The noise was to not think about you."

Shane looked at the window.

"That is worse, probably," Ilya said. "I know that is worse."

"It's not worse," Shane said.

After a moment, Ilya lay back on the couch, arms at his sides, looking at the ceiling. Shane got up from the chair and came around the coffee table and lay down beside him, on his back, close enough that their shoulders were touching.

"So," Ilya said, still to the ceiling.

"So," Shane said.

"I am not going to stop," Ilya said. "This. Whatever this is. I have tried and I cannot, and I think I am done pretending I am going to."

"I'm not going to stop either," Shane said.

"So we need to think about what that means. Actually think. Not just—"

"Hope it resolves itself."

"Yes." A pause. "We have been very bad at this."

"So." Shane said. “What are we going to do?"

Ilya considered this seriously. "I cannot receive favorable calls. This is the most important thing. If they look at my penalty history during your games it has to be clean. Cleaner than clean."

"Agreed. Which means I call everything. Anything marginal, I take it."

"Yes. And we are not seen. Not near the buildings, not near the arenas."

"Hotels are a problem," Shane said. "Press stays in the same places half the time."

"Not here." Ilya's hand found Shane's on the cushion between them, not lacing, just covering. "Here is fine. Here is mine. Nobody is looking for something in my apartment."

Shane looked at their hands.

"That's not a solution," he said. "That's buying time."

Ilya was quiet.

"The actual solution," Shane said, "is one of us stops." He said it like he knew it was true and did not want it to be. Flat. Careful. "One of us isn't in hockey anymore, and then there's no conflict, and none of this matters. And it should be me. I know it should be me. You're one of the best players in the league. You have years left. I'm a referee. There are other referees."

Ilya was quiet for a moment. "My visa is tied to the contract."

Shane turned his head.

"If I stop playing," Ilya said, "I go back to Russia." He said it without inflection, like he had already finished processing his feelings about that sentence. "My entire life is here. My apartment. Friends. My — everything I have built. It is here." A pause. "So it cannot be me. I know is not fair.”

Shane looked at the away. He had not done that part of the math. He had stopped at there are other referees and not gone further, had not followed the logic all the way to its end, and now it was sitting in the room and he couldn't put it back

"Okay," he said. His voice came out level, which cost him something. "Okay. So it's me."

"Yes," Ilya said. Quietly. "If it is anyone."

The if sat there.

"The thing is," Shane said, haltingly, "I don't know who I am without it." He said it quietly, without drama, which made it worse. "I had the injury at nineteen and I spent eight years building something else out of what was left, and this is what I built." He turned the thought over slowly. "I don't know what's underneath that. I'm not sure there's anything underneath that."

The room was quiet. Outside, Boston was doing its February thing.

"When I'm on the ice," Shane said, "calling a game — even with everything, even with you in it — I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. That's the only place I've felt that since I was nineteen." A pause. "It's the closest I've ever gotten to playing."

Ilya's hand on his didn't move. Shane could feel him breathing.

"I know what that is," Ilya said. Very quiet. "I know exactly what that is."

"So," Shane said. "I don't have an answer. I just needed you to know that I know what the answer is, and I can't do it. I don't know how to do it."

Ilya was quiet for a long moment.

"Not yet," he said.

"Ilya—"

"Not yet." The same way. Quietly immovable, like he was about the things that mattered. "We are not solving it tonight. But we are not done." His thumb moved once across the back of Shane's hand. "So. Not yet."

Shane looked at him. He thought about the photograph of empty ice and the single word that came back. He thought about all the ways Ilya refused to let him close doors on himself, quietly, without making it a thing.

"Okay," he said. "Not yet."

They lay there for a while. The apartment settled around them, the particular quiet of a place that was lived in. Shane was aware of Ilya's hand over his, the warmth of his shoulder against his own, the fact that neither of them had moved toward anything or away from anything and both of them knew it.

Then Ilya turned his head and looked at him.

Not the managed version. Not the performance. Just Ilya, in his own apartment, in the particular unguarded way he had when the composure had been set down somewhere and not picked back up. He looked at Shane like he had in Montreal, when there had been less performance in it than anything Shane knew how to handle and Shane looked back, which was its own kind of answer.

"Hi," Ilya said. Quietly.

"Hi," Shane said.

Ilya kissed him.

It was different from Chicago, different from Montreal, different from every other version of this. There was no urgency in it, no sense of overwriting anything or outrunning anything. Ilya kissed him like he had nowhere else to be, his hand coming up to Shane's jaw, his whole attention in it, the whole thing so deliberate and careful that Shane felt it somewhere deeper than he had room for tonight and didn't care. Shane kissed him back. He put his hand in Ilya's hair and felt him make a low sound against his mouth and thought: this is what it is. This is actually what it is.

They moved to the bedroom without deliberation, the same way they had been not-deciding things for seven months, except this time the not-deciding felt different. Felt chosen.

Ilya undressed him slowly, his hands careful. He kept stopping to look. Not at Shane's body specifically, though he looked at that too, but at Shane's face. Taking inventory of something he'd been afraid he wouldn't get back. Shane let him. He stood there in the low light from the window and let Ilya look at him in a way he had not let anyone look at him in a very long time, the full unguarded version, and felt the vulnerability of being seen by someone who already knew most of the worst of it and was still here, still looking, still moving his hands with that  careful attention.

"What," Shane said, at one point. Ilya's hands had stilled on his shoulders and he was just looking again, that same focused, serious attention.

"Nothing," Ilya said. "I just—" He stopped. His thumb moved against Shane's collarbone, a slow back and forth. "I thought about this. When I was — when it was bad. I thought about this. You." He said it plainly, in the voice he used for things he had decided to stop managing. "I wanted to tell you that."

Shane looked at him. He thought about the wire. Personal illness. He thought about Marleau finding him. He thought about all the versions of this moment that hadn't happened, that could have not happened, and felt the weight of that briefly and completely.

"I'm here," Shane said.

"Yes," Ilya said. "I know."

He kissed him then, the same way he'd kissed him on the couch — deliberate, present, like he was learning the shape of it without any intention of rushing to the end. Shane kissed him back and put his hands in Ilya's hair and felt him make a low sound against his mouth, the sound of someone arriving somewhere after a long time away.

They moved to the bed. Ilya was slow in a way he hadn't been before — not the performed patience of someone who had learned that slowness was effective, but actual patience, the kind that came from wanting to be somewhere and knowing you were already there. He took his time with Shane's throat, his collarbone, the eleven freckles he had apparently been counting since September. He pressed his mouth to the scar on Shane's ankle and looked up at him from there and Shane had to look at the ceiling because the expression on his face was too much to receive directly.

"You can tell me," Ilya said, from somewhere below his hip. "What you want. You can say."

“I want –” He paused. “Your mouth. I want your mouth.” His voice came out differently than he expected. Lower, with less management in it than he usually allowed himself. Ilya listened, taking Shane in. Shane said Ilya's name once in a voice he had never used in any professional context and felt Ilya's hands tighten on his hips in response, holding him still, keeping him exactly where he wanted him. Ilya's fingers worked him open slowly, carefully, while his mouth stayed on him, and Shane stopped being able to track his own thoughts in any coherent sequence.

When Shane finally pulled him up by the shoulders, Ilya came willingly, settling his weight over him. He reached past Shane for the nightstand drawer. Practical, prepared, very Ilya, and took his time with that too, his hands steady and careful, watching Shane's face the entire time with that stripped-back attention.

"Okay?" he said.

"Jesus Christ," Shane said. "Ilya. Yes."

Ilya finally pressed into him. He moved like he had nowhere to be and nothing to prove, deep and steady, watching Shane's face, adjusting without being asked, reading every signal, responsive to the smallest shift in Shane's breathing. Shane, who had spent his entire career developing the discipline not to react visibly to anything, found that discipline completely unavailable to him. He made sounds he didn't recognize. He said Ilya's name again in a voice that came from somewhere beneath everything, and felt Ilya go very still both times before continuing, slower, as if the name were something he wanted to hear again and was arranging the conditions for.

He kept his forehead against Shane's temple near the end, his breathing gone ragged, one hand pressed flat to the mattress beside Shane's head and the other curved around the back of his neck, holding him close in the particular way of someone who had been afraid they wouldn't get to do this and was not taking it for granted. Shane pulled him closer. He had his hands in Ilya's hair and his face turned into his shoulder and he thought, with the small coherent part of his brain that was still functioning: this is the thing. This is the actual thing.

Afterward they lay in the dark and Ilya pulled Shane against him, his arm across his chest, his face against the back of his shoulder. His breathing was slow and even. His arm was heavy with no intention of moving.

"Skate is at eight," Shane said, eventually.

"I know," Ilya said.

"You should sleep."

"I know." He didn't move. His arm across Shane's chest was heavy and showed no signs of moving. "You should stay."

Shane looked at the dark ceiling. He thought about the hotel on Boylston, the untouched room, the empty professional distance of it.

"Okay," he said.

He slept. It was the best he'd slept in two months.

He left before five. Ilya was still asleep, face open, the gold cross against his chest. Shane stood in the doorway of the bedroom for a moment — not long, long enough — and then he got his jacket from the hook by the door and went out into the February dark.

He texted from the Green Line platform.

Left early. Good luck tonight.

The reply came when he was halfway back to Boylston, which meant Ilya had woken up and reached for his phone before he'd fully decided to be conscious.

You too.

Then, a minute later:

There is coffee in the kitchen. For next time.

Shane stood on the platform and looked at the message. Next time. Shane put his phone in his pocket and thought about next time all the way back to the hotel.

The Garden was loud like it always was, the personal volume of a building where people took it personally. Shane dressed with Hayden, who handed him a coffee and did not ask any questions.

He clipped the lapel mic to his collar — small, directional, designed to catch his voice and ignore the eighteen thousand people producing noise in every frequency simultaneously. The transmitter pack went on his belt, and he checked the toggle switch like he did before every game. The switch had two positions. He knew which position was which.

The Raiders came out for warmups and Shane watched from the tunnel entrance without letting himself watch. Ilya took his figure-eight. He looked sharp. He looked like himself. The version that lived on the ice, which was different from the version Shane had left asleep in the dark this morning. Both were real. Shane was the only person in the building who had access to both.

He dropped the puck for the opening faceoff and did not look at Ilya's face. The first period was good hockey. Shane felt the game as a clean, total thing, his attention fully distributed across the surface. He called a tripping at seven minutes. A hold in the neutral zone at twelve. Ilya was everywhere, covering ice, setting up, driving to the net with the relentless fervor of making up for last time. He earned a roughing call at fourteen that he accepted without argument, skating to the box with the flat expression of someone doing the math.

At the penalty box, as Shane skated past, Ilya said quietly: "Good call."

"Don't," Shane said.

"I am just saying—"

"I know what you're saying. Don't."

A pause. “You should have stayed for coffee this morning.”

Shane kept skating. He did not look at the penalty box.

“Very bad coffee in the officials' lounge,” Ilya said behind him. “I have heard this. Someone should complain.”

Late in the second, Ilya had the puck behind the net. Cycling, reading the play, choosing his moment. Shane was positioned at the high slot.

The hit came from the left. A Seattle defenseman. Big, late, the kind of player who had learned to time things just outside the reach of a whistle. He came off the boards at full acceleration and caught Ilya mid-turn, not on the puck, not even close, and the thud of a body hitting the boards without bracing made eighteen thousand people inhale at the same time.

Ilya went down hard, an involuntary screech leaving his throat.

Shane felt his stomach drop. His whistle was in his mouth before the echo finished. He blew it. He was already moving, and his hand was already going to the toggle on his hip to make the call. The automatic reflex of a man who had been officiating for eight years and knew a major call when he saw one. His thumb found the switch and clicked it. He was live. The audio engineer in the broadcast truck saw the signal come through and pushed the fader up.

Shane was not thinking about any of this. He was moving. Not at the pace of a referee skating to manage a scene. At a faster pace, one that Hayden was going to see and notice, a pace that had a different name and came from a different place. Ilya was not getting up.

He was on the ice, face down, one hand pressed to the surface like he was checking if it was still there. Shane was at his side, crouching, and the trainers were just coming through the gate, and the arena was doing the quiet of a crowd that had decided to hold its breath.

Ilya moved. He pushed himself to one elbow, slowly, and the movement cost him something Shane could see in the set of his jaw, in the way his eyes squeezed shut and then opened. He was conscious. He was breathing, wasn’t he? He looked panicked. He had his hand pressed to his left side, high on the ribs, and Shane knew that side. Had pressed ice against it in a Chicago hotel room. Had lain beside it in the dark six hours ago and felt it rise and fall. His lips were turning blue as he gasped for breath. 

The trainers arrived. They came around Shane, one of them already talking to Ilya in the low, calm cadence of someone who did this professionally. Shane should have stepped back. He should have been managing the call, the defenseman, the benches. He knew all of this.

Ilya's eyes were open. They moved, the searching movement of someone locating themselves in space. They found the trainer. They found the ice. And then they found Shane, crouching two feet away in striped jersey and skates, and something in them shifted. Not surprise. Something on the other side of surprise. Something that was also pain, a lot of pain, and underneath it a deep-seated panic. He looked at Ilya's hand pressed to his left side and said, in a voice he had never used on the ice:

"Ilya. Please. Stay with me. This isn’t it,” he said.

Not a number. Not Rozanov. Please. The word you said when you had no authority over the outcome and you knew it, when the only thing left was asking, nicely, for fate to rule on your side. Three words in the voice from last night, from the phone calls, from the dark of an apartment six hours ago. But the mic was live and the fader was up and all of it went clean to the broadcast truck and from there to three million living rooms, and every person in the arena.

Shane looked around. His voice shouldn’t have been that loud. Hayden was staring at him.

The trainers were getting Ilya upright, pulling an oxygen mask over his blue lips in a scene that Shane was going to think about for a long time. The stretcher was on the ice. Shane finally made himself stand. He stepped back. He turned and skated toward the defenseman and the match penalty came out of his mouth just like this call had a thousand times, his thumb hitting the toggle, his voice going PA-flat and professional, announcing the number and the infraction.

Shane set up for the power play. He ran the rest of the period and the third and the overtime, all of it clean and exactly what it needed to be, and the quarterly grade was going to be the best of his career, and underneath all of it: please.

The Raiders won in OT. Shane did not know who scored. He was the last official off the ice.

In the officials' room, Hayden sat across from him and did not say anything for a long time. He was changed, his bag packed, his jacket on.

“How’s Rozanov?”

Shane’s head snapped up. “What?”

“How’s Rozanov?” Hayden repeated. “You seemed really concerned.”

“He has a collapsed lung. That’s all I know. The call was clean on that one.”

"The mic was on," Hayden said.

Shane looked up, his heart dropping. "What?"

"Your switch." Hayden held his gaze. "When you went over to him. You'd clicked it on for the match penalty and then you went to check on him first." He said it without inflection. "They got all of it. All of it, Shane."

Shane sat with it. He had clicked the switch on the way over. He had been completely, professionally certain he was private. That those words had gone into the ice and no further. He had hoped he had been imagining the amplification of his voice in the adrenaline with the moment.

"Production gets the isolated track within the hour," Hayden continued. "Broadcast review board gets it by morning." A pause. "What do you want to say? When they ask."

Shane looked at his skates. Not a choice. Just the truth, outrunning the mechanism meant to contain it.

"I don't know yet," he said.

"Shane."

"I know." He looked up. "I know what I said. I know what it sounds like."

Hayden held his gaze. Then he nodded, a small and careful acknowledgment. He picked up his bag. He stopped in the doorway. Then he set the bag back down and came and sat across from Shane again, which was not what Shane had expected.

"I'm not going anywhere yet," Hayden said. "So."

Shane looked at him.

"So," Hayden said again, in the tone of someone who had decided to stay and was waiting for the other person to catch up with that decision. “Spill.”

Shane looked at his skates. He turned the puck over in his hands. The fluorescent light was doing what fluorescent light does: making everything look like evidence.

"I don't know how long it's been going on," he said. It wasn't an answer to a question Hayden had asked. It was just where the words started.

"Okay," Hayden said.

"It's not — it wasn't supposed to be anything. The first time I didn't even know who he was. But then I did and we just kept going."

Hayden said nothing. His expression was the expression of a man who had worked enough games with Shane to understand that what was required right now was not commentary.

"I've been trying to end it since September," Shane said. "Every time I think I've ended it, I—" He stopped. 

"Yeah," Hayden said. Like he already knew.

A silence.

"Is he good to you?" Hayden said.

The question landed in a way Shane hadn't anticipated. Not how long or what were you thinking or the shape of the conversation he had been bracing for. Just that.

"I think he could be," Shane said. "If we had the time to just be us."

Hayden nodded. He looked at his hands for a moment, then back up. When he spoke again his voice was even, careful, the voice of someone who had decided that kindness right now meant not softening it.

"Okay," he said. "Then I'm going to say this once, and I need you to hear all of it."

Shane looked at him.

"The league is going to pull your certification. Not suspend — pull. Pending review at minimum, and the review board does not have a good record on conflict of interest cases, which is what this is going to be called. Every call you've made in a Raiders game this season is going to be reviewed. Every one. They will go back further if they think they have grounds." He said it without inflection, laying it down fact by fact. "There will be a formal hearing. It will not be quick and it will not be quiet." He paused. "Your career is probably over, Shane. I think you need to know that I think that. I'm not telling you it's definitely over. But probably."

Shane sat with it. He had known all of this. He had known it in the abstract, how you knew things you were not ready to look at directly. Hearing it said out loud in a fluorescent room by a person who was not trying to frighten him but simply telling him the truth was different from knowing it.

"Okay," Shane said.

"And Rozanov." Hayden's voice stayed level. "The league is going to look at him too. Whether he received favorable treatment, whether any results were affected. They will probably not find anything because from what I saw tonight you called him harder than anyone else on the ice, but they will look.. His name is going to be in the story regardless."

"I know," Shane said.

"I'm not telling you this to—" Hayden paused, starting over. "I'm telling you because you need to walk into whatever comes next with your eyes open. Not that you should have done something different. Just so you know what you're walking into."

The room was quiet. Somewhere down the corridor, a door closed.

"Is he good to you?" Hayden said again. Quieter this time. Not a different question. The same question, carrying more weight now that everything else had been said. “Is it worth it?”

Shane looked at the opposite wall. "Yes," he said. "He is."

Hayden nodded once. Something in his face settled.

"Okay," he said. "Then let's go get that beer and find you a lawyer."

Shane sat there for one more moment. The puck in his hand. The fluorescent light. The empty room.

He stood up.

"Hayden," he said.

Hayden stopped at the door.

"Thank you."

Hayden held the door open and looked at him with the steady, uncomplicated patience of someone who had already decided this was part of the job. "Don't mention it," he said. "Seriously. To anyone. We can still be friends after this, you know. Whatever happens."

Shane almost laughed. It came out wrong, shorter than a laugh, more air than sound. But it was something.

Chapter End Notes

A snowstorm followed by a long weekend has its perks! Hope you enjoy, and please leave me comments with feedback or thoughts! I love to read them!

See you next week 😘

Chapter 13: Please

Chapter Summary

The audio reaches three million living rooms. Shane reaches one hospital.

Chapter Notes

The bar was on a side street three blocks from the Garden, an establishment that had survived on proximity and indifference. Hayden had been here before. He knew where the quiet booth was. Shane sat across from him and looked at his hands. Hayden ordered two pints without asking, which was fine because Shane didn't know what he wanted, and when the glasses arrived, Shane picked his up and put it down without drinking.

"You should drink that," Hayden said.

"I know."

"You look like you're about to pass out."

"I'm fine."

Hayden gave him the look, the one that meant I have been standing next to you on the ice for months and I know exactly what fine looks like on you and this is not it. Shane picked up the glass and took a long pull. It didn't taste like anything. His mouth was numb from the adrenaline, or from the specific sensation of having said a man's first name into a live microphone in front of three million people and not being able to take it back. Shane looked at his beer. The foam was settling into a thin ring against the glass. It occurred to him that it had just been his last time on the ice as a working NHL official, and the thought arrived without the weight he would have expected. It was just a fact. 

"I need to know if he's okay," Shane said.

"I know."

"The trainer said he collapsed a lung. They took him to—"

"Mass General." Hayden turned his phone around. The Raiders' official account had posted a statement seventeen minutes ago. Ilya Rozanov has been transported to Massachusetts General Hospital following an on-ice incident. He is conscious and being evaluated. Further updates to follow.

Conscious. Shane read the word twice and felt something unclench in his chest that had been locked since the stretcher. Conscious meant breathing. Conscious meant talking. Conscious meant the blue lips had been temporary, that the oxygen mask had done what oxygen masks did, that the ribs were broken but the body was intact and the person inside it was still there.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay," Hayden said.

A silence. The bar was mostly empty. Two men at the counter were watching a basketball game with the sound off, the bartender polishing glasses with the distracted patience of someone waiting for closing time. Shane's phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn't look at it.

"The lawyer," he said. "You mentioned a lawyer."

"I know a guy." Hayden took a drink of his beer. "Sports law. Handles disciplinary stuff for the NHLOA. He's not cheap, but he's good, and he's been through review board hearings before. I'll text you his number."

"How do you know a sports lawyer?"

"I know a lot of people, Shane." He said it without weight, a plain observation. "Being a linesman in this league for more than a couple years means you know people. I called him from the hallway while you were sitting in the room."

Shane looked at him. "You called him already."

"I told him the situation in broad strokes. No names, no specifics. He said he'd take a call tomorrow morning." Hayden set his glass down. "He also said, and this is a direct quote, tell your friend not to talk to anyone from the league until he talks to me. That means the Director of Officiating, the review board, the press office, anyone. If McInnis calls you at seven in the morning, you don't pick up."

"I know how to handle—"

"Shane." Hayden's voice was patient. "You are not handling this one yourself. That is the whole point of having a lawyer. The part where you stop handling things yourself."

Shane looked at his beer. The bar was dim and warm and entirely ordinary, and none of it felt real.

"Thank you," he said. It came out rough.

"You keep saying that."

"I keep meaning it."

Hayden shrugged. The shrug of a man who had decided, at some point in the last hour, that this was simply what he was going to do, and who did not require gratitude for doing it. He finished his beer. Shane had barely touched his.

"Go to the hospital," Hayden said.

Shane's head came up.

"I know that's where you're going next," Hayden said. "So go. I'll cover whatever needs covering tonight. If anyone from the crew asks, you went back to the hotel with a migraine, which is not even really a lie based on how you look right now."

"Hayden, if someone sees me at the hospital—"

"Shane." Hayden looked at him with an expression that was, for the first time all night, something other than careful. It was tired and honest and maybe a little sad. "The audio is going to be everywhere. The whole world is going to know by breakfast. The part where someone sees you has already happened. It happened on the ice, in front of eighteen thousand people and a few million more." He paused. "So go see him. Whatever comes next, at least you'll know he's okay."

Shane sat with that. He thought about the toggle switch on his hip and how his thumb had found it automatically, the muscle memory of eight years of officiating, flipping the mic on before he'd even finished deciding what he was going to do. He had been so sure it was off. He had been completely, professionally certain that the words had gone into the ice and nowhere else. He had been wrong.

"One more thing," Hayden said. He was pulling on his jacket, the movements practical and unhurried. "The audio. I haven't heard it yet, but I was standing fifteen feet away."

Shane looked at him.

"It didn't sound like a referee checking on an injured player." He said it without judgment, just the plain delivery of a fact. "It sounded like a person who loves someone. For what that's worth."

Shane couldn't speak. His throat had closed around something he was not going to let become anything, not here, not in a bar three blocks from the building where his career had just ended. Hayden met his eyes for a moment, then looked away.

"Go," Hayden said. "I'll text you the lawyer's number. Call him first thing."

He left. The door swung shut behind him and the cold air moved through the bar for a moment and then settled. Shane sat in the booth alone. His phone buzzed again. He still didn't look at it. He finished the beer in three long pulls that tasted like nothing, and then he stood and pulled on his coat and left.

The cab took eleven minutes. Shane spent them looking out the window at the city moving past, the late-night traffic on Storrow Drive, the lights on the water. His phone had buzzed four more times. He could feel it against his thigh, insistent and patient, the world starting to reach for him. He left it in his pocket.

At the hospital, he went through the main entrance because the emergency department would require explanations he didn't have the energy to construct. The lobby was bright and quiet in the particular way hospital lobbies were quiet at midnight, the hum of fluorescent lights and the distant beep of something institutional. He went to the desk.

"I'm here to see Ilya Rozanov," he said.

The woman at the desk looked at him. She was in her fifties, glasses on a chain, the composed expression of someone who had been managing this lobby for long enough that nothing surprised her. She looked at his face, then at the NHL officials' jacket he was still wearing because he hadn't thought to take it off, and something in her expression shifted.

"Are you family?" she said.

"No," he replied. He wasn't anything to Ilya, nothing the hospital would recognize. Someone who ruined his career, maybe, but not family.

"We're limiting visitors. I'm sorry."

Shane stood there. He thought about saying something else, about explaining, about constructing a version of the truth that would get him through the door. He thought about the word family and how many definitions it had and how none of them applied to him, not legally, not in any way that would matter to a woman at a hospital desk who was doing her job.

"I understand," he said. He stepped back. He stood in the lobby and looked at the elevator bank and the hallway beyond it and the distance between himself and wherever Ilya was. Then he sat down in one of the plastic chairs along the wall, the ones that were designed to be cleaned easily and not to be comfortable, and he stayed. His phone buzzed again. He finally took it out.

Seven texts. Three missed calls. One voicemail. The texts were from numbers he didn't recognize, which meant the clip was already out. One of the unknown numbers had sent a message that began Hi Mr. Hollander, this is Rachel from— and he stopped reading. He scrolled past.

Three missed calls from McInnis. Shane looked at the name on his screen and felt something go cold and precise in his chest. McInnis had called at 9:47 and again at 10:44, and again 11:16. The voicemail notification sat there, a small red badge. He didn't play it. He didn't need to. He knew what it would say. It would say call me back immediately in McInnis's flat, measured voice, the one that preceded formal proceedings, and it would be the opening sentence of the conversation that ended Shane's career.

One text from Rose.

I saw the clip. I'm not going to ask you anything. But if you need someone to talk to who isn't going to put it on a broadcast, you have my number. I mean it.

He didn't reply. He kept scrolling.

One text from Hayden.

Lawyer's name is Roman Speeter. Number below. Call him before 8 AM. Do NOT talk to anyone from the league. I mean it, Shane.

Do NOT talk to anyone from the league. That's what Hayden had said. It would take every ounce of his own practiced discipline not to pick up a phone that was ringing with the voice of your own professional execution, and he let the voicemail sit there, unplayed, a red badge on a screen in a hospital lobby at midnight.

And then, at the bottom of the list, a text from a number saved under a contact name he had changed from Sasha to Ilya.

They will not let me have my phone for long. I am okay. Not as bad as it looked. Do not worry.

Shane read it. He read it again. He pressed his thumb against the screen like he could feel the texture of the words.

Where are you? Ilya's message continued, a second text sent thirty seconds after the first. Please tell me where you are.

Shane typed: Lobby. They won't let me up.

The reply came in under a minute.

Wait.

Shane waited. He sat in the plastic chair with his coat still on and his phone in his hand and waited. He would have waited forever if he had to. Seven minutes. He counted them. Then the elevator opened, and Cliff Marleau stepped out.

Marleau was in remnants of a suit, having come here straight from the game. The tie and jacket were gone. He looked like he'd aged three years in a few hours. He saw Shane and stopped, and his face went through a sequence of emotions moving through it too quickly for Shane to catalogue. Recognition. Assessment. Something that might have been anger, or might have been relief, or might have been both of those things held together by the pressure of a very long night.

He walked over. He stood in front of Shane's chair and looked down at him.

"So you're the referee," Marleau said.

Shane looked up at him. "Yes."

Marleau studied him for a moment. Whatever he was looking for, he apparently found it, or found enough of it, because something in his posture shifted.

"He's on the fourth floor," Marleau said. "He heard the clip. Someone showed him in the ambulance."

Shane's stomach dropped. "In the ambulance?"

"One of the paramedics had it on his phone. Recognized Ilya." Marleau said it with the flat disgust of a man who had spent ten years protecting someone from exactly this kind of thing. "He's not upset about the clip. He's upset because he wants you with him."

Shane stood up. His legs felt unreliable. "Can I see him?"

Marleau looked at him for a long moment. Not how he'd looked at Shane on the ice, through the scrum and the noise, when he'd been the opposing captain's wingman and Shane had been the official who'd just thrown Ilya out of a game. This was about standing in a hospital lobby at midnight, deciding whether the person in front of him was safe to bring to the person he had spent years keeping safe.

"If you hurt him," Marleau said quietly, "I will make your life hell."

"I know," Shane said.

Marleau held the look for one more beat. Then he turned toward the elevator. "Come on."

They stood side by side in the elevator, watching the numbers climb. The silence was not comfortable, but it was not hostile either. It was the silence of two people who had not yet figured out what they were to each other and were both too tired to perform anything other than what was true.

"Did they give him anything?" Shane said. "For the pain."

Marleau looked at him. A quick, evaluating look. "Why?"

"Because he shouldn't have narcotics," Shane said it quietly, looking at the elevator doors. "I know about the pills."

The elevator was very quiet. Marleau turned to look at him fully. Not the evaluating look from the lobby. Something less guarded and more startled, the face of a man who had just heard something he genuinely hadn't expected.

"He told you about that," Marleau said.

"Yes."

"All of it?"

"All of it."

Marleau was quiet for a moment. Shane watched the expressions process over his face. Surprise settling into something else. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. Softer, and something underneath it that sounded almost like relief.

"That's good," Marleau said. "He doesn't tell people that. I was there for most of it and he still didn't tell me the whole thing for years. He just — let me see parts of it and I filled in the rest." He looked at Shane. "If he told you, that means he trusts you. With him, that's — that's a lot."

He turned back to the elevator doors. "No narcotics," he said, answering the original question. "He told them when they brought him in. It's in his chart now. They're managing it with anti-inflammatories and a local nerve block." A pause. "He's in a lot of pain. More than he's going to show you."

"He told them that?" He imagined Ilya, on a stretcher with his lips turning blue, managing to say the words no narcotics before they'd even closed the ambulance doors. The addiction was that close to the surface. Permanently present. Shane understood the math of that. Ilya in pain that he was choosing to carry because the alternative was likely a quick slide to a rehab facility in Minnesota. The elevator opened on the fourth floor. Marleau stepped out. He stopped and looked back at Shane, still standing inside.

Marleau nodded. "I've been the only person who knows all of it for a long time," Marleau said, no trace of self-pity, just the plain statement of a weight he'd been carrying. "It's good that there's someone else."

Shane stepped out. The doors closed behind him.

"I know," he said.

The room was private, far away from any other patients. Shane realized that meant there had been phone calls and conversations that he was not going to think about right now. The hallway was quiet, or as quiet as a hospital ward could be, just the soft beep of monitors and the distant murmur of a nurses' station. Marleau stopped at the door.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "The nurse is going to come back and I'm going to pretend I don't know you're in there, but I can only pretend for so long."

"Thank you," Shane said.

"Don't thank me." Marleau's voice was low, not unkind. "I'm doing this for him." He paused, his hand on the doorframe. "He's going to act like it doesn't hurt. It hurts."

He leaned against the wall across from the door and took out his phone. Standing guard, Shane realized. Not for the hospital staff. For anyone else who might come looking.

Shane opened the door. The room was dim. One overhead light turned low, the monitors casting their pale blue glow across the bed and the wall. Ilya was propped up at an angle, an incline that meant someone had adjusted it to keep pressure off his left side. He had an IV in the back of his hand and an oxygen cannula under his nose and a hospital gown that was doing nothing for his modesty. His gold cross lay against the gown's cotton neckline, catching the monitor light.

His eyes were open. They found Shane immediately, how they always found him, across rinks and hotel lobbies and crowded rooms, with that particular directional certainty that had nothing to do with looking and everything to do with already knowing where he was.

Shane closed the door. He stood just inside it, his coat still on, his hands at his sides. He didn't know what to do with his body. Eight years of professional composure and he was standing in a hospital room at midnight with no idea what to do with his hands.

"Hi," Ilya said. His voice was rough, lower than usual, thinned out by whatever they had given him and the effort of breathing around broken ribs, but it was his voice. Present and real and unmistakably him.

"Hi," Shane said.

Something moved across Ilya's face. Not the smirk or a performance. Something underneath all of that, stripped down to the thing that was left when everything else had been taken off, like it had been in Montreal and Chicago and the apartment and every other time Shane had been close enough to see it.

"You are still wearing the jacket," Ilya said.

Shane looked down. The officials' jacket, the NHL crest on the breast, the stripes on the arm. He was still wearing it. He hadn't taken it off since the arena.

"Yeah," he said. His voice did something he hadn't authorized. A crack, structural and small, in the same place it had cracked in the loading dock in Montreal. "They haven't fired me yet." He let out a dry cough of a laugh.

"Take it off," Ilya said. Quietly. "You look terrible in it."

Shane almost laughed. It came out the same way it had come out with Hayden, more air than sound, not quite a laugh but close enough. He shrugged the jacket off and hung it on the back of the door and stood there in his undershirt and his dress pants and his untied shoes, looking, rightfully so, like a man who had left somewhere in a hurry and hadn't finished getting dressed.

He crossed the room. He pulled the plastic visitor's chair close to the bed and sat down and looked at Ilya properly. The shadows under his eyes were darker than the apartment. The sharpness in his face was the sharpness of pain managed by medication, his jaw set in the way Shane had seen it set on the ice a hundred times, how Ilya held himself when something hurt and he had decided it wasn't going to change what he was doing. The bruise on his left side was hidden by the gown, but Shane could see the careful way he was holding himself, the slight hitch in his breathing every time the ribs reminded him they were there.

"How bad?" Shane said.

"Three ribs. Collapsed lung. I needed a tube to reinflate." He said it like he said all medical things, clinically, without drama, the inventory of a body he had been maintaining and occasionally damaging for years. "It looked more dramatic than it was. I can leave tomorrow, next day maybe. Six weeks, no ice, they say. I say four."

"You're not saying four."

"Four. I am me."

"I'm saying six because you have three broken ribs and a collapsed lung."

Ilya looked at him. The faintest ghost of a smirk moved across his face, not quite arriving. "You are already telling me what to do. You are not even my doctor."

"I'm not your anything right now."

"That is not true," Ilya said quietly. "And you know it is not true." He shifted, and the movement took far more energy than it should have. Shane could see it in the way his jaw tightened. His hand came out from under the blanket and rested on the edge of the bed, palm up, a gesture that was not asking for anything but was making itself available.

Shane looked at the hand. He thought about it for just a moment. The hot mic and the lawyer's number, and Hayden. He put his hand in Ilya's. Ilya's fingers closed around his, the grip weaker than usual but present, holding on with the same practical authority he brought to everything, even from a hospital bed at midnight with broken ribs and a drainage tube and a life that was about to become very complicated.

"I heard the audio," Ilya said.

"I know."

"The paramedic played it." A pause. "I made him play it again."

"Ilya—"

"You said please." He looked at Shane. The monitor light moved across his face. "You said please. On the ice. In front of everyone."

"My mic was on."

"I know." Something in his voice shifted, beyond the usual dry amusement. It was heavier, and more careful. "You said my name. My first name."

"I know what I said."

"Do you know what it sounded like?"

"Yes."

"Because it sounded—" He stopped. He was looking at the ceiling now, and his grip on Shane's hand had tightened. "I don't know." 

The room was quiet. The monitors beeped. Shane looked at their joined hands on the edge of the hospital bed and felt the sentence land in the space between them, not a question, not quite an accusation, just a thing that had been said and was now sitting there waiting to be confirmed or denied or simply allowed to exist.

"I know what it sounded like," Shane said.

"Yes? What was it?" Ilya asked. Quieter now. Not pushing. Asking with the same attention he'd used in Montreal when he'd asked what do you want to do with his hand on Shane's chest.

Shane looked at him. He thought about all the versions of this answer he had been constructing and deconstructing for months, the managed versions, the deniable versions, the versions that preserved something he was no longer sure needed preserving. He thought about the loading dock and the blocked number and the night he sat on a hotel bed in his coat until four in the morning. He thought about the apartment on the harbor and the coffee in the kitchen and for next time. He thought about how Ilya's eyes had found him on the ice two hours ago, searching through pain and panic, and something in them had settled when they found what they were looking for.

"I wasn't thinking," Shane said. "I was scared. You looked so..." He trailed off.

Ilya was quiet for a moment. His thumb moved once across the back of Shane's hand. It was the same gesture from the apartment, the same small movement that meant something neither of them had ever said out loud and both of them had understood for a long time.

"Good," Ilya said.

"Good?"

"Yes. Good." He looked at Shane with an expression that had nothing managed in it. "Because it sounded like something I have been trying to say for a long time and could not figure out how. That's what it was."

Shane's throat closed. He looked at the monitor, at the IV, at the oxygen cannula, at the gold cross against the hospital gown. He looked at the bruise he couldn't see and the ribs he couldn't see and the drainage tube he couldn't see, all of it hidden under cotton and held together by the stubborn structural integrity of a man who had been putting himself back together his entire life.

"I'm going to lose my certification," Shane said. Not because it was the most important thing. Because it was the thing he could say without his voice breaking.

"I know."

"Every call I've made in your games is going to be reviewed. There's going to be a hearing. It's going to be public."

"I know all of this."

"Your stats could be affected. They'll look at whether you received favorable treatment. Your name is going to be in everything. You might get suspended." 

His phone vibrated in his pocket. He didn't need to look. He knew who it was. McInnis, calling for the fourth time, or the league's general counsel, or someone from the press office whose name he didn't know yet but would know very well by the end of the week. He reached into his pocket with his free hand and silenced it without breaking eye contact with Ilya.

"Shane." Ilya's grip tightened. "I know."

"Are you okay with that?"

Ilya looked at him. The expression on his face was one Shane had seen exactly once before, in the apartment, when Ilya had said I am not going to stop in the flat, immovable way he said things he had finished deciding.

"You came to my hospital room at midnight," Ilya said. "You are holding my hand. I asked for you in the ambulance and it made my teammate cry." A pause. "Marleau does not cry. He is very proud of this."

"I didn't mean to—"

"I know you didn't mean to." Something that was almost a smile. Pained, effortful, and entirely real. "That is why it was good. Because you did not mean to. It was just true."

Shane looked at him. He was aware of the monitors and the hallway and Marleau standing guard outside and the clip that was, at this moment, making its way across the internet, and the morning that was coming, and the phone calls, and the hearing, and all of it. He was aware of all of it, like you were aware of the weather outside. Present, external, not the thing that mattered.

"Ilya," he said.

"Yes."

"I need you to know something."

"Okay."

"On the ice tonight. When I was skating over." He stopped. "I wasn't thinking about my career. I wasn't thinking about the mic or the broadcast or any of it. I was thinking about Chicago. Pressing ice against your elbow. I was thinking about the tuna melt. I was thinking about the coffee in the kitchen." His voice was doing the thing again, the structural failure, and he let it. "I was thinking, if he dies on this ice, I never got to drink that coffee with him."

Ilya's hand tightened on his. The monitor beeped once, twice, the steady mechanical rhythm of a body doing the work of staying alive.

"There will be coffee," Ilya said. "I will buy more. Very good coffee. Much better than the officials' lounge."

"You've never been in the officials' lounge."

"I have heard things," Ilya smiled.

Shane looked at him. His vision was doing something he was not going to acknowledge. He blinked twice and the room came back into focus.

"Six weeks," Shane said.

"Four."

"Six."

The ghost of the smirk arrived. Real this time. Pained and medicated and entirely, unmistakably Ilya. "We will negotiate."

There was a soft knock at the door. Marleau, probably. Twenty minutes was up. Shane didn't let go of Ilya's hand.

"I have to go," he said.

"I know."

"I'll call the lawyer in the morning. Hayden found someone."

"Hayden is a good man." A pause. "Tell him thank you. From me."

"I will."

"Don't go to the hotel," Ilya said.

Shane looked at him.

"Go to the apartment." It wasn't a suggestion. He said it like he had said call everything in a text in Chicago and not yet on the couch with their shoulders touching. "The code is the same. You know where everything is."

"Ilya, I can't just—"

"You can." His grip on Shane's hand tightened. "You are not going to sit in a hotel room tonight. Not after this. Not by yourself." He paused, and something moved through his face that was harder to look at than the pain. "I have spent enough nights in my apartment alone after something bad. You are not doing that in a hotel."

The books with broken spines. The skating bag by the door. The laptop on the desk with game tape paused. The kitchen where Ilya had stood in the dark and opened an envelope and stopped being okay. He thought about a space that held all the evidence of a life, good and broken and rebuilt, and Ilya handing him the key to it from a hospital bed.

"The sheets are clean," Ilya said. The ghost of something almost wry. 

"Okay," Shane said. His voice was rough.

"Okay."

Shane stood. He looked at Ilya in the hospital bed, the monitors and the IV and the cannula and the pain he was carrying without narcotics because the alternative was worse than three broken ribs, and he felt something move through him that was older and simpler than anything he had let himself feel in a long time.

"Can I kiss you?" Shane said.

Ilya looked at him. The fact that Shane had asked, instead of just doing it, instead of assuming the answer or taking what he wanted. The fact that even now, even after the mic and the clip and the whole world knowing, Shane was still asking permission. The way he had always asked. The way Ilya had asked him, a lifetime ago in a hotel in Montreal: still okay?

"Yes," Ilya said. "Carefully."

Shane leaned down. He put one hand on the mattress beside Ilya's shoulder, keeping his weight off the left side, off the ribs, off anything that would cost Ilya something he was already paying too much for. He kissed him gently. Not like they had kissed in hotel rooms or in the apartment or anywhere else where the urgency had been the point. This was careful and brief and deliberate, his mouth warm against Ilya's dry lips, and he stayed there for a moment longer than necessary, feeling Ilya breathe against him, the shallow, effortful rhythm of a body working around damage.

When he pulled back, Ilya's eyes were closed. He opened them. They were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the medication and everything to do with whatever was underneath the expression he was wearing, which was not the smirk and not the performance and not the managed version of anything. His hand came up slowly, the IV tugging, and his fingers found the front of Shane's undershirt and held on for a moment. Just held.

"Go," Ilya said. "Sleep. You look terrible."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true." His fingers let go of the shirt. "I will be here in the morning. I am not going anywhere."

Shane straightened. He didn't let go of Ilya's hand until the last possible moment, their fingers separating at the full extension of his arm, how a thing comes apart when the distance between two points exceeds what's holding them together.

He stopped at the door. He looked back. Ilya was watching him, propped up in the hospital bed, the monitors and the IV and the cross and the dim light. He looked exhausted and hurt and entirely present. He was also, Shane noticed, holding his left side with his free hand as though he'd been holding it together through willpower for the duration of a conversation and the conversation was ending and the willpower was starting to cost more than it had been. Marleau had been right. It hurt. It hurt more than Ilya had let him see.

"Shane," Ilya said.

"Yeah."

"The coffee. It is in the cabinet above the stove. Left side." A pause. "For the morning."

Shane nodded. His hand was on the door handle. Not for next time. For the morning. Because Shane was going to be there, tonight, in Ilya's apartment, in Ilya's bed, and in the morning he was going to stand in Ilya's kitchen and make coffee and call a lawyer and begin the process of losing his career, and it was going to be the first morning of something rather than the last morning of everything.

Shane opened the door and stepped into the hallway. Marleau straightened from the wall, pocketing his phone. He looked at Shane's face and whatever he saw there made him pause.

"You good?" Marleau said.

"No," Shane said. Honestly. "But I will be."

Marleau studied him for a moment. Then he did something Shane hadn't expected. He reached out and gripped Shane's shoulder, briefly and firmly, the same way Shane had seen him do to Ilya on the bench a hundred times in game footage. The grip of a man who had spent a decade keeping someone upright through various kinds of damage and had apparently, in the space of one elevator ride and a hospital hallway, decided to extend the practice.

"He told me to go to the apartment," Shane said.

"Good." Marleau didn't look surprised. "There's food in the fridge. I stocked it last week." A pause, an expression on his face that was almost sheepish. "I've been keeping his kitchen stocked since Tampa. Don't tell him. He thinks he's been ordering groceries in his sleep."

Shane almost laughed. The sound came out small and broken and real. Marleau looked at him with an expression that was making a decision, and the decision appeared to be favorable.

"He's going to be in a lot of pain tonight," Marleau said. His voice dropped. "After you leave. He won't buzz the nurse. He never does. I'm going to stay with him." He paused. "I wanted you to know that. That someone is staying with him."

"Thank you," Shane said. It came out rough.

Marleau held the look for a moment. Then he moved toward the door. He paused with his hand on the frame, the same way Hayden had paused in the officials' room. He looked at Shane over his shoulder.

"He played the best hockey of his career this season while he was talking to you," Marleau said. "I don't know what you're going to do about the rest of it. But I know that." He held the look for a moment. "For what it's worth."

He went inside. The door closed. Shane stood in the hospital hallway at half past midnight. The fluorescent light was doing what fluorescent light always did. Making everything look like evidence. He leaned his back against the wall and breathed and felt the specific, terrifying weight of having said the true thing in the true place for the first time in his life, and the world not ending, not even close, just continuing, the monitors and the hallway and the quiet and the morning coming.

He pulled out his phone. He opened Rose's message and typed: Thank you. I might take you up on that.

He opened Hayden's message and saved Roman Speeter's number.

He opened the thread with Ilya and typed: Left side of the cabinet. I'll remember.

Then he put his phone in his pocket and walked down the hallway and took the elevator and stepped out into the February night. Boston was cold and dark and exactly itself, the harbor lights reflecting off the water, a siren somewhere in the distance moving through the city and fading.

He hailed a cab. He gave the driver an address two blocks from the harbor that he had only been to once but had apparently memorized. The city moved past the window. He thought about next time becoming tonight and the coffee in the cabinet and the sound of his own voice saying please in a building full of people who had heard it. He was not fine, not remotely, and the morning was going to be very bad, and underneath all of it, steady as a pulse: the knowledge that Ilya Rozanov was alive and breathing and had said good in the way that meant everything, and Shane Hollander, for the first time in his adult life, was not pretending.

The apartment was dark when he let himself in. The lobby code worked. The elevator was quiet. He stood in the doorway and felt the weight of the place settle around him, the particular silence of someone else's home when they weren't in it. The skating bag by the door. The books on the coffee table. The can of Coke on the counter, the same one from last time or a different one, it didn't matter. He took off his shoes. He hung his coat on the hook where Ilya's jacket usually lived.

His phone lit up in his pocket. McInnis again. The fourth call, or the fifth. Sixth? He had stopped counting. He looked at the name on the screen for a moment, the letters glowing in the dark apartment, and thought about all the mornings he had picked up on the first ring, all the times he had stood at attention for the voice on the other end of that number. He set the phone face down on the kitchen counter. He turned the ringer off. Roman Speeter, call before eight AM. Everything else could wait until he'd slept in a bed that belonged to someone who had told him to be there.

He found the bedroom. The sheets were clean, as promised. He lay down on the side that was not Ilya's and pulled the blanket over himself and felt enveloped by the smell of Ilya's detergent, and his shampoo lingering on the pillows. He stared at the ceiling and felt the enormous, exhausting quiet of a room that was not a hotel room, that belonged to someone, that he had been invited into. On the kitchen counter, his phone lit up twice more in the dark and went unanswered. He did not look at his phone for the rest of the night. Really.

Chapter End Notes

Note the increase in chapter number!
Next update will likely be the weekend of the 18th due to my travel schedule, but crazier things have happened than an early drop.

Chapter 14: Consequences

Chapter Summary

Ilya has a plan. Shane ruins it.

Chapter Notes

Enjoy, my darlings.

Content warning for some hospital. I'm also not a lawyer, don't come for me. I made sure everything was technically plausible, but perhaps not realistic.

Ilya watched the footage seven times. The first time, he was looking for the hit. Trying to reconstruct the angle, the force, the moment his body decided to fail him in front of a sold-out arena and everyone watching at home. The second time, he was looking at the boards. By the third, he had stopped looking at himself entirely. He didn’t remember much of the hit himself. The memory was gone in the haze of pain and adrenaline. He remembered how the ice had risen to meet him. He had not been alarmed. Not at first. He had been thrown to the ice plenty of times, and knew how to go down. What had been alarming was that when he tried to get back up, the air wouldn’t come. 

That was the part that his mind returned to. It wasn’t the pain which was immediate and considerable, and with him still. It was the air. The panic of a breath that wouldn’t fill. The way his lungs suddenly, in the span of an instant, stopped working. It was a visceral fear that came on involuntarily and couldn’t be shaken.

And Shane's face. Eighteen seconds, start to finish. He'd gotten there first, ahead of everyone else.  The way he looked at Ilya, the panic in his eyes matching the panic Ilya had felt. The tone in which he'd said his name. Not Rozanov. His name, in a voice that had nothing left in it but the one true thing.

He watched it four more times.

He would have watched it another except that breathing had become, at some point, a problem again. Not the crisis it had been on the ice. That particular brand of terror was gone. It was replaced in the ambulance by the organized efficiency of people who knew exactly what to do for a collapsed lung. Then by the mercy of a procedure he had been awake for and would prefer not to think about in detail, and then by the long colorless hours of the tube and the monitor and the slow mechanical reinflation of a lung that had not wanted to reinflate. He had been through worse, he told himself, which was not entirely true but was useful. He had played through worse, which was more accurate, though the attending had given him a look when he said this out loud that suggested she did not find it as reassuring as he did.

The tube was still in. It ran from his left side to a drainage unit on the floor that was doing the work his lung was unable to do for itself. The work it was doing was necessary, and he was, in an abstract way, grateful for all the medical interventions available to him. But now there was the architecture of three broken ribs that moved every time he breathed, whether he wanted them to or not. Each inhale moved the tube, against the cage of everything the hit had rearranged. He had to keep every breath unbearably shallow. The respiratory therapist had shown him how to do it. Shallow and even, small deliberate breaths. Suddenly having to think about breathing after nearly thirty years of doing it with no thought at all was jarring and unpleasant. He had hoped it would get easier, but all he had was a nerve block now, the coverage going patchy like a nerve block did when they started to wear off unevenly, leaving some places numb and others suddenly, specifically not.

He had known when he told the paramedics no narcotics, he had been very clear, and the receiving attending had noted this in his chart and not argued but had the expression of someone making an assessment they were not putting in the chart. He also knew he was writing a check his body would need to cash later. But it was the one decision of the evening that he had no uncertainty about. He would rather the cloudiness of a head shrouded in pain than in the pharmaceutical haze.

Marleau took the phone away. He reached across and removed it from Ilya's hand. "Sleep," Marleau said, from the chair he'd pulled up hours ago. 

Ilya looked at the ceiling. Sleep was theoretical. He had tried it twice and both times his body had found some new angle of protest to wake him with. A shift in the tube, a breath that went slightly wrong, the late-night quality of a hospital room that was designed to sustain life but provide no comfort. He was tired in the deep, structural way of someone who had been hurt and was using significant resources on the project of healing, and the tiredness sat underneath the pain and around it and made everything worse.

"I'm fine," he said. His voice came out lower than intended, roughed up by the procedure and the oxygen tube and the hours of managed breathing. Marleau looked at him skeptically. “They aren’t going to take the tube out tonight.”

“I know, I talked to the doctor.”

“They talked to you?”

“I said I was your brother. If they didn’t believe me, they didn’t say that.”

Ilya looked at him. Marleau looked back, the expression identical, offering nothing further on the subject of what he had said to the doctor or what the doctor had made of it. Marleau had been making himself family for years without ever formally describing himself as such, and the approach had always worked because Marleau was the kind of person rooms assumed was supposed to be there.

"So," Marleau said. "Tomorrow."

"Yes."

"And then they reassess the pain management."

"Yes."

Marleau nodded. “How bad is it? What number?” he asked.

"Four." The look again. "It depends on what I'm doing," Ilya conceded.

"You're not doing shit, Roz. Just lying there."

"Even lying in a bed, it depends. The tube—" He paused. "When I breathe."

“So it only hurts when you breathe? Jesus Christ.”

“Okay, nine.”

“You could tell the nurse.”

“No.”

“Ilya–”

“I know what I’m doing. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Marleau was quiet for a long moment. "You're not wrong," he said. "But you can tell them how bad it hurts. Talk options."

"I know." Ilya looked at the ceiling. "I'll tell them tomorrow when the tube is out. When there's something they can actually do about it." Ilya sighed. “You can go home.”

“You know I’m not going to.” Ilya wasn’t going to fight him on that. 

It felt like the entire world had watched a referee forget, for eighteen seconds, everything except the fact that he was frightened. He thought about what that meant. He thought about it for a long time, because there was nothing else to do, and because the alternative was thinking about the feeling in his ribs. He was still thinking about it at three in the morning when the ward had gone as quiet as it was going to get. Marleau had fallen asleep in the chair with his chin on his chest because Marleau had been awake since five that morning and had spent hours in a waiting room and had, despite all of this, the capacity for sleep that came with years of road trips and middle seats and pregame naps on training room tables.

Ilya lay still. The pain had shifted into its nighttime configuration, less acute in its peaks, more total in its presence. Less a series of events and more the general climate. The tube was the tube. His ribs were his ribs. He breathed into it and it breathed back at him.

He had been so relieved that Shane had come here, even if just for a moment. He thought about the footage. He had it without needing to watch it again. The freeze-frame of Shane's face at the boards. The face that hid underneath the professional referee's face. Filed with precision in the place he kept things he was going to need to return to. He had needed to see his face, back how it was supposed to be. Pinched, a little stressed, but his. Not terrified. Not worried he was watching Ilya die on the ice. He needed to get out of here, to see Shane again. To reassure him they would figure this out. That they could get through it. That it would be fine.

Unfortunately, it was not fine. The tube stayed in for three days instead of one, because the lung's progress was slower than the imaging had suggested. The attending explained this in the careful language of someone used to managing expectations, and Ilya listened and understood and then spent the next seventy-two hours learning the difference between pain that was getting better and pain that was simply becoming familiar. On the third day they took the tube out. The nurse first explained the procedure, which Ilya appreciated, and then told him he would need to bear down and hold his breath at the critical moment so that air wouldn't rush back in. He did it. The sensation was — he filed it away without examining it too closely, the wrongness of something being removed from inside his chest, and the involuntary noise he made that he was glad only the nurse and Marleau were there to hear. Marleau, to his considerable credit, said nothing and looked at the wall.

Shane did not visit again. Ilya had asked him not to. Not that he didn’t want to see him. That’s all he wanted. But it would be smarter to stay away until they had finished the hearing. His agent, Clare, came to the house on the fifth day after the accident with Greta Nygaard, some outlandishly expensive sports lawyer. He had only been discharged the previous afternoon, but Clare had insisted there was no time to waste. They came together, which meant they had already talked, which meant Clare had already briefed Nygaard on what the meeting was likely to be, which meant Ilya was walking into something more prepared than he'd intended. Marleau had been lingering at his place in between practices, but he had gone to the pharmacy. Ilya had waited until he had stepped out to text Clare come now, and Clare had apparently taken now to mean with counsel.

Nygaard sat at the kitchen table with her portfolio open and a cup of tea she had accepted and not touched. Clare sat beside her with coffee, she was actually drinking and the expression she had worn at their first meeting in 2020, the meeting where she became his agent after the Russian agent he’d had since he was a teenager had dropped him in the middle of his stint at rehab. She looked at Ilya across the table and waited.

He told them what he wanted, in the words he had been rehearsing for days in the hospital.

"I would like to take all of the consequences," he said. "I pursued him, I initiated, I used the power differential deliberately. I want the panel to believe this."

Nygaard began to speak. Clare put one hand flat on the table.

"You waited until Marleau left," Clare said.

"He would not be helpful."

"He would tell you this is a bad idea." She looked at him steadily. "Which it is." She picked up her coffee. "Greta. Go ahead."

Nygaard looked between them briefly, the practiced neutral expression of someone who had worked with Clare long enough to understand the dynamic, and turned to Ilya. "The messages between you are a problem for the coercion narrative," she said. "Not insurmountably so. Power differentials can coexist with apparent mutuality, and the pattern of initiation is well-documented on your side. But the content is substantive. A finding panel will read that thread and find it difficult to position Hollander as a passive participant."

"But it is still possible," Ilya said.

"Possible," Nygaard said. "Less clean than it would have been without the phone records, which they definitely also have. Hollander used his League-issued phone to communicate with you.” Ilya rolled his eyes. Really, Shane? “The panel would need to conclude that the apparent mutuality was itself a product of the dynamic. A first-year official in pursuit of certification develops an emotional investment as a function of the power the player holds over his career trajectory." She said it without inflection. "It is a coherent argument. I can make it."

"Then make it."

Clare set her coffee down. "Ilya, I have to insist that you do not do this."

He recognized the tone. Clare used his first name when she was about to say something she needed him to actually hear, which she did rarely enough that it landed when she did.

"Right now,” Nygaard said, "you walk away with a minimal finding. Conduct unbecoming, possible short suspension, captaincy intact or near-intact. Hollander takes the full weight of the conflict of interest finding." She paused. "His certification is likely gone regardless of the narrative. But the coercion finding follows him in different ways. It describes him a certain way. To every future employer. To every room he walks into."

Ilya looked at his hands on the table.

"I'm not his lawyer," Nygaard said. "My obligation is to your outcome. I’m telling you the options so you can make an informed decision."

"I understand what I'm asking," Ilya said.

"Do you." Clare again. Not a question. She held his gaze. "We have spent a lot of time rebuilding. I don’t think we’ll be able to do it a second time. The math doesn’t work that way."

"The math works for him," Ilya said. “I want him to keep as much of his life as possible.”

"We'll come back to that." Clare opened her folder. "First. The suspension length."

Nygaard took it. "If you say nothing, it puts you in the range of four to eight months. You’d both need to agree not to cooperate with the investigation, essentially. If that doesn't succeed, or if Hollander contests it, you're looking at significantly longer. The league has been waiting for a case that would allow it to establish precedent on official-player conduct. They will use this one."

"How much longer?" Ilya said.

"Twenty months is the number the Commissioner's office has been working with," Clare said. "That's not confirmed, but it's not a guess either." Twenty months. Two full seasons. The number sat in his chest and he breathed around it. "Your contract runs through next season," Clare continued. "The Raiders are not going to terminate. They want you back when you're eligible, and they'll honor the deal. But a twenty-month suspension takes you past the contract end date." She looked at him. "Which means renegotiation before you're even reinstated. They’ll have all the leverage, and you’ll take a major pay cut. And your visa status is tied to an active player contract."

Ilya was still.

"If the suspension runs past the contract expiration and there's no extension in place, your O-1 lapses," she said. "You'd have a window, sixty days to resolve status or depart. If it doesn't go through, you're looking at going back to Russia while you wait out the remainder of the suspension."

The room was quiet. Ilya knew that if he did what he wanted, giving Shane his freedom, it might mean returning to Russia. A Russia that would know about his relationship with a man. Russia would take him back. He could play in the KHL, and they would bury the story. But returning to Russia would be trusting an institution that understood what it meant to have leverage over someone. He knew what going back would look like. He had spent ten years making sure he didn't have to find out.

"There are other options," Clare said. She had been watching his face. "Before you go where you're going." He looked at her. "You still have a passport that opens doors in Europe," she said. "And I've had calls this week. Nothing formal, just calls, from representatives in Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden. ZSC Lions in Zurich, HIFK in Helsinki, Frölunda in Gothenburg. All interested. A loan arrangement, one or two seasons, structured around the suspension timeline." She let that sit for a moment. "You'd be skating. You'd be competing at a high level. You'd have medical staff, structure, and a city that isn't Boston with nothing to do but wait. And the visa issue largely resolves itself. You'd be on a European work authorization while the O-1 stays dormant rather than lapsing."

Ilya looked at the table. He thought about the apartment. The city through the windows at night. Everything I have built is here. He had said this to Shane once and Shane had gone very quiet. Ilya had understood, in the quiet, that Shane had not done that part of the math either, had stopped at there are other referees and not continued to. Then Ilya goes back to Russia, and neither of them had said it out loud because it was the sentence that ended something.

"These are real offers," Ilya said.

"Preliminary. But yes. Real. And Boston is open to the idea, since it will keep you in shape."

"You have not spoken to any of them about terms."

"Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first." Clare looked at him. "All three are good organizations. Zurich is the cleanest fit administratively. They've handled loan situations before during the lockouts. Helsinki and Gothenburg are both competitive leagues, different pace, different style. It's not a decision you have to make today." She paused. "But it's a decision you have to make soon. It’s not a matter of whether you will be getting suspended, but how long."

"I know," Ilya said.

"Are you intending to continue the relationship?" she said then. "Not what you think is possible. What you want."

"I would like to," Ilya said. "I don't see how."

"That's not a no."

"It is not a no."

Clare looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at Nygaard. Something passed between them.

"All right," Nygaard said. She picked up her pen. "Then we prepare."

Clare picked up her coffee. She did not look satisfied. She looked like someone who had made her case, had it noted, and was now doing her job anyway, which was what she always did, and which was why Ilya had called her in 2020 and had not stopped calling her since.

They left at six.

Clare paused at the door. Not to say anything. Just the pause of someone who wanted to make sure the person they were leaving was going to be all right, without making it a thing.

"Call me if anything changes," she said.

"Yes," Ilya said.

"And call Brennan."

He looked at her.

"I will,” he agreed, and he meant it. She left. Nygaard followed with a brief nod. The door closed, and the apartment was quiet.

Ilya sat at the kitchen table for a while. He did not move. Outside, the city was doing its early-evening thing, the light going amber and then grey, the harbor losing its edge. He had been looking at this view for years. He had stood at these windows at three in the morning with a glass in his hand, and after games, and the morning after Shane had slept in his bed in a way that was not about sex and everything about something else. The apartment was his, through all the ordinary mornings and difficult nights that built up in a place like sediment until it held the shape of you.

He thought about what Clare had laid out. Switzerland. Finland. Sweden. Three cities, three leagues, three different versions of the same essential thing: somewhere that was not Boston, not Russia, not a penthouse with no ice and twenty months to fill. ZSC Lions in Zurich, HIFK in Helsinki, Frölunda in Gothenburg. He knew all three rinks, as any player knew rinks they had played in a handful of times, all when he was still in juniors. The quality of the ice, the layout of the locker room, the acoustics of the crowd. He did not know any of the cities like he knew Boston. He would arrive in whichever one and begin building something from nothing.

He could start again. Meet someone new, unproblematic. The image came to him unbidden. A  picturesque ski chalet, snow on the glass, a man with blonde hair and a quiet voice handing him coffee, someone who looked nothing like Shane. Someone uncomplicated. Someone whose career did not depend on Ilya's choices. A year ago, that life would not have seemed like a punishment. He looked at it honestly. Brennan had taught him to look at things he was trying not to want, and he understood that the problem was not the ski chalet. The problem was the man in it. Any man he could picture clearly enough to construct that image was already, in some fundamental way, the wrong man.

He thought about Shane. Shane rebuilding a career out of what was left of it, which was what Shane did, which was the thing Shane had been doing since he was nineteen and which he was very good at, and which Ilya was going to watch happen from a significant number of time zones away for maybe years, maybe forever. Would Shane even want him then? He did not have an answer to that question.

The honest version of what he was deciding was this: go somewhere in Europe and give Shane his life back and build distance between them with time, until it didn’t hurt so fucking bad to think about being apart. Which city, which league, which rink, how long — that was a second question. The first question was whether he was going at all, and the first question had already been answered, and he was sitting with the weight of it.

He was going to be thirty years old this summer. He had built something careful and functional out of the wreckage of his mid-twenties, and that had required him to understand precisely what he needed and what he could not afford. What he could not afford had always been the thing that followed him home. The thing that waited. The thing that sat in the ceiling in the dark and got louder when he tried to manage it and quieter, briefly, when he found something to drown it with.

Shane had not drowned it. Shane had, for the first time in his adult life, made it stop on its own. Not by being a distraction. Shane was the least distracting person he had ever been in a room with, precise and present and demanding in ways that required Ilya to be equally present, which was the opposite of the quality he had previously selected for in the people he let close. Shane made the noise stop by being something worth being quiet for. He understood what that meant for his decision.

Leaving was the only path that did not require Shane to be the reason he chose wrong. Shane's record, clean. Shane's reinstatement, possible. Shane's career, the thing he had built out of the rubble of the ankle at nineteen, was preserved in the only way Ilya had available to him. This was the thing he could give. It was not the thing he wanted to give. He would have preferred, in some version of the world, to give Shane something that did not require him to be on the other side of an ocean with a fragile and precious thing left untended.

He picked up his phone. He did not call Shane. He would call Shane when the shape of it was settled enough to hand to someone else. Brennan picked up on the third ring.

"Ilya," he said. The particular surprise of someone who had been waiting for a call and was too professional to say so. "I'm glad to hear from you again, although I didn’t expect it so soon."

Ilya looked at the window. The city had gone fully dark, the harbor lights doing their small cold work against the black water. The apartment was quiet around him. His chest hurt, the dull, persistent hurt of ribs healing on their own schedule without consulting him.

"I have something I need to think through," he said. 

"Okay," Brennan said. "I've got time."

Ilya looked out the window for a moment longer at the city. Then he started talking.

Things moved quickly after that. The correspondence arrived, drafted in the flat administrative language of institutional process, and it landed in Ilya's mailbox while he was still on the wrong side of a chest tube and Shane was still on the wrong side of a lobby desk. 

Now, two weeks later, they had been spending forty minutes in the same waiting room. Six chairs, institutional gray, bolted in a row. Ilya at one end. Shane at the other. The silence between them was not hostile, but it was full of something else. Something neither of them could speak. 

Ilya was still unwell. He had spent two days convincing everyone in his vicinity that he was fit to attend, and he was fit to attend in the sense that he was present and vertical and his suit was correctly assembled. He was not fit in the sense that breathing still felt like a chore and his last ibuprofen had been six hours ago. He had found the chair position that hurt the least and he was holding it with the concentration of a man doing something technical that looked like doing nothing.

Shane's collar was straight. Shane was not looking at him. Shane was aware of every inch of the distance the same way Ilya was aware of every inch of the distance. At some point, Ilya shifted. A small adjustment, necessary. The stillness that followed was the stillness of absorbing the consequence and waiting for it to pass. He heard Shane's breath catch from five chairs away. He did not look. Shane did not look. Both of them looked at the wall directly ahead and waited.

When the door opened and the assistant said Mr. Rozanov, Ilya stood. Marleau stood with him. He had driven Ilya to the building that morning without announcing himself, because Ilya had needed it, and Cliff knew better than to wait for him to ask.

"I'll be here," Marleau said. He said it like he said most things, short, factual, requiring no response. He sat down on the bench across from the door with a coffee and a paperback he would not open.

Inside, the room felt smaller than it should have been. A conference table with six chairs, and a window that faced another building's dirty ventilation system. The investigator sat at the head with a laptop and a legal pad. The Commissioner's representative sat to his left. Nygaard and Clare were already seated. Shane’s lawyer was there as well, looking at him curiously.

Ilya sat down carefully. The chair was the wrong kind. It was high-backed with no give, the posture it required making his three healing ribs screech. He found the angle that caused him the fewest issues and held it. 

The investigator opened a folder. "Mr. Rozanov. I'd like to begin with the timeline. When did you first have contact with Mr. Hollander outside of a game context?"

"Montreal," Ilya said. "September fourteenth. A bar in the Village."

"And at that point, were you aware that Mr. Hollander was a league official?"

"No." He said evenly. "I did not know who he was."

"You gave him a false name." The investigator looked at his notes. "You identified yourself as Sasha."

Ilya felt the room's attention shift, the tightening of a proceeding as it arrived at a detail that mattered.

"Yes," he said.

"I was picking up a man," Ilya said, “And that is not something I do as Ilya Rozanov." Not quite how he had planned to come out.

The investigator made a note. Nygaard's expression did not change. The Commissioner's representative wrote something.

"When did you learn that he was an official?"

"Boston. October seventh. He was on the ice for our home opener." He could still see it. The shock of recognition, the world rearranging itself around a single fact. "I knew immediately that it was a problem."

"But you continued the contact."

"Yes."

"You texted him from your personal phone on October eleventh, thirteenth, and fifteenth. Three times in five days."

"Yes."

"He did not respond to the first two."

"No."

"What did the third message say?"

Ilya looked at the table. He knew what it said. He had the thread memorized the way he had game tape memorized, every word in its place. "I told him I would be in Chicago. I said I wanted to see him."

"And Mr. Hollander responded."

"Yes."

"With what?"

"He said he would be there," Ilya said.

The investigator made another note. He moved through the cities methodically, Chicago, the second Boston meeting, Montreal again, the loading dock, and Ilya answered each one. It didn’t seem like so much, laid out like that. But it was everything. He was precise about the timeline, the locations, the sequence. He took every initiation onto himself, every meeting, every hotel room, every text, because they were his to take and because if there was a version of this that worked, it required the picture to be clear. The picture was him pursuing, him initiating, him deciding. A first-year official who had been collected by a captain with a decade in the league and a known history of getting what he wanted. Ilya felt a pang as he realized the texts that had changed his life, that had ruled his schedule and moods for months, were just line items in a discipline file.

"December," the investigator said. "This was Mr. Hollander's decision to end contact?"

"Yes."

"And you respected that."

"I attempted to contact him, but he had blocked my number."

"He contacted you," The investigator looked at his notes. "After your personal leave."

Ilya said nothing. The investigator did not push. He was good at his job how many people were good at institutional work — thorough, meticulous, tracking the seams.

"Mr. Rozanov. I want to ask you directly. At any point during your contact with Mr. Hollander, did you use your position — your status in the league, your influence within the organization — to pressure him into continuing the relationship?"

"Yes," Ilya said. It wasn’t true. Not exactly. "The pressure would have existed whether I pressured him or not."

Nygaard picked it up. She was very good at it. He had known she would be. Power differential. Documented pursuit across multiple cities, across an entire season, across hotel rooms and the closed ecosystem of the professional hockey world where a player of Ilya's stature occupied a kind of gravity that newer officials navigated, whether they knew it or not. She laid it out without editorializing, without sentiment, without a single word that felt like advocacy. Just the shape of a thing that could be true.

By now, his chest had stopped cooperating, and he was measuring his inhales like the respiratory therapist had shown him, shallow and even, the ribs communicating their opinion of this proceeding in the only language they had. His cross necklace moved against his skin with each breath, a small cold pendulum marking time.

The investigator made a note. The Commissioner's representative made a note of his own. Ilya looked at the table in front of him and breathed and thought: this is what it costs. This is the number. Shane's certification gone, but his record clean. Shane described as a victim, which was not what he was, but which was survivable in a way that the alternative might not be. 

He could not give Shane back his career as it was, totally untouched. He understood that. But he could give him this. A chance, however slim. The version where Shane had been swept up in something bigger than himself, that had run away without his ability to stop it, rather than the version where Shane had driven toward it with both hands on the wheel, which was the true version. It was the version Ilya had loved from the first moment he understood that Shane Hollander in pursuit of something was the most deliberate force he had ever met. He could not give him that version. So he gave him the other one.

Nygaard was still talking. Ilya looked at the wall and breathed. He coughed painfully. The investigator glanced at the clock. "We can pause for a moment," he said.

“I’ll get you some water,” Clare said and stepped into the hallway. She stopped when she saw Marleau on the bench. 

Marleau stood up. "How's it going in there?"

Clare looked at him for a moment. She glanced back at Ilya through the open door, who gave her a nod of permission. Then she told him what Ilya was doing and why. The clean exit currently being assembled and handed across the table. Marleau listened. He nodded once. Clare walked away to the vending machine.

Shane had been in the hallway for ninety minutes when Rose Landry sat down beside him.

She didn't announce herself. She just appeared, coat over her arm, bag on her shoulder, two coffees from somewhere better than the building's machine. She held one out, pointedly ignoring Marleau on the other end of the chairs, keeping all of her attention on Shane.

"I'm not here as press," she said. "Before you ask."

"I didn’t think you’d do that." He took the coffee. It was good. He hadn't eaten since six that morning, and the coffee hit his empty stomach with a deep, acidic bitterness.

"Hayden told me," she said. "Not the details. Just that you were here today." She sat back in the chair, which was the same institutional grey as every other chair in this building, and crossed her ankles. "I was in the city anyway. I had a segment at eleven." She looked at him. "You look terrible."

"Since when do you have Hayden’s number?”

“I’m a reporter. I have everyone’s number. Have you eaten?"

"Rose."

"Okay." She held up one hand. "I'll stop." She didn't stop exactly, but she redirected, pulling out her phone and scrolling through something. She showed him a clip of a truly catastrophic own-goal from last night's Bundesliga match. Shane watched it without really seeing it. She didn't seem to mind. She showed him a second clip, a toddler on skates who ate it spectacularly at center ice during an intermission. That one almost got him.

"I saw the clip," she said then, without changing her tone. She was looking at her phone, not at him. "Everyone's seen the clip.” A pause. "So whatever's happening in that room," she said, "whatever they're deciding, it's real. I just want you to know that someone outside of all this knows it's real."

Shane didn't say anything. He drank the coffee. The hallway was quiet. Anxiety permeated the space, and nothing would stop that except hearing the verdict. Rose sat beside him, present without requiring anything, the same quality she'd had in the coffee shop in Montreal when she'd sat across from him and asked do you actually like it? and waited for the real answer instead of the performed one.

She was good at this. She was good at a lot of things, the career, her interviews, the way she moved through the hockey world. She was the kind of person Shane could have built a life around if he had been someone else. If the wiring had been different. She would have been easy to love, and the life would have been easy to construct, and nobody would have had to sit in a hallway outside a League hearing waiting for a verdict. Things would be easy if they were different.

But it wasn’t different. The wiring was what it was, and it ran in one direction, and that direction was currently behind a closed door giving testimony that Shane could not hear and could not stop and could not do anything about except sit in this chair and wait.

"He's in there right now," Shane said. He didn't say Ilya's name. He didn't need to.

Rose looked at him.

"I don't know what he's saying." He looked at his coffee. "I wish I knew what his lawyer planned to say. I know our lawyers talked, but they wouldn’t tell me anything except to stay quiet and let them handle it. His agent — she's very smart. She has a plan."

"But you don't know if that's what's happening."

"No."

Rose was quiet for a moment. "You're scared he's falling on a grenade for you."

Shane didn't answer, which was an answer. He was afraid that Ilya was in there taking the fall. It was real. Ilya knew it was real, the same as Shane. But was it more real than his need to preserve his career? His visa? 

Rose laid a comforting hand on his knee. "For what it's worth, from what I've seen of Rozanov, he doesn't do anything by accident. If he's in there doing something, he decided to do it."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

Rose looked at him for a long moment. She had the expression she got when she was reading someone, the one that made athletes spill their secrets on camera for years, except she wasn't on camera. She wasn't filing a story and she was just sitting in a hallway with her friend. The expression was not a professional assessment but plain, unguarded care.

"Okay," she said. She put her phone in her bag. "I'm going to go. You don't need me sitting here when whatever comes next comes next." She stood up. "But Shane."

He looked up at her.

"Whatever he's doing in there — whatever the strategy is — you get to decide what's true about you. Not a panel. Not a lawyer. You."

She touched his shoulder once, briefly. Then she picked up her coat and walked toward the elevator. Shane sat in the chair. He drank the rest of the coffee. He thought about what she'd said. You get to decide what's true about you.

He was still thinking about it when Marleau sat down beside him. Marleau told him then. 

“Ilya’s taking the fall in there. He said he pressured you into it.” Two sentences was all it took. Shane was very still while he listened, then he stood up suddenly. 

"Hollander—" Marleau said.

But Shane was already at the door. He was through it in thirty seconds.

The room went quiet. Both lawyers looked up. The investigator's pen stopped.

Shane was not looking at the lawyers.

"That's not what happened," he said.

Ilya looked at him from across the table, his face completely stricken. 

"I was not coerced." Shane's voice was level. The investigator, Shane's lawyer, the Commissioner's representative — he was not looking at any of them. He was looking at Ilya. "I made every choice with full knowledge of what I was doing. Every single one. I am not going to let him decide what is true about me."

Nygaard set her pen down. Shane's lawyer was standing, touching his arm. “It’s your turn later,” he said firmly, trying to direct Shane back out the door.

The investigator made a note. Ilya looked at Shane with an expression that had three things in it, happening at the same time: devastation, because the plan was gone and the clean exit with it; recognition, because he had known, at some level, from the moment Marleau stood up; and something that he did not have any words to explain.

"Okay," the investigator said, into the silence. He made another note. "Let's take a brief recess."

Ilya had known Shane would come through the door. He had prepared for this hearing, assuming Shane would insist that he was lying. He had built the narrative, and set it down in front of the panel anyway, because Shane coming through the door was not a certainty, and the alternative — the version where Shane didn't come through the door, where he sat in the hallway and let the plan work and took the clean exit — that version was also possible. Preferred, even. Ilya had needed it to be available. Shane had not taken it. Shane was looking at him. Ilya looked back. Both lawyers had their pens down. The room was waiting.

After Shane’s interruption, they demanded Ilya leave the premises completely for Shane’s testimony, fearing another. Cliff took him to a cafe down the street and they sat in silence.

The verdicts came at the end of the afternoon.

Ilya Rozanov: a nineteen-month suspension. Captaincy suspended pending return. The investigator noted that his testimony had been cooperative and consistent. He noted, without further comment, the work phone records. He noted the documented history of initiation. It wasn’t the full twenty. But it was a long time. 

Shane Hollander: indefinite suspension with conditions for reinstatement. The game log reviewed — found not to support systematic bias. Completed review required. The door open. The conduct at the hearing was noted as a mitigating factor.

Not unlocked. But open. Marleau handed Ilya a bottle of water in the hallway. He found the wall and put his shoulder against it. The walk to the cafe and back had spent more energy than he'd budgeted. Too long upright, the ibuprofen long past useful, his chest burning on every breath. He let the wall take some of it.

“Let’s get you home," Marleau said. He had his hands in his pockets. He was looking at the elevator bank blankly.

"I need to see Shane," Ilya said. Marleau gestured to the elevator. They rode down in silence. In the elevator, Marleau looked straight ahead. "For what it's worth," he said. "I think you picked a good one. I just hope he thinks the same of you."

Ilya looked at his shoes. He didn't say anything. Marleau nodded once, like he'd answered. 

Shane was on the sidewalk. He had his bag at his feet and he was watching traffic. The March air was cold and noncommittal, the kind of weather that hinted that spring was on the way, but that it was possible a snowstorm could be on its way too. 

Ilya came out through the glass doors and stood beside him. Close enough that their arms were almost touching. The cold helped, or he chose to believe it did. Outside air after a day of recirculated institutional air, something to breathe into carefully and let work. He breathed it in. Shallow and even. 

“I’ll go get the car,” Marleau said, walking away. 

They stood there. Neither of them said anything for a moment. The traffic moved. A light changed. The city went about its business with its usual absolute indifference to the fact that the world had shifted. 

"That was very stupid," Ilya said.

"I know."

"I had a plan."

"I know."

"It was a good plan." He said without heat. Just laying it down. "It would have worked. Nygaard is very good. She—"

"I know it would have worked," Shane said. "That's why I couldn't let you do it."

Ilya was quiet.

"You were going to let them—" Shane stopped. "You were going to take a version of this that wasn't true. Because you thought it was better for me." He wasn't looking at Ilya. He was looking at the traffic. "I wasn't going to let you do that."

"Your reinstatement," Ilya said. "The conditions are more — it is less clear now. The timeline is open. That is not—"

"I know what it is."

"Shane—"

"I know what I chose." He turned then and looked at Ilya directly. "You've given enough away. You gave up a lot. I couldn’t let you give up the true version of what happened too."

Ilya looked at him. His chest hurt. It had hurt all day, it would hurt for several more weeks, and what came after was a different question, the one that had been waiting in the corner of every conversation they had.

"I want to try," Ilya said.

Shane went still.

"I know there is nothing clean about any of this. Walking away is the right call." He looked at Shane, the managed version set completely aside, because the hearing room had used up everything he had and this was what was underneath. "But I want to say it now, before the next thing starts. I want to try doing this. With you."

Shane turned to look at him fully. “It’s not like I have any idea what it looks like from here." His voice was very even and quiet. "The reinstatement review could take a year. You're going to have to go somewhere. Do something for a while. Everything is—" He stopped. Looked at the sidewalk. Looked back up. "I don't know what we’re doing.”

"Neither do I," Ilya said. "That is — usually that would bother me. I like to know." He looked at the traffic. "It does not bother me. I don't know why."

"Yes, you do," Shane said quietly.

Ilya looked at him.

"Yes, you do," Shane said again. Something had shifted in his face, the last of the careful management gone. He looked tired and certain in the brisk air. "Ilya. You know why." He did know why. He couldn’t name it. Not here, not now. "We'll figure out the next part," Shane said. "Together. Okay? Whatever it looks like. We figure it out."

Shane was standing close enough that their arms were touching now, and nineteen months was nineteen months, and the captaincy was gone, and none of it was clean and none of it was certain.

"Okay," Ilya said.

"Yeah?"

"Yes." He looked at Shane. The first moment, he understood it as the first moment, the real first moment, that neither of them was performing anything for anyone. No league, no panel, no investigator. Just the sidewalk. Just the cold. Just this. 

"I can move to Boston,” Shane said. “We can try. I’ll find something. Coaching, maybe, or –”

“Shane, I’m not going to be in Boston.”

Shane's face fell. "Wherever then."

"I'm going to Europe. One of the three. Zurich, Helsinki, Gothenburg." He wasn’t cruel. Just the fact of it. "I have not decided which yet."

"What am I going to do in Zurich?"

"Shane. You are not coming to Zurich."

"You said you wanted to try."

"I do want to try. It will not be easy." He held Shane's gaze. "But you need to rebuild here. And I need to kill nineteen months somewhere that is not Russia and not a Boston penthouse with nothing to do." A pause. "We do it apart. And then we see."

Shane looked at him for a long moment. Something moved across his face, the working through of it, the calculation.

"And then we see," Shane repeated.

"Yes." 

Shane frowned at him. They stood there. The light changed. The traffic moved. Neither of them went anywhere.

Chapter End Notes

There is 100% going to be more fallout related to the suspension…it’s coming, don’t worry.

Comments always welcome ❤️

I also looked at this about a million times, but I'm certain I missed some typos somewhere.

Chapter 15: The Cottage

Chapter Summary

Shane and Ilya get a summer together.

Chapter Notes

The league's statement went out at eight in the morning two weeks later. Ilya read it on his phone in the kitchen, standing at the counter in the apartment that was still, technically, his home, though it had begun to feel like something else. A waiting room, or a holding cell, depending on the hour.

The language was flat and institutional, like these things were when they were using plain language to end a career. Ilya Rozanov of the Boston Raiders, a nineteen-month suspension, conduct unbecoming. The official involved has been placed on indefinite suspension with conditions for reinstatement review. They did not name Shane, but Ilya knew they would not need to. The hockey internet was a machine built for exactly this kind of excavation, and it would have his name by lunch. Unless someone got there first.

Ilya set the phone down. From the bedroom, he could hear Shane's voice, low and clipped, on the phone with his lawyer, determining whether Shane should release the carefully drafted response statement they had been working on. Ilya could hear bits and pieces of the conversation. Shane receiving information, processing it, putting it in whatever internal system he used for things that were decided and could not be undone.

Ilya picked up the phone again and called Rose. She answered on the second ring. He could hear traffic in the background, the ambient noise of the city.

"I saw it," she said. No preamble. "Shane said you’d call."

"Can you come here?"

A pause. "Which hat am I wearing? Are we being friends or am I a journalist?"

"Both," Ilya said. "I need both."

She was there in forty minutes. She came in with her laptop under her arm and looked at Ilya across the kitchen counter directly, reading, not unkindly. She had not slept well. He could see it in the skin under her eyes. She had been waiting for this the same way they all had, the breathless anticipation of a thing you knew was coming and still weren't ready for when it arrived.

"Where is he?" she asked.

"Bedroom. Talking to Speeter."

Rose nodded. She set the laptop on the counter and opened it but did not open a document yet. She looked at Ilya.

"Tell me what you want," she said.

"I can give you an interview. Statement. Whatever. His name stays out of it," Ilya said. "As much as you can. As much as your editors will allow. If you have to reference him, he is the official. He is nobody. He is a line in a report."

"Ilya —"

"I know people will find him. They have seen the tape. They will be able to find him. I know the internet will do what it does. But if the first piece, the piece that sets the frame, if that piece is about me. My suspension, my career, my conduct, then the frame is me. But if we could keep his name out of it, officially – People read the headline and the first three paragraphs and then they go argue about it. I want his name to not be in the first three paragraphs."

Rose was quiet for a moment. She had the expression she wore when she was weighing something that had no clean answer. "If I make it too one-sided, it looks like a cover-up. The league's report hints at coercion. If I don't address that directly, someone else will, and they won't have your version."

"Then address it. Say I deny it. Say no formal complaint was made. Say whatever you need to say to make it clear that I did not —" He stopped. His hands were on the counter and he was pressing down harder than he needed to. He shook his head. "I did not do that, Rose. I pursued him. I initiated. But I did not force anything. No blackmail. Nothing like that. He wouldn't still be here."

"I know that," she said, and how she said it had the quality of a person who had been in a hallway with Shane Hollander and understood, from that hallway, what the thing between them actually was. "I know."

She opened a document. "Let's go through the timeline. Not the league's timeline. Yours."

They worked for three hours. Ilya was precise. He gave her the cities and the dates and the sequence, the same way he had given them to the investigator, except that this time he was not building a coercion narrative. He was building the truth, or as much of it as could survive being published. Rose pushed back when he tried to take too much weight. She pushed back when he tried to make Shane disappear entirely.

"He has to exist in the piece," she said. "If I write a story about a suspension for a relationship and the other person is a ghost, it reads wrong. It reads like you're hiding something worse. I need him to be a person. An official who made choices, who is accountable for his own decisions, who the league found no evidence of systematic bias against. That's his defense, Ilya. That's the sentence that protects him. The game log was clean. Let me use that."

Ilya looked at the counter. He thought about Shane in the hearing room saying I made every choice with full knowledge of what I was doing. The honest version. The version that was worth more.

"Use it," he said.

Shane came out of the bedroom around noon. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at Ilya and Rose at the counter, the laptop between them. He looked at Rose.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't," Rose said. "Not yet." She looked back at her screen. "I'll send the draft to my editor by four. It'll be live by six. After that, I have no control over what anyone else writes. But the first piece will be mine, and the frame will hold."

Shane nodded. He went to the kitchen, made coffee on Ilya's four thousand dollar espresso machine that he couldn't use for anything more complicated than a particularly wet Americano. He set a mug beside Rose without being asked. Rose took it without looking up. Shane made a second mug for Ilya and brought it to the counter and their fingers touched on the handle and neither of them acknowledged it.

Rose left at four. She paused at the door, not to say something, but to make sure the people she was leaving were going to be all right.

"Stay off the internet," she said.

"I have lived my whole life with people having opinions about me," Ilya said.

"I know. Stay off the internet anyway." She looked at Shane. "Both of you."

The article went live at 5:48 PM. Ilya read it once, standing at the kitchen counter, and set his phone face down. Rose had done what she said she would do. The headline was his name. The suspension was the story. The relationship was the context. A consensual involvement with a league official that violated the code of conduct, the official, so-far unnamed by the League, referenced only as necessary. She had dismantled the coercion framing in two paragraphs, citing the absence of a formal complaint and the game log review that found no evidence of bias. She had framed the nineteen months not as justice but as precedent. The League using Ilya's case to draw a line that had never been drawn before. It did not say Shane was a man, and it also did not note that all NHL officials this season were male.

It was sharp and fair and it would not save him from what was coming. But it would set the frame. And the frame was Ilya Rozanov, suspended. Not Shane Hollander, destroyed.

Shane read it on his laptop in the bedroom with the door closed. Ilya did not go in. He stood in the kitchen and listened to the silence from behind the door and waited, and after a while Shane came out and his eyes were red and he did not say anything. He walked to where Ilya was standing and put his head against Ilya's shoulder and stood there. Ilya put one hand on the back of his neck. They stayed like that for a long time, the city going dark around them, the phone buzzing on the counter face down.

The penthouse became something else after that. Not a home, exactly. The two of them with no ice and no schedule and nowhere to be, learning the shape of each other in a context that had never existed before.

Shane had been living there since the week after the hearing. It had not been a discussion. It had been the practical reality of his home in Canada being staked out by two photographers from a tabloid blog and a freelancer from Deadspin who had apparently decided that putting Shane’s name on the recordwas a story worth camping for. Shane had come to the penthouse with a duffel bag and his laptop and had not left.

Shane slept in the guest room for the first four nights, tentatively keeping space between them, unsure how to navigate this new reality. On the fifth night Ilya found him on the couch at two in the morning, laptop open, reviewing his severance paperwork, and said "Come to bed, Shane." Shane closed the laptop and followed him down the hall and that was the end of the guest room.

Shane slept on the left side of the bed. He slept on his side, facing the window, one hand tucked under the pillow. Years of hotel rooms had trained him to sleep efficiently, quickly, with the lights from the street not bothering him. In the morning he was always awake first, which Ilya found both impressive and slightly annoying, because Ilya had spent his entire adult life being the first person awake in every room and suddenly there was a man in his kitchen who had already been up for forty minutes and was reading the news on his phone with a cup of coffee that he had finally figured out how to make correctly. Shane insisted on making his own coffee, every day without fail, because Ilya's version was, as Shane had pointed out on the second morning, "not coffee."

"It is coffee," Ilya had said, standing in the doorway in his underwear, his hair doing something aggressive. "I put the water and the grounds in the machine. It made coffee."

"You used twice the grounds and half the water. What you made is a war crime."

"In Russia this is normal coffee."

"We're not in Russia."

The domesticity was unprecedented. They had never had more than a night. Now they had weeks, and the weeks had mornings and afternoons and the mundane texture of two people figuring out how to exist in the same space without the architecture of their jobs to organize them.

Shane's toothbrush appeared in the holder on the third day. Blue, next to Ilya's black one. Neither of them mentioned it. Shane's running shoes appeared by the front door beside Ilya's skating bag. His coaching manuals accumulated on the coffee table beside Ilya's broken-spined novels. His reading glasses, which Ilya had not known about until Shane moved in, because Shane wore them only for screens and close work and had apparently been hiding them from the world like a state secret, sat on the nightstand on the left side.

"You wear glasses," Ilya had said, the first time he saw them.

"For reading. Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Whatever you're about to say."

"I was going to say they are nice."

"You were not going to say that."

"I was going to say I find it very attractive."

Shane had taken the glasses off and set them on the nightstand and turned the lamp off, and in the dark Ilya had reached across and found the glasses and put them back on Shane's face and Shane had let him.

Ilya learned the small things. Shane talked in his sleep, full sentences, mumbled rulings, except that the rulings were nonsense and the scenarios were impossible and once, at three in the morning, Shane had said very clearly "the puck was in a tree" and Ilya had lain beside him in the dark shaking with the effort of not laughing.

Shane learned the things about Ilya that hotels and hockey had hidden. He learned that Ilya reorganized the pantry when he was thinking about drinking. The cans by height, the boxes by color, a system that served no practical purpose and gave his hands something to do that was not opening a cabinet he had no business opening. On the bad days, the pantry looked like a museum exhibit. Everything aligned. Labels facing forward. The boxes in descending order of width.

Shane learned to read the pantry. He never said anything about it. He just looked at the pantry and then looked at Ilya and sometimes made a second cup of coffee and brought it to wherever Ilya was sitting, and the coffee was the conversation. On the worst day, a Thursday in May when Ilya had been alone in the apartment for six hours while Shane was at a meeting with his lawyer, and the pantry had achieved a level of organization that suggested genuine distress, Shane came home and found Ilya on the couch with his hands in his lap, very still.

Shane set his bag down. He did not ask what was wrong. He sat down beside Ilya on the couch, their legs touching, and put his hand on Ilya's knee. Just his hand, flat, warm, no pressure. He left it there.

"How was your meeting?" Ilya said, after a while. His voice was careful.

"It was fine. Speeter thinks the ECHL pathway is the strongest option for reinstatement." Shane's hand stayed on Ilya's knee. "How was your day?"

"I organized the pantry."

"I saw."

A pause. Ilya looked at Shane's hand on his knee. He put his own hand over it.

"It was a bad day," Ilya said.

"I know."

"I am fine now."

"I know that too."

"How do you know?"

"I know you."

Ilya looked at him. He was aware, in a distant and slightly destabilizing way, that this was either the most invasive or the most loving thing anyone had ever done for him, and he could not decide which.

"That is very observant," Ilya said.

"I'm an official. Observation is the whole job."

"You are not an official anymore."

"My brain doesn't stop just because the stripes are off." Shane's thumb moved against Ilya's kneecap, a small, rhythmic motion. "You had a bad day and you didn't drink, or anything else. That counts."

"It should not have to count. That is just a day."

"It counts," Shane said again. Ilya leaned into him, not dramatically, a small lateral shift. His body wanting to move closer to another body, to Shane's body. Shane's arm came around his shoulders without hesitation, without the self-consciousness that had been present in the first week, the period when they were both still learning how to touch each other in daylight without the cover of urgency or crisis. They sat like that on the couch for a while.

The physical intimacy outside of sex was the part that surprised Ilya most. He had not expected it to be difficult, and it was not difficult exactly, but it was unfamiliar in a way that caught him off guard. He had spent his adult life touching people in two contexts: hockey and sex. Both were purposeful. Both had rules. Both ended.

This didn't end. Shane was in the apartment all the time, and being in the apartment all the time meant that their bodies were constantly negotiating proximity. In the kitchen, on the couch, in the hallway between the bedroom and the bathroom. It meant Shane's hip brushing against Ilya's when they stood at the counter together. It meant Ilya's hand finding the small of Shane's back when he passed behind him, a gesture so automatic that he did it before he knew he was doing it and then stood in the hallway afterward thinking about the fact that he had a reflex for where Shane's back was.

It meant the couch at night, which was where they ended up most evenings, because the television was there and they were both the kind of people who processed their days by watching hockey, even hockey that had nothing to do with either of them. Ilya sat on one end and Shane sat on the other and within twenty minutes they had migrated to the middle, Shane's feet in Ilya's lap, Ilya's hand on Shane's ankle, the bad one, his thumb tracing the scar through the sock without thinking about it.

"Stop thinking about it," Shane said once, without looking up from his laptop.

"I am not thinking about it."

"You're rubbing the scar."

"I am rubbing your ankle. The scar is just there."

"You rub the scar every time. You can stop."

"I don't think I can."

Shane looked at him over his glasses. The librarian glasses, the ones Ilya was not supposed to comment on. His expression was not irritated. It was the expression of a person who had been seen.

"The ankle is fine," Shane said. "It has been fine for years."

"It aches after cold rinks. You told me."

"I told you that once."

"I remember things you tell me once." Ilya's thumb continued its circuit of the scar. 

Shane pulled his foot away. Then he put it back. Then he pulled it away again and moved across the couch and settled against Ilya's side, his head on Ilya's shoulder, his laptop balanced on his own knees. Ilya's arm came around him. They watched the San Jose game like that, Ilya's chin resting on the top of Shane's head, and at some point Shane fell asleep, and Ilya sat very still so as not to wake him and watched the third period alone with the volume low and the weight of Shane's sleeping body against his side and thought: this is what people mean. This is the thing I did not know I was missing, because I had never had it, and you cannot miss a thing you have never had, except that apparently you can, because I have been missing this my entire life.

He would call Brennan in the morning. He would say the number. How long it had been since Marleau had scraped him up off the bathroom floor. Brennan would say good, and they would talk about the week, and the count would continue.

Ilya was recovering. The lung was slow. Six weeks before he could skate at all, the respiratory therapist's exercises a daily humiliation for a man whose body had been the primary instrument of his professional life. The first time the therapist asked him to blow into the spirometer, the number that came back made him look at the device as though it were lying. The second time, the number was the same. The third time, he understood that the number was true and that his lung was going to improve on its own schedule and not his, and he sat with the spirometer in his hand and felt the frustration of a body that would not do what he asked it to.

Shane drove him to outpatient physical therapy three times a week. He sat in the waiting room and read coaching manuals he had ordered online. A stack of them, growing, with notes in the margins in Shane's small slanting handwriting. When Ilya came out looking grey and diminished, Shane did not comment on it. He handed him water and drove him home and made coffee and sat with him on the couch, and if Ilya's breathing was worse than usual Shane put his hand on Ilya's back, between the shoulder blades, and left it there.

"You are not a doctor," Ilya said once, when the hand appeared.

"I'm aware."

"The hand does not help the lung."

"I know. It's not for the lung."

Ilya was quiet. The hand stayed. After a while, he leaned back into it.

Clare called every few days. At this point, it was decided he would be going to Zurich. The terms were extremely good. Better than he could have dreamed to hope for. A full salary match, the Lions' facilities, their medical staff, a furnished apartment in Zurich-West. The timeline worked almost exactly: two seasons on loan, structured around the nineteen-month suspension. He should be cleared to start skating within days of arriving. He would be competing at a level that was not the NHL but was as close as possible, and the structure would hold him together in ways that a suspension in Boston with nothing to do would not.

Ilya took the calls in the kitchen, standing at the counter, looking at the harbor. He could hear Shane in the next room, the quiet click of keys, the occasional turn of a page. Shane sat in the next room, pretending not to listen and hearing everything.

Shane found the Vancouver job in late May. An assistant coaching position with a WHL program for the Vancouver Orcas. A real job, a rink, credible work. The head coach knew the situation and did not care about the league's optics. He needed someone who knew the rulebook better than anyone alive to work with his defensive corps and his special teams.

Shane told Ilya on a Tuesday evening, standing at the kitchen island, how they delivered all the important information to each other, standing, trying to minimize the heaviness.

"The Orcas want me," he said. "Vancouver. It's WHL. It's junior hockey. But it's a rink."

Ilya did not look up from the cutting board where he was doing something imprecise to an onion. "Vancouver."

"Yeah."

"When?"

"They want me for pre-camp prep. Mid-July."

Ilya set the knife down. He looked at the onion and then at Shane.

"It is a good job," he said.

"It's a long way from here."

"Everything is a long way from here. That is the point." He picked up the knife again. "Zurich is farther."

They were quiet. The onion sat on the cutting board, partially destroyed. Shane reached across and took the knife out of Ilya's hand and finished the onion himself, because Ilya cut onions the way he did everything in the kitchen, with immense confidence and no technique, and Shane could not watch it anymore.

"We should go to the cottage," Shane said, still cutting. "Before. While we still can."

Ilya looked at him.

"It's mine," Shane said. "I bought it when I was nineteen. Signing bonus from the Metros, before, you know. It was the only NHL money I ever saw." He set the knife down. "I almost sold it six times. Felt stupid keeping a cottage in Quebec on a referee's salary. But I kept it."

"Why?"

Shane looked at the cutting board. "I don't know. I liked knowing it was there. A place that was mine that had nothing to do with hockey." He paused. "It's on a lake. There's a dock. It's quiet."

"Quiet," Ilya repeated.

"Yeah."

"I would like to see this cottage," Ilya said.

Shane looked at him. Something moved through his expression, brief and unguarded. "Okay," he said. "After you sign the Zurich deal. Before I go to Vancouver. We'll have a few weeks."

"A few weeks," Ilya said. He picked up the mangled onion and looked at it. "I think you murdered this."

"It was already dead when I got to it."

Shane's parents called. Ilya was on the couch with a book he had been reading for four days, though he suspected he was staring at the same page more than reading it. The book was in Russian, which was either a comfort or a regression depending on how he chose to look at it. Shane was in the kitchen, trying to figure out whether the espresso machine needed descaling, when his phone lit up on the counter.

Shane looked at the screen. Something tightened in his face that Ilya recognized. Bracing for something he had been expecting and dreading in equal measure.

"My parents," Shane said.

"You should answer it," Ilya said.

Shane picked up the phone and walked to the balcony. Ilya watched the glass door close behind him and then looked at his book, and then set the book down and looked at the glass door again. He could see Shane's back, the set of his shoulders, how his free hand was gripping the railing. Shane's head was bent. The wind off the harbor was moving his hair.

Ilya watched. He could not hear the conversation. He did not need to. He knew what it sounded like from the posture. Shane's shoulders went up tight, braced, the posture of absorbing impact. They came down slightly a few minutes later, not relaxed but less guarded, the difference between being hit and being held at arm's length. At one point Shane's free hand came off the railing and pressed against his eyes, and Ilya's whole body went still on the couch because that gesture meant something was landing in a place that was going to leave a mark.

The whole thing lasted twenty minutes. When Shane came back inside he looked like something had been taken out of him that he was going to need later. Shane set the phone on the counter. He stood there for a moment, not moving. Ilya could see the fine tremor in his jaw, the muscle working, the effort of keeping his face in order.

"They read Rose's piece," he said.

"Okay."

"They know I'm here. They know about Vancouver."

Ilya waited.

"They're not angry," Shane said. He said it like he said things that were technically true, but also not the whole story. "They're scared. They think I threw away everything."

Ilya looked at him. "They are not entirely wrong."

"Don't."

"I am not — I'm not making a joke. They are parents. They watched their son build something for ten years and they watched it end. Of course they are frightened. I would be upset if they were not."

Shane leaned against the counter. He was pressing his palms flat against the granite like Ilya did when he needed to feel something solid. "My mom said I chose a player over the game."

"You did," Ilya said quietly. "You chose me over hockey. That is what happened. It was your choice."

"She doesn't see it that way."

"She is in Ottawa. She sees what the newspapers say." Ilya stood up from the couch and walked to the kitchen and stood beside Shane at the counter, close enough that their arms were touching. "They know you are gay."

"Since I was twenty-two. That wasn't the surprise."

"Then the surprise is me."

"You could say that. I'm living in a penthouse in Boston with the man who took five penalties in the playoffs and swore at the camera." The corner of Shane's mouth moved. Not a smile. The ghost of one.

"Did your mother cry?" Ilya asked.

Shane looked at the counter. "No. She was — she held it together. She asked if I was eating. Dad asked if I had health insurance if I'm in the states."

"These are parent questions."

"Yeah. They are." He paused. "Mom wants to know if you are good to me."

Ilya felt something move through his chest that he was not prepared for. A question from a woman in Ottawa he had never met, carried across a phone line and set down on his counter.

"What did you say?"

"I said yes." Shane looked at him. "I said you make terrible coffee and worse decisions and you are the kindest person I have ever known."

"I have not always been good to you," Ilya said softly. "You did not tell them about my problems."

Shane shook his head. "It wasn't for me to say," Shane said. "They want to meet you. Eventually. When things are settled."

"I would like that," Ilya said. "They'll come around." He did not know this. He said it because the alternative was saying what he actually thought, which was that some distances between parents and children did not close, no matter how much time had passed. He knew this from personal experience, and his personal experience was worse than Shane's and he did not want to put that in the room right now.

"Maybe," Shane said. He leaned his head against Ilya's shoulder. Ilya put his hand on the back of Shane's neck, the brief, firm grip that meant I am here and required no response.

The cottage was a six-hour drive from Boston if you did it legally and five if you were Ilya, which Shane pointed out twice and then gave up on because Ilya drove the way he skated. Fast, slightly too confident about the available space.

They crossed into Quebec in the late afternoon. The highway narrowed. The signs switched to French. The radio gave up on English stations somewhere past Sherbrooke, and Ilya found a French talk station and left it on for Shane. Shane had a coaching manual open in his lap but he was looking out the window instead, watching Quebec go past, and Ilya glanced over and saw something in his face that was different from the Boston face. Softer, younger, the face he wore when he was going home.

They turned off the paved road onto gravel that shook the car's suspension. The trees came in close, pine and birch, the canopy filtering the late light into something green and particulate. Then the trees opened and the lake was there. Dark blue, flat, ringed with rock and forest, no other buildings visible from the waterline.

The cottage was not what Ilya had expected. He had been picturing the word cottage. Cottages were small and weathered, a cabin, the kind of place where the pipes froze in winter and the roof constantly needed to be repaired. What sat on the granite outcrop above the lake was a house. Not large, but proper. Clean lines, dark-stained cedar siding, a stone chimney, a wide deck that wrapped the lake side. It had been built well and recently enough that the wood was still sharp at the corners. Floor-to-ceiling windows facing the water. A dock that ran straight and solid down to the lake.

"This is not a cottage," Ilya said.

"It's what I call it."

"This is a house, Shane. A very nice house." He looked at the deck, the windows, the dock. "You bought this when you were nineteen."

"The contractor had the lot and a plan for a spec build. I bought it before the foundation was poured." Shane got out of the car and stood beside it, looking at the place with the complicated expression of a man who owned something he wasn't sure he deserved. 

"How did you keep it?"

"I rent it out. Summer weeks, mostly. Ski season too. There's a resort thirty minutes from here. The rental income covers the mortgage and the property taxes." He paused. "It pays for itself. I just don't get to use it very much."

"Why not?"

Shane looked at the lake. "Because I was always working. Because July was the only month I had off and I spent most of it at camps and clinics and — " He stopped. "Because coming here reminded me of the career I didn't have anymore."

Ilya looked at the house again. He looked at Shane. He understood something about this place that Shane had not said and did not need to say. Shane had built himself a refuge at nineteen, before the ankle, before any of it, and then had spent ten years being too dedicated to his own destruction to use it.

"It is a very good house," Ilya said.

Inside, the cottage was clean and neutral in the way that rental properties were. Staged for strangers, arranged to suggest a life without actually containing one. The kitchen was modern, with granite counters, good appliances. The living room had a sectional sofa in a bland color and two prints of the lake on the wall that could have been any lake. There was a binder on the counter with the wifi password, local restaurant recommendations, and instructions for the hot tub on the deck. The bed in the master was made with white hotel-weight linens. It smelled like cleaning products and pine.

Shane walked through the rooms with purpose. He opened a closet at the end of the hallway, unlocking it with a key, and began pulling out boxes. His things. The life that lived underneath the rental.

Ilya watched him. The boxes came out one at a time, carried to the living room and opened. A wool blanket, dark blue, worn soft at the edges that went over the back of the sofa. A stack of paperbacks with broken spines. These went on the shelf beside the staged coffee-table books. A framed photograph, face down in the box, wrapped in a t-shirt. Shane unwrapped it and set it on the shelf without looking at it.

A tackle box and two fishing rods, stored in cases. A faded Ottawa Centaurs cap that went on the hook by the door. A set of mugs, mismatched, chipped, clearly used, that replaced the identical white rental mugs in the kitchen cupboard.

It took twenty minutes. When he was done, the cottage looked different. Not transformed. The bones were still the rental, the staged art still on the walls, the binder still on the counter. But the surface had been disrupted. Shane's things sat atop the anonymity like a signature on a form letter.

Ilya picked up the photograph from the shelf. A younger Shane in hockey gear, seventeen or eighteen, grinning at the camera with the unselfconscious confidence of a boy who did not yet know what was coming for his ankle.

"Put that down," Shane said, from the kitchen.

"You were very young."

"I was seventeen. Put it down."

"You looked happy."

Shane was quiet for a moment. He was unpacking groceries from the Sherbrooke bags, putting them in the rental kitchen that would soon be his for three weeks. "I was," he said. "Stop hovering, Ilya."

Ilya put it down. He looked at Shane in the kitchen, then back at the photograph, then back at Shane. The same face, ten years apart. The same eyes, with ten years more knowledge in them.

"You still look happy," Ilya said. "Sometimes. When you forget to be serious."

Shane crossed the room and took the photograph and put it face down on the shelf, which was not what Ilya had intended but which told him something about the photograph and about the boy in it that Shane was not yet ready to discuss.

They unpacked. There was not much to unpack beyond Shane's boxes. Two bags, the groceries. The first days had the quality of time that knew it was running out and had decided to go slowly anyway.

They swam in the lake every morning. The water was cold enough that the first entry was a full-body protest, a shock that started at the ankles and moved upward through every part of Ilya's body that had an opinion about temperature, which was all of it. Shane swam like someone who had grown up in cold water. Clean strokes, no hesitation, his body cutting through the lake with the same efficiency he brought to everything. Ilya swam like a Russian, which meant he went in all at once and made a sound and then was fine.

They swam out to a rock that sat in the lake about fifty meters from the dock, a flat granite shelf that caught the morning sun, and they sat on it together, dripping, the cold air raising goosebumps on their arms, and looked back at the cottage. From the water, the house looked like a good place that someone had built and then mostly let other people enjoy. The deck with its Adirondack chairs. The windows catching the morning sun. The dock running straight and confident into the lake.

"Why did you not live here?" Ilya asked.

"I told you. I was working."

"You had summers."

Shane looked at the water. He pulled his knees up and rested his arms on them, dripping, the freckles on his shoulders vivid in the sun. "I don't know. It felt like if I came here for more than a week, I'd stop wanting to leave. And I needed to want to leave. The job was in Ottawa, then on the road, then wherever the league sent me. The cottage was the thing I let myself have for a week in July, and then I went back."

"And now?"

"Now everything is different. Reffing is gone. I have to figure out my life again." He looked at the house. "I don't want to leave and I'm going to have to anyway, and I think I finally understand why I've been avoiding this place."

Ilya reached over and put his hand on the back of Shane's neck. The skin was cold and wet. Shane leaned into him. They sat on the rock for a while. His chest was still working through its opinion of the swim. The lung was better, measurably, but it let him know when he had asked too much of it, a small tightness on the left side that was less pain and more a reminder. Shane was looking at him, reading the breath, how he always read the breath.

"I'm fine," Ilya said, before Shane could ask.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was looking at the sky."

"You were looking at my chest."

"The sky is behind your chest. You're in the way."

They fished from the dock. Shane unpacked the tackle box and the rods from their cases with the practiced movements of someone who had stored and retrieved them many times. Ilya had never fished in his life, which Shane found both incredible and personally offensive.

"You grew up in Russia," Shane said. "There are rivers in Russia."

"I grew up in the city. My father did not fish."

"Both of your parents are gone now?"

Ilya nodded, but didn't offer anything more. Shane taught him fishing. The line, the cast, the patience, which was not Ilya's strongest quality, and which Shane was aware of and leveraged accordingly.

"You have to wait," Shane said.

"I am waiting."

"You've been waiting for forty seconds."

"This is a long time to wait for a fish."

"The fish don't care about your schedule."

Ilya caught a fish eventually. A small perch that looked at him with glassy eyes. He held it up. Shane took a photo on his phone. Ilya looked at the perch. The perch looked at Ilya.

"I feel bad," Ilya said.

"You play the most violent sport in North America."

"This is a very small fish. It was minding its business."

"You can put it back."

Ilya placed it back in the water. The perch swam away with purpose. Shane did not comment on this, but the corner of his mouth was doing the thing it did when he was not laughing out of respect for Ilya's feelings, and Ilya saw it and did not mind.

In the evening, they sat on the deck and watched the light change on the lake. The sunset was long. The days were at their longest, the sun taking forty-five minutes to go from the tree line to the horizon, the water changing color through the whole spectrum of blue and gold and grey. The Adirondack chairs were wide enough that you could sit with your legs pulled up, which Shane did, or sprawl with your feet on the railing, which Ilya did.

Sometimes Ilya moved his hand to Shane's chair and Shane moved his to meet it, and they sat like that, fingers loosely linked, watching the lake go dark. It was not a gesture either of them would have made in Boston. It was too exposed, too deliberate, too much like admitting something that the city's indifference had allowed them to avoid. But the cottage was not the city. There was no one to see. The declaration was for themselves.

On the second night, they lay in the master bedroom. The bed was good, better than the penthouse bed, which Ilya was not going to admit because he had spent a significant amount of money on the penthouse bed, and Shane put his head on Ilya's chest and Ilya ran his fingers through Shane's hair and they listened to the loons.

"What the fuck is that?" Ilya asked.

"Loons. It's a bird. They live on the lake."

"They sound like dying wolves."

"That's just what they sound like."

"Is very bad sound."

"It's not bad. It's — it's beautiful," Shane said.

Ilya's fingers moved through Shane's hair. The loons called. The lake was outside the window, silver in the moonlight. The rental linens were white and impersonal and they were going to need to be washed before Shane put the cottage back on the listing, and for now they were just sheets, warm, holding the shape of two people.

On the third night, Ilya called Brennan. Shane was on the dock, visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows that the renters probably loved, sitting with his feet in the water and his phone on the boards beside him. The sunset was almost finished, the last light copper on the water.

"How's the count?" Brennan asked.

"One hundred and forty eight days."

"And the noise?"

Ilya looked at the window. At Shane on the dock, his shoulders relaxed for the first time in months, the lake going flat in the evening light. "Quiet," he said. "It is very quiet here."

"Good quiet?"

"Yes. But I know what happens when the quiet ends. He is leaving. Vancouver. I am leaving. Zurich." He paused. "Nine time zones."

"What's your plan for that?"

"Shane has a plan. Calls. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Scheduled. He thinks structure will hold it."

"Will it?"

"It has to," Ilya said. "I do not have a better plan."

Brennan was quiet for a moment. "The calls aren't just for you, Ilya. They're for both of you. You need the check-in. He needs to know you're checking in. That's what makes the distance manageable."

"I know."

"You sound like you know."

"I know many things," Ilya said. "Knowing them and doing them are different."

"Yeah," Brennan said. "They are." A pause. "Call me when you get to Zurich. First week. Don't wait."

"I will."

He hung up. He stood in the kitchen for a moment, looking at the phone, and then looked out the window. Shane had lain back on the dock, arms behind his head, looking at the sky. The lake was mirror-still around him. Ilya went outside and walked the length of the dock and lay down beside him on the warm boards, their shoulders touching, the sky enormous above them.

"How's Brennan?" Shane asked.

"Brennan is Brennan. He asked about the count."

"What is it?"

"One hundred and forty eight."

Shane turned his head on the dock and looked at him. "Good."

"Yes."

They looked at the sky. The first stars were arriving, faint, competing with the last of the light.

"I should learn the constellations," Ilya said. "Zurich has a planetarium."

"You're going to go to a planetarium?"

"I might. I will have a lot of time."

"You're going to play hockey."

"In between the hockey. When the hockey is not enough." He paused. "The hockey will not always be enough."

Shane was quiet. He understood what Ilya meant. The hockey was not the thing that kept the noise away. The hockey was the structure. The thing that kept the noise away was lying beside him on a dock in Quebec.

"One hundred and forty nine tomorrow," Shane said.

"Yes."

"I'll know that. When you're in Zurich. I'll know the number."

"I know you will."

They lay on the dock until the sky was fully dark and the loons were going and the mosquitoes made the decision for them. Ilya slapped his arm. Shane said "They like Russian blood" and Ilya said "Everything likes Russian blood, this is why Russia has so many problems" and Shane laughed, the real laugh, the short unguarded one, and they went inside.

On the fourth night, a storm came in over the lake.

The thunder was low and sustained, the kind that moved through the floor of the cottage and vibrated in the glass. The rain hit the lake in sheets. Ilya could hear it on the roof, a sound that was nothing like the city, nothing like the managed acoustics of the penthouse where weather was something that happened on the other side of triple-paned glass.

They were on the couch. Shane was reading. His feet were in Ilya's lap, how they always ended up in Ilya's lap, and Ilya's hand was on his ankle, on the scar, doing the thing Shane had told him to stop doing and which he had not stopped doing because he could not.

Ilya was not reading anything. He was looking at Shane, cataloging, memorizing the specific details he was going to need to return to when there was an ocean between them and the only version of Shane available was a voice on a phone. The angle of his jaw in this light. The way his hair fell when he hadn't pushed it back. The freckles on his forearm, fewer than the ones on his collarbone but present, a secondary constellation that Ilya had mapped months ago and was now reviewing. The reading glasses, slightly crooked. How his mouth moved when he was reading something he disagreed with. A small tightening at the corner, almost invisible, that Ilya had learned in the penthouse and was now expert in.

"You're staring," Shane said, not looking up.

"Yes."

"Is there a reason?"

"I am memorizing you," Ilya said. He said it without the performance he would have wrapped it in a year ago. The version of him that had walked into a bar in Montreal and said just Sasha would have made it a line. This was not a line. "In three weeks I will not be able to look at you, so I am looking at you now."

Shane set the book down. He took his glasses off and set them on the arm of the couch. He looked at Ilya. The thunder did something outside that made the lights flicker.

"Come here," Shane said.

"No, you come here." Ilya replied with a grin.

"No, you come here." Shane parroted back.

Ilya went to him. They had time, but they also did not. The cottage knew it. The storm knew it. Ilya's hands knew it, moving with an urgency that was not about performance but about the devastating math of separation. He was not going to waste tonight being patient.

He pulled Shane off the couch and pressed him against the wall, the rough timber catching the back of Shane's shirt, and Shane's breath caught and then his hands were on Ilya's face, pulling him in, kissing him in a way that had less technique and more need in it than anything since the first night in Montreal, and Ilya thought: there it is. The underneath. He put his mouth on Shane's throat, on the tendon, on the pulse point where Shane's heart was doing something it did not do for coaching manuals. Shane's hands came up and gripped Ilya's shoulders hard enough to bruise.

"Ilya —"

"Quiet." He said it against Shane's skin. He unbuttoned Shane's shirt with hands that were less steady than he wanted them to be, which was its own kind of confession. Shane let him. Shane let him take the shirt off, drop it on the floor, and press his mouth to the collarbone. He counted the freckles, his mouth on each one, a brief press, an inventory. Shane laughed, low and private, the laugh Ilya had heard twice in Montreal and had been chasing ever since.

"Still eleven," Ilya said against his skin.

"Were you worried?"

"A little."

They ended up on the floor because the bedroom was too far and the couch was too narrow and the rug in front of the woodstove was there and sufficient. Ilya pulled Shane down onto it and Shane went willingly, his back on the rough wool, his hands in Ilya's hair, the firelight doing things to his skin that Ilya was going to remember in a flat in Zurich at three in the morning when the city was dark and the phone was silent and the distance was stretching between them.

Ilya took his time. Not patience, he didn't have patience tonight. Precision. He wanted to know every sound, every place that made Shane's breath change, every angle that produced the specific, wrecked noise Shane made when something landed right. He had been learning this since Montreal. He was still learning it. He intended to keep learning it from across an ocean if necessary, filing each new piece of information in the place he kept things he was going to need.

He worked his way down Shane's body. Throat, collarbone, the flat plane of his chest where his heartbeat was visible under the skin if the light was right. The ridge of his hip where the skin was thinner and Shane's response was more immediate. A hitch in his breathing, a shift in his hips, the involuntary movement of a body communicating something its owner would never say out loud. Shane was not quiet. Shane was never quiet, which Ilya had known since the first night and which still undid him every time because Shane Hollander was quiet about everything else in his life, controlled and precise and managed, and then in bed he was the opposite of all of that, and the contrast was the thing that had ruined Ilya for every other person he had ever touched.

He put his mouth on Shane's hip, the ridge of bone, and moved lower, and Shane's hand came to his hair and gripped and the sound he made was one Ilya already knew but was hearing differently tonight. The sound of being given something they were about to lose.

"God — Ilya —" Shane's voice had gone past the controlled register into something rougher, his hands fisted in the wool of the rug, his hips lifting.

He memorized everything. The way Shane tasted. The tension of his thigh muscles under Ilya's hands. The sound — the sound was the most important part, the one he was going to need to remember most. When Shane was shaking and close and saying Ilya's name in the voice that had nothing left in it but the one true thing, that same voice from the ice, from the broadcast, from the eighteen seconds that had ended both their careers, Ilya pulled back. Shane made a sound of protest that Ilya filed carefully alongside everything else.

"I want —" Ilya said.

"Yes," Shane responded before he could even get the rest of the question out.

Ilya went to the bedroom for what they needed. When he came back, Shane had turned onto his stomach on the rug, his chin on his folded arms, the firelight running the length of his back. The muscles of his shoulders were relaxed in a way they never were when he was vertical. His spine was a line of shadow and light. Ilya stood in the doorway and looked at him and felt the floor shift under him the way it had shifted in a bar in Montreal, the way it had shifted on the ice in Boston, the way it kept shifting and would not stop shifting because Shane Hollander lying there, waiting for Ilya to take him apart was the most devastating thing Ilya had ever seen and he was going to lose it in a few short weeks.

He knelt down. He pressed his mouth to the base of Shane's spine. Shane shivered, the whole length of him, a single wave. Ilya was careful where it mattered and not careful where it didn't. He opened Shane up slowly, with his fingers, watching how Shane's breathing changed. The held breath, the release, the soft sound into his folded arms that was half discomfort and half something else, something that turned into something else entirely when Ilya found the right angle and Shane's whole body arched up off the rug and the sound he made was the one that lived in Ilya's chest like a second heartbeat.

"Now," Shane said. "Ilya, now —"

Shane pushed back against him when Ilya pressed into him, a slow and deliberate entry that required both of them to breathe through it, and Ilya felt everything. The heat of him, how his body opened and resisted and then opened further, the sound Shane made that was the one Ilya was going to carry across the Atlantic like a talisman against the ringing in his mind. He stayed still for a moment, letting Shane adjust, his forehead pressed between Shane's shoulder blades, the crucifix cold against Shane's back like it had been cold in Montreal, the first time, when neither of them had known what they were starting.

"Okay?" Ilya said, into the skin between his shoulders.

"Yeah." Shane's voice was wrecked and steady at the same time. "Yeah. Move."

Then he moved.

The storm was still outside, the thunder and the rain on the roof and the wind in the trees, and inside the cottage was warm and smelled like woodsmoke and the rug was rough under Ilya's knees and Shane's skin was slick with sweat under his hands. He held Shane's hip with one hand and braced himself with the other and found the rhythm that made Shane stop being quiet and start being the other thing, the thing that was loud and unguarded and completely without the management that governed every other part of his life. Ilya bent forward and put his mouth on the back of Shane's neck and Shane turned his head and they kissed at an angle that shouldn't have worked and did, messy and graceless and perfect, and Ilya felt the sound Shane made against his mouth travel through his whole body.

Shane came first, Ilya's hand on him, his face buried in his folded arms, his whole body drawn tight and then released in a way that Ilya felt through his own chest. The clenching and the letting go, the specific devastation of it, the sound traveling through the floor and the rug and into Ilya's knees and his hands and his sternum. Ilya followed him a few seconds later, the feeling cresting and breaking with a sound he made against Shane's back that was closer to language than it should have been, words in Russian he had not planned to say and could not take back spilling from his lips.

They lay on the rug. The fire was dying. The storm was moving east, the thunder getting distant, the rain softening to something steady and manageable. Ilya was still inside Shane, softening, neither of them moving to separate yet. Shane's back was warm against his chest. The crucifix was between them, caught in the sweat.

"What did you say?" Shane asked, after a while. His voice was rough and quiet, the voice of a man who had been loud and was now the other thing. "At the end. The Russian."

Ilya was quiet for a moment. The rug was scratchy against his skin. He could feel Shane's heartbeat through his back, still fast, coming down. He could lie. Shane would never know. But he needed to know. 

"I said I love you," he said.

The silence that followed was full in the same way that the silence in the hearing room had been full, but different. The silence of something arriving rather than something ending.

Shane turned over. The movement separated them, which was its own small loss. He looked at Ilya in the firelight. His expression did the thing — the brief, unguarded thing it did when something landed somewhere he hadn't left open.

"Say it again," Shane said. "In English."

"I love you." Ilya said. 

Shane looked at him. His eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the fire. There was something moving through his face that Ilya recognized. The working through, the revision, the adjusting a calculation to account for new information. Except this was not a calculation. This was something else.

"I love you too," Shane said. "I've known for a while. I just didn't — I didn't have a moment that was big enough to say it in."

"This is a big moment?"

"We're lying on the floor of my cottage after —" He stopped. The corner of his mouth. "Yes. It's a big moment."

Ilya looked at the ceiling. He could see the beams above him, dark wood, hand-hewn.The noise was gone. Just gone.

"I will say it every day," he said. "If you want."

"I want."

"Then I will."

Shane reached over and put his hand on Ilya's chest, over the crucifix. The gold was warm from both of their bodies.

Rose came on a Friday.

It had been Shane's idea. Ilya had resisted. Not Rose specifically, but the intrusion, the fact of a journalist in the only place that was not about hockey or suspensions or the specific geometry of their public disaster. But Shane had been characteristically direct about it.

"She's going to write the Zurich piece whether we talk to her or not," he said. "Someone is going to write it. I'd rather it be Rose, and I'd rather she has the real version."

"She is a reporter, Shane."

"She's our friend, and she earned this."

Ilya had looked at him for a moment. Then he had nodded, because Shane was right, and because Shane trusted Rose like Ilya trusted Marleau — not blindly, but completely, which was a different thing.

Rose drove up from Montreal. She arrived in a rental car with her laptop and a bag from a bakery in Sherbrooke and looked at the house with an expression that recalculated something.

"This is not what I was picturing when he said cottage," she said.

"That is what I said."

"This is nice." She looked at the lake, the deck, the dock. "This is really nice, actually. You could charge a fortune for this in July."

"He does," Ilya said. "Except this July."

Rose looked at him. Something in her expression shifted, the journalist giving way, briefly, to the friend. "Good," she said.

She interviewed him on the deck. She was professional and thorough and asked the questions that the Swiss press would ask and some that they wouldn't, and Ilya answered them directly, without performance.

She asked about the ZSC Lions. She asked about the lung recovery and the timeline for full contact. She asked about the suspension and whether he viewed the nineteen months as fair.

"It is what it is," he said. "I am not interested in whether it is fair. Fair is a concept for people who believe institutions are capable of fairness."

Rose looked at him over her notebook. "Can I use that?"

"You can use whatever you want."

She took dozens of photographs. Ilya on the dock, Shane carefully absent. Ilya on the couch, Shane's books and photos tucked away.

When she was finished, she packed up her camera and sat on the deck for a while, looking at the lake. Shane brought her coffee. Rose took it and wrapped her hands around the mug and looked at the house. At the blue blanket on the rental sofa visible through the windows, at the mismatched mugs in the dish rack, at the fishing rods leaning against the railing, and something moved through her expression that was not professional at all. She was seeing something and knew it was not hers to report. Ilya was carefully washing dishes inside.

"He's good," Rose said, not looking at Ilya. Looking at the water. "I just — I wanted to say that. Whatever you're doing, whatever this is. He looks good."

Shane looked at the lake. "He is better here than in Boston."

"Most people are." She finished her coffee. She stood up and gathered her things.

"I'll make the piece good," she said. "The Swiss angle. Comeback narrative. Nobody's going to be thinking about Boston by the time he lands in Zurich."

"Thank you, Rose."

"Stop thanking me. It's becoming a thing." She walked to her car. She did not look back.

Two days later, they were on the deck, morning, the lake still wearing mist. Shane had his coffee and a legal pad, because Shane processed difficult things by writing them down, and this was going to be difficult.

Ilya knew it was coming. He had known since the night before, when Shane had gone quiet in a way that was different from his usual quiet. They had been in bed, Ilya's arm around him, Shane's head on his chest, and Shane had been tracing the links of the crucifix chain with one finger, a repetitive motion that meant he was thinking about something he had not yet said.

"What," Ilya had said.

"Nothing. Tomorrow."

"Shane —"

"Tomorrow. I'm not ready yet."

Ilya had let it go. He had learned in the months in the penthouse that Shane's process was not his. Ilya said things when they arrived, without organization, and cleaned up the mess after. Shane organized first, said second, and required the space between to make the saying feel possible.

So he waited. And in the morning, on the deck, the legal pad appeared, and Ilya knew.

"We need to talk about what happens when we're apart," Shane said.

"I know."

"I was looking at our schedules. I don't think we'll be able to see each other. After. Maybe not until next summer."

Ilya frowned, but nodded. "I was thinking this too."

"Nine time zones. I won't see you until next summer." Shane looked at the legal pad. He had written something on it and crossed it out. Written something else and crossed that out too. The page was a catalog of Shane's attempts to find the right way to say the wrong thing. "I can't ask you to —" He stopped. "This is going to sound like I don't —"

"Say it, Shane."

Shane looked at the lake. "If you need someone. A body, or a — a way to get through when the noise is bad and I'm not there. I need us to agree on that now, before we're in it. I need to know that it doesn't end this."

Ilya was very still. The mist was lifting off the lake in slow, vertical columns. "You want me to sleep with other people," he said.

"No. That's not — I want us to survive it." Shane's voice was even in the way it was even when something was costing him. "I'm being practical. I know what happens to you when you're alone. I'd rather you —" He stopped. Started again, looking at the legal pad rather than at Ilya. "I'd rather you had an option that wasn't, you know. I need you to come back to me, safe."

The sentence landed in Ilya's chest and stayed there. He understood what Shane was doing. He understood the careful, precise, Shane Hollander math that weighed the risk of Ilya in a flat in Zurich with no one against the risk of Ilya in a flat in Zurich with someone who was not Shane, and concluded that the second risk was smaller. It was the math of a man who had seen the bathroom floor as Marleau described it and was terrified of a version of it happening in a country where nobody knew the signs.

It felt like his heart was being torn apart.

"Okay," Ilya said.

The word sat between them on the deck.

"Okay?" Shane said. His voice had changed. Not the even voice anymore. The one underneath, the one that was hoping to be argued with. They sat there. Two men without the vocabulary for I can't stand this but I'm telling you it's fine. Shane was looking at the legal pad. Ilya was looking at the lake. The mist was gone. The water was clear and blue.

"Is this what you want?" Ilya asked, after a moment. He asked it carefully, looking at the water.

"I want you to be alive," Shane said. "In nineteen months. That's what I want."

"That is not what I asked."

Shane was quiet. The legal pad sat in his lap with its crossed-out attempts. A dragonfly landed on the railing and stayed there, wings catching the light.

"No," Shane said. Very quiet. "It's not what I want."

"What do you want?"

"I want to lock every door in Zurich and throw away the key and know that you're mine and nobody else gets to —" He stopped. His jaw was doing the thing, the muscle working. "But I'm not allowed to want that, because wanting that means I'm betting your sobriety on my pride, and I'm not willing to make that bet."

Ilya looked at him. Shane looked at the lake. The dragonfly left.

"Okay," Ilya said again. Because Shane needed him to.

The rest of the day was careful. The easy intimacy of the first week was gone, replaced by something more guarded. The awareness of the "others" they had just invited into their future, ghosts who did not exist yet and were already in the room. They moved around each other with the polite distance of people who had agreed to something and were still absorbing the cost of the agreement. Shane fished alone. Ilya sat in the kitchen and drank bad coffee and did not organize the pantry because there was no pantry to organize. 

It wasn't until that night, in bed, the loons crying somewhere on the far side of the lake, that the real version came out. They were lying on their backs, not touching. This was unusual. Since the penthouse, since the fifth night, they had not slept without touching. Ilya's hand found Shane's under the blanket. His grip was too tight. He knew it was too tight. He did not adjust it.

"I do not want them," he said. Into the dark. To the ceiling. "I do not want a distraction. I do not want to find a warm body in Zurich."

Shane was quiet.

"I love you," Ilya said. "I do not want to open anything. I want to close everything. I want to close every door except the one with you on the other side of it."

"Then why did you say okay?" Shane's voice was rough. Not the even voice. The underneath voice. The one that had said no, it's not what I want on the deck that morning.

"Because you wanted me to. Because you are frightened for me and you are not wrong to be." He turned on his side. Shane's face was close in the dark, the moonlight from the window catching the shape of his jaw, the shadows under his eyes. "But any agreement is for your peace of mind. I will not use it. I cannot. The problem is the same as it has been since I tried with the women in Boston. Any person I put in that bed will be wrong."

Shane looked at him. His eyes were bright in the dark.

"I can't do it either," Shane said. "I know I said —" He stopped. "It's only you."

Ilya looked at him. The loons were still going. The lake was doing whatever lakes did at midnight when no one was watching.

"Then we have an agreement we will not use," Ilya said.

"Yes."

"This is very stupid."

"Yes."

"I love you."

"I know," Shane said. "I love you too. We're idiots."

"We are idiots," Ilya agreed. He pulled Shane against his chest. Shane came, the distance of the day collapsing in a single movement, his head fitting in the space under Ilya's chin like it always did. "But we are idiots with a schedule."

"The schedule," Shane said, into Ilya's collarbone. "Tuesdays and Thursdays."

"Eight AM your time. Five PM mine."

"Every week."

"Every week. No exceptions."

"And the days," Shane said. "The count, every call."

"Every call. You will ask and I will tell you and I will not lie about the number."

"And if the number is zero?"

"Then we talk about it." Ilya said.

Shane was quiet for a moment. His hand came up and rested on Ilya's chest, over the crucifix, the gold chain warm from Ilya's skin. His fingers found the links and traced them like he had traced them the night before, the repetitive motion that meant something was settling into place.

"Okay," Shane said. "That's the rule."

They lay there. The cottage was dark and warm and the lake was outside and the summer was ending before it had properly started. Two weeks. Then the airport. Then the ocean. But not yet.

The remaining days had the quality of time that had been counted and was now being spent. They did not talk about the agreement again. It sat between them like a closed book, acknowledged and ignored, the understanding that it existed and would not be opened serving as its own kind of bond. They had agreed. They had un-agreed. 

They had sex every night and some mornings and once on the dock in the afternoon when the sun was hot and no one was within miles and Shane said "we can't do this here" and Ilya said "there is no one" and Shane said "there are fish" and Ilya laughed and pulled him down onto the warm boards and Shane stopped thinking about the fish.

The mornings were the best. Ilya woke up with Shane already awake, already looking at him, and Shane would say "one hundred fifty one" or "one hundred and fifty six" and Ilya would nod, and the number was the first thing of the day, and it was enough.

The last morning was too bright, too specific, every detail sharpened by the knowledge that it was being filed rather than lived.

Ilya stood on the dock at six AM. He was wearing Shane's Ottawa hoodie, which was too small across his shoulders and which he had been stealing since May and which Shane had stopped asking about because the asking was a formality and they both knew the hoodie was never coming back.

Shane was inside, packing. The sounds of the cottage being closed up. The windows latched, the woodstove cleaned. The systematic sounds of a person who had opened and closed this place every summer for a decade and knew the sequence. Ilya listened to the sounds and looked at the lake and thought about the photograph of the seventeen-year-old on the shelf, the one Shane had put face down, and how the boy in the photograph would not recognize the man closing the cottage. But Ilya would. Ilya recognized both of them.

Shane drove Ilya to the airport. He would go back to Boston for two days to close the penthouse and hand off the keys to the rookie who was going to rent the place from him, and then fly to Zurich. They had coordinated it this way because separating at an airport was better than separating at the cottage. The cottage deserved better than a goodbye.

At the terminal, Shane pulled the car to the curb. The engine idled. Montreal traffic moved around them with the indifferent efficiency of a city that did not know or care that something was ending in a car at departures.

"Tuesday," Ilya said.

"Tuesday," Shane said.

"Eight AM."

"I know."

They looked at each other. Ilya reached across and put his hand on the back of Shane's neck. Shane leaned into it, his eyes closing, the same way he had leaned into it the first time Ilya had done it in the penthouse kitchen, and every time since. The gesture meant I am here and required no response.

"Go coach some children," Ilya said.

"Go play in Switzerland," Shane said.

"I will play very well in Switzerland. The Swiss will be extremely impressed."

"I'm sure they will."

"They will write about me in the newspapers."

"Ilya."

"Yes."

Shane opened his eyes. He looked at Ilya with the expression that had less performance in it than any other — the one from the photograph, the one from the dock, the one from the rug in front of the woodstove.

"We're going to be fine," Shane said.

Ilya's throat did something. He swallowed through it. He got out of the car. He took his bag from the back seat. He stood on the curb and looked at Shane through the open passenger window.

"I love you," he said. In English. In public. On a curb in Montreal with a taxi honking behind them.

"I love you too," Shane said. "Call me when you land."

Ilya looked at him. "I will call you when I land."

Shane put the car in gear. He pulled away from the curb. Ilya watched the car merge into traffic and disappear. He stood there for a moment, his bag at his feet, the crucifix warm against his chest, the air carrying the same humidity it had carried on a September night when he had walked into a bar in the Village and seen a man sitting alone and thought: that one.

Chapter End Notes

I know a lot of you were hoping for WAG Shane hanging out in Switzerland, but no dice.

Many thanks to Aphantastical for their expert help beta reading this work. I cannot sing their praises high enough.

Also thank you to WholeKittenCaboodle for their assistance catching my million typos.

This is undoubtedly a better work due to their help.

Comments keep the WIP writers working! Thanks for being here.

Chapter 16: Missed Connections

Chapter Summary

Ilya arrives in Zurich.

Chapter Notes

The apartment was on the fourth floor of a building in Zurich-West, above a wine bar that was closed at this hour and across the street from a laundromat. The elevator was the size of a phone booth, so Ilya’s few boxes had to be moved up the stairs. The hallway smelled like someone else’s cleaning products. Pine, industrial, a chemical approximation of alpine air that bore no resemblance to the actual thing.

The apartment was entirely anonymous. White walls, freshly assembled IKEA furniture, a bed with crisp white sheets, straight out of the package. A kitchen with a single-burner stove and a fridge that was slightly too small. Someone had left a small paper bag on the counter with coffee and milk and two apples, a human gesture that landed strangely against the stark white of everything else. Ilya stood in the kitchen observing it all for a moment.

The window in the main room looked out over the Limmat. By all accounts, the apartment was in a fantastic location. Close to the tram stop, which he would need to take to practice and to games, and down from a small market. He thought about what Shane would look like standing here, looking at the kitchen. He would have found the welcome bag nonsensical in its sparseness and would have made a joke about it, breaking the tension Ilya felt settling across his neck. 

It had been a long time since Ilya had lived in Europe. After a decade of American living, the idea of markets and bistros seemed strangely far away. Shane would love it here, he thought. Shane had wanted to come. He had made the offer more than once, practically, without pressure, and Ilya had said no every time. Because it wasn't fair, because Shane needed to build his own life, because asking him to spend two years in a foreign city for Ilya's suspension was not something Ilya was willing to ask of anyone. But sitting in the apartment, he felt profoundly, terribly alone in a way that was anticipated, but still landed completely unexpectedly. The river at night was dark and mostly unlit, a strip of moving black between the embankment lights. He stood there for a while with his bag still on his shoulder, fiddling with the strap.

He unpacked in forty minutes. Clothes in the wardrobe, toiletry bag in the bathroom, phone charger on the nightstand, laptop on the sterile desk. One paperback novel he had not started. He set the bag by the door. There was nothing left to do after that.

He was awake before six the first morning, jet lag and old habit, and he pulled on his coat and went out into a Zurich-West that was barely awake. The tram lines were running but sparse. The wine bar below was shuttered, chairs on tables, the street outside it clean and empty. He walked without a destination, learning the grid of the neighborhood as you could only do on foot. The side streets that cut through, the places where the residential blocks gave way to something more open near the water.

Eight blocks from the apartment, he found a bakery, a small place with its lights on, its door propped open, and the smell of bread that was already done wafting into the morning air. Inside was a woman behind the counter, a glass case, handwritten labels in German. He stood in front of the case and pointed at a roll he did not know the name of. The woman said something in Swiss German he did not follow, and he said, in his careful new German one, please, and she put it in a paper bag. He paid and walked out and ate it sitting on a bench in a park one street over.

The crust was peculiar. A crispness that gave way too cleanly, something in the crumb that was different from anything he could get in Boston. He stood on the pavement in the cold and ate the whole thing before he had walked half a block, and then he walked back and bought another one. By the following week, the bakery was already a ritual. He went every morning he was in Zurich, and again every Tuesday and Thursday evening before the calls, walking out of his way to buy a roll in a paper bag eaten on the way back to his apartment. It was the first thing in Zurich that was straightforwardly good, with no complication attached to it.

The Lions' medical staff had been given his file and read it completely, which meant the intake assessment was thorough without being theatrical. They already knew every scar and quirk on his body and it was nice not to have to begin again from nothing. The head physio, a Swiss woman named Achermann, palpated his recently healed ribs, noted his pain management history, asked the relevant questions, and when he answered them, that was that. He was cleared. He could skate the next morning.

He arrived early to the first practice, before the other forwards, and skated figure eights in the neutral zone while he waited for everyone else. It felt familiar. Arriving before the room filled, before anyone could watch. He was fine. Clear-headed and ready. His two seasons of exile started that moment. He was going to make the best of it.

The rest of the team arrived in ones and twos, with equipment bags, locker-room noise filtering out through the tunnel. He had met most of them in brief introductions already, handshakes and surnames and the courteous, evaluating attention of men who had been told a famous North American was arriving and were waiting to see what he actually did on the ice. He was not the captain here. He was a curiosity, a name on a contract that the front office was excited about. 

Ilya pushed hard. This team was willing to take a chance on him and he felt determined to make it worth it. The first twenty minutes were the standard conditioning work, and he ran it beside a Swedish defenseman named Nilsson who had the compact skating style of someone who learned the game on outdoor ice and never lost it. Ilya felt a pang of familiarity, being around players who played the way they did in Russia, like people he had known from juniors. Nilsson watched him in the periphery, not unfriendly, just attentive, and Ilya let it happen.

Then Steiner, the head coach, blew the whistle and called a power play drill, and this was where the morning changed. Ilya had identified a structural flaw in the power play. One side noticeably weaker than the other, a pair taking too long to read each other on the rotation. The whole setup was easily broadcast to the other team before they were able to move the puck. He had been sitting on it because it was not his power play yet and suggesting adjustments before you had ice time was how you made enemies in a new locker room. He had ice time now.

He ran the drill in a more efficient configuration, which was different from what Steiner called. He didn’t explain himself, he just did it. He skated to the position he intended to occupy and ran the play from there, and the second time through, Nilsson adjusted to him without being asked. The third time, the setup moved with a logic it did not have before. The puck found the net on a one-timer that Hansdatter, the right wing, scored in a way he hadn’t been able to in the past several attempts.

Steiner blew the whistle again and studied Ilya from the bench. He did the calculation coaches did when someone had just demonstrated success despite being told to do something different. The question was whether to address it or absorb it, whether the demonstration was a challenge to authority or simply a better way of doing things. The puck was in the net. Steiner was stubborn, but he was not a fool. He absorbed it. He blew the whistle again and called the next drill.

After, in the locker room, Hansdatter said something to him in German that he didn’t fully catch. “Sorry, English, or Russian, a little French. No German.”

Hansdatter grinned and said something else to the room and the room laughed, and Ilya did not know what was said but the laughter was friendly instead of hostile.

Nilsson, pulling off his skates two stalls down, said in English, “Good read. That side was soft.”

“It has been for a while,” Ilya replied.

Nilsson looked at him. “I know. Steiner is stubborn.” A pause. “Welcome.” It was not warmth exactly, but it was the first gesture that wasn’t only a courtesy.

He was still pulling off his own skates when someone dropped onto the bench beside him with the casual territorial confidence that comes from claiming a space he had already decided was his. Ilya looked up. He was young, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three — with the broad shoulders and slightly battered look of a forward that enjoys full-contact play a bit too much.  He spoke Russian. Normal Russian, at full speed, not the slowed-down, careful, diplomatic Russian of someone accounting for a rusty audience. No one had spoken to Ilya this way in years. There were no other Russian-speaking players in Boston, and he could hardly get friendly with the players on other teams. He hadn’t spoken to his Russian friends or family since his father died. It was part of him that was completely relegated to the occasional movie or novel. But here, here there were teammates who wanted to talk to him in blissful, melodic Russian.

“You played the two-on-one wrong in the third drill,” the kid said. “You passed when you should have shot. Belenko, Sergei.” He extended his hand.

Ilya stared at it before he shook it.

“Rozanov,” he said. “I passed because Hansdatter had the better angle.”

“Hansdatter had been standing in the wrong position for forever. He wasn’t going to suddenly be in the right place.”

“But he was.”

“He got lucky.”

“Or he knew to get in the right position.”

"The angle was still too tight. You had a cleaner shot from where you were standing."

"I had a chance. His was better. You pass to where he is going, not where he is."

Belenko paused, not conceding, recalculating. "You’re playing too cautiously, That goal should have been yours," he said finally. 

"Cautious wins games. I don’t need the credit."

Belenko let out a noise that conveyed deep skepticism, pulled his jersey over his head, and wandered toward the showers. Ilya sat with his skate in his hand and felt a gap he had not known was there slide closed. Not the argument, the argument was nothing, a thirty-second exchange about a drill. The language. The ease of it. Years of translating every thought before it left his mouth, of operating at three-quarters speed because the other quarter was always occupied with not sounding like an idiot, and then someone dropped onto a bench and spoke to him like a person, and his brain just ran, unimpeded, as it was supposed to. He walked out of the locker room in a better mood than he had been in since the cottage. He could do this. Two seasons. 

Hansdatter caught him in the hallway and asked if he wanted to come out. A few of them, a bar nearby, nothing difficult, He said it in heavily German-inflected English with the easy confidence of never having once had to think hard about whether to have a drink after practice.

Ilya stood in the hallway with his bag and looked at him. “Thank you,” he replied. “Not tonight.” He meant to say, probably not ever, because I promised my boyfriend I wouldn’t fall down that slippery slope, but he didn’t say those words out loud.

Hansdatter shrugged, said next time, and meant it, and walked away. Ilya stood in the empty hallway for a moment before he walked to the tram.

He rode home on the tram, six stops. The bar Hansdatter had named was on a corner a few blocks from the rink, and as the tram passed it he could see the light inside. Amber, close, a handful of people at the tables near the window, a normal Wednesday evening, the kind of scene he would walk past again tomorrow and the day after that, and this was simply a fact about where he lived now.

He got off at his stop, walked the three blocks to the building, took the elevator to the fourth floor, and stood in the kitchen with his coat still on. Here was what he had not said out loud yet, not to himself or to Shane or to Marley or Brennan. It had been forming slowly, circling around him until it hardened. He could not drink at all, not even two, not the system he had run for years. The controlled two drinks and the exit and the warm body that followed, the twin mechanisms that had kept the ceiling at a livable volume. He could not do either half anymore. He understood this the way he had understood, waking up on a bathroom floor in Boston, that the pills were done. Not managed down. Done. The problem was that the system had worked, right up until it hadn’t, and he did not know what to use instead. He needed to find something else, but for now, he did not pick up a bottle. He picked up his phone and called Shane. It wasn’t their scheduled call, but he needed it.

Shane answered in two rings, on prep for a game in Prince George, nine days into his first WHL road trip, and his face on the screen carried the tiredness of someone whose exhaustion came from work they were good at. 

“Why are you still in your coat?”

“I just got home.”

“It’s almost eight.”

“There was a thing after practice,” He pulled the coat off, and set it on the chair. “I didn’t go. But I lost track of time.”

Shane studied him, the expression he had when he was deciding how hard to press, but he must have decided not to.  “How was practice?”

Ilya told him about the power play drill, told it without the management he used everywhere else, and Shane listened and asked the right questions and somewhere in the middle of it Ilya mentioned Belenko, the argument about the two-on-one, the Russian landing on him like a weight released from a height.

“You missed it,” Shane observed. “Talking to people in Russian.”

“I did not know I missed it.”

Shane was quiet for a moment. “I’ve been picturing you in that locker room not understanding half of what anyone says.”

“It has been like this, yes.” A pause. “Belenko has very strong opinions about shot selection. But he speaks to me like a person and my brain works at full speed and I like that.”

“Yeah,” Shane said. Something in his voice that was not quite sadness but adjacent to it. They talked for twenty minutes. When Shane had to go, film review before practice— he said “Call Brennan.” 

“I know,” Ilya replied. 

“Tonight,” Shane said patiently. 

“I know, Hollander.”

“Good.” The screen went dark.

Ilya sat at the kitchen table for a while after, but he did call Brennan.

His first game was a home fixture that the Swiss press covered with enthusiasm disproportionate to a regular-season match but proportional to a first appearance by a suspended NHL captain who had not been seen in a competitive game in six months. He played his game, scored twice, set up another, and came off the ice exhausted. The crowd was loud in a way that was not Boston but was still a crowd, and the locker room after had loosened. He felt younger playing here. The way things were before. Before everything.

After, in the locker room, Hansdatter suggested the bar again. This time three others agreed before Ilya had said anything, and the invitation was no longer just polite. Instead, it had the texture of something earned.

“Not tonight,” Ilya answered again. Easy, no explanation.

Hansdatter shrugged. Nilsson glanced at him before looking away. Not judgment, but certainly the forming of an opinion. 

Belenko, lacing his shoes at the end of the row, said in Russian without looking up, “They think you are very mysterious.”

“Good,” Ilya said, in Russian.

“I told them you are just boring.”

“Also good.”

Belenko looked up. He had the beginnings of a grin that he was not quite committing to. “Your goals were not bad,” he said. “The setup in the third was better.”

“Yes,” Ilya agreed. “It was.”

They walked out together, Belenko already talking about the defensive pair’s positioning in the second period, which had been wrong in a way he seemed to find a personal affront, and they argued about it in Russian at full volume on the pavement outside the rink while the rest of the team filtered past them into the night. It was, Ilya thought, the most natural he had felt in a public space in a long time. 

The scheduled calls anchored the weeks. Five his time, eight in Vancouver. Shane already in his working day while Ilya was still at the end of his, the two of them speaking across a seam in the clock that neither of them could do anything about. He had done the math before he left the cottage and the math was correct and also somehow worse in practice than in theory.

The first few calls were mostly practical and good. Shane’s face on the screen, slightly reduced by the resolution but recognizably Shane, the attentiveness, the patience in his listening. They talked through the time zone math out loud, working out which days were worst and which were manageable, and near the end Ilya told him about the roll from the bakery and the crust he could not account for, and Shane said it could be the proofing, that altitude affected how yeast behaved, and Ilya said Zurich was not exactly altitude and Shane said higher than Boston, and they went back and forth about this for a while, and it was not about the bread. There was a stillness on Shane’s end, concern filling his pauses, trying to mask the sound of it in his voice. 

The calls got harder. Not broken, but the difficulty of two people learning what a video call could and could not carry. There was a lag in the connection that clipped phrases at the wrong moments, so that twice Ilya thought Shane had finished a sentence and began to speak and found out he hadn’t, and he apologized both times, and the apologies accumulated into a weight that was not about the connection. Shane talked about the WHL system, the head coach’s defensive philosophy, the challenge of teaching positioning to seventeen-year-olds who believed in their bones that offense was more interesting than where you stood when you didn’t have the puck, and he talked about it with what sounded like genuine affection for the problem, even when the problem was a teenager who would not listen. Ilya told him about the Lions’ power play. He told him about the city, which was fine, and his new teammates, who were also fine. Neither of them said what the calls were about.

By November, the calls had found their rhythm and also their limits. Shane called from hotel rooms in Kamloops and Kelowna and Medicine Hat, and the connection in these rooms was never consistent. Some calls clean, others with the texture of a bad line, underwater, voices arriving half a beat off from the mouths that produced them. On those nights, there was a frustration that neither of them named because that would require admitting how much they needed the call to be good, how much they had been counting on it since the last call, and how badly a dropped connection landed. It was not the same as being in the same room. Ilya had known this. He knew it more now.

There was one call in November, where the connection dropped twice, and the second time took four minutes to restore. When the screen came back, Shane was in the middle of a sentence and did not know it had cut out, and Ilya had to tell him, and Shane stopped and said nothing and then said, flat and tired, “I hate this.”

He didn’t mean the connection. Both of them know it was not the connection.

“I know,” Ilya said.

“I’m in a hotel in Moose Jaw. Do you know where that is?”

“No.”

“It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s in the middle of fucking nowhere Saskatchewan and it is extremely far from you and I have been trying to tell you something for the last ten minutes and I don’t even remember what it was now.”

Ilya looked at the screen. The hotel room visible behind Shane looked completely unremarkable. A beige wall, a lamp, the corner of a garishly patterned bedspread.  Shane’s face, filled with the tightness it had when he was tired and had stopped trying to hide how tired he was.

“Tell me something else,” Ilya said.

“Like what.”

"Anything."

There was a pause, and then Shane said: "You tell me something first."

"What do you want to know?"

"Tell me what you can see from the window right now."

Ilya turned. The Limmat, dark, the embankment lights. A few lit windows across the water. A bicycle was chained to a post on the far bank. The cold pressing against the glass. He described all of it. He described it at length. The cyclist who had crossed the bridge ten minutes ago, the lamplight on the water, the river moving. When he ran out of things to talk about through the window, he described the apartment. A shelf he bought, still unassembled, the fridge that was a little too small for what he needed, the neighbor whose name he still did not know. Somewhere in the middle of it Shane's face on the screen had changed, the jaw loosened. 

Finally, Ilya said, “Your turn. Tell me about the worst player on the team."

“Ilya. Some of them are still children. That’s not—” A pause. Then, despite his protests, Shane started talking. A seventeen-year-old left wing with all the natural ability in the world and the positioning instincts of a golden retriever. He talked for four minutes. By the end of it the connection stayed stable and Shane’s voice had lost the flatness and Ilya was sitting at the kitchen table with the river outside the window. It was not the same as being in the same room but it was something and that night it was enough.

Shane opened his mouth, but closed it again. There was a pause long enough that Ilya thought the connection had dropped again, and then Shane said: "Ilya, I —" and stopped. The silence stretched between them. "I love you," Shane said finally. As if that was what had been there all along, waiting behind whatever he had started to say.

"I love you too," Ilya said. "I want to see you soon."

"I know. We'll figure it out."

The screen went dark. Ilya sat for a while in the silence of the apartment, not moving, and then he went to bed.

The 4 AM texts began the next day. Ilya was already awake when Shane’s games happened, western Canadian schedules running until ten or eleven or beyond, which was already his early morning in Zurich. At that hour the bar below was long closed, the street outside it empty. Once, maybe twice a night, the distant rattle of a tram a few blocks away, and then nothing. He watched the feeds on his laptop with the sound off, unable to stand the trite commentary in English, and texted from the kitchen with his first coffee of the day. A hold that wasn’t called in the second period. He pressed send, went to morning skate, and at some point during the day, from a hotel room in Kelowna or a rink parking lot in Victoria, Shane texted back.

The texts were always about the game, but never about hockey. The texts were not about the hockey. He had understood that the first morning he sent one, standing in the dark kitchen watching Shane’s team skate the length of the ice to get position on a play. Seeing Shane yell and point from the bench. Ilya felt the floor tilt under him and recognized the tilt. I am awake at four in the morning watching your games because this is the closest I can get to being in the same room as you, and I would rather be here than anywhere else that is available to me.

He didn’t send that message. Instead, he said, The hold in the second. Your forward was better positioned. You needed to trust him. 

Shane wrote back, I know. I was already moving to cover the gap. 

Ilya wrote, I saw. 

Shane responded Go to sleep. 

Ilya, already in the locker room: Too late, it’s morning.

By December, the grinding behind the scenes started to feel more visible and more raw. Ilya had scored fourteen goals in his first twenty games. The Swiss press discovered him with the energy of people who had been told a name was coming and were delighted to confirm it, and he won the Swiss league’s player of the month and did not read the coverage. He read Shane’s WHL evaluation notes instead, which Marleau forwarded to him like he had accepted an assignment and was committed to seeing it through. He called Brennan every two weeks, without fail.

He told Brennan the count, 166 at the cottage, climbing, past nine months by December, and Brennan noted it without ceremony. They talked about the apartment, which didn’t feel like home no matter what he did to it, and saying this out loud to Brennan for the first time he realized he had not tried to make it into his home. Had not bought anything for the walls, not learned the name of the neighbor whose shoes he heard on the stairs every morning at seven. There was a reason for this. Making it a home would mean accepting the distance as permanent rather than temporary, and he was not ready to make that concession yet.

“Some nights,” he told Brennan, “the count feels like the only thing that is real.”

Brennan did not treat this as a small thing.

The bar invitations kept coming. Hansdatter and Nilsson and, by November, a Finnish defenseman named Laine who spoke very limited English but communicated via a series of gestures that seemed to cover most of the essentials. Belenko declined too, for reasons he had never explained and that the room had apparently decided not to press, and Ilya noticed this without comment. The invitations were genuine by now, and that was what made them harder. 

“I don’t drink,” he told Hansdatter once, simply, without apology, and Hansdatter said okay and meant it and did not ask again, and neither did anyone else, because the locker room had its own understanding of the word and it was not complicated.

What was complicated was that the locker room had opened up to him and he kept deflecting, keeping every door closed. Every declined invitation was simultaneously the right thing to do and also a small severance from the friendship of his teammates, from the ordinary post-game looseness that was how men in hockey became something more than acquaintances. He had used bars for years, the noise and the lowered inhibitions and the permission alcohol grants everyone in the room. He knew that world. He was good at it. Now that it was gone, he could feel its crushing absence. Some nights, he had the calls, or Belenko arguing the merits of one team or another in Russian at full volume in the corridor after games. It was something. Some nights it was enough. Other nights the apartment went silent and the river was dark outside the window and he sat on the edge of the bed and wrapped his hand around his crucifix and waited for the night to end, not opening a bottle, not finding anyone, just waiting, which was its own kind of discipline and some nights felt like nothing at all.

On a Thursday call in early December he told Shane about Belenko — not the first meeting, he had told him that already, but the accumulation of it. The arguments about the game that had become a standing feature of the post-practice walk to the tram, Belenko’s disagreements about the power play setup, delivered with the confidence of someone who had never once considered that being wrong was possible, the Russian running between them like water through a channel that had been dry for months, the nicknames they had started calling each other. 

“You sound different when you talk about him,” Shane said.

“Different how.”

“Faster,” Shane replied. “You talk faster. Like you’re not — like you’re not translating.”

“I’m not,” Ilya said. “When I talk about him I am thinking in Russian and then talking in English. Usually I think in English now. It is —” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “It is tiring. I did not know how tiring until I came here.”

Shane was quiet for a moment. “I really need to learn Russian,” he said.

“I did not know how much I missed speaking it,” Ilya said. “Until Belenko sat next to me on a bench and my brain just — like turning a light on. I bet you could learn it in a week.”

“I’m glad you’re making a friend,” Shane said.

“He is insufferable,” Ilya said. “But yes.”

The last Tuesday call before Christmas, Shane was in a hotel in Portland. It was eight in the morning his time and he looked tired in a way the screen flattened but did not hide.

They had been talking for forty minutes. Shane had described the past week’s practices and Ilya had described the December schedule and the Lions’ road trip and neither of them had said the thing either of them was thinking. The call had taken on a particular density because of this. Two people talking around the shape of an absence without naming the shape.

Ilya looked at the window. He had his Christmas break coming. Ten days, the league going quiet after the 24th. He had been carrying that fact for three weeks, quietly building the ask around it. Shane, not so lucky, got just three days. 

“We should talk about summer,” he said. “We can go to the cottage. After your season ends — we’ll have the whole summer.”

Shane was quiet for a moment. Not the pause of deliberation. The pause of information he had been waiting to deliver and was now working out how to say it delicately.

“I have development camp the last week of June,” he said. “And the front office wants me in for draft prep through most of July. I can get away in mid-July. Mid-July to mid-August, maybe.”

Four weeks, maybe five, where he had been imagining months. He had been doing the math on the suspension calendar and assuming it mapped cleanly onto Shane’s life, and it did not map onto Shane’s life at all. Shane’s life had its own obligations, its own schedule that did not bend around a suspension, and this was simply true.

“Mid-July,” Ilya said.

“It’s still a good stretch.”

“Yes,” Ilya said, trying to hide his irritation. “I know.”

He did know. He sat with the adjustment and did not say what he had been imagining. Endless days of sitting on the dock, Shane’s hair shining in the setting sun. All the time in the world. But saying it would not help and would make Shane feel the gap as a failure when it was not. Shane was doing what Ilya had asked him to do.

On the kitchen table beside him, his laptop was open. A browser tab had flights from Zurich to Vancouver, landing December 23rd. He had not bought anything yet. He had been looking at the options for three days. A layover in Frankfurt, the arrival time that would put him in Vancouver late in the evening the day Shane got off work for the holiday.

"What about Christmas break," Ilya said. "I have ten days. I was looking at flights to come see you in Vancouver. I know you have work, but I could still visit."

Shane's face changed. Something moved across it and was pushed away, and then he was very still. "You didn’t buy them yet, right?" For a brief instant, Ilya’s heart leapt. Had Shane negotiated for more time? Was he coming to Zurich? 

"No. I was still looking." He tried to keep the hope from his voice.

Shane’s face went unbearably serious for a brief flicker of a moment. “My parents are coming for Christmas,” Shane replied. His voice carried the note it had for things already decided. “I’m — it’s better if you don’t come here.”

Ilya was very still.

“They’re still worried,” Shane said. “About us. About all the backlash. I don’t want to — they’re just here for a few days and I can’t deal with that many things at once.” Can’t deal with me, Ilya heard. “They’ll come around. But maybe we don’t do this right now.”

“I understand,” Ilya said. He meant it, even if he hated it. Shane’s parents are people who love their son and watched what happened to him and are doing what parents do. Ilya was the reason for the worry. That was true and not negotiable. If his mother was alive, she would feel the same.

“Are we — fine?” He was testing the waters. 

“Yes.” And then, because it was also true, “I was looking forward to it. I am disappointed.”

“I know,” Shane said quietly. “I’m sorry.” A pause. “Where will you go for Christmas?”

Ilya looked at the apartment. The white walls. The river. The paper bag from the first night was still sitting on the counter next to the coffee maker, the apples long gone but the bag still there, soft and creased, stained from the condensation off his coffee maker. 

“It’s not my Christmas. But I’ll stay here,” he said. “See if the Christmas markets are as organized as everything else in this country.”

“That sounds really nice,” Shane said, but it rang hollow.

“Probably.”

A pause. They had been on the call for fifty minutes and had not said the thing either of them was thinking. The call was ending and it was still not going to be said and both of them knew this.

“How long,” Ilya said. Shane looked at him on the screen. “Until we are not doing this anymore.” 

Shane was quiet for a moment. “Mid-July. I’ll have so much time.”

“That isn’t what I meant.” Flat, not unkind. 

The silence shifted. Shane’s face on the screen. The weariness there, and something underneath it that Ilya recognized because he had seen it every time Shane had been asked a question he could not answer honestly. Shane did not perform around this. He just went still.

“I don’t know,” Shane said. “I don’t know when.” 

“No,” Ilya said. “Neither do I.”

Shane nodded and the call ended. Ilya called Marleau.

"Hey," Marleau said.

"Hey." A pause. Marleau waited. He was good at that. "I'm not going to Vancouver for Christmas," Ilya said. "Shane's parents are coming."

"Okay," Marleau said. “Are you good with that?” Not a judgment. Just receiving it.

"It is fine," Ilya said. "It is the right call. His parents are worried and it would be complicated and he is right."

"Yeah," Marleau said.

"I just —" He stopped. Outside the window the river was dark and the city was going about its December business without him. "I had been counting on it."

"I know," Marleau said again.

They stayed on the phone for a while after that. Marleau talked about the team. Who was playing well, who wasn't, the third line that had finally started to click. Normal things. The kind of update Ilya would have received standing at the next stall, pulling off his skates, the ordinary beats of a life he no longer had access to. He listened and did not say much and Marleau did not ask him to.

"You okay?" Marleau said, before they hung up.

"I will be," Ilya said. It was not quite the same as yes, and Marleau heard the difference, and neither of them addressed it.

"Call me," Marleau said.

"I will."

The call ended. Ilya set the phone on the counter and stood there for a while longer, the apartment silent around him. The thought arrived, and he recognized it. He had been here before, not this apartment and not this December, but this particular shape of alone. The gap between what he had expected and what was available, the contraction of a window he had been counting on, the holiday coming with nowhere to put himself inside it. He knew what the thought wanted. He knew the name for what would quiet his brain.

He recognized it and did not move toward it. He wrapped his hand around his cross, held it with the chain pulled taut against the back of his neck, and then picked up his phone and called Brennan.

Brennan picked up on the second ring.

“Ilya,” he said, unsurprised. Ready, expecting this call.

“I’m having a hard night. I wanted to call before it became something else. I talked to Shane. And Cliff. You’re next.”

“That’s really good. Talk to me about it.”

He sat down on his bed and looked at the river for a moment, the Christmas market lights beginning to be visible from the bridge, small and bright in the dark, the Alps somewhere behind the cloud cover, the whole city going about its own life in a language he was still learning. Then he started talking. The call, the Christmas break, the team going out after games, and the sincerity of the invitations and what he did not do when he declined them. He talked around the edge of it for a while before he said it directly.

“I don’t know what to use. Instead. I had a system and the system is gone and I don’t have anything to replace it with.”

“Tell me about the system,” Brennan said, though they both knew he already knew.

“Two drinks. And then someone. The drinks made the someone easier to find and the someone made two drinks enough— without the someone, two drinks doesn’t do it, and I can’t have the someone either.” He paused. “I’m not going to find someone in Zurich, so both parts are gone and I have the calls with Shane on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the hockey and some nights it’s enough and some nights it isn’t.” 

He could hear Brennan still on the other end of the line. “You called tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Instead of the other things.”

“Yes.”

“That’s something. You found a third option.”

“It doesn’t feel like it’s enough.”

“No. It probably won’t for a while.”

They stayed on the phone for another twenty minutes, and Brennan did not offer a solution because there was not one to offer tonight, and Ilya did not ask for one because he already knew this. What there was: the count, past nine months, which would still be past nine months tomorrow. The river outside the window. A call that was ending. Brennan suggested looking into hobbies. Exercise for fun, not just to stay conditioned for hockey. Art, museums, the theater. Anything. Something to look forward to. 

“Call me before it becomes something else. Every time. Any time,” Brennan finished.

“I know.”

“Good. You’re doing really well, Ilya. What you’re doing is really hard.”

The call ended. Ilya set the phone on the nightstand and lay down on the bed in his clothes and stared at the plain white ceiling and he waited for the night to pass.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks for your patience on this update. Work is...it's own mess right now, so less time for writing which I used to do on the clock (whoops). Hopefully in a few weeks there will be more time for hobbies, like finishing up some fics.

Many thanks to Aphantastical for their expert help beta reading this work. They check my (very, very bad) math, and help me trim the repetitive bits in the kindest, most helpful way.

Also thank you to WholeKittenCaboodle for their assistance catching my million typos and tense shifts and their hatred of the word "gotten."

Let me know what you think! I love reading your comments, even if I can't always get to them all.

Chapter 17: The Visit

Chapter Summary

Long distance is hard, especially when there's stress coming in from every direction.

Chapter Notes

The apartment in Kitsilano was a one-bedroom Shane could barely afford, across from a park that flooded whenever it rained. He had looked at two-bedrooms first, out of habit, out of the assumption that his salary would accommodate it. It didn't. It didn't even come close. The WHL assistant coaching stipend was livable but uncomfortably tight. Shane had been looking at an NHL salary in the six-figure range. Now, his salary was less than a third of what it had been, in an outlandishly expensive city. It was even less than his first AHL contract. After his share of the lawyer's fees, there wasn't much left to work with. He did the math on his phone in the parking lot of the second two-bedroom place he'd viewed and stared at the number for a while before he called the one-bedroom landlord back.

He mentioned the apartment to his parents when they asked, letting the square footage speak for itself. The apartment was perfectly fine. A kitchen that fit one person comfortably, a window overlooking the park, a bathroom with a showerhead that dripped. He bought a secondhand desk from a Kijiji listing and put it against the wall in the bedroom. He stacked his binders on it and that became the office. He tracked his spending meticulously. Groceries, transit, the phone bill. He ran the seawall in the mornings because it was free and he could use the gym at the rink.

The Pacific time zone meant his mornings were Ilya's evenings and the difference was punishing but survivable. Nine hours between them, the calls at five PM Zurich time, landing at eight AM Vancouver, which meant Shane was already at the rink or just leaving home to go there. It was survivable. What he hadn't considered were the silences in between. The nature of his work meant constantly walking into new rooms, but Vancouver was taking longer than expected to become habitual. The seawall runs helped in the mornings, the rain becoming familiar if not comfortable. The WHL kids responded to him. The head coach gave him genuine responsibility within two weeks and he was good at it immediately, which was an unexpected surprise. Reffing was a million miles away from coaching in terms of skillset, and he had expected struggle. It was a tiny amount of relief in an otherwise overwhelming time. But he came home to a one-bedroom apartment in a city that still didn't feel comfortable and ate whatever was cheapest at the grocery store two blocks over and sat at the secondhand desk with a stack of scouting reports. Some evenings the silence had a heaviness that he couldn't shake.

He called Hayden on Wednesdays. It had started as a check-in. Hayden's idea, framed practically, two weeks after the move. It had become something else by October without either of them realizing it. They talked for an hour, sometimes longer. Hayden talked about the games and the crew and the calls he was still thinking about. Shane listened and responded and they argued about positioning the way, and for an hour on Wednesday evenings, Shane felt nearly normal. Hayden spoke about his four kids, the oldest two just old enough to start hockey themselves, and his wife holding the house together while he was working out of town. It helped. It also, some weeks, made everything worse, and he had stopped trying to separate those two things.

Hayden worked a Boston game in November. He called Shane from the parking lot at TD Garden after, and they talked for ninety minutes about nothing in particular. The game overall, a hooking call in the third that Hayden had hesitated on, the defensive pair that had been running the same obstruction pattern all season and getting away with it. Normal things. At the end Hayden said, "It was good, but I was thinking about the last time, when we were here together."

"Yeah," Shane said. Neither of them said anything else about it. He lay awake that night until two, resisting the urge to text Ilya.

The anxiety arrived quietly, sneaking in unexpectedly over days and weeks. He had spent most of his twenties in the AHL and OHL eating shitty hotel food and driving between towns in the middle of nowhere, and all of it had been for his moment in the NHL. It was the payoff, the long-awaited gift at the end. He didn't even get one season before his own stupid decisions had taken it from him. Now he was eating beans most nights and debating whether the good toilet paper was worth it. His entire professional identity had been built on competence and precision, and now it felt like he was an observer to his own life, watching himself become someone who just waited. He was good at his job. He could not control the reinstatement timeline. He could not control the connection quality on their calls. He could not control what happened in Zurich at three in the morning when Ilya was alone and unable to control his thoughts, and his usual methods of coping weren't available. This last one was the one that kept him awake the most.

He had done as much reading as he could on addiction and supporting someone through it. He understood that this was not something that ended, that Ilya was doing maintenance work that had no finish line. He also understood, from half a world away, that he was a variable in that maintenance. He couldn't tell Ilya any of it, because Ilya was already carrying so much. All of the reading he had done had been clear about this. The support people around an addict are not neutral in their recovery. Shane was a factor that could help or could harm, that could make a Tuesday call easier or harder depending on his voice, his attention, and whether he had managed his own state well enough that day not to leak it through the screen. If the shame around his own inability to manage his life slipped into a call, and Ilya heard it and it made his night harder, and theat meant that he started the path that ended up with him unconcious on a bathroom floor with no one to find him—Shane would have done that. He would be responsible. He couldn't let that be the sequence of events. He couldn't let himself be part of that sequence at all.

So he never asked the question directly. He said how was practice. He said tell me about your day. And Ilya said things back and the calls were good and Shane smiled in rink parking lots and at the secondhand desk and did not ask am I making this harder for you? Am I the thing that tips you into relapse? 

He ran in the Vancouver drizzle. He went to sleep at ten. He kept his voice level on the calls. Some nights it worked. Some nights it was two in the morning and the apartment was still and the rain was on the windows and he was lying awake thinking about all the things he was doing wrong at that moment. Ilya had nearly died once and it had been his fault. He could not let it happen a second time. He had to manage every variable he could control, because the one thing he couldn't control was whether Ilya was going to make it. Whether the next phone call he got would be the call. A good call meant Ilya would wake up, the count still climbing. And so far, it had, which was good, which was evidence, which should be enough. But underneath the count was the question he couldn't find the answer to. What happens when he does it again? Where are you then?

He didn't text Ilya on those nights. He couldn't burden him in that way. Ilya's 4 AM was Shane's evening, and he watched Shane's games on his laptop then. Shane working late into the Vancouver night, the WHL games going past eleven, the texts arrived when Shane was at the rink or driving home, and he read them over a cup of tea at night, and they helped. But Shane's 2 AM was Ilya's late morning, Ilya in practice or post-practice or eating something in the apartment, and the kinds of messages Shane would have sent at two in the morning were not things he could discuss while the sun was up in Ilya's time. So he lay awake and waited for morning.

Not all of the calls were good, despite his best efforts. A Tuesday in November. Shane had run a practice the day before that hadn't worked. The defensive structure failed completely under game simulation, three kids regressing to exactly the habits he'd spent two weeks correcting. He was tired and underneath the tiredness was the shame of incompetence at something that was supposed to be his job now. If he was never able to go back to reffing, coaching might be all he had. He had a meeting at seven with his boss that left him feeling worse than before, and then it was time to call Ilya. He managed the emotion in the car before the call. Kept it out of his voice. He stayed even for the full forty minutes, performing normalcy. When the call ended he sat in the parking lot and didn't move for ten minutes.

There was the Moose Jaw call. He was in a cramped hotel room with an uncomfortable bed and sheets that felt like sandpaper. They had lost their first game and had another the next day that Shane wasn't feeling optimistic about. The connection dropped twice. The second time took four minutes, and when the screen came back, Ilya had to tell him he'd been talking into silence, and Shane stopped and felt the misery of it. The medium, failing. No other options available. He had said I hate this and meant the connection, but also meant everything else. Ilya had said I know in a voice that meant he knew all of it. They had talked their way back from it but Shane slumped back in bed after that call in the kind of silence that took a few days to clear.

His parents flew into Vancouver on Christmas Eve. They looked around the one-bedroom apartment with an expression Shane had been dreading since September. They were trying. He could see them trying. His father asked about the team with genuine interest and he talked about the kids and he listened and asked follow-up questions. His mother asked about the reinstatement timeline. Shane gave the same answer he always gave. He didn't know. He was doing all of the steps, but there was nothing to do but wait. 

The first evening was fine. They met for dinner at a Thai place near their hotel, his mother ordering for the table the way she had his entire life. Afterward, they walked back along the waterfront. 

"Beautiful city," his mother said. 

"It is," Shane agreed. 

His mother held his arm while they walked and talked about home improvement plans and the fishing trip his father was planning. Normal things. And then, carefully: "You seem tired, honey."

"I'm okay," Shane said.

"You're allowed to say if it's hard."

"I like my job," Shane said. She nodded. She didn't push. 

The next day was Christmas. They came to the apartment again for lunch. His mother had suggested it, and Shane had cleaned it the night before anyway, which he recognized as irrational, given that they had already seen it and had already said nothing about the secondhand desk and the single set of dishes on the drying rack. Their silence had been its own statement, and he had been sitting with it since. He cleaned the space again. He couldn't help it. His father looked around the same way he had looked around the first time, without comment, and Shane felt the accumulated weight of two days of that silence pressing on the back of his neck. They ate at the small kitchen table and talked about nothing, and the nothing settled across his shoulders.

They had exchanged gifts, deeply impractical things that Shane had overspent on, but did not want his parents to know how deeply his finances occupied his mind. Artisanal jams from the ritzy grocery on Robson. A full-grain leather wallet for his father. His parents had brought him a  new pair of rainboots. It was certainly an upgrade to his not-waterproof-enough-for-Vancouver boots that he had owned for five years. 

His parents returned that evening for Christmas dinner, which had been store-bought and brought over in foil containers. His mother washed up the dishes, his father sat at the table with his tea. Shane was portioning the leftovers into containers, noting what he could get another meal from, when his mother said, setting down the last dish, "We looked him up."

Shane closed the fridge. "Do you really want to do this?" he asked.

"We've been trying to understand it," she said. "I was hoping you would bring it up and we could have a conversation about this like adults. Your father and I have been very patient." 

"I know what's online, Mom."

"Then you know what I'm going to say."

His father wrapped both hands around his mug and said nothing. His mother turned from the sink.

"Shane," she continued. "The pictures." He waited. "Of him with—there are a lot of them. Different women. Women, Shane. And the articles." She stopped. Her hands tightened on the dish towel. "You're building your life around this guy and I need to know you've thought about what that means. What it means for you when—"

"Mom."

"I'm not trying to—" Her voice caught slightly. "I love you. I love you and I'm worried. We're both worried, right David?" She looked at his dad, who cleared his throat uncomfortably.

"We want what's best for you, Shane," he added.

"I don't think he knows what you had to give up for this. Reffing for the NHL has been your dream!"

Shane leaned against the counter. He felt the pull of it, the need to explain. He knew exactly what the pictures she saw were. He knew what they looked like from the outside and he knew what they were covering for, the calculations of a person who had been managing one thing with another for years. But it was not his information to give, and even if it were, it was not a sentence that would do what he needed it to do in this kitchen.

"No, playing hockey was my dream. But that's not happening. We don't need to do this. I'm an adult. I know what I'm doing."

"We're worried, Shane."

"I know what it looks like," he said. "But you don't need to worry."

"What does it look like?"

"He's not like that anymore," Shane said. 

"How do you know that?"

"Because I know him."

"You've known him what, a year?"

"How long did you know Dad before you married him?" Shane knew the number. It was sixteen months. Shane had met Sasha in a bar just short of fifteen months ago.

"That was different." She was wiping down his counter with a dish towel, avoiding his eyes. 

"I don't think it is." He lifted his chin.

"Shane." She set the dish towel on the counter. "What happens if he goes back to that? The women, or whatever it was that came before? Where are you? You've given up your career, you're living in—" She stopped herself. Looked at the scuffed desk through the bedroom door and looked back at him. "You deserve someone great, who would choose you over everything."

"He did choose me," Shane said. "He does choose me."

"He chose you when his life fell apart," she said. "That's not the same thing as choosing you when life is ordinary." She sighed. "There weren't any nice boys in Montreal?"

Something in Shane broke open. "We're together, Mom. I love him. We're making it work." His voice came out sharper than he intended. "He texts me at four in the morning because that's the closest he can get. He is rebuilding his entire life in a city where he doesn't speak the language and he doesn't drink anymore at all and he—" He stopped. He heard himself half a second too late. 

The room was quiet in a different way than it had been a moment before. His mother's expression had shifted. It was not just registering his certainty in his relationship now, but recalculating. He could see her doing it. The photographs, the reputation, and now, he doesn't drink. The pieces rearranging themselves into a different shape. Shane felt the slip settle in his chest like a stone. He had not meant to say it. It had come out in the momentum of defending Ilya and he could not take it back and he did not know yet what his mother would do with it.

"Shane."

"He is doing everything right. And he does all of that while waiting for me to be allowed back on the ice, which could be another year. I need you to trust that I know him. I know who he is."

"And if something goes wrong?" she said. "If he has a hard night and there's nothing you can do?"

"Then I won't be there," Shane said. "Same as I am now. Same as I'll be whether I'm in Vancouver or Ottawa or anywhere else." He looked at the window. The rain on the glass. "Being closer doesn't fix that. Being here doesn't fix that. That's just—that's the situation."

His father was looking at his tea.

"We just worry," his mother said.

"I know you do," Shane said. "I know." The anger had already gone out of him, which was worse in its way. He had nothing left to push against. "I'm tired, Mom. I'm really tired."

She crossed the kitchen and put her arms around him, and he let her, standing at the counter with his chin over her shoulder and his eyes closed. She was smaller than he remembered. He didn't know when that had happened.

"I know," she said. "I know you are. You don't have to be."

Shane lay awake until two in the morning. He did not text Ilya. He ran in the morning and came back and his parents came over for breakfast. They ate it without mentioning the evening and his mother asked about the WHL playoff structure and Shane explained it and by noon things felt almost normal.

Then his father said, from his chair, not looking up from his book, "It's a long time to wait for someone you haven't gotten to spend much time with. I wish you didn't have to do that."

"I know," Shane said.

His father looked up then. "I know," he said. "I just wanted to say it out loud."

Shane looked at him. His father was not filing evidence. He was just sad about it.

"I know, Dad," Shane said again.

They left the next morning. He went to the hotel to say goodbye, and his mother hugged him in the lobby for a long time, and Shane held on.

"Call us," she said.

"I will," he said.

He walked home, then stood in the kitchen, staring at the containers of leftovers in the fridge. His mother's voice underneath everything. He had a few hours before afternoon practice. He picked up his phone and called Ilya. Ilya picked up on the second ring. It was evening in Zurich. Ilya was still on his holiday break and wouldn't have a game. "Hi," Ilya said.

"Bad Christmas," Shane said.

"Tell me."

So he did. He sat on the floor of his kitchen with his back against the cabinets and talked for twenty minutes—the dinner out and his mother in the kitchen with the dish towel and everything she'd said and the fight and what came after it, the hug at the counter. He did not tell him how he slipped and disclosed his drinking problem. That was not a stress he needed right now. Ilya listened. He didn't offer solutions. He said, "She is afraid because she loves you. She is not wrong to be afraid." Later, "You handled it well." This last one landed oddly because Shane hadn't felt like he'd handled it well at all, had felt like he'd been barely functional, and hearing Ilya say it plainly was different from being comforted.

"I'm exhausted," Shane said.

"I know," Ilya said.

"Everything feels impossible right now."

"I know," Ilya said again. And then, after a pause, "It is not impossible. It is very hard. Those are different."

Shane sat with that for a moment. Then, because he had been talking for twenty minutes and Ilya had said almost nothing about himself, "How was your Christmas?" A silence. Not a long one. Just long enough.

"Fine," Ilya said.

"Yeah?"

"I stayed in the apartment. I can see the Christmas market from the window. The lights were nice." A beat. "My teammate's wife dropped off food. It was very kind."

Shane closed his eyes. He thought about the apartment he had never seen except through a screen—the white walls, the IKEA furniture. Stark. Impersonal. Ilya alone in it on Christmas Day with someone else's family cooking for him. The count climbing through December, through Christmas, through whatever the night had asked of him that he hadn't said anything about and wasn't going to.

"Ilya," Shane said.

"It was fine," Ilya said. "I called Brennan on Christmas Eve. We talked for a while. I ate the food." Another silence. "My bakery was closed for Christmas. This was the most upsetting part."

Shane laughed despite himself, which he suspected was partly the point. "I'm sorry," he said. "About Christmas. I should have—"

"Stop," Ilya said. "Your parents were there."

"But you were alone," Shane said, and heard how hollow it was even as he said it.

"You are with me now," Ilya said. 

"It's not the same."

"No, it is not."

Shane sat on the kitchen floor for a long time after the call ended. The rain on the windows. His parents had flown across the country to see him. They had stayed in a hotel, bought him dinner and worried about him out loud because they loved him. He had spent three days finding it suffocating. His mother's questions had gotten inside of him and he couldn't get them out, especially the one she had asked a dozen ways since April: are you sure? Some nights he was sure. And some nights when he had eaten instant ramen for the third time that week and couldn't figure out how he was going to get to the other end of this with his sanity intact, it sounded like a perfectly reasonable question. And he'd come too close to letting that doubt slip into his call with Ilya.

The last week in January, a text from Ilya arrived while Shane was driving to morning practice. He glanced at it at a red light.

The team is going to the bar in my building after the game tonight. I do not think I can say no this time.

He pulled into a parking lot and read it again. This was not a crisis text. Ilya did not send crisis texts. When things were bad he went quiet, or called Brennan. This was something else. Ilya reaching out before, which was the right thing, also meant he was close enough to the edge that he needed to reach out before. The text was not alarming in its content. It was alarming in its existence.

Shane contemplated how to respond. He settled on Call Brennan first. Then decide.

Three minutes later, Already did.

What did he say?

He said it was my decision. That I know what I can handle.

Do you think it will be fine?

A longer stretch. I don't know.

Shane looked at the parking lot he had pulled into. A strip mall with a nail salon and a bubble tea place and a pharmacy. He thought about what he could actually do from here, which was nothing, which he never stopped thinking about.

You don't have to go, he typed.

I know. But I keep saying no. Brennan says I need to decide if I am protecting or isolating myself.

Shane had no answer for this because it was true and not his call to make. What does your gut say, he typed finally.

Trusting my gut is not smart.

No, Shane responded. But it's what you've got.

He sat in the parking lot until the phone buzzed again. I'll call you later. Shane noted that he did not indicate his decision.

Shane let out a breath. Okay, he wrote. Love you.

He drove home and ate lunch, thinking about Ilya. This time was close, and next time might be closer, and there was nothing he could do about any of it.

His phone rang again at one that afternoon. He had thought Ilya, maybe, calling like he said he would, after his game. But it was his mother. He answered because not answering made it worse.

"Hi, sweetheart," she said. "I just wanted to check in."

"I'm okay," Shane said. "Work is good."

"Good," she said. A pause. "Your father and I were talking."

Shane waited.

"We were thinking—and this is just a thought—but if Vancouver isn't working out the way you hoped, you could always come home for a while. To Ottawa. Just while you figure out the next step. It wouldn't be—"

"Mom," Shane said.

"We have the space, and it might be easier financially—"

"I'm not moving back to Ottawa."

"We are not saying permanently—"

"Mom," He kept his voice level. "I'm not coming home. Vancouver is where I need to be right now."

"We just want you to know it's an option."

"Thank you for offering," Shane said tightly. "I'm not doing it."

A silence. "Promise me you'll think about it." When he didn't respond, she said, "You sound tired."

"I am tired," he said. "I'm fine. I'll call you this weekend."

Shane sat at the kitchen table and felt the hollowness of a conversation that had not gone badly but had not helped. Come home. As if home was Ottawa. As if any of this was temporary. A text came through from Ilya a little after two, Shane's time, a little after eleven in Ilya's. 

I am at the bar.

Shane's stomach felt like it had fallen out of his body. Shane dialed his number immediately. Ilya did not answer.

I am fine. I am out with the team. But felt bad for it to be a secret.

I need you to call me.

After, came the reply. 

Shane started acting before he had time to think. He opened his calendar and checked the practice schedule. He just needed confirmation. He had a stretch of days off. He had a practice tomorrow, and then a game, and then five days with nothing in them. A rare break he had noted and then forgotten, because there was nothing to do with five empty days in Vancouver except run the seawall and wait for his next day of practice. He pulled up Ilya's calendar. One home game. Nothing away.

He looked at it for a long time, then he opened his laptop. Zurich via Frankfurt. Leave late January 28th, arrive early on the 29th. Returning February 2nd. The price came up on his screen and he looked at it like he had looked at the two-bedroom apartment in the fall. He sat with the number and felt what it meant, the months of cheaper groceries and a desperate lack of entertainment. Due to the short notice, with dates that needed to be precise, economy seats were sold out. The number was larger than his rent. He thought about the credit card he had been careful not to use, the one he kept for emergencies. He got it out and bought the ticket.

Four nights. They would have four nights together. He sat with his phone in his hand after, thumb over Ilya's name, but did not call. Ilya would call. Ilya would tell him it was fine. And if he didn't, he would be there in two days. 

I am fine, Hollander the message buzzed two hours later. Do not worry.

The next day dragged by. Shane worked hard. Running until his legs burned. Ilya hadn't called him. No other texts after he had the nerve to tell him not to worry. It made Shane concerned and sad and furious in equal quantities. He didn't tell Ilya he was coming. He told himself he would call from the gate. He didn't. He called from the arrivals hall, shortly after noon, bag at his feet, the smell of a European airport settling around him—cleaning products and coffee and pastries and something else he couldn't name.

Ilya picked up on the first ring.

"Hey," Shane said.

Shane could hear the acoustic of a rink corridor—distant ice, echoes off the concrete. Just leaving practice. "Hey," Ilya said, and his voice had already changed, already reading the thing Shane hadn't said yet. "Is something wrong? It is very early for you. You do not need to be—"

"I'm at the airport," Shane cut him off.

"Ah. Where are you going? Hopefully not back to Moose Jaw again."

"No, I'm at your airport. In Zurich. I'm here."

A silence stretched long enough that Shane was certain the call had dropped. Finally, Ilya spoke. "Outside, there is a train station. Take the train to Zurich HB. All the southbound trains will go there. Then the 50 or the 51. 17 also fine. Does not matter. Six stops. I will text you the address. I am still at the rink, but I will meet you there."

He didn't ask why Shane was here. He didn't ask for how long. Shane stood in the arrivals hall and felt the band around his chest loosen by a fraction.

"Okay," he said. "Six stops."

He arrived at the apartment building and rang the buzzer. The door clicked open without Ilya's voice through the intercom, which meant Ilya had been watching for him. Ilya was in the doorway of his apartment on the fourth floor when Shane came around the landing. He was still in his training clothes, hair air drying in every direction, the glint of gold chain around his neck catching the hallway light. He looked at Shane exactly like he did through a screen, except now there was no screen and no lag and nothing compressed or flattened by resolution. Shane put his bag down.

"Hey," he said.

"Hi," Ilya said.

Neither of them moved for a moment, and then Shane crossed the landing and put his hands on either side of Ilya's face and kissed him, hard, with months of calls and 4 AM texts and parking lot calculations behind it. Ilya made a sound low in his throat and grabbed Shane's coat, pulling him forward by it through the door. 

Ilya's hands were everywhere, on Shane's coat and collar and jaw. Shane got one hand in Ilya's hair and kissed him before the door had fully closed behind them. More than six months apart. The screen version and the real version running parallel week after week and now Ilya's mouth was exactly the way Shane had been not-thinking-about, warm and certain and present, and Shane made a sound against it that he didn't try to control. Ilya pulled back just far enough to look at him. His hands were still fisted in Shane's coat lapels. His hair was wrecked, going in three directions from Shane's hand, and his eyes were searching Shane's.

"You're here," Ilya said.

"Yeah," Shane said.

Ilya kissed him again, slower this time, one hand coming up to cup Shane's jaw. He pulled back slightly, his thumb slipping into Shane's mouth and Shane leaned into it and felt the loosening of everything he had been holding tight for months. The coat was still on. He didn't care. He got both hands under the hem of Ilya's training shirt and Ilya inhaled sharply at the cold of Shane's hands against his sides and then pressed closer rather than away.

"Your hands are cold," Ilya said against his mouth.

"I know," Shane said. "Sorry." He didn't move them.

Ilya made a noise that was not a complaint. He pushed Shane's coat off his shoulders, then lifted his sweater over his head and ran his hands along Shane's chest.Shane pulled off Ilya's shirt and dropped to his knees, pulling Ilya's joggers down and getting his mouth around him. Ilya's hands went to his hair, tight and then gentle, his thumb stroking along Shane's temple, and he made a sound from deep in his chest that Shane had been hearing in his memory since last summer and was now hearing in an actual room. Ilya urged him back up after a while, pressed his back against the wall and kissed his throat, his collarbone, the freckles along it, and Shane tipped his head back and felt every kilometer of the distance collapse into the width of the apartment.

 "It's been so long," Shane said. Not a complaint. Just the fact of it.

 "Yes," Ilya said, against his skin. "I know. Come to bed."

Ilya pulled Shane by the hand to his bedroom, the clothes coming off easily on the way. They fell onto the bed, the friction nearly too much for Shane. Ilya worked his way down Shane's body, his tongue tracing along his stomach and his hip and further. Shane felt the heat of his tongue licking and biting, and then finally entering him. His tongue and then a finger working Shane open, and it was all too much.

"Ilya, you have to stop if you want to—"

Ilya pulled away slightly, looking chagrined. "I did not buy condoms."

Shane looked at him. "We don't need them," he said, then stopped himself. "Do we?"

"I have not, not since—" Shane felt the last of his anxiety unwind, his heart swelling.

"Me neither," Shane said. "So—"

"So," Ilya agreed.

"I need you in me."

Ilya kissed him again, his hand wrapping around Shane's cock, slow and deliberate, and Shane's head dropped back against the pillow. He reached across Shane to the nightstand drawer, and returned with a small bottle. Ilya slicked his fingers and pressed back in slowly, watching Shane's face the entire time, and Shane exhaled and relaxed into it.

"Okay?" Ilya asked.

"More than okay," Shane said. "Keep going."

There were two fingers and then three, curling and pressing until Shane was pulling at his shoulders and making sounds he had no ability to control. He had not been touched by another person in months and it registered in every nerve ending he had.

"Ilya. Come on."

"I heard you," Ilya said, not moving any faster.

"You're doing this on purpose."

"Yes," Ilya agreed, and pressed deeper, and Shane made a sound that was not entirely dignified.

When Ilya finally lined up and pushed in, slow and steady all the way, Shane wrapped his legs around him and pulled him closer and held on. The fullness, the familiar gravity of Ilya's body, the reality of being here with him landed somewhere past the physical and Shane pressed his face into Ilya's shoulder and breathed.

Ilya's hand came up to the back of his neck. "I have you," he said. 

"Move," Shane said against his skin.

It built slowly, Ilya finding the angle that made Shane's back arch off the bed and staying there, his hands on Shane's hips and then his thighs, shifting him, and Shane let himself be shifted because Ilya had always known what he was doing and right now Shane had no interest in arguing about anything. He got a hand in Ilya's hair and kissed him badly, more breath than kiss, because concentrating on two things at once was beyond him in that moment.

"You feel—" Shane started.

"So do you," Ilya said. His voice had gone rough.

They stayed like that until it became clear they both needed something different—Ilya pulling out briefly and urging Shane onto his side, pressing in again from behind, one arm coming around his chest, the other gripping his hair in the most satisfyingly painful way. Shane exhaled at the change in angle, the shift of it, and Ilya pressed his mouth to the back of his neck and started moving again.

It was slower this way. Deeper. Ilya's chest against his back, Ilya's breath at his ear. Shane reached back and got a hand on Ilya's hip and felt the rhythm of him, felt the slight catch in his breathing that meant he was close, and got his own hand between his thighs.

"Yes," Ilya said, against the back of his neck. "Do it."

Shane worked himself and Ilya kept moving and the world held still around them. Shane came first, the shudder of it moving through both of them, and Ilya followed not long after with a sound low and broken against Shane's skin, his arm tightening across Shane's chest, his hips pressing in and holding. Shane shuddered at the sensation of Ilya spilling within him. 

"Bed's all dirty," he mumbled.

"We will change the sheets," Ilya replied, pulling him in tighter. After a while, Ilya turned his face into the back of Shane's hair. His arm was still across Shane's chest.

"Your freckles," Ilya said, planting kisses along his neck. 

"What about them?"

"I missed them."

Shane listened to his breathing for a while. Ilya shifted behind him.

"You did not fly this far just to fuck," Ilya said.

Shane laughed. "No," he said.

"Did you come to end it?" Ilya had gone rigid behind Shane.

"Ilya, no. Fuck no. That's not—"

"So tell me."

Shane was quiet for a moment. He had not said what he was feeling to anyone—not to Hayden, not to his parents, not to Ilya on the calls where he kept his voice level and asked only the right questions.

"You sent me that text," he said. "About the wine bar."

"Yes," Ilya said.

"I was trying to figure out what I could do if it went wrong." He took a deep breath. "Which was nothing. The answer was always nothing. And I keep—That's all it is. Every call, every text. Is he okay or is he just pretending to be okay? Is tonight a bad night? Is the connection dropping at the wrong moment? Is my voice doing something it shouldn't because I'm tired and I can't—" He stopped again. "I can't fix anything from there. I can't do anything."

Ilya didn't respond immediately. Shane had expected something—reassurance, or the practical version Ilya sometimes offered, the reframe that was not comfort but was accurate. Instead, Ilya was just quiet, which was different from not listening.

"I know you think about this," Ilya said finally.

Shane turned his head to look at him. "And the wine bar?"

"Sparkling water only."

"And it didn't—you didn't—"

"No. But I made you worry. I should not have texted you. I did not know how to take it back." He paused. "I can hear it sometimes. On the calls. You are very controlled and I can tell."

Shane felt something shift in his chest, large and slow. "It is a lot of pressure," he said.

"Yes," Ilya said. "But I did not say it to pressure you. You asked what you can do from there." He turned his head to look at Shane properly. "But you already do it."

Shane looked at the ceiling. The river outside. The darkness in the apartment, different from the dark in Vancouver, the lights off the Limmat instead of the lights off the park.

"I'm worried I'm going to get it wrong,," Shane said.

"I know," Ilya said. "Me too. But less now."

They lay there for a while. Shane felt his mind quiet for the first time in months. The worry wasn't gone now, but still, like something that had been running in the background finally allowed to pause.

"I needed to see you," Shane said.

"I know," Ilya said. "I am glad you came." Shane squeezed his hand. "But now you are filthy. Come shower."

The shower was small. They made it work, bodies pressed against each other and elbows clashing. Afterward, Ilya checked his phone while Shane was drying off, reading his messages and set it face down on the nightstand.

"Steiner?" Shane asked.

"He will say something tomorrow." Ilya looked at the phone. "Afternoon skate. Not mandatory. But he notices."

"I didn't think about that. I should have—"

"No," Ilya said. "I decided. It is done." He said it in a way that made it clear that it was not open for revision, and Shane let it be.

Shane's body thought it was six in the morning after pulling an all-nighter and he was sore now from the plane and from Ilya, and the jet lag had started to press in behind his eyes. He lay back down on top of the newly changed sheets and Ilya lay beside him and neither of them said anything, and eventually, Shane fell asleep.

He woke to the room going dim, the January light already failing a little after five, the city outside shifting into its evening sounds. Ilya was up, had been up for a while by the look of it. Dressed, the kitchen light on. Shane lay still for a moment and listened to the sounds of the apartment and the city below it, the wine bar coming alive for the evening crowd, a tram somewhere, voices on the street. All of it in a language he didn't speak. All of it Ilya's ordinary life.

He got up and Ilya handed him a cup of coffee without being asked. Shane drank it standing at the kitchen window with the river below, the embankment lights just coming on.

"You're looking at me," Shane said.

"Yes," Ilya said.

"Why?"

"Because I have not been able to look at you for so long," Ilya said simply. Shane looked at the river. He turned that over for a moment, the plainness of it, the way Ilya said things that would have sounded large from anyone else and from him just sounded true. "What is it?" Ilya said, noticing Shane's silence.

"Nothing," Shane said.

"It is something."

"My parents. They called a couple of days before I left."

Ilya nodded. He didn't ask Shane to explain. Shane explained anyway, going through Christmas in detail he had not mentioned over the phone. The three days of careful questions and what was underneath them, his mother in the kitchen, questioning if Ilya would choose him. Ilya listened without interrupting. When Shane finished, Ilya said, "She is worried about you. It is what moms do."

Shane looked at him, his brow furrowing.

"She is worried about the wrong thing," Ilya said. "But not wrong to be worried."

"She thinks you're going to hurt me," Shane said.

"She only knows what she sees online," Ilya said.

"I accidentally let slip that you haven't been drinking."

"That is not a lie. You did not tell her the rest?" Ilya asked, his brow quirking.

"No."

Ilya considered his words carefully. "I would be worried if it was my son."

"It wasn't mine to tell her," Shane knew he looked guilty, but Ilya didn't seem to mind.

"You can tell your parents as much as you want to." 

"I still should talk to you about it before I do."

They ate dinner late, something Ilya put together from what was in the fridge — bread and cheese and some leftover soup reheated without comment. It was not a meal Shane would have planned. It was fine. They ate it at the kitchen table with the river outside going full dark and the wine bar below doing its evening business, voices drifting up occasionally through the floor. Ilya washed the dishes. Shane dried them. Neither of them said anything that needed saying, and the silence was different from the silence of the calls. Later, wrapped around Ilya, Shane lay in the dark, listening to the city and to Ilya's slow, deep breathing beside him, and slept.

Shane woke early, jet lag and old habit, and found Ilya already in his coat by the door.

"Come," Ilya said.

The street in the early morning was cold and barely awake, a city just beginning. Shane walked beside Ilya through streets he didn't know and let him navigate, which was a different experience from every other context in which he had known Ilya, who usually didn't know where anything was.

The bakery was small, lights on, the door propped open, the smell of freshly baked bread wafting out into the cold. A woman behind the counter, a glass case, a chalkboard in German. Ilya ordered without looking at the board and the woman put two rolls in a paper bag and Ilya paid and they walked out.

They ate standing on the pavement in the cold. The crust gave way too cleanly, falling apart in his mouth. He ate the whole thing before he had walked half a block. Shane looked at Ilya. He was eating his own roll. "You said you come here every day," Shane said.

"Every morning," Ilya said. "And again before I call you."

Shane looked at the bakery, at the street, at the tram line two blocks away. At the structure of a life held together by consistent things while everything else was on hold. He thought about his mother's voice. "Does he know what you gave up for this?" He thought Ilya might know. He thought the bakery might be part of how he knew.

"Good," Shane said. 

They walked back toward the apartment through the waking city. At the corner near the tram stop, there was a small café, just opening, the lights on and a chalkboard out front. Ilya stopped.

"Coffee now," he said.

"I'm okay," Shane said.

Ilya looked at him. "You need to stay awake," he said. "You want coffee."

"I'm fine." Coffee out, from a cafe, was a luxury Shane had cut months ago. He really didn't need it. Ilya kept looking at him. Not with suspicion exactly. He glanced at Shane's hand, which had gone briefly to his pocket and then stopped.

"Come," Ilya said, and went in. "I am getting coffee, you will also get coffee."

Shane followed. Ilya ordered at the counter in his careful German without looking at the menu and paid before Shane could reach for anything. Shane stood beside him, feeling the heat of a small humiliation, and said nothing. They took the coffee outside. Ilya leaned against the building and drank his and did not immediately say anything, which meant he was deciding how to lay the words out delicately. 

"The plane ticket," Ilya said finally. "What did it cost?"

Shane looked at the tram line. "It's fine."

"Shane."

"It's fine, Ilya."

"It is not fine," Ilya said, without inflection. "I know what flights from Vancouver to Zurich cost." He put his hand on Shane's. "What did you pay?"

"$3,817."

Ilya nodded. "I will send you the money," he said.

"No," Shane said.

"It is simple—"

"No." Harder than he intended. "I don't want your money."

Ilya looked at him. "I have it," he said. "I have far too much. You took a pay cut to go to Vancouver." Shane was grateful he said to go to Vancouver rather than to stop being a referee after you fucked up your entire life.

"I know you have it." Shane couldn't bring himself to meet Ilya's eyes. A tram passing, the morning just starting, people with their collars up against the cold. "I know that. That's not—" He stopped. Tried to find the sentence that was actually true. "It was my decision to come here. I made it. You didn't ask me to. It cost what it cost and I knew that when I bought it and I don't need you to fix it."

Ilya was quiet for a moment. "Why not?" he said.

"I made the choice," Shane said. "I need it to be my choice."

Ilya looked at him for a long moment with the stillness he had when he was thinking about something he hadn't decided yet whether to say. Shane braced for the argument. The logic of it, the practicality, Ilya explaining that pride was not a useful organizing principle when one person had an NHL salary that numbered into the millions and the other had a WHL coaching stipend that few public school teachers would be jealous of. 

Instead, Ilya said, "Okay."

Shane looked at him.

"I understand," Ilya said. "I do not agree. But I understand." He drank his coffee. "We have three days left. We are not spending them arguing about money."

"Thank you," Shane replied.

"Don't," Ilya said. "Drink your coffee. You are not paying for anything while you are here. No argument."

Shane drank his coffee.

After, they returned and Ilya got ready to go to his morning skate. "You will come," he told Shane, matter-of-fact.

Afterwards, Shane had been watching through the glass, and Belenko found Ilya in the corridor outside the weight room. Shane had gone ahead to wait by the exit and didn't hear what started it, but he could see them through the window in the door—Belenko saying something in Russian, hands in his pockets, the posture of someone making a deliberate choice to speak plainly. Shane watched Ilya go still, and say something back. 

Belenko shook his head, said something else. Then Ilya nodded, once, and Belenko clapped him on the shoulder and they parted and Ilya came through the door.

"What was that?" Shane asked.

"He saw the articles," Ilya said. "About the hearing. When he heard I was coming."

"And?"

Ilya was quiet for a moment. "He said he thought we had more in common than I would think." He looked at Shane. "He is from Novosibirsk and his family does not know about his partner."

Shane let that settle. "Did you know?"

"No," Ilya said. "I did not know."

They walked out into the January cold.

"Are you going to say anything to him?" Shane asked.

"I already did," Ilya said.

"What did you say?"

Ilya looked at the street. "I said: I know what it is like to hide," he said. "And he said: I know you know."

The next morning Ilya asked, not making it a bigger deal than it needed to be, "Do you want to come to the game tonight? Meet the team. They saw you yesterday. But official. Sit with WAGs. Drink champagne. Watch me win." He grinned.

"Yeah," Shane said. "I do."

Shane did not end up with the WAGs. That felt like perhaps a bigger step than he was willing to take that night. He sat in the stands for warm-up and watched Ilya skate. The feeds hadn't carried what he could see now—something clarified in this skating, a precision in the weight transfer that the camera didn't capture. Months of Swiss conditioning and work on this ice had done something structural to the way he held his body. Watching him, Shane felt calmer. Ilya was not fine in an artificial, put-on sense. He was actually fine. He was doing well here. Shane could see it now and had not been able to see it through a screen.

At the far end of the ice Ilya turned from his edge work and his eyes went directly to Shane in the stands and for a moment they were simply looking at each other across the glass. Then Nilsson said something and Ilya turned back.

ZSC won 4-2. Ilya scored once and set up two others and played with a total command of the ice. After, Shane waited in the corridor outside the locker room. The team filtered out. Hansdatter nodded at him with easy friendliness. Nilsson gave him the measured look of someone filing information, but offered his hand for a shake. 

Belenko came out mid-sentence, addressing Ilya who was two steps behind him, and stopped when he saw Shane. He looked at Shane, then at Ilya.

"This is him," Belenko said in heavily accented English.

"Da," Ilya replied. 

"Hollander," he said, extending his hand. "I know who you are."

"Belenko," Shane said, shaking it. "I know who you are, too."

"Then we are equals." Belenko's grin was the beginning of something he hadn't fully committed to. He looked at Ilya. "We should have dinner. I can bring Matej."

"Ah, not tonight," Ilya replied. "Shane is only here a short time." 

"Next time then," Belenko said, nodding at Shane. "It was nice to meet you." He walked down the hallway.

Shane looked down the corridor where Belenko had gone. "Nice guy," he said.

"He is the worst," Ilya said. "And yes."

They walked back instead of taking the tram, the river beside them, the city quiet. Shane's hands were cold.

"So your team knows," Shane said.

"They all read Rose's article before I got here. They did not think we stayed together and were too polite to ask," Ilya said. 

"Is that okay?"

Ilya was quiet for a moment, which was itself an answer. "Yes," he said. "It is different here. Nobody is watching.

Ilya had morning skate the next day. Shane slept through it, woke at nine to an empty apartment and a note on the kitchen table that said back at noon, bakery is eight blocks, turn left out of the building.

He lay in bed for a while. Then he got up, found the bakery without difficulty and bought five rolls, and ate one standing on the pavement the way Ilya did, and walked.

He had not been in Zurich without Ilya yet. The city was different without him as a navigator. It was less purposeful, more legible in a way, the streets just streets rather than routes between things. Shane walked without a destination through Zurich-West and then crossed the Limmat and found himself in the old town, the cobblestones and the guild houses, forming the European density of it, centuries of civic organization made physical. Ilya had said once that the city was organized like it had decided order was a form of beauty, and standing in the old town Shane understood what he meant. Everything was considered. Everything was in its right place. He bought a coffee he didn't need from a stall and drank it walking back toward the river.

When he got back to the apartment Ilya was back, in training clothes. "You found it," he said, meaning the bakery.

"Turn left out of the building," Shane said.

"I told you."

They ate lunch at the kitchen table, rolls Shane had brought back along with sliced ham and Appenzeller cheese, and afterward Ilya poured two more badly-made coffees.

The afternoon went by slowly. Ilya had tape work—some footage Steiner had sent, a Lausanne game from the previous week—and sat on the couch with his laptop and Shane read. At some point Ilya's hand found Shane's knee and stayed there without either of them remarking on it. Outside the light failed early the way it did in January, the city going grey and then dark before five, and at some point they put the lights on and it was evening and Ilya said, "Come on, I know a place near the rink." 

It was their last night together. Inside the restaurant, nobody looked at either of them twice. They split a bottle of sparkling water and talked about the game and the WHL kids and the two who would make it in the NHL someday. Then the questions Ilya had been holding back.

"How is your reinstatement going?" Ilya said.

"Filed it a few months ago. Should hear something in the spring."

"Pacific division?"

"That's what I'm hoping for. Different arenas. People who don't know my story."

"Staying in Vancouver," Ilya said.

"If I can, yeah. I signed a two-year lease." 

"Can I ask you something?" Shane said. "Everything happened so fast." Ilya met his gaze. "It's blown up both our lives." He looked at the river. "I don't know sometimes if what you felt was about me. Or about having someone. Anyone. Just a person in your corner."

Ilya didn't answer immediately. Shane had learned by now that this was not evasion—it was Ilya refusing to say something that wasn't true. He waited.

"When you called from the airport," Ilya said finally, "I was leaving practice. I had my bag. I was going to go home, eat something, watch your game on the laptop, text you." He paused. "When I heard your voice I knew. Before you said Zurich, I knew." He looked at Shane. "That is not someone in my corner. That is you. You are not just someone." Shane looked at him, at the man who had been there building something in careful pieces. 

"Okay," Shane said.

"Okay," Ilya said.

They walked back along the embankment and up through Zurich-West and let themselves into the building without speaking. The apartment was cold. "Come to bed with me," he said to Ilya. Ilya followed. 

Afterwards, Shane's head was on Ilya's chest. "What happens after April," Shane said. It wasn't quite a question.

Ilya considered it. "I come to Vancouver," he said. "For the summer. You let me pay the rent and do not argue about it."

Shane opened his mouth.

"You will not argue about it," Ilya said. "It is not the same as the ticket. You did not ask me to come to Vancouver. I am deciding to come to Vancouver. It is my choice. You said that mattered."

Shane closed his mouth.

"We go to the cottage for a few weeks. We have a good summer," Ilya continued. "I try to make your parents not hate me. Then I come back to Zurich for one more season, and I go to Vancouver for Christmas, and you come here for breaks when you can." He looked at the river. "And then you are reinstated and I am not suspended and it is over."

"And then?"

"We figure it out," Ilya said. "We have time."

"That doesn't sound so bad," Shane said.

"No," Ilya said. "It does not."

"We can do it."

"We can do it," Ilya agreed, his voice dropping as he pulled Shane closer. 

In the morning, their time was up. Standing at the door, bag at his feet, he pulled Ilya close. "Thank you," Shane said.

"Don't. I should not have made you worry," Ilya said. "I will do less of that."

Ilya pulled him in and kissed him. He put his hand briefly at the back of Shane's neck, and Shane put his forehead against Ilya's for a moment, just that, and then stepped back.

"You will call me on Tuesday," Shane said.

"Tuesday," Ilya said. There was one last kiss goodbye, and then that was it. Shane went down the stairs. Through the glass door he could see the street, the tram stop, the winter morning. He pushed through the door and walked to the stop without looking back. He was on the tram, watching Zurich-West pass outside the window, when his phone buzzed.

Season ends April 14. I will be on a plane April 15.

There was a screenshot of a ticket, and Shane felt a brief hope that it really would be fine.

Chapter End Notes

A little lightness. Just a little.

Many thanks to Aphantastical for their expert help beta reading this work.

I love reading your comments, even if I can't always get to them all. ❤️

Chapter 18: Indefinite

Chapter Summary

Another trip back to the cottage.

Chapter Notes

The season ended in April. ZSC made it to the semifinals and lost in six. It was a respectable finish, and Steiner gave a brief speech to the team in the locker room that Ilya followed only half of, and which received a long, appreciative silence in response.

Belenko was sitting two stalls over, not crying exactly, but close enough that he was not making eye contact with anyone. He was twenty-three. Ilya remembered being twenty-three and caring that much about winning. He had won his Cup at twenty-two, throwing himself into the process of being a winner with single-minded furor. It was a particular kind of caring that the years did not improve on, only changed. Things were different now. The calculus on what he was willing to do to win had changed. Ilya had changed.

After Steiner's speech, Belenko looked over at Ilya. "Next year," he said, in Russian. "Next year is our year."

"Next year," Ilya agreed.

Belenko looked sideways at him. "You're not coming back."

"I'm coming back in September."

"You know what I mean."

Ilya looked at him. The kid said the truth plainly because he had not yet learned the strategic value of leaving it unsaid. "I still have one more here," Ilya said. "Next year is the last year."

Belenko nodded slowly. He peeled the tape from his wrist and rolled it in his hands. "The NHL," he said. Not quite a question.

"Yes."

"I might get there," Belenko said. "It would be nice to play in the United States."

"You are good enough. I think you could do it," Ilya said.

He had not planned to know Belenko as well as he did. Zurich was about killing time, not about making friends. But since January, since Shane's visit, they had spent more and more time together. It was incremental, driven mostly by geography. They both lived in Zurich-West, Belenko two streets over, and they had started walking to morning skate together because it made more sense than two separate tram rides. An accident of proximity that, over the months, became something that was not an accident.

Belenko had also started coming to the team's post-game bar visits, sitting next to Ilya, splitting a bottle of sparkling water with him. They didn't need to talk about it, or draw attention to it. Ilya didn't push. He had his own reasons for avoiding alcohol, and didn't want to make a thing of it for himself or anyone else. 

Eventually Belenko had looked at him over a glass of water and said, in Russian, 

"I don't actually like it."

"Water?"

"No. The bar. Coming here."

"Me neither, but it's important to the team," Ilya had responded, and Belenko had nodded.

On the walk back towards their respective apartments, Belenko talked about his family in Novosibirsk, his younger sister starting university, the two years he had spent in the KHL before coming here. Whether it was better to stay in the Swiss league another year or two, or for his agent to push for an NHL contract. Then the question came. "Why don't you drink?"

"It starts me on a path that doesn't end well," Ilya said. "It's better if I don't."

"Do you miss it?"

"Sometimes," Ilya answered honestly. "But less than I thought I would."

Belenko was quiet for half a block. "My mother drank," he said, in Russian. The past tense doing all the work. "I watched it for a long time before I understood what was happening."

Ilya understood the grammar of that kind of sentence—the compression of years of struggle into a single clause, the thing left out that was the whole point. "I don't want to be like that for Matej."

"I'd like to meet him."

"Soon. He is nervous."

"If I had met Shane that young, I would be nervous too." It was an interesting thought. What would it have been like to have met Shane that young? Would he have been nervous and skittish, maybe still not out to his parents? Ilya had spent those years fucking his way through Boston, getting in fights on the ice, and generally earning the reputation he had maintained all these years. 

Ilya had told Shane about the walks, the Russian, the water instead of the vodka. Shane had said, "I'm glad you have him." Not a friend. Him, specifically. It was the right word. Someone who got it.

He packed the apartment the next morning. It had never been his—the team had furnished it, maintained it, kept it anonymous in the way of places that belonged to no one in particular. Leaving required almost nothing. Clothes jammed into two bags, phone charger coiled on top. The plants on the windowsill were the only question. He had bought three in February, following Brennan's advice to find something living to maintain, and had not anticipated caring about what happened to them. Belenko had elected to stay in Zurich for the summer to be closer to Matej, and he passed them off to him, confident they would survive. 

"And you're coming back?" he asked.

"September," he said.

He stood in the doorway for a moment after. The apartment looked the same as it had in September. Furnished by someone else, belonging to no one. 

He was on a plane to Vancouver the following afternoon. Shane was at practice when Ilya arrived. He had left a key under the mat, which Ilya found troubling from a security standpoint. Canadians, too trusting. He let himself in.

The apartment was tiny in the way that suited people who were not planning to be there much. It reminded Ilya of the apartment he lived in when he first came to Boston, years ago now. It had that bachelor-apartment feel that his lifestyle and paycheck had long outgrown, but the location was stellar. Inside, it wasn't sparse so much as efficient. Every surface had been used with intention. The secondhand desk along the bedroom wall. Binders migrated to the kitchen table. Running shoes by the door, mud caking the soles. The wool blanket he recognized from the cottage thrown over the back of the couch. He had last seen it folded over the arm of the cottage couch, and before that, draped over Shane's shoulders on the dock. Here it was in a cramped apartment in Vancouver. Everything about this place felt familiar, but also diminished in a way. The shabby, secondhand furniture, the sparse decor. Ilya felt a warm flush of guilt. His life had been practically luxurious by comparison. He set his bags down and stood in the kitchen. The refrigerator had two photographs held by magnets: Shane with a player in an Orcas practice jersey who was missing a tooth, and one of him with what must be his parents. They were standing close together, Shane's father's hand on his mother's shoulder. Shane was between them, his face split into a wide smile that Ilya didn't often get to see. Ilya had been imagining them in the abstract, but now there were faces for the names, forming opinions about him he hadn't had the chance to address.

He had intended to wait for Shane. But the jet lag was starting to sink into his bones, his eyelids growing heavy and dry. He walked into Shane's bedroom—their bedroom, he corrected, and sank onto the mattress. 

He woke up when the mattress shifted next to him. He blinked a few times to see Shane sitting next to him. He was still in his coaching jacket, wearing a backward hat. When he saw that Ilya was awake, his face did the small, involuntary softening that Ilya lived for. 

"You're here," Shane said. "In my bed."

"Our bed," Ilya corrected. 

Shane didn't respond right away. He reached out, his knuckles sliding slowly across the side of Ilya's jaw, as if to confirm he was really solid. Ilya caught his wrist and pulled Shane down until his face was buried in the crook of Shane's neck, breathing him in. 

"You must be hungry," Shane murmured against his hair, but he didn't pull away.

"I can eat."

Shane made eggs, which turned out to be the only thing in the refrigerator that constituted a meal. He scrambled them with cheese and stood at the stove in his coaching jacket, and Ilya sat at the kitchen table and watched him and felt the strangeness of it. Falling into someone's life. The ordinary intimacy of a person moving around a kitchen they knew well, while Ilya sat in it for the first time. They had eaten room service, and cooked in his penthouse, or at the cottage, but none of those times had felt like this. Ilya watched Shane move around the kitchen and felt something like relief. It was a feeling of wanting something for so long, and it finally appearing, fully in front of him.  He was not sure what he would do now that he had Shane for an entire summer, now that he didn't need to hope and want from a distance. He would figure it out. He would figure out who they were now, in the domesticity, the real test.

They ate at the table. Shane asked about the flight, about the last week of the season, and Ilya answered and asked about the Orcas and the WHL draft and Shane's ankle, which Shane said was fine and which Ilya would assess himself later when he had Shane flat on his back. They talked like they had on the Tuesday and Thursday calls, except that across a kitchen table the silences had a different texture. They didn't have a bad connection and they weren't running out of things to say. The silences didn't feel tense or tenuous. They were comfortable and didn't need filling.

At some point Shane took off the coaching jacket and hung it on the back of his chair, and Ilya noticed the way Shane moved in his own space, and thought, I am going to learn all of this. Every domestic habit, every organizational preference, every way he filled a room when nobody was watching. He had months of it ahead of him. It was a nice feeling. 

After they ate, Shane cleared the plates and stood at the sink, and Ilya said, "We should talk about the rent. I have budgeted $2,400 a month. So, that is how much I will pay."

Shane turned around. "That's too much."

"It is what I would pay if I got a place, maybe even more," Ilya said. "How can I transfer the money to you?"

"That's the entire—"

"I know. You have been paying it alone while I sat in Switzerland with a payout." He looked at Shane steadily. "I will pay the rent."

Shane leaned against the counter. He had the expression he wore when he was calculating whether an argument was worth having. "That's not—"

"Shane."

"It's too much."

"It is not too much. It is a number I will not notice, but that you will. We are doing this together. Let me do this. You can pay the utilities if it makes you feel better."

Ilya stepped up behind him, trapping Shane between his chest and the edge of the counter. He slid one hand over Shane's hip, his fingers digging into the denim. Ilya could see the objection forming and behind the objection the part of him that had been eating cheaper groceries for a year because he would not ask, and behind that the part that recognized this was not charity but just reality. "Fine," he said. "Utilities."

"Obviously," Ilya said.

"And all the groceries."

"Are you sure? I eat a lot. Switzerland has given me a very expensive cheese habit."

Shane turned back to the sink. After a moment, he said, "You're very annoying about money," and Ilya said, "I know," and that was the end of it.

They were in bed by nine. Ilya had imagined taking Shane to bed and dismantling him again and again until neither of them could move, but his body had been awake for the better part of twenty hours, minus his brief nap, and the time zones were not treating him kindly. Shane turned off the lamp and lay down beside him. When Ilya put his arm around him, Shane settled into it with the ease of something long-practiced, his head against Ilya's shoulder, and they lay in the dark with the Vancouver street sounds coming through the window—a bus, someone's dog, the rustle of the trees in the wind.

Shane's hand found the crucifix at Ilya's chest, the small familiar weight of it, and rested there without pressing. Outside, the rain started, tapping at the window, and Ilya listened to it. He meant to tell Shane that he was happy, that this was exactly what he wanted, but he was asleep before he finished the thought.

The daily version of them took some adjustment. The first week was clumsy. There was an urgency, a relearning, the catching-up of nine months of living separately compressed into days. By the second week that gave way to something that felt close to normal and that was when the adjustments became visible. They had learned each other through hotel rooms, and screens, and then the blur of stress that was last spring. Ilya had anticipated there being some conflict. That would have been unavoidable. They had both lived alone for so long, that inviting another person in would be friction. He had not anticipated being bad at it.

It emerged that Shane had a strong opinion about the position of the cutting board, which he kept beside the stove and which Ilya had moved to a lower cabinet. Shane discovered this when he opened the cabinet looking for something else and went noticeably rigid.

"Is there a problem?" Ilya asked.

"No," Shane said, in a voice that said there clearly was a problem. He sighed. "You moved my stuff."

"I did. It made more sense on the lower—"

"It's fine," Shane said. He took the cutting board out and returned it to its place beside the stove with an extremely pointed deliberateness. Ilya watched and thought, ah. This is the part of him I have not met yet.

He had known Shane in bits and pieces, gleaned across short meetings and stolen moments. He had not known Shane in his own apartment with his own organizational system and the order he moved through his mornings. Coffee first, then running shoes by the door, then the jacket from the hook on the left, not the right. A routine built by a man who had spent years in other people's spaces and had made one he controlled. Ilya had walked into it and rearranged a cutting board. They were fine. He moved it back.

What surprised him—because he had anticipated the difficulty and prepared for more of it—was the ease of the rest. The granular ease of a person who already knew how you slept and what you were like when you were avoiding something and the sound you made when you disagreed before you'd found the words. They had known each other in compressed urgent circumstances, and the slow version turned out to be, in most respects, the same.

Shane read with his feet in Ilya's lap in the evenings. He made a small sound in the morning, half-asleep, when Ilya's alarm went off at six for the gym, and put his hand on Ilya's arm in the moment before it registered. Ilya woke before the alarm, as he always had, and lay in the dark and remembered the count before he got up. Shane's hand found his under the blanket, groping in the dark without fully waking up. Ilya lay in the dark and held it and thought this is what it was all for. He hadn't said this to Shane. He wasn't sure he needed to. 

The reinstatement letter came on a Friday in June. It arrived as a certified letter while Ilya was at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal he had not finished and a training plan he needed to review but had not started. Shane was at morning practice. The knock came at nine and Ilya signed for it and left it on the counter. 

When Shane came home at noon he saw it immediately. He stopped in the doorway, then crossed the kitchen and stood at the counter and looked at it before picking it up. Ilya watched him open it. In nine months of calls he had learned Shane's registers through a screen—the level voice, the one underneath, the one that was raw in a way Shane could not entirely manage. This was a little different. It was disbelieving not of the fact but of the reality of it, the gap between knowing something was coming and it being suddenly, irreversibly here.

Shane read it standing at the counter. He read it twice. "It's done. I'm reinstated," he said. "I can start in September. They didn't find any evidence of wrongdoing besides the lack of disclosure."

Ilya stood up from the table.

"My name's in the system." Shane set the letter down and looked at it. His eyes closed. His shoulders came down. "It's real." 

Ilya crossed the kitchen and stood beside him and read it over his shoulder. Official letterhead, Shane's name in the body of the second paragraph. The dry, bureaucratic language. The conditions were met and the review was complete. But it didn't undo any of the damage. The words on the page could not account for the time zones, the fear, the shabby furniture in the sparse apartment. Shane Hollander was permitted to resume his officiating duties, the organization behind the letter never once considering what it meant to have stopped. He wrapped Shane in a hug, placing soft kisses along his neck. 

"I know this is a relief for you," Ilya said.

"Yeah," Shane said. His voice wavered. Ilya turned to look at him and noticed a tear sliding down his face. Ilya shifted his grip, his hands sliding under Shane's shirt to find the warm, bare skin of his back. He pulled Shane close until his forehead dropped heavily onto his shoulder. They stood in the kitchen like that, Ilya swaying them slightly until Shane's breathing leveled out.

Behind the fact of the letter was the math of next year and the one after it that Ilya had been carrying and needed to talk to Shane about. The conference split. Living in two cities, mornings like that completely out of reach. But this wasn't the moment. He kept his arms around Shane and didn't say it yet. 

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"I don't think I really believe it's happening yet. I keep starting to feel it and then it stops," Shane said. 

"Give it a few hours," Ilya said.

Shane read the letter a third time, checking it again. Then he carried it to the desk in the bedroom and set it there and came back to the kitchen and poured a glass of water and drank it at the sink.

"I have to get back to the rink," he said.

"Go," Ilya said.

Shane looked at him. A smile formed across his face. "Don't eat all the good cheese before I get back."

"I will eat exactly as much cheese as I want," Ilya said.

Shane stuck his tongue out at him, then picked up his bag and went. 

Ilya sat back down at the kitchen table, his cereal long since soggy. Shane had the letter. Shane was going to be back on track for the life he wanted. The plan had worked. He had expected relief, and there was. But he had also been building towards the conversation. The move back to Boston. He didn't want to bring down their summer over an issue that may still resolve itself. Shane needed to arrive at the problem first. Then they could talk. He was not there yet. 

Shane's summer scouting work ran most of June and into July. Regional skating camps, a WHL prospect showcase in Kamloops, days with the Orcas' front office going over draft lists. He had laid this out for Ilya in April. The schedule was the schedule, and he had to fulfill all his work obligations up to the last day. Ilya had understood, and had not said that he longed for a long summer on a lake and lazy afternoons pressed against each other on the dock with nowhere particular to be.

The nights Shane was on the road, Ilya was in the apartment. He ran the seawall in the mornings, worked through Clare's emails about contracts and potential appearances or endorsements, and got occasional messages from Belenko, who was training twice a day and apparently wanted credit for it. Ilya bought a succulent for the kitchen windowsill, a single one in a small ceramic pot, because the Zurich plants had survived and Brennan appeared to be right that keeping them would make him anchored. 

The apartment was different without Shane in it. Vancouver was Shane's city, not his, and without Shane, it was just a sad room in a building on a street he didn't know. He trained as much as he could stand, and rearranged the kitchen just enough that it made more sense to him, but that Shane wouldn't comment on. He could accept living in the apartment, he just wanted Shane to be there for it too. 

Shane called every evening he was away. The hours matched now, at least. The calls had a different texture from the Tuesday-Thursday structure of the previous nine months. It was less formal, less scheduled, making the calls just calls rather than lifelines. It was a nice change. Shane would eat whatever the hotel had and describe the day's skaters. Shane found the work genuinely absorbing, and Ilya would listen when he called, sitting in the kitchen with his tea.

When Shane came home from Kamloops on a Thursday evening he dropped his bag at the door, stood in the kitchen doorway, and looked at the apartment, surveying the incremental changes Ilya had been making to their space.

"There's a plant," he said.

"Yes," Ilya said.

"You bought a plant."

"It was Brennan's idea."

Shane looked at it on the windowsill. Then he crossed the kitchen and kissed Ilya, and said "Vacation tomorrow" against his mouth, and Ilya said yes, and they went to the bedroom.

They flew into Ottawa and spent two nights with Shane's parents before driving out to the cottage. Shane had arranged it in early June, broaching the topic with Ilya like you might try to lure a stray cat into a carrier.

"We are going to see my parents on the way to the cottage. Two nights. It will be fine."

Ilya had said yes, even though there hadn't been a question. There wasn't a great alternative. 

David Hollander opened the door of the house in Kanata. It was a suburban street, well-kept, with a small garden in the front that appeared to be an ongoing project. He shook Ilya's hand on the front step. Ilya felt the heft of the handshake. He had shaken countless hands in his career, but this one was different. This one belonged to the father of the man Ilya had cost a year of his career, and no amount of preparation would have made him ready to stand on that step and take David Hollander's hand. 

David was shorter than his son by two inches, but had the same horizontal line of jaw, the same mannerism through his hands, though in David it read as simple nature rather than control. "We've heard a lot about you," he said, and appeared to mean only the good of it.

Yuna stood in the hallway behind him. She was tense and precise in her movements and she had Shane's eyes, the same brown, the same attentiveness. She did not offer her hand. She said, "It's nice to meet you." It did not have the same warmth as David's handshake. 

Dinner was roast chicken, which Yuna had made from scratch. David poured water. Shane passed the bread. The four of them arranged themselves around the meal with the careful choreography of people who did not yet know each other's habits, and for the first ten minutes the conversation stayed on the surface. How was the drive, the weather, the garden David had been expanding into the back corner of the yard. 

"The tomatoes are late this year," David said, gesturing with his knife toward the window. "Too much rain in May. But the squash is doing well."

"Shane never liked the squash," Yuna said. She didn't look up from her plate. Her knife moved with microscopic precision, parting a wing from the bone. "He used to hide it under his napkin."

"I was seven, Mom," Shane said. 

"He was very neat about it," David added, catching Ilya's eye with a quick smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "You wouldn't notice until you went to clear the table. Always checking his corners, even then."

Yuna set down her fork. The sharp clink of silver against china was loud enough to make the water in David's glass ripple. She looked across the table, her brown eyes completely flat.

"What are your intentions with my son," she said. 

"God, Mom. It's not the 1950s," Shane complained, scrubbing his face with his hands.

"Shane, I think he owes us some answers," she responded. David coughed an agreement next to her.

"It is fine, Shane," Ilya reassured him with a hand on his leg. "They have questions. They should have questions." 

"You knew that an undisclosed relationship between a player and an official was a violation of league policy."

Shane had gone very still. David was focusing very hard on his dinner.

"Yes," Ilya said. "We knew."

Yuna's eyes didn't waver. "And you chose to continue it anyway."

"Yes."

"Why?" she said.

"Because we were not willing to stop," Ilya said. "That is the truth."

"And Shane," she said. "Was he willing?"

"You would have to ask him," Ilya said.

"Mom," Shane pleaded. Ilya squeezed his knee. 

"I'm asking you."

"Shane made his own decision. I did not pressure him. We both knew the risks and chose to continue. That is the truth."

Yuna didn't speak immediately. She picked up her fork, took a bite, and set it down again. "Shane lost a year of his career. More than that," she said. "His certification. He moved to a city where he knew no one, took a job that was below him and spent a year telling us he was fine when he was not fine." She looked at Ilya. "And you went to Zurich. You played hockey. You were paid, quite a lot, I might add." A pause. "I'm trying to understand what exactly you lost here. Because to me, it looks like Shane was the one who gave everything up and you took a Swiss vacation."

It was a fair question and Ilya knew that and he could not insult her by pretending otherwise.

"My reputation," he said. "The respect of people I had worked with for eight years. Some of that will not come back." He paused. "I am aware that Shane had more consequences than I did. I was very lucky."

"And the drinking?" Yuna said.

"What about it?"

"David and I have concerns about Shane getting together with an addict."

"That is fair," Ilya said, shrugging. "There is nothing I can say that will convince you. I am making the right choice every day. Shane knows this. I have a regular schedule to meet with a counselor. We have a plan for when things are hard."

Yuna looked at him. "Shane is part of that plan."

"Yes," Ilya said. "That is true. I am not going to tell you it isn't."

Yuna looked at him for a long moment. David reached over and refilled Shane's water glass without being asked. Shane picked it up and drank.

"What does this look like going forward?" Yuna said. "Practically. You're in Zurich until next summer."

"Yes."

"And then Boston."

"Yes, that is the plan."

"So for the foreseeable future Shane is in Vancouver and you are somewhere else."

"Yes," Ilya said. "That is correct."

She nodded, once. "The league is never going to allow you in the same conference," she said. "Not after what happened."

"No. They won't." 

"So you're looking at long distance indefinitely. Until you retire." She stabbed her chicken. "Or are you expecting him to give up his career and follow you?" 

Shane didn't look at Ilya. He stayed entirely rigid, his shoulders locked. His hands stayed flat on the table, the knuckles white against the wood. His chair scraped back an inch.

The sound was small but it was enough. Ilya's hand found his arm under the table, his grip firm, and Shane did not get up. But his breathing had changed—Ilya could hear it—and his hands were flat on the table in front of him and he was staring at the tablecloth with the focus of someone trying very hard to stay inside their own skin.

"Shane," Ilya said, quietly. Not a question.

Shane shook his head slightly. His jaw was tight. Ilya kept his hand on Shane's arm and looked across the table at Yuna, who had frozen. David had put down his fork. The room was very still.

Ilya kept his hand on Shane's arm and felt the tension in it. Shane's whole body was screaming that he wanted to be anywhere but at that table in that moment. Ilya thought I did this. Yuna's question may have gotten to him, but Ilya was the one who caused this. The reason his knuckles were white on the table was Ilya walking into a bar in Montreal all those months ago and deciding he wanted something and refusing to stop even when that would have been the sane choice. The consequences hadn't landed equally, and he had known that. But knowing it in the abstract was different from the trembling muscle of Shane's arm under his hand right at that instant.

"He is not going to give up his career," Ilya said, to Yuna. "It's important to him and I would not ask him to do that. We do not know the details yet, but it will be his decision as much as mine." He looked back at Shane. "Breathe," he said. So softly it was almost only for the two of them.

Shane breathed. It was not easy and it was not pretty but it was a breath, and then another one. His hands flattened further on the table and then, slowly, relaxed. 

David picked up his fork. Yuna looked at Ilya—not at Shane, at Ilya—and held his gaze for a long moment. A calculating expression was moving through her face that had not been there before dinner started.

She picked up her fork. "I left the salad in the kitchen. Can you go get it?" she said to David, and David stood up and fetched the salad, and the conversation moved somewhere easier, and Shane passed the bread again and said very little for the rest of the meal.

After dinner, when the kitchen sounds of clearing up were coming through the wall, Ilya found Shane on the back step, elbows on his knees, looking at the garden.

"Okay," Ilya said, sitting beside him.

"I'm sorry," Shane said. "I nearly—"

"I know. It is okay."

"She was—"

"She was asking the right questions," Ilya said. "She was asking them hard. That is what you do when you are worried about someone." He turned to the garden, the dark shapes of it in the evening.

"Did it—" He stopped. "What she said. About you expecting me to follow you. Do you—"

"No," Ilya said. He put his hand on the back of Shane's neck, the brief, firm pressure. "We figure it out together. That has not changed."

Shane let out a long breath. He looked at the garden for another moment, and then he leaned sideways until his shoulder was against Ilya's. Ilya brought his other hand up to loop their fingers together on Shane's knee. His thumb rubbed rhythmic circles over Shane's knuckles. They sat on the back step until the light was gone.

The second morning, Shane and David went for groceries. Ilya stood in the kitchen with his coffee when Yuna came in and poured her own.

They stood there together, unspeaking. Then, "He takes his coffee with milk and one sugar," she said.

"In case you didn't know."

"I know," Ilya said.

She looked at him over her cup. Ilya's crucifix had shifted, and he straightened it by habit, the chain warm under his fingers.

"My mother's," he said, noticing her looking. "I've had it a long time."

"My brother was an alcoholic who found God. It helped the drinking, but drove us apart." She refilled her coffee.

"I wear it for my mother, no other reason." He took a sip of his coffee. "I love him, you know."

"I really think you believe that."

David and Shane came back with groceries and the good-natured disagreement of two people who had argued about orange juice and were still going. Shane looked at Ilya across the kitchen with the question he was not going to ask out loud. Ilya gave him the small nod that meant fine. Shane's shoulders came down.

They left for the cottage the next morning. David caught him on the front walk before they loaded the car, while Shane was inside doing a last check of the guest room. He had his hands in his pockets.

"The other night," he said. "At dinner. When she got to the long distance thing." He paused. "How you handled that. With Shane."

"He was overwhelmed," Ilya said.

"Yeah, he gets like that." David said. "He always has. Holds everything together for months and then something cracks it." He looked at Ilya. "You knew exactly what to do."

Ilya said nothing. He knew what to do because he had been in rooms where he was the one about to come apart, and had learned that the right intervention wasn't words. He had learned it from Marleau, who had never asked him how he was doing, but had shown up with takeout and put a game on and stayed. He was not sure how to explain this to David Hollander other than to show him that he could take care of Shane. He would take care of him every day for the rest of his life, if Shane would let him.

"Yuna can be a lot," David said. "She loves him. That's where it comes from. But she can be a lot." He shifted his weight. "I can see you're doing right by him. I can see that. And she'll come around." A pause. "But if you hurt him—I mean actually hurt him—I will make your life very difficult. I don't know exactly how. But I will."

"I understand," Ilya said.

David nodded once. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and picked up one of the bags by the door. "Good drive out there," he said, holding out his free hand to shake Ilya's. 

The drive out was two hours, Quebec coming in around Sherbrooke, the highway narrowing, the signs switching to French. Ilya found the same French talk station they'd had on the year before and left it running. Shane had a scouting binder open in his lap, but he was watching Quebec go past the window, the face he wore when he was going somewhere he still considered home even if home was a complicated word.

The gravel road, the trees closing in. The lake opening through them. "Still here," Shane said.

"Were you worried?" Ilya said. 

"A little," Shane admitted. "I'm a little nervous until I see it. Every time."

He unlocked the front door and the cottage was exactly as it had been—the white rental linens, the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the water. Shane went to the locked closet and pulled out his boxes, and Ilya carried them to the living room and watched him open them and place things back: paperbacks on the shelf, the mismatched mugs replacing the rental ones in the kitchen cupboard, the photograph—the seventeen-year-old in hockey gear, grinning at something he didn't know yet was coming—went on the shelf without Shane looking at it, the same as the year before.

The fishing gear came out of the second box. Shane set it on the counter with a look.

"You are not catching anything with that," Ilya said.

"I might."

"Shane."

"The relaxation is the process," Shane said, with the stubbornness that appeared when he had an opinion he knew was indefensible. Ilya looked at him. Shane looked back. Shane put the fishing gear in the closet by the door.

The first night they ate badly because Ilya had bought groceries without any sort of plan, prioritizing coffee and good cheese over anything that constituted a meal. They ate the cheese with crackers on the deck while the sky went dark and the loons started.

"Still dying wolves," Ilya said.

"They're beautiful," Shane said.

The days moved without having to be anywhere. Ilya ran in the mornings on the path through the treeline. He swam in the lake, which was cold even in July. Shane fished from the dock in the afternoons with the unsuccessful dedication of someone fully committed to being wrong. Ilya watched him from the deck once before building his day around it.

They cooked badly together. Shane overestimated quantities, cooking enough to feed a whole family. Ilya underestimated time, certain that everything took fifteen minutes. They argued once about the pasta, a short exchange with real edge in it, Shane saying it needs more time and Ilya saying I made this a hundred times, it does not need more time and Shane saying look at it and Ilya looking at it and saying nothing. They ate the pasta, which was fine mostly.

"You can say it," Ilya said afterward. "You can say you told me so."

"Al dente," Shane replied. Ilya threw a dish towel at him. Shane caught it, laughing. Before he could drop it, Ilya closed the distance, grabbing Shane's hoodie and pulling him into a hard, brief kiss that tasted like garlic and salt. 

Clare called three days later. Shane was on the dock with the fishing gear, and Ilya was on the deck with his coffee when his phone showed Clare's name.

"Morning," Clare said. "Do you have twenty minutes?" 

"Yes," Ilya said. He leaned back in the Muskoka chair and looked at the lake, at Shane's silhouette at the end of the dock, rod over the water. "Tell me."

"The Raiders came back overnight." He could hear her moving papers. Clare always had papers. "They're at eight-eight. Down from your previous ten-nine, which we expected, and they've added a buyout clause if the suspension runs long for reasons outside your control, which it won't, but it was worth getting in. No performance clauses. No conditions on the suspension. They want you back in October of next year and they are not hedging on it."

Ilya considered this. He had known this was coming but had not entirely prepared for the reality of it—the Raiders putting a number on paper that said: we know what happened, we know what it cost, and we're still interested.

"The term?" he said.

"Three years. You'll be thirty-three at the next contract negotiation." A pause. "It's a good deal, Ilya. Given everything. They didn't have to come in this clean."

"I know," he said. "Is ZSC willing to match the salary for the first year?"

"Yes."

"Okay then."

"Do you want another day?"

He watched Shane at the end of the dock. Shane had shifted his weight, adjusting his grip on the rod, completely absorbed in something that was not going to produce a fish. The lake was flat and blue and the light was good.

"No, I know I'm going to take it," Ilya said.

He signed on his phone ten minutes later, Clare still on the line while he went through the pages. It took less time than he expected for a document that determined the next three years of his life. When it was done Clare said, "Congratulations. Go enjoy wherever you are."

He put the phone in his pocket and sat on the deck for a while with his coffee going cold. Boston was real now. October of next year, the Raiders. Going home. He had known it was coming and it was still a different thing to have it signed.

After a while he walked down to the dock. Shane heard him coming and glanced back. 

"Anything?" Ilya asked, meaning the fishing.

"Not yet," Shane said.

Ilya sat down beside him and put his feet in the water. The lake was cold around his ankles. Shane's rod was arced out over the surface, the line stationary, and they sat without talking, like they had for days now. He did not say anything about the call. Not yet. 

In the evenings they sat on the dock with their feet in the water and watched the sky go dark. The loons. The lake in every iteration of light. On a Thursday night, the third week, Ilya lay on the dock on his back with his arms behind his head and Shane was beside him, close enough that their shoulders were touching. The sky was enormous. All the stars the city kept from them were here. Shane's breathing had slowed, like it always did when he was almost asleep and not fighting it.

Ilya turned his head. Shane's profile in the dark, the strong line of his jaw, the freckles on his forearm visible even now. He shifted and pressed his mouth to the freckles on Shane's collarbone, his lips on each one in turn.

"I can feel you doing that," Shane said, without opening his eyes.

"You are almost asleep."

"I can still feel it."

Ilya counted anyway, his mouth on each freckle. On the last one, Shane's hand came up and pressed the back of Ilya's head, gently, keeping him there.

"Still eleven," Ilya said into his skin.

"I know," Shane said.

They stayed on the dock until the mosquitoes won.

It was a Saturday afternoon a week later when it became something they had to say. Ilya had been looking at the ZSC pre-season schedule on his phone, not hiding it, and Shane had glanced over from the couch, and something in Shane's face had shifted—not the level face, the one that meant he had been not-saying something and was running out of reasons.

"How long?" Shane said.

Ilya looked at him.

"Until we're done," Shane said. "If everything goes the way it's supposed to."

"I come back to Boston in June," Ilya said. "The Raiders renewed."

Shane absorbed this without visible reaction. "I know," he said. His eyes went to the lake through the glass. "So. That September. I'm in Vancouver. You're in Boston."

"Yes."

"The compliance ruling doesn't mean we can't still both be in the League," Shane said. His jaw had a muscle ticking in the corner. "It's not that clean. Any game you're in, they have to route me around it. If I'm in the East too, there's no way for me to get scheduled within the conference anyway. There would be too many scheduling blocks. I'd be effectively out of a job." He paused, thinking on this. "The League doesn't have to make it impossible. They just have to make it easier not to try."

Ilya nodded. "You need to stay West. I need to stay East."

Shane hesitated, working through the implications of it, reaching for the exact language. "If we had disclosed before the story broke," he said, "it would have been a scheduling block. A simple team restriction. I could have lived in Boston. I could have worked the Metropolitan division, or the Northeast. We could have had a house." He looked at Ilya, his eyes flat and clear. "But because we fucked it up the first time, they made the conference split the only real way I can keep my whistle.They will never let us work the same half of the continent. And we can't go back and undo the filing."

Ilya said nothing. Because there was nothing to add to the math. It was a fixed boundary. They could have had a house. A house implied permanence, a life arranged around two people instead of only one. Shane had been so focused on getting back on the ice, he hadn't looked at what the reinstatement would mean. Two cities, without much opportunity for overlap, waiting for a summer where they could go to a place that was theirs. 

"So this is it," Shane said, his voice terribly level. "Indefinite long distance. Three time zones. Six-and-a-half-hour flights. Until you hang up your skates."

"Yes," Ilya said. "That is what it means. We can't go back in time." 

"You've been thinking about this for a while."

"Yes."

"And you didn't say anything."

"I needed you to get the credential back first," Ilya said. "To have it in your hand. If I had made you look at the map in June, you would have spent the summer trying to find a loophole that does not exist, instead of just enjoying the summer and being excited about reffing again."

Shane was quiet. He looked at the water, then at his hands, then back at Ilya. "Every October to April," he said. "For three years. Maybe more."

"Probably more, if I do not get injured. I think I can make it to forty."

Outside, the lake was serene and the dock was empty and the afternoon was doing nothing in particular. Ilya watched Shane absorb it, the full shape of it—the penalty that had no workaround.Ilya was thirty-one. Nine years wasn't an entire life, but it was an unthinkably long time. The count would be nearly four thousand days then. They had already waited a year, and planning one more. They could not wait nine. Ilya knew they could not. He couldn't. He wouldn't make it.

"I am not going to ask you to quit," Ilya said, when the silence had gone long enough. "You wanted the credential back. What you do with it is yours."

"You keep saying that," Shane said.

"Because it is true," Ilya said. "If you stay on the West Coast, I will be in Boston. We will handle it." He hoped that he sounded convincing. He had to, or the alternative would destroy him right there on the dock. In truth, a cold, heavy pessimism was settling within his chest. We will handle it was a lie that he wanted desperately to believe, but looking at Shane, the idea that their time here was coming to an end felt like a terminal disease. They would try, they would stretch, but eventually, that thread would snap. But right now, that lie was better than telling the truth.

Shane looked at him. He pressed his palms to his knees, containing the weight of a continent between them, then he picked his book back up. He found his page. After a moment, his foot tapped Ilya's. 

"June," Shane said, without looking up. The timeline of his return East, however brief the summers would be.

"June," Ilya agreed. "But we have this summer now. And then we'll deal with what comes after."

Neither of them said anything else about it. The lake went gold in the late light. Ilya put his hand on Shane's ankle, on the scar, and Shane did not tell him to stop.

The last night, they stayed on the dock until midnight. The sky was clear and the lake was black under it and the loons had been calling since nine. They lay on the boards like they had the summer before, shoulders touching, the dark above them. The same position. The same lake. A different number. A less tenuous number. 

"Five hundred and thirty-one tomorrow," Ilya said.

They looked at the sky. Shane's hand found his in the dark and the grip was easy—the grip of someone not afraid of letting go because letting go was temporary and not the end of anything.

The trip back to Vancouver was quiet. They had two nights there before Ilya's flight, and spent them in the apartment with the easy domestic ordinariness that had been building since April—Shane's feet in Ilya's lap, the bad coffee he had never fully learned to make properly, the park across the street going gold in the August evenings.

At the airport, Shane pulled to the curb and put the car in park.

"Christmas," Ilya said.

"I'll find out what my schedule looks like."

"I will buy a tree. We could go to the markets."

Shane looked at him with the complicated patience of someone not ready for this and doing it anyway. "Text me when you land."

"I will text you when I land."

He stepped out of the car. He took his two bags from the back. He stood on the curb and looked at Shane through the passenger window.

"I will see you soon," he said.

"You will," Shane said. "Love you."

He put his hand briefly to the glass. Shane put his hand on the same spot from the other side. The small softening of Shane's face was replaced by a sadness that he wasn't quite managing to mask. His mouth was a tight line, his eyes heavy with the imminent weight of returning to an empty apartment. He was already hurting. Ilya felt the cold, mathematical pessimism of the distance twist into something sharp and stubborn. The distance was impossible and never ending. But looking at Shane, Ilya realized it didn't matter. He would crawl across time zones on his knees if he had to. He would do whatever it took to keep that look off Shane's face, to buy them another far-too-short July on the dock. He would handle it, because losing this was the only alternative, and that was simply unacceptable. 

Then Ilya stepped back from the curb and went inside, and the automatic doors closed behind him, and the new season began.

Chapter End Notes

Many thanks to Aphantastical for their expert help beta reading this work, polishing out its rough edges and fact-checking even the most mundane things.

Also thank you to WholeKittenCaboodle for their assistance catching my million typos and formatting inconsistencies.

Let me know what you think! We're coming down to the end :)